Arthur Butz


Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, United States and a Holocaust denier best known as the author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. He achieved tenure in 1974 and currently teaches classes in control system theory and digital signal processing.

Education and career

Butz attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he received both his Bachelor of Science and, in 1956, his Master of Science degrees. In 1965, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His doctoral dissertation considered a problem in control engineering.
Butz invented the algorithm which bears his name and was published in 1969. It provided a means for computing Hilbert's space-filling curve. This algorithm advanced certain computer search techniques and has certain other applications. Butz is the author of numerous technical papers.

Holocaust denial

In 1976, Butz published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, which argues that the Holocaust was a propaganda hoax. From 1980 to 2001, Butz was on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Review, a publication of the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denying organisation.

Faculty reaction

In 2006, sixty of Butz's colleagues from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty signed a censure describing Butz's Holocaust denial as "an affront to our humanity and our standards as scholars". The letter also called for Butz to "leave our Department and our University and stop trading on our reputation for academic excellence."
University President Henry Bienen issued a statement condemning Butz' Holocaust denial, but noted that tenure and academic freedom protected Butz from dismissal as he had kept his denialism separate from his work as an instructor.

Debunking

According to the Anti-Defamation League, "some Holocaust deniers argue that Butz's book has never been refuted by mainstream scholars, but in fact many of his arguments were thoroughly debunked" in books by Deborah Lipstadt, John C. Zimmerman and online web sites such as Nizkor Project and www.anti-rev.org.

Removal from Amazon.com

In 2017, Amazon.com removed the book along with other Holocaust-denying books from its US and UK sites. The ban of the books was requested by the director of Yad Vashem, Robert Rozett, who sent an email to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos directly.