Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
trial before a German court and was sentenced in 1948 to ten years imprisonment.
However, he was released in 1951 on grounds of ill health and awarded a pension,
which was shortly later disallowed on account of public protest. As for the comments
attributed to him, Reitlinger remarks that they “saved him from the Allied
Military Courts and perhaps the gallows” for, while they speak of atrocities, they
are so worded as to put the author of the documents in opposition to the crimes.
The document dealing with Sonderbehandlung is a letter from Lohse to
Rosenberg dated June 18, 1943. The actual document, 135-R, seems to be claimed
to be an unsigned carbon copy of the correspondence, found in SS files. The relevant
passage reads: 356
“That Jews are sonderbehandelt requires no further discussion. But that
things proceed as is explained in the report of the Generalkommissar of 1 June
1943 seems scarcely believable. What is Katyn compared to that”
Three unsigned reports supposedly received from the Generalkommissar
(Wilhelm Kube, Generalkommissar for White Russia) are attached to the document.
The second Lohse document is 3663-PS and is one of several documents bearing
the major irregularity of having been processed by the Yivo (Yiddish Scientific
Institute) of New York before being submitted as Nuremberg trial documents.
There are about 70 such documents said to have been found in the
Rosenberg Ministry in September 1945 by Sergeant Szajko Frydman of the U.S.
82nd Airborne Division. Frydman, however, was a staff member of the Yivo both
before and after his service in the Army. Indeed, the Yivo was so active in producing
documents supposedly found in the Rosenberg Ministry that it may very
well have some enlightening information on the origins of their supposed text of
Himmler’s Posen speech. The first part of the document is written on the stationery
of the Ministry. It is a letter to Lohse, dated October 31, 1941, with a typewritten
signature by Dr. Leibbrandt and an illegible handwritten endorsement by
somebody else. It reads:
“The RSHA has complained that the Reichskommissar for the Ostland has
forbidden executions of Jews in Libau. I request a report in regard to this matter
by return mail.”
The second part of the document is the reply, handwritten on the reverse side
of the first part, supposedly in the hand of Trampedach and initialed by Lohse
(with a letter “L” about 1-1/2 inches high). It reads:
“I have forbidden the wild executions of Jews in Libau because they were
not justifiable in the manner in which they were carried out.
I should like to be informed whether your inquiry of 31 October is to be regarded
as a directive to liquidate all Jews in the East Shall this take place
without regard to age and sex and economic interests (of the Wehrmacht, for
instance, in specialists in the armament industry) Of course, the cleansing of
the East of Jews is a necessary task; its solution, however, must be harmonized
with the necessities of war production.
356
244
Hilberg, 252n; Reitlinger, 232-233. documents 135-R and 3633-PS reproduced in Poliakov &
Wulf (1955), 190ff.