Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Supplement 3: A Response to a Major Critique of Holocaust Revisionism
public documents, mainly of an engineering nature, that had previously been in
the category of extreme esoterica, either unknown or known only to a few researchers.
We are better off on account of the book, but the gain is comparable to, say,
the publication of an index or bibliography. The value is purely in the factual information.
The analytical part of the book is a transparent charade by an actor
who is confident in advance that the people he is serving will cooperate in the
sham and will not call attention to the obvious disguise that renders him, in fact, a
clown in the eyes of his targets. How else can we react to a man who insists on
treating as irrelevant, at a time when it was decided to build large crematories, the
fact that there was a documented catastrophic death rate Even Pressac’s formal
sin on this point – of presuming that, which he is trying to prove, in order to find
“traces” of it – is minor compared to the comedy of his ungainly pirouetting
around and away from the central points.
I began this paper with a promise to show how Pressac seeks to have his reader
focus entirely on local matters while ignoring the context of the Auschwitz concentration
camp in its full dimensions. I have shown three specific important
senses in which this is true.
First, in his treatment of the decisions to build crematories at Auschwitz he
fails to acknowledge the relevance of the catastrophic typhus epidemics that prevailed
at the time of the decisions. Second, his “criminal trace” number one is a
highly questionable interpretation of a single word occurring in a document that
disproves, or at least renders implausible, his major claim. Third, his discussion of
the WRB report disregards the account given there, and consequently the decisive
consequences of that account in evaluating the reliability of the so-called witnesses,
in favor of a focus on a very picayune detail.
One should ask: how are such procedures possible in a work as replete with
documentary detail as this bulky tome That is what the notorious disorganization
of the book contributes; it is a means of avoiding a focus on the simple essentials.
The disorganization is there not because of the bad style of the author, but because
of the bad logic applied by the author and desired of the reader.
It is fair to say that one message of Pressac’s book is that, yes, the revisionists
and particularly Faurisson are right in their rejections of the traditional or accepted
evidence for homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. He does not put it that
bluntly, but it is there. He then claims that he, almost half a century after the alleged
events, has finally gotten the evidence right. The procedure is the usual one;
flip through the mountains of documents, rejecting all clearly exculpatory material
as the result of deceptive German practices in keeping written records and then,
when something that can be given an incriminating interpretation is found, declare
it an “enormous gaff[e]” of an unintended confession.
I think I could do the equivalent for any establishment or agency that generates
voluminous written records. In these days of “affirmative action” in employment,
perhaps I should look for Northwestern University’s gas chambers for white
males, while taking the precaution of developing an explanation why I survived.
Likewise, a future Pressac can concede that our Pressac is wrong, but that he has
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