Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 2: The Camps
Horror Scenes and ‘Extermination’ Camps
When Germany collapsed in the spring of 1945, it was after a long allied
propaganda campaign that had repeatedly claimed that people, mainly Jews, were
being systematically killed in German “camps.” When the British captured the
camp at Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, they found a large number of unburied
bodies lying around the camp.
Photographs, such as Fig. 10, and pictures of guards with unfortunate facial
expressions, such as Fig. 12, were accordingly reproduced all over the world.
It is, I believe, Belsen, which has always constituted the effective, mass propaganda
“proof” of exterminations, and even today you will find such scenes occasionally
waved around as “proof.” In fact these scenes, repeated in varying degrees
at other German camps, e.g. Dachau and Buchenwald, were much less related
to “extermination” than the scenes at Dresden after the British-American
raids of February 1945, when many, many times as many bodies were found lying
around. 53 The deaths at Belsen were the result of a total loss of control, not a deliberate
policy. Equivalent scenes could easily have existed in any country invaded
on all sides by enemy armies, crippled by powerful “strategic” bombings,
which had caused all sorts of shortages and chaotic conditions.
The major cause of the deaths at Belsen was a typhus epidemic. Everybody
agrees that typhus was a constant menace in all German camps and eastern military
operations; for this reason there was a real fear of typhus spreading throughout
Germany and vigorous countermeasures were applied. 54 The typhus problem
will play a most significant role in our story, because it was not merely at the end
of the war that it manifested itself; the scenes at the end of the war were due to the
total collapse of all measures against a disease that had plagued the German concentration
camps since early in the war. The typhus was of the sort carried by the
body louse, and consequently, defensive measures consisted in killing the lice,
whose spread was due mainly to the constant rail traffic with the East.
Thus, all “survivor literature,” sincere or inventive and regardless of the type
of camp involved, report the same basic procedures involved in entering a German
camp: disrobe, shave hair, shower, dress in new clothes or in disinfested old
clothing. 55
At Belsen, the trouble had started in October 1944 with a breakdown of these
measures. In the account of a political prisoner there: 56
53
54
55
56
Veale, 133-136; Martin, 121.
Reitlinger, 122, 402; Hilberg, 570-571; DuBois, 127.
Burney, 9; Buber, 188; Lenz, 31; Cohen, 120-122.
Sington, 117-118.
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