Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
to “transfer” N inmates to X camp, reasoned that putting the half dead on the train
had the double merit of minimizing numbers of deaths and also getting some of
the dying off his hands. However, such problems are not of essential or central interest
here.
The truth about Dachau was not long in coming out, but did not receive wide
publicity. The causes for the dead bodies, which were found at the camp when it
was captured, were described in a 1948 publication of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science. As the U.S. Army advanced into Germany, it
encountered the sorts of conditions, which its medical services had anticipated
and for which they had prepared counter-measures: 86
“Germany in the spring months of April and May was an astounding sight,
a mixture of humanity traveling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and
carrying typhus with them. […] The more territory that was uncovered, the
greater was the number of reported cases; for Western Germany in the areas
of the American advance was rather uniformly seeded with typhus. To be sure,
there were heavily involved communities and others lightly affected. There
were great accumulations of cases in the concentration and prison camps, and
in nearby small communities.
As estimated 35,000-40,000 prisoners were found in [Dachau], living under
conditions bad even for a German camp of this kind and worse than any other
that came into American hands. Extreme filthiness, louse infestation, and
overcrowding prevailed throughout the camp buildings. Several car-loads of
human bodies were found packed in box cars in the railroad yards adjacent to
the camp, the vestiges of a shipment of prisoners from camps further north
who were transferred to Dachau in the late days of the war to escape the advancing
United States troops.
The number of patients with typhus fever at the time the camp was first occupied
will never be known. Days passed before a census of patients could be
accomplished. Several hundreds were found in the prison hospital, but their
number was small compared with the patients who continued to live with their
comrades in the camp barracks, bed-ridden and unattended, lying in bunks 4
tiers high with 2 and sometimes 3 men to a narrow shelflike bed; the sick and
the well; crowded beyond all description; reeking with filth and neglect – and
everywhere the smell of death.”
It is not surprising that Dachau had experienced catastrophes very similar to
those at Belsen. Since the beginning of 1945, there had been an estimated 15,000
prisoner deaths from typhus, mostly in the final two months. 87
The Americans brought the camp under control, and it served, as we have
seen, as an American camp and center of “war crimes trials.” An American lawyer,
Stephen S. Pinter, who was stationed there and evidently disapproved of what
had been carried out there in the name of the United States, wrote in 1959: 88
“I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a US War Department
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87
88
Gordon, 23-25.
Red Cross (1947), 150.
Letter by Pinter in Catholic weekly Our Sunday Visitor (Jun. 14, 1959), 15.
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