August 9, 2003 (Saturday)
Key West, Florida

YESTERDAY a letter from Professor Peter H., of Montreal, very nice, about the discoveries I made in the interrogations files relating to Von Stauffenberg's 1943 plans against Hitler. He says the stuff is "fascinating and tantalizing" because so much of it rings true, while being mixed with apparently absurd off-the-mark utterances: for example, General Broich saying, "Stauffenberg war schon im Sommer 41 bei mir und wir wollten es eigentlich schon im Januar 43 machen."

That seems far too early to the professor -- but Broich was captured in May 1943, so all his information must antedate that time. Hoffmann admits that these reports were completely unknown to him.

IN his letter the professor encloses an envelope he sent me months ago, returned to him with a bogus rubber stamp on it, reading "return to sender". I write to the Post Office in London yet again about this tampering:

We have written to you on several occasions over the last twelve months concerning serious improprieties affecting our mail deliveries . . .

1. Thefts. Over the last months many items of our mail have been opened at one corner and contents including cash removed. . . How are your inquiries progressing?

2. Label tampering. For a year or more somebody in your office has been intercepting mail addressed to me and maliciously stamping it with a non-official rubber stamp specially made for the job reading ADDRESS CHANGED. RETURN TO SENDER. In consequence mail addressed to me from all over the world has been in several instances actually destroyed or lost. . . You informed me, when I first reported this, that the stamp was not an official PO stamp. I was deeply shocked. This tampering is happening at your office, as (a) it affects only mail sorted ready for delivery to me (and nobody else at this street address), and (b) the imprint has been stamped onto letters before the bundle is put through our door's letter slot. The fact that other letters were delivered despite the stamp being on them may be one clue for you. A search of sorting desks at your building may well bring the unofficial rubber stamp to light.

To assist your investigating authorities: I am a well known author of books on World War II, and I have in consequence been the object of harassment and even violence by left-wing (and in confidence to yourself [...]) groups and individuals.

GUNTER L. of Vancouver has sent me a sheaf of photocopies. "The enclosed excerpts provide incontestable proof, if such was needed, of Robert Jan Van Pelt's mendacity and his intention to deceive. The man is a shameless dissembler, not scholar. The allegation referred to is not only improbable (like the rest of the testimony) but physically impossible."

My correspondent is referring to the oft repeated theme in such Holocaust "eye-witness" accounts about "execution machines," "human meat grinders", and -- in this case -- "lining up the victims to shoot several of them through the head with one bullet."

"See Ella Liebermann-Shiber," adds my friend in a postscript, enclosing the relevant pages. "The one-shot-through-several-heads theme appears to be one of their favourite perverse pipe dreams of Nazi atrocities."

Yes, perverse. Pelt has quoted the earlier parts of one witness's testimony, but for obvious reasons leaves out the "several heads" item and even claims that the witness made no "improbable allegations," so is plausible -- just as Professor Christopher Browning left out the inconvenient, nay impossible, forty-meter high mounds of clothing, and other improbable statistics of the Belzec camp, when he quoted the Gerstein report, and suffered several agonising moments in the witness box under my cross examination in consequence.

Yes, Van Pelt does appear curiously selective in his sources. I remember that during the Lipstadt Trial he produced to the Court grisly pen-and-ink sketches by David Olère, who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor, of the inside of Auschwitz "undressing rooms" (with largely nubile young females undressing, full frontal to his drawing pad, in front of whip-toting Nazi soldiers) and of a "gas chamber" (Pelt said the cross hatching in the shadows was actually the famous wire-mesh Zyklon-B insertion funnel).

Despite his claims to be a survivor, this artist Olère seems in truth never actually to have been near Auschwitz, because he showed hills in the background of the camp buildings, and as everybody knows Auschwitz is in a region of Silesia flatter than Florida, nay, flatter even than Calista Flockhart.

Needless to say, the Olère drawings were heavily relied on by Mr Justice Gray (right) in his ponderous and adverse judgment: hence the word which I attached to it at the time, as my only other adjective: perverse.

Academics! Scholars! Pfui deibel, Milch would have said.

I scan the documents for the website, and thank Gunter of Vancouver profusely: "Ironic that I was the one accused of selective quoting of documents and sources! Expert witnesses! 'If the price is right!'"

 Our bulging dossier on Robert Jan van Pelt