Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 8:
Remarks
Miscellaneous Objections
We close this work with a few miscellaneous remarks, most of which deal
with some objections that may arise in certain situations.
An objection that one highly intelligent critic actually expressed was that he
thought that my story was similar to ones he had read about “flying saucers” and
“divining rods.” The reaction was startling, but it was at least understandable.
Years of propaganda have so associated Nazi Germany with the six million legend
that denial of the legend seems at first almost as preposterous for many people
as denying that World War II happened at all. Nevertheless, the objection is
not one that can be answered, except by pointing out that our account does not involve
the supernatural or extraterrestrial or, indeed, anything more unusual than
people lying about their political enemies. With this critic, one can only ask that
he attempt to say something intelligent.
The most consequential objection to this work will be that I have employed the
“holocaust” literature, in particular the books by Reitlinger and Hilberg, as
sources, although I have also denounced such books as “monumental foolishness.”
This objection is a serious one, because I would be the first to hold that,
once the extermination legend had been buried, these books will become significant
only as supreme examples of total delusion and foolishness and will be referenced
only in connection with the great hoaxes of history. However, our task here
is precisely to bury the legend, and the only way to do that is by considering the
story that has been advanced, and this amounts to analyzing the case put forward
by Reitlinger and Hilberg. The only practical way of exposing the hoax is by considering
the claims that have been put forward by the extermination mythologists.
There was a second reason for employing Reitlinger and Hilberg as sources. In
this work, great weight had been placed on providing documentation that a reader
without access to a large library can confirm on his own. Unfortunately, this desire
could not be entirely satisfied, because a good part of the analysis relies on
documents and publications that are not readily available without going through
complicated borrowing procedures. In order to partially overcome this difficulty, I
have used Reitlinger and Hilberg as sources on many such points, but I have only
done this in cases where I have been able to confirm their remarks. I have not
adopted the practice of assuming that anything that Reitlinger or Hilberg says that
helps my case must be true. For example, in connection with our discussion in
Chapter 5 (p. 188) concerning the date of the first Allied air raid at Auschwitz, I
gave reasons for the conclusion that the first raid did not occur before August
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