Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
The theory, which I consider beyond dispute, is simply that Birkenau was designated
to accommodate all persons who were in the non-worker category but
were, for whatever reason, the responsibility of the Auschwitz SS administration.
Thus, Birkenau was designated to receive the permanently or semi-permanently
ill, the dying, the dead, the underage, the overage, those temporarily unassigned to
employment, and those for whom Auschwitz served as a transit camp. These
categories could have been received either from other camps (including the many
small camps in the Kattowitz region) or from incoming transports. This theory is
based on the following considerations.
First, as has been noted, Birkenau was clearly the “principal” camp in terms of
inmate accommodating functions. Auschwitz I was the “main” camp in an administrative
sense, but it was a converted and expanded military barracks, while Birkenau
had been designed from the beginning as a much larger camp intended for
the specific needs of the SS operations in the area.
Second, it has been noted that people discharged from the Monowitz hospital
as unfit for work were sent to Birkenau.
Third, family camps existed at Birkenau (the “gypsy” and “Theresienstadt”
camps in Fig. 29). It has been seen that these people had been designated as being
“in readiness for transport” during their stays of pre-specified limited duration, so
that the obvious interpretation of these family camps is that they were transit
camps, comparable to those that existed at Belsen and Westerbork. The destination
of transport has been suggested and will be discussed further in Chapter 7.
Fourth, it was only at Birkenau that unusually extensive facilities for disposal
of the dead via cremation were constructed.
Fifth, it was quite normal for a very high proportion of Birkenau inmates to be
unemployed. In the two years summer 1942 to summer 1944, as Reitlinger remarks,
“only a fraction of the starved and ailing Birkenau population had been
employed at all.” On April 5, 1944, 15,000 of the 36,000 Birkenau inmates were
considered “unable to work,” while only about 3,000 of the 31,000 other prisoners
of the Auschwitz area were considered in this category. A month later, two-thirds
of the 18,000 inmates of the Birkenau male camp were classed as “immobile,”
“unemployable,” and “unassigned” and were quartered in sick and quarantine
blocks. 253
This makes it impossible, of course, to accept the assumption, so often expressed,
that to be sick and unemployable and to be sent to Birkenau meant execution.
This has been expressed in particular in connection with sick people being
sent from Monowitz to Birkenau, the assumption being reinforced by the fact that
such inmates’ clothing came back to Monowitz. The return of the clothing, of
course, was due to their being transferred from the Farben to the SS budget. 254
Sixth and last, there was an unusually high death rate at Birkenau, although
there are some difficulties in estimating the numbers except at particular times.
The first major relevant event is the typhus epidemic of the summer of 1942,
which resulted in the closing of the Buna factory for two months starting around
253
254
158
Reitlinger, 125; NO-021 in NMT, vol. 5, 385. See also Fyfe, 729, or Appendix D herein.
DuBois, 192, 220.