Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
but the extent, to which contrary hints are found in their writings, is considerable.
No professional historian had published a book arguing and presenting evidence
either for or against the reality of the exterminations. The motivations are obvious.
No established historian had been willing to damage his reputation by writing
a scholarly-sounding work supporting the extermination allegations, solemnly referencing
documents and testimonies produced at illegal trials held under hysterical
conditions and seriously setting forth, without apology, obvious idiotic nonsense
such as the alleged dual role of the Zyklon. At least, no inducement to produce
such a work seems to have come along. On the other hand, the pressure of
intellectual conformity (to put it mildly) in academia has evidently terrorized historians
into silence in the opposite regard. This being the case, it is both justified
and expected that works such as the present one be produced by engineers and
whatever. 434
Other Matters
As promised early in this book, we have dealt here at depth with only one
propaganda myth and have in no sense attempted to cover the general field of
World War II revisionism. There is no point in repeating here what has been ably
said by other authors who have contributed to demolishing lingering mythology
relating to the war, but a few words, intended mainly to direct the reader to the
appropriate literature, are in order.
The myth of Germany’s solitary responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1939
has been demolished by the American historian David L. Hoggan in his book The
Forced War. A. J. P Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War is not as extensive,
but it has achieved a much greater circulation and has been available in
paperback for some time. Taylor’s well deserved reputation as a Germanophobe
have made his book a notable addition to the revisionist literature.
The myth of extraordinary Nazi brutality, as compared to the brutalities of the
Western democracies, had been exploded by a number of books, of which the best
is F. J. P. Veale’s Advance to Barbarism, of which a new and expanded edition
appeared in 1968. Other noteworthy books are Unconditional Hatred by Captain
Russell Grenfell, RN, America’s Second Crusade by William Henry Chamberlin,
and Freda Utley’s The High Cost of Vengeance. However, these authors ignore
one of the greatest crimes of the western democracies, the forcible repatriation of
Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union after the war (“Operation Keelhaul”). Most of
what we know of this shameful episode is due to the efforts of Julius Epstein, a
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In the years after this book was first published in 1976, there was a great outburst of relevant
scholarship of varying quality (see e.g. my Foreword to the 2003 edition). In 2003, I would not
express myself on the historians in quite the way I have in these paragraphs. See for example my
discussion of books by Martin Gilbert and Walter Laqueur in Supplement 2, written in 1982.
Their books, while not brilliant, are competent and routine works of history. Their outstanding
feature is that the authors fail to draw the obvious conclusions from their own research, as I explain
in Supplement 2.