Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Gitta Sereny
Gitta Sereny’s article in the New Statesman of November 2, 1979, furnishes a
useful illustration. She attempted to counter my arguments in only one respect. In
the course of writing Into That Darkness, she had interviewed, in a German
prison, Franz Stangl, former commandant of Treblinka (a facility in central Poland
that served as a transit camp for deportations of Warsaw Jews). She wrote:
“I talked with Stangl for weeks in prison; I talked to others who worked
under him, and to their families. I talked to people who, otherwise uninvolved,
witnessed these events in Poland. And I talked to a few of those very few who
survived.
Butz claims in his Hoax that those [hundreds] who admitted taking part in
extermination were doing so as plea-bargaining, in order to get lighter sentences.
But those I talked to had been tried. Many had served their sentences,
and none of them had anything to gain – except shame – by what they told me.
Stangl himself wanted only to talk, and then to die. And Stangl is dead. But if
[…] Butz […] were really interested in the truth, Stangl’s wife, and many
other witnesses are still able to testify.”
Although the point is not of major importance, I note that Sereny had misleadingly
reported Stangl’s hopes during her interview. According to her Into That
Darkness, Stangl was awaiting the decision on his appeal against a life sentence,
so he presumably wanted to get out of jail before he died.
Anybody who has taken even a brief look at the details of the Treblinka legend
(e.g. the claim that the exhausts of captured Russian tanks and trucks were used in
the “gassings”) would understand that history was not being served by Sereny’s
remarks on her interviews with Stangl. However, I am afraid that in the typical
case such healthy skepticism might be accompanied by some myopia in offering
an explanation for Sereny’s account.
The most obvious myopic reaction would be to say or suggest that Sereny was
lying, that Stangl never said anything like what she has attributed to him. Other
possibilities might be to suggest that such remarks by Stangl were produced by
bribery or torture. That such reactions quite miss the mark is easily seen by first
considering the context, rather than the content, of Stangl’s remarks. He was by
then an old man. He had heard the tales of what was supposed to have happened
at Treblinka for twenty-five years. Of course, he privately scoffed at them at first.
Then he got accustomed to living in a culture, in which such tales were never publicly
challenged. He may (as sometimes happens in such circumstances) have
started to believe them himself, or perhaps he privately cultivated his knowledge
that the tales were almost pure invention. It is most unlikely that we shall ever
know, but we do know that in his confrontation with the journalist Sereny, the
hapless old man could scarcely have reasoned that he could help himself by denying
the legend as it applies to Treblinka. I am confident that Stangl told Sereny
something like she reports. Of course Stangl sought to excuse himself personally,
but what possible self-serving reason could he have found for telling Sereny that
the “gassings” are a myth
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