Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 6: Et Cetera
did not, moreover, end with the IMT for he was also used, after his own trial and
while he was under sentence of death, as a prosecution witness against Wehrmacht
generals in Case 12.
Personal guilt, obviously, is not involved, if the actions demanded or suggested
by the accusers would have led to the clearly inevitable death of the accused.
I suspect that every accuser of the Einsatzgruppen would have obeyed orders
to participate in the air raids on Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki
(none of which, incidentally, had credible military motivations).
However I do not want to create an impression that I am denying that the Einsatzgruppen
executed apparent civilians, including women and children, in connection
with their activities in Russia. All experience with anti-partisan warfare,
whether conducted by the British, the French, or the Americans, suggests – quite
independently of the tainted (to put it mildly) evidence of the trials at Nuremberg
– that such things happened. In the Vietnam war, Americans did much of this with
napalm and then made a big fuss over the fact that one obscure Lieutenant had
been caught doing it with bullets.
Neither am I trying to create an impression that, actually, everybody is very
brutal, but a thorough discussion of the problems involved would carry us far
afield, so it will not be attempted; only the essentials can be outlined here.
It is an unhappy fact that partisan, irregular, or guerilla warfare, together with
the measures taken to suppress such operations, is not only the dirtiest business in
existence but has also been a regular feature of twentieth century history. It is
dirty business even when the two sides are highly civilized and culturally similar.
A good example is the British campaign against the Irish rebellion of 1916-1921,
where both sides acted with remarkable brutality.
If one adds to the fact of guerilla warfare that at least one side is drawn from a
primitive, uncivilized, or semi-civilized population, then one has a situation that it
is most difficult for an ordinary civilized person to grasp, if he has no direct experience
of it. It is too easy for us, sitting in the warmth of our living rooms, to
generate moral indignation over operations, which involve the killing of “apparent
civilians, including women and children.” The typical West European or American
has lived in a culture, in which certain standards of charity, kindness, and
honor have been taken for granted, and it is difficult for him to understand that
certain fundamental assumptions about other people would not hold in a context
such as guerilla warfare in Asia or Russia; the viciousness involved exceeds the
imagination. To give just one example drawn from our Vietnam experience: what
do you do, if a child, despite signaled warnings to stay away, is obstinately approaching
you asking for food or candy, and it is known that there is a good
chance that there is a grenade attached to him
Of course, many needless brutalities always occur in such circumstances, but
one should attempt to understand the situation.
What I am denying with respect to the Einsatzgruppen is that one can give any
credence to the story told by the trials evidence, which, while it is somewhat variable
on some points, has the basic feature of asserting that the Einsatzgruppen,
which had a total strength of about 3,000 for the anti-partisan operations for all of
249