Home History 203 lecture list Wallace G. Mills Hist. 203 17 The Holocaust

Anti-Semitism in the Nazi State and the Holocaust

- as part of the agreement that brought the Nazis to power as part of a coalition government and Hitler as chancellor (January 30, 1933), Goering was given responsibility for the Prussian police. This was fatal. Quickly the Nazis began to take over and to turn this body (subsequently becoming known as the infamous Gestapo) into an instrument of domination and ultimately of terror.

- also, the S.A. (the brown shirts) had virtually a free hand to intimidate, harass, and attack opponents and now the police were being used to help.

- the Reichstag fire on Feb. 27, 1933 was used as an excuse by the Nazis to demand that the Reichstag immediately pass a law giving Hitler emergency powers. This enabling act gave Hitler dictatorial powers. In effect, the law was suspended and henceforth, the law became whatever the Nazis said it was. Old laws could be changed or ignored and new laws come into existence simply by issuing a decree. Public opinion exercised some restraint, but increasingly, the nazified police did pretty much whatever they wished.

- still playing up and exaggerating the threats revealed by the fire, the Nazis began to round up and incarcerate their opponents and anyone they disliked. To hold these thousands of people arrested, the Nazis hurriedly set up camps. Although almost anyone who opposed the Nazis and their policies was liable to picked up, the Nazis especially targeted socialists, communists, trade unionists and homosexuals. Most were never officially charged or convicted; they were declared to be undesirables, traitors and degenerates and incarcerated.

- these concentration camps were also supposed to provide rehabilitation as well as being to some extent self-supporting; thus, inmates were supposed to work. However, inmates were almost consistently underfed and much of the work was heavily manual (e.g., sometimes breaking rocks with sledge hammers, etc.) and very inefficient. The labour was really very harsh punishment and was part of the sadism that was so prominent among Nazis.


- however, Nazi anti-Semitism was so rabid and fanatical that right from the start, treatment of Jews was different and harsher than for other German targets. Very quickly, the Nazis began their programme of separating Jews from German society with the first laws being promulgated in April 1933. Thus began the relentless programme that led ultimately to the ‘Final Solution’ and the Holocaust–i. e., attempted extermination and genocide.

Two interpretations

 1. Intentionalists

 - these historians argue that Hitler and the Nazis planned genocide from the beginning. They point to Nazi hate literature, Mein Kampf and the pathological anti-Semitism and hatred of Hitler and many leading Nazis. The Nazis talked endlessly about ‘solving the Jewish problem or question.’ The Nazis gradually, but systematically implemented their intention. The various phases of the holocaust were simply pursuit of the intention as opportunities arose. The final or extermination phase had to wait until the war provided a cover; even the Nazis hesitated to engage in genocide openly.

2. Functionalists

 - according to this view, the Nazis were certainly rabidly anti-Semitic and determined to ‘solve the Jewish problem’ and get rid of all Jews from Germany; however, they had not decided how this would be done and what it would entail. While they were certainly vicious thugs, even they may not have contemplated extermination as the solution initially. At various times, emigration from Germany, resettlement in the east and resettlement on Madagascar were all put forward as ‘solutions’. However, their treatment of Jews became increasingly harsh and brutal, especially with the start of the war. The Final Solution evolved out of a process of escalating brutality and evil; each step was a function of the previous step.

-throughout the war and especially as the military situation got worse and worse for Germany, substantial resources (people, transportation, etc.) were devoted to rounding up Jews from Germany and all occupied areas, to transporting them to death camps in the east, and to disposing of the bodies after the victims died or were killed. Even after (perhaps especially after) it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war, there was a frenzy to complete the job of extermination before the final defeat. Of course, for the victims, the debate between the functionalists and the intentionalists makes little difference because the end result was the same.


- I tend to side with the functionalists. The functionalist approach coincides with my view that war brutalizes. The western allies ended up in a massive campaign of indiscriminate bombing of cities and civilians (especially Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo) and ultimately the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

-while it was unquestionably necessary and essential to defeat and destroy the evil embodied in the fascist regimes, especially Germany and Japan, the feelings and sensibilities of the peoples of the democracies were also brutalized; an example that hits us close to home is the treatment of Japanese Canadians during the war and even after the end of the war (until at least 1947 or 1948, the official policy was still to send all Japanese Canadians to Japan even though most of them had been born in Canada!).

- however, the Final Solution did not emerge out of nowhere. The Volkish and other racists had been incubating a rabid, irrational hatred against Jews for much of the 19th C and the Nazis had been fostering and building it up for about 2 decades. Thus, the Final Solution was a logical, albeit insane, extreme projection of Nazi anti-Semitism.

Anti-Jewish Legislation in Germany

 - the Nazis wasted very little time after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 Jan. 33. The first 2 laws were issued on 7 Apr 33 excluding “non-Aryans” (i.e., primarily Jews but it could also include others, such as Gypsies) from the civil service (including teachers) and from the legal profession. A similar law regarding physicians was promulgated on Apr. 22nd. These initial laws often provided for some exceptions for ‘privileged non-Aryans’, mostly because suddenly excluding all Jews would have been disruptive and left many people without anyone to provide these services. However, subsequently, the exemptions were canceled.

- on Apr 25th, the “Law against the overcrowding of German Schools” began to restrict access of Jews to educational institutions, in many cases by imposing restrictive quotas.

- in the wake of the peace settlement establishing Poland at the end of World War 1, substantial numbers of Jews had immigrated to Germany. A law in July 1933 revoked the naturalization and citizenship of all of these migrants. This was followed in March 1934 by the expulsion of these immigrants.

- in Sept. 1933, the Reich Chamber of Culture was established; it provided the basis for excluding all non-Aryans from art, music, literature, etc. Later the same month, non-Aryans were excluded from farm labour and the ownership of farm land. In Oct., the exclusion was extended to journalism.

- in May 1935, non-Aryans were excluded from the Wehrmacht and in June from the Labour Service.

- on Sept. 15, 1935 came the infamous Nuremberg Laws (so named because they were issued during the monster annual rally of the Nazi Party held each year in Nuremberg.

- this law made marriage and any sexual behavior between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’ illegal. All existing mixed marriages were annulled and dissolved. No Aryan female could be employed in domestic service by a ‘non-Aryan’ unless she was at least 45 years of age.

- this made it official (Nazis had been saying since coming to power that only ‘Aryans’ could be German citizens). The status of German Jews was changed from citizen to ‘subject’.

Who is a Jew?

 - passing laws which restricted and discriminated against Jews was easy. Implementing and enforcing the laws was much more difficult. Passing regulations requires clear cut definitions.

- for many Jews, it was fairly straight-forward. Those families who were well-known as Jews, who attended synagogues and who practiced clearly were Jews. However, it was not so simple in many other cases. Increasing numbers of Jews were secular and non-practicing; it was more difficult to distinguish them from other Germans, especially if this had been the case for a couple of generations. Then there were Jews who had converted to Christianity. In former times these gradually merged into the rest of the population. But for the race fanatics among the Nazis, they were still Jews even after 2 or 3 generations.

- most difficult of all were the products of intermarriage. While these had partly Jewish ‘blood’, they also had German ‘blood’. It became a real exercise in splitting hairs to determine where the line should be drawn between those who could be accepted as sufficiently German and those who would not. Even then, for those who would have been classified as ‘Jewish’ but who had connections to influential Nazis, they could be exempted as ‘honorary Aryans’.


- what can be noted is that the Nazis did not try to do everything at once, but there was a relentless determination in the Nazi campaign. During 1936 and 1937, there were not any major new laws (partly because Nazis wanted to avoid disruption of the Olympic Games), but they continued to fine-tune the laws already passed, ending exceptions and exemptions, etc. However, the pace was increased dramatically in 1938. Perhaps the anschluss with Austria had an effect. Not only were the Nazis joined by Austrian Nazis with extreme anti-Semitism, but the Nazis were more confident that they could do anything and had much less to fear from foreign opinion.

- Nazi thugs had long targeted Jews, especially shopowners and had often tried to discourage people from patronizing such businesses. After coming to power, this behavior had become more intensive and now had no restraints from police; boycotts, etc. became more frequent. Nevertheless, Nazis were disappointed because Germans did not respond nearly as much as the Nazis would have liked.

- although the Nazis had made some efforts to get Jews out of business, some Jews had still managed to avoid this. 1938 brought new laws to force Jews to sell their businesses and prevented Germans from assisting Jews to hide any continued Jewish ownership.

- in the same year, it became compulsory for Jews to carry identification cards and by law the first name of all Jewish males became Israel and Sarah for women.

- the rising tide of persecution of and violence against Jews in 1938 culminated in the infamous “Krystal Nacht’ (Night of Broken Glass) 8-9 November. The Nazis had clearly been waiting for some excuse to unleash even more violence against Jews. The assassination of an official in the German embassy in Paris by a young Jew provided that excuse. The mentally unstable young man was a member of a Polish Jewish family that had lost German citizenship and been expelled to Poland where they had been held in an internment camp. Ironically, the official assassinated was not a Nazi.

- orders were given to organize a ‘spontaneous demonstration and reaction’. However, it was clearly organized officially as police and military vehicles were used to convey participants around and the riots occurred simultaneously in cities all over Germany. What ensued was an orgy of destruction and killing. Synagogues and other Jewish property was burned and destroyed in huge quantities. Jews were beaten, terrorized and even killed. Even the Nazis were taken aback at the scale of the destruction.

- then, the Nazi government blamed the Jews for all the destruction and levied a huge fine—RM 1 billion—on the Jews of Germany as compensation! They were further required to pay all damage done to their property. The victims, not the perpetrators, were forced to compensate.

- the Nazis had long been attempting to squeeze all wealth from Jews. For example, anyone wishing to emigrate was required to turn over all their wealth. Now, the Nazis became even more systematic in confiscating all wealth and property from Jews. The Nazis needed more revenue to pay for the rearmament programme, but Hitler was afraid to raise taxes.

- from this point on, the Nazis continued the process of separating Jews from the rest of German society, forcing them all to move into separate residential areas (ghettos) and increasingly restricting their rights to be anywhere outside these ghettos.

Solving the Jewish Problem or Question

 1. Emigration from Germany

 - this was the approach from the coming to power until the outbreak of war. However, while encouraging Jews to leave Germany, the Nazis were also discouraging emigration by insisting that they leave all their wealth behind.

- from 1933-37, about 129,000 Jews emigrated out of approximately half a million; the largest number of these went to France but others went to Britain and North America. As Hitler jeered, most other countries were not willing to accept many Jews.

[The Canadian record in this regard was one of the worst. There was a good deal of anti-Semitism in Quebec and Quebec politicians were adamant in opposing Jewish immigration, but feelings were only moderately better among Anglophones. Certainly, studies have shown that immigration officials in the External Affairs department (many of whom were WASPs) were strongly anti-Semitic and using their positions to keep out Jewish immigrants. Many of these officials were still there after the war and continued to try to keep Jewish refugees and survivors from coming to Canada. The title of a book which documents this, None is too many, is a direct quote from a memo by one of these officials regarding Jewish immigrants.]

 - as a result, emigration had not really ‘solved’ the so-called ‘problem’. The majority of German Jews were still in Germany. However, the war quickly exacerbated the ‘problem’. The conquests quickly multiplied the number of Jews in Nazi dominated territories. Several millions were added in the conquest of Poland. More were added when the Netherlands, Belgium and France were overrun; in France, a substantial number of the German Jewish emigrants of previous years were restored to Nazi control. With the attack on the Soviet Union in June of 1941, additional large numbers of Jews were added in eastern Europe. For the sick and tortured minds of the rabid Nazi anti-Semites, it was a nightmare where the ‘problem’ had in fact become worse by 10 or 15 times. Moreover, war brutalizes and quickly leads to a throwing off of moral and ethical restraints. Certainly, the Nazis felt even fewer restraints in the treatment of Polish Jews than with German Jews.

2. Death by starvation and disease for Polish Jews

 - very quickly, the Nazis herded the large Jewish population into ghettos in a few centres, the largest in Warsaw (i.e., large urban concentration camps). The Nazis built walls around the ghettos. Initially, they seemed content to allow starvation and disease to reduce the Jewish population. They deliberately reduced the food allowed into the ghettos very substantially below the minimum necessary.

- subsequently decided that this was too slow. Also, some Nazis pointed out that in social darwinist terms this was very dangerous. It would weed out the weaker members, but those left would be the fittest and hardiest; there was a danger that the ‘race’ would return in future even stronger if not destroyed and annihilated.

3. ‘Resettlement in the East’ and the ‘Madagascar Plan’

 - from late 1939 until the summer of 1941, the Nazis toyed with a couple of options for disposing of German and other Jews. It is debated by historians of the holocaust whether or not the Nazis were really serious about these options or whether they were just window-dressing. Intentionalists tend to adopt the latter view.

- the Madagascar Plan was put forward briefly after the fall of France (Madagascar was a French colony). Madagascar was to be a kind of isolation reservation to which all Jews would be deported. However, this plan would require the cooperation of the Allies, especially the British who controlled the seas and the Suez Canal. Churchill absolutely and categorically rejected this plan when it was floated briefly by the Nazis.

- ‘resettlement in the east’ had a longer history. Initially, it seems to have been intended that German Jews would be transported to the ghettos already established in Poland. After the invasion of the Soviet Union and the early smashing success of the Wehrmacht, there was discussion about transporting and settling the Jews east of the Caucasus once the Soviet Union had been defeated and dismembered. The last idea became moot once the Wehrmacht had been stopped and the tide had begun to turn. In the later stages as the extermination policies were implemented, Jews being sent to the east to the death camps still were told that they were going to be ’resettled’, but this was clearly a ruse to prevent last desperate resistance by the Jews.

4. Start of mass killing

 - the process of starving and working Jews to death was still proceeding when the invasion of the Soviet Union brought a new escalation in violence and brutality. The SS set up special units (einsatz gruppen) in territories of eastern Europe captured from Soviet control; while the basic personnel were German SS, anti-Semites were also recruited from among the local populations of the newly occupied territories.

- the task of these units was to follow behind the Wehrmacht and military units and weed out undesirables of all kinds. These undesirables included ‘commissars’ (communist officials), but the main targets were Jews. This area of eastern Europe was to be the ‘lebensraum’. The intention was to settle the area with German peasant stock who would be able to regain the connection to the soil and an agrarian way of life. The settlers would need labour and some of Slavic ‘untermenschen’ (inferior people) would be retained for this purpose in a feudal relationship. Some of the Nazis thought they were very clever by interchanging the terms ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’. However, there were far too many at that time and the population would have to be reduced very substantially until it reached the proper number.

- the einsatz gruppen had orders to be ruthless and they were. They rounded up large numbers of people and killed them summarily. The methods were often very crude. Huge pits would be dug; after having been ordered to remove all their clothing, the victims would be brought in small groups to the edge of the pits and shot so that their bodies would fall into the pit. The next group, who had been watching this, would then be brought. This might go on for hours, even well into the night. However, this was found to be very stressful and fatiguing to the people doing the killing; it was also too slow and inefficient.

- a refinement was to build enclosed chambers on trucks. The victims would be crowded into the vans and the doors locked. The truck exhausts would be fed into the chamber. The human cargo would be asphyxiated while being driven to the disposal area (usually a mass grave).

- eventually, four camps in Poland were built, expanded or converted into death camps (i.e., camps whose role was the killing of large numbers of people). All Nazi concentration and work camps were death camps in the sense that inmates were underfed, mistreated and suffered high mortality rates from exhaustion and disease, but they were not geared for killing on a mass production line basis.

- there is a bit of confusion about Auschwitz. It had been created as work camp early in the war and had had German and Polish prisoners as well as Jews. Here many inmates were worked to death; treatment of Jews was even harsher than that for Germans and Poles. It continued to operate in this fashion until shortly before the Red Army arrived to drive the Nazis out. However, in this last stage of the final solution, a huge extension, called Birkenau, was added; this was the death camp. Most of the inmates of Birkenau were Jews although there was also a section for Gypsies. This led to the infamous procedure whereby incoming trains were met by Nazi medical personnel who went down the lines of prisoners signaling them either to the old work camp or to Birkenau; the latter meant a quick death while for most of the former it meant a much slower death as only a few survived the work camp.

 - initially, the SS used carbon monoxide to kill in these death camps, but there were difficulties. The process took too long (at least half an hour) and frequently the engines broke down in the middle before all the people had been killed. [There is a story that SS boss Himmler vomited when this happened during a demonstration for his edification.] Eventually, they turned to an insecticide as the poison agent.

- even more difficult to resolve was the problem of what to do with the vast number of bodies. Burial and decomposition produced tremendous odour and pollution problems for air and water. When they burned the bodies with gasoline, the air pollution and odor problems were again horrendous. Finally, they settled on cremation as the best solution. Even then, when the cremation ovens were working 24 hours a day at maximum through-put, it was difficult to keep them from breaking down and producing a backlog.

- this creation of the death camps coincided with the implementation of the Final Solution.

The Final Solution

 - the procedures and mechanisms for this were drawn up at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 (Wannsee was a suburb of Berlin). Heydrich, one of Himmler’s top commanders, called together a number of officials from all government departments and from Nazi occupied territories.

- at this conference, the term ‘final solution’ was used but was not officially defined. The minutes and notes of some of the participants provide practically the only documents which use the term. However, it is known that the term was used frequently by top Nazis among themselves during these last years of the regime.

- it is clear from the context that ‘final solution’ meant obliteration and extermination although no documents have been found which spell this out; participants at the conference who survived also have testified that that was what they had understood the term to mean. This is important because the deniers claim that the dearth of documents using the term prove that there was no such programme or that the term did not mean extermination and meant only removing and resettling the Jews in the east.

- the Nazis frequently endeavored to cover up many of their brutal activities, using ambiguous terms or euphemisms. For example, documents accompanying prisoners being sent to concentration camps sometimes carried the notation “Special treatment”; that meant that the prisoner was to be executed!

- the Wannsee Conference was called to facilitate the disposal of the remaining German Jews, to work out the bugs and bottlenecks and to ensure that the system worked as quietly and inconspicuously as possible. By this time, German Jews had been completely isolated from the rest of German society. They were congregated into ghettos, allowed out only for limited number of hours per day and forbidden from appearing in many areas entirely. As much as possible, they were denied any contact with other Germans. They were forced to wear the yellow star of David, but in any case, they had been robbed so persistently by the Nazis that all they had to wear was rags which made them easily identifiable.

- with the system worked out, the Nazis began shipping large numbers of German Jews to camps in the east, primarily the death camps. However, there was one camp in Czechoslovakia named Theresienstat which was a model village. Because of opposition in Germany, the Nazis had trouble dealing with Jewish WW1 veterans some of whom were decorated for their war service to Germany. There were also prominent older Jews. The Nazis liked to depict Theresienstat as a kind of retirement village. It was also used by the Nazis to hoodwink the Swiss members of the International Red Cross. As rumours of what was going on began to slip out of Nazi occupied territories despite vigorous efforts to maintain secrecy, the Nazis would allow Red Cross officials to visit Theresienstat as a representative camp. In preparation for the visit, buildings would be fixed up and painted and the inmates warned to assure the officials that they were well and treated well.

- the system was quickly put to use for the Nazi plan to completely annihilate all Jews in Nazi occupied Europe. Later, regimes linked to the Nazis in Hungary and Rumania were also pressured to send their Jews and after the German takeover in Italy, Italian Jews were rounded up as well (an Italian Jew who managed to survive, Primo Levy, has given us one of the most vivid accounts, Survival in Auschwitz).

- as the tide turned against Germany and the Axis by the end of 1942, the SS had developed the efficiency of the system which stopped only when the SS was forced to withdraw by the advances of the Red Army. Consider it; just when the German forces were being increasingly pressed, large resources (trains, people etc.) were devoted to shipping millions of people from all across Europe to their deaths in the camps. There was almost a frenzy to complete the task of extermination before defeat came.

Other horrors

 - there were other horrible and ghoulish aspects to Nazi behaviors in the camps. Efforts were made to salvage as much as possible. Women’s hair was shaved off and collected to make felt; gold fillings were extracted from the dead. Eye glasses and anything else of value that the victims had somehow managed to retain were collected.

- extensive medical experiments were carried out. For example, to study hypothermia, people were deliberately frozen to death to see how long it took and exactly what happened. The infamous Dr. Mengele was intrigued by twins; one could be used as a control while the other was experimented upon. People were deliberately exposed to or injected with pathogens to study diseases. After the experiment, the human guinea pigs would be sent to the death camp to be disposed of.

- often very little of scientific value was derived from these ‘experiments’ because many were premised on the pseudo-scientific Nazi race theories and were thus junk science.

How much did ordinary Germans know?

 - this became a frequently asked question after the war, especially as most Germans claimed that they knew nothing about the Holocaust. Ironically, the claim was both true and untrue.

- it is true that exact details were shrouded in secrecy; considerable efforts were made to keep what was going on quiet. Details were not published and the massive movements of people (of victims) were deliberately covered with misleading labels, such as ‘resettlement in the east’.

- it is also true that many Germans deliberately avoided knowledge of what was going on—even Nazis. Albert Speer talks about it in his autobiography—Inside the Third Reich. He carefully avoided going to any concentration camps, let alone death camps. This was reenforced by a friend who had been devastated by his visit to one of the killing camps and he kept repeating, "whatever you do, don’t go to the camps.”

- massive numbers of ordinary Germans also looked away and avoided asking obvious questions because they did not want to face the answers.

- however, the claim was also untrue.

- there were large numbers of people involved—in the camps, on the railroads and in various departments and agencies all over Europe as part of the system.

- in the east, not only the members of the einsatz gruppen, but large numbers of German military personnel (members of the Wehrmacht were told to mind their own business and keep their mouths shut) had witnessed some of the brutal massacres. These witnesses undoubtedly told family members and close friends about what they had seen. Rumours about the horrible activities of the einsatz gruppen were in fact common in Germany.

- of course, anyone in the vicinity of the camps could not avoid noticing things: the fact that the flow of people in regard to the camps was virtually one-way. Almost no one left. Odour problems spread for miles, especially down wind from the camps. It is true that the death camps were all in Poland, but substantial numbers of Germans were there—the German industrialists who were employing the labourers from Auschwitz, for example.

- there was also virtually universal knowledge by inference. Germans had watched their Jewish neighbours, store owners, lawyers, doctors, teachers, musicians, etc., etc. all be beaten up and mistreated.

- in the cities, they had watched the Jews be gradually segregated and removed from society; Krystal Nacht had involved burning Jewish property and killing and beating up Jews in almost every significant urban area in Germany.

- all that was in the context of the constant threats that were voiced by Hitler and other top Nazis to ‘solve the Jewish Question once and for all;’ it did not require any significant imagination to draw the inference that the Jews being carted away by the train load were facing hardship and likely death.

- thus, while most Germans may not have had specific detailed knowledge, the majority undoubtedly had more than an inkling that some very nasty, horrible things were going on.

- it is also true that the majority undoubtedly were afraid and felt that they could do nothing. The Nazis were unusually rotten and vicious. Most of German society were terrified; the Nazis were unspeakably brutal to their enemies and anyone who opposed them.

- what we cannot know is what proportions of the German population welcomed and cheered the Nazi actions. We do know that anti-Semitism was widespread in Germany, as indeed it was in all western societies in the period. Many of the early discriminatory laws (against both Jews and Gypsies) were welcomed. That certainly argues for massive complicity, even though I think it is true that most Germans probably did not want or support the genocide.


A. R. Butz and the Deniers

 - Butz’ The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is the most prominent in the literature of denial, at least in English; it is the one with the most pretension as scholarship. Most other deniers tend to rely on it. Jim Keegstra is said to have referred to it in his Alberta classroom where he was teaching the Jewish world conspiracy and denying the existence of the holocaust.

- initially, Butz seems a formidable document and difficult to deal with. Butz adopts an air of open inquiry and investigation; he expresses surprise at what he began to find:

- at 1st, it seems as if it would be very difficult to evaluate Butz’ charges unless one went to original documents; these are not easily accessible.

- however, it becomes clear that Butz’ methods of dealing with evidence is not only biased, but he is not above some devious methods on evidence; even more he finds one or other specious excuse to discard all evidence contrary to his position.

- in the end, what he produces is a new giant Jewish conspiracy operating through World Communism and more surprisingly through the US government , especially the State Department. He argues that Jews became dominant in the State Dep’t and started to create the ‘hoax’ even before the war was over; Roosevelt was bamboozled or perhaps allowed his anti-German feelings to induce him to assist in the attempt to punish the entire German nation. At any rate, Jews came to dominate the special section of the Justice Dep’t that was put in charge of the War Crimes Trials and they used this position to create the myth and establish the hoax.

Butz’ Use of Evidence:
Main areas Butz disputes:

1. The question of numbers, especially the 6 million Jews figure that has so often been used.

2. No ‘smoking gun’: no document ordering the killing or extermination of Jews en masse.

3. The existence of ‘extermination’ camps and the use of poison gas to kill people.

1. How many Jews were killed?

 - the figure of 6 million has always been acknowledged to be based on general estimates made very early with reliable statistics being unavailable. The first of these was made by Jewish organisations at the end of the war. Contrary to what believers in a world conspiracy thought, Jews were not well organised internationally and in many cases there were no reliable statistics about the size of prewar Jewish populations in many countries; thus, rough estimates had to be made. Then, in the turmoil of millions of displaced persons (remember that many of the survivors had survived by hiding their Jewish background), it was impossible to know how many had survived and this too had to be estimated roughly. As a result, the almost 6 million figure was derived by subtracting the rough estimate of survivors from the rough estimate of prewar populations.

- even by 1966 (i.e., in time for Butz’ book), the figures had been revised to 4.2-4.5 million although in the media and in the popular mind, the 6 million figure has become etched in stone. For most of us, the precise figure is largely irrelevant. The Nazis certainly killed as many as they could and would have killed more if they had had more time and the opportunity. Besides, isn’t 4.2 million horrific enough? The crime is the same. [Would it have been less horrific if “only” 7 or 8 women had been murdered at the Montreal Polytechnique?]

- however, Butz takes this ‘straw man’ of the 6 million figure, declares it is untrue (something no serious scholar would dispute nowadays) and then says this just shows that the entire story is a lie! He really harps on this throughout the book.

2. No ‘smoking gun’

 - he harps also on the fact that no documents have been found that explicitly refers to mass killings or extermination. In fact, the term ‘final solution’ has not been found in official documents although other documents and many witnesses have confirmed that the term was being used in Nazi and government circles at least from 1942 onwards. People making notes at the Wannsee Conference recorded it. Several people reported Himmler using it in speeches to SS people involved in the death camps and Himmler said specifically that Hitler had given explicit orders to proceed with the ‘final solution’.

- scholars involved in the study of these matters insist that ‘final solution’ was just one of a number of euphemisms being used to disguise what was going on.

- Butz denies all of this. He says that it is impossible to believe that an explicit policy of extermination would not be mentioned in some document or other. Yet intensive examination of Nazi government records have turned up no official document; he argues that the absence of any document is powerful evidence that no such policy existed. However, we know that a great deal of business was conducted in the Nazi regime on the basis of verbal orders and permission. Hitler often seemed to prefer this approach.

- on the question of what the term ‘final solution’ meant, Butz denies that it meant extermination or genocide. He acknowledges that the Nazis wanted to rid Germany of all Jews, but he insists that that did not mean genocide; they hoped to get rid of them by emigration to Madagascar or to east of the Caucasus. However, a great many German witnesses who were there at the time have said categorically that extermination was precisely the meaning they understood at the time.

3 Extermination camps and use of poison gas

 - Butz denies the existence of extermination or death camps and emphatically rejects the idea that poison was used to kill people.

- he concedes that there were concentration camps, but these were primarily intended for criminals and anti-social people (he doesn’t deal with the question of why there would be so many millions of such people who are always a tiny minority in a normal population); however, he categorically denies that there were ever camps devoted entirely or mainly to killing people. In popular minds, there has been a tendency to believe that all concentration camps were death camps. [Actually, it is not too far-fetched because the mortality rates in most got so high that they could be considered death camps.] However, only 4 camps (all in Poland and eastern Europe) seem to have been set up specifically for assembly line killing and disposing of large numbers of humans.

- he emphatically denies that any gas, especially Xyklon B, was ever used to kill people. Xyklon B was used only for its intended purposes—as an insecticide. Most people arriving at the camps were infested with vermin and the insecticide was used to fumigate their clothing, bedding etc. The showers were part of measures to do the same for people. Indeed, those selected for labour at Auschwitz did go through this procedure.

- none of this explains what happened to the vast numbers who were sent to Birkenau and were never seen again; as far as I remember, Butz doesn’t even try to explain this.

- I think that we do have an exaggerated view of how many were killed by gas. The number of people who died or were killed by other means outnumber those who were killed by gas. Some of the other ways of killing people are even worse. In the Polish ghettos that were set up, there was a deliberate policy of restricting the flow of food to far less than was necessary to maintain even minimal health; the Nazis knew and intended that this would mean that large numbers of people would waste away and die of malnutrition or disease. In Auschwitz and other labour camps, food intake was restricted to far lower than minimum requirements, especially when people were subjected to hard physical labour. These people wasted away until their bodies were no longer able to sustain life. This was deliberate and was as cruel as medical experiments. I don’t think that the use of gas should be singled out as the worst of the crimes committed by the Nazis. Machine gunning families who had been stripped naked with those who would treated the same watching or starving people slowly to death are just as horrific and unforgivable as using gas. However, Butz does not deal with any of these crimes, many of which were outlined in official documents.

What about the cremating ovens?

 - well, it was true, Butz concedes, that the camps had high mortality rates and it was determined that cremation was a better, safer way to dispose of the large number of bodies of people who had died of ‘natural causes’ from serious contagious diseases.

- does not the bringing together of large numbers of people in insanitary conditions, with inadequate food intake carry with it criminal responsibility for death due to ‘disease’? These deaths were not from ‘natural causes’.

What about the high death rates?

 - well, yes, that was very unfortunate, but it was not really the fault of the Nazis, Butz claims. As war shortages and problems grew (particularly in the east as German armies were pushed back), lack of supplies—food and medicines especially—increased and the death rates in the camps soared. However, once the authorities became aware of the problems, they did act (in the context of the general conditions and shortages prevailing) in a vigorous manner. Butz claims that the death rates were in fact lowered in 1944. Only with more serious problems during the winter as Allied forces were closing in and constant aerial bombing disrupted transportation did the conditions in the camps worsen and create the dire problems revealed by liberating forces.

- in fact, he blames Allied bombing for most of the resulting conditions that were found in the camps. He never explains why there were high mortality rates in the camps long before Allied bombing or the problems of the collapse of the eastern front can be dragged in as specious explanations.



HOME History 203 list Top of the page