Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
charge of forgery.
Forgery is less risky if it does not involve the actual forgery of signatures; if
the cooperation of the persons who signed or initialed the forged documents could
have been obtained, then it might have seemed that the risk was removed or
minimized. Thus, we should take a close look at the endorsers of these documents.
If NG-5684 is excepted, we have endorsements consisting of initials and/or
signatures (or alleged initials and signatures) by Geiger, Wissberg, Hencke, Reichel,
Mirbach, Wagner and Thadden, with the great majority of the endorsements
coming from the latter two. These seven people have one very interesting thing in
common; none were defendants in Case 11 or, apparently, in any other trial. In the
cases of the first five, this can be argued to have been reasonable, either on account
of the low rank of the person or on account of his peripheral involvement
with the alleged crimes. Thus, the first five people had only a minor involvement
in Case 11; Mirbach appeared as a defense witness and Hencke was a defense affiant.
283
With Wagner and Thadden, however, the immunity from prosecution is most
mysterious, if one does not grasp that the apparently safe manufacture of the incriminating
Hungary documents required, basically, only their cooperation. We
should thus examine their roles in the Foreign Office and their experiences after
the war.
Eberhard von Thadden was an official in “Inland II” in the Foreign Office.
This group’s responsibility was liaison with the SS, and thus, Thadden was the
“Jewish expert” of the Foreign Office, so to speak. Communication with
Eichmann relative to the carrying out of Jewish policies, whatever those policies
were, was a quite normal part of his duties. NG-2233 and NG-2980 are quite accurate
in at least that respect. Horst Wagner was a member of Foreign Minister
Ribbentrop’s personal staff and, as the head of Inland II, was Thadden’s superior
and, as the documents correctly suggest, he was equally involved in the Jewish
policies of the German government. The Foreign Office had been accused by the
various military tribunals of being implicated in the extermination of Jews, and at
the IMT Ribbentrop had been found guilty in this respect. The main defendants in
Case 11 were some officials of the Foreign Office, most of them ordinary diplomats,
and implication in Jewish extermination was naturally one of the charges.
Both ex officio and in consideration of the documents that have been reviewed,
both Thadden and Wagner would have seemed, at the start of Case 11, to have
been in serious trouble. Moreover, they could not have been considered too obscure
in relation to Case 11, the Ministries or Wilhelmstrasse Case. For example,
the New York Times story announcing the opening of Case 11 chose to mention
eight prominent “defendants or witnesses,” and Thadden was one of those in the
list. 284
It is thus inexplicable, on normal grounds, that they were not even defendants
in the trial; they both appeared as prosecution witnesses. 285 Strange occurrences
283
284
285
198
NMT, vol. 14, 1023, 1027.
New York Times (Feb. 26, 1947), 4; Hilberg, 350f; NMT, vol. 14, 1057f; Steengracht 86.
NMT, vol. 14, 1031.