Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 4: Auschwitz
ganda.” In fact, knowledgeable officials of the U.S. government have admitted the
“information” spreading. At the Farben trial, prosecuting attorney Minskoff asked
defense witness Münch the following question about gassings at Birkenau: 206
“Now, Mr. Witness, isn’t it a fact that, during the time you were at Auschwitz,
Allied planes dropped leaflets over Kattowitz and Auschwitz informing
the population what was going on in Birkenau”
Münch did not know that. Minskoff was knowledgeable in this area because he
had been a foreign operations oriented lawyer in the Treasury Department during
the war and was presumably well informed on WRB matters; the WRB had collaborated
with the Office of War Information on various leaflet operations. The
head of the prosecution staff at the Farben trial was DuBois, who had been general
counsel of the WRB, who wrote that in his “office in 1944, [he] knew […]
what was going on at Auschwitz,” and who chose in his book to reproduce with
general approval the part of the testimony containing the Minskoff question. 207
This is good evidence for an American leaflet operation over Auschwitz, although
the method seems somewhat crude. My guess is that, if the leaflets were indeed
dropped, they were dropped at night and in moderate quantities.
Actually, a leaflet operation was not necessary to get rumors going in the
camps, for the highly organized Communists were very active in this area. Their
superior organization, which involved systematic illegal listening to radios, had
made the other inmates essentially fully dependent on them for “news.” 208 Let us
remember that it was a small world, even in 1939-1945, and that, on account of
the general ease with which information flowed into and out of the camp (a fact
noted on page 121), the Allied stories about the camps would have ultimately and
necessarily penetrated into those camps by various routes.
The Red Cross delegate mentioned above had attempted to visit the Auschwitz
camps but apparently got no further than the administrative area of Auschwitz I
and the quarters of the British POWs. The latter were the only persons the existing
conventions entitled him to visit; with regard to other matters the German officers
there were “amiable and reticent.” The delegate reported without comment that
the British POWs had not been able to obtain confirmation of the rumors by consulting
camp inmates. It is claimed that, despite these rumors, the British POWs
who were interrogated by the Russians after the capture of the camp “knew nothing
at all” of the “crimes.” 209
Subsequent events have, of course, changed the rumors into “knowledge” in
many cases. Incoming Jews certainly had no suspicions of gassings. 210
With the “selections” we are offered another fact for dual interpretation. There
is no doubt that the extensive industrial and other activities required “selections”
of people for various conventional purposes. We are then asked to add an “extermination”
purpose to these activities.
206
207
208
209
210
NMT. vol. 8, 320.
DuBois, 53, 173, 231; US-WRB (1945), 48-55.
Lerner, 152-153.
Friedman, 13-14.
Cohen, 119.
143