Professor Gerald Fleming

In the David Frost British television programme on June 9, 1977, when Hitler's War was published, David Irving was pitted against Professor Gerald Fleming of the University of Surrey, England, a specialist in the history of the mass liquidation of Europe's Jews.

OVER the intervening twenty years, they have exchanged many documents as between colleagues. In 1985 Irving drew Fleming's attention to the extraordinary CSDIC Walter Bruns interrogations. Later, he told him of the Kurt Aumeier dossier. It proved a one-way traffic however. When Mr Irving asked to borrow the photo of Himmler (right) visiting Auschwitz, Fleming declined.

Provoked by Mr Irving's offer of a £1,000 reward, after seven years' research Fleming in ... published a book, Hitler and the Final Solution, seeking to prove Hitler's direct responsibility. Professor Gordon Craig, reviewing it in the USA, concluded that Fleming had failed; Tom Bower, the noted British investigative journalist, agreed with that assessment in his own published review.

In 1993 the legally enforced disclosure of secret Canadian, Australian, and other government files unexpectedly revealed that Fleming was acting as an agent of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, even secretly urging punitive measures against the British historian including his arrest and imprisonment by foreign powers.

In 1997 Fleming confirmed that he was born Gerhard Flehinger, in Mannheim, Germany, emigrating to the U.K. in 1938.

• In 1985 David Irving voluntarily supplied to Prof Fleming a key "Holocaust" document which he had found in British archives -- the Bruns document
• Jun 1991: Fleming supplies four Holocaust documents June, Oct 1942 and Mar 1943, to David Irving
• But a document dated Jul 22, 1942 suggests that these consignments of Zyklon-B were purely for fumigation
• Berlin radio signal Sept 15, 1942 orders a car from Auschwitz to Lodz (Litzmannstadt) and back to inspect a test station for "Operation Reinhard" field kitchens
• The Berliner Morgenpost reports, Jul 14, 1992, on documents Fleming claims to have found in the secret Moscow archives, including Auschwitz "gas chamber" blueprints
• Gerald Fleming boasts in the Jewish Chronicle, Jul 17, 1992, on his Auschwitz document finds in the Moscow archives
• Brian A Renk, "The Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung Archive in Moscow. A Critique of Exterminationist Methodology" (1992)