Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 6: Et Cetera
testimony has an importance in our analysis which transcends the immediate point
we are discussing.
Morgen testified that in the course of his investigations of the camps, carried
out in pursuance of his duty as an SS official, he unexpectedly encountered extermination
programs at Auschwitz and at Lublin, but that SS involvement was
nonexistent or minimal. At Lublin the exterminations were being conducted by
Wirth of the ordinary criminal police, with the assistance of Jewish labor detachments
(who were promised part of the loot). Wirth supervised three additional extermination
camps in Poland, according to Morgen. Although the criminal police,
the Kripo, was administratively under the RSHA, Morgen was careful to point out
that Kriminalkommissar Wirth was not a member of the SS. Morgen claimed that
Wirth had been attached to the Führer Chancellery, had been involved in the
euthanasia program (which is possibly true), and had later received orders from
the Führer Chancellery to extend his exterminating activities to the Jews. Although
the only real point of Morgen’s testimony was the futile attempt to absolve
the SS, the testimony is considered “evidence” by Reitlinger and by Hilberg, who
avoid considering the fact that Morgen, in his attempt at excusing the SS, also testified
that at Auschwitz the extermination camp was Monowitz, the one of the
complex of camps that was administered by Farben. Morgen did not go so far as
to claim that Farben had its own company extermination program, but he declared
that the only SS involvement consisted of a few Baltic and Ukrainian recruits used
as guards, and that the “entire technical arrangement was almost exclusively in the
hands of the prisoners.” 311
Morgen’s ploy obviously inspired the prosecution anew, because it had not occurred
to relate exterminations to euthanasia. It was too late to develop the point
at the IMT, so it was developed in Case 1 at the NMT (actually the euthanasia
program is loosely linked with exterminations in the “Gerstein statement,” reproduced
here in Appendix A – the Gerstein statement was put into evidence at the
IMT long before Morgen’s testimony, but nobody paid any attention to its text).
To us, this relating of exterminations to euthanasia is just another example of the
“excess fact”; the inventors were so concerned with getting some real fact into
their story that it did not occur to them that there are some real facts that a good
hoax is better off without.
This seems to cover the evidence for gassings at the camps in Poland exclusive
of Auschwitz.
We again remark that the logic of Morgen’s testimony, as courtroom defense
strategy, is of some importance to our study. His side obviously calculated that the
court was immovable on the question of the existence of the exterminations, and
thus, Morgen’s testimony invited the court to embrace the theory that somebody
other than the SS was guilty.
311
IMT, vol. 20, 487-515.
217