1993:
Banned from the German
Federal ArchivesIn the
Interests of the German People
I
ONCE wrote, in a chapter I contributed to a book
on the subject, that if I ever found a rival
author, let us say Mr William Manchester,
was running a year ahead of me on an identical
project, and about to publish, I would wait
until he was really near the end and then make a
gift to him of my entire research files,
accompanied by a suitably gushing letter. He
could hardly ignore my offer. Exploiting the
files would delay his project ruinously, and
might even knock his manuscript hopelessly out
of kilter -- unhinge it.
I fact the only time I used this tactic was
when I supplied the 1938 diary of General
Louis Spears' wife Mary Borden,
the novelist, to historian Martin
Gilbert. The Borden diary is an essential
source for research into Winston
Churchill's anti-Chamberlain plotting at the
time of Munich. I found it in Boston,
Massachusetts. The cheerful but indolent Gilbert
never used it -- no surprises there.
I
mention this, because the position I unwittingly
found myself in that summer of 1992 was the
plight I would have willingly inflicted on my
rivals: a completed
Goebbels biography on the one hand, and the
subject's hitherto missing diaries suddenly
unleashed upon me, the diaries which I had
retrieved from the Moscow archives: what might
be called an embarrasment of riches. It took me
the better part of three years to reconstruct
the whole book. I had to transcribe hundreds of
diary pages and meld them in, assigning the
correct relevance to each new diary passage.
I also supplied vital chunks of the diaries
to my friend Dr Ralf-Georg Reuth, a rival
Goebbels biographer and journalist on the
prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, the FAZ. His own Goebbels
biography had by then already appeared, but a
publisher had commissioned him to issue an
abridged five-volume edition of the Goebbels
diaries.
I filled in the most obvious gaps for him --
the whole of 1938, the 1934 Röhm Purge,
Kristallnacht, August 1939, and the like, but I
earned no credit for this. In fact the
publishers, Piper Verlag, wantonly attacked me
in a German television broadcast, and stated
that it was scandalous that ausgerechnet
David Irving, i.e. "of all people,"
should have been privileged to obtain them in
Moscow.
It was all part of a growing, and a worrying,
pattern. Reuth kept his part of the horsetrade
upon which we had agreed. He met me in an inn
off the main square in Bonn, and over dinner
handed over a package containing Goebbels diary
fragments for 1944, and the whole diary of the
legendary young Nazi, Horst Wessel, too.
I thanked him in my acknowledgements when my
biography appeared in 1996, and earned an
insulting, hysterical letter for having done so.
The climate in Germany for scholarly
cooperation, even by the 1990s, was not a good
one.
SOME
loose ends still remained in the summer of 1993.
I had found Leopold Gutterer, Goebbels'
wartime state secretary, aged ninety, living in
Aachen. I wanted to revisit the Goebbels
archives housed in the city hall of his native
Mönchengladbach, and give them a set of the
Moscow diary extracts that I had promised. I had
made a second set to donate to the Bundesarchiv,
the German federal archives. While in the latter
building, I wanted to have a shot at deciphering
a key word on one microfiche, two words left
blank in Elke Fröhlich's
transcription, but which I surmised showed
Adolf Hitler insisting on better
conditions for the Jews in the camps.
I had driven over to Germany on a brief
speaking tour arranged by my friends. Two
journalists from the Finnish daily Helsingin
Sanomat trailed me, by agreement. In Berlin
I took them over to the Bogensee lake, and
showed them the two houses that Goebbels had
built there -- a cottage for his mistress
Lida Baarova, and later a more opulent
mansion for his family at the other end of the
lake -- and I showed the journalists the rusting
metal hooks I had found screwed into a lakeside
tree branch from which Goebbels had suspended a
swing for his ill-starred children.
In Aachen Gutterer was still lively and
alert. His mind was full of surprising details.
On trial in Hamburg after the war, he learned
one day that that none other than Herschel
Grynszpan was in the public gallery -- the
young Jew who in November 1938 had assassinated
the number two man in the German embassy in
Paris, triggering the Goebbels pogrom, the Night
of Broken Glass. It seemed ironic that of all
the Jews who had come under the Nazis' heel, the
murderer Grynszpan should somehow have
survived.
I left the set of Goebbels diaries at the
Mönchengladbach archives, received several
photos of his girlfriends in return, and drove
on down to the German Federal Archives building
on a hilltop outside Koblenz.
It was July 1, 1993. In my diary I wrote on
the day before that this might well be my last
visit for a while, as the Goebbels book was now
complete. For thirty years I had been visiting
this building and its more humble predecessor
and I had turned over most of my archives to
them in gratitude, adding more boxes as each
book was completed. I had brought a truckload of
boxes down to the building only a few months
before, in the spring of 1992, and archive
directors had begun pressing me to sign the
formal deed of transfer.
I was usually an honoured visitor, but this
time I noticed a certain shiftiness in the
junior staff as I walked in. As I ordered up the
two microfiches of Goebbels papers, a flunky
said that the archive directors had asked to see
me upstairs. In the boardroom I found two or
three archive directors, including its president
and vice-president Dr Büttner; I
guessed that they wanted to express formal
gratitude for the Goebbels diaries I had brought
with me. The newspapers -- particularly Der
Spiegel-- had been full of my scoop for
weeks.
I was wrong. They handed me a lengthy typed
letter; its date -- July 1, 1993 -- was entered
in ink that was still wet. That suddenly did not
look so good. The deputy chief's face registered
embarrassment. The letter declared that "in the
interests of the German people" I was forthwith
banned from entering or using the federal
archives. The general sense of the letter was
that archives were available only to historians
who came to politically acceptable conclusions,
and I was believed not to be among their number,
as the recent court proceedings in Bavaria had
shown.
True, there were words of gratitude for the
rare documents that I had turned over to them
over the last quarter century, the Sammlung
Irving: "We would hope that despite the
unfortunate circumstances we may retain them
here," said the deputy chief, twisting his
hands. "But if you insist on us mailing them
back to you in England we would regretfully
comply."
His face red and awkward, a colleague, Dr
Posthuber, tugged at his sleeve. "Mit
der Post wird das wohl kaum gehen, Herr
Vizepräsident," he murmured.
Using
regular mail was out of the question. "The
Sammlung Irving, Herr Vizepräsident -- it
weighs nearly a ton."
The situation was absurd, ludicrous; after
the initial shock I felt in control, superior to
them all.
"Ich merke, Herr Vizepräsident
fühlen sich nicht wohl in seinem eigenen
Haut," I said with a smile which I tried to
keep faint, so as not to offend. I did suggest
that they might informally allow me one hour to
complete the task I had come for; but panic,
like gangrene, had set in. Senior German civil
servants were cowards, and always have been.
So that was it. I stipulated that if I was to
be physically banned from the archives, there
could be no question of my collection
remaining.
AS I rapidly packed my things, that first
July day of 1993, and left the Federal Archives
research room, I noticed Gudrun, the
surviving daughter of Heinrich Himmler;
he called her Püppi. I paused briefly to
exchange pleasantries, and she thanked me for
having donated to the archives the colour copies
of her father's missing diaries for 1935 and
1939.
I inquired what she was working on.
"A book to clear my father's name," she said.
She had been working on this book since 1945, I
later found out.
It might seem that she was engaged in a
devoted but hopeless task. There are daughters,
and daughters: some revere their fathers, others
despise them. Gudrun had embarked on a lifelong
Labour of Sisyphus. Why? As a penance? But then
I was ushered out, and have not returned since
then.
I drove back to my hotel, issued a statement
to the German press agency, The Times,
and The Daily Telegraph, and phoned Dr
Reuth, now chief of the FAZ's Berlin
bureau. He said that this development was
without precedent. Shortly, he phoned back --
his newspaper had guaranteed him the whole back
page of its Feuilleton, (Review) section,
to cover the story.
The article never appeared. This was, I
recall, the first time that I began to
appreciate that I was in deepening trouble. The
ban was reported around the world, but the
German press uttered not a whimper, and their
cowardly historians remained silent too.
A paper war began with the archives: with me
now gone, they insisted on cherry-picking the
most valuable items in my collection, and
retaining them; I refused to accept back any
shipment unless the Sammlung returned
intact.
Ten
years of shameful wrangling would pass before a
German government transport truck finally
brought the boxes back to England (with the most
valuable items still missing); by that time I
had no room for them, as my London home had been
seized in the wake of the Lipstadt trial,
together with the historical archives still
within its walls, and the truck was unloaded
into a warehouse in Wiltshire.
TO be fair, I will add that the Bundesarchiv
had at first put up quite a fight on my behalf.
My Mainz lawyer, Dr K. A. R. Schütz,
appealed against their decision in their
country's Verwaltungsgericht. Given sight
of the bulky Irving file, the lawyer found the
whole behind-the-scenes battle between the
archives and the ministry of the interior which
controlled it. The directors had put up a manful
fight against the insult and injury being
proposed against me, though one might suspect
this was more in their own interest than in
mine.
Over the next ten years I repeatedly came
across caches of German wartime documents,
looted by GIs, which properly belonged in
Koblenz, and I acted as intermediary. Among them
were the papers of Hans Frank, Alfred
Rosenberg, and other top Nazis, and the
Gestapo interrogations of the staff of Rudolf
Hess: under its constitution the
Bundesarchiv had a statutory obligation to
retrieve missing German archives from around the
world, and I continued to cooperate sub
rosa with its officials, quietly drawing
their attention to thefts of documents from the
Berlin Document Center, and to valuable caches
of stolen or looted Nazi files upon which I had
stumbled in my wanderings around the United
States.
The ministry's attitude actually hardened. As
the years passed, the archives consequently
adopted a strange dog-in-the-manger attitude.
The problem came to a head when
a Philadelphia antique dealer bought the papers
of the late Nuremberg prosecutor, Robert M.
W. Kempner, lock-stock-and-barrel, and
he invited me to come and assess them: they
turned out to contain a ton or more of materials
stolen from the Nuremberg courthouse in 1947,
including the original handwritten war diary of
the Sonderstab Oldenburg -- the OKW unit
set up in February 1941 to prepare the economic
exploitation of the Soviet Union.
I informed my contact man at the
Bundesarchiv, Dr Wilhelm Lenz, that the
dealer was willing to restore the files to
Germany for modest but proper reward; after some
weeks of negotiation, Lenz informed me that the
archives directorate had forbidden him to have
any further contact with me, even though it
meant the permanent loss of these missing
troves. Their panic was now comparable to the
Seventh Army's Rout at Falaise, and I never
found out why.
All that I have been able to do since then is
to tease and tantalize the archives each time I
come across a new hoard, knowing that the
ministry binds their hands. I still tell them of
all that I find, because I feel obliged to do
so, and where to get it. From the archives comes
only silence in return. 
© David
Irving 2007
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Irving