Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
activities ranged from active sabotage to propaganda and, on occasion, to armed
resistance. Extermination propaganda started in underground publications slightly
earlier than it started being generated by the World Jewish Congress (see Appendix
E), but it was not believed by the Jewish population, because nothing in their
experiences supported it; letters received from Jews deported East reassured
friends and relatives. As Dawidowicz writes in her introductory chapter on the
problems posed by the “holocaust” for historical research:
“One impediment was the inadequacy of Jewish documentation, despite its
enormous quantity. […] The absence of vital subjects from the records may be
explained by the predicament of terror and censorship; yet, lacking evidence
to corroborate or disprove, the historian will never know with certainty
whether that absence is a consequence of an institutional decision not to deal
with such matters or whether it was merely a consequence of prudential policy
not to mention such matters. The terror was so great that even private personal
diaries, composed in Yiddish or Hebrew, were written circumspectly,
with recourse to Scripture and the Talmud as a form of esoteric expression
and self-imposed reticence.”
As is clear from all studies of German population policies in Poland, e.g. those
of Dawidowicz and of Koehl, there was a constant moving about of Jews, in accordance
with the general German policy of concentrating them as far east as
practicable. According to the “Korherr Report” of March 1943, 1,449,692 Jews
had been transported “out of the East provinces to the Russian East.” It is further
specified that 90% of these had passed through camps in the General Government,
and the others had passed through camps in the Warthegau (presumably meaning
mainly Lodz). The huge ghetto of Warsaw was liquidated in the spring of 1943,
and most of the Jews were sent further east, with Treblinka serving as a transit
camp for this resettlement. This was only accomplished, however, after fierce
Jewish resistance and a battle that received world publicity while it was raging.
The resettlement, however, was not complete, because there were always at least
some Jews at the site of the ghetto and, as remarked above, all of the larger ghettos
existed in some degree throughout the war.
When a resettlement was announced to a ghetto, it was the duty of the Judenrat
to draw up the lists of those to be resettled. With only rare exceptions, the
Jews being resettled went along peacefully, because it was well known that the
“resettlement” was just that.
It appears that epidemics were common in the ghettos. The Germans attributed
them to “a lack of discipline” on the part of the Jews. They took what countermeasures
they could and, as the New York Times reported on at least one occasion,
“many ambulances were sent to Warsaw to disinfect the ghetto.” 387
While the general eastward movement of these Jews is an established fact, the
data to reconstruct exactly what numbers were sent where does not exist. The important
point to note, however, was that it is almost certain that the greater number
of Polish Jews were completely cleared out of all of pre-war Poland except the
387
270
New York Times (Oct. 18, 1941), 4.