Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
tectors are one of the “criminal traces” on Pressac’s pathetically short list. 674
In historiography, there is an alternative and more commonplace description of
Pressac’s procedure with “criminal traces”. It is bad historiography of the simplest
sort: tendentious selection of a very small part of the data, resulting in grossly distorted
history.
Normally, one cannot get away with this. But today a Pressac, waving aside
historical reasoning and the mountain of documentary evidence, comes rushing
forward waving some document and saying, in effect, “but how about this”, and
he is respected instead of being ignored or laughed at. 675 He is credited by some
with finally proving the extermination allegation as it relates to Auschwitz, although
it had for years been claimed that it had been proven and that there was
nothing to argue about.
Thus, to the person who objects that I have treated petty details here, which are
incommensurate with the scale of the historical claim involved, I reply: you are
right, but it isn’t my fault! Ordinary historical reasoning observes that nobody
acted, during the war, as though “extermination” was going on, and that the Jews
were still there at war’s end. 676 However, a lot of influential people won’t accept
ordinary historical reasoning, and the debate, to the extent that it exists, has revolved
around the petty details.
The promoters of the legend may get away with such practices for a while in
arguing the reality of physical exterminations of Jews during World War II. There
are two leading reasons for this. Most obvious is the fact of the entrenched status
of the legend. What ought to require proof has been allowed to flourish unproved,
and the revisionists have in effect been forced to try to argue a negative. Another
reason, less obvious but very simple, is that the revisionists may not be able to
immediately offer correct replies to the sallies of the defenders of the legend. This
appears to me to have been the case with the Topf letter. I don’t believe Faurisson’s
immediate replies (which I would also have made) were correct. In fact, nobody
could be relied on to be correct under the circumstances and in the time
frame involved. A comparison: there is much building activity at Northwestern
University now. Does anybody believe that, fifty years from now, perhaps after
some cataclysm, anybody could reliably interpret individual documents that were
records of this construction Of course not. Nobody could do that, and nobody
could infallibly interpret every Auschwitz document from the period 1941-1945.
Indeed, the hypothesis I have advanced here may be wrong, even though I have
had a few years to consider the solitary document in question.
674
675
676
440
Pressac (1989), pp. 432-457.
On Pressac’s 1989 book see e.g. the NY Times, 18 Dec. 1989. On his 1993 book, which reproduced
the Topf letter in question here, see (all 1993) l’Express, 23 Sept. pp. 76-87; Libération, 24
Sept. pp. 28f; Le Monde, 26-27 Sept. p. 7; Die Welt, 27 Sept. p. 1; AP report in the Denver Post, 2
Oct. p. 6A; Die Woche, 7 Oct. p. 8; NY Times, 28 Oct. p. A3 and 31 Oct. sec. 4, p. 2 and 8 Nov. p.
A14; Chicago Tribune, 28 Nov. sec. 1, p. 25 and 13 Dec. sec. 5, p. 1.
Butz (1982). Supplement 2 here. For some Jewish demography see Chapters 1 and 7 herein.
Much more is to be found in Walter Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, IHR,
1983.