Summary and Review of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz, Part 2

Go to Part 1.

5720 words

Whatever one can say about this work, it is a coherent and readable account why what has been presented as fact regarding the Holocaust is questionable — both in scope and essence. It obviously should not be banned and its banishment (along with holding any Holocaust skepticism as punishable “wrongthink”) is a testament to how culturally and intellectually totalitarian we have become. The “historical consensus” and “mainstream” sources that demand absolute fidelity and obsequiousness to the Holocaust narrative are premised on only a few planks of reasoning and evidence: (i) German wartime records; (ii) post-war German confessions; and (iii) physical evidence. The entirety of Butz’s book is to dismantle each plank — or, at the least, present a counterclaim as to the standard narrative. What is, of course, lacking from the standard narrative is that the Germans, who famously are a meticulous people with an obsession for record keeping and order-following, never had an order in writing that outlined a plan for extermination, which the post-war Allies alleged happened in the Holocaust. As Butz points out, we are supposed to believe that Goebbels made public statements calling for the annihilation of the Jews (which he did but Butz attributes them to wartime hyperbole) but were so circumspect in internal records as to leave no evidence of a systematic plan. We are forced to believe that a mass plan of enormous economic cost just happened without any central planning and explicit preparatory documentation. To know German people is to know how suspect that idea is on its face.

There are a few parts in which I learned things that are both true (I independently confirmed them) and very troubling about the Holocaust narrative. First, Butz seems to hew closely to analyzing data by employing Ockham’s Razor — that is, the simplest explanation of complex phenomena is the usually the best, i.e., that the German government did what it claimed internally and externally to have done: evacuate the Jews eastward towards the outer sphere of German influence, and, at the same time, put able-bodied Jews to work for the German war economy. Setting aside the wisdom and morality of the question: the Germans pursued ultimately an expulsion as a “final solution” to the Jewish Question. He says that the German records, examined with that view in mind, make the most sense. Candidly, this resonates the most with me: why would Germany’s political and military planners jeopardize the war with a half-baked extermination plan that was never made explicit or subject to central planning? Why would a nation and its war effort starved for fuel waste any of it on extermination?

But then Butz must deal with the confessions of fabulous things at Nuremberg and other postwar trials. He does this in a few ways: one, the trials were preordained “show trials” that were substantively and procedurally irregular. More than that, they were administered by corrupt and zealously anti-German men who coerced testimony in a hysterical moment of time. Several of the key figures of the Nuremberg trials were Jews who were fanatically anti-German or Zionist. One that stands out is David “Mickey” Marcus: He was indeed a committed Zionist and served in the Israeli military during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Marcus volunteered to advise and command Israeli forces, was appointed as Israel’s first modern general (Aluf), and was killed in action in June 1948. Another Jewish figure, primary prosecutor Robert M.W. Kempner, was accused of coercing evidence and witnesses during Nuremberg preparations. For example, defendants like Friedrich Gaus claimed Kempner used threats (e.g., potential handovers to the Soviets) to obtain affidavits, and Gaus later recanted parts of his testimony, citing duress. Similar accusations against Kempner arose in the Ministries Trial. In other words, the idea that “evidence” in confessions was coerced is far from a “conspiracy theory” but a very real concern.

Butz likens the hysteria of the moment to the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693. This comparison is used rhetorically to portray Nuremberg as a form of modern “witch hunt,” characterized by hysteria, unreliable evidence, coerced or pressured testimonies, and a predetermined outcome rather than impartial justice. He argues that both events share structural and procedural similarities that undermine their legitimacy:

• Presumption of Guilt and Mass Accusation: In Salem, people were accused of witchcraft based on spectral evidence (visions or dreams claimed by accusers), leading to rapid convictions without strong physical proof. Similarly, Butz claims the Nuremberg defendants were presumed guilty of orchestrating a vast extermination program from the start, with the trials serving to confirm a pre-existing Allied narrative rather than objectively investigating facts. He describes the trials as “precedent-shattering” and politically driven, where the victors imposed retroactive “crimes against humanity” without legitimate legal jurisdiction.
• Reliance on Questionable or Coerced Evidence: Butz highlights Salem’s use of spectral evidence (later discredited even by contemporaries) and pressured confessions (some obtained under duress or fear). He extends this to Nuremberg by alleging that many affidavits and witness statements were obtained through coercion, threats (e.g., potential transfer to Soviet custody), or duress—citing examples like the partial recantations or complaints from figures such as Friedrich Gaus. He argues this mirrors how Salem “witches” confessed under fear of execution or torture to save themselves, producing unreliable “evidence” that fed the hysteria.
• Hysterical Atmosphere and Propaganda: Butz portrays both as products of wartime/postwar propaganda and mob-like fervor. In Salem, fear of the devil and community panic drove accusations. At Nuremberg, he claims Allied (especially Zionist-influenced) propaganda amplified atrocity stories to justify the war, secure reparations, and support a Jewish state—creating a “legend” that became self-perpetuating, much like how witch accusations snowballed in colonial Massachusetts.
• Lack of Due Process and Political Motivation: Salem trials lacked jury impartiality, allowed hearsay, and were influenced by religious/political zeal. Butz applies this to Nuremberg by noting the absence of a jury (military tribunals only), the victors judging the vanquished, no appeal mechanism, and what he sees as biased staffing (e.g., his mentions of figures like David Marcus). He frames Nuremberg as “victor’s justice” akin to a show trial, where the goal was to institutionalize the “hoax” rather than seek truth.

Butz does not devote an entire chapter to this analogy—it’s woven into his broader attack on the trials’ origins and fairness (especially in Chapter 1 or introductory sections on the International Military Tribunal). He uses it to argue that, just as Salem is now universally recognized as a tragic miscarriage of justice driven by superstition and fear (with later apologies and exonerations), future generations will view Nuremberg similarly once the “extermination legend” is debunked through technical scrutiny of documents, logistics, and demographics.

What Butz does here is challenging: he attempts to capture a cultural moment, and it seems to have some credence although it lacks verifiability. While “mainstream” historians, who have a vested interest in perpetuating the Holocaust mythos complain that such a comparison is a misleading trope, they indeed gloss over the arguments made against the hysteria and irregularities of Nuremberg. Instead of dealing with the arguments made in earnest, they resort to lazy name-calling of “revisionists” or “denialists” as if the mere incantation of such terms immunizes them from dealing with the substance of the arguments. In a sense, we can glimpse this hysteria indirectly because it still echoes in our era by the manic reaction of the “mainstream” to a dispassionate account of the problems associated with standard narratives surrounding World War II. Witches, it would seem, are still being burned.

Butz’s framing serves his thesis that the Holocaust narrative is a constructed “hoax” perpetuated by political forces, much like a witch craze — and it does something else: it provides a coherent explanation as to why people would have confessed to fantastic and fantastically false things. Butz argues that the Nuremberg trials (and similar postwar proceedings) were structured so that the existence of the extermination program was treated as an unquestioned, axiomatic, and established fact from the outset. Because of this, defendants quickly realized that directly challenging the core “extermination legend” (i.e., denying that systematic mass murder via gas chambers or other means had occurred) was not a viable legal or practical strategy. Instead, the rational, self-preserving approach for many was to accept the overall narrative as true while denying or minimizing their own personal knowledge, involvement, or responsibility, which was how some Germans were saved from the gallows.

He writes (in a passage that appears in slightly varied forms across his work): “Thus to many relevant defendants it seemed that the only possible defense strategy was to deny not the exterminations but only their personal responsibility for them (e.g. Ernst Kaltenbrunner or Adolf Eichmann).” Butz extends this to figures like Rudolf Höss (Auschwitz commandant), Otto Ohlendorf, and others whose detailed “confessions” or testimonies are often cited as key evidence. In his view, these statements were pragmatic calculations under extreme pressure: the defendants understood the political reality of “victors’ justice,” the hostile atmosphere, the threat of harsher punishment (or transfer to Soviet custody), and the fact that the tribunal was not genuinely open to debating the foundational allegations.

Butz frames it thusly:

• The trials presupposed guilt on the extermination charge, so the only realistic defense was “I didn’t do it / I didn’t know / I was following orders / it was someone else’s department.”
• This created a self-reinforcing loop: “admissions” by defendants helped legitimize the narrative for the public and for later historiography, even though (in Butz’s opinion) they did not reflect actual belief or truth.
• He contrasts this with the Salem witch trials analogy he draws elsewhere: once the core accusation is treated as beyond challenge, rational people adapt their testimony to survive within that framework.

Butz presents this as further proof that the trials were not impartial searches for truth but political proceedings designed to institutionalize the “hoax.” He argues that if the extermination claims had been genuinely debatable, more defendants would have contested them directly — the fact that so few did (and that those who partially cooperated often fared better) shows how stacked the process was. Albert Speer, the alleged “Good Nazi” was the most high-ranking Nazi who employed this strategy at Nuremberg to save his neck. This is a recurring theme in his early chapters on the origins of the “legend” at Nuremberg. He does not claim every single defendant was consciously lying as part of a calculated ploy; rather, he says the structure of the trials made outright denial of the extermination an almost impossible defense tactic.

Butz addresses a key part of the Holocaust narrative: Heinrich Himmler and the Posen speeches, which are used as exhibit A in the extermination legend. His key points:

• He quotes or paraphrases Himmler’s famous line about the “extermination of the Jewish people” (“Ausrottung der Juden”) as something “easily said” but part of the party’s plans, then argues that such language was hyperbolic wartime rhetoric or euphemistic for expulsion/resettlement, not literal killing.
• Butz claims Himmler was referring to the evacuation and harsh treatment of Jews (deportation east, forced labor, liquidation of ghettos due to disease/partisan activity), not industrialized murder. He suggests the speech’s secrecy (“a page of glory in our history that has never been recorded and never shall be”) proves it was about something shameful but not genocide — perhaps the brutal realities of deportation and labor exploitation.
• He places the speech in the category of postwar misinterpretation: Allied prosecutors and historians allegedly took isolated, ambiguous phrases out of context and “glossed” them as proof of extermination, ignoring the lack of explicit orders or infrastructure for mass gassing.
• Butz notes that Himmler spoke openly to SS leaders about “liquidating” Jews but insists this was consistent with a resettlement policy disrupted by war conditions, not a deliberate annihilation program. He implies any killing mentioned was ad hoc (e.g., reprisals, disease control) rather than systematic.

Butz does not appear to deny seriously the authenticity of Himmler’s speeches (they were recorded and captured postwar) but argues their content has been exaggerated or mistranslated to support the “hoax.” He contrasts them with the absence of any written Hitler/Himmler order for extermination, claiming euphemisms like “Ausrottung” (uprooting/extermination) were metaphorical or referred to removing Jews from Europe geographically.

Another key element of Butz’s argument is understanding what Auschwitz was in actuality: a massive industrial site requiring enormous manpower to fuel the German war effort. If we think of it at all, we think of Auschwitz as an enormous extermination camp, but Butz argues that Auschwitz was a massive industrial and labor complex built around IG Farben’s Buna-Monowitz plant (Auschwitz III), which was intended to be one of the largest synthetic rubber (Buna) factories in the world, along with associated synthetic fuel, oil, and chemical production. The entire Auschwitz camp system (Auschwitz I, Birkenau, Monowitz, and dozens of sub-camps) existed first and foremost to supply enormous quantities of forced labor for this critical war industry.

Butz argues:

• The Buna plant required tens of thousands of workers for construction and operation (11-hour shifts, 6 days a week). Prisoner labor was rented from the SS at 4–6 Reichsmarks per day.
• The workforce was a mix: German employees (~20%), voluntary foreign workers (over 50%), and concentration-camp prisoners (less than 30% at the Farben plant itself).
• Auschwitz had hospitals, medical care, family compounds, skilled-worker barracks, and even a “family camp” for some Jews — all which Butz says only make sense if the camp was trying to preserve and exploit a large labor force, not annihilate it.
• Epidemics (especially typhus) and overwork caused high death rates, but these were the inevitable result of brutal industrial conditions, not systematic gassing.

The need for synthetic rubber and oil was enormous — and Germany had virtually no resources of its own save coal. By 1944, synthetic fuel plants across Germany (coal hydrogenation) were producing about 75% of all the liquid fuel available to the Germans (the rest came mainly from Romania, which was being bombed and later lost to the Germans). Auschwitz had a hydrogenation plant that contributed to this effort. The Buna synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz was designed to produce 3,000 tons per month — making it one of the four largest Buna plants in Germany (the others were at Schkopau, Hüls, and Ludwigshafen). It was never fully completed or operational (by evacuation in January 1945 it was only producing acetaldehyde from acetylene).

Butz’s real emphasis is strategic: Germany was desperate for synthetic rubber and fuel because of the Allied blockade and bombing of natural supplies. Auschwitz was therefore a top-priority war industry site, and the camp existed to feed it manpower. Diverting resources to exterminate the labor force is therefore doubly dubious. The “extermination legend,” in his view, was grafted onto a genuine industrial operation that the Allies themselves knew was a bombing target.

Another part of Butz’s attack is the attack on the authenticated records themselves. In The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (especially in chapters dealing with Nazi policy, the “Final Solution,” and document analysis, such as his discussions of the Wannsee Conference protocol and related SS/RSHA records), Butz contends that postwar interpreters (primarily at Nuremberg and in subsequent historiography) imposed an “extermination gloss” on ambiguous German bureaucratic language. He claims many key terms and phrases were capable of non-genocidal meanings in their wartime context, and that the Allies/prosecutors selectively chose the lethal interpretation to fit a preconceived narrative of systematic murder.

He cites:

• “Endlösung der Judenfrage” (Final Solution of the Jewish Question): Butz argues this referred literally to expulsion, resettlement, or forced emigration from German-controlled Europe (often to the East, into occupied Soviet territories after expected victory), not physical annihilation. He points to pre-war and early-war documents using similar phrasing for deportation plans and claims the shift to a genocidal meaning was retroactively projected.
• “Sonderbehandlung” (Special Treatment): This is one of his central examples. Butz insists the term often meant privileged handling, execution of specific criminals/partisans/resistance members, or labor assignments—not routine mass gassing of Jews. He cites instances where it appears in non-extermination contexts (e.g., medical exemptions or transfers) and argues that applying it uniformly to killings is an interpretive overreach.
• Other euphemisms/phrases (e.g., “Evakuierung” [evacuation], “Umsiedlung” [resettlement], “durchgeschleust” [processed through], or references to “labor in the East”): Butz claims these were straightforward descriptions of forced relocation and exploitation amid wartime labor shortages. He accuses historians of assuming euphemism-for-murder without sufficient proof, especially since no explicit, unambiguous order for extermination appears in captured German files.

Butz frames this as a “scientific” or technical critique: as an engineer, he says he applies dispassionate scrutiny to documents, rejecting what he calls politically motivated readings. He argues that if alternative, non-lethal constructions “also made sense” (or even fit better with logistics, demographics, or other records), then the extermination interpretation collapses as the only plausible one.

I found this line of argument compelling: It exploits real aspects of Nazi bureaucracy. It is more reasonable to assume that the documents and language used therein meant what they purported to convey as opposed to a line of reasoning that they represented coded/euphemistic language in sensitive matters (to maintain secrecy, avoid direct paper trails for atrocities, or simply bureaucratic habit). Usually the most sensible explanation, i.e., that language means what it says, is right, but in any event the so-called smoking guns of German documents are far more ambiguous than the mainstream Holocaust experts would have us believe. It seems to me, which is why this line is so effective, that the mainstream does not want this latent ambiguity to be known. There is an element of documents and phrases being shoehorned into a preordained reality. That some defendants acceded to the desired gloss is no proof at all given what Butz has to say about the irregularities, coercion, and defense strategy implicit at Nuremberg.

*         *         *

I would be remiss if I did not mention where others have specifically attacked him. To be sure, more research on my part is needed, but this is what I have gleaned from consulting the sources that have evidently taken him seriously enough to move beyond ad hominem. First, the Einsatzgruppen Mass Shooting Reports: Butz concedes “some” Jews were shot as partisans/reprisals (he guesses 5k—100k total) but dismisses the scale and systematic nature. The Germans themselves produced thousands of detailed daily/weekly reports (Ereignismeldungen) and summaries. The Jäger Report (by one commander in Lithuania) alone tallies 137,346 Jews killed in five months, with dates, places, and victim counts. Overall, the reports reportedly document ~1.5 million Jewish deaths by shooting in 1941–42. These are internal SS/RSHA documents, captured in German archives—not coerced testimony. Butz treats them as inflated anti-partisan actions. This is something that Butz appears to gloss over based on the limited number of troops assigned to the Einsatzgruppen to accomplish that many killings.

Second, there is Operation Reinhard Camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka) and the Höfle Telegram. Some argue that this is the biggest structural hole in his treatment. Butz’s book is overwhelmingly Auschwitz-centric, because, in part, he maintains that the entirety of the hoax was fabricated around Auschwitz. He gives the Reinhard camps a few pages in “Et Cetera,” calling them transit or labor sites based on inconsistent testimonies. Proponents of the Holocaust narrative maintain that the Höfle Telegram (intercepted by British codebreakers in 1943, declassified later) is a single Nazi document from SS officer Hermann Höfle to Eichmann listing exact 1942 arrivals/killings at over a million. While the Höfle telegram details arrivals (not executions), historians have maintained that there no further transportation of these people. While this is relatively new information (post-dating Butz’s research in 1972), I am sure he would argue that these were merely records of transit — not execution —  but it is a lacuna in his work. Third, there is an argument regarding Zyklon B Delivery Records vs. Actual Delousing Needs: Butz argues deliveries match sanitary/delousing requirements for typhus control. Some have maintained, however, that Auschwitz received ~23–25 tons of Zyklon B. Forensic and documentary analysis show only a fraction (roughly 6–10 tons) was needed for delousing clothes, barracks, and trains. The surplus arguably aligns with gassing estimates. This is an example — really one of the rare ones — in which the dispute is centered on different facts, not interpretation of facts or motives. It is something that requires, at least for me, more research. Fourth, some have conceded, at least in part, the complaints about Nuremberg’s irregularities but maintained that post-Nuremberg German trials were fairer. Butz focuses on Nuremberg (and likens it to Salem). He argues defendants adopted a “I didn’t know” defense to survive. The big West German trials of the 1960s (e.g., Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, 1963–65) involved dozens of lower-level SS men tried under normal German law, with West German judges, defense lawyers, and with limited Soviet/American pressure. Many confessed in detail (e.g., about gas chamber operations at Auschwitz) because evidence from documents and other witnesses was overwhelming. Butz engages these trials in a limited way. Butz treats these trials as an extension of Nuremberg in relatively conclusory fashion, and, considering that West Germany was essentially an American protectorate after the war, I am not sure that this argument against Butz lands any punches.

In short, Butz’s work evidently is not without fault or gaps, but this is to be expected to some extent. Taken as a whole, and perhaps this is the greatest point, who deems this type of position as “out of bounds”? Whatever we can say, Butz is not a polemicist or a fabulist. He is hard-hitting but he is not a liar. He may be an amateur historian who is relatively out of his league, but his academic and engineering credentials demonstrate that he is an unusual amateur historian who should be taken seriously. To be sure, his academic bona fides are substantial even if he lacked a Ph.D in History. Why can we debate the scope and existence of a variety of historical phenomena but not this one? All of it — both the hysteria of the reaction against any work that questions the mainstream narrative and the slavish fidelity of any mainstream historian that touches upon it— lead me to believe the whole of it has more a religious quality to it than an historical one. The dissenters are not merely wrong — they are heretical and per se immoral. The Holocaust narrative cannot be denied. Its victims, the Jews, must be shrouded in sacral victimhood that immunizes them from any subsequent corporate criticism. If Butz makes the point that Nuremberg was like Salem, he does not — but could have — claimed that the manic and quasi-religious desperation to silence any opposing view as “denialism” or “revisionism” smacks of a modern-day religious inquisition.

There is an additional comment regarding this work, which, overall, is a devastating enough attack on the Holocaust narrative. Butz is not sympathetic, even in the slightest, to the suffering that came with what he believed happened — that is the forced expulsion of a civilian population and instrumentalization of them for slave labor during the war. Even his account of what happened to the Jews is terrible, but his account is notably lacking in what might be described as empathy. Now, would his work have been better received if he were empathetic to this type of forced relocation and enslavement? Hardly. But his lack of empathy struck me — and if it struck me, it probably struck others too. If the invisible demon that Butz had to contend with in this book is that he is a clandestine anti-Semite who wrote it because he secretly hates the Jews, his lack of empathy towards what he maintains happened only reinforces the existence of implied bias.

In fairness to Butz, I think one could read his book — the evidence he puts forward — and come to a very different conclusion that there was some industrial murder (perhaps not systematized but nonetheless significant). To put it differently, Butz never sugarcoats the horror of what he contends was happening — wartime expulsion, ethnic cleansing, camp epidemics, and civilian enslavement. Now, one could counter that Butz’s goal in the book was solitary — to deconstruct the extermination legend and he slavishly hewed that line. Still, his reaction throughout operated (almost) to excuse what the German government was doing in expelling and enslaving the Jews.

But if it is legitimate to divine the secret anti-Semitism of why a man like Butz wrote a book like this (as if the only explanation is an irrational Jew hatred), why are the obvious biases of people (like Deborah Libstadt) who are Jewish and unapologetically Zionist ignored? For religious or ethnocentric reasons, these “defenders” should not be immune to questioning their motives for similar reasons. If anti-Semitism is the only acceptable explanation for denying the Holocaust, why is not philo-Semitism (or Zionism) an explanation for accepting the Holocaust? The truth always comes out — free inquiry cannot be suppressed forever. I suspect that Butz’s book will gain a currency after his life is over more than it ever did while he was living.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, this is a powerful book — one it was difficult for me to obtain and one that deserves to be read. What the mainstream Holocaust purveyors do not realize (or perhaps they do but persist anyway) is that the suppression of alternative views fuels the very idea that a conspiracy exists to prevent the truth from coming out. If sunshine is the best disinfectant, this is one area that is in massive need of disinfection. At the very least, Butz wrote a book that is an amazing piece of amateur sleuthing that calls into question the most sacred of all the sacred cows of WWII and the postwar world.

Post-Script

A brief comment on anti-Semitism.

The mere act of seriously considering this book — and writing a review of it that does not dismiss it as garbage — is an anti-Semitic act, at least according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The IHRA is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1998 (initially as the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research) at the initiative of Sweden’s then-Prime Minister Göran Persson. It now has, I believe, 35 member countries (including the U.S., U.K., Germany, Israel, and others), plus observer and partner nations. Its core mission is to promote Holocaust education, remembrance, and research globally, based on the historical record of the Nazi genocide. Yes, it is dedicated to the standard narrative in the sense that it upholds the mainstream historical consensus on the Holocaust (e.g., systematic extermination of ~6 million Jews via camps, gas chambers, shootings).

IHRA doesn’t “define the motivations” of questioners in a psychological or accusatory way. Instead, its 2016 working definition of antisemitism is a non-legally binding tool designed to help identify and monitor manifestations of anti-Semitism in modern contexts, like education, law enforcement, and policy. The definition itself is brief: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It includes eleven illustrative examples, one of which explicitly calls out “Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people” as potentially anti-Semitic, depending on context. Another one addresses accusing Jews of “inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.” This is not about probing personal motives—it is about categorizing behaviors or claims that, based on historical patterns, often stem from or fuel anti-Jewish prejudice. For instance, if someone claims the Holocaust was a “hoax” for Jewish gain, IHRA sees that as fitting a long-standing trope of Jewish conspiracy/deceit, which has anti-Semitic roots regardless of the individual’s stated intent.

Imagine: questioning an historical phenomenon such as the Holocaust narrative is itself “antisemitic.” Ironically, a definition such as this is antithetical to a free society and rigorous scholarship. Moreover it cheapens anti-Semitism in an irony lost on its advocates. A definition such as this is as ready an explanation why historians are not free to challenge the “fact, scope, or mechanisms” of the Holocaust narrative. In such a climate, no wonder the Holocaust narrative becomes self-perpetuating, because challenging it is tantamount to professional suicide. It is as stifling as stifling can be — and if an established historical fact requires the protection of blasphemy laws, well, it probably is not nearly as unassailable as the high priests would have us believe.

*         *         *

For the record, I harbor no racial or religious animus toward Jews. I therefore reject the IHRA definition as preposterous, suffocating, and fundamentally illiberal.

The real disagreement is not whether Jews suffered catastrophically under Nazi rule—I concede that they did. It is over whether the mechanism was industrialized, homicidal gassing carried out on the scale and with the deliberate intent usually claimed in the standard Holocaust narrative, or whether the primary drivers were forced labor, mass expulsion eastward, and the collapse of supply lines and public health during total war. Nothing in my skepticism about the gas-chamber extermination story excuses or diminishes the documented brutality: slave labor, disease epidemics in the camps, reprisal shootings, deliberate ghettoization and deportation policies that cost Jewish lives no matter the number. The same horrors befell many non-Jews caught in the same circumstances. Ironically, the same horrors befell millions of Germans after the war at the hands of the victorious Allies (mass rapes and reprisals, ethnic cleansing, slave labor, and war crimes). These facts can—and do—coexist with my questions about the specific claims of systematic extermination. They coexist in me without contradiction.

I claim no special insight. I claim only the ordinary human right to read, think, and question any historical account—without prior restraint, without automatic moral condemnation, and without needing permission from any institution or interest group. That right belongs to everyone, including people who reach conclusions I find unpersuasive. If this sounds like I’m trying to ingratiate myself with anyone—mainstream historians, Deborah Lipstadt, the IHRA, or the revisionist community—let me be clear: I don’t care what any of them think of me. Such disclaimers would never “save” me from professional consequences anyway, and I’m not writing them for cover (because I am aware of the political toxicity of what I have written here and elsewhere). I’m writing them because I believe them, and because the truth does not bend to fit someone else’s approved narrative.

I will continue to consider whatever I damn well please.