Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 2: The Camps
respect. The point of exploring these details regarding Dachau is that the credibility
of the U.S. occupation is thereby demolished. The U.S. propaganda had
claimed exterminations in the German camps and Dachau was the major camp
taken over by the Americans (Buchenwald was later surrendered to the Russians).
Thus, an effort was made to distort and misrepresent what had happened at the
Dachau concentration camp. A recognition of the amazing crudeness and clumsiness
of that effort, and the ludicrous nature of the “evidence” put forward will
prime the reader quite suitably for our analysis of the central part of the hoax, the
Auschwitz lie.
The conditions in the camps had forced the German government, in March
1945, to take the final step in reversal of its earlier policy of absolute exclusion of
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from the concentration
camps (existing conventions covered POWs, not concentration camp inmates). On
March 29, 1945, SS General Kaltenbrunner authorized the ICRC to place one
delegate in each camp for the purpose of distributing relief supplies, on the conditions
that the delegate remained there until the end of the war. 78 The ICRC organized
road transport for relief supplies (use of the railways was out of the question)
but its effectiveness was to a degree influenced by the attitudes of individual concentration
camp commanders; for example, the reception at Mauthausen on April
23-30 was at first negative. SS Colonel Ziereis claimed that he had not heard of
the Kaltenbrunner order. 79
At Dachau, the ICRC had gotten a relatively warm reception on April 27 (after
some coolness on April 26), and a delegate was allowed to establish himself in the
camp. By Sunday, April 29, it was found that most of the German officers,
guards, and employees had fled, and the effective command of the camp had
fallen to a certain SS Lieutenant Wickert who had similar intentions of leading a
flight of the remaining guards. Because this raised many dangers, notably violence
by prisoners against German civilians of the area and the spread of epidemics,
the delegate talked Wickert out of this. They came to an agreement regarding
surrender of the camp, which the ICRC delegate was to do his best to have respected.
First, guards would remain in the towers to prevent the escape of prisoners.
Second, the soldiers not standing guard would assemble, unarmed, in one of
the courtyards.
Third, the garrison would be allowed to withdraw to its own “battle lines,” after
the transfer of the camp to the Americans.
The ICRC delegate then affixed a white towel to a broomstick and, taking a
German officer with him, left the camp to hunt up some Americans. After a while
they encountered an American motorized unit and the delegate presented himself
to the American general (not named in the delegate’s report on these events) who,
on learning the identities of his new guests, immediately asked that the delegate
and the German officer accompany them for the purpose of taking press photos at
the camp, particularly of a certain train which was full of dead bodies. Although
78
79
Red Cross (1948), vol. 1, 620; vol. 3, 83, 184; Red Cross (1947), 82-84.
Red Cross (1947), 134-137.
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