Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
clear that he based this assertion on the inhuman conditions of the departures
and the brutality of the guards. After such a beginning, it was easy to imagine
that the old, the sick, and the children were not able to live long, even if typhus
did not cut them down in the overpopulated and unsanitary camps. In the same
sense was taken the remark of the Croation police chief Eugene Kvaternik, according
to whom the Germans had already caused two million Jews to die and
that the same fate awaited the Croatian Jews. Afterwards, these words have
been confirmed as only too exact. It is obvious, however, that the representative
of the Holy See, Father Abbé Marcone, in reporting them to the Vatican,
did not believe or was unable to believe that they should be taken literally.
One took them at least as a grave intimation of the tragedy which appeared
only in general outline.
The end of the year 1942 saw several public declarations on the deportations.
On 17 December, the United Nations published in London a declaration
on the rights of man, in which it denounced, in strong but general terms, the
treatment inflicted on the Jews. On 24 December, Pope Pius XII made, in his
Christmas Eve message, a very clear allusion to the deportations, concerning
which the world, at that time, was able only with difficulty to form an idea.”
This Vatican explanation is not acceptable. It is of course true that only occasional
scraps bearing on exterminations of Jews appear in their documents. Moreover,
no reasonable person would deny that most of these scraps must be classified
as inventive propaganda, for the claims of exterminations are either coupled
in some sense with other claims that nobody would defend today, or are associated
with other oddities demolishing their credibility. For example, a note of 2
January 1943 to the Vatican from Wladislas Raczkiewicz, the President of the
Polish exile government in London, claimed that the Germans had embarked on a
general extermination of the Polish population in addition to its Jewish minority
(in agreement with our analysis of Chapter 3, the note mentions the Auschwitz
concentration camp with an implication that it is not one of the sites of exterminations).
449 We have already noted, in Chapter 3 (p. 128), that Msgr. Burzio, the Papal
Chargé d’affaires in Slovakia, sent some invented tales back to Rome. Additional
scraps of this sort are reviewed below.
One must, of course, accept the Vatican claim that such information as they
had during the war could not have been taken as decent evidence of exterminations;
that has already been proved in this book. However, that is not the point.
The Vatican spokesmen today assert not merely that their information did not reveal
an extermination program, but that the exterminations happened, on a continental
scale, without reliable information about them coming to the Vatican. It is
this claim that is completely ridiculous and simply cannot be entertained for more
than a few seconds.
It is not possible for an extermination program of the type claimed to have
transpired without the Vatican learning of it. The slaughters are supposed to have
taken place mainly in Catholic Poland, where the Church had its agents, Catholic
449
348
Actes et documents, vol. 7, 179.