Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Supplement 2: Context and Perspective in the Holocaust Controversy
deportations to and administration of the settlement (not concentration camp) near
Riga that is described in Jeanette Wolff’s article in Boehm’s book I do not know.
I am not saying that they will never turn up, but I know that they were not available
to those who looked for such things at the Nuremberg trials. 565
There is a second possible interpretation of Hilberg’s remark. While little
weight can be given to postwar Jewish population figures claimed for eastern
Europe, it must be conceded that the number of Jews in postwar Poland is only
some fraction of the very large number (perhaps 3 million) that lived in prewar
Poland (not quite the same territory). This is not because we must believe population
figures that are offered. It is because Poland, unlike the Soviet Union, is not a
large country and such large communities of Jews would certainly have been noticed
if they were still there.
Thus, if one drops all historical context the argument seems simple. They are
not in this territory we today call Poland; therefore they were killed. To those familiar
with fairly commonplace history the conclusion is as much a non sequitur
as would be the observation that because there were many millions of Germans
and ethnic Germans living east of the Oder-Neisse before the war, and today almost
none, then they were all killed. In fact, the period was one of massive population
movements, and the Jews were no exception. The Soviets deported many
into the interior of the Soviet Union, and in the period after the war, the Polish
Jews pouring into west Germany to proceed on to the U.S., Palestine, and other
destinations became a widely publicized problem. 566
I have little more advice at this time on prosecuting “Holocaust” controversy,
and I cannot anticipate every trick. I cannot even promise that the Sereny and Hilberg
expositions discussed here will be representative of what the reader might
encounter as argument in support of the legend. Even today one runs into the argument
that the American and British troops who captured Belsen, Buchenwald,
and Dachau “saw it with their own eyes.” They saw dead bodies, and it has been
relatively easily available knowledge since 1945 that the deaths were due to the
privations entailed in Germany’s collapse, but the reigning confusion is so great
that we still hear the argument anyway. All I can add is that one should keep current
with the revisionist literature and the more important pieces of literature in
support of the legend and, in controversy, be mindful above all of preserving historical
context and perspective and not getting trapped with myopic historical vision.
565
566
See Chapter 7, pp. 267-269.
See Chapters 1 and 7.
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