Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
the defendants were well aware that there was considerable hostility to the war
crimes trials in the public opinion of the Allied countries, especially in the U.S.
and England. Many must have calculated that their immediate objective should be
to say or do whatever seemed necessary to survive the transient wave of post-war
hysteria, deferring the setting straight of the record to a not distant future when a
non-hysterical examination of the facts would become possible.
Fourth, extermination of Jews was only one of the many accusations involved
at Nuremberg. In retrospect, it may appear to have been the main charge, but at
the time, the principal accusations in the minds of almost everybody concerned
responsibilities for “planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression”
– so-called “Crimes Against Peace.”
With the preceding four observations in mind, we can see that the behavior of
the defendants during the trial was about what one would expect from a diverse
collection of dedicated Nazis, technocrats, conservative Prussian officers, and ordinary
politicians. In “private,” i.e. in prison, when court was not in session, the
prisoners were just as guarded in their remarks as they were in public, and there
was an abundance of mutual recrimination, buck passing, and back biting. Frank
made the worst ass of himself in this respect, but the practice was rather general.
The Nazis were not one big happy family. In regard to trial defense strategy, it
will suffice to discuss Speer, Göring, and Kaltenbrunner.
Speer’s trial strategy was simple and also relatively successful, because he did
not hang. He claimed that his position did not situate him so as to be able to learn
of the various alleged atrocities. Even today, he is permitted to get away with this
nonsense. In fact, Speer and his assistants were deeply involved in, e.g., the deportations
of employable Hungarian Jews in the spring of 1944 for work in underground
aircraft factories at Buchenwald. 314 Any rail transport priority given to
Hungarian Jews to be exterminated, as opposed to employable Hungarian Jews,
would have become known to them, if such had actually happened. If Speer had
testified truthfully, he would have declared that he had been so situated that, if an
extermination program of the type charged had existed, he would have known of
it and that, to his knowledge, no such program had existed. However, if Speer had
testified truthfully, he would have joined his colleagues on the gallows.
In his book, Speer gives only one ridiculous piece of “evidence” that he encountered
during the war that he now says he should have interpreted as suggesting
the existence of an extermination program, and that was the suggestion of his
friend Karl Hanke (who was appointed Himmler’s successor as Reichsführer-SS
by Hitler in the last days of the war), in the summer of 1944, that Speer never “accept
an invitation to inspect a concentration camp in Upper Silesia.” Speer also
passes along Göring’s private remark just before the IMT trial about Jewish “survivors”
in Hungary: “So, there are still some there I thought we had knocked off
all of them. Somebody slipped up again.” 315 Such a sarcastic crack was understandable
under the circumstances, because Göring never conceded the reality of
any extermination program and insisted that he had known only of a program of
314
315
222
Hilberg, 599; Reitlinger, 460-463; IMT vol. 16, 445, 520.
Speer, 375-376, 512.