Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
buried. This report was widely publicized and circulated. 518
Of course, the present story is that almost all the Jews were killed in gas
chambers, their bodies later being burned. Also there is nothing about Auschwitz
as an extermination camp in this report of the Polish underground, which, in this
instance, cannot be accused of ignoring the plight of the Jews.
Karski published his story in 1944 as a silly book, Story of a Secret State,
which sold well. At present, he is a Professor of Government at Georgetown University
in Washington, DC. Although the wild disagreement between his wartime
tall tales and the postwar tall tales is not novel to a student of this subject, I
thought it useful to select Karski for mention because in recent years, in the deluge
of Holocaust propaganda, he has been rediscovered and feted as something of
a hero. He wrote a new and sanitized version of his story in 1979, no doubt for the
benefit of those of his friends embarrassed by his book. 519 Then in 1981, he was a
participant in a conference held at the State Department and sponsored by the
United States Holocaust Memorial Council, whose chairman, author Elie Wiesel,
“organized the event in part to build a bulwark against a rising tide of revisionist
history.” I have no evidence that anybody at the conference sought to get Karski
to explain the discrepancies between his and today’s received accounts of “exterminations.”
520
I am sometimes asked why I ignore Elie Wiesel, so here I shall given him one
paragraph. I ignore him because, unlike authors I usually discuss, he is frankly a
novelist and there is next to nothing in his declarations that could be considered
historical argument. Even his allegedly autobiographical Night is too histrionic to
be entertained as a purported primary source. This does not mean that there is absolutely
nothing to be gained from noticing him. That a novelist was chosen to be
Director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, a plum for which there
must have been a lot of behind-the-scenes jostling, is tremendously revealing of
the forces at work today. As for a short judgment of Wiesel’s various writings on
the “Holocaust”, I think it is fair to characterize them as reaching the heights that
most of us can reach only with the help of magic potions containing gin and vermouth
and comparable ingredients; Wiesel does not need such help. 521
To return to the point, namely “that the wartime claims were not based on
fact,” the logic goes as follows: The defenders of the legend could explain the retention
of a small fraction of the wartime reports only by claiming that wartime
exigencies made corroboration of information impracticable and that as a consequence
many inaccurate stories were passed along for public consumption. The
result was a set of reports which, although originally inspired by fact, exaggerated
the real situation. However, such an explanation cannot be reconciled with the
fact of the absence of Auschwitz from the extermination claims. The Auschwitz
518
519
520
521
394
M. Gilbert, pp. 93ff; Laqueur, p. 231.
Laqueur, Appendix 5.
Washington Post, October 28, 1981, p. A1; Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1981, pt. I, p. 20.
See e.g. his contribution to the booklet Dimensions of the Holocaust, Northwestern University
Press, Evanston, 1977. This is the published version of a lecture Wiesel gave at Northwestern in
the spring of 1977. An alternative is his article in the London Jewish Chronicle, November 4,
1977.