Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Supplement 1: The International Holocaust Controversy
and transport – of all German countermeasures against diseases, mainly typhus,
that had plagued all German camps throughout the war. These German
countermeasures had included periodic showers of all inmates and
also extensive and periodic use of insecticides, such as Zyklon B, for disinfestation
purposes.
7. Concentration camp inmates were an important source of labor for the hard
pressed wartime German economy, and the high death rate that prevailed in
the camps throughout the war was considered “catastrophic” by the Germans
(Chapter 4, p. 160). As a result of the high death rate, about 350,000
or perhaps 400,000 inmates died in the German camps during the war,
some minority of that number being Jews. 479
8. There were crematoria in all of the camps for the disposal of the bodies of
people who died there.
9. The camps in Germany are not even claimed to have been “extermination
camps,” except in occasional publications of a frankly sensationalistic nature.
The so-called “extermination camps,” such as Auschwitz, were all in
Poland and were captured by the Soviet troops after having been evacuated
in an orderly fashion by the Germans. The Russians found no horrible
scenes comparable to those we later found in Germany and no evidence of
exterminations.
10. The “gas chambers” are fictitious, and the best the bearers of the legend
can do to argue their existence is to advance the ludicrous claim that the
Zyklon did double duty in exterminating Jews as well as lice or to misrepresent
a shower or even an ordinary room as a “gas chamber.” Another tactic
is to confuse the concept of a “gas oven.” All crematorium ovens are
“gas ovens.”
That is the basic structure of the hoax.
Why a “Hoax”
At this point, it is convenient to remark on the title I chose for my book. In the
controversy, one of the things that jolted some, even some who were otherwise
favorably impressed by the book, was my use of the term “hoax” to describe the
received legend. Some felt that, whatever the truth of the legend, the term was not
adequate or appropriate to the situation. Such a trivializing concept, it was
thought, should not be applied to a legend that lives on the vast scale of the Holocaust
– it struck some as comparable to criticizing Handel’s Messiah as a “ditty.”
Let me assure you that the choice of “hoax” was calculated and that today I am
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The figure is for deaths of people who had been registered as camp inmates, in written records of
which enough have survived to permit the estimate. The legend asserts that the “exterminated”
millions were not entered in such records. See the report, “The Number of Victims of the National
Socialist Persecution,” available from the International Tracing Service, D-3548 Arolsen,
Germany. The remark should not be misinterpreted as a claim that the number of Jews who perished
was some minority of 350,000. Many more died outside of the concentration camps, from
diseases in ghettos, in occasional pogroms, and in other commonplace and uncommonplace
ways. The number is not known.
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