The World’s Greatest Hoax
A very early review of Arthur Butz’s (pictured) The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
IF THERE was ever a time in human history when falsehood was about ready to put truth permanently out of business, it was the last three decades — from the cocoon stages of the Six Million Myth in early World War II through the avalanche of death camp propaganda in the late 40s to the present era of total acceptance. How can a lie be nailed down when the whole world believes in it, when 99.99 per cent of the world’s magazines, newspapers, textbooks, educators, scholars and historians pay total obeisance to it? In America, a few whispers of protest were quickly and efficiently consigned to the silent graveyard of the extreme right, while in Germany the few brave souls who raised some troublesome questions were brought to court and in some cases jailed.
It is a strange sort of truth that must be upheld by lawsuits, jail terms, threatening headlines and social ostracism. But it is not strange that an obnoxious piece of trumpery wins the world’s credence. When the earth was declared to be officially flat, the people said yea and the intelligentsia tactfully kept its counsel. Only once in a thousand years does a Bruno come along. Only rarely will a man of wisdom, in contrast to cranks and visionaries, put his life on the line in a lonely fight against an institutionalized lie. Today’s Bruno goes by the name of Arthur Butz, the author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.
The few books contradicting the Six Million Myth would fit into a molehill and leave enough space for a good many moles. The books that have fertilized and canonized the myth, stacked on top of each other, would reach as high in the sky as a factory smokestack. The con books were reviewed in Instauration (December 1975). For almost three decades the pro books have been reviewed lavishly and lovingly in the New York Times and its media satellites. Unfortunately, the printing, writing, editing and general format of the con books do not match their good intentions.
All the more reason that The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, a model of scholarship, research and erudition, deserves the fair and open hearing that the liberal-minority coalition is determined it shall not have. One of the greatest works of counterpropaganda ever written, it clearly demonstrates that the West’s will for truth, though moribund, is not dead. It takes courage to wrestle with a taboo that no respectable historian and no respectable publisher would dare to touch. It takes immense courage for the author to write such a book under his own name. As a professor at Northwestern University, Dr. Butz has opened himself and his career to attack from some of the world’s most rabid and most vengeful organizations. Since he is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, he will, of course, be attacked for not having the proper credentials — attacked by the very same crowd who wildly applauded Einstein’s and Oppenheimer’s neurotic excursions into politics.
The whole Six Million Myth, writes the author at the very beginning of his book, is a frame-up spun out of whole cloth. He then proceeds to show how it was born in the early days of World War II in the minds of members of the War Crimes Branch, the OSS (the father of the CIA), Rabbi Wise, Bernard Baruch, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and his assistant, Soviet agent Harry Dexter White, and the little-known Colonel David “Mickey” Marcus, the West Point graduate who, while serving as Supreme Commander in the Jerusalem sector for the Israelis in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, was killed by a trigger-happy Jewish sentry. It is Dr. Butz’ considered opinion that the framework of the Six Million tale was prepared a few years before the “events” it is “based” upon were supposed to have happened.
From Washington the center of action moves to German in 1945 and the various war crimes trials, at which German refugees in American uniforms played commanding roles. Brief but highly informative profiles are given of such behind-the-scenes characters as Robert Kempner, a former Prussian police chief and other anti-National Socialist refugees who obtained affidavits and perjured testimony from German prisoners by a sickening combination of torture (including crushing of testicles, knocking out teeth, burning splinters and starvation), mock trials, threats against prisoners’ families, false promises of immunity, an abominable spectacle that will go down in history as the American edition of Stalin’s show trials. After disposing of the claims about extermination camps in Germany proper, which even Jewish organizations now admit never existed, the author focuses most of his attention on Auschwitz, which has remained the chief prop of the Six Million Myth and where “reputable” Jewish scholars still insist four million Jews were gassed to death or were disposed of by other equally abhorrent means. The long and deliberately neglected history of Auschwitz as one of Europe’s largest wartime industrial projects is finally brought to light, while the “confessions” of Nazi camp commanders who were tried and hanged by the Communists are carefully scrutinized. Dr. Butz also examines the gruesome “I was there” reports of various Jewish doctors, escapees, SS informers and double agents, most of whom have since disappeared into anonymity. He finds the reports fictional and measures their accuracy against contradictory statements by more reliable eyewitnesses.
Typhus, exacerbated by the Allied air forces’ complete destruction of the German supply system in the closing days of the war, was largely responsible for the approximately one million Jews who did die in World War II, Dr. Butz asserts, and the gassing and extermination propaganda was only a mishmash of old Talmudic exaggerations (the Talmud claimed four billion Jews were killed in Bar Cocheba’s 132-135 A.D. revolt against Rome), deliberate U.S. government fabrications, wartime dementia praecox, Jewish vengeance and Bonn subservience to the “liberators.” Zyclon B, the gas supposedly used to do away with so many millions of Jews, was a common insecticide used to get rid of body lice that carried typhus. The Auschwitz “smell of death,” so widely publicized in the mass media, came mostly from the factories involved in the hydrogenation process for the manufacture of artificial rubber.
There are as yet no authenticated state or other official documents to puncture the Six Million Myth, obviously because no government would dare to release them in the present climate of world opinion. Senator Taft and Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark were the only public figures in the Western world who had the courage to speak out against the shameful perversion of the Nuremberg trials, which helped feed the myth. The “great” liberal justices, Warren, Black, Douglas and Jackson, who should have been the first to cry out against the infamy, kept their silence. Jackson, in fact, presided over the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials and turned out to be the chief kangaroo in history’s most infamous kangaroo court. It is fitting to note that one of the four judges of this juryless trial was a Soviet general, whose countrymen a few years earlier had murdered thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, a neat little massacre that the New York Times originally tried to pin on the National Socialists.
Dr. Butz firms up his case with a chapter on the Hungarian Jews, 400,000 of whom were supposed to have been transferred to Poland and murdered in 1944. In Hungary the International Red Cross had been permitted to take up the Jewish cause, so Red Cross officials knew better than anyone the fate of their Jewish wards. The official Red Cross reports on the Hungarian Jews in 1944 contain no information about the transport or extermination of any sizable number of Hungarians anywhere. The Myth of the Four Hundred Thousand, like its parent myth, was based almost entirely on fabrication and forgery.
Dr. Butz brings up other evidence to demolish the death camp propaganda — the tens of thousands of Polish Jews who moved into Germany after war’s end, the contradictory testimony that emerged from the Eichmann “trial,” the manipulation of Jewish census figures, the “reopening” of Auschwitz years after the war under Polish Communist auspices. But the main part of his argument is so plausible the reader hardly needs additional confirmation.
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is a book that will germinate in the minds of men until civilization reaches the point where it will never again let history become the prey of a massive racial defamation campaign. If Israel could only be founded on a hoax and can only endure on the annual dividends produced by such a hoax, it is doomed to an early and ignoble demise. And once the truth is out, anti-Semitism is certain to reach levels never dreamed of by the most virulent National Socialists.
Dr. Butz’ work, to the discredit of the American publishing industry, had to be printed in England.
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Source: Instauration magazine, October 1976
I’ve just finished Arthur Butz’s book Hoax of the Twentieth Century, and it was fantastic. Right from the beginning it intrigues with its un-convoluted and uncomplicated reasoning about why we should question the (as he called it) “extermination legends”. (good phrase for it)
I’ve also read Germar Rudolf’s Dissecting the Holocaust. Just as good but a little more technical. It has a good list of all the legends (soap from human fat, mass electrocutions by conveyor belt machine etc) that have been analyzed and debunked over the decades.
Best two books I’ve read in a long time.
Regarding “The Auschwitz “smell of death,” so widely publicized in the mass media, came mostly from the factories involved in the hydrogenation process for the manufacture of artificial rubber.” It also came from the large camp kitchen with multiple chimneys that was often mistakenly described as a crematorium. A witness against the ‘accountant of Auschwitz’ mentioned the smell of burning flesh. It was his meal being cooked in the kitchen.
Of course, this is no longer available on Amazon.