Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 6: Et Cetera
emigration and evacuation of Jews from the German sphere in Europe.
The introduction to Speer’s book, by Eugene Davidson, mentions the fact
(noted here on page 141) that many Dutch Jews sent to Birkenau, “within sight of
the gas chambers,” were unaware of any extermination program. They wrote
cheerful letters back to the Netherlands. 316 The remarks about Jewish extermination
were not in the original version of Speer’s manuscript; they were added at the
insistence of the publisher. 317
Unlike the other defendants, Göring assumed throughout the trial that he was
to be sentenced to death, and his testimony appears to be the approximate truth as
he saw it. Although he never conceded the existence of a program of extermination
of Jews, we have seen that he misunderstood what had happened in the German
camps at the end of the war and assumed that Himmler had, indeed, engaged
in mass murder in this connection. However, he never conceded any number of
murders approaching six millions. 318
An incidental remark that should be made in connection with Göring is that he
was not, as legend asserts (and as Speer claimed in private on several occasions
during the IMT), a drug addict. The Nuremberg prison psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley,
has attempted to set the record straight in this regard. Göring was a military
man, had been an air ace in World War I, and had been the last commander of the
“Flying Circus” of von Richthofen (the “Red Baron”). Refusing to surrender his
unit to the Allies at the end of the war, he returned to Germany and found himself
a hero without a profession. Eventually joining the Nazi Party, he naturally, as a
holder of the Pour-le-mérite (Germany’s highest military decoration), soon became
a leader of the small party. As such, he was a leader of the putsch of 1923,
in which he was wounded in the right thigh. The wound developed an infection
which caused him to be hospitalized for a long while, during which time he was
injected with considerable amounts of morphine. He developed a mild addiction
but cured it shortly after being released from the hospital in 1924. Much later, in
1937, Göring developed a condition of aching teeth and began taking tablets of
paracodeine, a very mild morphine derivative that was a common prescription for
his condition, and he continued to take the paracodeine throughout the war. His
addiction for (or, more exactly, habit of taking) these paracodeine tablets was not
severe, because he was taken off them before the IMT by Dr. Kelley, who employed
a simple withdrawal method involving daily reductions of the dosage. 319
To return to the IMT defendants, Kaltenbrunner’s position seems to us today
to have been somewhat hopeless, and it is probable that his lawyer felt the same
way, but he nevertheless had to present some sort of defense, and his defense on
the matters that we are interested in rested on two main points.
The first point was that he was head of the RSHA, which was charged with security,
and not the head of the WVHA, which administered the concentration
camps. He thus claimed that he had had almost nothing to do with the camps. The
316
317
318
319
Speer, xvii; de Jong.
New York Times Book Review (Aug. 23, 1970), 2, 16.
In Göring’s testimony, see especially IMT, vol. 9, 515-521, 609-619.
Kelley, 54-58.
223