People are sick of the myths and alibis. — Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”
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A book that I am currently reading, “120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature” by Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald and Dawn B. Sova, divides the works into four categories: books that were banned for political reasons, religious reasons, sexual reasons and social reasons. The book contains about 20 titles that I have already read and several that I would like to read in the future, including “All Quiet on the Western Front,” about World War I; “Andersonville,” about the Confederate-manned, Yankee prison camp in the Civil War and “The Satanic Verses,” by Salmon Rushdie, which resulted in a fatwa being issued on Rushdie’s life for supposed blasphemy against the Muslim faith.
While I may write additional blog articles on subsequent chapters in the book on censorship, I wanted to add a few thoughts about what undoubtedly is one of the controversial of controversial works in the whole collection — “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry” by Arthur R. Butz. Many books in the collection were flagged by various religious groups or school districts for either coarse language, racial stereotypes, political views or other controversial content. Butz’s work is a piece of revisionist history — to call it “revisionist” is being both generous and polite — claiming that the Holocaust and the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe was a “propaganda hoax.” Butz, who has a background in control sciences and electrical engineering — not history — is currently a professor at Northwest University, which has protected his right to espouse his personal views while condemning those same views.
It is to the credit of the authors of “120 Banned Books” that they don’t make value or moral judgments about the works they are describing. They simply provide a summary of the narrative arc of the novel or thesis of the nonfiction work, whichever is appropriate, and then outline in some detail the censorship histories of each work. The authors’ handling of Butz’s work is no different.
According to “120 Banned Books,” Butz’s contentions about a conspiracy theory related to the Holocaust are far and wide, and the book attacks nearly every major detail we know about the Holocaust — information, in other words, that makes the Holocaust one of the more egregious offenses against humanity in the history of, well, humanity.
Butz argues that the judges who worked during the war crime trials after World War II had already made up their minds about the presumed guilt of the defendants, which implies that the trials were unjust. Butz questions world Jewish population figures at the time of the planned extermination and the sources by which those numbers were devised. He writes:
… in the demographic argument for a five or six million drop in world Jewish population, the sources and authorities for the figures used are Community and Jewish and thus, essentially useless.
Butz contends that about 750,000 people were resettled from Germany to other areas, while many others died because of disease and starvation, not an attempted wholesale extermination. He said it was likely that a “fair number” died during the resettlements, while others relocated to others areas, like the United States and parts of Europe or the Middle East.
Typhus, Butz said,
plagued the German concentration camps since early in the war. A typhus epidemic at the Belsen camp, for example, is cited as the major cause of death, resulting from a “total loss of control” at the end of the war, not a “deliberate policy.”
noting that disease caught the Germans off guard, and they were unprepared to handle such catastrophic loss of life, which is presumably one reason, according to Butz, that so many piles of unburied bodies were scattered across the Germans landscape and the historical record.
Butz discredits the number of Jews the Germans supposedly killed, citing “inconsistencies and implausibilities” in estimates ranging anywhere from 750,000 to 7 million. He alleges that the area did not have enough crematoria to handle such a large influx of bodies.
As the authors of “120 Banned Books” point out, Col. Rudolf Hoss, who ran Auschwitz, confessed that 2.5 million people were murdered at that concentration camp alone. This was a revised figure. He previously claimed the number was 3.5 million. Needless to say, when killing human beings becomes almost as routine as your morning coffee or brushing your teeth, when women and children are treated like dogs, spat upon, called names, murdered and then are unceremoniously tossed into mass graves like their lives meant less than nothing on a daily basis, it’s easy to see how Hoss and other Nazi officials could have gotten confused as to whether the number of people killed at Auschwitz was 2.5 or 3.5 million in lieu of record keeping. In the calculus of human lives in the Nazis’ depraved sense of morals, what’s difference does a million lives here or there make? A million multiplied by zero is still zero.
But Butz goes farther. He claims that the infamous gas chambers were actually used to disinfect clothing in order to kill lice, which carry the typhus bacteria. This might be one of the more shocking and absurd claims. Here is Butz:
… all ‘survivor literature’, sincere or inventive … report the same basic procedure involved in entering a German camp: disrobe, shave hair, shower, dress in new clothes or in old clothes after disinfection.
Far from exculpating the Nazis for their role in the gas chambers, Hoss has testified that this was a lie concocted by the SS to fool the victims into willingly walking into their own death traps so, presumably, the guards would not have to go to the trouble of forcing them into the buildings. That said, I don’t know why this ruse was even necessary. Surely, the victims could see the writing on the wall. They saw the haggard appearances of their Jewish brethren. They saw the rampant sickness and hunger. They heard the screams. They were forced to march all over the German and Eastern European landscape, sometimes with no shoes or in extreme weather conditions, at the whim of the Nazis. The SS had no problems forcing the Jews to do other tasks, and many had to dig their own graves. So, marching or forcing them into the chambers should have been just as routine as the other mindless, inhumane things they did to the Jews.
Finally, Butz traces the figure that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi to various sources in articles from The New York Times and to the World Jewish Congress, which he said gave an estimation that there were 5,721,800 “missing” Jews to the International Military Tribunal. He claims the Americans and British embellished the numbers of Jews that were killed as a “propaganda basis for their war,” presumably as a way to gin up support to attack Germany and oust the Nazis.
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I want to be careful to say that I am not presenting a comprehensive picture of Butz’s views as he lays them out in “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.” Perhaps at some point in the future, I will read Butz’s full thoughts on the Holocaust, if it’s even worth my time — I’m not sure that it is — but in this blog entry, I think I have fully represented Butz’s view as summarized in the book on censorship, and lest someone claims that I have taken his views out of context, I think it’s fair to say these were clearly were Butz’s views, and the views of other Holocaust deniers, at the time he wrote the book, and as I understand it, these are still his views, namely that the Nazis had no state-mandated policy to exterminate the Jews, thus no “final solution;” that the gas chambers were not killing centers; that the Germans did not kill 6 million Jews; that the Jews who did die fell victim to starvation and disease; and that the trials of 24 top officials of the Third Reich after World War II were carried out unfairly on the presumption of guilt and their testimony was largely invalid.
Given enough time and space, I could dispute all of these views, but many people have done this before, and Butz’s arguments have been roundly criticized and debunked since the book’s publication in 1975. On the question of whether the Nazis received a fair trial and whether their confessions were given under duress, and can thus be discarded, I offer the following passage from the BBC:
This, however, ignores the fact that some of the more detailed confessions were written after the perpetrators had been sentenced to death. It also ignores the fact that many of the perpetrators described – sometimes in great detail – what happened, but insisted that they either had nothing to do with it or were forced by their superiors to participate.
Thus this argument fails to take into account the statements of Nazis such as the Commandant of Birkenau concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, who described the mass murders that took place in his camp in a document written after he had been sentenced to death. It also fails to account for Adolf Eichmann who, in the memoir he wrote during his trial, spoke of the gassing of the Jews.
It also fails to take into account, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen does in detail in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” the large number of everyday Germans — local police officers, civic leaders and church officials who either openly supported the wholesale persecution and murder of Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — who were fully on board with the Nazi regime’s plan and even took part in some of the killings themselves, either directly or indirectly. Although Goldhagen’s book was published 20 years after “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” one could conclude, without even considering the reams of first-person testimony we now have about how utterly devoted much of the German collective was or how devoted they eventually became to antisemitism and the extermination project, that it would be impossible to fabricate such large numbers of photos of mass graves, physical evidence attesting to the “final solution” and Nazi propaganda material and meeting minutes that document the Third Reich’s intentions to eliminate the “Jewish problem,” not just to resettle them elsewhere.
More than that, it would be impossible to imagine a scenario in which the Nazis could have carried out their heinous acts in a vacuum without widespread support from the populace. The sheer scale is unprecedented and had to have involved much of the entire country. If that is hard to fathom, that an entire country could be caught up in an antisemitic and murderous fervor, one only need consider the embedded hate against the Jews that began centuries before with the death of Christ and continued into the early 20th century. The Germans and other antisemites branded the Jews as Christ-killers, even though the Romans ultimately killed Jesus, at least as the story goes in the Bible, and in Hitler’s time, they were largely blamed for the economic recession that struck the poor and working class people of Germany. Antisemitism was deeply embedded, not just in Hitler’s Third Reich government, but in the entire nation. It was a powerful, destructive force. The idea that the final solution was a manufactured genocide in order to start the war is belied by the evidence, both cultural and actual.
Nonetheless, as offensive as Butz and the Holocaust deniers claims are, not only to Jews, but to lovers of humanity who think all life is valuable regardless of sex, gender, race or religion, the entire point of a book like “120 Banned Books” is to suggest that we must protective people’s right to be offensive, and we must protect people’s right to, if they choose, counter the offensive material with either mockery or facts. The prohibition of thought does not move society forward; in fact, it acts as a regressive force, and as we know, the repression of thought has led to and fed some of the most dictatorial regimes in history.
Butz continues to be employed at Northwestern because in the college and in this nation, and others that value free thought and expression, supports his right to speak his mind, whether we think he’s wrong or not. I will end with a statement from Northwest University’s former president Henry S. Bienen, who served in that role for 14 years before retiring in August 2009:
Northwestern University Associate Professor Arthur Butz recently issued a statement commending Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Butz is a Holocaust denier who has made similar assertions previously. His latest statement, like his earlier writings and pronouncements, is a contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people. While I hope everyone understands that Butz’s opinions are his own and in no way represent the views of the University or me personally, his reprehensible opinions on this issue are an embarrassment to Northwestern.
There is no question that the Holocaust is a well-documented historical fact. … Butz is a tenured associate professor in electrical engineering. Like all faculty members, he is entitled to express his personal views, including on his personal web pages, as long as he does not represent such opinions as the views of the University. Butz has made clear that his opinions are his own and at no time has he discussed those views in class or made them part of his class curriculum. Therefore, we cannot take action based on the content of what Butz says regarding the Holocaust – however odious it may be – without undermining the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect.
[Cover image credit: “Holocaust Memorial” by DeviantArt user Good Mythical Miles.]
I was inspired by what the artist behind the artwork above had to say about the tragedy of the Holocaust and thought it was apropos to share part of it here:
I drew this, it’s supposed to be in reference to the dehumanization of the Jewish people in the concentration camps and their fight to retain their identity. There’s a lot of tiny things in it inspired by details in the class lectures and the books we read, but the biggest one is that the numbers are supposed to be projected onto the sculptures from a distance, so the viewer blocks the numbers from reaching the figures and instead sees them on their own person, and becoming part of the piece themselves.