Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 7: The Final Solution
Rothe, incidentally, had taken the position that the Wannsee Conference is itself
a propaganda myth. His principal reason for this is his belief, for which he
presents respectable evidence, that Heydrich was in Prague on January 20, 1942.
However, the date attributed to the conference and the document said to be the
minutes of the conference are so consistent with everything else that is known
about the German policy that we believe that Rothe is mistaken on this point. 372
The only factual aspect of the program of evacuation to the East which is generally
consistent with the extermination claims is that many Jews sent to the
camps in Poland did not return, at least not to their former homes. This, apparently,
had been the reason why many people with more or less first hand information
about certain individuals have accepted the extermination claims. However,
the situation is basically simple. These camps were obviously serving as transit
camps for the program of evacuation to the East. We have observed that at Birkenau
there was a special compound that served as a transit camp for Theresienstadt
Jews, and that Dutch Jews also passed through Auschwitz (Chapter 4, p. 139).
The concentration camp at Lublin also played this incidental role on occasion. 373
Treblinka, which was a labor camp but does not appear to have been administered
by the WVHA, clearly served also as a transit camp, especially for Warsaw Jews.
As with Auschwitz, Reitlinger finds the alleged facts put forward concerning gassings
at Treblinka difficult to reconcile with one another. Sobibor was explicitly
called a transit camp. 374
It may astonish the reader that the documents we have reviewed, which constitute
very strong evidence that no extermination program existed, are not passed
over in silence by the bearers of the extermination legend, but are thrust boldly
into our faces as evidence that an extermination program did exist. Not only is this
the implicit idea conveyed by the collection of documents in NMT volume 13;
Reitlinger and Hilberg are quite serious in considering these documents relevant
to an extermination program. Thus, the “evacuation to the East” is claimed as a
code term for extermination.
On account of the fact that a fixed feature of the extermination legend is that
one of the tasks of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia was the extermination of the
Jews, the bearers of the legend are committed to the view that the policy of extermination
had been settled on by the summer of 1941. Thus, although Göring’s
letter of July 31, 1941, to Heydrich specifically states that the “final solution” is a
program of emigration and evacuation, and although it makes specific reference to
the program, which existed from 1939, which both Reitlinger and Hilberg concede
was an emigration program, both authors must and do take the position that
this was really an extermination order. They are apparently not bothered by the
fact, noted by them, that deportations of Reich Jews to Russia and the Baltic states
had started in the autumn of 1941. 375
Continuing to keep faith with their fundamental commitment, the Wannsee
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Rothe, 173-196.
NO-1611 and NO-1882 in NMT, vol. 5, 616-619.
Reitlinger, 149, 279; Hilberg, 318, 619 or 621.
Reitlinger, 84-97; Hilberg, 262-263.
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