University Says No Action is Pending Against Professor Who Claims Holocaust is a Myth

A spokesman for Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Friday that “no action is contemplated at this point,” against Arthur R. Butz, a professor at the university who is the author of a book asserting that the Nazi slaughter of Jews is a hoax and a Zionist myth.

Asked if action against Butz will be taken in the future, the spokesman, Jack O’dowd, said that no such move is likely unless Butz violated the rules of the American Association of University Professors under which the University operates. O’dowd said the book, titled “The Fabrication of a Hoax,” did not constitute a violation of these rules.

PROVOST CONDEMNS BOOK

O’dowd noted, however, that a statement condemning the book was issued Thursday by Provost Raymond W. Mack on behalf of the university. The statement said it agreed with the students and faculty members who feel that a distortion of well documented historical facts constituted “a contemptible insult to the dead and the bereaved.”

“It is a right available to any citizen of the United States under the First Amendment,” Mack stated, to have his writing published, but, he said “it is a shame when that right is used to insult survivors of concentration camps.” Butz, an associate professor of electrical engineering, published his book last May in Great Britain. The book is not on sale in the United States.

The uproar concerning the book started two weeks ago when the university’s student newspaper reported on the book after learning about it from an article in the Jerusalem Post. Butz claimed in his book that Zionist leaders invented the Holocaust to obtain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Butz also contended in his book that there was no German policy of Jewish extermination and that millions of Jews were not deliberately slain in Nazi concentration camps.

Following publication of the report in the student paper, the Daily Northwestern, petitions denouncing the book and its author were signed by many faculty members and students. The petitions warned that the book added “academic legitimacy to anti-Semitic-propaganda.”

WORKMEN CIRCLE URGES FEDERAL PROBE

Meanwhile, Bernard Backer, president of the Workmen’s Circle, urged HEW Secretary Joseph Califano and Defense Secretary Harold Brown to investigate whether any federal funds channeled to Northwestern University for research purposes were utilized by Butz.

If any federal funds were used by Butz “while writing or researching his scurrilous manuscript, it would be a violation of the Civil Rights Law of 1964 which clearly forbids the use of federal funds to hold up any minority to ridicule or depreciation,” Backer said. “It would also be a violation of law for federal funds to be used to fashion apologia for Nazi oppression and tyrrany.”

Backer told a luncheon honoring him at a Workmen’s Circle division of Histadrut at the Hotel Plaza today that Butz “has laid a literary wreath on the memories of the butchers of Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka. For an electrical engineering professor to engage in perpetrating such a myth under the guise of historical fact is to tear up his own academic credentials in an attempt to erase and forgive the tragedy of the Holocaust.”