Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 1: Trials, Jews and Nazis
given 14 ) and that many European Jews had emigrated to the U.S. or Palestine or
elsewhere since the beginning of the war. The facts available to the West European
observer in late 1946 argued very strongly against the extermination claims,
which had received such wide publicity during the war and at the recent trial at
Nuremberg.
The passage of a quarter of a century has, despite superficial developments,
gradually strengthened this view of the extermination tale, although for many
years there was only one serious writer in the field, the late French geographer
Paul Rassinier. In 1948, he published a book, Passage de la Ligne, on his experiences
as a left wing political prisoner at Buchenwald, 1943-1945, “generally received
with sympathy, provoking only muffled and inconclusive gnashings of
teeth on a certain side.” 15 Then in 1950, he published Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (The
Lie of Ulysses), a critical study of the concentration camp literature, in which he
challenged the certainty of the gas chambers: “It is yet too early to pronounce a
definitive judgment on the gas chambers.” 16 This provoked a violent press campaign,
which led ultimately to legal actions, in which author, preface author, and
publisher were first acquitted, then found guilty with judgments involving fines,
damages, and suspended prison sentence, and finally acquitted again.
In 1955, the two books were combined as Le Mensonge d’Ulysse, 2 nd edition,
in which material increasingly critical of the gas chamber claim had been added.
The most common (but not very common) edition today is the fifth (referenced
here), published in 1961, in which year Rassinier also published a short “complementary”
volume, Ulysse Trahi par les Siens, consisting of three essays showing
that he had moved rather strongly in the direction of a negative judgment on the
gas chambers; the last essay is the text of a speech given in several German and
Austrian cities in the early spring of 1960 (just before the Eichmann affair). In
1962 followed Le Véritable Procès Eichmann (The Real Eichmann Trial), a study
of the entire range of alleged German crimes in their historical and political contexts;
by this time, he had reached a definitive conclusion on the tale of extermination
of the Jews: “a historic lie: the most tragic and the most macabre imposture
of all time.” 17
Rassinier employed two basic approaches to reach this conclusion: the material
and the demographic.
By the material approach we mean the analysis of the evidence that mass executions
of Jews by gassings or other specific means were in fact conducted by the
Germans during World War II. The material approach is nearly synonymous with
analysis of the war crimes trials evidence, or of the trials evidence as interpreted
by Hilberg and by Reitlinger, and as supplemented by them with similar evidence.
Rassinier only tentatively explored the demographic approach in Le Véritable
Procès Eichmann, but in his final general work on the Jewish extermination problem,
Le Drame des Juifs Européens (The Drama of the European Jews), 1964, he
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17
Grayzel, 792.
Rassinier (1961), 9.
Ibid., 175.
Rassinier (1962), 112.
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