Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Appendix A: The ‘Statement’
is difficult to believe that a German could have followed such practices in a statement
written out voluntarily.
No two people could possibly agree on how such deranged material should be
presented in English. Do not assume that an obvious error is mine. As for the very
long paragraphs, that is the way the document came. For the sake of the reader, I
even inserted a couple paragraph breaks that were not there.
It may seem impossible to squeeze 700 or 800 people into a chamber 20 or 25
meters square and 1.9 meters high, but it is possible if one uses a scrap press, but
in that case the victims would be literally, just as the document asserts, “crushed,”
and gassing would be quite superfluous.
It is of passing interest that in the original document “Warsaw” is not referred
to via the German or French names for the city, but via the Polish “Warsawa.”
As Rassinier has put it: if it is not true that Hitler made the said visit to Lublin-
Majdanek, 439 if it is not true that 700 to 800 people can be contained in a gas
chamber of 25 square meters, if it is not true that the Germans gassed 25 million
people, and since the document contains little else, then we should ask: what does
it contain that is true
The role of Baron von Otter, a young Swedish diplomat during the war, was
scrutinized in the postwar period. No confirmation of the Gerstein-Otter meetings
had come from any Swedish source during the war, i.e., before the document we
have examined was created. Moreover, everybody knows that there was no friction
in Sweden’s relationship with Germany over the allegations attributed to Gerstein
or anything similar.
In the immediate postwar period, the Allies were eager to organize support for
their atrocity charges. Having the Gerstein document in hand but no Gerstein,
they approached Baron Lagerfelt, a Swedish diplomat in London, to ask him to
press von Otter to confirm the Gerstein story. Von Otter was then stationed in
Helsinki, and Lagerfelt was a personal friend. These communications took place
in July 1945, but Lagerfelt’s success was only partial. He was able to compose an
aide-mémoire for the Swedish Foreign Office, dated August 7, 1945, confirming
the substance of what the Gerstein statement says about the meetings with von Otter,
but he did not identify von Otter. The aide-mémoire identifies only “a foreign
diplomat of a neutral country”, and the country is not even named. 440 In 1945, von
Otter evidently refused to allow his name to be used to confirm the story in an official
document. However, in submitting the document, Lagerfelt was covered by
his private correspondence with von Otter.
Von Otter’s wish for anonymity in a 1945 report to his own Foreign Office
raises problems. First, there was a document, our 1553-PS, that named him, so the
maneuver was futile. Perhaps at that early point von Otter did not grasp that a
document naming him was to get into the public record. That view was understandable;
the Nuremberg trials were months off, and 1553-PS had not yet become
notorious.
The second problem in interpreting von Otter’s wish for anonymity is that the
439 Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (April 1953), 177-185, esp. note 39a.
440 Roques, 312.
311