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AR #13, Dec. 1, 1997
BY DAVID
IRVING
PART TWO
 ORKOUT
IN THE EVENING, and supper at the Rusty Anchor. Increased weights
and distances. Fit again.
Wanting some kind of decision
on Goebbels, I again phone Harcourt Brace in San Diego, but Dan Farley's
secretary says he's in New York.
I send this fax to Benté around midday:
Tomorrow please phone the
Public Record Office, Kew and ask if they have an information sheet
on the recent releases of Bletchley Park ("Ultra") intercept files,
particularly about the killing of Jews on the eastern front.
As I cycle over to the Rusty Anchor a spectacular
thunderstorm begins. Lightning strikes all round, but my time is apparently
not yet up.
THEN IT IS TIME TO RETURN to
London. I check into a cheap hotel on Miami Beach for the night, half
a mile from the houseboat where Andrew Cunanan shot himself two weeks
ago. Now boarded up.
At the airport I pay $200 for excess
baggage - all those books - and sweat pints repacking the trunk at the
check-in desk to reduce the weights to within the statutory limits.
Plane lands at Heathrow at nine a.m. Back at Duke Street
flat at midday. Welcome home. Jessica and Mama both beautiful.
TO THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE outside London; starting work
there at 10 a.m. I meet here Dr John Fox, an academic who used to edit
the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies - until he fell foul of higher
authority there because of his immutable opinions. He is researching
the "Ultra" files for Richard Breitmann, a professor at Washington.
I make good finds. It is quite obvious that documents relating to Pearl
Harbor and to the 1942 assassination of the French Admiral Darlan have
been removed from the archives.
The staff fail to locate
one of Churchill's files on Japan, for which I have been asking for
ten years; it was originally sealed for fifty years - now it is 1997,
and they say it's missing. They privately hint that it has been completely
withdrawn. It is about Japanese oil supplies from the Philippines, September
1941. A key issue before Pearl Harbor.
In the mail there
is a two-paragraph letter from Der Spiegel's lawyers addressed to Focal
Point Publications, asking that they desist from issuing the Spiegel
lampoon as it infringes their "legally protected" magazine logo. Operation
Stable-Door. FPP could answer (but won't) that my reputation was also
legally protected before they decided to smear it.
The
Daily Telegraph reports that a "Nazi mistress" has been found, namely
Lida Baarova, living in Salzburg, Austria, with Parkinson's disease.
If they had read my goebbels book in 1996, they would have "found" her
then!
Jessica burbling and running around, full of vitality.
IN THE POST is an anonymous two-hundred
deutsch-mark contribution to the Fighting Fund from Germany. The sender
encloses a card merely reading, "Greetings from Dülmen."
I know who it is - and so, probably, do the German security authorities,
as the envelope is postmarked, not Dülmen, but "Briefzentrum 45", one
of "democratic Germany's" regional letter-censorship offices.
SUNDAY AUGUST 31, 1997. I rise to the stunning news that
Diana Princess of Wales has been killed in a car crash in the small
hours of this morning, at the side of her Arab playboy/amour Dodi Fayed.
Later news bulletins say that the car was being chased by photographers,
and they were trying to escape. The driver died as well.
The car, a Mercedes, was flattened into a tangled wreck: what was she
doing in a cheap foreign car? Life, and death, in the fast lane. Her
French driver was heavily intoxicated. After campaigning valiantly against
all the grotesquer forms of death, like AIDS and anti-personnel mines,
the princess is slaughtered by one of the most common causes of all:
l'ivresse. What a senseless end to such a charmed life. I, and all our
family, are stricken by the news.
The radio is playing
sombre music all day in tribute. The news bulletins are full of condemnation
of the "paparazzi", the photographers who chase the Royals. A phoney
war: The media vs. the paparazzi - as though they are not one and the
same: the photographers would not do it if the media were not paying
the big prices for their candid photographs. Hypocrisy Sunday.
THIS LETTER GOES to Prof. Klaus Herrmann in Montréal:
The latest ADL brochure is
interesting, though why they repeat the canard that I ever (allegedly
in 1959, nearly forty years ago!) called myself a "mild fascist"
I cannot understand - but of course, I do understand, quite fully.
The ADL tone is suddenly almost respectful, perhaps
because they have got wind of the legal steps I am preparing to
take against them in the US District Court.
I am
currently reading at the Public Records Office the originals of
the German police signals intercepted by the British wartime codebreakers;
highly interesting. Very many references to, and cipher signals
from, Auschwitz (Höss, Liebehenschel etc), but nothing whatsoever
about gassings.
Puzzling? I do get however a slightly
odd feeling that the typhus epidemic was deliberately set by us,
the Allies, as the codebreakers were required to track its progress
and report. There is hard evidence of this in Combined Chiefs of
Staff records of 1943 - namely boasting by the Polish Home Army
to this effect.
I wrote to Prof. Jan van Pelt at
Waterloo (see action report #12); he has not so far deigned to reply.
A poor show, we English would say.
IN THE EVENING an endlessly verbose German, Herr G S, comes
round; the appointment is for six p.m., so he rings the bell at five-thirty
as I am still signing scores of letters. Aaargh.
What
does he want? I tell him to his face that I trust nobody from Germany
nowadays. As far as I am concerned they are all agents of the Verfassungsschutz
(Office for the Protection of the Constitution). I almost wrote Verflschungsschutz
(Protection of Fakery).
 LEAVE
FOR CAMBRIDGE at ten a.m.; researching at Churchill College archives
all day. Around mid-day I find what I suspect to be the final proof
that the British foreign office received the notorious "winds message"
(the final tip-off re Pearl Harbor) on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.
An irritating fax from Ernst Zündel, declining to pay for the one hundred
nuremberg books I have sent him.
He gets this well-earned
reply:
I fully understand your feelings. I too have
been under attack, ever since 1989 - when I came to Toronto to give
evidence on your behalf. In consequence of that incident, my career
has been systematically destroyed by the same people who have been persecuting
you. I have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in author's income,
as a direct consequence of helping you. But I have not mentioned it.
When I sent you the Nuremberg books, in which you had
previously expressed great interest, I wrote saying that if you did
not wish to sell them, you could tell me and I would take them off you
when I next come to Niagara Falls, USA.
ALL
DAY at the public Record Office. I now search the file kept by J
C Sterndale Bennett of the Foreign office on all the queries he received
in 1945 from the U.S. State Department for copies of British secret
documents needed for the Congressional Pearl Harbor inquiry. The file
covers precisely the same period as the two incriminating letters to
and from Sterndale Bennett which I found in secret wartime U.S. embassy
files years ago, but there is no trace of them here. My conclusion:
they have been removed.
Back at Duke Street at 5:50
p.m. A two-page fax has come anonymously from - somewhere - at 3:02
p.m. It is the top (signed) copy of a letter from the President of the
German foreign Intelligence service, the feared Bundesnachrichtendienst
(BND), addressed to Horst Eylmann, chairman of the German parliamentary
committee on legal affairs, refusing indignantly to get involved in
the case of the "notorious" (Berüchtigt) David Irving, as it would oblige
their Dienst to bring up certain matters which would not just do a disservice
to the interests of the Federal Republic but would be highly detrimental
to them.
What an extraordinary document, and who is
the kind Samaritan who sent it to me? And how to use it? I phone my
lawyers and discuss it with them; they agree with my interpretations.
TELEVISION THIS EVENING shows moving scenes as Diana's coffin
is transferred from St James Palace to Kensington Palace, to provide
a longer state-funeral route than the one which that muttonhead Sir
Paul Condon, Metropolitan Police commissioner, has ordered.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews and their "Community Security
Trust" - their sinister secret army of two thousand paramilitary thugs
- have now both written to me letters (each signed by the same devious
executive, Mr Michael Whine) denying they hold records on me "as defined
by the Act"!
Not good enough; they are all hardened
liars, but how to get them to come clean?
THE
DAY of Princess Diana's funeral. We are awakened by the police helicopters
that have been hovering over the West End all week, scouring the rooftops
for IRA snipers.
The one bright spot of the week has
been to see Gerry Adams' bearded contortions as he is asked, again and
again, by American television journalists about the IRA's plot, five
or six years ago, to assassinate the princess. Every word his thick
lips utter is a desecration of the beautiful Irish brogue.
I go for breakfast outside Ponti's - a raisin danish and pot of tea.
After a while the tall woman with cheaply dyed brown hair who owns the
tailor's shop walks past and glares at me.
For the last
five years she has hissed sieg-heil and given a Hitler salute every
time Benté walks past. Benté has put up with this indignity. I have
never spoken to the woman in my life before, but today I follow her
into the cafÈ and quietly say: "I'd be grateful if in future you'd refrain
from saying offensive things to Benté every time she walks past. It
strikes me as being very common behaviour."
As she walks
out past my table a few minutes later she screeches, having reached
a safe distance, "They say the good die young. It's a pity. It should
be you in that coffin this morning."
Just as the screech
starts an elderly English lady (she confides to me afterwards she is
seventy-five) is teetering out of the cafe. The tirade hits her in full-face.
"I beg your pardon?" she exclaims to the tailoress,
astonished. "Not you," screams the tailoress. "Him. He's a Nazi!"
I leave the two ladies to sort out their misunderstandings.
Just as Adams is a disgrace to the Irish, some Jews are a disgrace to
their own benighted race.
During the morning's funeral
service we are interrupted by phone calls - from my lawyers, now expressing
doubts about the authenticity of the "BND" letter.
At
12:15 p.m. we rush to the corner of Oxford Street where the cortËge
is due to turn north; but although immense crowds have gathered, the
police soon dispel us with word that the cortËge has left the pre-arranged
route and headed north from another corner.
I am concerned
about one aspect of the "BND letter": it has no Eingangsstempel (received-stamp)
or other endorsement of any kind. How so? Originated at BND and copied/leaked
immediately there? (Or a fake!)
To quote Adolph Berle,
"I think there's some hard lying going on somewhere." If we issue something
and it turns out to be a forgery, it will harm us immensely, which is
why absolute clarity must be established first.
Heavy
traffic on the way to the Public Record Office, as all the Royal parks
are still closed.
I now find that there is no Japan
file in Anthony Eden's papers, FO.945: all very mysterious. All the
other countries, and the enemy powers in particular, are represented.
I must ask Birmingham university if their set also has a gap.
A FAX COMES overnight from Joe H. in Sydney: I was severely
libelled by a Hungarian Holocaust survivor on Channel Nine television
last night. But I am still banned from Australia - I am powerless to
defend myself.
In the Cambridge Churchill College archives
I finish reading General Sir Ian Jacob's diary (Martin Gilbert either
did not read it fully, or left out the bits which in his view reected
discredit on Winston).
I call for the diaries of A
V Alexander (his First Lord of the Admiralty), and find that the heavy,
legal-sized, gold-lettered, handsome, locked, leather-bound volume contains
just a dozen entries from Jun. 15 to 21, 1942; it ends three pages later,
leaving 400 pages blank.
Yes, it takes daily discipline
to write a proper diary. As Dr Goebbels would know, too.
HAVE
A HEADACHE. it gets so bad that I have to sleep with my head in
my hands in the archives for half an hour. I leave at four and sleep
in the car before risking the ninety-minute drive back to London. Back
at six-thirty p.m. Another heap of letters and faxes. Roop quit for
three months today to have her baby. Three months' maternity leave on
full pay. That's better than Benté got.
I drive up to
Cambridge early, and finish there. The Churchill papers are in fact
very meagre; the best stuff has been withdrawn by the authorities -
as have all the most important files of the H Montgomery Hyde collection,
relating to our wartime monkey-business in the United States.
Fax from P. during the day: the signatory of the "BND" letter does indeed
exist, and is at the Pullach headquarters of the Dienst. Curiouser and
curiouser. I shall therefore fire off the first two letters as planned
(to Herr Eylmann and the BND man himself).
I put Jessica
to bed at nine and read four nursery books to her. I am washed-out,
no work done. I do phone Daniel Farley in San Diego, however, and he
breaks it to me that after three months' consideration of goebbels.
mastermind of the third reich, he is about to write to me setting out
"the problem": it has passed all the initial stages - marketing, etc.,
- but neither of the two editors he tried has felt he is up to the "problems"
it will face; one editor, he implies, has proven particularly difficult
(he does not identify him).
I commiserate, saying I
appreciate that it will take "a heart of steel" in an editor to face
the renewed onslaught that will result from publishing goebbels in the
U.S.A. This result is, frankly, quite anticipated, and does not depress
me at all.
Long phone call with Stefan W. He is going
on trial in Dresden, Germany, for "forming a terrorist group" there,
Bonn's latest means of suppressing free speech; the police have seized
all my books from his shelves (published by the country's leading publishers)
and intend to get them declared illegal!
He says that
Ewald Althans, the government-agent-turned neo-Nazi, has been sprung
from jail, bailed by one of his homosexual friends, Thomas B. of Munich.
Althans turned up at a recent political demonstration, photographing
all the demonstrators from the outside!
LIE
AWAKE worrying for three or four hours. Today's Daily Telegraph
publishes a monstrous caricature of Charles Saatchi, the millionaire
advertising-agency chief who has put his obscene collection of "art"
on display at the Royal Academy; the Saatchi exhibition is causing much
public disorder, with public picketing among others by the mothers of
child-victims killed by the subject of the biggest painting, Myra Hindley.
The Telegraph's artist published a similar portrait
of me four or five years ago; it was sober, respectful, and well executed.
The Saatchi caricature is equally accomplished, but rather dwells upon
the gentleman's long, hooked nose and other Central European features.
Sure enough, the next day's Telegraph carries a thunderous letter from
Michael Whine's chief, Neville Nagler, president of the Board of Deputies
of British Jews , fulminating at the Saatchi picture as portraying the
ugliest possible stereotype of a Jew.
For a moment
I am tempted to write a reader's letter along these lines - "Few of
us are secretly happy with the looks that the Lord has granted us, but
I doubt that writing letters to the newspapers is the way to do anything
about it."
I decide on balance against it, however.
Years ago I concluded that the reason we are so displeased, for example,
with our photographs, is that we are accustomed to seeing ourselves
in mirrors. Look at the picture in a mirror, and all comes right.
I try this with the Saatchi picture: he still looks
unlovely to me, but then perhaps there is something wrong with me, and
Mr Nagler is right all along. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
All day at the Public Record office until seven p.m. Excellent material
on the Darlan assassination, which really begins to stink. Who dunnit?
I suspect: Eden, behind Churchill's back (and against his wishes).
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, reading which is my regular morning
indulgence, brings to light an unexpected and unsavoury element in the
murder of a British tourist in Israel six weeks ago. An English girl
and her boyfriend were hitchhiking by night across the Negev desert
- yes, love is blind - when they were given a lift by a man, who shortly
turned them out of the car and shot them both at pointblank range. The
boy was killed outright; the bullet passed through the girl's face from
left to right but she survived, though unable to describe the killer.
The newspapers unanimously described him nonetheless as "an Arab Israeli"
- i.e., one of the dispossessed. Thus the edgling state was momentarily
spared embarassment.
A month later however the gunman
was arrested. The police had harboured their own suspicions all along
- the killer was one Daniel Okev, a local Jewish psychopath.
Now today's newspaper reveals that the killer's lawyer David Yiftach
is claiming that his client had been traumatised by his experiences
as an Israeli commando (stormtrooper) recruited into the army's elite
killing unit known as rimon (pomegranate). Asked if he had personally
killed Arab opponents, Okev snarled: "Do you think that I spent three
years in the unit playing backgammon?" Indeed not.
From
1970 to 1973 he had cruised the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip liquidating
Palestinians from a hit list supplied to him by the Israeli government.
Killing had become meaningless to him. "He was killing terrorists all
the time," said his lawyer. "Killing became very easy."
Linguistic confusions, like the use of the word "terrorist," also seem
to have become easy in that troubled land.
SPEAK AT MY OLD SCHOOL, Brentwood, for the first time in five years.
The new headmaster greets me, less of a wimp than his predecessor who
banned my lecture at one day's notice, under the usual outside pressures,
in 1992. The audience, of about forty boys and girls includes the Miss
Myers whose parents have this time threatened the school with violent
demonstrations if I am allowed to speak.
Needless to
say, nothing materialises - against either me or her. The rules seems
to have changed since I first attended this school fifty years ago.
In those days of course it was all-male.
Train back
to London at 10:38 p.m. A young man walks down the carriage to talk
to me, having recognised me: he was at the same school, is now at Oxford
studying English. I did not catch his name, but he gets a Nuremberg
book as a gift from me. Tired of carrying these things around.
ORK
ON DISCOVERY for the Observer-Sereny libel action, finally completing
the list at four a.m.: 1,842 items, a sixty-nine page document.
I sleep an hour during the day on the sofa, with Jessica happily jumping
up and down on my stomach on some pretext or other.
An oily letter goes to the new Federal German ambassador in London,
Gebhard von Moltke:
Your Excellency, May I be
among the first Englishmen to welcome you to your new posting.
I have had an engraving and a photograph of two
of your illustrious family forebears [von Moltke] hanging on my
study wall here in Grosvenor Square for the last thirty years.
It would honour me if you would accept as a gift the enclosed book
- the first I ever wrote, in 1961, and published many times in Germany
by Ullstein, Bertelsmann, Rowohlt, Heyne and other houses under
the title Der Untergang Dresdens.
I was one of
the first to contribute to the fund for the reconstruction of the
city's Frauenkirche, in 1989, [it was flattened in the 1945 RAF
air raid] and I have of course contributed large quantities of records
to the collections of the Bundesarchiv, and of the Institute of
Contemporary History in Munich, which I collected as a result of
my travels.
His Excellency does not have the manners to reply.
Mario S. phones me from Rome and asks me to write to Erich Priebke in
prison, and commend him for his upright bearing in the military court.*
[Extradited from Argentina after a campaign by ABC television anchorman
Sam Donaldson, Priebke has been given a prison sentence after being
tried twice for the same offence - participation in a reprisal operation
in which Jewish and communist hostages were executed after the murder
of German troops ambushed in wartime Rome.]
ALL
AFTERNOON WORKING on final editing of Churchill's War, Vol. II:
Triumph in Adversity.
The Southend Evening Echo
publishes a loud wail from "a leading Southend Jew," solicitor Mr Alan
Gershlick - where do they get these names? - against Brentwood School
for having allowed me to lecture to sixth-formers. "Their methods of
teaching need to be questioned," he writes. "I do not understand why
they have to invite a Nazi apologist to the school when there are many
other fine speakers around."
The headmaster however
rejects his criticism.
The newspaper does not mention
that this was my old school, and that I have spoken there for twenty
years, twice a year, before the traditional enemies of free speech began
their campaign to silence me.
I am also obliged to send
this letter to Finland's leading newspaper, the Helsingin Sanomat, whose
journalist Sole Lahtinen has put a new spin on the Hitler Diaries scandal,
by clumsily alleging that I forged them! Confusion confounded by confusion!
He stated:
".... A controversial historian
David Irving supplied 'diaries', which were at first supposed to
be written by Adolf Hitler, to the international press for a considerable
sum of money at the beginning of the 80s. Later it turned out that
they were made by an antique dealer Konrad Kujau and they were fakes."
As I point out in my Reader's Letter (which the
Finnish newspaper does not publish):
This is a total reversal
of the facts. May I ask you to be so good as to publish a correction?
Two Germans, Gerd Heidemann (a well-known Der Stern
journalist) and Konrad Kujau, a common forger, were later convicted
for faking the Adolf Hitler diaries. When they were shown to me
in 1982 I at once detected that they were forgeries. Der Stern (Hamburg)
and The Sunday Times (London) had however paid between them $5 million
for the diaries, and they decided to publish the "diaries".
At Der Stern's press conference in Hamburg announcing the publication,
on Apr. 25, 1983 I was the only person to denounce the diaries as
forgeries, as the caption to the Associated Press photo [which I
enclosed] makes plain.
N
THE AFTERNOON a phone call from James Bacque. He says that the daughter
of Liebehenschel, purportedly one of the less evil commandants of Auschwitz,
is living in California, and has written a manuscript. Would I like
to see it? Indeed I would.
Benté bought herself a smart
jacket for a parents' meeting at school; the teachers say that Jessica
is "of genius quality" - streets ahead of all the other children. My
heart bursts with pride over her and her mother.
AT
THREE A.M. MY ATTORNEY Ed Wall phones from Australia. Apologises
that he has lost yet another Melbourne lawyer, David Guthrie, who pleads
that his secretary, a Jewish girl, has threatened to resign if he does
not drop our libel case against their prime minister, John Young.
I have been damaged badly by all this shilly-shallying.
Flight to Amsterdam. I begin reading the Ian Mitchell book, The Cost
of a Reputation, the real history of Lord Aldington's two-million pound
libel action against Count Tolstoy, the crusading historian. Tolstoy
had called him a war criminal (altho' it is well known that there were
no war criminals whatever on the Allied side).
The manner
in which certain British army and foreign office files vanished from
the Public Record Office for the precise duration of the Tolstoy trial
is scandalous, and does seem to me like a perversion of the course of
justice. The actual story of what happened - the British army's handover
of Yugoslav refugees and Cossack troops to their certain deaths in April/May
1945 - is truly horrendous. Harold Macmillan and Brigadier "Toby" Low
(British Army V Corps, now Lord Aldington) acted without a shred of
compassion.
At Schiphol airport, in the otherwise deserted
Business Class lounge where I am to meet a good friend, I detect a man
seat himself at the table behind me, the closest seat to mine, and he
stays there throughout my conversations.
Four p.m.
flight back to Heathrow. I walk from Green Park back to Duke Street
in pouring rain. I have bought a huge box of Dutch colouring pencils
for Jessica, and they are a real wow for her. Then I prepare for tomorrow's
court hearing.
TEN A.M. THE JUDGE HEARS my
application and makes an order that The Observer and Gitta Sereny must
furnish their list within fourteen days.
Problems are
beginning for Dr John Fox. He has been badly misquoted by The Daily
Telegraph, and the Jewish Chronicle is now taking up his "case." He
writes me:
You might also be interested
to learn that I am having great difficulty in obtaining from the
American publishers of Deborah Lipstadt's book an explanation as
to who wrote the nonsensical statement on the back cover that 6
million Jews were killed in "Nazi concentration camps."
As I pointed out, there is no support in the text of the book for
that misleading statement. From Lipstadt herself, I received some
time ago - because of something I am writing on the politicisation
of "the Holocaust" - a rather weak explanation that "someone" at
the publishing house did this without reference to her. That I find
difficult to believe.
A GOOD DAY AT THE PRO. I find more files
that are, significantly, still closed. On one Dec. 1942 document Anthony
Eden heavily scratches out a sentence, writing in the margin that it
is too secret to leave undeleted (in a conversation with his protÈgÈ
General de Gaulle, shortly before Admiral Darlan's murder!)
Back at Duke Street at 7:45 p.m.
I have a long talk
at ten with Dr Fox, who has really stuck his neck out on the mass killing
of Jews. He is joining the Undead - but does not yet know it.
THE TIMES EDUCATIONAL Supplement reviews a book by Nick Tiratsoo,
a collection of essays, From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain
since 1939. "Paul Addison himself takes issue with the 'revisionist'
historians Maurice Cowling, David Irving, and John Charmley in their
assessment of Churchill's responsibility for the war and his part in
the double-whammy of 1945 - a Labour government and international decline."
Hurrah, at last I'm getting some of the credit for
the new thinking on that ghastly era.
I send this overnight
fax to Ed Wall in Australia, which suppresses my true rage:
I am very unhappy about this
delay in issuing the Writ against John Howard.
It was an open-and-shut affair: I provided the Words Complained-of
etc. to you the same night as he spoke them. It is now nearly a
year later.
I really cannot understand what has
gone wrong. We had all the press and news media along with us, frisking
at our sides, baying for his blood. Now it has gone cold, and through
no fault of mine. How he must be laughing at us.
IAN MITCHELL COMES FOR lunch with another copy of his
book The Cost of a Reputation. The foreign office and ministry of defence
clearly removed files from the PRO to prevent Count Tolstoy from using
them for his defence, then returned them a few days after his trial
was over.
The Old Boy network. I read the book right
through, 500 pages, until three a.m. I write a long letter to The Times
about this, entitled: "Withholding Public Records from Court Actions."
It ends:
Historians are already at
the mercy of government departments which arbitrarily decide which
records shall be released and which retained ad infinitum (among
the latter: Anthony Eden's entire wartime file on Japan, and the
transcripts of Rudolf Hess's conversations and of Winston Churchill's
wartime telephone consultations with Franklin Roosevelt).
It is quite wrong that when a writer like Tolstoy succeeds in painstakingly
filling in the gaps from other sources, he should be at the mercy
of a fickle old boys' network - whether it be of masons or ministers,
Old Wykehamists* or Conservative Party officials or whatever - which
secretly conspires to hound him and his family to ruination.
In the Tolstoy case there was a lynching, a demonstrable interference
with the course of justice, and there must be a criminal inquiry
into who abetted it. The PRO keeps the most excellent computerised
records of all who draw upon its resources, so it should not take
too long to get to the bottom of this scandalous affair.
The letter is not printed.
OUT OF THE BLUE, A LETTER COMES from a producer at the BBC: together
with several European television corporations, the BBC now want to produce
a film on the global bans inflicted on me, and the gradual erosion of
free speech across Europe. The fight avails!
I reply:
Thank you for your interesting
letter. It is an extraordinary story.
I have been
subjected to what I call a Global Vendetta by wealthy organisations,
but fortunately I have many hundreds of supporters around the world
and we have succeeded in prising open the files of the Canadian,
German, Australian, and other governments, which show these bigoted
forces at work ("arrest that man!")....
As said,
all very entertaining - were not families, reputations, and livelihoods
at stake.
THE DAY THEN TAKES A HILARIOUS TURN.
My old friend M., whose morning newspaper is The Financial Times, phones
to suggest that I attend today's Commonwealth Business Forum, organised
by the newspaper at the Intercontinental hotel only a hundred yards
from my home: Mr John Howard, no less, prime minister of Australia,
will be there!
I rapidly put on my pinstripe suit,
wangle my way past the security guards, am issued with an identity badge,
and get a good seat.
Seeing Young take up his seat
in the front row, I approach him, hidden tape recorder in hand:
Irving: Mr Howard .... Mr Howard!
Howard [stands up, takes my outstretched hand]:
Uh?
Irving: I am David Irving.
Howard: Oh, sh*t. [Laughter all round].
Irving: I wanted to say hello to you, since you've come today
to within a hundred yards of where I live. I hope one day to be able
to visit your fine country.
After listening to four or five economic speeches,
including a twenty-minute oration by Howard himself, I challenge him.
I see him lean over to Sir Cyril Ramaphosa, secretary-general of the
Commonwealth, and whisper. I am not called. I keep my hand down for
two more questions then put it up again, sliding down behind the head
in front of me.
R. gives me the floor, without recognising
me. I click on the tape-recorder:
Irving: Mr John Howard - I am David Irving. You know me of
course! May I welcome you to our Parish of Mayfair, as a citizen of
the Parish of Mayfair? As you know, I can't come to Australia. You have
spoken a great deal about liberalisation, of the pace of liberalisation,
which we can only greet, and of the importance of the global network.
Would you say a word about Australia's record in the suppression of
Free Speech into your country, of which of course I am a victim?
Howard: Mr Irving, of course I do know you, uh ...
Irving [standing again]: ä and of course you are within the
jurisdiction of the English courts now sir!
Howard: I, uh, do, I do, I do know you, and uh, I am responsible
as prime minister of my country, uh, for taking a decision not to allow
you to enter Australia. And the reason for that decision was, uh, based
upon my government's perception of the Australian national interest,
and, uh, uh, the reasons that relate, uh, in part, as you know, to some
of views that you have expressed about matters which we believe, if
propagated in Australia, would not be in the Australian national interest.
And my government, fully consistent with impeccable credentials of free
speech, has the right to take that action. And I don't resile from it,
I don't apologise for it, and I believe that if it is in the national
interest of my, uh, of my country to take decisions of that kind, uh,
then we do. Taking in relation to other people, we will continue to
do so where appropriate and any democratic country consistent with its
principles of free speech has a perfect right to do so.
Irving [rising to his feet again]: Thank you for that courteous
and shoddy answer!
Ramaphosa: Sir, you only have one chance -
Five or six television cameras and twenty or thirty
journalists ambush me outside the hall. I stage a fifteen-minute press
conference. One Australian television news journalist asks my views
on Pauline Hanson. I say I have read her speeches and approve of what
she said.
Another asks if I disapprove of Blacks, and
I say that we have inflicted a tragedy on them, importing them as cheap
immigrant labour; Australia should learn from our mistake.
A journalist uses the word multiculturalism: I say my dictionaries are
ten years old, and that word does not figure in them. Would he like
to suggest another word for it - is he proposing race-mixing, for instance?
He changes the subject.
When one of them again raises
the colour question, I look around, and say to the cameras, "I notice
that among all you fine television and radio and newspaper reporters,
there is not a single coloured face!"
Collapse, as
Punch would have said, of Stout Parties.
Altogether
a most enjoyable episode; it was huge fun to see John Howard squirming.
Delayed by this interlude, I take a cab over to the British Library,
where I work all afternoon reading the private wartime correspondence
between the British Admirals Cunningham and Pound.
In
the evening an unexpected ordeal begins as the Australian media, twelve
hours out of sync, kick in. At 9:10 p.m. Radio 3LO phones from Melbourne
- it is morning drive-time there - can they do a live interview at 10:40
p.m.? My Howard ambush is all over their media. Ho-ho.
I prepare a few choice things, i.e.; calling the Australian prime minister
a "stunted little runt."
The interviewer professes to
be shocked at the word "runt," and repeats it three times. Besides,
Young called me "a crackpot historian with criminal convictions," so
he can hardly complain. It seems there is some fuss about the conference
security men not having spotted me.
Then Perth radio
phones at 2:05 a.m. and we do a ten-minute interview. Reasonable, except
for a reference to the fact that "you have a daughter in Brisbane."
I try to phone Beatrice, my fourth daughter, in Brisbane to warn her,
but she is not at her desk at present.
At 7:45 a fax
comes from Joe H.:
You made headline news here
in Sydney, especially on all the main news TV programmes. They emphasised
the misnomer "Nazi" historian or "pro-Hitler" historian, who confronted
Mr Howard unexpectedly at a news conferenceä They also showed you
talking to the media outside the conference.
STILL CHECKING ON THAT BND letter, I
phone the addressee, Horst Eylmann, a government lawyer at Stade, in
what used to be communist East Germany.
His secretary
speaks with him, then says, "I'm sorry, Herr Eylmann cannot speak to
you." I say: "Not at all?" She repeats, "He has no time to."
Won't talk: that's odd. If the item is a fake, why won't he talk?
THE FIGHT CONTINUES. I send this letter to the literary agency
acting for the publisher selling rights in England in a new book libelling
me, The Hitler of History :
I understand that you are
acting on behalf of Mr John Lukács in the sale of rights or licences
in his new book.
I draw your attention to my enclosed
letter to Mr Lukács' New York publisher, and would ask that you
keep it on file and, in their own interests, inform any prospective
U.K. publisher of the risks attendant on publishing this work in
an unamended form.
I put you, and through your
agency any such publisher, herewith on notice that I shall immediately
commence libel proceedings against any publisher who is foolish
enough to repeat these libels within the jurisdiction of our courts.
That's the way to do it.
DURING MUCH OF THE DAY I watch the live Sky TV coverage of the trial
of the seventeen-year old English au pair Louise Woodward in Boston.
She looks agonisingly like Josephine: same long hair, same chubby, smooth
face (but Louise has her legs).
The jury retires and
- ominous sign - comes in after four hours to ask the judge for the
distinction between Murder One and Murder Two.
Looks
like she's in for a lynching: the evidence was in her favour, but this
is Tea-Party Boston.
I remember my indignation when
I visited the city in about 1983 and was shown by my hosts the only
anti-British exhibition I have ever seen, anywhere in the world (a Madame-Tussauds
like show of British Redcoat fusiliers shooting innocent American passers-by
in the War of Independence).
The BBC producer comes,
discussing the film he will make on the global suppression of free speech.
He leaves around three-thirty p.m.
In Boston the jury
is still out, oblivious that the key phrase in the judge's charge to
them was "beyond reasonable doubt." Full of doubts, even after twenty
hours, they are plunging into all the medical intricacies of the evidence.
A chilly day. I spend all afternoon at the PRO and return to Duke Street
at eight p.m. Still no verdict in the au pair trial. Poor girl, she
is poised on the brink of vanishing into an American women's jail for
life with no chance of parole.
TODAY'S DAILY
TELEGRAPH prints a postcard, post-marked Krakow, July 1943, from
one Lola to "mein Lieber," dated "20.02.1943, Krakow," addressed to
a Jacob Rosenblum in Bucharest. It bears various censorship stamps.
What makes it interesting is that the Yad Vashem institute,
unaccountably, sent it to an Israeli police lab. for tests and the scientists
claim to have brought up a 22-line message written in secret ink in
a different, block-capital, handwriting signed "Otto":
Vernichtungslager. Das Antlitz(?)
tuscht. Aus Walpurgisnacht. Hunger. Hungertod. Hundekuchen... Epidemie.
Folter. Folterkammer. Erniedrigung. Ehrlosigkeit. Heftigkeit. Hetze.
Heidenangst. Hollenaugst [sic] Vergasung. Hinrichtung. Hochgericht.
Ermordung. Einescherung [sic]. Höllenqual....
Difficult to know what to make of this; much of
it rings true, particularly the closing words - "Es hat Eile. Leucht
Pistole. Lichtbildgert. Geheimtinten. Es hat Eille [sic]. Flugzeug Stutzpunkt.
Hörfolge. Es ist Hörezeit. Der Kessel Wlzt."
I find
that the use of the word Vernichtungslager - roughly, "extermination
camp" - is odd. A linguistic anachronism?
ALL AFTERNOON SETTING UP and configuring the new computer,
which replaces the one which died in June.
I wander
into the drawing room, where a television is on: the news is covering
the shocking guilty verdict, with a life sentence, on the English au
pair girl, Louise Woodward. I am really upset by this for the rest of
the evening.
I worry for the poor girl when I wake up
during the night.
Up at seven-thirty a.m., and resume
work on The Backlog, which never seems to diminish.
A letter in today's Telegraph asks whether a Boston jury would have
found her guilty if she had been Irish. TouchÈ. Our foreign office now
issues a statement, saying they are offering her full support; that's
rich - when the Austrian, German, and Canadian courts started taking
their swipes at me, our fat-bottomed diplomats weren't to be seen for
dust.
John Fox agrees that the word Vernichtungslager
is a post-war word. So there you are.
FIND
MID-MORNING THAT I have unaccountably put my underpants on back
to front. Suppose I were to be found dead later this morning - what
fantastic conspiracy theories would be woven around this sartorial flaw!
There could be no reasonable doubt about that. Some innocent guy might
end up getting sent to the slammer for life.
The newspapers
today make the same point that occurred to me as I lay awake for a second
night, praying for Louise's release - namely that some of the jury's
animus toward her may have been avoured by anti-British feeling inspired
by her English accent in the witness box (even though to our ears it
was coloured by an unmistakable Cheshire twang).
Even
during the war there were Intelligence reports warning that Americans,
while liking the sound of Cockney and even other regional variations,
found the pure Oxford-English voice too arrogant, too supercilious,
and too condescending.
Hollywood, as The Sunday Telegraph
remarks today, has done much to exploit this hostility: for the last
ten years, the worst villains have routinely been played by English
actors, including of course the infamous doctor Hans von Bülow (played
by Jeremy Irons) and all the most evil SS-officers in Schindler's List.
There may not have been an effective English Legion
serving in the Waffen SS during the war; but those boots sure keep on
marching down the Halls of Hollywood now.
John Fox says
he discussed that word Vernichtungslager with Dr Hans Abendroth of Leicester
University; Abendroth said straight away that the word is very odd for
a wartime document. So that confirms my suspicions.
MID-DAY AT THE HIGH COURT (my application re the Lipstadt
case). The defendants are represented by four solicitors and one barrister
(Victoria Sharp: a little-black-suited, shrewlike female aged ca. thirty-five,
with an indoor complexion). Small talk about the Count Tolstoy case
(she was his junior counsel) but she does not want to be drawn on that.
The judge is very affable toward me - he knows me well
enough by now. I say that the defendants have had four extensions to
the brink of an Unless Order, although they have highly experienced
firms of solicitors. I submit that they are in difficulty, as their
American author, Deborah Lipstadt, appears not to be giving them any
input whatever. They are just trying to stave off the inevitable.
Miss Sharp takes noisy exception to my application
for one expert witness to be allowed on "organised attempts by pressure-groups
in Britain and internationally to suppress discussion on controversial
matters of recent history." Quite so.
After giving me
a good hearing, the judge grants my application, but will allow the
other side no less than fifty-six days to serve their lists.
As we gather up our papers, he asks about the 1950s' book of Goebbels
Diaries he once read - yet I am claiming to have found them in Moscow?
I cheerfully explain the history of the Louis Lochner edition (the fragments
of 1942-3, found in the ruins of Hitler's chancellery in 1945). Evidently
a widely read judge.
I phone our secretary, Roop Nahil;
no baby yet, it's due tomorrow. We wish her well.
Lunch
at the Public Record office, the whole afternoon working on the history
of bacteriological warfare, hitherto unknown to me - British wartime
attempts to develop bombs containing N (anthrax spores) and X (botulinum),
the most deadly poison known to man.
HAVE
RENTED A VAN TO PICK up the balance of the first edition of Nuremberg.
I drive Jessica to Sainsbury's for a major groceries expedition. She
pleads with me to blow up the balloons she has plucked from a shelf
at the store: first two, then "just" two more, then "only two more"
and so on until all twelve have been inated.
I learn
the knack of twisting the balloon-neck round my little finger to tie
it in a knot; I suspect Jessica is learning the knack of twisting her
Papa round her little finger. We knot the balloons into a bundle, and
they tingle with static electricity each time we touch them.
I carry the remaining boxes of Nuremberg upstairs and line them along
the corridor, discreetly covered in red cloth. Two tons of books from
Somerset up up to our first oor.
AT THE LAWYER'S
OFFICE I read files of documents produced by The Observer's defence
counsel against me.
They make astonishing reading:
on Apr. 18, 1977 the Washington ADL - the Anti-Defamation League of
B'nai Brith - rigged a television programme, "Panorama," on which I
appeared to promote The Viking Press edition of Hitler's War. A week
later they sent a videocassette to their agents worldwide "so that you
may better appraise Irving's knowledgeability and toughness as an adversary..."
There is also evidence that on May 25, 1977 the London
Daily Express deliberately faked a quotation by Lord Weidenfeld attacking
me; the Express secretly paid him libel damages.
Writing
on Apr. 3, 1996, to The Observer's Tim Adams, Gitta Sereny accuses me
of lying when I express in Goebbels my thanks to Dr David Marwell, director
of the Berlin Document Center (BDC): "He ä denies absolutely to have
assisted Irving," writes Sereny.
Twenty years ago, while
still a student (at Georgetown, I think), Marwell wrote me an admiring
fan letter; he joined the OSI, then resurfaced at the BDC. He used to
invite me into his office for coffee and showed me his latest archival
finds.
He expressed real gratitude when I revealed the
theft of thousands of Nazi personnel files to street traders. He gave
me photographs of Göring's still top-secret "last letters," and of files
on Goebbels' henchmen. He also showed me the oath sworn by an SS officer
on joining the camp staff at Auschwitz; it certainly looked very ominous,
and I wrote a note about it in my diary at the time.
HAVE
SPENT A COUPLE OF days in Louisiana, where the local Republican
Party chaired by the well-known, indeed notorious, David Duke has invited
me to speak.
I take the opportunity to read some of
his draft memoirs, which in my view need editing - for "political correctness"
as much as for anything else!
I have been watching closely.
Today at a Wafe House there is again a trickle of ordinary Americans
coming up to shake his hand, after first inquiring if he is not David
Duke.
One well-spoken and evidently wealthy man, owner
of a big interstate trucking company, begins by saying, "If you're not
David Duke, you're sure running the risk of getting shot at some day
by some radical!"
By my estimate, most of these well-wishers
are stable, intelligent, worried members of the southern middle class.
Mandeville is admittedly one of the few largely White areas in Greater
New Orleans. But these people are the quietly-seething ones, whose views
have been reined in so far only by their own sense of good behaviour.
They are a formidable lobby; a silent majority.
What
I find remarkable is this: given the excoriation heaped on him over
the years, we expect to find him ostracised. In Europe he would have
been in and out of jail like a yo-yo: people would be frightened to
be seen near him, let alone shake his hand. The national and state media
have left nothing undone in their desire to appease his opponents, from
caricatures and OpEd articles to whole-page advertisements and outspoken
abuse.
I go out first to the car, and it takes several
minutes for him to join me - "Another two or three people came up to
me," he apologises.
Elected to the Louisiana House
of Representatives in 1989, he won sixty percent of the White vote in
two separate 1990 and 1991 campaigns, the gubernatorial and the US Senate
elections in Louisiana; that was forty percent of the overall vote (the
newspapers who have ways of estimating the racial make-up of the different
constituencies conceded this).
More recently he won
last year a big share of the vote in the U.S. Senate race where he came
in second of the six Republican candidates. Since then, to the chagrin
of Newt Gingrich, he has been elected as chairman in this, the largest
Republican parish (county) in Louisiana.
He says that
his share of the vote would have been higher but for the pressure piled
on by out of state organisations, who for example forced major local
employers to put notes on workers' payslips warning them that "If Duke
is elected" the company would pull out of Louisiana; the chief of the
local National Guard wrote to every member of the guard ordering them
to vote against him, and appeared in uniform in paid advertising slots
on television with the same message.
There
are Six Million
Stories in the Naked City |
PSYCHIATRIST
VIKTOR FRANKL, born in Vienna in 1905, died in September, aged
92. The obituary published by The Daily Telegraph and syndicated
in newspapers around the world, including The Age in Melbourne,
reported on "his experience as an inmate of Auschwitz and other
concentration camps during the Second World war." He had previously
specialised in Vienna in treating suicidal patients, and remained
at his hospital post until 1942, when he was deported to Theresienstadt.
Thereafter he was moved to three more camps including Auschwitz.
"In 1945," reports The Daily Telegraph,
"completely alone, Frankl went back to Vienna to resume his
routines amid the ashes of his former life, as if the Anschluss,
the war, and the death camps were but rude interruptions. Shortly
after returning [to Vienna] he saw a newsreel item about the
gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps, which during
his time of incarceration he had never seen."
[AR thanks
its readers around the world who sent us this news clipping.]
|
N
THE EVENING William C., a local chiropractor, drives me over the
26 mile causeway to downtown New Orleans, to the magnificently decorated
synagogue in St Charles Avenue where Daniel Goldhagen is to speak on
his book Hitler's Willing Executioners.
It came
out last May and, of course, my own book Goebbels. Mastermind
of the Third Reich was sacrificed by St Martins Press, to give
"Professor" Goldhagen a clear run with his work, as Frank Rich
admitted in his syndicated OpEd piece at the time - no nasty confrontations
on talk shows, etc., with somebody who might really know what he was
talking about when it came to the Nazi era.
The rotunda
is packed with over a thousand listeners, and there is a sprinkling
of police outside. A rabbi reads an introduction, while a thin, badly
shaved young man, with a gaunt face reminiscent of Key West's HIV-positive
population, slouches on a chair at stage-right.
This
turns out to be Goldhagen. His talk is disappointingly bland - delivered
without notes in a disconcertingly gentle, laid-back voice, at such
a slow and hesitant pace that one wonders whether he suffers perhaps
some chromosome defect that the newspapers have been too polite to mention.
Goldhagen utters a ninety minute tirade against the "ordinary Germans"
who he claims were fully aware of what was going on, and were willing
and indeed eager to make up the firing squads when it came to getting
rid of the Jews.
As he talks of the zeal with which
these "ordinary Germans" rounded up, tortured, mocked and killed their
opponents, I think involuntarily of the West Bank, of the Arab children
shot down with live ammunition, and of modern prime ministers who send
assassins into neighbouring countries armed with nerve-gas syringes
to dispose of their opponents.
Dr C. afterwards remarks
that he has never before heard so much hatred spewed forth in a House
of Worship. The same thought occurs to me: it was undiluted Volksverhetzung,
far more ugly than the kind which now earns revisionists and other searchers
for the truth hefty prison sentences in Europe.
Goldhagen
finally rambles to a conclusion - mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, in fact
mid-lecture for all anybody can tell, since the whole talk is utterly
shambolic from start to finish, without starting point, mile-markers,
or objective. If he is a lecturer in politics at Harvard, I feel endlessly
sorry for his students. One wonders how he got the job; one must ask
his father, a long-time benefactor and professor at the university.
Goldhagen Jr. probably picked up at least a $20,000 fee for his performance
this evening.
At question time I get to the microphone, and
challenge him:
"Professor Goldhagen, we have listened
with enormous interest to your talk, but forgive me if I now voice
some criticism.
"I too am an historian, an English
historian who has worked for thirty-five years at the other end
of the spectrum, as I might put it, questioning most closely every
member of Hitler's private staff about what decisions were taken
at the very highest level.
"Let me make plain that
there can be no doubt whatever as to the scale of the killings of
Jews carried out on the eastern front during Hitler's Russian campaign.
But you are aware that your book has attracted much informed comment
world-wide, both for the narrowness of its focus and for the cavalier
manner in which you used archival records during your visit to Ludwigsburg.
"For instance, you claimed in your talk to have
used the interrogation records of 'literally thousands of the Perpetrators,'
as you call them; but we know that in fact you used scarcely a hundred
if that."
At this, I can feel the temper of the audience behind
me rising. I press on:
"What concerns me most however
is the claim that it was only 'ordinary Germans' who carried out
the killings. This is totally untrue and might lead to the very
wrong conclusion that because Germany was finished - squashed at
during the appalling military conict of World War II - therefore
the Jews of the world no longer have anything to fear.
"We know the make-up of the police battalions which carried out
the killings on the eastern front, the battalions to which you attach
such emphasis. In these units the Germans were in a minority - most
of the men were drawn from units of the Baltic states, the Estonians,
Latvians, and Lithuanians, as well as a large number of Ukrainians
and other Russians too. And surely this raises a fundamental question,
which you would have done far better to address - "
The audience are now very restive, as it has dawned
on them that I am not a Goldhagen fan.
" - Why did you not ask the
far more important question: why everybody joined in getting rid
of their Jews with such zeal, 'Why us?' Let's face it, when Germany
said to her neighbours, in 1942 and 1943 and 1944, 'Give us your
Jews,' Hungary, France, Slovakia, etc., could not hand them over
fast enough! There was no reluctance to do so."
This generates uproar, but I carry on: "And when other countries
like England, Sweden and so on were invited to take in these Jews
nobody, nobody, wanted to have them."
At this there is a sprinkle of applause.
"Why did you not address
that far more vital question? Why did nobody want the Jews! You
address only the question, 'Who did it?' and you fail to ask the
far more ominous question, 'Why us?'"
The answer is more verbal Jello from Goldhagen.
He is clearly furious to have been accused of "inventing," as he (not
I) put it, and he has no real answer to my point that, as he said, the
Jews are now "complacent" about the risk of it all happening again.
The chairman makes a point of saying that no more questioners will be
allowed to "make statements."
So it seems I got in not only under their radar,
but right under their skin as well.
|
