Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Rogge also involved himself in the widely publicized “Trenton Six” murder
case of 1948-1953 as a lawyer for the “Civil Rights Congress.” In December
1949, the judge barred him from the New Jersey trial for :
“[…] violating the lawyers’ canons of ethics by denouncing the conduct of
the trial in public, by showing ‘studied discourtesy and contempt’ in the court
and by ‘deliberately distorting the facts.’ [The judge also charged that] the
Civil Rights Congress […] collected more money from the public than was
needed for the trial.”
Seven months later, a U.S. court held that Rogge’s barring from the trial was
wrong but did not order his restoration. 295 This short discussion of Rogge suffices
for our purposes.
To return to Kempner. When the Bonn government had been newly constituted
in 1949, he warned of incipient Nazism there. Such a view did not prevent
him from serving, two years later, as Israel’s representative to Bonn in negotiations
relative to the restitution of Jews who had suffered injury at the hands of the
Nazi government. However, the next month he was attacking the reprieves and
reductions of sentences of “war criminals” that had been granted by the U.S. 296
Kempner next appeared in connection with the 1952 House investigation of
the Katyn Forest massacre, a well known Russian atrocity whose handling by the
IMT throws full light on the absurdity of that tribunal’s claim to respect.
On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced that, in the Katyn Forest near the
city of Smolensk in Russia (mid-way between Minsk and Moscow), mass graves
of Polish officers who had been captured by the Russians in 1939 had been uncovered.
Four days later the minister of defense of the Polish government in exile
(in London) announced that he was requesting the International Red Cross to
make an inquiry. The Germans supported the proposed inquiry but the Russians
opposed it, referring to the London Poles as “Hitler’s Polish collaborators,” and
on April 26 broke diplomatic relations with that government over the matter.
On account of the Russian opposition, the Red Cross refused to get involved.
However, the German government exhibited the Katyn mass graves to various
parties of Poles, to a group of foreign newspaper correspondents, to a group of
German journalists, to small parties of British and American POW’s, to a technical
team of the Polish Red Cross and, most importantly, to an international commission
of experts in forensic medicine (specialists in rendering medical opinions
in legal proceedings). The commission concluded with a report which demonstrated
the certainty that these Polish officers had been murdered by the Russians
prior to the outbreak of war between Russia and Germany in June 1941.
When the graves had first been discovered, the German propaganda service,
not knowing how many bodies were to be found there but knowing the approximate
number of Polish officers who could have been involved as victims, used the
figure of 10,000 and 12,000 as the number of bodies discovered, and these were
the figures which were given the widest publicity during the war. Consequently,
at the IMT, the indictment charged the Germans with murdering 11,000 Polish of-
295
296
206
New York Times (Dec. 17, 1949), 1; (Jul 22, 1950), 32.
New York Times (Sep. 30, 1949), 2; (Jan. 12, 1951), 7; (Feb. 2, 1951), 8.