Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 3: Washington and New York
haps none, as was the case with most categories of information; it is just that you
don’t miss a bet in the sort of situation in which the Americans found themselves
regarding rubber in 1942.
Consideration of technical matters has been necessary here because it was in a
technical context that Auschwitz first became prominent in Washington. However,
it is not the technical matters that have been our objective here but simply
the fact of prominence, or heavy exposure, in U.S. inner circles in the summer of
1942; this is the only point relevant to our subject. We have no direct evidence of
this, but we have reviewed reasons why such exposure may be assumed. It remains
to show that events at Auschwitz at this time were such as to suggest an
“extermination factory” charge to those in the inner political circles, who were
alert to the appearance of semi-factual bases for atrocity stories. The events at
Auschwitz in late 1942 – early 1943 will be covered in a second context in the
next chapter and hence are not annotated here.
The eeriest aspect that Auschwitz must have presented while the Baruch
Committee was meeting was that of the site of a ghost factory; starting around
August 1, the Buna plant had been closed. There was no activity to be seen except
possibly an occasional watchman. This must have excited great curiosity and no
doubt special steps were taken to find out what was going on.
Our ugly old friend typhus was at Auschwitz; an epidemic had shut down the
Buna plant for two months, so that work did not resume until late September. By
this time, the number of dead must have been a few thousand, although there is a
large degree of uncertainty here. The German policy was to cremate the bodies of
camp inmates who died, but the epidemic caught the Auschwitz authorities with
inadequate crematory facilities. There was a small crematory at Auschwitz I, but
more extensive facilities at Birkenau, plans for which existed in January 1942,
were still under construction in 1942, and the first complete new unit, consisting
of fifteen conventional crematory muffles, was not available until March 1943. It
appears that many of the victims of the epidemic were immediately cremated in
pits, but it is possible that many were buried, at least temporarily. That the Germans
were constructing crematories at Birkenau was probably evident to continued
Allied surveillance (which we assume existed) in the autumn of 1942. The
buildings housing the Birkenau ovens had certain halls, rooms, or cellars, which
the accusations say were the “gas chambers.”
Several books offer versions of Fig. 7, which is claimed to be a photograph of
gassed victims about to be burned in pits, taken by an Auschwitz inmate in
1944. 123 We have no way of knowing when, where, or by whom it was taken.
However, such scenes were common at Auschwitz in 1942, when the camp presumably
attained some prominence in Allied intelligence. Indeed, the poor quality
of the picture caused some initial speculation on my part that it is an aerial intelligence
photograph; the low angle does not rule out the possibility because such
angles were frequently attained even with highly defended positions. 124 Also, the
123
124
The photograph appears in Schoenberner, 162 (206 in paperback), and in Central Commission,
Fig. 39.
C.B. Smith, 166-171 and photographs.
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