London, October
21, 1998Dear Ian
Congratulations on the success
of your new volume. I glimpsed the last
part of Sunday night's TV broadcast on
the Final Solution on the eastern
front, and was impressed with the use
made of Walter
Frentz (I was the one who
first persuaded him to talk, many years
ago; one of these days one of us will
succeed in prising out of his
collection the colour transparencies he
took of the killing operation at Minsk.
He showed me his album of black and
white still photos.)
My friends tell me you were good
enough to list two books by me in your
bibliography, including Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third
Reich, but not
The War Path
(Michael Joseph Ltd., and Macmillan),
which includes very many unpublished
documents from the pre-war years; they
were surprised to see you did not use
the original Goebbels
Diaries entries for the
Reichstag Fire and the Röhm Purge,
which I obtained from Moscow, but
relied instead on
Kaiserhof and
the Heinz
Höhne book.
I would have been happy to lend
you the original Goebbels Diaries
copies which I have here. I have here
my card index of some 20,000 documents
collected for Hitler's
War, most of them
unpublished. When you come to the later
years, you should not ignore sources
like these, and particularly my volumes
on the Forschungsamt (Das
Reich hört mit),
and Hitler's health (The
Secret Diaries of Hitlers
Doctor: I found and
transcribed the Morell diaries for
1937-1945). Of course it is possible
your volume is already complete, in
which case the best of luck with
it.
Yours sincerely,
David Irving
write to David
Irving