September 19, 2003 (Friday)
London - Copenhagen (Denmark)

Copenhagen. The last time I was in this city was in 1965, when I took a train through it, and no more, to interview Colonel Knut Haukelid for The Virus House, in Norway.

Five p.m. Alex meets me at the airport with driver Henrik. Pleasant city.

Irish TV3 has asked me for an interview in London for a feature programme. That's nice.

A number of Scandinavians have contacted me, asking to attend tomorrow's little luncheon, including some from Sweden. Alexander tells me that a (now former) friend of his had been phoning around the guests, suggesting that they not attend, as I am so "notorious." Three have accordingly cancelled; their loss, not mine. I am not talking tomorrow about the Holocaust, whatever it was, but about Adolf Hitler, whoever he was, and the problems of writing factually about him (and surviving afterwards).

Excellent supper, in a restaurant across the Nyhaven dock from the house where another writer, Hans Christian Andersen, once lived. It looks like an office block to me. Copenhagen has hardly been damaged in the war. We'll have a look at the former Gestapo prison tomorrow, and at the site of a children's school which a rooftop level Royal Air Force attack flattened, in the city's worst tragedy, when they tried to breach the prison walls in March 1945. That slick phrase "collateral damage" didn't exist in those times, but the military's insouciance about it certainly did.

Tomorrow we'll go to the museum which has some Heinrich Himmler stuff, including his fake eye-patch, donated to the Danes by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery; I wonder what else Monty had that he retained?

I am still hoping one day to locate the diary of Werner Best, which I suspect is somewhere in this city. He told British interrogators that "the Danes" had taken it from him.

My hunt for new documents never ceases. Best, (left), one of the most brilliant National Socialist officers, was a senior Gestapo official who interrogated General Werner von Fritsch in 1938, and then became governor of Denmark.

September 20, 2003 (Saturday)
Copenhagen (Denmark)

I wake to find that my sixth-floor hotel bedroom, which is on two levels connected by a spiral metal staircase, is on a level with the middle decks of a large ferry, Pearl of Scandinavia, which has throbbed into a dock about fifty feet away, almost silently -- you can feel the thud of its engines rather than hear it through the double glazed windows. The rest of the boat towers thirty or forty more feet above my windows. Cars from Norway are clanking across the steel drawbridge onto Danish soil.

Alex picks me up with his driver. The Freedom Museum is well organised, and I take pictures of the Himmler eyepatch and other items, which are all behind glass. The operations of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) are very well portrayed.

We drive across the town to the street where the Shell House is -- still Shell's headquarters -- of which the top floor housed the Gestapo cells holding the Resistance workers whom the air raid was supposed to liberate. A small bronze plaque with the Royal Air Force crest names about ten airmen with very English names, and bears just a date, March 21, 1945, but no other legend.

Unfortunately one of their planes was brought down and crashed a mile away in a residential district; the other pilots thought that the blaze marked the right target and unloaded their bombs there. It was a French convent school, and a statue marks the site, showing a nun clutching two terrified children looking up at the sky, although again with no explanation of what it is commemorating.

About forty hexagonal paving slabs surround the statue displaying, rather in the fashion of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the names and ages of the 170 who died, the youngest aged four or five, the oldest a Sister born in 1869, without stating that they died in a British raid.

It seems odd, but I suppose that respect for the sensitivities of the English dictates a proper element of tact (rather like that monument on the beach at Timmendorfer Strand, in northern Germany: it records the burial place of the 7,000 refugees who were aboard the liners Cap Arcona and Deutschland, sunk by one Canadian pilot of the 2nd Tactical Air Force in May 1945, but it describes the victims as "concentration camp prisoners" of the Nazis, which is rather less than accurate).

The folks meet me for the luncheon at the restaurant at one p.m. and to hear my talk (about the problems of writing on Hitler). Nobody dies. Two guests have travelled from Sweden, and there are others young and old. Some bright questions at the end, and we'll do it again, this time with some students if we can convey the meeting time and place safely to them. We all know how the traditional enemies of the truth just love to let me speak.

So my visit to Copenhagen ends: impressions -- a bright, clean, bustling town; ancient buildings, palace guards with bearskins, Disneyesque palaces; and thousands of blonde girls pedalling around the city looking like Benté. I see no Blacks, and no obese people, but I do once glimpse a gaggle of hooded, cotton-shrouded Somali "refugee" women huddling along the sidewalks to nowhere in particular.

THAT is the real mystery of this last half century, ever since World War Two. Why have the European countries, with all the ugly lessons of racial conflict offered by the United States before them, inflicted this same self-injury upon themselves, and unhappiness on the newcomers too?

When the Black hordes of Tamils were first being flooded into Germany by the East Germans in the 1970s, I offered the view that this was Moscow's new ploy: they were replacing the old Marxist Klassenkampf with Rassenkampf, and nothing that I see now diminishes that view. Marxism feeds on social discontent, and what better way to degrade one society than by inflicting another, alien, society upon it, to destroy it from within?

September 21, 2003 (Sunday)
Copenhagen (Denmark) - London (UK)

CARSTEN S. of Colorado asks me to address his history class when I pass through Denver late in December. I will try to tweak the itinerary to make that possible; it must be a Monday or Wednesday however. I usually speak at Littleton, which has become otherwise notorious of late.

I have posted yesterday on the website the startling news that Presidential hopeful Wesley Clark, the general whom we all learned to loath during the Kosovo war for his over-pretty features, has now subjected himself to the eugenic knife as well as the cosmetic: the Jewish Telegraph Agency has announced the revelation that he was born Mr Cann and comes from a long line of rabbis.

Not to be outdone, Senator Kerry reveals today that the name of one of his two Jewish grandfathers was Fritz Kohn. Well that certainly would give both of them my vote if I were an American.

Somebody emails me (subject: "Ideology overrides fact") that The New York Times today mentions my humble person in an article on the manner in which the IPC publishing group has laboured frantically to suppress a gushing feature-article which Homes & Gardens, one of its journals, published in 1938 about the h & g of Mr A Hitler, well known European artist and statesman.

  I lifted it from The Guardian journalist Mr Simon Waldman's website, cleaned it up and posted it some weeks ago. (The page-scans are still rather poor. Perhaps I can persuade someone to digitise the text). Waldman, cowed by IPC's lawyers, has taken his page down.

Tom Zeller, a New York Times journalist, asked me last week what I would do if IPC tried to force me to take the 1938 article off my website too; I replied:

My own website's policy is to reproduce articles but always giving full credit to the source (usually reproducing the masthead as an illustration -- another violation, I suppose).

Ha'aretz, one of the world's best newspapers in my view, once protested; I said that my posting of an article published by them, some days later, was surely equivalent to my finding a copy of their newspaper on a subway seat, and taking it home to read it and show it to others. They should not object to such a spreading of their fame. They lost no subscriptions thereby, probably the contrary.

If I suspect that an attempt is being made to suppress an awkward item -- which I suspect may be behind the Homes & Gardens effort -- then I would dig my heels in rather more, and hold out as long as I could.

The problem is, as you know, that under US law the affronted newspaper can complain to the web hosting service and insist on the item's removal.

I have lost two web hosting services (Powernet in the UK being one) in consequence: they wrote to me that as a small ISP they could not afford the legal costs of responding to letters from high powered law firms, so would I please take fpp.co.uk elsewhere, which I did (around 1999). Verio, in the USA, simply wiped the offending files off my website without telling me when outsiders complained.

The Anti-Defamation League objected to my using their logo as an illustration, and applied pressure to my web hosts; we then devised our own version of the ADL logo which is clearly a caricature or comment on it, and their lawyers evidently recognized that they had lost their last toehold and gave up on their attack.

I would add that in fighting any H&G attempt to suppress, I would plead (a) fair usage (b) First Amendment (c) matter of extreme public interest, given the identity of the home-and-garden owner involved.

In his article today, the New York Times journalist has used my contribution like this: "British revisionist historian David Irving, who maintains an index of Hitler-related content on his website and believes that the Holocaust never happened, suggested he would be more intransigent if challenged."

True, but why the bit about the Holocaust? I have written neither a book nor article on that boring topic, and readers of my website know precisely what my stance is: sceptical about some of the story, accepting some of the rest.

Yes, The Guardian. I am troubled to find that I like more and more of what this left-wing liberal newspaper has to say. And its Sunday sister, The Observer. Perhaps I am really left- wing after all, a socialist, as was the aforementioned artist and statesman.

He would probably have liked The Guardian too, under its present colours. I have never felt comfortable with the right-wing tag applied to me by the less discerning elements of the journaille. I am not sure however if it worth going the whole hog and claiming to have Jewish grandparents as well. I tried it during the Lipstadt trial, in conversation with a Jerusalem Post journalist, and I think I detected a hint of panic in his eyes.

Posting this diary on the website, my eye catches the previous item that I posted, about the New Jersey missile "sting" in mid-August, and the two New York gem dealers who were arrested for their part in financing the deal. I have heard nothing about them since. Surely the latter two were arraigned for trial? Surely?

Danish poster girl, revisionist