ugust
1999
London,
England
All day Jill works
on distilling DRESDEN for Acrobat
posting on Website. The computer then
crashes and I spend the evening
rebuilding the PageMaker item. Aaargh;
but got it posted onto the Website in
very nice form at 11:44 PM. Free, but
in the spirit of the Web. I shall do
the same with HITLER'S
WAR very
shortly!
Work all day with Jill on Acrobat
version of NUREMBERG,
THE LAST BATTLE. Post it in the
evening on the Website. Much praise
already for the APOCALYPSE
1945, THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
posting.
Video
of Wochenschau arrives from
Hamburg. I ask them for permission to
place one segment on our Internet
Website.
Jill has started preparing GOEBBELS.
MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH for
the Website, a free download; the
floppies we are working from are of
course considerably longer than the
published text; I edit them down at
St
Martins' Press's request,
particularly the early chapters.
To a sceptic I reply:
When my books first
appeared (1962) there were no such
things as computers or floppies. I'm
going only the Acrobat way.
If
people can't be bothered to get the
free Acrobat Reader download, then I
can't be bothered with them. Book
sales won't suffer (a) they're
mostly out of print; (b) students
will prefer to read and quote from
(my) on line books, as they can copy
and paste. In my view anyway.
I phone the Institute
for Historical Review (IHR) about
doing a mail-out; they can send out
12,500 leaflets about Cincinnati.
Drive out to Heathrow at 5 p.m. to
collect Benté and
Jessica on their return from
Denmark; I take a home movie of their
arrival. It would be nice to visit her
parents, but -- we know that Denmark
sometimes acts as though the Wehrmacht
is still in occupation. Benté
does not spot me, Jessica does. Both
looking very beautiful indeed.
Today there are thirty emails. One
from a lady in Indiana offers
2400 self supporting acres
in Southern Ind [Indiana] to
be offered to white power groups and
individuals esp vets who make up
over half of the homeless. Yeh
America, where the draft dodger
sleeps in the White House and the
vets sleep in the streets.
She gives her address, but sounds
like an agente provocateuse to me. Why
me, O Lord?
A Dr David Meier asks:
Did you do the translation
of Reinhard Gehlen's memoirs
into English? Did you have contact
with him at the time?
I reply:
I did. His memoirs
published in German were a heap,
purchased blind (unseen) by Peter
Ritner of World Publishing Co.
Ritner later exited from the
company, taking an unusual and
rather direct route from their 100th
floor of the Empire State Building
to the ground. I like to think that
Gehlen's memoirs, as worked over by
me, had nothing to do with that
primitive attempt at flight. When
Ritner saw the useless book he had
spent $200K on, he hired me to put
meat on its bones; I interviewed
Gehlen ten or twenty times on tape,
and fleshed out the MS with chapter
and verse. In the process I reviewed
all the clippings files on him and
discovered the rather odd fact that
chapters of his book were almost
identical with articles in Dr
Gerhard Frey's newspaper
Deutsche
Soldatenzeitung: either
Gehlen had lifted (pirated) them, or
he was the original author for Frey,
writing under a nom de plume. Gehlen
then chopped out a lot of what I put
in, on security grounds. I put all
the interview notes into my papers
(collection, Sammlung Irving) at the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte,
which I can no longer reach
(banned
from German soil since
1993).
A vicious and abusive email comes from
Professor Arthur Butz, of
North-western University, objecting
that I describe John Bennett of
Australia in my last Action Report as
an "Aussie meathead" because he called
me in the wee hours. I could have
commented of course that as a tenured
professor he has a rather cushioned
existence, with no doubt a pension at
the end of it all. Instead I reply:
I have noted your comments.
Had John Bennett not repeatedly --
i.e. many times -- committed this
infraction, he would not have earned
the title. A meathead in my book is
somebody who will not learn.
Perhaps that includes us all, but
I at least try not to phone people
around the world in the wee small
hours of the morning. I have a short
enough night as it is, without being
phoned on the hour and half hour by
my many thoughtless friends around
the globe who cannot be bothered to
work out for themselves what time it
is in the land they are calling.
Work
until 3 a.m. putting in rolling link
Javascript on the front
page of AR-Online.
Charles Provan phones, delighted
to speak at Cincinnati on the Dachau
massacre. Things are shaping up well; I
just hope we now get the numbers.
Alois S. congratulates us on the
Adobe book uploads:
Dear Mr Irving, I would like to
present my congratulations for the
excellent quality of your .pdf files.
The use of embedded fonts and clean
typography makes the result really
impressive! I don't know what impact
these files will have on your book
sales but it is surely a kick in the
a... for the enemies of real history
and free speech.
I reply:
Many thanks for your kind
remarks. After I noticed that the
FBI Website and other important
Websites (among them, the
Smithsonian) used .pdf files, I
investigated and realised that with
PageMaker 6.5 you can produce very
clean files in that format for free
downloading. One of my staff is
currently preparing
Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third
Reich in pdf. Trotz
Verbot, nicht tot!
We attach importance to clean
typography and the hyperlinks. You
will notice that we use a generous
leading (space between the lines)
which would be impossibly
extravagant in a printed (paper)
book; this is to discourage Far East
pirates from printing the pdf. files
as books. I think that over the
years it will help to spread my
books, and not damage sales. It is
anyway my modest contribution to the
world we live in. Students will be
able eventually to read all my 30
books in .pdf files (and very few
books by my rivals are available in
this manner). Your letter of
encouragement suggests to me that I
am doing the right thing...
Abusive and pornographic e-mail from
"Nazi-hunter" threatening to wreck the
Cincinnati function. It reads:
The infamous nazi-wannabe
piece of sh*t "historian" has
organized a "Real History"
conference in Cincinnati September
24-26. This scumbag **** nazi
pederast deserves a proper
reception.
Accordingly, we are in the
process of ascertaining the exact
location, timetables, and schedules,
of these proceedings. These will be
published, together with the phone
numbers of the hotel and organizers.
We will also detail what our further
actions will be.
Islamic radio in Iran phones asking
me for an interview. I refuse and hang
up. Mark W. has given them my phone
number
With Benté to Grosvenor Square.
Jessica has her pink bicycle, on which
she now pedals crazily around the
flower beds. She has learned suddenly
to balance, "got the hang of it." She
pedals madly up and down the paved
surface, past Benté who sits
facing me, smiling proudly. She
whooshes past with no feet on the
pedals, then no hands. My heart too
bursts with pride and joy about this
little girl (and about Benté
too).
I work until 2 a.m.
Set out with Jessica as driver's
mate to Dartford with a load of books
for America, at 3 p.m., but traffic is
heavy and we won't make it by 4:30 p.m.
so I turn back. Larry M. emails a
picture of his five year old Sarah, who
died last year. I reply
Thank you so much for your
kind letter and for the picture of
Sarah, which came through bright and
strong and which I am printing
tomorrow for Jessica, who is always
with us. When I go out with Jessica,
as I did today I am always mortally
terrified that something may snatch
her away.
This worrying email comes:
I have received several
reports about a possible
confrontation with ARA in Cincinnati
in connection with your "Real
History" weekend on September 24.
People have written me that the ARA
is gearing up to getting ugly, and
some have expressed concern that, if
you are caught unawares, bad
headlines for the cause of truth in
history might result.
The ARA is, in fact, a creation
of Jewish interests. He knows this
via an ARA dropout. ARA has replaced
the JDL, which gave the Jewish
community a bad name because of the
name, "Jewish." They are an a
Marxist-anarchist street gang for
hire, to be used by more-or-less
remote control - just like B'nai
Brith did it in their campaign in
Toronto, where BB supplied legal
advice, signs and press contact as
well as organizational support in
their campaign against Ernst for
several years.
Cincinnati is ARA Central Command
Office. Money and directives come
from a Jewish law firm who acts as a
conduit in Cincinnati. ARA had their
national (possibly even
international) get-together there -
marches, speeches etc. in 1996-97.
They had demonstrations there where
several of them were arrested. They
are one ugly bunch.
That the Cincinnati Police
Intelligence Unit seems to have
penetrated this outfit at their last
gathering, and the cops there did a
superb job in boxing in or
containing the illegal activities of
ARA hotheads to a minimum.
Up at 8:30 or so. I go out with
Jessica to Grosvenor Square, and she
pedals madly around the perimeter for
fifteen minutes.
Around lunchtime or just after (we sit
outside the Spaghetti House) I finally
open the first of the thick blue
binders of expert reports served up by
Lipstadt. This one contains reports by
Professors Roger Eatwell, Funke,
and Levin. I know none of them,
and having read the reports suspect my
life has not been deprived of much. I
spend the whole day until around
midnight reading the first binder, 500
pages or so of double spaced
typescript.
Of course I am alarmed that my
private diaries for forty years, some
seventy volumes, have been placed in
the hands of experts overseas, over
whom the British courts have no
jurisdiction, and at the end of the day
I write a letter to Mishcon de Reya
asking if these experts have been
warned about the implied
undertakings.
I also noted that Mishcon have
provided Levin with Mozzochi's
affidavits, though both were
ordered
struck out by Master Trench
as defective. This seems a clear
wrongdoing to me, and they earn a sharp
letter of rebuke and a request that
they remove those passages, failing
which I shall ask the court to do
so.
Irritating is that they have
cherrypicked the references to Mr Duke
visiting me (with his nubile girlfriend
Christy); the sentences which make
plain that Mr Duke came to me as a
budding author, that I then made
pertinent suggestions about editing his
work, and advised him to find a
mainline publisher, and passed his name
to my literary agent for that purpose
are overlooked.
As edited by Levin, my diaries
reveal me as the kind of person I for
one would certainly not have liked to
associate with!
I spend until 2 a.m. reading the first
six months of my 1995 diary, and this
restores my self-esteem: many historic
episodes, large and small, like
Jessica's first steps; the admission
by Auschwitz
to
L'Express in January that the
gas chamber shown to tourists is a fake
-- another great revisionist
victory; and the shocking phone call in
February with word that poor, obese old
Tom Norman, Wheezy Tom, who had
spent two weeks with us at the end of
1994, and was setting up our mail-order
bookstore in North Carolina, had been
found dead, shot execution-style in the
back of the head while he slept,
etc.
Two of the Professors reproduce my
nonsense-poems hummed to Jessica. Those
will rebound on them if they use them
in court: wait and see. One of the
Professors comments on the content of
the Website, for its high "traditional
enemies" profile (which they speciously
and wrongly equate with Jewish): What
do they expect? The Website was
launched soon after the writs were
served, with the aim of providing funds
and Intelligence for the two big court
actions (which are shortly to be joined
by a third).
If they object to some of the
(newspaper) items I have posted, they
should see those that I have
rejected!
Phone John Fox to discuss
revelations of Himmler
diary, December 1, 1941.
Professor Toby Graham sends a
letter regretting that he has had a
stroke and cannot speak (on
Churchill) at Cincinnati after
all. I invite Count Tolstoy.
Dinner at the Spaghetti House. Kevin
H. is there, which rather disturbs my
plan to read more of Professor
Longerich's epic statement, which is
pure guff so far: I return to the flat,
my brain deadened with professorial
waffle, my ears ringing with
clichés. Not much fear from his
testimony.
Up at 7 a.m., unable to sleep;
Viking Ltd delivered new office
bookshelves, mahogany finish, they look
good. Three of them, 8 feet tall. At
last we can restore order to this flat
after two years of chaos (legal
Discovery).
Mishcon have refused to remove the
offending passages from Levin's
statement, based on the "forbidden"
Mozzochi affidavits. I phone my legal
friends, and they agree: Issue a
summons. To High Court at midday to
issue the summons. Only now it is
called an Application, and the fee has
increased by eighty percent.
Rumours have begun circulating in
Germany that I am dead. Gerd Sudholt
phones in alarm two or three days
ago. (He hasn't phoned me for years,
and pirated HITLER'S WAR with Fleissner's
help, so he may have hoped it was
true). I reassure him. Today a letter
from a retired lieutenant: same thing,
and "Please tell me that it's not
true." I reply, "Reports of my decease
are premature and exaggerated. Who
invents them! I presume, the
traditional enbemies of the truth."
It's a familiar method of
intimidation by proxy. I do not fear
being bumped off either -- yet: "they"
will wait until after the two High
Court trials, or at least the first
one.
Reinhard
T. emails me from California about the
History Channel's documentary on the
fake Hitler's diaries. "You were never
mentioned while I watched. They may
have given you some recognition at the
beginning of the show but I doubt it.
It consisted of a bunch of people
claiming that they suspected them to be
frauds. It looks like you are destined
for the memory hole," to which I reply:
"Indeed. I am told that if you see the
newsreel coverage of the Stern press
conference, April 1983, you can see me
as the person denouncing the diaries
are fake. But no name is given! For the
story (in case you did not see it) go
to my Website: http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/Torpedo/index.html."
Tolstoy hedges his bets about
Cincinnati; has another date, otherwise
he will come. I reply:
I should have mentioned
that the 200 people attending
include most of my heavyweight
backers. They would undoubtedly be
proud to assist you in your cause,
after a well delivered address on
the subject of your battles. I have
of course read the Ian Mitchell book
as well as your own, and wrote
letters to The Times and the
Telegraph commenting on the
scandalous perversion of justice
that has occurred. My own action
against Lipstadt starts on January
11, no judge yet assigned (hope it's
not Judge Davies). It's going to
last three months, but I can take
it.
For my updating of HITLER'S WAR I have
over recent days been dipping into
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD
REICH. I am immodest enough to say that
I find myself now unable to put it
down. I think it is the finest I have
written so far. 
Eight
years in the gestation: eight days in
the suppression! Thank you, Mr
Abraham H Foxman and other
well-wishers of free speech.
Drove around all afternoon with
Jessica, to builder's merchants, then
to Sainsbury's. Very pleasant, in the
sunshine, listening to her girlish
chatter.
Quiet day. I am still reading
Longerich. He claims to have
worked in 44 archives, but there is
little trace of it in the report; his
reference notes are to published
volumes, as though he sat in a library
all his life, plucking volumes off the
shelves and reading what was thus
placed before him by other
Peter-Longerichs in past decades. In
other words, he has not added one iota
to the sum total of human knowledge.
Needless to say, no reference to the
David Irving Collections in any of the
German archives.
The Times reports, BORMANN ASHES ARE
BURIED IN THE BALTIC. I put the story
on the Website with this footnote:
"Martin
Bormann [left] was one of
Hitler's most industrious henchmen, in
a milieu where the hardworking
triumphed over the indolent and
malcontent. Hovering in the background,
or seated inconspicuously at meals,
Bormann had his notepad always ready to
take down his Führer's remarks,
convert them to commands, and order
them executed without question. Hitler
remarked one day that he had no shade
to stand in as the thousands trooped
past his summer home at the Berghof to
see their Führer. Next day, he
found a full grown lime tree standing
there for him: brought in Bormann. He
became indispensable. His private
hatred of the Catholic church and of
the Jews became the mainspring in the
campaigns which were to prove the
eventual downfall of the Nazis. The
body of Bormann was eventually dug up
after brilliant sleuth work by my
friend Jochen von Lang,
Stern
journalist [born Piechocki,
Vertreter der SS im RmfVuP who boasted
that it was his voice on Berlin radio
that announced the death of
Hitler], in the 1970s. Buried next
to it was found a second male corpse
with a wedding ring -- the date
engraved inside confirmed it as the
corpse of Hitler's SS doctor Ludwig
von Stumpfegger, as I confirmed
with Stumpfegger's brother, then living
at Ingolstadt. The two men had broken
out of Hitler's bunker on May 1;
trapped by Russian troops beneath the
Lehrter railroad bridge, and dazed by a
tank shell detonating just yards away,
they swallowed their cyanide pills as
Hitler had ordered all his staff to do.
Dental evidence on Bormann at first
seemed conflicting, until the doctors
realised they were looking at the jaw
the wrong way up. In his expensive
leather greatcoat, which was stripped
off the body by a Russian soldier, was
found a pocket diary, which my Moscow
friend Lev Bezymenski later
published: these pages provided
important evidence that the Hitler's
Last Testament table
talks published by Trevor Roper in
the 1960s were fake. But that is
another story."
A couple of hours sitting in
Grosvenor Square in the sunshine
reading the Longerich reports, marking
them up, and watching Jessica pedalling
around on her pink bike, and making
friends with other families.
I write to one of my experts:
Yes, as you may recall in
my abrasive
(and as yet unanswered) letter
to Van Pelt I asked him why
he never bothered to make the drive
down the road from Waterloo,
Ontario, to Washington DC to have a
look at all the verbatim Höss
testimonies on microfilm there
-- something which I, a
non-Holocaust scholar, did out of
sheer curiosity.
This trial certainly offers a
chance to bring all the Höss
materials out into the open,
including Eichmann's comments
on the Höss memoirs, which I am
sure I can borrow in the original
from their owner for the
occasion.
I have nearly finished reading
Longerich's report. He claims to
have worked in 44 archives, but
quotes only printed sources. He has
sat in a library, on his butt, and
not advanced the sum total of our
knowledge one iota. Then he bleats
toward the end that even now (after
sixty years!) we have no real
evidence as to how it all
happened.
Perhaps in that case Germany
should stop locking up scholars who
"look askance"
(schief
schauen, to quote the famous
July 16, 1941 memorandum), then! The
evidence he quotes for the shootings
in the east is watertight, and I
do not dispute that. None of us
does, right?
His star source is Von dem
Bach-Zelewski. Now, what
happened to Mr Bach-Z after the war,
then? Did he survive? Uh, you say he
died in his bed, at a ripe old age?
You say he was relied upon by the
Americans, and the IMT, and by Mr
Longerich and countless others, this
Nazi war criminal and mass murderer
who gave orders for the liquidations
of tens of thousands? What kind of
deal did he cut with the Allies
then, this worthless piece of
uniformed crap?
The evidence that Longerich produces
for "It was done on Hitler's orders" is
all, without exception, from court
verdicts of the 1960s and 1970s.
Really safe, given the verdicts
handed down from courts in a country
where the Minister of Justice
humiliates, publicly excoriates, and
dismisses judges who get the wrong
results, or sends them on "sick leave";
where a defence lawyer is beaten to a
pulp with baseball bats in the court
precincts, or lawyers are arrested and
fined for defending their clients,
under those same laws of defaming the
memory of the dead, etc; and where
defendants are not allowed to produce
witnesses and documents.
I
think the traditional enemies of the
truth are going to regret the day they
commissioned Deborah Lipstadt to
libel me.
In the evening, 11:30 p.m., I find a
fax from Count Tolstoy: his Russian
speaking tour has fallen through, and
yes he will speak at Cincinnati. That's
fabulous.
Replying to a good message from my
experts I write:
The Pelt statement is
voluminous, ca 500 pp., and
illustrated with good facsimile
documents. I am waiting for the
lawyers to send me a diskette of it,
which I am entitled to under the
Rules.
Harald Turner document. My
instinct is, it is probably genuine.
It was first thrown at me by
Gitta
Sereny in 1977. I noticed the
typed-in runes, but considered it
was a one-off attempt by Turner.
Although it must have taken a hell
of a long time, and did he do that
with every letter? One wonders if
there are any other Turner letters
to compare it with. The paper is an
odd size, US letter size, which is
in fact very odd. That I have
NEVER seen in
German archives before.
Oddly enough, I bumped into
Turner's daughter in Torremolinos in
about 1970. She was pretty bitter
about her father having been hanged.
I have her address somewhere
(Marburg I think).
I must read up my diary on that
talk with her some time. I was not
interested in the Holocaust then (in
fact it was not even called that
then) and am not now.
The extraordinary thing about the
BP
decodes is that they support the
revisionist line the whole way. Just
one instance: I was excoriated for
my printing the
Nov. 30, 1941 Himmler phone call to
Heydrich from Hitler's bunker,
ordering "Keine Liquidierung" of a
Berlin transport of Jews. But they
had already been shot that morning
on arrival outside Riga. Now we find
(a) a furious Himmler, hearing of
this shooting, signals
Jeckeln twice on Dec. 1,
1941, telling him he has overstepped
the Richtlinien
[guidelines], and ordering
him to report to Führer
headquarters at once to explain
himself! (The intercepts of the two
signals are in PRO file HW16/32).
Tail between his legs, Jeckeln turns
up at Himmler's HQ on Dec. 4, 1941,
as ordered (Himmler
diary, just published), and the
shootings of German Jews stop for
many months (as the Peter
Witte book admits: now where was
all the hype about
THAT in the
press! Nowhere.)
Jessica scampering around. Work until
3:30 a.m. on a seven-hour job, scanning
the
Völkischer
Beobachter, January 31, 1939
edition (it's been hanging on my office
wall these last twenty years),
correcting tones, etc.
If the argument by Professors Levin,
Evans and the others is that by
having met and talked with D., V., E.
and others I have become tainted, and
that I am in the words of Professor
Lipstadt also an extremist thereby, I
shudder to think of the damage I have
done, scattering my vicious extremist
pollen around the world in talks with
thousands of innocent liberals like the
philosopher Karl Jaspers, with
whom I spent an afternoon visiting him
with the no less liberal playwright
Rolf Hochhuth (my Dutzfreund
since January 1965); people like
Hugh Trevor Roper, CIA chief
Bill
Casey, etc., etc.
In fact like some AIDs-infected
flight-attendant I must have cut an
unwitting swathe of extremism through
the entire liberal world since 1959
when I first came out -- or so it is
alleged by the Board
of Deputies of British Jews and its
Gestapo-like army of sneaks and
"monitors" -- as a mild
fascist.
An exchange of messages during the
forenoon with Tolstoy. He writes:
I shall certainly preserve
confidentiality, and am glad we are
not to be pestered by hacks or
censors.
I reply: "I am telling individual
audience members this:
"I'm delighted to say I
have persuaded Count Nicolai Tolstoy
to address the Real History function
this year on "A British War Crime:
Censorship and the Historian." He is
the author of two great books on the
1945 British repatriation of
Russians and Yugoslav civilians to
their deaths at the hands of the
Reds, with the secret connivance of
Harold Macmillan and British
army generals. The story of the
massacres was hushed up, and one of
the generals, who is now Lord
Aldington, sued Tolstoy for
libel. It was one of the most famous
British libel actions of all time.
The government concealed the
archival records proving that he was
right until the day the trial ended
-- when the missing files
mysteriously returned to the Public
Record Office..."
In barest outline, I believe this
is correct?
He replies:
This is quite correct,
except that Douglas Hurd kept
the material secret until threatened
with exposure nearly a year later by
Thames TV. The original cover-up was
ordered by Geoffrey Howe, who had
been appointed a Director of Sun
Alliance by Aldington as Chairman!
Then disaster strikes. Count Tolstoy
tells me Russia has just contacted him
to go ahead, and he is withdrawing from
Cincinnati.
I worry all night about Benté,
get up at 4:20 a.m., then go back to
bed.
Jessica shows me a floppy disc she
has labelled with a 101-Dalmatians
label she has printed; she has dragged
a number of her files onto the disc.
Then she prints out a fax to J. (one of
our secretaries) and sends it: It
reads, "When I grow up I am going to
look for lots of cats." Not bad for a
five year old.
The History Channel announces the
DRESDEN film, but adds the now
obligatory slur and shinkick:
WORLD PREMIERE! Inferno:
The True Story Of Dresden (September
19): On the night of February 13,
1945, Allied planes began Operation
Thunderclap, a 24-hour bombing raid
over the German industrial city of
Dresden in the hope of delivering a
knockout blow to break Germany's
spirit. The bombing of Dresden
caused a drastic loss of life and
provoked worldwide horror and
controversy. What were the wartime
circumstances that caused the Allies
to believe such a brutal attack on
civilians was warranted? Experts
from both sides, including
controversial neo-Nazi David Irving,
reflect on the motives of the
attack.
I protest to the film production
company Termite Art at once:
I am shocked to see that
the History Channel in advertising
the DRESDEN film refers to me as a
neo-Nazi. I find this poor return
for the unpaid work that I put in on
assisting your staff on this
project. . .
I am sure that your people who
know me have not attached this label
to the program, and that the guilty
party is somebody else who has an
agenda of his own. Please ensure
that this label is removed forthwith
from the film.
Posted
Sunday,
October 10, 1999
write to David Irving