Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
was as a last resort. In announcing the policy, Hitler declared in a Sportpalast
speech of September 4, 1940: 143
“If the British Air force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of
bombs, we will drop a hundred and fifty, a hundred and eighty, two hundred
thousand, three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand kilograms and
more in a single night.”
This was a gross exaggeration of his capabilities relative to the British, for his
bombers were designed for support of troops and not for the “strategic bombing,”
for which the British bombers were equipped, although at the time Germany’s
bombers were numerically superior to the British. Nevertheless, violent words are
cheap, and after the Luftwaffe, which was never more than a nuisance for the Allied
bombing operations, violent words (sometimes coupled with promises of secret
new weapons) were about all Hitler and Goebbels were able to come up with
in 1940 or at any subsequent time to oppose the bombings. It is in this context that
the Goebbels remark should be grasped.
(d) There were bloodthirsty remarks made on both sides during the war. In the
U.S. there were many examples of wild views earnestly put forward by apparently
civilized persons, which were received with apparently thoughtful reactions of
approval by equally respected persons. Because there were so many such people,
it will suffice to remark only on Clifton Fadiman, the well known author and critic
who, at the time, was the book review editor of the New Yorker weekly magazine.
Fadiman was the principal luminary of the Writers War Board, a semi-official
government agency that did volunteer writing for government agencies in connection
with the war. The Board was chaired by Rex Stout. The thesis that Fadiman
and Stout carried to the writers’ community in 1942 was that writings on the war
should seek “to generate an active hate against all Germans and not merely
against Nazi leaders.” This generated some heated controversy, and writers and
observers took sides in what became a debate hot enough for Fadiman to declare
that he knew of “only one way to make a German understand and that’s to kill
them and even then I think they don’t understand.”
These were not isolated outbursts, for Fadiman welcomed the opportunity to
set down his views on Germans in a more organized context through his column
in the New Yorker. In April 1942, he had found the juvenile concept he needed in
a book by de Sales, The Making of Tomorrow. Taking for granted the reader’s
concurrence that the Nazis were at least the worst scourge to come along in centuries,
he wrote that de Sales’
“argument is simply that the present Nazi onslaught is not in the least the
evil handiwork of a group of gangsters but rather the final and perfect expression
of the most profound instincts of the German people. ‘Hitler is the incarnation
of forces greater than himself. The heresy he preaches is two thousand
years old.’ What is the heresy It is nothing more or less than a rebellion
against Western civilization. Mr. de Sales traces five such German rebellions,
beginning with Arminius. At first you are inclined to be skeptical of the au-
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Hitler, 848.