Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 1: Trials, Jews and Nazis
sisted of ten U.S. Army officers. There was one person with legal training present,
all of whose rulings on the admissibility of evidence were final. There were 1,416
convictions out of 1,672 tried, with 420 death sentences.
While the prosecution could hunt all over Europe for witnesses and, if necessary,
torture or otherwise coerce Germans in order to get “evidence,” the accused,
cut off from the outside world and without funds, were rarely able to summon
anybody to their defense.
In addition, the “Association of Persons Persecuted by the Nazis,” by a propaganda
campaign, forbade former concentration camp inmates to testify for the defense.
The American lawyer George A. McDonough, who had had the rather peculiar
experience of having served as both a prosecutor and defense counsel in the war
crimes program and later on as a member of a reviewing board and an arbiter on
clemency petitions, wrote to the New York Times in 1948 complaining about the
lack of legal basis for the trials and remarking that “in nine problems out of ten
the authorities and the textbooks had no answer” to the legal questions that regularly
and consistently came up for anybody seriously concerned with matters of
legality. For McDonough, the major problem was whether or not a defense of superior
orders should be accepted in war crimes trials. He wrote:
“At the Dachau trials, the claim of the accused that he would have been
shot himself if he had not obeyed his superior’s order to commit an act which
he, in ignorance, may have believed to be a legal order, or knew to be illegal,
seemed to be handled by the courts as an issue of fact. The availability of this
defense seemed to depend upon the age and the rank of the accused, and the
state of battle existing at the time of the offense. Again it would seem highhanded
procedure to hold an enlisted man to the knowledge of the illegality of
a particular act when the international authorities themselves are in disagreement
as to its illegality or have never defined the act at all.
[…] Hearsay evidence was admitted indiscriminately and sworn statements
of the witnesses were admissible regardless of whether anybody knew the person
who made the statement or the individual who took the statement. If a
prosecutor considered a statement of a witness to be more damaging than the
witness’ oral testimony in court he would advise the witness to go back to his
home, submit the statement as evidence, and any objection by defense counsel
would be promptly overruled.”
One notable incident occurred when investigator Joseph Kirschbaum brought a
certain Einstein into court to testify that the accused Menzel had murdered Einstein’s
brother. When the accused was able to point out that the brother was alive
and well and, in fact, sitting in court, Kirschbaum was deeply embarrassed and
scolded poor Einstein:
“How can we bring this pig to the gallows, if you are so stupid to bring
your brother into court”
The U.S. Army authorities in charge admitted some of these things. When the
chief of the Dachau War Crimes Branch, Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld, quit his post in
1948, he was asked by newspapermen if there was any truth to the stories about
41