Butz also claimed that defendants’ confessions about the Holocaust were the result of their having been subjected since the end of the war to a barrage of “familiar propaganda”: These former leaders of Nazi Germany had themselves become victims of the hoax. One must marvel at the power of those responsible for the hoax. Not only had they won the cooperation of the world’s greatest military and political powers, forged thousands of pages of documents in record time without being detected, and created physical evidence attesting to an annihilation program, but among their most impressive achievements was success at convincing the very people they accused of perpetrating the hoax that it had actually happened. According to Butz even this did not exhaust the full extent of Jewish powers. Their most impressive accomplishment was winning the defendants’ cooperation in their own incrimination! They persuaded Nazi leaders not only to testify to the veracity of the myth but to sign their own names to the forged documents. “Jewish propagandists” convinced the defendants that this would win them clemency from the prosecutors and the court.{34} That is why some documents have signatures that cannot be dismissed as forgeries. Butz never explained why, long after the war crimes tribunals were concluded, defendants did not come forward and say they had lied in order to win lenient treatment. In fact, many of them continued to acknowledge that the annihilation had happened and that they had played a role in it.
Butz declared that the conspirators not only concocted the proofs to establish the hoax as fact but had won the cooperation of the mass media in disseminating the story. Motivated by both gullibility and culpability, the mass media in Western democracies constituted “a lie machine of vaster extent than even many of the more independent minded have perceived.”{35} These charges hark back to the work of Rassinier, App, and Barnes and evoke what has become a standard litany of antisemitic charges regarding Jews’ control of the banks and the media.
Butz dismissed the media as a “lie machine” for disseminating the Holocaust legend. At the same time, however, he used the media’s wartime failure to highlight news of the annihilation as proof that the story was false{36} (if it were true, the media would have stressed it). This “explanation” ignored an array of other factors that governed the media’s and much of the rest of the world’s response to this story.{37}, [3] It also failed to address the fact that all the Allied governments publicly condemned it in December 1942 and a number of papers did consistently feature the story, among them the New Republic, Nation, PM, the Hearst papers, and the Catholic journal Commonweal. Butz’s “explanation” had its own internal contradiction: How could the Jews have had such control over the media after the war but virtually none during it?
Butz favorably contrasted the record of the Nazi press with that of the American media. The refusal of newspapers in the Third Reich to even mention the “Jewish extermination claim” was evidence that it was on a higher level than the Allied press. Butz credited the German press for ignoring the propaganda about death camps and focusing its attention on “legitimate” questions such as the “extent and means of Jewish influence in the Allied press.”{38} Butz’s citation of the Nazi press as an example of high-level journalism, when all forms of public information in the Third Reich were under absolute government control, is itself significant. So, too, is his description of the question of Jewish control of the media as a “legitimate” one. These are reliable indicators of his own worldview.
But references to the annihilation of the Jews were contained not only in German documents and the testimony of war crimes defendants. As we have seen in the discussion of Richard Harwood’s work, the ICRCs report specifically mentioned the “extermination” programs. It is in his treatment of the report that Butz parts company with deniers such as Harwood and his anonymous American counterpart. He did not deny that the ICRC made specific reference to extermination, but he offered a series of explanations as to why these references to “extermination” did not mean just that. Butz insisted that the ICRC capitulated to external political pressures to inject into the report an “anti-German bias.”{39} The references to extermination placated the Allies in general and the Russians in particular.{40} Readers who rejected the notion that the ICRC was willing to acquiesce in such tactics were offered another explanation. The ICRC, just like some of the war crimes defendants, was a victim of the hoax. Despite the humanitarian agency’s experiences in Europe during the war, its postwar thinking was contorted by the war crimes trials, with their forged documents and spurious testimony.{41}
Finally the reader was warned that the ICRC report which described the aid the relief agency had provided European Jewry was “self-serving.” Butz argued that it was typical of a charitable organization’s publications to exaggerate the efficacy of the help it rendered and that the ICRC may have done less than the report claimed. In probably one of the more revealing observations in the book, he consoled his readers: “We should not be crushed if it were found that the Hungarian Jewish children or the Jews who walked to Vienna, both of whom were aided by the Red Cross, actually suffered a little bit more than might seem suggested by the Report.”{42} His contention that readers might be “crushed” to learn that Jewish children suffered more than the report suggested they did offers a frightening insight into Butz’s sentiments.
Butz’s treatment of the report reflected the flaws in his methodology. He diminished its trustworthiness, accusing the authors of being political pawns, duped by the hoax. However, when it served his purposes, this same report became an authoritative source for determining that the Holocaust had been a hoax. At one point the report mentioned that many of the inhabitants of Theresienstadt had been “transfer [red] to Auschwitz.” Given the report’s repeated references to extermination, there was little doubt as to what that statement meant. But Butz postulated that because there were no “sinister interpretations” placed on that remark, the Red Cross did not think it meant anything notorious. For everyone but Butz and his cadre of deniers, the words “transferred to Auschwitz” were sinister enough; no further comment was necessary.
This attempt to give meaning to the absence of a specific statement is reminiscent of an incident that occurred during the trial of Adolf Eichmann when Pastor Heinrich Gruber, a Protestant minister, appeared as a witness. During the war he had repeatedly attempted to persuade Eichmann to ameliorate the treatment of the Jews. He had asked that unleavened bread be sent to Hungarian Jews for Passover and had traveled to Switzerland to urge his Christian friends to obtain immigration visas and entry permits for Jews. He even tried to visit the concentration camp at Gurs in southern France, where Jews were living in horrendous conditions. He was incarcerated in a concentration camp for his efforts. At his trial Eichmann tried to prove that his behavior during the war had been acceptable to the German public, arguing that no one had “reproached” him for anything in the performance of his duties. “Not even Pastor Gruber claims to have done so.” Eichmann acknowledged that Gruber had sought alleviation of Jewish suffering but had “not actually object[ed] to the very performance of my duties as such.”{43}