Archive/File: people/b/butz.arthur 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
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