Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
4, a trial of concentration camp administration, Cases 6 and 10, self explanatory,
Case 8, dealing with German resettlement policies, Case 9 (the Einsatzgruppen
were used for rear security in the east) and Case 11, a trial of officials of various
ministries. The U.S. Government published a fifteen volume set of books, referred
to here as the “NMT set,” in which may be found “summaries” of the cases, along
with very limited “selections” of the documents put into evidence. The volume
numbers corresponding to the various cases are listed in the above table.
On this point, the student encounters a significant difficulty because, as can be
seen by consulting Hilberg and Reitlinger, almost all the evidence for the extermination
claim was developed at the NMT, not the IMT. That is to say the important
documents, those which, for better or for worse, constitute major source material
for writing any history of Nazi Germany, are those of the NG, NI and NO
series, and these documents were put into evidence at the NMT trials. Documentary
evidence is, especially in view of the irregular legal and political circumstances
which prevailed, immeasurably more weighty than testimony, as has been
suggested. The relevant documentary evidence generated at the NMT consists of
certain kinds of material allegedly supporting the extermination charges: documents
dealing with concentration camp administration, with crematory construction,
with deportations, with certain Farben and Krupp operations which employed
prisoner labor, with general Jewish policies of the German Government,
etc. There is of course no direct documentary evidence for an extermination program.
As Dr. Kubovy of the Center for Jewish Documentation in Tel-Aviv admitted
in 1960: 32
“there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich speaking
of exterminating the Jews and […] the word ‘extermination’ does not appear
in the letter from Göring to Heydrich concerning the final solution of the
Jewish question.”
The difficulty for the normally circumstanced person is that only small fractions
of the NMT testimonies and documents are widely accessible in English
translations (in the fifteen volume NMT set). Additionally, these translations cannot
always be trusted, as will be seen. Also, the extracts which are published have
been selected by unknown criteria.
Finally, the fifteen volume NMT set is likely to be found only in cities of
moderately large size.
The situation is better if one lives in a very large city, since reasonably complete
collections of documents together with the mimeographed trial transcripts
(almost always in German) exist in certain library centers. However, the normally
circumstanced person may encounter trouble in arranging to examine specific
pieces, which he may call for, and in some cases general browsing even by university
faculty is not welcome. In addition, no subject or name indexes exist for
the NMT trials (indexes of testimonies of witnesses, with many errors, appear in
the NMT volumes).
The IMT and NMT trials are almost the only ones of significance here. Of
32
Rassinier (1962), 83. See also Dawidowicz, 121.
36