Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Gerstein statement presents him as having told Gerstein, at a subsequent meeting
in 1942, that he had reported the allegations to the Swedish Foreign Office. Why
then the wish for anonymity in 1945 A more basic question: why was a 1945 report
to the Foreign Office needed at all, if von Otter had reported the matter in
1942 We shall see.
The Gerstein matter followed von Otter around in the postwar period. The
Swedish Foreign Ministry wrote to the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine
in Paris on Nov. 10, 1949, attaching a copy of the aide-mémoire of August
7, 1945, apparently to a letter naming von Otter. On Nov. 22, 1952, Dibelius,
as Lutheran Bishop of Berlin, wrote to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich,
confirming that he not only heard the story of the gassings directly from Gerstein,
but had also learned from von Otter, “a few days” after the August 1942 train ride
from Warsaw, of the encounter with Gerstein and the contents of his story. 441
Von Otter does not seem to have confirmed the Gerstein story in a public forum
until 1966, during an interview with Pierre Joffroy, author of a book on Gerstein.
Von Otter then confirmed the meetings with Gerstein and the associated
story, but was very vague on details. He also said that he never transmitted the
Gerstein story to Dibelius, as Gerstein had supposedly asked, although he encountered
Dibelius by chance in Berlin in the autumn of 1942. (We see that at least one
distinguished citizen lied! I think the liar on this point was Dibelius.) On May 29,
1981, von Otter testified in a French trial similarly. In March 1983, von Otter
stated in a television interview that his alleged 1942 report of the Gerstein encounter
to the Swedish Foreign Office was only oral, not written. Moreover, he
never made a personal memorandum of the encounter. 442 That resolves the puzzle
of the quest for anonymity in 1945, and the need for a report in 1945. There was
no 1942 report to the Swedish Foreign Office. Add that to the 25 million etc., as a
falsehood in the document.
As for Dibelius, although he had been a leading member of Hugenberg’s Nazi
linked DNVP before 1933, he became associated with the Niemöller led church
opposition to the Nazis after 1933. Niemöller was incarcerated in 1935, but
Dibelius was allowed to go free, and then he vanished into the obscurity of a minor
post in a church welfare organization, being made Bishop after the war ended
in 1945. It is not correct to characterize Dibelius as an active member of the wartime
resistance, as the Gerstein statements do, thereby inflating his significance
well beyond what the facts warrant. 443
In the relevant reports of Cesare Orsenigo, the Papal Nuncio in Berlin, that
have been published by the Vatican, there is of course no reference to Gerstein.
See Appendix E.
A German version of the “Gerstein statement”, of essentially the same content,
was produced about a year after Gerstein’s disappearance. His wife said that Gerstein
had, unknown to her at the time, deposited it among their belongings at the
441 Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (April 1953), 177-185, esp. p. 181 and note 10.
442 Roques, 309-313. On the 1983 television interview Roques cites Alain Decaux, L’Histoire en
Question – 2.
443 Mosse, 245. New York Times (Feb. 1, 1967), 39.
312