Arthur Butz

Arthur Butz is most well-known for his 1976 Holocaust denial work titled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, in which he refers to the mass extermination of Jews as “legend.” He also wrote articles for the Journal of Historical Review and served on their advisory board from 1980-2001. Butz taught electrical engineering at Northwestern University, and Holocaust deniers used these credentials to validate the credibility of his writings. He rejects the claim that Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust as well as the six million figure of those murdered. Butz was a featured speaker at the Nation of Islam convention in Chicago in February 1985, during which he presented his Holocaust denial thesis.

In his words:

• “The Jews of Europe were not exterminated and there was no German attempt to exterminate them.... The ‘gas chambers’ were wartime propaganda fantasies” - The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
• “The evidence, thus, suggests that the extermination legend owes its birth to obscure Polish Jewish propagandists, but the nurturing of the legend to the status of an international and historical hoax was the achievement of Zionist circles centered primarily in the West, particularly in and around New York.”

On the title of the book in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century:

• “Let me assure you that the choice of ‘hoax’ [as the title of the book] was calculated, and that today I am even more convinced that it was a felicitous choice, for the reason that the thing really is trivial. The term ‘hoax’ suggests something cheap and crude, and that is precisely what I wish to suggest.”