Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Also “they were […] sent to death camps,” which was true of those who had been
conscripted for labor and sent to the concentration camps during the camps’ two
worst periods (1942 and 1945). It “seems” that “many thousands” of Slovakian
Jews went “to the extermination camps.” It is anybody’s guess what is meant by
the “death camps” to which some Romanian Jews were sent in 1940; whatever is
meant, it was not a German measure.
In Volume 3 we read (page 479) that “when military operations spread to
Hungarian soil (in early October 1944), the ICRC delegate in Budapest made the
uttermost exertions to prevent the extermination of the Hungarian Jews.” Further
on (pages 513-514) we read that during the war, “threatened with extermination,
the Jews were, in the last resort, generally deported in the most inhuman manner,
shut up in concentration camps, subjected to forced labor or put to death.” The
Germans “aimed more or less openly at their extermination.”
We can see two possible reasons for the presence of such (ambiguous and/or
very general) remarks. The first is that they are there because the authors of the
Report, or most of them, on the basis of news reports, the war crimes trials, the
fact of deportations, the fact of Nazi hostility toward the Jews, and the fact that
the Germans wanted the Jews out of Europe, believed the wartime and post-war
extermination claims (they obviously did not see any Jews being exterminated).
The second possible reason is that the remarks are there for political-public relations
reasons. For example, although the Germans and Hungarians had allowed
the ICRC to operate in Hungary and the Russians had expelled it, the Report nevertheless
finds it expedient to say that Budapest was “liberated” by the Russian
capture.
The critical reader will obviously wish that the first explanation for the appearance
of these remarks be accepted, at least for purposes of discussion. We
should have no objections to this; it makes little difference in the analysis because
all we want to know from the Report is what happened to the Jews of Slovakia,
Croatia, and Hungary. The presence of the remarks about “extermination,” put
into the Report at a time when the detailed extermination charges had received the
widest publicity, is actually helpful to our case because, whatever the explanation
for the remarks, the possibility of extermination of most or many of the Jews of
Slovakia, Croatia, and Hungary most definitely is part of the proper subject matter
of the Report. An absence of claims bearing on extermination should not, thus, be
interpreted as meaning that the possibility of extermination is not part of the matters
being treated, but that the ICRC did not observe occurrences consistent with
the extermination claims.
With these considerations in mind, what does the Report say happened to the
Jews of Slovakia, Croatia, and Hungary The extent of German influence had differed
prior to 1944, and some number of Slovakian Jews had been deported to the
East, but the Report makes no speculations of extermination here and obviously
accepts that they had merely been deported. By 1944, German influence in the
three countries was about uniform, and nothing very consequential happened until
the autumn of 1944 when the Germans interned, or attempted to intern, many of
the Jews for very valid security reasons and also deported a number of Hungarian
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