Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 7: The Final Solution
sienstadt source who reported that the Nazis were deporting Jews to Riga and
other places throughout the course of the war. Nazi documents dealing with the
Riga settlement have not survived.
The Polish Ghettos
One can see, in general outline, what happened to the Polish (and Latvian and
Lithuanian) Jews by consulting the “holocaust” literature, which has been contributed
by “survivors.” In the larger towns and in the cities, the Jews within Poland
were quartered in ghettos, which existed throughout the war. In Poland, there
were particularly large ghettos at Lodz (Litzmannstadt), Warsaw, Bialystok,
Lwow, and Grodno; in Lithuania, at Vilna and Kovno; in Latvia, as we noted
above, at Riga. Although the “survivor” literature offers endless ravings about exterminations
(frequently of a sort not reconcilable with the legend, e.g., gas chambers
in Cracow in December 1939), it also offers enough information for one to
grasp approximately how things were. In each ghetto, there was a Jewish Council,
Judenrat, which was the internal government of the ghetto. The ghetto police
were Jewish and responsible to the Judenrat. The Judenrat usually counseled cooperation
with the Germans because, under the circumstances, it saw no other
plausible course. The Germans made frequent demands for labor details drawn
from the ghetto, and the Judenrat then drew up the lists of people to be thus conscripted.
There were also resistance organizations in the larger ghettos, usually
well armed, whose members often viewed the Judenrat as composed of German
stooges. 386
Dawidowicz’s book devotes several chapters to conditions in the Polish ghettos.
Although the initial policy of the Germans, immediately after occupying Poland,
had been to forbid Jewish schools, this policy was soon abandoned and Jewish
children received an essentially regular education in schools operated either
privately or under the authority of the Judenrat. Cultural activities for adults – literary,
theatrical, musical – helped alleviate the otherwise unhappy features of
ghetto life. The Jewish social welfare agency was the ZSS (dissolved in mid-1942
by the Germans but shortly later reconstituted as the JUS, Jüdische Unterstützungsstelle),
which drew supplies of food, clothing, and medicine from the
German civil administration and which also maintained contact, through the German
Red Cross, with foreign organizations that provided money and supplies. Before
the U.S. entry into the war, the bulk of such external funds came from the
Joint Distribution Committee in New York, but after December 1941 this was no
longer legally possible.
Despite the protected status of the ZSS-JUS, it sometimes provided cover for
illegal political activities. The various political organizations – Socialist, Communist,
Zionist, Agudist – were connected with the resistance organizations, whose
386
In the “survivor” literature, see in particular Glatstein et al., 25-32, 43-112; Gringauz (1949 &
1950); Friedman & Pinson.
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