Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
newspaper executives arrived in Frankfurt as the first stop in a tour of Germany
and were told by “high United States officers” that Jews were flooding into the
U.S. zone at the rate of 10,000 per month, thereby creating a “grave problem.” It
was said that “many of them are coming from Russia, and if they join those in Poland
in an apparent mass movement toward Palestine, we may have to look after
3,000,000 of them.” Of particular interest in this statement is where “many” of the
Jews were coming from, and the fact that the U.S. Army authorities felt it plausible
to use a figure of 3,000,000 (not a misprint). They were, of course, exaggerating
the situation in order to provoke some sort of relevant action, for there was
never any possibility that 3 million Jews would enter the U.S. zone in Germany.
Nevertheless, their use of such a figure and their specifying that “many” of the
Jews were “coming from Russia” are worth noting. 411
The problem got so much attention that in early August 1946 the American
military governor, General McNarney, announced that “the United States border
patrol will not permit Jewish refugees from Poland to enter the United States zone
in organized truckloads and trainloads.” McNarney added, however, that “if persecutees
come across the borders individually, of course, it is a different matter,
and we will accept them.” It may have surprised many observers that this seemingly
unimportant qualification was so satisfactory for the Zionists that, shortly
later, Rabbi Wise and other prominent Zionists publicly lauded “the attitude of
Gen. Joseph T. McNarney […] toward the entire problem.” The puzzle was resolved
the following November, when it was reported that a record 35,000 Jews
entered West Germany from Poland (the greater part of them to the U.S. zone) in
September and that the “trickle” that existed in November amounted to “150 to
200 persons daily.” 412
In the news stories of this period, it was frequently the case that the Jews “returning”
from Russia to Poland were described as consisting mainly of the 1940
deportees to the Soviet Union. Such a press treatment was to be expected, because
the others were supposed to be dead, but such interpretations may be disregarded,
although, as Korzen remarks, this group included 1940 deportees.
During 1946, the U.S. Senate War Investigating Committee sent its chief
counsel, George Meader, to Germany to investigate the U.S. occupation policies.
Meader’s report, which charged, inter alia, widespread immorality and racketeering
in the Army, was suppressed as a result of “tremendous pressure by the White
House, State and War Departments, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg” and a threat
of resignation by General Clay, but the contents eventually were made public
anyway. The report was very critical of the entire practice of accommodating the
Jews who were pouring in from Poland, because they were not really refugees (in
the sense of having been stranded in Germany at the end of the war) but part of
the mass movement of people that was being sponsored by private groups on behalf
of a specific political cause, Zionism. The U.S., therefore, was “financing a
political program” by receiving these Jews in the German DP camps, although
that program had never been submitted to the Congress for consideration. In the
411
412
280
New York Times (Jun. 24, 1946), 12.
New York Times (Aug. 10, 1946), 4; (Aug. 27, 1946), 6; (Nov. 2, 1946), 7.