Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
on December 20, 1960, near Hamburg, where he was working as a lumberjack.
He was imprisoned and interrogated in prison and insisted that the Auschwitz gas
chambers were a myth. Unfortunately, he did not live to take this position in
court, because he died in prison on June 17, 1963, at the age of 51, apparently
from a circulatory ailment, although his wife considered his death rather mysterious.
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When the trial finally opened in Frankfurt in December 1963, the principal defendant
was one Robert K. L. Mulka, an ex-SS Captain who had served briefly as
adjutant to Höss at Auschwitz. Mulka had been tried and sentenced, by a German
chamber immediately after the war in connection with his role at Auschwitz, and
quite a few of the other 21 defendants at the Auschwitz trial were standing trial
for the second time on basically the same charges.
The court, of course, did not ignore legal matters entirely, and it took the trouble
to explain that the Bonn Government considers itself the legal successor to the
Third Reich, and thus, it was competent to try persons for infringing laws that
were in force in Germany during the war. Killing Jews, of course, had been illegal
in Nazi Germany, and thus, the majority of the defendants were charged in that
respect. In regard to the reasonableness of such a trial, one can do not better than
to quote from the opinion of the Frankfurt court itself: 330
“This determination of guilt has, however, confronted the court with extraordinarily
difficult problems.
Except for a few not very valuable documents, almost exclusively only witness
testimonies were available to the court for the reconstruction of the deeds
of the defendants. It is an experience of criminology that witness testimony is
not among the best of evidence. This is even more the case if the testimony of
the witness refers to an incident which had been observed twenty years or
more ago under conditions of unspeakable grief and anguish. Even the ideal
witness, who only wishes to tell the truth and takes pains to explore his memory,
is prone to have many memory gaps after twenty years. He risks the danger
of projecting onto other persons things which he actually has experienced
himself and of assuming as his own experiences things which were related to
him by others in this terrible milieu. In this way he risks the danger of confusing
the times and places of his experiences.
It has certainly been for the witnesses an unreasonable demand for us to
question them today concerning all details of their experiences. It is asking too
much of the witnesses if we today, after twenty years, still wish to know when,
where and how, in detail, who did what. On this basis astonishment was repeatedly
expressed by the witnesses, that we asked them for such a precise reconstruction
of the past occurrences. It was obviously the duty of the defense
to ask about those details. And it is unjust to impute to the defense that it
wished to make these witnesses appear ridiculous. On the contrary, we must
call to mind only once what endless detail work is performed in a murder trial
in our days – how, out of small mosaic-like pieces, the picture of the true oc-
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Aretz, 58; Naumann, 8.
Naumann, 8-26, 416-417.