Update AR #10 - July 5, 1996

Inside:
· Opinion: "What, Us? An International Conspiracy?"
· Inside Story: The Life and Death of "Dr Goebbels".
How a Powerful Lobby Killed that Book
· Diary Note on a 1986 visit to CIA Director William Casey
· A Last Letter from One of Our Number (before Burning Himself Alive)
and, as always,

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Opinion

Chutzpah:

What, Us? An International Conspiracy?

It is six years since certain North American organisations started to orchestrate their campaign of dirty tricks against British writer David Irving, whose International Campaign for Real History challenges some of their most cherished orthodoxies.

A few of their methods:

In november 1991 they smeared him in the Argentinean media as an international agitator. When their embassy was bombed, they got President Menem to link it with Mr Irving's visit weeks before.
In 1990 the leading British Jewish organisation secretly approached London embassies including the German and Austrian, asking for Mr Irving's imprisonment and exclusion from their countries.
In 1991 the same organisation forwarded through Jewish channels to the Canadian government a 50-page Intelligence report which libelled Mr Irving so grievously that when he unmasked its secret authors and threatened a lawsuit their lawyers panicked and offered to withdraw.
Outraged when he became the first historian to get to the diaries of Dr Joseph Goebbels in Moscow's secret state archives, Jewish organisations blackened his name, staged riots outside his home, and forced the prestigious Sunday Times to violate its contract to pay £85,000 for the diaries which they had by then published.
In 1992 the Canadian and American Jewish organisations applied pressure to the discredited Mulroney government of Canada to exclude Mr Irving. When thisfailed, they supplied documents from sister-organisations all over the world including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the Australian Jewish Congress to prevent him from having a fair hearing in Canada. To Canada's great shame, he was imprisoned, manacled, smeared and deported.
In 1993 the Australian Jewish Congress bribed Paul Keating's government to ban Mr Irving's Australian lecture tour.
In 1993 the British board asked the German government to fine him $25,000 for saying: "The gas chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz is a post-war fake" (Poland has now admitted that this is true). They forced Bonn to exclude him from German war archives (the only historian ever so penalised) and to expel him from Germany, where he has his publishers, thousands of friends, and millions of readers.
In 1994 the League of Human Rights of the Canadian B'nai Brith bragged in a secret fund-raiser that through these and similar manipulations they had persuaded country after country to deny Mr Irving entry, thus silencing his lectures.
In an ongoing campaign of terror, vilification, and intimidation they have forced one after another of Mr Irving's world-wide publishers to repudiate contracts with him. TV channels, which use his expertise in confidence, no longer dare invite him onto their programmes.

In its most heartless smear yet, in January 1996 the Jewish Telegraph Agency accused the British historian of complicity in the Oklahoma City bombing. In February 1996 the U.S.-based Jewish Defence League and the Anti-Defamation League engineered a three-month campaign of death threats and obscene phone calls to his U.S. publisher St Martins Press until SMP abandoned plans to publish his biography of Dr Joseph Goebbels. This cancellation deprived publisher and author of a spectacular success, and robbed Mr Irving of a just reward for his seven years'of research just as surely as if they had mugged him at gun-point.

In June 1996 Mr Irving's major publisher the Hearst Corporation suddenly demanded the repayment of $30,000 advanced to him for his forthcoming roosevelt's war, on which he has worked for six years.

In short, the traditional enemies of the truth have begun a systematic attempt to deprive David Irving of his livelihood, and to drive him and his family into penury. That is the penalty for writing the truth.

BUT HE FIGHTS ON. the campaign for Real History is now unstoppable. It is world-wide and growing in momentum.
Meanwhile the bigots have the wit to taunt him, "Mr Irving, are you antisemitic?"

His reply is thought-provoking: "Not yet."

How can any decent person, he asks, blame all the Jews, in their entirety, for this filthy vendetta? It is the handiwork of a criminal few, and they shall one day be exposed.

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THE GOEBBELS BOOK SCANDAL

Death Threats to New York Publisher
Lead to Setback for Real History

David Irving Lawsuit Targets
NY Publisher Who Ran Out on Truth

LONDON-In the wake of the crushing of plans by St Martin's Press to publish David Irving's biography of Nazi propaganda minister Dr Joseph Goebbels-the first to be based on the propaganda minister's secret diaries, which Irving exclusively obtained in Moscow from the former Soviet secret state archives-the British writer has announced that he has instructed a New York law firm to commence proceedings against his former publishers for unstated damages, citing breach of contract and defamation.

"When they caved in under the threats of the Traditional Enemies of the Truth," states Irving, referring to the often violent left-wing and liberal pressure groups who are trying to silence his six-year-old international campaign for Real History, "St Martin's had two choices: one honourable, and one dishonourable.

"They could admit that after a three-month campaign of death threats and obscene phone calls, for the sake of their hundreds of employees they had no choice but to violate our contract. Or they could grind their heel in my face, and claim they had 'only just read the manuscript,' and 'only just discovered' who I was. They chose the dishonourable route."

SMP's senior editor Thomas Dunne had at first valiantly defended their decision to sign up Mr Irving. He issued a robust press statement commenting that the attempts by certain organisations to suppress the book were reminscent of the methods used by Dr Goebbels himself and the Nazis. This redoubled the fury of SMP's opponents.

However SMP chairman Tom McCormack, revealing simultaneously that he 'has many next of kin who are Holocaust survivors,' declared that on reading Irving's major book, which was two weeks later published in London to magnificent notices from the entire national press, he discovered that the book had a vicious antisemitic undertone.

Inside Story

The Life and Death of "Dr Goebbels"

How a Powerful U.S. Lobby Killed that Book

By David Irving. Special to Action Report

It was Feb. 17 last year when Tom Dunne, senior editor at St Martins Press in New York, told my U.S. literary agent that they wanted to publish my biography of Dr Joseph Goebbels.

St Martins Press is owned by the British publisher Macmillan Ltd, which in turn is now owned by the German combine Holtzbrinck.

The book had been seven years in the writing: in June 1992, four years into the project, with the draft MS already complete, I had run into every author's nightmare: a vast cache of new materials-in this case, the complete missing diaries of the former Nazi minister, microfilmed by the Nazis themselves on primitive glass microfiches, twenty-five or forty pages to a plate.

Visiting the former Soviet archives in Moscow, I counted, identified, and labeled 1,400 glass plates. The Red Army had siezed them in Berlin, but the Russian archivists were unable to enlarge them, let alone read the handwriting.

I am one of the three or four people in the world capable of reading it. Those plates held some 75,000` pages, or fifteen million words. (The final biography runs to 200,000 words, which has not prevented critics from sneering, "Mr Irving has been selective in his choice of extracts from the diaries.")

Those critics first emerged in force in July 1992 when Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times accepted my offer of the best excerpts from the diaries, including the famous Night of the Long Knives (1934) and the Night of Broken Glass (1938). The newspaper contracted to pay me £85,000.

Under pressure from the same international lobby of which more mention is made below, after days of rioting in Central London and mass demonstrations outside its head office, the newspaper crumpled and violated the contract, refusing to pay me after they had already published the diaries. That is another story, but it was a fore-echo of what was to come in the spring of 1996.

Agreement Admittedly things did not run smoothly at SMP at first. It took five months for them to sign the agreement. I spoke with Dunne himself for the first time on Apr. 20, for twenty minutes: "He is very keen to buy US rights in Goebbels, which he has read and finds very authoritative," I noted in my diary that same day. "He says he finds the opening slow, and I remark that George S- [one of our editors] had the same feeling."

I confirmed this in a three-page letter to him the next day. I stated that Focal Point (my own imprint) would produce the British Commonwealth edition; besides the commercial advantage it would yield a better book with more illustrations including many in colour.

We would also produce a dummy edition, with the entire picture section, for SMP's sales force. SMP would reproduce our U.K. edition (we had opted for American spellings), and would pay an additional fee since FP would carry the costs of typesetting, design, and manufacturing the photo section.

With this letter on Apr. 21 last year I sent to Dunne a copy of my controversial book Hitler's War, first published by The Viking Press in 1977 and repeatedly reissued since then. This is important, as SMP would latterly claim to have had no idea who I was.

On Jun. 2, SMP made their formal offer; it was not high. They said that Dr Ralf-Georg Reuth's ponderous German biography on Goebbels had soured bookstores' enthusiasm for the man.

Relations between SMP, Focal Point, and myself were brisk and normal. On June 29-now back in London after nine months' writing in Key West-I faxed to SMP:

"Can we now make progress rapidly on the dustjacket artwork and any display cards etc., as suggested in my letter to you about off-setting?"

Dunne messaged me a week later, "The Goebbels contract should be coming to you soon." They now began work on the dustjacket. This now adorns the British version of the book now-but not their own, as theirs would never ultimately appear.

SMP finally made the first payment on about Aug. 7. The cash went direct to Ed Novak my agent, and from him to mortgage banks, lawyers (I was fighting the Sunday Times over their breach of contract), and other creditors.

For the rest of 1995 relations between us were extremely amicable, particularly after SMP saw the quality of the product they were getting. On Sep. 11 Tom Dunne's office notified me that they had launched the biography at the first of many marketing meetings. They now asked me to change the title, Dr Goebbels. His Life and Death, to something punchier. I suggested The Trail of the Jackal (my Rommel biography had become a best seller under the title The Trail of the Fox). After a few days, they selected from a list of suggestions Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich.

The Focal Point edition would have no fewer than fifty pages of black-and-white and colour photos. I offered to visit SMP in Manhattan on Oct. 3 or 4, as I would be touring the east coast at that time; in fact I never met them.

On Sep. 26 SMP came up with the usual requests to me, for instance that I list for them "what's new in this biography," "What's ground-breaking news."

I was on the road, completing a one-month, twenty-thousand mile lecture tour of the USA. From Myrtle Creek, a village in Oregon, on Oct. 13 I sent them this description:

What is new: of course, I am the first and so far only historian to have had full use of the 75,000 page Goebbels Diaries that were discovered in the Moscow secret state archives in 1992. I am said to be one of only three historians capable of reading the handwriting. From these diaries we get new insight into the ruthless conduct and planningof Hitler's political conspiracies and military operations; we have fresh evidence about the role of Goebbels (and Albert Speer) in planning and inspring the Final Solution. On a personal level we learn much about the tortured psyche of the Nazi propaganda minister,f romthe warped mind created by his physical deformities, through his abnormally late sexual development, to his family problems and romantic escapades with Germany's most beautiful film actresses. The photographs, nearly all of which have never been published before, also deserve a mention.

On Oct. 26 SMP again pressed me for records on the sales of all my books in the United States. My four page reply gave a breakdown, including my well known books published over thirty years by The Viking Press, Simon & Schuster, Avon Books, William Morrow, Macmillan, and Little, Brown.

On Nov. 13 we received from our printers the colour proofs of the Goebbels book; they were spectacular, and earned congratulations all round.

Armed with this, SMP went to town.

A publishing triumph seemed in the offing. On Jan. 25 SMP notified me that The Military Book Club, run by Doubledays, had bought Goebbels as a dual main selection (the club's editor, I was told, called it "a strong work of history"). SMP's publicity chief Joe Rinaldi started to fire up his machine.

By Feb. 8 Focal Point had supplied to SMP a hundred of the special dummies containing all the pictures and the opening chapters of the book. We mailed out 2,000 to every major bookstore in Britain, and to every literary editor.

The response was vast; eventually 120 newspapers in the U.K. asked for review copies, an unheard of success for what, had editors wished to be bitchy, they could have ignored as "vanity publishing" (i.e. an author publishing his own work.)

The Enemy  Simultaneously the Traditional Enemy began his fight to suppress the book. On Feb. 5 Tom Dunne's office phoned me in Key West to report that they were suddenly getting hate mail on the Internet about me, alleging that I was involved in Holocaust controversies.

I said that I had never written on that subject. He revealed that SMP were planning to publish the book in the first week of May, about two weeks behind our British publication date.

Knowing full well from ten years' experience fighting off these ugly enemies what was about to happen, I sent Dunne this fax:
If you get hate mail attacking me, please ask the writer for permission to show me their letters, e-mails, etc, so that I can respond and if necessary protect myself with legal actions as I am doing in Britain and Canada (with libel actions against Deborah Lipstadt and others).

You'll be surprised how many will back off then. Then tell them in that case you'll file their message in the appropriate receptacle.
You can draw the attention of serious inquirers to the passages in the book about the expulsion of the Jews from Berlin, and their fate; the brand new documentary sources on this, and the photos illustrating it.

I have not written on the Holocaust; if asked, my personal view is that the figures are open to scrutiny, and that there is quite a lot I find no archival evidence to support.

The next day, Feb. 6, I noted in my diary: "Ominous silence from St Martins Hope nothing's going wrong there now, intimidated by the traditional enemy."

These proved premature, but prophetic, words. The bigots were hard at work. On Feb. 20 there was a morning phone call from Joe Rinaldi stating that Kirkus, the biggest publishing trade journal in New York, wanted to know if "I'm still with the IHR"-the California based Institute for Historical Review.

I replied that I am not and never have been a member or official of the IHR, but that I have spoken to audiences of IHR members (three times in six years). I added that of course others like Pulitzer-prize winner John Toland also address such audiences.
Anticipating trouble I asked SMP now to pay us now the agreed $5,000 fee for permission to offset (photograph) our British edition. (They never paid it.)

Cyber Cesspit  I now know that by early February this year The Shallit Report, a newsletter published on the computer Internet by Ken McVay and his Nizkor Project (a Jewish-funded website which monitors the world of historical revisionists) was offering a two page fact sheet on me, quoting only Jewish sources (David Cesarani, Bernard Levin, Andrew Cohen) and containing such unverified lies as "He calls himself a 'moderate fascist'", and "Irving omitted crucial lines from a translation of Goebbels diaries-lines that would have contradicted his theory that Hitler knew nothing about the extermination fo the Jews."
All the allegations contained in the Shallit Report (ironically subtitled "Lies of Our Times") were vicious and untrue; a copy reached me only months later, unfortunately.

SMP seemed to be undeterred by the mounting hullaballoo. On Feb. 29 they asked me urgently to arrange for the British printing film to reach them. Doubleday proceeded with promoting their book club edition too, producing a lavish brochure by mid March.
Behind the scenes however the bigots and censors were turning up the volume of their campaign to full blast. These were some of their tricks:

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel instructed SMP that unless they cancelled the book he would withdraw the puffs that he had provided for other books. He wanted, said Eric Breindl, quoting Wiesel, "nothing to do with a firm that published Irving."
Breindl: "Private protests by infiuential figures within the [publishing] industry along with public declarations of opposition by legitimate Holocaust historians, seem further to have concentrated St Martin's attention."

Anonymous  On March 21, shortly after midnight, Reuters began issuing around the world an advance preview of what Publishers Weekly intended to say about the book. This said that "British historian David Irving, whom critics have accused of being a Nazi apologist," was about to get "blistering prepublication reviews" for the book. PW in an anonymous review was calling it "repellent," and alleging that there was "an agenda to Irving's documentation." In the book "Nazi brutality is almost always retaliation for the plots of international Jewry and the criminality of domestic Jews."

SMP's Tom Dunne-who informed me he had read the book seven times-told Reuters that he and his editors were mystified at such suggestions.

I was back in London, awaiting delivery of the first two thousand copies of the book from the printers. That afternoon, Mar. 21, the wires hummed with the Reuters and AP dispatches from New York.

At 5 p.m. a phone call from the London Daily Express told me what PW was saying. "Sounds like a major mudslide is building," I predicted in my diary. "I'm going to have a fight on my hands." [see Radical's Diary]

Joe Rinaldi phoned me for half an hour, and I gave him a list of professors and other historians who knew me and would contradict the smear.

Dunne put up a brave fight. On Mar. 22 he issued a press statement listing the famous publishing houses which had published my books in the past, and the major newspapers which had reviewed them. "In the last few weeks, we have received several calls denouncing our publication of Irving's latest volume, Goebbels, which, they maintained, is an apologia for Hitler's evil propaganda minister.

"Since a number of the calls we have received have expressed fury that we would publish a book by 'a man like David Irving' and have questioned our moral right to do so, I can only say that Joseph Goebbels is doubtless laughing in hell. He after all was the man who loved nothing better than burning books, threatening publishers, suppressing ideas, and judging the merits based not on their content but by their author's racial, ethnic or political purity. That is indeed a sad irony."

This was tough talk indeed to level at SMP's tormentors. Dunne was in effect accusing my critics of using Nazi tactics to besmirch my reputation.

By Mar. 23 my fax machine was churning out clipping from my friends all round the world, reporting the Reuters smear. It was impossible for me to counter all of them. I fax to the Sydney Morning Herald, one of Australia's most conscientious newspapers:

Sir,-Here we go round the Mulberry Bush again. My biography of the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich is not even out yet -but New YorkPublishers Weekly is to publish an anonymous review denigrating it as "repellent" (closing words: "The real insidiousness of the biography is that its formidable documentation will gain it acceptance as history").
Immediately Reuter and AP-as though there is little greater world news worthy of pushing-circulate this to every corner of the globe
Who is behind this latest orchestrated smear? Either the same people who have been agitating to keep me out of Australia and who told the media four weeks ago that I "might have" supplied the detonators used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City; or somebody who has been eatingtoo much British cow-meat recently.

The first reviews were already appearing in the British, press, and they were brilliant. The rest of the world's press was reverberating to the smear campaign. I was going down with pneumonia.

Meanwhile SMP were under fire. I sent this fax to publicity chief Rinaldi:

I have now seen further AP bulletins, as well as news stories printed by the Toronto Star, the Sydney Morning Herald, Die Welt, and other newspapers around the globe. I take it you have seen the story printed by Fred Kaplan in the Boston Globe on March 23. This states that Kirkus and the Library Journal will also carry blistering notices (how does Kaplan know?)
I am doing what I can to answer these ill-advised press stories. I intend to refuse to discuss any unsigned and anonymous articles with the media; that would be like trying to debate with a masked mugger. I am always willing to defend myself against critics who identify themselves.

Under Attack Publishers Weekly, in a major story in its Mar. 25 edition, stated: "Irving, undaunted offers his own action report on the Net. In it, he describes himself as 'under world-wide attack by the traditional enemy of truth.'" (In fact I have no contact with the Internet, though supporters are at liberty to post extracts from this action report on it.).

PW also quoted Tom Dunne as asking, "I'd like to know what people would have me do-cancel the book?"

On days to come, Dunne also drew attention to the book's opening sentence: "Writing this biography, I have lived in the evil shadow of Dr Joseph Goebbels for over seven years."

"Even if it turns out to be gravely fiawed," conceded the Jewish Internet newspaper Electronic Telegraph, "the book will be of interest to scholars because Mr Irving was the first author to gain access to 75,000 pages of Goebbels's diaries stored in Moscow."

But some people have no intention of letting people see for themselves.

On Mar. 25, knowing whom we were up against, I confided to my diary: "I think it is fifty-fifty that Saint Martins Press will cancel publication."

SMP's Jewish authors now began threatening to pull out their books. On the evening of Tuesday Apr. 2, unidentified staff members forced an unprecedented two-hour open forum on the book at St Martin's. Perhaps SMP actually welcomed this pressure from vox populi-another old Goebbels trick.

"Something close to a hundred employees appeared to voice their opinions," reported Thomas J McCormack, chairman and editorial director, afterwards. "Some of them argued in favor of publishing, and their arguments were neither insensitive nor unreasonable. But they weren't persuasive either. The immense majority conveyed fervently that they hoped I would not go forward."

[Note: According to Eric Breindl, writing in the New York Post on Apr. 12, "95 percent of the 400 or so who attended wanted the book canceled." None of these had, of course, had any chance to read the book, which was not in production in the USA yet: the films had only just arrived in New York from England.]

With his own job pretty well on the line for having signed up my book, Tom Dunne, speaking to the New York Times, would state, "I was the first one to suggest that we haul down the fiag on this one. There's been all this mud-splattering on innocent people, horrible phone calls and death threats. Orders to our college department were canceled." He himself had received, reported the NYT (Apr.5), several anonymous death threats.

McCormack would claim the next day that the decision was finalized that night of Apr. 2 to abandon production, even before he saw the fresh hostile commentaries in the Apr. 3 papers.

Ugly Fight The fight was getting even uglier. Frank Rich-and they don't come much uglier than that-wrote a major Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (Apr. 3), wailing that "only Two Passovers ago American Jews were kvelling over the newly Oscar-anointed Steven Spielberg," and that this Passover the mantle had passed to Daniel Goldhagen for his book Hitler's Willing Executioners. But in May, lamented Rich, controversy over David Irving's forthcoming book would destroy all of that.
He rehashed all the lies that he had found about me on the Internet, adding more of his own for good measure, and quoting Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University (Atlanta) Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies as saying: "What David Irving and St Martin's is [sic] facilitating is not the destruction of live people but the destruction of people who already died. It's killing them a second time. It's killing history."

[Prof Lipstadt is about to receive a writ from me for her tract Denying the Holocaust, which she has foolishly started peddling within the jurisdiction of the British courts.]

In England it was nearly ten p.m., Apr. 3, 1996. I was ill in bed. The New York Daily News had phoned me at eight, and told me that the Washington Post was carrying an article attacking me by Marc Fisher. I somberly predicted to the News that the book would not see the light of day in the USA.

Sure enough, around nine p.m.The Washington Post informed me that St Martins Press had pulled the book. Not having been told officially by SMP, I refuse any comment.

My first thought was for my family's future. I wrote in my diary: "The consequences may be financially serious, if St Martins refuses to make the final payment or the offsetting fee they were contracted to." These words proved prophetic.

At 11:19 PM a fax came in from Thomas J McCormack, chairman of St Martins Press: "After much thought, we have made the decision not to publish your book Goebbels. The fact is that, at the time we acquired your book, we were without information essential to our decision."

Neither in this fax, nor before, nor since, did SMP specify what the "new information" was or invite my comment on it.
Minutes later, at 6:21 p.m. in New York McCormack issued his own three-page release to the newswires (again without sending a copy to me. I have the IHR to thank for mailing it to me).

"I want to emphasize," stated McCormack, "that we are not canceling under coercion-publishers can often be at their best in resisting pressure-nor was our decision prompted by mere embarrassment. We are canceling because we think many of the arguments put to us as objections to publication are valid and convincing, and because of discoveries we made on our own as we investigated the matter more deeply."

Describing how Dunne had come to sign up the book, McCormack stated:

"The book was long, detailed, and based on an immense coup of Irving's-exclusive first access to the never-published diaries that Goebbels kept. The diary material was by turns tedious, ludicrous and horrifying. And in the biography Irving made it amply clear that he despised Goebbels."

But then:

"Beginning two weeks ago people more informed than we started sending us new information about Irving"

"We condemned ad hominem arguments," continued McCormack, "but then had to ask ourselves: Could we honestly say we never rejected a proposal because we didn't want to be associated with the author because of ugly, loony, or murderous things he said or did?"

This was powerful, and vicious language.

"The final decision about whether or not to go forward with Goebbels fell on my desk. Among many other things I did, I at last sat down to examine the page proof myself. I despised it intensively. There were several reasons for this, but one was sufficient for me: The subtext of Goebbels was in my judgment this: The Jews brought it on themselves. My feeling was that this is at base an effectively anti-Semitic book, an insidious piece of Goebbels-like propaganda that we should have nothing to do with."

"I wish we knew back in 1995 what we know now," McCormack would add mysteriously. "I wish, once the new information began coming in, we were faster to push through to this decision." "I won't try to defend St Martin's against the criticism we have received, because the fact is I agree with much of it. We made a mistake. We now know it. We now should admit it-and correct it. I am informing David Irving today of our decision. We will not publish his book. I should say that Tom Dunne agrees with this decision. The [Doubleday] Military Book Club also joins St Martin's: They are cancelling the book as an offering to their members."

Stiletto-Heel In this extraordinary press release about me, one of their own authors, rushed out to the media without consulting me or offering me any chance to defend himself, the cowardly chief of St Martins Press chose to grind his corporate stiletto-heel in my face as he picked up his skirts and fied.

In their panic, neither he nor SMP cared if they made my name and books unpublishable ever again in the United States (or in the English-speaking world for that matter, because his news release was fiashed around the world hours before I even heard about it.)
To the credit of my own literary agent it has to be said that on April 8 he would send to McCormack a furious letter which he duly published to the press:

You displayed the utmost contempt for me by failing to keep me informed of events surrounding your decision. One day I read Tom Dunne bravely and articulately defending the decision to publish the book in Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post; the next day reporters are calling me to comment on your decision to not publish the book. I was forced to read The Washington Post to find out what was going on inside St Martins Press regarding this book. Is it your practice to keep all your business partners in the dark? For the sake of all the other agents and authors you deal with, I hope not.

Second, David Irving told me that he urged you-meaning St Martins Press-to contact him the moment any trouble began so that he could respond to any attacks. No one at St Martins gave the author a chance to defend himself. I told Tom Dunne prior to the acquisition of this manuscript that the author is controversial so that you would know what to expect. The bottom line is that you never gave David Irving a chance to answer his citics. Your response was fiat out pathetic and cowardly.

SMP turned Novak's letter over to their legal department.

On Good Friday, Apr. 5, before setting out on my rounds of the clamouring bookstores in London, I sent McCormack a lengthy but considered letter.

Tom Dunne, who behaved impeccably throughout, wrote to me privately, enclosing a glowing review of the book in the U.S. trade magazine Booklist (Sample: "With diligence and judiciousness, Irving capably connects the curse of Goebbels' diabolical energy to the larger nervous system of the Nazi Party"); Dunne described my letter to McCormack as "a model of dignity."

"I hope you succeed in placing the book in the U.S." he added.

McCormack himself has yet to reply.

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By David Irving

AN ITEM PUBLISHED in the United States newspapers based on a Jewish Telegraph Agency despatch has a bold story about the Oklahoma bombing, with a picture of me next to a picture of Timothy McVeigh. Great. They cite the London-based Institute of Jewish Affairs as their source. I send this warning letter to the institute's director:

The statements made in the enclosed article are defamatory and untrue, and this letter gives due warning that any repetition of them within the jurisdiction of the British courts will be met with an immediate lawsuit by me.

Midnight. Charles Maclean of AM.1040 radio Vancouver phones, to line me up for his programme. There's eight hours' time difference. He says they are already being bombarded with calls from the usual people trying to get the programme cancelled. Freedom of speech!

The two hour phone-in programme is rumbustious and amusing, particularly a lady caller named Hilary who has in front of her the Immigration Adjudicator's finding against me in Ontario in Nov. 1992, having downloaded it off the Internet; I ask her to think Who put it on the Internet in the first place. Not Canada Immigration! The Internet: a cyber-cesspool of lies about innocent people.

Later London Talk Radio phones, will I be available to do a talk at 5:40 p.m. on Michael Howard's attempts to stop Europe's laws against discussion of the Holocaust slopping over into England? Yes. Then BBC Radio phones, can I do a talk show this evening at 8 p.m., recorded; sure, and I walk down Oxford St to Broadcasting House. Its for the World Tonight programme.

A newspaper phones from Perth in West Australia, asking for comments about today's hearing of my case by the Full Federal Court in Perth. I say we shall appeal to the Supreme Court and to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal if it goes against us. La lotta continua!

DURING THE AFTERNOON Gitta Sereny of the Observer asks for another copy of my Goebbels biography, for review purposes. The Guardian says there is an item on the wires about a "review" of Goebbels. This is a worry: a review, already? In London they are not permitted until Apr. 14, and in the United States four weeks later. In my absence Tom Bower phones from the Daily Mail; I call him back, he sounds surly.

Later the Daily Express phones, says Reuters are carrying a story quoting an anonymous Publishers Weekly review in New York as calling my (still unpublished) biography goebbels. mastermind of the third reich "repellent."

I say that if the review is anonymous this justifies Goebbels' own law which made it illegal to publish such reviews; writers had to stand by what they had written. Yes, she comments, so he could throw them in jail.

SOUNDS LIKE A MAJOR MUDSLIDE is building. I phone my New York publisher, St Martins Press: yes, they say, they have been bombarded by phone calls from journalists quoting the Reuters report.

Joe Rinaldi, publicity chief at St Martins Press, phones until 10:25 PM. Damage control. I give him names of famous historians who will provide very different views on my reputation-among them Charles Burdick, David Kahn, Robert Wolfe, and Richard Hunt.

At 7 a.m. a truck from the printers in Somerset delivers the first thousand copies of Goebbels. I load them into a rented truck. Another call from Tom Bower; he now sounds impressed by the book, having read it right through last night.

Out all day delivering to bookstores around London. Selfridges and Harrods take it well; one or two Waterstones branches are actively hostile. In Dillons in James Street the dept. chief takes six, plus one Hitler's War: then gets shrieked at by a man with four nose-rings and two ear-rings accompanied by a fat, US-style MacDumpling of a woman, who calls me every obscenity under the sun. Manager embarrassed and changes his mind; I smile indulgently and say we haven't enough books to go round anyway.

Bad night; head cold, headache. Wake at 00:15 and find a fax from Australia, with an article from the Sydney Morning Herald about the anonymous Publisher's Weekly review entitled: "Irving 'accuses Jews of provoking brutality'"! Oy!

These people get their stories around the world with the speed of a hurricane. How interesting it is to see them at work, while simultaneously proclaiming with injured mien that there is no international network behind them. The fax machine is busy all night, and proves them wrong.
In the morning, I find more faxes from Germany: the Munich court has turned down my lawyer Hajo Herrmann's appeal against the order banning me from Germany. Freedom of speech! Today's Daily Telegraph reports this. Windeseile! With the speed of the winds.

I have been toying with the idea of blaming the Publishers Weekly item on Mad Cow disease, but this may go too far. They have no sense of humour, these people. The slightest drop of rain falls on their butterfiy-wings and they crumple into tears.

ALL AFTERNOON OUT IN THE TRUCK AGAIN. Good book sales, several bookstore managers eagerly awaiting the book, having seen our brochure in January. Particularly in Charing Cross Road, where the big stores take thirty, forty and fifty copies each.

At Waterstones in Earls Court Road, the opposite experience: a blue-stocking of an assistant manager says: "No, we won't stock that."

Thinking I have heard won't for don't, I ask her to repeat it. She says: "We have a store policy of not stocking books by David Irving. We have to do what the customers want. Some customers object to the content of his books."

"Isn't a bit a cowardly to bow to the pressure of a tiny minority," I say, adding: "You stock works by Karl Marx?" "Yes." "Although customers might object to him?" "That's different." "How?"

Impatient, she says: "Look, if you want you can take it up with the manager. The ruling is his. I agree with it." She writes his name on a piece of paper for me, adding: "-And my name is Louie Smart."

As I walk to the van I notice that the name of her manager is David Crank. Crank & Smart: what a couple.

Yet they stock the libels by Deborah Lipstadt and Gerald Gable. I shall buy the latter books there and take the appropriate steps to join Messrs Crank & Smart to the libel actions I am bringing-and any other Cranks and Smarts I encounter on the next four-week drive round Britain's bookstores.

FIFTY EIGHT YEARS OLD TODAY. So far nobody has noticed it.

Wakened at 3:10 a.m. by a fax from Toronto. The Star has carried the smear about Goebbels too. From Los Angeles comes a computer print of the AP's latest despatch, quoting Abraham Foxman of the ADL®, that carapace of Jewish virtues. He has not read the book but demands its banning. He forces Tom Dunne, my editor at St Martin's Press (SMP), into contortions to defend the decision to print it.

Oddly, the British newspapers make no mention of the rumpus in the USA.

Phone call from Günter Matschullis in Hanover, reporting that today's Bild am Sonntag carries a story about the banning of the unbelehrbare (incorrigible) Mr Irving from Germany. He is shocked to hear that I have been banned from Germany since 1993.
I send off this fax to SMP publicity chief Joe Rinaldi:

I have now seen news stories printed by the Toronto Star, the Sydney Morning Herald, Die Welt, and other newspapers around the globe. Fred Kaplan in the Boston Globe on Mar. 23 states that Kirkus and the Library Journal will also carry blistering notices (how does Kaplan know?)

I intend to refuse to discuss any anonymous articles with the media; that would be like trying to debate with a masked mugger. I am always willing to defend myself against critics who identify themselves.

IN THE AFTERNOON I DRIVE the truck with a ton of books, out to Richmond, Putney, and Kingston to visit bookshops. Tired arms!

I phone the chief buyer at WH Smith's head office, Michael Neil; he hems and haws about "shelf space," and is still considering the book.
I drive out to London airport and collected the pallet of books from Veritas in Australia. Then straight up to Norwich. Bertrams (one of Britain's biggest distributors) take 150 Goebbels; Jarrold's bookstore in the city take 12, and Waterstones 2. Back at London fiat 9:30p.m. A lo-o-ong day.
Faxes there from Saint Martins Press. They're getting death threats. The fight may get uglier. It is 50:50 that under this intimidation SMP will cancel publication.

I try to phone my literary agent Ed Novak in Pennsylvania: no answer. Moments later he phones back, sounding oddly distant. Just says yes and no. I think he's as scared as hell: but the way it is going, with two pages of news about it in the biggest American trade journal Publishers Weekly (they even quote action report on the "traditional enemy of the truth"), it should boost sales. Dunne of SMP seems to be hanging in there anyway.
Phone Ed Wall, my lawyer in Australia. No reply. (An overnight fax from Adelaide suggests that the hearing on Mar. 21 has gone badly).

AT ELEVEN A.M. the nursery school phones. Jessica has chicken pox. My desk is snowed under with paperwork and the mound grows each day.

I start out at 3:30 p.m. on the rounds to bookstores; Foyles, Britain's biggest bookstore, are already restocking! They ask for ten apocalypse '45.
Benté says the phone's been ringing off the hook. The Independent want the photograph of Hitler snoozing on deck; it will be hard to use that with a foul review.

In the evening Georgina, from Globus, a Croatian magazine, calls for a 90-minute interview; she chain-smokes throughout. A slightly fiummoxed, fiustered, but beneath it all focused, type.

I rise at 6:50 a.m., and dig into the paperwork. Poor Jessica is covered in spots today. She is glimpsed in the bathroom saying "mess"-her only word yet-and trying to wash one spot off.

A PHONE CALL from Robert Harris ("Fatherland") who's writing a feature on the book for the Evening Standard. He says today's Daily Mail carries the Tom Bower article. It is vigorous, blustering, and-Bower is Jewish-libellous, but I shan't act on it: I cannot take on wealthy newspapers too often in the courts.

I drive the truck out to Oxford; back in London at 4 p.m. feeling like death. Flu's stranglehold getting worse. Blackwell's have tripled their order. I feel worse and worse as the evening progresses. I am going down with something.

Ill in bed most of the day. First time this has happened in thirty-three years (jaundice in Madrid); I drag myself into the drawing room in the afternoon when Dr Schütz, one of my Germans lawyers, pays a surprise visit. He ignores every hint from me that he curtail the session, as beads of perspiration pour off me, and paroxysms of coughing come forth.

The hired truck sits opposite my window, loaded with a thousand books, glaring at me: when are we going to set out around the British Isles?
I rise at 7:30 a.m., determined to get into work routine, but then have to lie down. Karl Ph. phones that two days after the Munich judgement last week, in which the court rejected my appeal against the banning from Germany, the Judge revoked his own judgement, without giving any reasons! Unheard of.

The judge may have been afraid of U.N. repercussions-they are known to be drafting a complaint against Germany's laws curtailing freedom of speech. I am less optimistic; more likely his judgement as framed left loopholes for us to take such action. ¡Vamos a ver!

THE AMERICAN PRESS IS FROTHING about my Goebbels book, which is not even on sale over there.

The postman brings a registered letter from my Polish publisher who has contracts to publish Hitler's War and Goebbels; concerned about the U.S. and British media brouhaha. Heroes of the resistance.

The London Evening Standard carries an excellent whole-page lead review of the book by Robert Harris. Cheers me up no end, although he repeats the old canard that I had to publish goebbels myself as I could not find a U.K. publisher.

I send him a mischievous fax:

Thank you for those nice words. I would write in longhand, but for the first time in thirty years I'm bedridden with some bug. Bah. Let me know where to send the cheque some time!

Seriously, one thing I forgot to straighten out on the phone with you was something I actually forgot, it's so far back. After Felicity Rubinstein, 23-year-old nymphet, became Macmillan's managing director, most of the top staff quit in fury despite my entreaties. It was Sept. 1992. I wrote a formal letter to Macmillan saying I had reached the sad decision that I too would want, if allowed, to leave and publish the book under FP's imprint as I thought we would do a better production job; could we please agree a price for me to buy back the rights at. Agreement was duly reached.

STILL VERY BAD LEFT CHEST, muscle pains, dizziness, total lack of appetite, agonising spasms. I get very short of breath. Feels like an infection?

At noon-thirty Dr Douglas Rossdale calls round and tells me I have pneumonia. Something from sub-tropical Key West; the fiight home?

What a disaster; what a curse; I am devastated. I can hardly speak. My desk is now swamped six inches deep in paper all round.

One appalling spasm, as though shot in the left side, during the night. I lie on my back, stiff as a board, terrified of any twitch which may provoke another spasm. Rise at 5:55 a.m. determined to get paperwork done.

Gloomy fax from Ed Wall in Australia, summarising the hearing on March 21. The judges have not however issued their judgement yet.

At the Nuffield Hospital for chest X-rays. Dr Rossdale announces, "It's very nasty indeed."

HE LETS ME SEE THEM. The pneumonia has collapsed about 20% of the left lung. He says, "If you had insurance I would put you straight into hospital for four weeks. You'll have to take things easy."

I say, "So I can't just get into my truck and start driving round England?"

What a rotten timing. We have drained our entire assets into the production of one book. That book is stacked in the rental truck parked across the street.
Britain's national press is lined up to lavish free publicity on the book as never before in my career. And precisely now, at this time in the international fight for Real History, the struggle with the traditional enemy of the truth, this comes from out of nowhere and knocks me down.

Within a month reputation and fortunes would have been repaired.

I can only force out two words at a time, my breath is so short from the effort.

The New York Times publishes a lethal Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich, syndicated from sea to shining sea, attacking my (still unpublished) Goebbels biography. I draft this response:

Sir,-I hope that readers who obtain the book, which is already on sale in London and being reviewed, will find Rich's fears unjustified; and that a balanced reading of the entire work will provide a better overall feel than the quotations he has selected.

"Only 10 days ago," writes Mr Rich, "a Munich court upheld an order barring him from entering Germany, where Holocaust denial is a crime."

Is Mr Rich advocating that the United States should act in the same dismal fashion as Germany, adopting the same restrictions on free speech-illegal under the UN Charter of Human Rights-as were perfected by Dr Goebbels himself not so long ago?

Those restrictions levied against me culminated in 1993: On Jan. 13, a Munich court fined me $22,000 for speaking one sentence, an historical opinion, in a public lecture (words which the Polish authorities concerned have now publicly confirmed were true). The court permitted no defence evidence.

On Jul. 1, as I sat in the German federal archives for my final hour's work on the biography, the president of the archives informed me that their ministry of the interior had ordered me banned from the building with immediate effect-becoming the first historian ever to be so treated-on the grounds that my continued work in the archives was "not in the interests of the German people." (I glimpsed Heinrich Himmler's daughter working on her father's files as I was ushered out).

On Nov. 13 as I arrived to lecture to students of Munich university on problems of freedom of speech, I was handed an expulsion order by the city's political police.

As Mr Rich correctly writes, only ten days ago a Munich court upheld this order.

As in history, on some matters the jury is still out.

THEN THE SKIES BEGIN to darken. I am confined to bed in my London apartment, crippled with pneumonia and barely able to speak.

At eight p.m. there is a long phone call from the New York Daily News; they say that the Washington Post has today run a big piece attacking me by one Marc Fisher. Amazing how the gang's all there: the three anonymous "muggers," and now Frank Rich, Tom Bower, Marc Fisher. Who else, I wonder?

I end this conversation by predicting, reluctantly, that my Goebbels book will not see the light of day in the USA: the Daily News reporter is shocked, she interrupts to tell me that St Martins Press are insisting that they will not buckle under this intimidation.

I correct her: I know who my opponents are, and they would not have taken the risks they have in starting this terror campaign against SMP if they were not sure that they had already won.

For a while I try to phone Joe Rinaldi at SMP, then Tom Dunne; the latter's secretary asks who is calling, and when I identify myself, says after a few seconds, "Mr Dunne is in a meeting." I say I'll call in a day or two.

I phone friends in California-can they surface the Washington Post story off their computer net for me?

Around nine p.m. a call comes from The Washington Post, a female reporter, who asks for my response to the news that St Martins Press have "pulled the book". She puts to me one by one the items in today's Marc Fisher article, all of which are untrue. Will I sue SMP, she asks?

I say politely that I have still not been told officially by SMP, and accordingly cannot comment until I know what pressures they came under.

At 10:25 p.m. the Publisher's Weekly phones from New York, and I give them the same story. Will I sue SMP? they too ask. I say that the US publishing industry is probably fed up with British authors (like Joan Collins) suing them and winning.

I CRAWL OUT OF BED TO FAX this letter to Dunne at St Martins Press:

It is an unusual sensation to lie in bed with pneumonia, and be told by the American gutter press on the phone that your publisher has "pulled" your book from production.

I have so far responded that until I am officially informed of any such move, I can not comment.

As I approach the machine to fax it through at 11:19 p.m. it begins to whir softly at me. A fax is coming through from Thomas J McCormack, Chairman of St Martins Press, " We have made the decision," it says, "not to publish your book Goebbels."

They are not cancelling the contract, he insists-merely not publishing it, which "entitles you to terminate the contract". An odd way of doing things. Something a lawyer should look at.

At midnight I finally get through to Ed Novak, my literary agent in Harrisburg., Pa. He has just arrived home from New York, knows nothing of any decision but has found messages on his machine from Publishers Weekly and the Washington Post which has published, he thought, a "fine piece" on the book (did I mishear him?).

From now until the weekend I intend to make no statements, other than that "I do not want to complicate the legal position"-as a hint that I shall not take this lying down.

I then go and lie down. It is one a.m. I could not have taken all this three days ago.

I rise early after twice getting up during the night in some pain. I do a lot of thinking during these waking hours, and send this fax to Ed Novak during the morning:

Dear Ed,-I would understand very well at this point, and being a gentleman I would find no hard feelings at all, if you were to withdraw from acting for me and you may regard this letter as permission in advance, if such permission should be needed. It has been a long and unpleasant struggle to this point, and I am facing elements which I am confident I can overcome in the end; but to you it may all seem perplexing. I am having buckets of mud dumped on me in a country where it is quite permissible to do so, and some of it sticks for a while. It was my belief that the book's publication would eradicate all the mud; the opposing elements seem to have been of the same belief, and they have pulled out every stop to prevent it happening.

I am shocked that despite my written demand that they do so, six weeks ago, SMP never showed me or discussed with me any of the allegations made to it ("the new information" McCormack speaks of).

Novak seizes the opportunity to put as much visible distance between him and me as possible. He phones during the afternoon; he sounds defeated, hopeless. Says he's leaving literary agency work in the summer anyway.

Back from Harrods bookstore at 6 p.m., very strained and with chest pains. Doreen Carvajal of the New York Times phones; we talk half an hour, my voice gradually slipping away. She claims SMP have denied that I am to be allowed to "keep the money". It is difficult to fight this war at such long range.

Feeling delicate all evening, with several chest spasms. Around 10 p.m. a wad of faxes comes through, evidently from California, the latest trawlings off the Net: it includes SMP's 3-page communiqué announcing the ending of the book. In turning to fiee the Wrath of the Traditional Enemy of the Truth, they have ground their heel well and truly in my face.

I rise at 6:25 a.m., and resume work on the backlog. I consider it proper to write this letter, despite everything, to St Martin's Press's chairman, Tom McCormack:

Dear Tom,-It is I suppose twenty years since you came to London and we had our first exchange of letters. Since then much water (and ink) has fiowed, but I little anticipated then that I would have to face, at the summit of my career as an historian, an onslaught such as this.

For about ten years I have had to withstand a cruel and insidious campaign waged around the globe against me by rivals and enviers, and by people of meaner motives, bent on my destruction and the ruination of my livelihood. I have withstood it until now and although I am currently laid low with pneumonia and beset by other demons within and without, no doubt I shall see it through.
I am sorry to see that your great firm was also subjected over the last three months to this terrorisation on my account. I do not blame you for having capitulated so quickly, as your "family" is considerably larger than mine. Having watched, so far as I was able, your brief battle rage I am more glad now than ever that I founded my own imprint a few years back with precisely this situation in mind. Six years ago I actually wrote to Macmillan UK and requested them to sell back to me the rights in Goebbels; what a wise move! My editors and sub-editors and indexers are beyond reach; my printers, down in Somerset, are craftsmen carved of the same oak, I sometimes think, as the men-o'-war in which Horatio Nelson put to sea. I do not think that your tormentors would get very far with them.

If I regret one thing-and one thing only-in our relationship as author and publisher, it is this: when Tom Dunne informed me on February 5 that your firm was beginning to receive approaches, I sent him this immediate response:
"If you get hate mail attacking me, please ask the writers for permission to show me their letters, E-mails, etc, so that I can respond and if necessary protect myself with legal actions as I am doing in Britain and Canada (with libel actions against Deborah Lipstadt and others). You'll be surprised how many will back off then. Then tell them in that case you'll file their message in the appropriate receptacle"
Unfortunately, from that day to this, your firm did not put to me one single item of the allegations raised against me. This surely would have been the fair and proper thing to do. Instead, you appear to have accepted at face value all the canards about my having "authenticated" the Hitler Diaries (the very reverse is the truth), and having called Auschwitz, Anne Frank's diary, the Holocaust and everything else "a hoax"-vicious libels which Lipstadt, Foxman and others have perpetrated knowing that under the prevailing American libel laws there is little I can do to repair the damage.

Recently (March 7) the Jewish Telegraph Agency even spread the rumour, complete with photographs of myself and Tim McVeigh, that "Irving had supplied the detonators for the Oklahoma City bombing".

Tom, I have read the text of your 3pp. statement of April 3: It was faxed to me from the other side of the world by somebody who retrieved it from the Internet. I am not on the Net, which I regard as a poisonous cesspit of stale and ftid information; I do not know what is posted on it about me, nor do I have any means of reply. I am sure there are any number of "friends" who think they are doing me favours by clanking off into battle on my behalf. I cannot stop them.

I appreciate the very fair words you used to describe the book, which is surely what our relationship was all about. Your colleagues have had nothing but praise for it since the first day; Tom [Dunne] told me he had read it seven times. It should have soared aloft in May to a great and vibrant success for us all. It is a real pity that nobody in New York has yet seen the final product; perhaps you should have gone into production sooner, so that people could judge for themselves. Perhaps I should have shipped a score of copies over to you.

The book is already prominently displayed in most bookstores in London (release date April 14), and 120 national, Sunday, and provincial newspapers have asked for review copies; many of the Sunday papers have asked for several. Small though my imprint is, we are poised for a very great publishing success indeed.

If I succeed in re-placing the book in the United States publishing world, I shall of course consider it a matter of honour to repay the entire advance to your firm.

RON M. REPEATEDLY TELEPHONES from the USA, where the newspapers are full of it. Does not seem to grasp that (a) I have pneumonia, (b) it is six a.m. when he starts phoning.-The pain is getting worse; I have to lie rigid at night. I decide to take a couple of days with long spells lying down.

The Independent magazine publishes the "rare" photo of Hitler snoozing, which they borrowed from us: but it is in an article about sleep, with no credit to us or to the Goebbels book at all!

At 2 p.m. an extraordinarily robust and totally unexpected fax comes from Ed Novak, which he has drafted to McCormack, accusing SMP of having deliberately smeared me to get themselves off the hook, and in doing so making me virtually unpublishable in the USA. I take back the unkind words I wrote about him, and send Novak this fax:

Dear Ed,-I am truly proud of you having read your draft, which came out of the blue. A letter like that to a publisher can only be written by an agent who is going out of the business! Everything I have brooded about in long fevered nights-my pneumonia is getting worse-was right there in your draft, without my having had to say it to you.

For your interest, I attach the letter I faxed to SMP yesterday. It "turns the other cheek", but as from Tuesday I begin the search for a US attorney to raise a claim for damages against SMP, not for breach of contract, but for their despicable behaviour. Precisely as you have set out.

In short: having portrayed, possibly correctly, the three months of terrorism and death threats they were subjected to, SMP does not want to be seen capitulating to that, but suddenly "discovers" who I am, which provides their alibi. But in getting themselves off the hook, or petard, they may well have made me unpublishable in the USA.

I READ THE MEDICAL DICTIONARY about pneumonia. The book says I must convalesce for four weeks: Aaaargh! Can't do-not now.

A Mr Alexander Pericles Maillis phones from the Bahamas. The news has been splashed everywhere-except here in the U.K., where the Traditional Enemy is not keen to give me any publicity which might benefit me.

Jeff T. turns up in the evening; I am gasping for breath, but sit squirming until he has gone. Afterwards I write him:

I am terribly sorry to say that Benté did not tell me about the fine bottle of wine you brought as a gift when you called yesterday; very remiss. Please accept my thanks, and my apologies for having seemed very rude in not thanking you yesterday.

I FIND ENOUGH ENERGY to tackle the backlog of paperwork, which is now eight inches deep.

Jessica is perceived dragging her pillows and blankets into the drawing room, where she plumps them on Daddy's sofa and stretches out, ashen faced: she's a little poorly after the chicken-pox and has deduced that this is the Get-Well sofa.

Bad night. I was planning to drive books up to Birmingham. I abandon the plan.

Channel FOUR TELEVISION SHOWS a remarkable documentary on the killing of the woman police constable Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in 1984 in St James's Square; the programme concludes that the fatal shot was not fired from inside the embassy, but from rooms rented by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the building next door.

The CIA, explains the producer, had an interest in setting Britain and Libya at loggerheads. Sir Teddy Taylor, MP, has been trying to raise this matter for months. I write him this letter:

In May 1984 several provincial newspapers published an article by me drawing the same conclusion. There were many odd things. The stray bullet which went across the square penetrated two planes of glass about two feet apart and hit the wall at the end of the room. I went up there when the holes were still in the glass and asked permission to check their alignment to see where the shot had come from. The staff told me that Scotland Yard had already made all sorts of measurements "with arrows and things" and had instructed them to replace the windows immediately.

For what it is worth, I had an hour long conversation with William Casey at CIA headquarters one month after the bombing of Tripoli.
After pointing to the obvious forgery by the National Security Agency of certain intercepts, I said that the real origin of terrorism in the Middle East was Syria and not Libya, he drawled: "Syria-Libya-the American public don't know the goddamn difference!" [see panel on left]

This weekend sees the the publication in London of my book Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich-the culmination of eight years' work. Pray God that this brings a turning point in our affairs.

I phone O'Neill at the Daily Telegraph as requested; he has a question about the Oklahoma City bombing. What has that got to do with me?

The Telegraph then publishes his feature on me: not a bad picture, my eyes glazed and blank from the pneumonia; but there is a nasty undertone of envy and an attempt to depict me as finished: once again, ¡vamos a ver!

Since O'Neill maliciously and deliberately identifies the truck I have, parked uselessly below my windows with £50,000 of books on board, I make up these placards to leave in its windows overnight to deter sabotage attacks on it.

London Electricity Board
L. E. B.
Engineer working on site.

Publication day. I have spent a poor night worrying about what today's Sunday newspapers will say. Up at 7:01 a.m., but the newspaper shop is still closed. Stacks of Sunday papers outside.

I sneak a look into our neighbours' Sunday Times from downstairs. A triumph! It has a major, glowing review by Professor Norman Stone, without a sour word; one that I can instantly rush to Random House in New York, who have asked the see the book urgently: It explicitly and specifically refutes all the spiteful American Jewish charges against the book.

The Sunday Telegraph has a good review of the book, by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper; he also criticises the Americans. Nothing could now be clearer than the divide between Jewish and non-Jewish reviewers and critics of the work. This increases my sense of outrage at the violence done to me in New York.-Temperature still well up.

The printer delivers 1,056 more copies of Goebbels. I help load them into my truck before dawn, and put 200 in the hall for onward shipment to America tomorrow. Wheezep;cough-wheeze.

Alan C. says Selina Scott, who is to interview me on television shortly, is a woman of profound intelligence; he had her to lunch with the Home Secretary Michael Young and several others some months ago, down at his castle. I say we'll send him a book. He's a multi-millionaire, but gets it free: that's how people like him get to be rich.

The Daily Telegraph runs two interesting items on facing pages: a long plea by Barbara Amiel, herself Jewish, wife of the proprietor, stating the argument that some Jews (in this case the Simon Wiesenthaler Center and the ADL®, by their treatment of Marlon Brando) are actually increasing anti-Semitism, not reducing it.

But the principal item is a prominently featured Reader's Letter from a Dr John Fox, another leading Jew, on the controversy surrounding Oxford University being forced to return Dr Flick's money. In concluding this letter Fox reveals:

In 1991, on behalf of a Jewish academic body, I was asked to exert direct pressure on Macmillan to stop its reported publication of the Goebbels biography by David Irving. I refused, not because I agree with Irving's denials of the Holocaust-I don't-but because this seemed an unethical and immoral attempt to deny him freedom of speech.

To BOOKS ETC. IN Charing Cross Road. As we park near Foyles the manager of the Biography dept. runs out into the street, calling: "Mr Irving! I need more, we're running out!" He's sold 150 already.

Then to the next-door Waterstones: when asked if they want to stock copies, Wendy, the sickly-featured department chief, does not really think so, hinting at directions from above. Up to the Second Floor, where copies of Gerald Gable's "anti-fascist" smear sheet Searchlight are prominently featured on the counter.

The deputy chief of the History dept. says that "Alistair" has ordained that they will not order any books by me. "Yes," he confirms, "we have had several inquiries this week about Goebbels."

Craig Williams of Radio Four, Edinburgh, phones to tape an interview. He tries to rope in analogies with their local Professor Chris Brand, an academic geneticist running into familiar "correctness" problems over the IQ's of the difference races; I say we just hired an Asian girl, who is clearly of superior intelligence-which tends to bear out Brand's views.

That leaves Williams fioundering. "But what about the Blacks!" he screams, without realising that his very question brands him as a racist.

I phone Steve Wasserman at Random House, New York. He says he's read one third of the book. "The photos alone are worth the money," he says, but adds: "I am not very hopeful." He has too many people to persuade, but he will try his best.

Professor Francis Loewenheim at Rice University in Houston says he's discussed it with Gordon Craig, the noted historian at Stanford; after seeing what Loewenheim has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Craig agrees the book should be published.

At last I drive up to the northern Midlands. Excellent sales at the Manchester Waterstones; then on to Preston in Lancashire, where Askew's takes a bunch, and Lytham St Annes, where I persuade Holt Jackson Ltd to step up their order from 50 to 100. John Walsh at The Independent phones me, and mentions that Professor Donald Watt's review which they're publishing next week is also highly favourable.

In bed at Leeds at 7 p.m., feeling congested and coughing a lot. Has the truck's ventilation caused the mischief?

NOT FEELING AT ALL GOOD this morning; pneumonia returning? Austick's at the University takes one book, "for her husband," saying he likes all my books. Then down into the city. Austick's in the Headrow says, "We had a lot of inquiries 2 or 3 weeks ago, where were you then?" Where indeed.

Waterstones at No. 96 Albion Street has a Marxist manager, who has issued orders to take no books by me; I buy and identify a Deborah Lipstadt book. But Waterstones at No. 36 in the same street takes a bunch. Silly clowns these Marxists are: Politically adrift, and no land in sight for miles.

At Sheffield I have a pleasant mid-day except for the Meadowhall Centre, where an invisible female manager insists on the phone to the fioor manager that I make an appointment and return.

I say sarcastically, "Oh yes, I shall drive back from London to Sheffield especially to see her"-and sell either one or no book! At Nottingham I persuade J.M.L.S. to take five more: wow-ee. At Leicester, I walk into Waterstones in The Shires centre. The female in charge of the Biography section ooh's and aah's over the book and says she'll take a dozen, and will I speak with the History dept. too.

At the History desk, a male says he'll get the deputy manager. The latter gentleman, who identifies himself as Colin Orr-I need names to put on the Court pleadings!-states: "We have established a branch policy not to handle your books," or words to that effect.

When I ask why, he says: "I don't intend to get into a discussion with you, but I'll be happy to write them to you in a letter if you write." (I write him; he never replies).

I say that his Biography dept. has asked to order several. He says: "I am branch manager and I have decided that this branch will not sell your books." (I explain this to the lady, she looks sheepish, and confirms unhappily: "He is the manager.")

Orr also states that if customers wish to order books by me, they will not accept the order. Changing the subject, I ask if they have a copy of Deborah Lipstadt's book. Orr says: "The topic is closed," or words to that effect. Orr walks away, and a male gets the book, and sells it to me; I obtain all the necessary paperwork, write on the title page of the book in view of the assistant, then walk over to where Orr is hiding behind a bookshelf.

I say, showing him the Lipstadt book: "I draw your attention to the fact that I have just purchased this book in your branch."

"I have nothing to say," he says. "I am not going to get into a discussion." He imagines that the matter is therewith closed.

BEFORE LEAVING LIECESTER I buy a pink tricycle for Jessica.

Arrive back at London fiat at 7:10 p.m. Great excitement as the truck door is opened and Jessica sees the trike. There is an excellent review in today's Spectator.

Shortly a fax comes from Steve Wasserman, senior editor at Random House in New York, enclosing an article from yesterday's New York Post. Somebody has leaked that Random House are interested in goebbels. mastermind of the third reich. Who? I would not put it past X-.

Novak's letter is printed in Publisher's Weekly, who splash the fact that he has parted company with me. Most tactful of him. Wasserman warns me not to be optimistic about Random House.

In the mail there is a very generous letter from Tom Dunne, my (former) editor at St Martin's Press. He encloses a great review from the American Booklist. Late, but worthwhile. I write him:

Thank you so much for your kind words of April 17, and the clipping from Booklist: better late than never. As you probably know, the book has attracted 95% glowing reviews in the U.K., with endorsements from every leading historian.

I may be "self-publishing" the book, but I wiped the mainstream publishers off the front of the book review pages of The Sunday Times, Observer, Sunday Telegraph, and many others.

Gitta Sereny, fortunately, was hostile; I would not have liked to get praise from her. Her throw-away line in the Observer that "no reputable publisher will touch Mr Irving" will earn a Libel Writ for her newspaper next week.

As you will have seen in the New York Post, Random House are seriously considering picking up the pieces; if they do, they will earn the praise that rightfully should have gone to you and SMP. (To be realistic: I think there is a less than 50:50 chance that RH will actually sign, although most of their chiefs are in favour.)

Please stay in touch; when I'm in N.Y., lunch is on me.

A MR. BILL GLAUBER of the Baltimore Sun comes to pick up a book, he wants to accompany me on Monday out to Bristol.

In the evening Susie Mackenzie of the Evening Standard phones, can they interview me for a profile next week?

Wakened at 4:20 a.m. by Doug Christie to dictate phone greetings on his birthday to his 150-strong audience in Vancouver; I speak briefiy, hope I was coherent.
The Observer has not printed my Reader's Letter replying to Gitta Sereny's lies. I shall have no recourse but to sue them for the very serious libels.

We're running out of books fast. Set out for Somerset, arriving at the printers at 4:30 p.m.; I call at my older brother John's house, but he's on a pilgrimage to Mecca until the weekend.

I pick up 528 more books; the truck is laden down again. Drive in stately fashion back to London.

I phone Murray Pope in Australia. Jan Pope says the 200 I sent by air arrived yesterday, look good, and she's sending out review copies tomorrow.

Susie Mackenzie of Evening Standard comes to interview. Benté unfortunately is unfamiliar with the wiles of reporters. When La Mackenzie asks her one particularly vicious question about me, I interject and warn Benté that whatever she replies, the answer will be rewritten into her mouth, as tho' she has said it, question and all.

S M looks daggers at me; but I've been through it all before, and I tell the story of the journalist (later BBC reporter, later still pædophile, and after that criminal recordee) Clifford Luton who printed on May 1, 1959-yes, that story's thirty-seven years old-that I said to him, "You can call me a mild fascist if you like."

In fact Luton had asked: "It seems to me, you're some kind of mild fascist." To which I contemptuously and foolishly as it turned out replied, "You can call me what you like!" We live and learn-mostly the hard way.

At the High Court at 11 a.m., to issue the Writ against The Observer's publishers and Gitta Sereny; I serve it on them by post during the afternoon.

OUT TO BRENTWOOD AT 2:00P.M..; I send 502 copies of Goebbels and two boxes of Göring's to the boat to Australia.

Arriving back at the London fiat at 7 p.m., I learn from Benté that my third daughter, has just phoned: Josephine (my oldest) has had a serious accident and is in the Royal London Hospital with multiple fractures. They have been operating on her all day. She has been helicoptered to the hospital. Nobody can see her yet.

Feeling very depressed; images of Josephine as a child. They have operated on the broken legs, and are now working on the crushed vertebræ. I lie in bed, praying to the Lord, desperately sad for Josephine, who has had an awful life since 1980. How cruel the Lord can be.

Then it occurs to me that the Evening Standard may have some thoughtless words in the coming Profile, and I send a private and urgent fax to them at 1 a.m.

During the day James Hanning, the Standard's features editor, phones to put my mind at rest; an hour later, a huge bouquet of fiowers comes from the Evening Standard with a card expressing sympathy. I am astonished by their thoughtfulness.

The fight continues! I drive down to Somerset and pick up another pallet of books at the printers. Then on to Bath. The female at Waterstones in Milsom Street orders eight; but when I carry them in the Assistant Manager is already on the spot, another female, who says that they have a policy of not ordering books "by that author".

She explains, "We won't order books with those sort of ideas in them."

I ask what ideas, and has she read the book or even the magnificent reviews of it? Identifying myself I ask her name; she declines to give it ("What do you want my name for?"), but says that her manager is Amanda Bloss. They have however no Deborah Lipstadt book on offer.

KARL PH. ARRIVES; he says that Ewald Althans has been seen, he is out of jail: he has not served two years for his Thought Crime, then. A German government agent.

I drive north up the Ap;1 to Gateshead (the Metro Centre already has the books from us, mailed direct, I find). From Newcastle I telephone London: Benté says that Josephine is going to have one or both legs amputated. The news casts a cloud over the whole day.

Great hostility in the Newcastle bookshops. At Fenwick's department store, as I go down in the elevator, a man glimpses the book and says, "There's folks as don't think much of David Irving's opinions!" I say, "Well I agree with them-because I'm him!" The man goes bright red and apologises. I smile broadly and say I am accustomed to criticism. I give him the book and he asks me to autograph it.

I drive on northwards, and reach Edinburgh at around four p.m. A quick tour of the shops reveals that a total boycott has been organised by the Left.
Waterstones at No. 83 George Street refuses to touch the book; Jane Whitcomb is the History Buyer here.

I ask if they have the Deborah Lipstadt book; she checks the computer, confirms that there is one listed in their inventory, but they "cannot find it" when I ask to buy it. Won't save her: the law says, If it is on offer-.

I phone John Menzies, but he is out today. His secretary personally asked some months ago for a free copy of the book for the millionaire chief of the Menzies Group, saying he's a great fan.

I call up a reporter for Scotland on Sunday, and arrange for him to come at 5:45 p.m. for an exclusive interview. We meet in The George Hotel and talk for two hours.

He has the usual preconceived notions, but seems receptive enough. He asks where I'm heading to next, and I say: "Aberdeen-I was in Glasgow yesterday." This is a necessary security measure.

I spend the night with a film industry friend in Border Country. Supper with him at the pub at Leadburn. There is a brisk cold air.

Back to Edinburgh next morning. On the phone from London Chitra says that Waterstones in Cheltenham want another dozen, Hatchards in Piccadilly ten more. T.H.E. distributors have ordered thirty; gradually the big distributors are coming on line.

OVER TO GLASGOW: Pickerings, a little Christian bookshop, takes four. The manager says he is not going to be intimidated by anybody; all the same I tell him our standard policy, of replacing free any damaged merchandise.

At Waterstones' the History buyer gets the store manager, who comes, and says looking very worried that "David Irving's books like Hitler's War etc haven't sold in the past." (Then why are we reprinting that book?!) I respond that it is a question of display. If the books are hidden away, they do not sell, that is clear!

Over at John Smith & Co., the company's manager Willie Anderson doesn't look me in the eyes, but says, furtively, "We're not going to stock it. I'm not going to explain to you why, I don't have to explain why!"

I say, "That's quite right, you don't have to tell me why." (In fact one of his staff upstairs had just taken some.) They have no Deborah Lipstadt books in stock.

Then on to Dillons in Glasgow: here the history buyer Duncan Carman takes two Apocalypse '45, and suggests that Goebbels is one for Biography. I fetch the Apocalypse books in for him from the truck. As I leave to get the Goebbels, I notice from the corner of my eye a group of unkempt young men and women beginning to form up outside the shop, and start pointing. It is all very like the Richoux riot of July 12, 1992.

The Mob has arrived, the usual spotty-faced, unwashed, mean-faced, coarse-mouthed bunch of jostling, threatening lunatic left-wing screechers and thugs: the traditional enemies of the truth. Somehow they have found out that I am visiting Dillons. I suspect one of the staff has phoned for them.

I walk out through them, before they gather their wits, and without letting on that I have spotted them I head up Gordon Street, walking away from the truck, with its doors gaping open and boxes of my books inside.

I pause twice to look in shop windows-the refiection shows that the menacing throng surging along the on the far side of the road is growing in size, as they summon up reinforcements by hand-held telephones. Yes, they have all the modern accoutrements of street war: Who is paying for them? Who puts them up to this?

Things begin to look hazardous. I duck into the Central Station concourse, and walk into the Central Hotel foyer on the far side.
Within seconds, the Mob's first scouts saunter into the foyer, to find where I am: that accomplished, they post lookouts on all the exits and summon still more reinforcements. They do not realise that I have rumbled them.

I hand in my order book at the reception desk and ask the girl to look after it. "How long for?" she asks, surprised, and I say: "About half an hour-," and I add: "-Now call the police."

THE MOB BURSTS IN AT THIS POINT, but before the violence begins one of them whispers urgently: "He's already called the police."

Furious at this news, an unappetising woman screams at the hotel staff that they ain't seen nothing yet, because the rest are still on their way.

It takes an hour for police to restore order; the hotel staff are most co-operative. Meanwhile the deputy manager invites me to coffee upstairs, at the hotel's expense.

From the motorway I telephone the Scotland on Sunday reporter, and apologise for having misled him for security reasons yesterday. He presses: "Are you driving north up to Aberdeen now?" I murmur inconclusively-and head south to London. I have no obligation to reveal my movements to the press.

I arrive back home at 10:15 p.m.; not bad going. I averaged 70 to 80 m.p.h. A blank call on the answering machine. The phone exchange reveals that the caller-"at 19:59 hrs"-has withheld his number. I suspect it is our Scottish friends, still scouting. I hope it rains all day in Aberdeen tomorrow.

Vanity Fair has published a good article, though author Christopher Hitchens hedges his bets, no doubt in order to preserve his own career. A fax from Los Angeles informs me that he was also glimpsed on television, on the PBS Channel, defending me stoutly against a scummy journalist from the New York Post, a Mr Eric Breindl, a night or two ago.

There are letters from lawyers acting for The Observer and Gitta Sereny, entering an appearance in my libel suit against them; I'll read them tomorrow. I am worn out today.

I WORK ON THE DESIGN FOR a Bookseller advertisement for Goebbels. This turns into an hour with Jessica teaching her the letters of the alphabet, which I construct in perfect Roman outline for her.

She is enthralled, and calls out each letter as I am half-way finished. "S p; T p; K p; P", etc. What a bright girl. She knows them nearly all, but cannot make up her mind which tiny fist to hold the pen in, and her attempts to copy my letters are approximate to say the least.

She has yet to learn that the pen is mightier than the sword, and often many times more poisonous.

I COLLECT MY REPAIRED BICYCLE and put it in the truck. Deliver ten more books to Hatchards; I have to brake suddenly in Piccadilly, the three-quarter ton pallet of books tips bodily over and squashes the bike like a fiy. Aargh! I drive out to Book Shippers Association near London airport; untangle the mangled heap of books and load them onto a fresh pallet for shipment to Los Angeles.

The truck is lighter now.

I drive up to Birmingham to spend several days in the university, researching the diaries of Anthony Eden, our former foreign secretary and prime minister.
At first I find and use only the diaries of the various overseas conferences. Disappointed and puzzled at the prospect that that is all; but as I am packing to leave, the Librarian, to whom I have donated the Goebbels book, shows me the boxes with the real diaries. Much better, though Eden wrote only sporadic entries. It is clear I shall have to stay two more days in Birmingham.

Before leaving the university, I read the Eden Diaries as far as the notorious Jul. 6, 1944 Cabinet-and we see what Eden's decorous biographer left out -the references to Churchill's being "tight" at that historic meeting. There are also shocking examples of Eden's antisemitism: but then, educated sentiments about the Jews in 1941p;1944 ran very differently from now.

Among the mail in London is a demand from Simon & Schuster for $20,000 plus £4,000 or they will seize this apartment. The row over St Martins Press simmers on. A Mr W. has written them an appallingly antisemitic letter rebuking them for their behaviour with my book. I admonish him:

Firstly, although I understand the strength of your feelings about what St Martin's Press did to me - and believe me I was not happy about it either - I am not sure that your letter to McCormack will have helped me. He is likely to send copies to all his pals in the publishing world, which would result in me being blackened for ever. So, for my sake, go easy on the invective! Let's leave the language to the JDL and their ilk.

The four books I sold in Glasgow to Pickering & Co. come back today; Aaargh! But we write them-

Thank you for your kind and courteous letter; although you have not asked, we are of course enclosing £5 to cover your postal costs incurred in returning these books. Mr Irving spoke highly of the efficiency and friendly ambience of your book shop after his visit to Glasgow.

GERMAR RUDOLF ARRIVES IN LONDON from Spain, where he is living in exile from Germany.

Sentenced by the Stuttgart, Germany, criminal court on Jun. 23 last year, after an eight-month trial, to fourteen months in prison for issuing a scientific report on the permanence of cyanide compounds in brickwork, the young former specialist of the Max Planck Institute escaped to Spain, whose government has refused German requests to extradite such "criminals," and he is planning to move permanently to the U.K. Now he is reconnoitring jobs, homes, universities, etc. He has a twenty-one month old baby girl. I give what help and advice I can, but am very tired from working in the Public Record Office, and not very good company I am afraid.

Benté and I have been invited to dinner in the Painted Hall at Greenwich Naval College; Germar Rudolf, whom I find at the fiat on my return from the PRO, is press-ganged into baby-sitting Jessica, who puts up no fight.

Rudolf notices on an old envelope the name of Reinhold Elstner, of Munich. I tell him that Elstner first wrote to me on March 31, 1994, asking if I knew the identity of a wartime Luftwaffe pilot who defected to us, the enemy, taking the latest Me.109 fighter plane with him. I replied on June 15, 1994 that it was Count Baudissin, who later rose to high rank in the post war German air force. For two years Elstner was an active supporter of our Fighting Fund. I was sorry to get back the action report I sent him in June 1995 endorsed, "deceased".

Rudolf explains that Elstner was the 75-year-old war veteran and Sudeten German refugee who doused himself with gasoline and set fire to himself in a public square in Munich on Apr. 26,1995 to protest against the manner in which the Bonn government was succumbing to foreign interests, while his fellow-Germans were being subjected to "ceaseless slander and condemnation". He died twelve hours later.

None of the press reports I saw named this hero. The cowardly German press united to describe Elstner as a lunatic, and his disturbing last letter [see next page] was suppressed.

TODAY JOSEPHINE GOES INTO SURGERY for the amputations. I phone the hospital. The staff nurses confirms that my daughter has had her operation today. I ask for her to be told I have phoned.

One way and another, this has been a very distressing month.

A fax comes from Michael C. in France:

official: François Genoud committed suicide in Lausanne on the 30th May 1996 with the assistance of the local branch of 'Exit,' a Swiss association aimed at helping people to commit suicide. He drank one glass of water with some powder which put him asleep for ever.

I am upset to hear this. Genoud, variously described as a banker and as a lawyer, has attracted much derision over the years for proclaiming his continued loyalty to the name of Adolf Hitler and the cause which the National Socialists first espoused in 1933. More recently he is alleged to have funded the defence of some of the wrinkled ex-Nazis dragged before the courts in France.

I first met him on the shores of Lake Geneva over thirty years ago, in 1965, when I was hoping to buy from him the rights to publish in German Martin Bormann's private letters; back in the fifties, this shrewd little man had done deals with the surviving next of kin of Martin Bormann as well as of Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Negotiations with him always ended in deadlock however : He was always "in principal" in agreement, but never put ink to paper to settle.

He told me on that first occasion with a chuckle that when publisher Sir George Weidenfeld had asked him to whom he should pay the £40,000 fee for Hitler's Table Talk, from the Bormann documents, he had replied that he wanted two equal cheques: one made out to himself, Genoud, and one to Hitler's still living sister Paula. Weidenfeld, a devout Jew of Austrian origin, had choked, but had no option but to pay this huge sum to Hitler's kinswoman. (It is only fair to add that Weidenfeld hotly denies the story).

Running into me about twenty years ago in a Paris street François Genoud blandly admitted to me that he, Genoud, had himself forged the manuscript of the so-called "bunker conversations"-allegedly transcripts of Hitler's later table talks in February and April 1945, which were published as The Last Testament of Adolf Hitler with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper.

He refused to agree that this was blatant forgery-"It was the kind of thing that the Führer would have said, don't you agree!"

I deposited this spurious document in the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, but this has not stopped reputable historians from continuing to quote this "source" against me.

Now he is dead. He was a kindly old man who latterly fell into the clutches of an avaricious lawyer, the niece of Dr Hjalmar Schacht.

When I retrieved the Goebbels diaries from Moscow in June 1992, I offered him Danegeld of £20,000, one-quarter of the fee which the Sunday Times was contracted to pay me.

His lawyer held out for far, far more, and I had to remind her, through the crackling static of the phone-line from Moscow, that the London courts took a somewhat dimmer view of his "rights" to the diaries' copyright. In the recently discovered 1936 diary Goebbels told of selling precisely those rights to Nazi publishing house Franz Eher Verlag Nachf. in perpetuity; there was not much that Genoud could have bought from the family in 1956-so we argued.
The Sunday Times eventually had to pay £80,000 legal costs in warding off her claim; the newspaper thereupon reclaimed that amount from me, and-under pressure from New York and Toronto-refused to pay me the balance due to me.

Genoud himself was left saddled with nothing but legal costs and, as I chided him in a private letter, a "lost friendship."

BILL GLAUBER FROM THE BALTIMORE SUN finally comes to interview me. Little Jessica toddles in from time to time to make sure that he is still here, and rummages around in all my desk drawers, tossing out priceless photos, file cards and tapes in a successful attempt to distract me.

He stays two and a half hours, covers much ground but once again-sigh!-hovers, like a carrion crow, over the Holocaust.

I have never written a book on the subject, but that is all they want to talk about.

He is astonished to hear that I have published two new books this year; and aghast to hear that two more will hit the bookstands before the year is out-nuremberg, the last battle and churchill's war volume ii.

It is an optical illusion, I explain: I have not written four masterpieces in the space of twelve months; these books have been backed up for years while publishers and agents wrangled, until I myself have cut the Gordian Knot and handed them to Focal Point to publish, in editions better than any of them could put out themselves.

He asks what my next book will be, and I reply:

"Roosevelt's War. It has a major U.S. publisher, but don't expect me to identify him!"

During the day I receive by fax articles from the New York Times (Tina Rosenberg) and Washington Post (Richard Cohen) about the banning of Goebbels. Both now feel that the book should not have been cancelled by St Martins Press.

Oh, yeah? What hypocrisy. They stand by politely applauding while You-Know-Who terrorises SMP, they wait until the book is safely smashed in the USA and until buckets of glop have been poured over my reputation, then salve their own liberal consciences by printing throwaway lines like these.

La Rosenberg says that the book is "a Rolls-Royce of a book, with costly color photos." I shall use that quotation in our next campaign.

FLYING VIA MIAMI TO KEY WEST, I rework Chapter 18 of the Nuremberg book.

Both fiights in a lot of pain because of my head cold, a holdover from the medical disaster of the spring, as the plane repressurises on landing. The Virgin fiight attendant Miss Gwynn gives me a eucalyptus infusion to clear my head; like an idiot I drink it instead of inhaling, sticky half-dissolved gelcaps and all, and wonder why it has little effect.

London phones: there is a letter in the mail from bailiffs wanting to serve something "foreign" on me. Probably the Mannheim Court; yeay, freedom of speech!

A registered letter comes from Dr Ralf-Georg Reuth in Berlin, foaming with rage because I have thanked him in my Acknowledgements in the Goebbels biography. What a coward. He was chief of the Berlin bureau of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; recently he was booted out, to become chief of the Berlin bureau of the Axel Springer tabloid Bild.

He earns this reply:

Dear Dr Reuth,-My London staff, as well as my friends and I have searched the book Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich in vain for any reference to you which would have justified this outburst. Can you be more specific?

If either of us has cause to complain, it should in fact be me:p; You published the Goebbels diary extracts which I had exclusively and at great expense obtained in Moscow, both in your Piper-Verlag paperback edition and in the foreign editions of your biography; not only did you not give me in either work the credit for providing this material, but the head of Piper Verlag referred to me in a news bulletin and discussion on German television in despicable language ("Herrn Irving of all people etc.") soon after your publication.

SOMEBODY SENDS ME A PAGE from Time magazine, May 6. One extraordinary reader's letter is prominently featured:

I am a Jew whose parents lost their families in the Holocaust. I grew up in Israel among Holocaust survivors. Since I was a child, I have read every book I could find on Nazi Germany. I have tried to understand why and how the Germans came to carry out their plan for exterminating the Jews. I have read all of Irving's excellent books. He is no 'apologist for Adolf Hitler.' His words record the extermination of the Jews and provide evidence of Hitler's direct involvement. Irving is not an anti-Semite, nor is he a supporter of Hitler or Nazi Germany. His books, more than any others I have read, help explain what happened in Germany. If we are to prevent future exterminations, we have to eradicate hate. The process must start with free speech and the ability to discuss openly all aspects of history and express all viewpoints. Irving through his writing has made a large contribution toward preventing future Holocausts.

It is a consolation to think of six million Time magazines around the world containing this letter, from a Jew, vindicating everything I have worked for as an historian.

So the wheel of time continues to turn. Günter Deckert has just been sentenced to 20 more months in jail for having organised my lecture in Weinheim in 1990 [see this page].

Bill Glauber's article is published on June 17 in the Baltimore Sun and there is a very good feature article this morning in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Glauber's piece is the usual piece of craven journalistic hypocrisy. Such "friends" when they come to interview you, such warm handshakes, such fiattery: but the usual vitriolic mindslop intoxicates them the moment they take out their pens.

Glauber writes that "many of the British reviews were just as hostile as those in the United States"; what he does not say is that most of them, around 95 percent of them, were glowing with praise!

But the Sydney newspaper makes up for it: Peter Ellingsen has written a warm, understanding article that makes plain that I write the truth where I find it, whatever it is, regardless; people may not like the truths that I write, and that is why I am disliked.

At midday on Jun. 22 I cycle over to the Key West post office, a couple of hundred yards from Ernest Hemingway's home, to mail letters. In my P O Box there is a letter from general counsel for the Hearst Corporation in New York. It comes from out of the blue. It cancels the contract between me and William Morrow Inc. for the book Roosevelt's War and demands repayment of the 1990 advance ($30,000) "within two weeks."

Get back in line there!

I write to Morrow's editor Mr. Steve S. Power (now those are interesting initials!) and his editor-in-chief Darlene DeLillo asking them to return the copies of Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich which I sent them ten days ago. Why should they keep them?

Let's start getting tough at our end too.

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A Last Letter from One of Our Number
(before Burning Himself Alive)

Reinhold Elstner to the German People
Translated by Hans Schmidt

GERMANS in Germany,

in Austria, in Switzerland, and everywhere else in the world: Please awaken!

50 years of never-ending defamation, ugly lies and the demonization of an entire people are enough:
50 years of incredible insults to former German soldiers, of blackmail that has cost billions and of "democratic" hatred, are more than one can take
50 years of judicial zionist revenge are enough
50 years of trying to create rifts between generations of Germans by criminalizing the fathers and grandfathers are too much.

   A Niagara of lies and defamations inundates us. Since I am now 75 years old, there is not much left for me to do - but I can still seek death by self-immolation; one last deed that may act as a signal to the Germans to come to their senses.

   Even if through my deed only one German will awaken, and because of it will find the way to the truth, then my sacrifice will not have been in vain.

   I felt I have no other choice once I realized that even now, after 50 years, there seems to be little hope that reason would gain the upper hand.

   As someone driven from his home after the war, I always had one hope, that that which was granted the Israelis after 2,000 years, namely the right to return home would also be granted German expellees. What happened to the promise of self-determination promulgated in 1919, when millions of Germans were forced to live under foreign rule? To this day we have to suffer from these wrongs, and it wasn't the Germans who can be held responsible for it.

   I am a Sudeten German. I had a Czech grandmother, and on the other side Czech and Jewish relatives, some of whom had been incarcerated in concentration camps like Buchenwald, Dora and Theresienstadt.

   I never belonged to the Nazi party or to any other group that was in the slightest tainted by association with national socialism. We were always on the best of terms with our non-German kin, and when necessary we helped each other out. During the war, our food market and bakery was responsible for the supplying foodstuffs to the French prisoners-of-war and eastern workers living in the town. Everyone was dealt with fairly and at the war's end our business was not plundered because the French prisoners stood guard on it until they were repatriated to their own country. Our relatives who had been prisoners in concentration camps came already home on May 10, 1945 (two days after the hostilities had ceased), and offered their help. Of special assistance was my Jewish uncle from Prague who had seen the horrible blood bath that Czech partisans inficted on the Germans left behind there. The horror of these cold-blooded killings could still be seen in the man's eyes - a horror the likes of which this former prisoner of the Reich had not experienced during his incarceration.

   I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht of the Greater German Reich, fighting from day one on the Eastern front. To this I must add a few years of slave labour as a prisoner in the Soviet Union.

   I well remember the Kristallnacht of 1938: on that day I ran into a Jewish girl, a girl with whom I had been studying, and she was crying. But I was even more shocked when I saw in Russia how all churches had been desecrated, how they were used for stables and machine shops; I saw grunting pigs, bleating sheep, and hammering machines desecrating the holy places. Worst of all was to see churches being used as museums for atheism.

   All this was going on with the active connivance of the Jews, that very small minority of which so many members were acting as Stalin's executioners. Foremost amongst them was the Kaganovich family, seven brothers and sisters, who were such mass murderers that alleged SS-killers seem harmless by comparison.

   I was permitted to go home after my discharge from Russian prison camps (what a mockery to say "home" to a prisoner-of-war who has been expelled from his ancestral homeland.

   I now heard for the first time of the brutalities of the German concentration camps; at first there was nothing about any gas chambersor the killing of human beings by poison gas. On the contrary, I was told that the concentration camps at Theresienstadt and Buchenwald even had bordellos for the inmates.

   During the "Auschwitz trials" Prof. Martin Broszat of the Institute of Contemporary History [in Munich] stated that the famous "Six Million" figure was a purely symbolic one.

   Although Broszat also declared that there had been no gas chambers used for the killing of human beings in any camps on German Reich soil, for years alleged gas chambers were shown to visitors at Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and the like.

   Lies, nothing but lies to this day.

   Everything became very clear to me when I read dozens of books written by Jews and so-called anti-fascists.

   In addition, I was able to draw upon my own experience in Russia. I lived for two years in the hospital town of Porchov, where in our very first winter the danger of typhus epidemic arose, and all the hospitals and first-aid stations were deloused with what we called then "KZ-Gas" (concentration camp gas), namely "Zyklon-B".

   I learned there how dangerous it was to handle this poison gas even though I did not belong to the teams that fumigated the buildings. Ever since then I have had no choice but to regard all concentration camp memoirs that describe the alleged "gas chambers" as fairy tales.

   In 1988 the German TV broadcast a report on Babi Yar [near Kiev in the Ukraine] where it was stated that the SS had killed 36,000 Jews by stoning them. Three years later, a Mrs Kayser wrote in the Munich newspaper "tz"stating that these Jews had been killed by shooting, and that their bodies had then been burned in the deep crevasses. Dr Kayser mentioned a bookstore in Konstanz selling the book Shoa at Babi Yar.

   On the very day that this book arrived at my home, German TV reported from Kiev the latest findings of a Ukrainian commission at Babi Yar; they had discovered the remains of some 180,000 murdered human beings, all killed on Stalin's orders [i.e. before 1941].

The Germans were not responsible. But everywhere in the world one can still find Babi Yar monuments blaming the Germans for the killings there.

   Due to the facts as stated by Prof. Broszat, namely that we had been deceived about the occurrences in a dozen concentration camps, I myself am unwilling to believe the tales that are being told about the alleged happenings in the camps in Poland.
Nor do I accept believe the postwar accusations that we Germans are particularly aggressive. While Germany that kept the peace from 1871 to 1914, while England and France, the foremost democracies, conquered most of Africa and expanded their colonies in Asia.

   Meanwhile the USA fought Spain and Mexico, and Russia battled Turkey and Japan.

   In these matters I consider the government of the United States particular cynical since it was that country which twice this century crossed the ocean to attack Germany and convert us to "democracy".

   And this was a government which exterminated its native Indian inhabitants, and to this day treats its Black population as second-class citizens.

   During my years I met kind and helpful Jews not only among my relatives but also as a prisoner-of-war in Russia. In Gorki a female Jewish professor helped me back to health when I suffered pleurisy and severe eye problems.

   I had also heard many ugly things about this minority. Was it not Churchill who wrote in the London Sunday Herald ( Feb. 8, 1920):

"From the days of the Spartacus Weishaupt to Marx, Trotzky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldmann, there is a worldwide conspiracy busy to destroy our civilization, and to change our society on the basis of unhampered developments of ugly greed, and an impossible dream of equality of all.

"This conspiracy with its relentless undermining of every existing institution was able to engage a gang of unscrupulous people from the underworld of the larger cities of Europe and America to take over Russia, and make itself masters of this large empire. It is not necessary to overestimate the role which these godless Jews played in the establishment of Bolshevism."

(I hope it is in order for me to quote this recipient of the prestigious German Charlemagne Prize).

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson wrote:

"I am not certain what we should fear more, a street full of soldiers who are out to plunder, or a room full of writers who are used to lie."

Given what we have been through after 1918 and after 1945, we Germans ought to know whom we have most cause to fear!

München, 25 April 1995 Reinhold Elstner

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Write to Action Report or to David Irving and his Fighting Fund (DIFF) at:
P O Box 1707
Key West, FL 33041, USA

Or to: 81 Duke Steet, London W1M 5DJ, England

Herewith

You are doing great. Keep it
up. Am looking forward to
your action report #10.

R W, Oklahoma City.

A few weeks ago I transferred DM50 to your account in Essen, Germany; payment came back because of "incomplete details," which is of course Unsinn. I'm trying again.

H D, Glinde, Germany.

Action Report says: As you say, Unsinn-nonsense. But this bank, where Mr Irving has banked for 35 years (ever since he was a steelworker in the Ruhr), has recently made several attempts to close down his account forcibly, because he once printed his account number in Action Report. When Mr Irving queried this, the bank mailed to him the latest copy of AR, intercepted by the German postal censorship authorities. Fourth Reich! Non-German citizens will be astounded to hear that under leftwing pressure, German banks have begun systematically closing down accounts to harass their politically out-of-line clients.

German public prosecutors have a track record of seizing bank accounts of people they dislike, and confiscating their funds: Mr Irving's account cannot be seized or confiscated, as he keeps it permanently in debit. The bank has decided not to close it.

ISSUE-ORIENTATED

Can you send a brochure explaining the work of David Irving's Fighting Fund, a kind of "This is who we are, this is what we do," explanation? Along with a classmate at college I have become very issue-orientated and we are not content with the "answers:" of the big political parties nor their media promoters. An extra copy will for my classmate will be given to her.

L A, Arlington, Massachusetts

[We get many such requests; we send them all ar-it's the best way for people to see what the struggle is about. In 2 x 2 words: Free Speech. Without Hindrance.]

A particularly good read.

A McI, Kent, England

SURVIVAL

Although only a child during World War 2, in Malta, where my parents lived in a tiny village called Luqa where the aerodrome was, and where my father was the G.P., I remember well coming out of our private shelter in our garden and finding our house had been hit.

We grew up using the end of the war as a point of reference to indicate the passing of time, as one would use AD or BC. I remember my father and uncles heatedly discussing politics. I've always felt that the only people who gained anything out of a devastating war were the Zionists, by the commandeering of Palestine thanks to Churchill.

By using the word Holocaust they can subjugate whole nations to pander to their every whim-even trivial things such as the incident recently at the Palace Pier in Brighton with the word Zyklon on one of the helter skelters. [See page ···]

M H, Swansea, Wales.

Auschwitz Survivor

From 1943 to the end of the war I served with the Luftwaffe in both west and east. At the collapse, I was in Jägerndorf in the former Czechoslovakia. I managed to withdraw as far as the Moldau with some comrades, but I was turned over by partisans to the Russians. We were marched 35 or 40 km a day without food until Auschwitz, from where we would be sent by train to Russia.

We were fed first in Auschwitz for two or three weeks so we wouldn't die on the journey to Russia.

In Auschwitz I met a Jewess from Waldenburg-my own home town. She assured me she had been happier working under the German guards than the Russian.

In Russia I spoke with a soldier who had this to say about Auschwitz. SA few Wehrmacht staff officers there had asked the Russian commandant in front of all the men about the gas chambers. His reply was: nix gaskammer rabotty.

The permanently persecuted minority could have got into the camps even then and get an international commission to do what Ernst Zündel later did when indicted in Toronto.

G F, Québec

Action Report says: Be that as it may: the key question about Auschwitz which needs to be investigated in depth and at length is this: who dynamited the crematoria in 1945 (which Holocaust historians identify as the gas chamber buildings)? The withdrawing Nazis before mid-January 1945, or the invading Russians after? The BBC, in a documentary on the crumbling ruins of Auschwitz stated quite bluntly that it was the Russians.

STUNNING

What a stunning biography of Dr Goebbels you have produced! The style you have presented the masterpiece in is truly splendid. I am looking forward to this study with the same anticipation of all of your works that I possess. I am a great admirer of your works and deeply appreciate all you are doing. It is some-thing I will treasure.

J N, Wellington, Kansas

The story of Bristow and Droege [see AR#9] was completely new to me. I can only congratulate you for your excellent action report. Enclosed is my contribution for your Fighting Fund.

O G R, Calgary, Alberta

UNEXPECTED

I was expecting a simple newsletter but this was much more impressive and very informative.

J K, Illinois
I do not have TV but happened to read the Radio Times when the Horizon item on Auschwitz was shown.

[On May 9, 1994 the BBC television programme Horizon showed "Blueprints of Genocide", a much-hyped report on the documents found in Soviet archives which-the Exterminationist historians claim-prove that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz. The programme was also shown several times on PBS television in the United States, and elsewhere around the world.]

The description in the Radio Times suggested that they had discovered in Moscow drawings showing the plant by which the Germans incinerated thousands of people per day.

So, being a retired draughtsman/engineer, I sent for their booklet and studied their drawings for feasibility.

The booklet has however no new drawings; there is an early scheme for the crematoria Krema 2 and Krema 3. The stair on the left was subsequently, it seems, put on, the end of a very long underground room. [The mortuary staff would have needed some means of entering].

The photo on page 3 seems to be of Krema 4 looking north, Birkenau. On the drawing on page 11 I can make out the word Aufzug, meaning "lift" but cannot see the word Rutsch [chute], against what seems to be a spine off which the stair is cantilevered.

Page 15 is absurd: as if a gang could dig up and burn 100,000 corpses! What the Horizon booklet says about the Krema 2 and 3 being near the railway and claiming that people walked straight off the trucks, down the stair into the gas chambers, needs to be looked into. [It is not born out by aerial photographs].

The interviews were very contrived. Nor is it surprising that firms should have tendered for the supply of plant and buildings, even the retorts for crematoria. The booklet alleged that forklift trucks were to be used for "lifting bodies". It seems a monstrous injustice that the head of the firm which supplied insecticide, Zyklon, was executed and that the head of the firm which supplied retorts for the crematoria was sent to prison in Russia were he died.

Incidentally: at the time of the recent VE Day celebrations The Times said that the Government has sent an information pack to every school, and it mentioned that the Holocaust Educational Trust has sent the film Schindler's List to every secondary school in the country. The Charity Commission told me that this Trust is led by Sir Ivan Lawrence MP.

R T, Kings Lynn, England

[Lawrence, a thick-lipped and unpleasant specimen of a Member of Parliament if ever you saw one, first came to our notice when he appeared as a barrister to defend Gerald Gable, head of the gang of Jewish arsonists and burglars known as Searchlight, for breaking into historian David Irving's home, armed with a stolen Post Office ID, in 1963; Gable gained a criminal conviction and has persecuted Irving, who caught him red-handed, ever since. Thirty years later Lawrence headed a bunch of venal MPs who tabled an Early Day motion attacking Irving in the House of Parliament for issuing the Leuchter Report; such a motion is a convenient way of smearing ordinary citizens without fear of reprisal.]

THIN BLUE LINE

I'm the proud possessor of a fire-engine red three-dollar David Irving lecture ticket for Latimer Hall, University of California at Berkeley (UCB) Feb. 3, 1995 seven p.m. Someday when UCB, "the mother of the Free Speech Movement", stops dragging its feet I'll be able to use this treasured item. I took the abuse that night including being kicked by an obese traditional enemy from the Spartacus League but neither that witch nor her 100s of cohorts could dislodge me from the lecture entrance (blocked by the "thin blue line".) I'd do it all over again if necessary!

R C, San Francisco.

Are you aware of the book West German Reparations to Israel by Nicholas Balabkins? Since East Germany was part of the Soviet Bloc, it never

Opinion

Chutzpah:

What, Us? An International Conspiracy?

THE GOEBBELS BOOK SCANDAL

Death Threats to New York Publisher Lead to Setback for Real History

David Irving Lawsuit Targets NY Publisher Who Ran Out on Truth

Inside Story

The Life and Death of "Dr Goebbels"

How a Powerful U.S. Lobby Killed that Book

By David Irving

A Last Letter from One of Our Number (before Burning Himself Alive)

Reinhold Elstner to the German People Translated by Hans Schmidt

GERMANS in Germany,

ISSUE-ORIENTATED

SURVIVAL

Auschwitz Survivor

STUNNING

UNEXPECTED

THIN BLUE LINE

Death Threats to New York Publisher
Lead to Setback for Real History

David Irving Lawsuit Targets
NY Publisher Who Ran Out on Truth

A Last Letter from One of Our Number
(before Burning Himself Alive)

Reinhold Elstner to the German People
Translated by Hans Schmidt