Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 8: Remarks
The simplest explanation is that the relative did indeed perish somewhere in
Europe during the war, or in a concentration camp, from causes that have been
covered in this book, along with an indeterminate number of other persons of central
and east European nationalities.
The second possibility is that the relative survived the war, but did not reestablish
contact with his prewar relations. One possible, although not very likely, motivation
for such a failure to reestablish contact could have been some prohibition
on such correspondence imposed by the Soviet Government on those Jews who
had been absorbed into the Soviet Union.
A more important and more plausible motivation for failing to reestablish contact
held when a separation of husband and wife was involved. A very large number
of marriages are held together by purely social and economic constraints; such
constraints didn’t exist for a great number of the Jews uprooted by the German
policies and wartime and postwar conditions.
In many cases deported Jewish families were broken up for what was undoubtedly
intended by the Germans to be a period of limited duration. This was
particularly the case when the husband seemed a good labor conscript; just as
German men were conscripted for hazardous military service, Jews were conscripted
for unpleasant labor tasks. Under such conditions, it is reasonable to expect
that many of these lonely wives and husbands would have, during or at the
end of the war, established other relations that seemed more valuable than the
previous relationships. In such cases, then, there would have been a strong motivation
not to reestablish contact with the legal spouse. Moreover, none of the “social
and economic constraints,” which we noted above, were present, and Jews
were in a position to choose numerous destinations in the resettlement programs
that the Allies sponsored after the war. This possibility could account for a surprisingly
large number of “missing” Jews. For example, suppose that a man and
wife with two small children were deported, with the man being sent to a labor
camp and the wife and children being sent to a resettlement camp in the East. Let
us suppose that the wife failed to reestablish contact with her husband. We thus
seem to have four people reported dead or missing; the husband says his wife and
children are presumably dead and the wife says her husband was lost. However,
this one separation of husband and wife could account for even more missing
Jews, for it is likely that the parents and other relatives of the wife, on the one
hand, and the parents and other relative of the husband, on the other, would also
have lost touch with each other. Thus, one had some number of people on the
husband’s side claiming that some number of people on the wife’s side are missing,
and vice versa. Obviously, the possibilities of accounting for “missing” Jews
in this way are practically boundless.
It is said that the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem now have the names of between
2.5 and 3 million Jewish “dead from the Nazi holocaust.” The data have
supposedly been “collected on one-page testimony sheets filled in by relatives or
witnesses or friends.” Of course, it is in no way possible to satisfactorily substantiate
this production of the Israeli government, which certainly cannot be claimed
to be a disinterested party in the question of the number of Jews who perished.
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