Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
were also allied with Germany, and the Waffen-SS (regular military units within
the SS) recruited troops all over Europe, particularly in the Baltic states, in the
Ukraine, in Scandinavia, and in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and much (later all) of France
were occupied by the Germans. Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal remained
neutral throughout the war.
It is convenient to review, at this point, some matters pertaining to the SS, a
strange bureaucracy, which had responsibility for certain improbable combinations
of functions.
Only three of these functions – security, concentration camp administration,
and resettlement policies – are of interest in our study.
The best known agency of the SS was the RSHA, Reich Security Main Office,
which embraced the Gestapo (Secret State Police, headed by SS Lieutenant General
Heinrich Müller), the SD (Security Service, headed by SS Lieutenant General
Schellenberg), the Kripo (Criminal Police, headed by SS Lieutenant Generals
Nebe and, later, Panzinger) and related functions. The first head of the RSHA had
been SS General Reinhard Heydrich, an ambitious and ruthless young man whose
methods generated many enemies for him.
Ever since the Röhm purge of 1934, the substantial ambitions of the SS in respect
to military matters had resulted in growing conflict between the SS and the
regular military establishment, the Wehrmacht, and Heydrich was not in the least
bit delicate in the methods he employed to prosecute the conflict. In 1938, he had
forced the resignation of the Minister of War, General Blomberg, by showing that
Blomberg’s new wife had been a prostitute. Blomberg’s obvious successor was
General von Fritsch, so Heydrich constructed a frame-up of von Fritsch, based on
perjured allegations of homosexuality. Although von Fritsch was eventually exonerated,
his career had been ruined, and the bitterness toward Heydrich swelled.
The SS had a second basis for rivalry with the military establishment. The
German intelligence services were the Abwehr, German military intelligence, responsible
to the military high command and headed, since 1935, by Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris, and the SD, the political intelligence arm, responsible to Heydrich
and Himmler. Since the two types of intelligence activity cannot be strictly
separated, Canaris and Himmler inevitably became rivals. Heydrich appears to
have attempted to be cooperative with Canaris, at least at first; this may have been
due to Heydrich’s own background as a naval intelligence officer who, during the
twenties, had served and trained under Canaris and had even been a frequent visitor
to his home.
More significantly, the Admiral was a traitor; he is one of the awesome mysteries
of World War II. During and even before the war (he was in contact with
Churchill in 1938), Canaris betrayed Germany at every opportunity. A British official
has expressed the role of Canaris most succinctly: “We had Admiral Canaris.”
The man’s motivations remain as mysterious as his personality and his antecedents.
Ian Colvin, one of the authorities on World War II intelligence operations,
wrote a whole book about Canaris and, yet, never deciphered him:
“The readers will have to judge for themselves whether Admiral Wilhelm
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