Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 6: Et Cetera
The text of the document is as spurious sounding as one should expect the text
of such a document to be; it was allegedly written by an obscure 2nd Lieutenant
and fortuitously fell into the hands of the Russians in 1943! Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,
in The Gulag Archipelago, mentions the case of the Bavarian Jupp
Aschenbrenner, whom the Russians persuaded to sign a similar declaration that he
had worked on wartime gas vans, but Aschenbrenner was later able to prove that,
at the time he had supposedly been working on the vans, he was actually in Munich
studying to become an electric welder. 351
The most frequently cited evidence is a collection of documents purporting to
be daily and other reports of the Einsatzgruppen to Himmler and Heydrich for the
period June 1941 to May 1942. Document numbers are 180-L – said to be a report
of Stahlecker found in Himmler’s files 352 – 2273-PS – said to be another
Stahlecker report on actions up to January 31, 1942, “captured by Russians in
Riga” (Stahlecker was killed in March 1942) 353 – 119-USSR, and many others,
too numerous to list, most having numbers around NO-3000. Beside telling of
regular anti-partisan activities, the reports tell of individual actions of mass executions
of Jews, with numbers of victims usually running in the thousands. It is indicated,
in most cases, that many copies, sometimes as many as a hundred, were
distributed. They were mimeographed, and signatures are most rare and, when
they occur, appear on non-incriminating pages. Document NO-3159, for example,
has a signature of a R. R. Strauch, but only on a covering page giving the locations
of various units of the Einsatzgruppen. There is also NO-1128, allegedly
from Himmler to Hitler reporting, among other things, the execution of 363,211
Russian Jews in August-November 1942. This claim occurs on page 4 of NO-
1128, while initials said to be Himmler’s occur on the irrelevant page 1. Moreover,
Himmler’s initials were easy to forge: three vertical lines with a horizontal
line drawn through them. 354
In connection with these matters, the reader should be informed that, when examining
printed reproductions of documents in the IMT and NMT volumes, a
handwritten signature not be assumed unless it is specifically stated that the signature
is handwritten; “signed” generally means only a typewritten signature.
Document 180-L, for example, is reproduced in German in the IMT volumes, and
excerpts in English are reproduced in the NMT volumes. In both cases signatures
are indicated, but the actual document merely has “gez. Dr. Stahlecker” (signed
Dr. Stahlecker) typewritten in two places. 355
There are two documents said to have been authored by Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar
for the Ostland, who was also the person to whom Wetzel’s “Brack
remedy” letter was addressed (see p. 215). One of the documents deals with Sonderbehandlung
and was alluded to in Chapter 4 (p. 146). Like Wetzel, Lohse was
never called as a witness at Nuremberg. Unlike Wetzel, however, Lohse stood
351
352
353
354
355
Solzhenitsyn, 112n.
IMT, vol. 3, 559.
Reitlinger, 201, note 70 on page 611.
NMT, vol. 13, 269-272 (excerpts only).
IMT, vol. 37, 670-717; NMT, vol. 4, 154.
243