AS Hitler
was not personally implicated in the
Franke-Griksch document, I paid little
attention to it for my Hitler biography.
But bubbles of it kept coming to the
surface, like marsh gas. 
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May
19, 2005 (Thursday)
Key
West (Florida) A STRANGE document has surfaced,
apparently in the Public Record office in London,
allegedly a section of a genuine Franke-Griksch
report. In this newly
found version, SS officer Alfred
Franke-Griksch describes a visit to the
Auschwitz
camp, evidently in the company of Heinrich
Himmler's homosexual chief of SS personnel,
Maximilian von Herff, and is amazed and
impressed by the scholarly work he finds being
conducted there in the fields of innovative
agricultural research. It seems genuine, the date is probable, but we
have not been told yet in what British file the
document has been found, nor do we have a German
original to examine. The translation is evidently
by an English hand (see the last sentence -- "the
commandant's flat, where an American would
write apartment.) This is the new document's significance: Albert
Franke-Griksch was an SS officer,
SS-Sturmbannführer (roughly a major),
who allegedly made a field trip to the
Generalgouvernement in May 1943, which included the
Auschwitz town and concentration camp or camps, and
for many years a two-page
extract of his field report had variously
delighted the trial lawyers and conformist
historians, and haunted or baffled the revisionists
for the explicitness with which it describes the
liquidation procedures at Auschwitz. But there are problems. It is not an original --
that has vanished; it is a two-page postwar typed
extract, "authenticated" by a US army officer,
Eric M Lipman, who used to live in Florida
and survived as recently as at 1991 in Richmond,
Virginia at 5310 Riverside Drive. In short, no
English magistrate's court would accept a document
of such uncertain provenance. Reasonable doubt.  I
myself came across Lipman while writing my
Rudolf
Hess book: sent to raid the home of Rudolf
Hess's wife Ilse for documents in 1945, he
found that the files there showed that that Hess
had done so many charitable deeds during the Nazi
years that it was positively an embarrassment for
the prosecution, for which Lipman worked.
The documents were accordingly left securely in
Ilse's possession, and they were all still there in
the 1990s when I stayed for a week in the basement
of her home, unbeknownst to the old lady upstairs,
cataloguing every page and sorting them at Wolf
Rüdiger's request, and making too some
copies for my Goebbels
biography. The catalogue was unfortunately
among my records seized by the British government
Trustee in May 2002, but that is another story. 
AS Hitler was not personally implicated in the
Franke-Griksch document, I paid little attention to
it for my Hitler biography. But bubbles of it kept
coming to the surface, like marsh gas.
In the 1970s the chief archivist at the
Institut
für Zeitgeschichte, Dr Anton Hoch,
who was a very good friend (now long dead, alas),
kept asking me in a quizzical kind of way what I
thought of Franke-Griksch, and I never really knew
what to reply. I had the impression that Hoch knew
more than he wanted to say, the laws on free speech
being as they were (and still are) in Germany. Working in the Berlin Document Center twenty
years or more ago I came across two ring-binders of
selected documents on the Judenfrage,
numbered 238-I and 238-II I think, and there was an
unsigned, anonymous two-page account of the
liquidation procedures, written on a different
typwriter, \and perhaps even a postwar one to judge
from the type face, and it had (from memory) the
same content. Again, the copy I made is in my
seized archives. Around the same time, I came across Melitta
Wiedemann in Vlotho, a hardy old soul, an
Amazon, indeed something of a battleaxe, of the
early Nazi years, and she claimed to have typed the
Franke-Griksch document. It all meant nothing to me
at the time, my interview notes with her are lost
(apart from the heading), and she is long gone. Franke-Griksch was captured by the British,
released years later, lured into the Soviet Zone in
the 1950s, and done to death in a gulag. Years
later, in the mid 1980s, I was called as an expert
witness for the defence in the Westphalian trial of
his son Ekkehard, who had been indicted
under modern Germany's laws for the suppression of
free speech. He had been caught thinking impure
thoughts about the Real History of WW2. I was not paid for my defence work, unlike
some expert witnesses in recent history, and he
was bound to be convicted anyway. I seem to
remember the penalty imposed on him was slight,
around ten thousand dollars, plus
Berufsverbot, a ban on ever working in his
profession again. I reproduce Ekkehard's view on
the two-page "Lipman-authenticated" document
elsewhere.
Lipman, questioned by our friends in 1991 about the
original version, could remember nothing. Now comes this new item, also claiming to be the
Franke-Griksch report. [Previous
Radical's Diary] 
A
page from the SS personnel file of Albert
Franke [aka Franke-Griksch]-
The
Franke-Gricksch Report: The Lipman Version
originating evidently at IMT Nuremberg [page
1] [page
2] from Jean-Claude Pressac's monumental
work
-
New extract of this report
allegedly surfaces 2005 in London
archives
-
David Irving, a Radical's
Diary, discusses
-
Revisionist
forum on May 2005 controversy
-
Another
web page examines the Franke-Griksch
report
-
Brian
Renk relates his investigation into the origins
of the controversial Franke-Griksch
report
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David Irving