Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
there is no question of the competence of the authors of the report.”
The authors were acquainted with the interior of the camp (although not, as
Pressac acknowledges, with the interior of the crematories at Birkenau).
Thus, Pressac should confront a major contradiction here. Pressac notes various
contradictions in the testimonies of the usual alleged eye witnesses (such as
Commandant Höss), but continues to believe that they were at least speaking of
real events. However, if he is to accept the WRB report, then he must throw out (I
won’t say “we” because I did so long ago) the testimonies of the alleged eyewitnesses
Höss, Fajnzylberg (Jankowski), Müller, and Broad, as they claimed to have
witnessed mass gassings at the Stammlager, and, according to Pressac, the lack of
documents and “the present state of the premises” make their testimonies the only
“evidence to establish the reality of homicidal gassings at the Stammlager.” 630
This is not a contradiction of detail. By this I mean that one can no longer continue
to hold that they were at least speaking of real events. Because they are so
unreliable, their testimony on mass exterminations in other parts of the camp
complex must be rejected. But because that testimony is no less reliable than the
others, Pressac ought to reject all alleged eyewitness testimony. Thus, Pressac has
a mass extermination program that was witnessed by no credible person.
As I said, we are dealing here with a “cornucopia of absurdities,” and it is easy
to overlook the significance of this point, for which the question of the authorship
of the WRB report is unimportant. The sole objective of the well informed authors
in composing and propagating the Report was to claim that Jews were being exterminated
en masse at Auschwitz. It is a piece of war propaganda, and there is no
obligation to believe such claims. Nevertheless, there is no way that Pressac or
anybody else may deny that, if there had in fact been mass gassings in the
Stammlager, then they would have been spoken of in the WRB report. Therefore
there were none. And yet the testimonies for the Stammlager are equivalent, in
terms of credibility and the circumstances under which they were delivered, to the
testimonies of mass gassings in other parts of the camp complex.
In contemporary exploitation of the affair of the WRB report, Vrba is really
the star. Since he first publicly identified himself as Rosenberg (probably in
1958), he has published a book (in 1964) about his wartime experiences, I Cannot
Forgive, testified at the first Zündel trial in Toronto in 1985, and appeared on
630
426
Pressac, p. 123. Pressac writes on p. 132 that the Stammlager “gas chamber was used sporadically
from the end of 1941 to 1942.” In view of the testimonies he cites, he should say rather
“from the end of 1941 to at least through 1942.” For example, the Fajnzylberg testimony cited by
Pressac on p. 124 speaks of a gassing of “400 Jews brought from Birkenau” on a date not earlier
than November 1942, when he was assigned to the Sonderkommando of Crematorium I. The
other testimonies – in Jadwiga Bezwinska, ed., KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS (NY: Howard Fertig,
1984), pp. 114ff, 174fff, and in Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz (NY: Stein and Day, 1979),
pp. 31-49 – also claim not merely gassings, but mass gassings of Jews in the mortuary of Crematorium
I during much of 1942. One of the many contradictions in Pressac’s work is that on p. 133
he also asserts, on the basis of logic that I can’t see at all, that from the data given in the Leuchter
report we can infer “use as a homicidal gas chamber” for Crematorium I. Another contradiction I
noticed is that on p. 106 he contrasts the oil-fired ovens of Buchenwald with the coke-fired ovens of
Auschwitz, but on p. 259 he says they were “identical.” Faurisson reviews additional contradictions:
See The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 1991), and No. 2 (Summer 1991).