Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust' Controversy Institute for Historical Review Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust' Controversy Arthur R. Butz Introduction When in the discussion of some subject we criticize somebody because "he can't see the forest for the trees," we refer to a special sort of intellectual failing. We do not mean that the object of our criticism is incompetent or that his views on the subject of interest are erroneous or irrelevant. His views may, on the contrary, be buttressed by investigations of depth and power that would be a credit to any intellect. We mean that he is so focused on details that he fails to see the subject in proper and larger context, especially from the higher perspective which, if adopted and pursued, would solve many of the problems that excited general curiosity in the subject in the first place. When I first addressed an IHR conference three years ago I explicitly made reference to this problem by pointing out that on p. 10 of the Hoax of the Twentieth Century I had mentioned the consideration that, if appreciated adequately, would have made much of my study superfluous: The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason; at the end of the war they were still there. Through all of the controversy on the "Holocaust" my thoughts have continually returned to this point. That so much controversy could have raged, with only rare occurrences of this observation, raises questions that are worth exploring. On the one hand my making of the above and similar general historical observations in my book shows that I did not myopically see only the trees and not the forest. On the other hand in some parts of the book my focus may seem to be on obscure details and to suggest myopia. This bifocalism is the topic of this paper. For one thing, I want to develop the "forest" side of the subject further, i.e. I want to place the "Holocaust" subject more firmly in the context of the higher history of the twentieth century. On the other hand, I want to consider the fact that so much of the investigation that has been conducted in recent years, certainly including my own, has presupposed and sought to satisfy myopic demands. I will argue, partly from historical analogy, that as a practical matter this great emphasis on detail seems justified and even necessary in the times we are in, but that it is important, even to avoid getting tripped up on points of detail, that we keep the larger context in mind. Gitta Sereny Gitta Sereny's article in the New Statesman of 2 November 1979 furnishes a useful illustration. She attempted to encounter my arguments in only one respect. In the course of writing Into That Darkness she had interviewed, in a German prison, Franz Stangl, former commandant of Treblinka (a facility in central Poland that served as a transit camp for deportations of Warsaw Jews). She wrote: I talked with Stangl for weeks in prison; I talked to others who worked under him, and to their families. I talked to people who, otherwise uninvolved, witnessed these events in Poland. And I talked to a few of those very few who survived. Butz claims in his Hoax that those (hundreds) who admitted taking part in extermination were doing so as plea-bargaining, in order to get lighter sentences. But those I talked to had been tried. Many had served their sentences, and none of them had anything to gain-except shame-by what they told me. Stangl himself wanted only to talk, and them to die. And Stangl is dead. But if ... Butz ... were really interested in the truth, Stangl's wife, and many other witnesses are still able to testify. Although the point is not of major importance, I note that Sereny has misleadingly reported Stangl's hopes during her interview. According to her Into That Darkness Stangl was awaiting the decision on his appeal against a life sentence, so he presumably wanted to get out of jail before he died. Anybody who has taken even a brief look at the details of the Treblinka legend (e.g. the claim that the exhausts of captured Russian tanks and trucks were used in the "gassings") would understand that history was not being served by Sereny's remarks on her interviews with Stangl. However I am afraid that in the typical case such healthy skepticism might be accompanied by some myopia in offering an explanation for Sereny's account. The most obvious myopic reaction would be to say or suggest that Sereny was lying, that Stangl never said anything like what she has attributed to him. Other possibilities might be to suggest that such remarks by Stangl were produced by bribery or torture. That such reactions quite miss the mark is easily seen by first considering the context, rather than the content, of Stangl's remarks. He was by then an old man. He had heard the tales of what was supposed to have happened at Treblinka for twenty five years. Of course he privately scoffed at them at first. Then he got accustomed to living in a culture in which such tales were never publicly challenged. He may (as sometimes happens in such circumstances) have started to believe them himself, or perhaps he privately cultivated his knowledge that the tales were almost pure invention. It is most unlikely that we shall ever know, but we do know that in his confrontation with the journalist Sereny, the hapless old man could scarcely have reasoned that he could help himself by denying the legend as it applies to Treblinka. I am confident that Stangl told Sereny something like she reports. Of course Stangl sought to excuse himself personally, but what possible self-serving reason could he have found for telling Sereny that the "gassings" are a myth? Accordingly I wrote in my letter of reply to the New Statesman, which was not published there but was published in this journal:[1] The key point is that the objective served by such statements should be presumed to be personal interest rather than historical truth. At a "trial" some specific thing is to be tried, i.e. the court is supposed to start by treating that thing as an open question. The "extermination" allegation has never been a-i question in any practical sense in any of the relevant trials, and in some it has not been open to question in a formal legal sense. The question was always only personal responsibility in a context in which the extermination allegation was unquestionable. Thus the "confessions" of Germans, which in all cases sought to deny or mitigate personal responsibility, were merely the only defenses they could present in their circumstances. This is not exactly "plea-bargaining," where there is negotiation between prosecution and defense, but it is related. All it amounts to is presenting a story that it was possible for the court to accept. The logical dilemma is inescapable once the defendant resolves to take the "trial" seriously. To deny the legend was not the way to stay out of jail. Moreover it is not true, as Sereny implicitly asserts, that this logical dilemma no longer holds when the defendant is serving a life sentence. If he is seeking pardon or parole, he would not try to overturn what has already been decided in court; that is not the way pardon or parole works. For example, at the Frankfurt "Auschwitz trial" of 1963-1965, so monstrous were the supposed deeds of Robert Mulka that many thought his sentence to 14 years at hard labor unduly light. Then, in a denouement that would amaze all who have not studied this subject closely, Mulka was quietly released less than four months later. However, if Mulka had claimed in any plea (as he could have truthfully), either at his trial or afterwards, that there were no exterminations at Auschwitz and that he was in a position to know, then he would have served a full life sentence in the former case and the full fourteen years in the latter, if he lived that long. It is not widely known, but there have been many such instances -the subject is hard to investigate.[2] In no instance would it have made any sense, in terms of immediate self interest, to deny the exterminations. That was not the way to get out of jail. If one accepts, as the terms of the debate, the purely defensive attitude of responding to the specific points made by the other side, then I still believe this to be the correct way to answer Sereny. I was satisfied as I wrote those lines but, in the course of so doing, the madness of the immediate context struck me. It was 1979, not 1942, and Sereny was trying to explain to readers of the New Statesman, via her account of a lone old man's remarks, that they should believe the "extermination" tales. Continuing the letter, then, I wrote: We do not need "confessions" or "trials" to determine that the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, or the reprisals at Lidice following Heydrich's assassination, really took place. Now, the extermination legend does not claim a few instances of homicide, but alleges events continental in geographical scope, of three years in temporal scope, and of several million in scope of victims. How ludicrous, then, is the position of the bearers of the legend, who in the last analysis will attempt to "prove" such events on the basis of "confessions" delivered under the fabric of hysteria, censorship, intimidation, persecution and blatant illegality that has been shrouding this subject for 35 years. To put it another way, Sereny in her 1979 article was arguing the reality of the colossal events alleged by reporting what a tired old man recently told her in prison. One might as well argue that the gypsies burned down New York City in 1950, on the basis of confessions of gypsies who were living there at the time. Of course Sereny would argue that I am seizing on only one remark of hers and making it appear to be her whole argument. However, while I concede that she has a great deal more to say on this subject, the basic observation still stands. She was taking a great deal of space in a prominent journal in presenting arguments that in 1979 were wildly incommensurate with the allegation in question. If the Jews of Europe really had been exterminated, such arguments would not be offered. When I saw Robert Faurisson in 1980 he congratulated me on this point, i.e. for pointing out that we do not need "trials" in order to believe in real historical events (Hiroshima, Lidice, etc.), and said he wished he had thought of it. I knew how he felt for, at about the time of Sereny's article a man I had never heard of before telephoned me and raised a point I wished I had thought of, namely, why didn't those Jewish bodies outside the Axis sphere, who had so much to say about "extermination" and "murder," undertake to warn the Jews under Hitler what supposedly lay in store for them in the German resettlement programs? In all accounts we are told that the Jews packed up for the deportations and entered camps later without imagining that they were to be killed. This feature of the legend is of course necessary for it is well known that violent resistance to the deportations was very rare (I implicitly touched this point on p. 109 of Hoax, but nowhere nearly as strong as I should have). The general lesson suggested by these two incidents is the subject of this paper. We see that what was involved in both incidents was temporary myopia, not merely of the bearers of the received legend, but more importantly of the revisionists, who were so busy analyzing the trees that it took some fortuitous prodding to make them notice some important features of the forest. This is not a failing of individuals. It is a consequence of the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. I shall try to describe those circumstances and show how we should handle them today. This is done partly by presenting my approximation of posterity's outlook on these matters, and partly by offering several suggestions on the conduct of practical controversy. The Donation Of Constantine The "Donation of Constantine" is the most famous forgery in European history. It first appeared somewhere around the year 800. It is a document allegedly in the "hands" (sic) of Emperor Constantine 1 (288?-337), which recounts the long standing and false legend of Constantine's conversion and baptism by Pope Sylvester I. Its principal feature is its grant to the Pope of temporal authority over "the city of Rome and all the provinces, places and states of Italy, and the western regions." It also decrees that the Pope "shall have the supremacy as well over the four principal (holy) sees, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople," and makes various additional specific grants. To make it clear that the Donation is in earnest, the document then has Constantine declare his intention to transfer his own capital to "the province of Byzantia (where) a city should be built in our name ... for where the primate of priests and the head of the Christian religion is established by the Heavenly Emperor, it is not right that an earthly Emperor shall have authority there." What is of the greatest interest here is that the authenticity of this document was rarely questioned before the fifteenth century, despite the facts that (1) according to legends and histories widely available throughout the Middle Ages and to the document itself, the city that Constantine founded on the ancient site of Byzantium, and which was later called "Constantinople," had not yet been founded, much less made the site of a principal holy see and (2) more conclusively, and in analogy with our "they were still there" observation on the "Holocaust," according to records and histories available throughout the Middle Ages, imperial rule continued in Italy during the times of Constantine, Sylvester, and their immediate successors. It was certainly not lack of interest or relevance that explains the long failure to see the Donation as a fraud. Much of the political life of the Middle Ages revolved around the controversy over the relative power of Pope and Holy Roman (i.e. German) Emperor, and able intellects participated in circumstances in which the Donation was considered one of the arguments on the side of the Pope. Even Dante (1265-1321), an outspoken enemy of papal temporal power, touched on the Donation in his Inferno only to deplore Constantine's granting of it: O Constantine, what great evil had as its mother Not your conversion, but that dowry Which the first rich father got from you! Thus a wildly ahistoric forgery, approximately in the class of a letter bearing the alleged signature of George Washington, granting the Methodist Episcopal Church "authority to rule over Washington, D.C. and subject territories of North America," went almost unchallenged throughout centuries of relevant controversy. The first challenges were typically silly, off the mark, tendentious, or circumlocutory, and often, with Dante, challenged only the desirability of the Donation and not its historicity. In the middle of the twelfth century the reform movement of Arnold of Brescia attacked the whole legend of Sylvester and the Donation by arguing that Constantine was already a Christian when he met Sylvester. Among the anti-papal Ghibellines of Germany there arose around 1200 the legend that, when Constantine made the Donation, the angels cried audibly "Alas, alas, this day has poison been dropped into the Church of God." The partisans of the Pope retorted that, sure, the weeping was heard, but it was just the Devil in disguise, trying to deceive us. Others argued that the Donation was not valid because Constantine was tainted with Arian heresy, or because the consent of the people had not been obtained, or because the grant was supposed to apply only to Constantine's reign. Others turned the Donation into a back handed blow at the papacy by arguing that it showed papal primacy to be derived not from God, but from the Emperor. Indeed the last argument became, until the middle of the fifteenth century, a standard attitude toward the Donation on the part of anti-papal spokesmen. Around 1200 two writers had pointed to the fact of the continuity of imperial rule in Italy after the alleged Donation, but their presentations were circumlocutory and did not reveal their personal conclusions on the matter, and they had no evident influence on future controversy. What should have been a conclusive critique of the Donation came in 1433, not from an anti-papal source, but from somebody we might characterize as a liberal reformer within the Church. Cusanus, Deacon of St. Florinus of Coblenz, presented for the use of the Council of Basle a critique of the Donation which emphasized the overwhelming historical evidence against any transfer of sovereignty from Emperor to Pope in or just after the time of Sylvester and Constantine. Cusanus' De concordantia catholica had little direct impact, partly because of its dry and dispassionate tone, and partly because it was eclipsed by the 1440 treatise of Lorenzo Valla, De falso credita et ementita Constantini. It is Valla's name that is most closely associated with the overthrow of the hoax, partly because his own considerable talents were supplemented by Cusanus' work, partly because of the oratorical and passionate nature of his treatise, and partly because the quickly succeeding developments of printing and the Reformation movement gave the treatise a massive distribution in various translations. Valla's basic approach was to subject the Donation to criticism from every perspective that was available to him. For example he starts by trying to look at the matter from the perspective of Constantine, "a man who through thirst for dominion had waged war against nations, and attacking friends and relatives in civil strife had taken the government from them," who then allegedly would "set about giving to another out of pure generosity the city of Rome, his fatherland, the head of the world, the queen of states ... betaking himself thence to an humble little town, Byzantium." After reading only a few pages of Valla the Donation seems incredible, but the treatise runs to about 80 pages in English translation and is a classic case of "overkill." Valla supported Cusanus' argument, that the alleged transfer of sovereignty had not taken place, with the evidence of the Roman coins of the period, which were issued in the names of Emperors, not Popes. Valla analyzed the language and vocabulary of the Donation document, and showed they could not have represented the sort of Latin used by Constantine. Such methods were novel for the times. Valla was not a disinterested scholar. At the time he wrote the treatise he was employed as secretary to Alfonso of Aragon, who was contesting the rule of Naples with the Pope. Valla left his reader in no doubt of his view that temporal power of the Pope is bad and ought to be abolished. Nevertheless Valla's treatise is a landmark in the rise of historical criticism, and I believe it can profitably be studied today by those engaged in "debunking the genocide myth." Although somebody was burned at the stake in Strassburg in 1458 for denying the Donation, Valla's thesis was at first quite well received among educated people, although the treatise remained in manuscript. By 1500 it seemed the legend was finished; the relative quiescence of fundamental controversy on the character of the papacy was probably helpful. However the development of the Reformation movement, and the wide use of Valla's treatise as a weapon against the papacy, had the ironic effect of reviving the defense of the legend. On the one hand Martin Luther declared in 1537 that Valla's treatise had convinced him that the Pope was the embodiment of the Antichrist. On the other hand Steuchus, librarian of the Vatican, produced in 1547 a rather able attack on Valla's treatise, which was put on the Index shortly later. The process of overthrowing the legend could only be considered complet… truncated (73,266 more characters in archive)