Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
tainly in conflict with the extermination claims in the case of the Romanian Jews.
It is reasonable to assume that the bulk of the Jews in Soviet controlled territory
that was occupied by the Germans after June 22, 1941, escaped into the interior before
the arrival of the latter, a belief that is also held by Reitlinger (page 241). In any
case, there is no evidence that the Germans did more than adopt the sort of guarded
and hostile attitude toward the Jews who remained, which was implied by the partisan
menaces discussed in the preceding chapter. The Polish Jews constituted the
majority of the Jews moved around by the Germans and present, on account of their
location and circumstances, the greatest difficulties to any detailed analysis of the
matter. We can only reconstruct in general outline what happened to them.
We first remark that, while it is convenient here to distinguish between Russian
and Polish Jews, the real distinction is most slight, if it could be said to exist
at all. Before World War I, both sets of Jews were subjects of the Russian Empire.
The first relevant events involving Polish Jews were due to Russian, rather than
German measures. Germany and Russia partitioned Poland in 1939, the eastern half
and thus a large portion of the Polish Jews thereby coming under Soviet rule. These
Jews were the objects of a Russian resettlement program whose broad features have
been described by Korzen in an article published by the Israeli Government. Korzen’s
article is of some importance to the matters treated in this chapter. 383
Briefly, what happened is that “hundreds of thousands” of these Jews were
dispersed throughout the Soviet Union in an evacuation program which commenced
in June 1940. At first, many were sent to labor camps, but after September
1941, a serious effort was made “to convert the refugees into Soviet citizens
and prevent their leaving the Soviet Union.” The dispersion was as far as Central
Asia and even to the Far East. Details are difficult to develop, and Korzen pleads
for more interest in research into the matter. Many became Soviet citizens, some
trekked back to Poland after the war and in may cases proceeded on to Israel.
Korzen remarks that the Jews who remained in Poland as leaders of the new
Communist regime were put under pressure “to change their names to purely Polish-sounding
ones as well as to keep their Jewish origin secret”. Some eventually
arrived at places such as Persia and India via Shanghai. The Joint Distribution
Committee of New York maintained contact with the refugees in the Soviet Union
during the war and assisted their movements after the war.
It is also known that a large number of Jews, given by one source as 300,000,
fled from western to eastern Poland in 1939 when the Nazis invaded the former.
384 Thus, a significant fraction, perhaps as many as a third, of the Polish Jews
had been moved beyond reach of the Germans before the outbreak of war between
Russia and Germany in June 1941.
Although there had been a limited German resettlement program earlier, notably
for Vienna Jews, the Nazi resettlement program began with earnestness in the
autumn of 1941. If Polish Jews are excluded but Romanian Jews included in our
immediate considerations, we see that the Germans moved at most a million Jews
to settlements or ghettos in the occupied East. From the locations that have been
383
384
266
Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 3, 119-140.
Kimche & Kimche, 63.