Arthur Butz

Overview

Arthur Butz is a Holocaust denier, author and contributor to anti-Semitic websites that regularly defend Hitler and the Nazis.

Butz’ watershed publication was the 1976 book "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century — The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry." In the book, Butz claims that the “alleged slaughter of millions of Jews by the Germans, during World War II, did not happen.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described Butz’ book as “one of the first major works of Holocaust denial in the English language.” Butz — like many Holocaust deniers — frames his work as “Holocaust revisionism.”

In 2015, Butz published the seventh edition of his book. The full text of the 2003 edition is here.

Butz is an author and writer contributing to the websites of the Holocaust-denying enterprises Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) and the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). CODOH has defended the likes of Josef Mengele and IHR has defended Adolf Hitler, on numerous occasions.

As of February 2017, Butz’ latest article on CODOH was a February 21, 2016 eulogy of CODOH founder Bradley Smith. The article was titled "A Life That Made a Difference" and Butz called Smith “tough and tolerant.” In 1987, Smith said: “I don't want to spend time with adults anymore. I want to go to students. They are superficial. They are empty vessels to be filled.”

Butz follows 41 Twitter accounts, nearly 60% of which are either: anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, white supremacist or promote Holocaust denial. Among them are @Unfree_Speech — whose photo contains the text: "THE 1% IS 99% JEWISH" and @MarxistScourge — whose photo features the likeness of a famous Jewish Rabbi holding money and a sign reading “HOLOCAUST” — modeled after the famous “Hollywood” sign in California. Butz has yet to spread his views directly on social media. As of February 2017, Butz had no tweets.

Butz is a tenured associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University (NU). He teaches at the McCormick School of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, St. Paul (UMN) in 1965 and received tenure from NU in 1974, two years before his book was first published. He has three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Holocaust Denial

On January 25, 2006, Mehr, a semi-official Iranian news agency, published excerpts of an interview with Butz. There, Butz outlined the arguments of his 1976 book, entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, as follows: "1. The alleged slaughter of millions of Jews by the Germans, during World War II, did not happen. 2. The extermination allegation is properly termed a hoax, that is to say, a deliberately contrived falsehood. It was not at its source an honest misunderstanding or accidental falsehood. 3. The hoax had a Zionist provenance and motivation. That is, while some of the original obscure stories did not come from Zionist sources, the elevation to allegations repeated by the American and other governments, and major institutions, was due to Zionist circles within those countries, who acted with Zionist motivations."

In 2003, Butz republished the book. Text on the back cover of this republication claimed European Jews "... were not virtually wiped out, but what's more, that no evidence exists to date to confirm that there was ever any Hitler attempt to do so." The 2003 edition of Butz’ book was published by Theses and Dissertations Press, which specializes in Holocaust denial books.

In the 2003 edition of his book, Butz claimed that many Jews who disappeared were actually hiding from their spouses. Butz wrote (page 291): "In many cases deported Jewish families were broken up for what was undoubtedly intended by the Germans to be a period of limited duration. This was particularly the case when the husband seemed a good labor conscript;... Under such conditions, it is reasonable to expect that many of these lonely wives and husbands would have, during or at the end of the war, established other relations that seemed more valuable than the previous relationships. In such cases, then, there would have been a strong motivation not to reestablish contact with the legal spouse. ...This possibility could account for a surprisingly large number of ‘missing’ Jews."

In 2000 — at the 13th IHR conference — Butz routinely mocked eyewitness testimony to Nazi atrocities by Holocaust survivors and defended Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler. Butz said: "The Auschwitz legend rests entirely on the alleged eye witness accounts. The extermination — so-called — can’t be deduced or even suspected from the documents or the ordinary historical record of how the principals behaved or from the evidence at the site."

On August 7-9, 1998, Butz — at a conference hosted by the Adelaide Institute in Australia — Butz condemned efforts to punish those responsible for the Holocaust, saying: "We hear of aged alleged Nazi war criminals still being hunted down, Switzerland's alleged wartime crimes (which get more and more vague as time goes on), the alleged hardness of the Vatican. From the relative silence of the 50s this propaganda has built up to a constant din today I know of nothing comparable."

Butz further trivialized the Holocaust and objected to preserving consciousness of its significance, saying: "Try to imagine constant whining about the US Civil War, which ended in 1886, in 1918. The ‘Holocaust’ has become the principal topic of current affairs. I believe the ‘holocaustomania’ is largely a reaction to revisionism. As I noted, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum admits this as part of its mission."

On June 6, 1996, Butz wrote an article featured on CODOH attacking Jewish Holocaust testimonies and said: "... post-war declarations of Jews range from fantastic concoction and venal or malicious lying, through sincere expression based on lack or misinterpretation of information, to simple truth. Unfortunately it can be very difficult for a normally situated person to tell the differences."

On May 13, 1991, Butz published an article in the Daily Northwestern defending "Holocaust revisionism" — and claiming that the war crimes trials after World War II were held to establish the “legend” of the Holocaust.

Using NU Resources for Holocaust Denial

As of April 30, 2006, Butz was using his NU-provided website to promote news related to his views on the Holocaust. Such content on his website went back to 1996.

On December 18, 2005, Butz used his NU-provided website to applaud former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling the Holocaust a "myth." Butz said: “I congratulate him on becoming the first head of state to speak out clearly on these issues and regret only that it was not a Western head of state.”

On February 6, 2006, after Butz’ backing of Ahmadinejad’s views made the news. NU President Henry Bienen said that Butz’s views were an "embarrassment" to the school. Nonetheless, Bienen concluded: “we cannot take action based on the content of what Butz says regarding the Holocaust – however odious it may be – without undermining the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect.”

On February 15, 2006, over 60 NU faculty members from Butz’s department decried his views and urged Butz to "stop trading on [their] reputation for academic excellence." in addition NU’s entire Department of Religion drafted a letter that opposed Butz’s professorship at NU and denounced his abuse of the tenure system.

On November 30, 2011, it was reported that: "Several students said it was their understanding that Butz agreed never to discuss the issue following his comments about Ahmadinejad."

Social Media and Weblinks

Twitter:https://twitter.com/ArthurButz

Website:http://www.ibiblio.org/team/history/controversy/abutz/

University Website: https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/research-faculty/directory/profiles/butz-arthur.html

Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Butz