Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 3: Washington and New York
extermination camp, appearing even under obscure circumstances, was immediately
after D-Day (June 6, 1944), when nobody was paying any attention to such
stories. Later in the summer of 1944, the emphasis shifted to the Lublin camp,
which the Russians had just captured. The first reference to emerge from a U.S.
government source that was high enough so that it could not be ignored, and
which charged exterminations at Auschwitz, came in late November 1944, after
the exterminations are supposed to have been terminated. 126 Otherwise, people
such as Roosevelt and Churchill and their ministers spoke only in very general
moralistic terms about exterminations. It is only if one believed there actually
were exterminations taking place at Auschwitz, and one wanted to stop them, that
one would have made a specific charge concerning Auschwitz, to which the Germans
would have felt obliged to respond. No such challenge ever materialized.
Despite the fact that in all versions of the extermination legend the Auschwitz exterminations
had certainly started by the late summer of 1942, and despite the fact
that U.S. military intelligence must have known whatever it was that was going on
at Auschwitz at that time, no specific extermination charges came from any high
source until much later.
The First ‘Extermination’ Claims and Washington
The first “inside” events relative to the extermination propaganda were in the
context of a conflict involving the U.S. State and Treasury Departments and the
World Jewish Congress (and American Jewish Congress), headed by Rabbi
Stephen S. Wise. The prominent characters in the story are Treasury Secretary
Morgenthau, later the nominal author of the notorious “Morgenthau Plan” for the
despoliation of Germany, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Undersecretary of
State Sumner Welles, who were mildly reluctant to be carried along by the propaganda,
and Assistant Secretary of State J. Breckenridge Long, who was very resistant
to the propaganda. Also involved are the World Jewish Congress representatives
in Switzerland, Gerhard Riegner and Professor Paul Guggenheim, who
transmitted stories of supposedly European origin to Wise or to other persons in
the U.S., notably to the State Department through the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland,
Leland Harrison, or through the U.S. Consul in Geneva, Paul C. Squire.
The principal work that has set forth the events surrounding the birth of the extermination
legend is Arthur D. Morse’s While Six Million Died, a book which is
supplemented to some extent by Henry L. Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue. Additional
material had been contributed by post-war accounts given by Morgenthau,
historians J. M. Blum and Anthony Kubek (in interpreting Morgenthau’s
papers, the latter for the U.S. Senate publication Morgenthau Diary), historian F.
L. Israel (in summarizing the papers of J. Breckenridge Long), and J. DuBois,
who was at first Chief Counsel of the Treasury’s Foreign Funds Control, involved
in these matters chiefly in connection with efforts to extend assistance to refu-
126
Hilberg, 631; Reitlinger, 493-495.
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