Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 5: The Hungarian Jews
tice Department by Attorney General Clark. Rogge defended his actions, explaining
that, after all, he had merely made “a study of international Fascism, for the
people under investigation were part of an international movement to destroy democracy
both here and abroad.” Again he was specific; two of the people posing
the Fascist threat were Mr. Douglas MacCollum Stewart and Mr. George T.
Eggleston, at the time a member of the staff of the Reader’s Digest. Rogge said
that in Germany he had obtained information about them from former German
diplomats who had had official connections with the U.S. before Pearl Harbor.
Pravda described Rogge’s removal as a “scandal.” 291
In the period before Pearl Harbor, Stewart and Eggleston had published the
Scribner’s Commentator, which was dedicated to keeping the U.S. out of World
War II. During 1941, Stewart had received a large sum of money, $38,000, and
could not explain where it came from. He told the “sedition” grand juries of 1943-
1944 that he had found this money in his home. Since such a story sounds ludicrous
even to an impartial observer, Stewart was assailed by the prosecutor and
judge for giving such testimony. His refusal to change it led to his being held in
contempt of court, and he was sentenced to serve 90 days in jail (he was paroled
after 75 days).
In the course of 1946, the Justice Department, including even Rogge, had become
convinced that no “sedition” charge could succeed in court, so the case that
had been opened in 1943 was finally closed. However, there was still the matter
of Stewart’s testimony, which seemed a good basis for a perjury charge. Thus, in
March 1947, Stewart was put on trial for committing perjury in testifying before
the wartime grand jury.
The prosecution claimed that Stewart had received $15,000 of the $38,000
from the German government and produced two witnesses to support its contention.
Baron Herbert von Strempel, former First Secretary of the German Embassy
in Washington, testified that he had given Stewart $15,000 in the Hotel Pennsylvania
in New York in the fall of 1941. The money had been obtained, he said,
from Dr. Hans Thomsen, German Chargé d’Affaires. Thomsen then testified in
support of von Strempel’s story. The testimony of Strempel and Thomsen was, in
fact, the direct consequence of Rogge’s information gathering expedition in Germany
in 1946.
Stewart’s defense produced evidence that Stewart had received large sums of
money from American sources in 1941. It claimed that some wealthy Americans
wished to support the, by then, beleaguered cause of staying out of the war, but
anonymously, so they slipped money to Stewart anonymously. Whether this claim
was truthful or the truth was that Stewart had, indeed, lied before the wartime
grand jury on account of feeling himself obliged not to divulge the identities of
his American supporters, is scarcely relevant to our subject. More relevant was
the defense cross examination of the prosecution’s German witnesses, because the
defense was able to discredit the prosecution case by showing that the testimony
291
Current Biography (1948), 534; New York Times (Oct. 14, 1946), 44; New York Times (Oct. 23,
1946); 8; (Oct. 26, 1946), 1; (Oct. 27, 1946), 16; (Nov. 3, 1946), 13; Newsweek (Nov. 4, 1946),
26.
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