[Smith is an American historian and author of numerous studies of the Nazis. In the following essay, he reviews The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by A. R. Butz and Hitler's War by David Irving.]

In his closing statement to the Nürnberg Tribunal, the American Chief Prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, predicted that the war crimes trial's "mad and melancholy record" would "live as the historical text of the twentieth century's shame and depravity." Yet here we are 30 years later not only facing a bewildering range of scholarly interpretive and factual assertions about Nazism, but also a book by an American university professor (Butz) which contends that no Nazi exterminations of the Jews ever took place, and a volume by an English specialist on the Second World War (Irving) which concedes that Jews were exterminated, but claims that Hitler did not order the killings.

So much for those who hoped to produce a permanent historical record about Nazism which would bind and control the future! Times change, and the emotional experience of one generation cannot be completely transferred to the next, no matter how strong the emotion or deep the pain. This is the main reason why the purists are wrong when they advise that scholars should not give attention to "mad" or "crazy" works such as those by Butz or Irving. The very existence of these two books indicates that the feelings of the present, no matter how base or petty they may appear on occasion, can be more intense than the loftiest sentiments carried over from an earlier time. In 1978 a reader who is under the age of 35 can no more have had direct experience of the Nazi era than he, or she, can have participated in the Boer War or the burning of witches. The post-1945 generation may only develop a personal feeling for the Nazi period through study and by trying to share the emotional experience of others. But to expect that this feeling or attitude will, in every case, run in the same channels and with the same intensity as that of the war's chief victims is totally unrealistic. The events of the Third Reich and World War II are now being made to serve the whole range of emotional, ideological and political demands of the present. Obviously these can take forms which, as in these two volumes, are difficult for many of us to emotionally accept, but such is the ultimate law of history. Even in the case of historical atrocities, time does not stand still, and we either face things as they are now, or leave the historical opinion formation of the present generation to the whims of public fancy and the works of [A. R.] Butz or [David] Irving.

Of the two volumes before us, that by Butz should have the least claim to our attention if we judge impact solely on the basis of whether a book might produce large over-the-counter sales. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is a dull, badly printed volume of 200 pages, produced by an obscure English provencial press. Its general tone and the quality of the writing are not significantly higher than that in the anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, and pro-Nazi tracts which lie around bus stations and skid row bookstores. But Butz is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Northwestern, and his assertions are bound to be quoted by his ideological (rather than his academic) colleagues as the height of scientific erudition. Furthermore, when the book appeared in the summer of 1977, it immediately produced a long wire service story which, in turn, caused articles about the volume to appear in many American newspapers. On the heels of this first burst of publicity came a second, occasioned by controversy at Northwestern, and by denunciations of Butz and the University's handling of the affair, from the Anti-Defamation League.

So Butz is with us, and on the bar and parkbench circuit his views will probably enjoy a wide circulation. Butz's main contention is one common to elements of the radical right that the historical fact of a Nazi murder of 6 million Jews is nothing but a myth concocted by communists and Zionists for their own devilish political purposes. According to Butz and his friends, the Nazis were rather decent fellows who only wanted to put Jews to work in order better to defend Germany against the Reds and misguided, Jewish dominated fools in the Western democracies. After the war, in Butz's view, Bolsheviks and Zionists gathered up the Jews who had been contentedly laboring in camps in the East, and either absorbed them into the Soviet Union or smuggled them into the United States and Israel. So to believe Butz is to deny that mass killings occurred and to hold that the historical reality of extermination is only a plot, a "hoax" to create sympathy for Israel and "Jewish" Communism.

Even after taking a deep breath it is difficult to take in all this, especially as Butz tries to produce a scholarly gloss for his assertions by the use of some 450 footnotes. Therefore one must begin by stressing that Butz's "conclusions," which are also his premises, are totally false. We are fortunate to have a recently published scholarly German study by Ino Arndt and Wolfgang Scheffler ["Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in Nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslagern," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte] which systematically refutes all the assertions and alleged statements of fact made by current German rightwing publications of what may come to be called the "Butz school." This splendid survey is as applicable to Butz as it is to his German comrades, and should be studied by everyone able to read German.

But even for those able to read Arndt and Scheffler, it is important to understand the particular methods Butz uses to support his "conclusions," for it is from a superficial appearance of scholarly inquiry that The Hoax may gain some credence. Butz uses a whole series of methodological tricks and gimmicks in addition to misleading or erroneous footnotes and the confusing half-truths which are the stock and trade of polemical writing. Butz is a master of deceptive selection. His favorite device is to reject broad categories of evidence on the ground that the sources are tainted. Thus any document or testimony which originated in the Soviet Union or Israel is dismissed out of hand, as are most statements by individual Jews or Russians. Butz also easily convinces himself that the Nürnberg trials were a Communist-Zionist plot, so all of this material is cast away. There is virtually no end to his categorical rejections. In a typical Butz explanation, he dismisses all evidence from the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Office of War Information (OWI), and War Refugee Board (WRB) on the ground "that two 'internationals,' the Communist and the Zionist, played important roles" in these agencies. By the time one has subtracted all the material that Butz wants rejected, little remains of World War II documentation except a few Nazi records and the apologia of SS men.

Yet even when dealing with the records of the Third Reich, Butz has a special gift for selecting and arranging in a way that produces the maximum confusion and uncertainty. One may ask, for example, how he could hope to explain away the numerous references to the "Endlösung" and "Sonderbehandlung" in SS documents? He does it simply by denying that these words actually mean extermination and killing. He asserts that Endlösung merely indicated that Jews were being transferred to the east, while Sonderbehandlung referred to anything from special correspondence privileges for prisoners to specialized procedures for handling abortions. Butz scampers through published document collections—including ones he elsewhere rejects as "Zionist"—until he finds a document in which a specific word like Sonderbehandlung is not used in a perfectly clear way. In most such cases he misreads or misinterprets the document until he can claim a harmless meaning, and then crows to his readers that Sonderbehandlung did not necessarily mean killing. The important consideration here is not that he twists a particular document to come up with this conclusion, but that he passes over scores of documents in the same collections which show beyond any sane margin of doubt that Sonderbehandlung was the cover word used by the SS to mean execution or killing. Obviously we are faced with a conscious effort to misrepresent the evidence.

In a related piece of slight-of-hand, Butz loves to jump on a weak source while ignoring any formidable account with which he does not want to cope. For example, in discussing the operation of concentration camps, he waxes eloquent on the weak points of an obscure book of memoirs published by Christopher Burney in 1946, but is careful not to take on any piece of significant concentration camp literature such as Kogan's Der SS Staat, or the recent detailed studies of the camp system which have been published in Germany. Regarding documentary sources too, he can speculate endlessly on such inane questions as the authenticity of the published version of Himmler's speech to the SS leaders in Posen on October 4, 1943. The reason Butz needs to discredit such items is obvious because in this speech, and many others, Himmler frankly discussed the extermination of Jews. So Butz floats up every imaginary reason why the printed text might contain errors, but he pays no attention either to published commentaries on the speeches, or the original texts and recordings of them which are in the National Archives. Butz claims that he visited the Archives, but if so he did not check the original Himmler speech materials or the thousands of other primary source documents in the collection which would have quickly demolished his wild speculations about the validity of the crucial published materials.

One could go on and on, citing instances of Butz's mania for distortion and misleading selection, but the pattern should by now be clear. Butz's book is a contrived sham, dangerous only because of its possible impact on naïve and confused general readers. For the specialist, or those with a general grasp of World War II conditions however, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is a sitting duck.

After struggling through this polemic by Butz, it is easy to see that the second work under consideration, Hitler's War by David Irving, is a different, and historically more serious animal. Irving is a technically competent student of the Second World War, and he is, after a fashion, trying to understand what happened. Hitler's War simply suffers very seriously from a basic flaw that has marked a number of the author's previous works. Irving cannot rise above his own intense emotional response to Britain, Germany, and the events of World War II. Perhaps already alienated from his own country at the time the war ended, Irving made the rather unusual decision to leave Britain and, while still a young man, went to Germany—the land of the defeated enemy in the late 1940s—where he toiled for a year as a factory worker. Although he then returned to Britain, this period seems to have left a strong mark upon him. In those years he developed a passionate interest in the history of the Second World War, a sure grasp of the German language, a great love for Germany, and a sharp hostility, if not contempt, for wartime Britain and its leaders, especially Winston Churchill.

One suspects that only such a peculiar personal history could lead a professional writer to produce a volume for the Anglo-American public that approaches the Second World War uncritically, even enthusiastically, from Hitler's point of view. The title is no misnomer. Irving assumes Hitler's vantage point so totally that it is often difficult to tell where the views of the Fiihrer end and those of the author begin. Irving only puts before us the facts and issues which surviving records and interviews indicate that Hitler saw. He then argues and badgers us in an effort to make his readers believe that Hitler's judgment and his orders were usually reasonable and justified. It is as if Irving had walked into Hitler's headquarters, sat down at his desk, donned the same blinders that Hitler wore, and then presented the Fiihrer's memoirs as if they were history.

As a tour de force it is intriguing at first, especially because Irving's narrative makes use of some unknown and genuinely significant new documentary sources. It is also satisfying to see him demolish the post-war excuses and self-justifications of the many Hitler servants who have long tried to heap all responsibility for Nazi errors and atrocities on the head of the dead Fiihrer. But since the text is 823 pages long, the myopia becomes ever more depressing, especially when it emerges that Irving is not just playing at being Hitler for illustrative purposes. To him this is not a tour de force but a realistic point of view, and the reader gradually finds himself gripped by disgust and the same kind of otherworldly panic which occasionally took possession of those wretched souls who actually lived through the madness that was Hitler's wartime headquarters.

Volumes could, and probably will, be written on the ways Irving's vision distorts every conceivable aspect of the history of World War II, but here we are only concerned with his claim that although Adolf Hitler did order the deportation of the Jews, he did not command that they be exterminated. Building his case on the lack of any direct written order by Hitler to exterminate, Irving gathers together a series of garbled documentary scraps and concludes that Hitler's aides carried out the killings behind his back, and without his knowledge. These assertions are so singular that they have brought forth a number of harsh popular reviews as well as extended negative critiques by four of the world's leading specialists on Nazi Germany: Alan Bullock, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jackel and Martin Broszat. All four authorities agree that Irving's conclusions are wrong and that he misinterprets or distorts the evidence. Martin Broszat also convincingly demonstrates that the absence of a written killing order by Hitler is neither surprising nor interpretively very significant. The command system in the occupied Eastern territories, and the complex evolution of Nazi anti-Semitic measures combined so that an oral order from Hitler to Himmler and Heydrich was a more "natural" development than a written authorization moving through bureaucratic channels.

In his extended analysis, Broszat shows that the core of the trouble with Irving's book is the author's decision to try to stand in Hitler's shoes and allow the whole range of World War II events to swirl around him. By so doing he and the reader lose sight of the way the Endldsung killing system developed; each murderous event simply floats by in the narrative as if it was an isolated incident having no connection with what came before. Irving examines each phase, such as the Einsatzgruppen murders in Russia in the summer of 1941, or the beginning of gas chamber execution of Jews at the end of that year, but concludes there is no overwhelming evidence extant to trace responsibility for any particular case directly to Hitler. As Broszat stresses, Irving has to give more ground on some incidents than others, but he is careful never to draw attention to the cumulative case that points toward Hitler.

Broszat's 35 page critique is too long and too detailed to permit even a cursory summary in these pages, but the validity of his major point, that Irving's explanation fails as soon as the Endldsung is examined systematically, can be demonstrated if we apply it to one simple question—who does Irving indicate was responsible for the killings if it wasn't Hitler? To my knowledge none of Irving's critics have posed this question, but it is obviously critical to the Endldsung thesis in Hitler's War. Immediately beneath Hitler in the chain of command stood Himmler, then Heydrich, and finally the SS and Party leaders in the Eastern territories. For Irving's argument to be taken seriously it is crucial to establish whether he is saying that Himmler duped Hitler, or whether the Reichsfuhrer-SS is also supposed to have been duped. We know that Himmler had an incredible Paladinkomplex which makes the first alternative implausible. The simple law of probability would suggest that one can't extend the "duped chain" indefinitely, so even if we ignore the numerous documentary references showing that Himmler issued killing orders, the second choice also seems doubtful. Irving is in a tight corner, which way does he go?

As one might expect, he goes every way. When speaking of the killing of Polish Jews in 1939, Irving says that "Himmler and Heydrich provided the initiative and drive themselves." He also makes use of a modified form of this assertion when first discussing the killings in Russia in late 1941. "Responsibility for what happened to Russian Jews and (sic) to European Jews after their arrival in 'the east,'" Irving writes, "rested with Himmler, Heydrich, and the local authorities there." But six pages later, while still discussing the extermination of Jews in Russia he asserts that "It was Heydrich and the fanatical Gauleiters in the east who were interpreting with brutal thoroughness Hitler's decree that Jews must 'finally disappear' from Europe; Himmler's personal role is ambivalent." Finally near the end of the book, when describing the frank speeches on the exterminations which Himmler made in October 1943, the author remarks that Himmler must have felt impregnable because his speeches amounted—in Irving's twisted view—to an open admission "that he had disregarded Hitler's veto on liquidating the Jews all along."

Without resorting to caricature one might capsulize Irving's statements as follows: The responsibility for the extermination of the Jews was not Hitler's; it was Heydrich's, but sometimes it was also the Eastern Gauleiters, and Himmler's too, but the latter point is not certain even though the Reichsfuihrer-SS was the one who did it behind Hitler's back. This is not an explanation of the murder of Jews, or of anything else. It is merely an accumulation of vignettes which Irving has used to drape the reality that he cannot present any plausible alternative to a Hitler order for the Endlosung. Irving has thereby failed to produce a viable revisionist interpretation of the exterminations.

In conclusion, it is important to stress that while Butz is vicious, Irving is merely frivolous, if irresponsibly so. Yet because he is so technically skilled, Irving through his impact on historians could have a more pernicious influence than Butz. With public interest in the mass murders heightened by the recent television series, "The Holocaust," both the general reader and the historian need a new, corrective English language handbook on the exterminations. Until it appears, the works by Arndt, Scheffler and Broszat cited above, are still the best buttresses we have for the cause of historical sanity.