Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 8: Remarks
really anomalous that a Talmudic scholar such as Rabbi Weissmandel plays a
possibly significant role in the hoax. Also, because Rabbi Wise translated a good
deal of ancient and medieval Jewish literature and also founded a Jewish seminary,
he may also have some claim to being a Talmudic scholar. One suspects that
such scholars might have been exactly the type required to give birth to the hoax.
Credentials
A remaining objection could raise the question of my credentials for writing
such a book. This is a good point, for it is true that my formal training has been in
engineering and applied mathematics and not history.
It is not unprecedented for investigators to make contributions in fields apparently
remote from their specialties, but I will concede that the point should not be
waved aside lightly. Normally, we expect developments in historical investigation
to come from historians, just as developments in engineering come from engineers.
Exceptions to this rule can be admitted, but some justification for the exception
should be expected.
My justification is the obvious one: default on the part of regular professional
historians. No such person has come forward with a critical study of the question
or with any work actually arguing any particular side of the extermination question
and presenting the evidence, which supports the thesis. The closest thing to
such a work is the book by Reitlinger, who is at least willing to take explicit note
of some of the anomalies that develop in presenting the story of the “holocaust,”
but Reitlinger is not a historian but an artist and art collector. He has written several
books, the most significant being his three volume study of the history of
dealings in objects of art, The Economics of Taste. After Reitlinger, Hilberg manages
a tiny bit of a critical attitude, but Hilberg is a professor of political science
at the University of Vermont, and his doctorate is in public law and government.
The books by Reitlinger and Hilberg recognize, to a very inadequate but nevertheless
perceptible degree, a responsibility to convince the skeptic. The other
extermination mythologists do not make any effort whatever to show that the exterminations
happened; they just assume we all know it happened and then they
take it from there. This is the case with the remaining three of the five leading extermination
mythologists – Nora Levin, Leon Poliakov, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz.
Levin was a research librarian while writing her book and now teaches history at
Gratz College, a small Jewish school in Philadelphia. Poliakov is research director
of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, and thus a professional
Jewish propagandist. Dawidowicz is the only regular professional historian
in the group and occupies the Leah Lewis Chair in Holocaust Studies at the Yeshiva
University in New York. All five of the leading extermination mythologists
are Jews.
In books and articles on subjects that are other than, but touch on, the “holocaust,”
professional historians invariably give some sort of endorsement to the lie,
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