Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 5: The Hungarian Jews
on interpreting the Report as declaring in a very general way that the Germans
were attempting to exterminate the Jews, because all we want to know is what the
ICRC delegates were able to witness in their positions in Slovakia, Croatia, and
Hungary.
1944 Propaganda
We have seen roughly what happened in Hungary, and now the extermination
claims should be examined. We first review the relevant propaganda during 1944
and then the charges made after the war, constituting the legend of the extermination
of the Hungarian Jews. There are both significant differences and significant
similarities between the 1944 propaganda and the later claims. Our survey of the
former again employs the New York Times as source.
In 1944, atrocity and extermination propaganda of a general sort continued:
12 Feb. 1944, p. 6: “A young Polish Jew who escaped from a mass execution
in Poland […] repeated a story […that at Belzec] Jews were forced naked
onto a metal platform operated as a hydraulic elevator which lowered them
into a huge vat filled with water. […] They were electrocuted by current
through the water.”
This claim had also been made in London in November 1942, 273 and we encountered
it on page 102 in the New York Times story of December 20, 1942. The
emphasis in the propaganda during the spring and summer of 1944 was, however,
on the Hungarian Jews. Immediately after the German occupation:
21 Mar. 1944. p. 4: “The fate of 800,000 Jews in Hungary was one immediate
concern of Jewish circles in Stockholm.”
Roosevelt involved himself directly with a speech prepared for him by the War
Refugee Board. 274
25 Mar. 1944, p. 4: “In the meantime in most of Europe and in parts of
Asia the systematic torture and murder of civilians – men, women and children
– by the Nazis and Japanese continue unabated. In areas subjugated by the
aggressors innocent Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Dutch, Danes, French,
Greeks, Russians, Chinese, Filipinos – and many others – are being starved or
frozen to death or murdered in cold blood in a campaign of savagery.
The slaughters of Warsaw, Lidice, Kharkov and Nanking – the brutal torture
and murder by the Japanese, not only of civilians but of our own gallant
American soldiers and fliers – these are startling examples of what goes on
day by day, year in and year out, wherever the Nazis and the Japs are in military
control – free to follow their barbaric purpose.
In one of the blackest crimes of all history – begun by the Nazis in the day
of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war – the wholesale
systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As
273
274
Reitlinger, 148.
US-WRB (1945), 49.
183