Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Conference of January 1942 is also interpreted as a veiled discussion of extermination,
although the evacuation program, of which the minutes of the Conference
speak, was in fact in progress. Both authors lay stress on the reference to the
“remnant that finally is able to survive all this” and are to be “given treatment accordingly.”
This passage could mean any number of things. The version of the
Wannsee Conference minutes that is printed in NMT volume 13, incidentally, has
the phrase “if they are allowed to go free” deleted by the editors. This suggests
that the editors may have interpreted the passage as a recommendation that the
“remnant” should be “allowed to go free.” In commenting on the Wannsee Conference
minutes, Reitlinger remarks that “Heydrich was discreet enough not to
mention the rest,” and that “the drafting of circumspect minutes was one of the
major arts of Hitler’s Reich.” Hilberg resolves the lack of clarity of meaning of
some of the passages (from his point of view) by remarking that “we know from
the language of the Einsatzgruppen reports that he meant killing.” 376 This amounts
to making the extraordinary claim that Hitler’s Reich was “circumspect” regarding
the language used in the minutes of secret conferences, but not circumspect
regarding the language used in the widely distributed Einsatzgruppen reports. In any
case, these passages in what is said to be the minutes of the Wannsee Conference
are the only passages in the documents describing German Jewish policy for which
a sinister interpretation is possible, although many interpretations are possible.
The excessively strained interpretations of these documents are factors, added
to the several discussed in Chapter 4, which forced Reitlinger to declare that Höss
must have really meant the summer of 1942 as the date of receiving his extermination
orders from Himmler. Reitlinger and Hilberg both assume that the deportations
to the east were for the purpose of killing the Jews there, in one way or another,
and that the gas chambers in Poland were established in mid-1942 as a
change in the method of killing. We have seen that this theory does not harmonize
with the dates associated with the planning of and preliminary work on the
Auschwitz crematories that are supposed to have been designed for the exterminations.
Thus, the claim that the documents should be interpreted as meaning other
than what they say leads one into irresolvable contradictions and difficulties, but
such would also be the result, if comparable practices were applied to the interpretation
of recipes, road signs, mathematical formulae, etc.
There is no point in discussing further these efforts to make these documents
mean other than what they say. The German policy, the “final solution,” was to
resettle Jews in the occupied territories in the East. This is what their documents
say, and the program spoken of in these documents is confirmed by neutral
sources and even, to a significant extent, by hostile sources. By way of additional
confirmation, it is worth mentioning passages by Grayzel in his History. In one
paragraph he says that the Germans were doing what their documents say they
were doing:
“They followed this up with wholesale deportations. They set aside a number
of places in Eastern Europe in which they concentrated Jews from other
376
262
Reitlinger, 102-109; Hilberg, 264-265; NMT, vol. 13, 213.