Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Many bodies were being burned in open fires, he said, because the crematories
were over-taxed.”
On August 11 (page 4) is reported a letter by Horthy to the King of Sweden
declaring that deportations of Jews had been stopped and that they were being allowed
to leave Hungary.
There are too many contradictions in the propaganda for it to equal later
charges. However, the charges resemble the propaganda somewhat. The present
story is that between the middle of May and sometime in early July 1944, approximately
400,000 Hungarian Jews, from districts outside of the capital of Budapest,
were deported by rail by the Germans and that almost all of these were
killed at Birkenau, the killings having been the primary purpose of the deportations.
This operation essentially cleaned out the Hungarian Jews, except for Budapest,
where the Jews were left essentially intact. Even Birkenau was not designed
for such large numbers of killings, so many bodies were disposed of in
burning pits, and many were shot rather than gassed. 275
It is obvious that no such thing could have happened, and received world-wide
publicity during the war and at the later trials, without the ICRC delegation in Budapest
learning of it. After all, we are speaking here of the near entirety of non-
Budapest Jews, and such massive and monstrous events could not have been flippantly
forgotten by the person contributing the “Hungary” section of the excerpt
we have examined. The excerpt says emphatically that the major negative events
effecting the Hungarian Jews occurred starting on October 1944 after Horthy’s arrest.
Moreover, the Report contains the general remarks about “extermination”
which we have noted, so any extermination of Hungarian Jews would, if it were a
reality, definitely be mentioned in the Report. There is clearly no truth to the
claim of exterminations of Hungarian Jews.
At this point it is appropriate to provide some remarks on Hungarian Jewish
population in early 1944. The Nazis used a figure of about 700 or 750 thousand.
276 Ruppin’s 1940 book reports that the Hungarian Jewish population rose
from 440 to 480 thousand in the autumn of 1938, due to the annexation of parts of
Slovakia. In the spring of 1939, the Carpatho-Ukraine was annexed so that, in
June 1939, there were about 590,000 Jews in Hungary. It is known that a good
number of non-Hungarian Jews, mainly Polish, took refuge in Hungary after
1939, so Ruppin’s pre-war figure of 590,000 could easily have swelled to the
700,000 or 750,000 figure that the Nazis used. Ruppin’s figure for Budapest’s
Jewish population is 200,000 in 1930. This figure would not have been supplemented
by the annexations, but it would have been supplemented to some degree
during the Thirties by German and Austrian Jews and to a greater degree by Polish
and other Jews after 1939. It seems reasonable to assume that there were about
300,000 Jews in Budapest in the spring of 1944. Thus, we seem to have a fairly
good idea of Hungarian and Budapest Jewish population in 1944. Clearly the re-
275
276
186
Reitlinger, 447-487, 540-542; Hilberg, 509-554, 599-600. Reitlinger figures some of the Hungarian
Jews among the Romanians.
NG-2586-G in NMT, vol. 13, 212; NO-5194, part of the Korherr report, which is reproduced in
Poliakov & Wulf (1955), 240-248; NG-5620, cited by Hilberg, 513.