Archive/File: people/b/butz.arthur butz.006
Last-Modified: 1994/10/29
See Also: ~/butz.002

From oneb!hakatac!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!spool.mu.edu!sdd.hp.com!col.hp.com!csn!csus.edu!netcom.com!codfish Mon Sep  5 15:44:55 PDT 1994
Article: 15867 of alt.revisionism
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Path: oneb!hakatac!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!spool.mu.edu!sdd.hp.com!col.hp.com!csn!csus.edu!netcom.com!codfish
From: codfish@netcom.com (Ross Vicksell)
Subject: Butz's version of CNN show
Message-ID: 
Keywords: Butz
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 1994 02:40:25 GMT
Lines: 300

As some of you may recall, Ken McVay posted an item a while back purporting  
to show how Arthur Butz was cowed by a righteous, albeit somewhat
obscure, survivor, on a national TV talk shoe.  I was unable to get a
video of the show from the CNN tape library.  It apparently was not one
of their all-time best sellers; the guy at the tape library said no one
had ever requested it before.  There's an outside chance one could get
a tape or transcript of the show from of the U.S.  Holocaust Museum or
the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  I was just at the H.  museum but I clean
forgot to check.

I also contacted Butz. I'm including in this post my letter to him (which 
incorporates McVay's post) and his responses.

                 Ross Vicksell

************************************************************************

          COMMITTEE FOR OPEN DEBATE ON THE HOLOCAUST (CODOH)

                     Director: Bradley R. Smith
                     Box 3267  Visalia CA 93278
                      Tel/Fax: (209) 733 2653
 _________________________________________________________________________
 Regional Directors: Andrew Allen(Northwest)Fax:(415)435-3166  David 
 Cole(Southwest)Tel:(310)836-0211  Robert Countess, Ph.D. (South) 
 Rolf Hermes(Texas) Tel/Fax: (210)519-8325  Ross Vicksell(New  England) 
 Tel/Fax: (617)272-0321
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Dr. Butz,

I'm the CODOH person in New England.  Fritz Berg and I have been 
participating in the "alt.revisionism" discussion group on Internet, where 
we are greatly outnumbered by exterminationists.  Situation normal.

One of them posted the following the other day.  I would like you to
comment on it, if you would be so kind. ...

                    Thanks,


                    Ross Vicksell

********************************************************************
Xref: netcom.com alt.revisionism:14550
Path: netcom.com!csus.edu!csulb.edu!nic-nac.CSU.net!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!mala.bc.ca!hakatac!oneb!kmcvay
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: BUTZ: "I don't want to hear anymore of this!"
Message-ID: <1994Jul11.043512.18067@oneb.almanac.bc.ca>
From: kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca (Ken Mcvay)
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 94 04:35:12 GMT
Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac
Summary: An Auschwitz survivor confronts Butz head-on - Butz          turns 
 tail and runs ..
Lines: 145

Archive/File: holocaust/usa/ihr butz.002
Last-Modified: 1994/07/05

                 "Voice of An Auschwitz Survivor"

                    A Survivor Fights Denials

   Including a Media Debate with Arthur Butz and An Account of This
            Survivor's Work in the Auschwitz Crematorium

                         by Lilli Kopecky

   In my monograph, "In the Shadow of the Flames,"<1> I stated in the
   preface to Lecture 5<2> that the first comprehensive study dealing
   with neo-Nazism and denials of the Holocaust was published to my
   knowledge in 1977 by the "Public Committee of Survivors of
   Auschwitz and Other Extermination Camps" in Israel, of which I was
   SEcretary General until 1988. I wrote there of my conviction that
   we, the concentration camp survivors, have the moral obligation and
   sacred duty to warn the world so that the tragedy of our past may
   not be forgotten and repeated!

   In this article, I only want to prove that even ONE person -- alone
   but unafraid -- can and should act in order to be heard.

   As I wrote in "In the Shadow of the Flames" (pp. 58-59), one of the
   very vicious books in the 1970s, "The Hoax of the Twentieth
   Century" by Arthur R. Butz attempts to refute proven facts of the
   Holocaust and, indeed, the Holocaust itself.<3> In trying to fill
   the gap in historical revisionism, the author reconstructs the
   actual evolution of knowledge in the U.S. with regard to the gas
   chamber atrocities -- knowledge based, in his opinion, solely on
   the propaganda of the Nuremberg Trial in 1946, and states that no
   German documents from Auschwitz mention a gas chamber. He cites a
   document from the construction firm of Topf and Sons in Erfurt
   which makes reference to a "Fergasungskeller" (gassing cellar).
   However, Butz, with his knowledge of engineering, tries to explain
   this as a "gas generation cellar" for igniting the crematoria used
   for disposing of those who had died in the camps from presumably
   natural cuases. To the great delight of German neo-Nazis, a German
   translation of this book is on the market.

   On April 30, 1981, I had the singular opportunity of challenging
   Butz to his face on the "Freeman Reports," a television program
   carried by Cable News Network (CNN) and broadcast to hundreds of
   thousands of viewers. I conversed by phone with him from the
   studios of CNN in Hollywood, California. I pointed out to Butz that
   his skillfully constructed lies collapse readily in the face of
   evidence offered by the following primary sources:

   (a) Testimonies of hundreds of former Auschwitz prisoners,
   especially "Sonderkommando" survivors, as well as SS officers,
   taken during the Auschwitz Trial before the court in Frankfurt am
   Main.

   (b) Notable memoirs by SS offficers, including those of the
   Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, Perry Broad of the SS Political
   Department, and the diary of Dr. Kremer.

   (c) Published manuscripts of "Sonderkommando" prisoners<4> which
   were buried and found on the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
   crematoria.

   (d) About two hundred authentic photographs made by the SS
   "Erkennungsdienst" (SS photographers) in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
   recording the arrivals, selections, and marches towards the gas
   chambers of Jews deported in 1944 from Hungary.

   (e) Three photos made by the Auschwitz resistance movement showing
   "Sonderkommando" members at work.

   (f) Reprints of the authentic detailed ground plans of the four
   crematoria with eight gas chambers in Birkenau. These plans were
   smuggled out of the SS Construction Office in Auschwitz and sent to
   the Swiss Consulate in Prague in 1944.<5> Their authenticity is
   verified by checks with the gas chamber ruins, now part of the
   Polish Museum in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), and against American aerial
   reconnaissance photographs from 1944.<6>

   I had scarcely finished this list when Butz said, "I don't want to
   hear any more of this." Pointing my finger at him, I said, "Dr.
   Butz, you are a liar. Sue me!" He only answered, "I'm hanging up
   now," and broke off our conversation without responding to the
   challenge. I feel that such open and direct confrontation is for
   now the best way to expose these fabricators of "facts."

   In the same broadcast, I stated that -- except for the
   "Sonderkommando" -- I am, to my knowledge, the only person to be
   brought regularly (in 1943 and 1944) into the old Auschwitz
   crematorium. My presence in the crematorium was kept very secret
   and I was always threatened with death if I would tell anybody
   where I have been. I had to fill -- directly from the oversn -- the
   urns for German inmates (non-Jews) who had died and whose families
   had paid for the urns. I was brought there by my boss,
   Unterscharfuehrer Albrecht, then head of the Auschwitz crematorium,
   from the Registrar's Office where I worked as a typist. Thus I had
   direct knowledge of the gas chamber.

   I have been there!

   NOTES:

   1. Kopecky, Lilli, "In the Shadow of the Flames. Six Lectures
      on the Holocaust," Witness to the Holocaust Project, Emory
      University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1982.

   2. Ibid. Lecture 5, "Holocaust Denials, Neo-Nazism, Anti-Semitism,
      Radicalism and Terrorism."

   3. Butz, Arthur, R. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Historical
      Review Press: Richmond, England, 1975. 0Butz has a Ph.D. in
      electrical engineering and is a tenured professor at Northwestern
      University which in the face of many protests over the years has
      insisted on retaining him on the basis of "academic freedom."

   4. Sonderkommando (translated Special Detatchment).  Its members
      had to pull the corpses (after being gassed) out of the gas
      chambers and bring them into the overs or, in 1944, when there
      was not enough space in the ovens, burn the corpses on the
      stakes.

   5. Taken from the office by Vera Foltynova, smuggled by the
      underground into Prague to the non-Jewish wife of Ota Kraus and
      given to the Swiss Consulate for safekeeping. Source: Erich
      Kulka.

   6. Central Intelligence Agency, "The Holocaust Revisited; A
      Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination
      Complex. Prepared by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier, February,
      1979.


Source:

Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide - an international information
resource exchange towards understanding, intervention and prevention
of genocide. Published by the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide,
P.O. Box 10311, Jerusalem, Israel. (Telephone and Fax: 972-2-720424)

Issue 48 - April, 1994
-- 
--------------------------The Old Frog's Almanac-------------------------
"However, it is sophistry to proclaim that something must have happened a
certain way because your `reason' demands it." (Greg Raven, Institute for
Historical Review)   

************************************************************************
                                               July 20, 1994

Dear Mr. Vicksell,


In reply to your inquiry postmarked July 14, I did have a very brief 
encounter with CNN.  It was around 1981.  I have attached some notes I 
made on Feb. 13, 1986 when wild claims were made as to what I had said.

>From the program, I remember only the actor Robert Clary.  I do not 
recall ever having heard of Lilli Kopecky in any connection, but it is 
possible she was also somehow involved in that program.

Cooper's 1986 account of what I said is invented out of thin air.  I 
certainly didn't get "about four or five minutes' to have my "say", and 
I didn't say what he claimed.

Kopecky account of 1994 is probably a concoction, too.  On internal 
evidence, one should be suspicious of her, since she reports pointing 
her finger at me through a telephone connection, a very good trick!  The 
remarks she put in my mouth do not sound like me, and I am sure there 
was no exploration of the matters of her items (a)-(f) while I was 
connected; the encounter was much too emotional for that.

             Best Regards,
             Arthur R. Butz

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Feb. 13, 1986

Today I got a cassette from David McCalden purporting to be the record
of a meeting held Jan 19 at the Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles.  Mel
Mermelstein said he attended a lecture by Elie Wiesel who "cried in
front of hundreds and hundreds of teachers" that he had gotten "a
letter and a postcard from a professor (Faurisson) who said that the
Holocaust is nothing but a hoax and that the chimneys of Auschwitz are
only those of the bakery." Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center and co-editor of Response, had a very strange
idea of what I said when I was on the telephone with CNN-TV in Atlanta
a few years ago.  I was connected by telephone only and had not seen
the program on TV.  My recollection is that I said only a few words and
that Robert Clary made such a scene that I had no opportunity to say
anything more.  My recollection does not resemble Rabbi Cooper's
account, which seems to implicitly report that he, Cooper, was present
during the production of the program.  Speaking first of Robert Clary,
Cooper said:

when we first met Robert and a number of other survivors were on on a 
CNN television program out of Atlanta ... (Butz) wasn't on the screen 
but (the moderator) let him go through his say and after about four or 
five minutes the moderator in disgust finally interrupted and said "now 
listen here.  You're a professor but you've heard everything these 
people have said.  If you saw the show you saw the materials that the 
Nazis, the Germans themselves, took.  How in the world can deny what 
happened?"  And I think that Butz's answer that day was probably the 
most honest statement he has ever made in his adult life. He said "O do 
not believe Auschwitz happened because I'm more comfortable not believing 
Auschwitz happened.  I'm more comfortable believing that Auschwitz did 
not happpen" ... I think for someone like Butz there's a lot for us to 
learn from, a, in a sense an off the cuff gut statement like that from 
that professional bigot.

**********************************************************************
                                                          July 23, 1994
Dear Mr. Vicksell,

Since mailing you my letter of July 20 it occurred to me that the 
statements Kopecky attributed to me ("I don't want to hear any more of 
this ... I'm hanging up now") might have been uttered by me in reaction 
to Clary's rantings, the precise content of which I don't remember.  
However I could not have reacted that way to points such as her (a) - 
(f) in the Internet message, regardless of by whom uttered.

                   Best Regards,
                   Arthur R. Butz

Home ·  Site Map ·  What's New? ·  Search Nizkor