Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Buchenwald and the activities of commandant Koch; these offer quite perfect illustrations
on how the meanings of facts have been distorted in speaking of these
camps. We are fortunate in having a book by Christopher Burney, a former inmate;
this book not only indulges in some of this distortion but also offers us
some facts or hints which enable us to see through the distortion. Burney’s book
should illustrate to any reader the necessity, when reading “personal experience”
literature of this sort, of sharply and rigorously distinguishing between the scenes
the author actually claims to have witnessed or the claims he had read or heard, on
the one hand, and the inferences he has drawn or pretended to draw on the other.
The differences are often most stark. Describing commandant Koch: 70
“No cruelty was foreign to him, no single cell of his brain had not at some
time or other contributed to the planning of new refinements of anguish and
death for the rats in his trap.”
Burney goes on to explain that, because Koch was a homosexual, Frau Ilse
Koch used to make out with the prisoners, “who were then sent to the crematorium,”
except that highly valued tattooed skin was saved for lampshades. At this
point in Burney’s book things obviously look bad for him, especially if he has tattoos
and Frau Koch finds him but, happily, all of that had happened before he arrived
there in early 1944. Koch had been arrested in 1943 for embezzlement and
was succeeded by Pister who was “one of the mildest concentration camp commanders
in history” so that:
“in the last year of its existence a casual observer who came to the camp
and looked generally at it without probing its corners, would have seen little
or no beatings, a large number of men doing no work, a much larger number
working with a lethargy taught them by the Russians […], living blocks which
were clean, kitchens with huge, horrifyingly modern soup-cookers and a hospital
which would just pass muster at first glance.”
The Koch arrest had, in fact, been part of the breaking of a ring of corruption
which had spread through the German concentration camp system and had involved
the murder of some prisoners who knew too much. It was exposed through
the efforts of SS Judge Konrad Morgen. Koch was executed by the SS. 71
The tattooed skin was undoubtedly due to the medical experiment role of
Buchenwald. As remarked by Burney, when a Buchenwald inmate died, the camp
doctors looked his body over and if they found something interesting they saved
it. 72 It is fairly certain that the collection of medical specimens thus gathered was
the source of the tattooed skin and the human head that turned up at the IMT as
“exhibits” relating to people “murdered” at Buchenwald. What is probably the
greater part of the collection is pictured in Figure 32. The head is normally pictured,
without any explanation, in the company of some soap (Fig. 24), allegedly
made from human bodies, which was submitted as evidence by the Russians who,
when they learned there was to be a trial, evidently read up on what the Germans
70
71
72
Burney, 10-14.
Hoehne, 383-387 (434-436 in paperback).
Burney, 10.
60