Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
we see that torture, while indeed inadequate in itself to produce the sort of testimony
that was produced at Nuremberg, might very well have been employed to
achieve a general “softening up” of witnesses and defendants that would help the
process of coercion and intimidation at other points.
A few complications are also worth mentioning. First, physical torture is not
such a very well defined thing. One could argue that extended imprisonment under
unhealthy or even merely uncomfortable conditions with daily interrogation is
a form of torture. Another complication is that there are modes of torture, mainly
sexual in nature or related to sex, that one could never learn about because the victims
simply will not talk about them. Finally we should observe that almost none
of us, certainly not this author, has ever experienced torture at the hands of professionals
bent on a specific goal, and thus we might suspect, to put it quite directly,
that we simply do not know what we are talking about when we discuss the
possibilities of torture.
Our basic conclusion in respect to the torture problem is that there is something
of an imponderable involved. We believe it likely that torture was employed
to achieve a general softening up of the victims, so that their testimonies would
more predictably take courses that were motivated by considerations other than
torture, and we have analyzed witness and defendant testimony in preceding
pages of this chapter on this basis; the effects of and fear of torture do not, in
themselves, explain testimony in support of exterminations. We thus tend to disagree
with much of the existing literature in this area, which, it seems, places too
much weight on the singular efficacy of torture at Nuremberg, although we concede
that our analysis of this hard subject is not conclusive. We have similar suspicions
that writers on witchcraft trials have also leaped to invalid conclusions on
the basis of the two indisputably valid facts that, first, victims in witchcraft trials
were tortured and, second, many of these people later testified to impossible happenings.
The former does not really account for the latter, but it can be a contributing
factor when its effects are added to the more weighty motivations for delivering
certain kinds of false testimony.
Adolf Hitler
We will return to some statements made at trials in due course. There are a few
remarks, allegedly made by top Nazis, that should be mentioned. On April 17,
1943, Hitler met Admiral Horthy at Klessheim Castle. Hitler was critical of Horthy’s
lenient Jewish policy and, it is said, explained to Horthy that things were
different in Poland:
“If the Jews there did not want to work, they were shot. If they could not
work, they had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, with which a healthy
body may become infected. This was not cruel if one remembers that even innocent
creatures of nature, such as hares and deer, which are infected, have to
be killed so that no harm is caused by them.”
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