Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
ness property, their jewelry, any clothing they could not carry as luggage, and all
but about $25 of any ordinary currency they had were simply confiscated in the
course of resettlement (some of the business property might have been resettled
with them). The camps at Lublin and Auschwitz were principal gathering and
processing points for much of this property, wherever it had actually been confiscated.
392 Thus, many Jews, having neither property nor relatives at their original
homes, had no very compelling reasons for returning to them. The German program
had truly been one of uprooting.
Another aspect of the situation was that, in late 1945 and in 1946, there was
much talk about anti-Jewish pogroms allegedly occurring with great frequency in
Poland and other East European countries. If these reports were true, then the pogroms
were a powerful inducement to the Jews to leave. If these reports were
merely Zionist propaganda having little, if any, basis in fact, then one can infer
that the Zionists were engaging in operations designed to move Jews out of eastern
Europe. Thus, whether the reports of pogroms were true or false, they suggest
a movement of Jews out of eastern Europe.
At the Yalta meeting in 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin had agreed that
“it would be impossible for Jewish refugees to return to Poland and be reintegrated
into its normal life.” 393 While it is certain that many Jews returned to their
homelands, there were solid facts and also, apparently, much propaganda discouraging
them from doing so. If this is true and if it is also true that a significant
number of Polish Jews left Soviet territory, then many of them must have proceeded
through Poland to other destinations. This is the case. The Zionist political
leadership had other destinations in mind for them.
6. Many of the Jews eventually resettled neither in the Soviet Union nor in
their original countries but elsewhere, mainly in the U.S. and Palestine. We all
know this to be true, but there is some uncertainty in the numbers involved, principally
in the case of the U.S. immigrants. Until November 1943, the U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service recognized a category “Hebrew” among “races
and peoples,” but in that month this practice was stopped, and no official records
of Jewish immigration have been kept since then. 394
Another problem in accounting in detail for Jewish movements around the
time of the end of the war is that we run right into the War Refugee Board and the
UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) in attempting
to examine this subject. It will be recalled that the WRB was set up in early 1944
as an apparently joint venture of the U.S. State, Treasury, and War Departments,
but that it was, in fact, under the control of Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau.
The Board was granted the extraordinary power of appointing special attachés
with diplomatic status. Another very irregular feature was that the WRB worked
very closely with private organizations. Collaboration with the Joint Distribution
Committee and the World Jewish Congress and several other Jewish and Zionist
organizations was extensive. Some non-Jewish organizations were also involved,
392
393
394
274
Koehl, 198-199; NMT, vol. 5, 692-741; vol. 4, 954-973.
New York Times (Jun. 28, 1945), 8.
Davie, 33.