SOURCE: "Two Alibis for the Inhumanities: A. R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century and David Irving, Hitler's War," in German Studies Review, Vol. I, No. 3, October, 1978, pp. 327-35.

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...