Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 3: Washington and New York
have escaped from German controlled areas. They reported the extermination of
Polish Jews and the utilization of the Jewish corpses for the manufacture of fertilizer.
This was forwarded to Washington through diplomatic channels, and again
an attempt was made to get confirmation by the Vatican (which had thus far ignored
the first request for confirmation). At about the same time, Wise had received
a message from a World Jewish Congress official in Europe reporting on
the “manufacture of soap and artificial fertilizer” from Jewish corpses.
In late September 1942, Riegner came forward with two new documents. The
first had, he said, been prepared by an (anonymous, naturally) officer attached to
the German High Command and had reached Riegner through several intermediaries.
The anonymous officer claimed that there were at least two factories in existence
which were manufacturing soap, glue, and lubricants from Jewish corpses
and that it had been determined that each Jewish corpse was worth 50 Reichmarks.
The second document consisted of two coded letters that had, it was said,
been written by a Swiss Jew resident in Warsaw. The anonymous Jew reported
wholesale exterminations of Warsaw Jews deported to the East. All of these messages
were forwarded to Washington and then filed.
In passing we should note the resemblance of such claims to World War I
propaganda and the appalling lack of originality and creativity on the part of the
World Jewish Congress. It scarcely requires remarking that the soap and glue factories
were a very transient propaganda phenomenon and that the only similar
charges made at Nuremberg were made by the Russians. These charges were
largely ignored even then, and nobody, to my knowledge, has since come forward
with the locations of these factories, the identities of the persons who managed
them, or similar information. Reitlinger does not claim the existence of such factories,
and Hilberg (page 624) does not believe they existed.
On October 10, the Vatican finally informed the U.S. representatives that it
had been unable to confirm the many reports it had heard of severe measures
against the Jews.
On October 22, Riegner met with Ambassador Harrison and presented him
with more of the same sort of “evidence,” this time reporting “information” provided
by yet another anonymous German informant (whose name, however, is
said to have been presented to Harrison in a sealed envelope and to have been
kept secret from everybody but the Office of Strategic Services, OSS) and also an
anonymous official of the International Red Cross. Harrison forwarded this material
to Washington, but also wrote two personal letters to Welles in late October,
claiming that he knew the name of the German industrialist and also claiming that
the anonymous Red Cross official was Carl Jacob Burckhardt, the distinguished
Voltaire-Goethe scholar who was prominent in the International Red Cross during
the war. He enclosed an affidavit that Guggenheim had deposed before Squire on
October 29, in which Guggenheim claimed that he had obtained from an anonymous
German informant information confirming Riegner’s claims. The anonymous
German informant had gotten his information from an anonymous official
of the German Foreign Ministry and from an anonymous official of the German
Ministry of War. Moreover, an anonymous Swiss informant, resident in Belgrade,
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