Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 1:
Trials, Jews and Nazis
Trials and Doubts
The “war crimes trials,” which the victors in World War II conducted, mainly
of Germans but also of many Japanese, were precedent-shattering in their scope
and in the explicitness of the victorious powers’ claims to some sort of legal jurisdiction
in respect of laws or understandings, which did not exist at the time they
were allegedly broken by the Axis powers. Thus, in disregard of European honor
conventions, which had been respected for centuries, German civilian and military
prisoners, many of the highest rank, met violent deaths while in Allied captivity as
a supposed consequence of these extraordinary proceedings.
Nothing resembling the trials of 1945-1949, which were conducted by the wartime
enemies of Germany, has ever occurred before. The case of Joan of Arc
comes to mind, but that involved a solitary prisoner, not an entire state, and the
English who were, in the last analysis, responsible for the trial did everything to
make the issue appear to be one of heresy and witchcraft, already formally proscribed,
to be decided by an impartial and universal church according to preexisting
rules of evidence and procedure.
In the United States, the real progenitor of the trials, opinion on the appropriateness
of having conducted such trials has always been divided, but the balance
has varied. In the immediate post-war period, opinion generally favored the trials
with, however, some significant voices in opposition. In the middle of the heated
election campaign of 1946, just before the major Nazis Göring, Ribbentrop et al.
were to be hanged, Senator Robert A. Taft delivered a speech attacking both the
legal basis for the trials and the sentences which had been imposed; his speech
seems to have hurt his Republican Party in those elections.
A decade later, views had evidently changed somewhat, since at that time the
then obvious presidential candidate John F. Kennedy published a book, Profiles in
Courage (a survey of various people whom Senator Kennedy thought courageous),
in which he commended Taft for taking this stand, adding that Taft’s
views “are shared […] by a substantial number of American citizens today.” 13
With the Eichmann abduction in 1960 and subsequent “trial” and with the associated
later publicity, opinion seemed to move again, however slowly, toward
approval of the trials. Many reasons may be offered for this extraordinary reversal,
but it seems to me that what had happened was that in a peacetime, generally
non-hysterical atmosphere the world’s attention had been focused on one tale of a
peculiarly macabre sort: the killing, mainly in “gas chambers,” of several (usual
13
Kennedy, 216-219; 236-239 in Memorial Edition.
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