David Irving |
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Wednesday, October 3, 2007
© Focal Point 2007
Now, at last, after fourteen years, it is all back under my roof.
October 1, 2007 (Monday)
Wiltshire-Somerset border (England)AROUND five p.m. Bernard Josephs of The Jewish Chronicle phones me for an interview; I tease him mercilessly, but compliment him again for having produced the fairest reporting on the Lipstadt Trial, for all that he is Jewish. He is a good reporter.
I drive back to Windsor, make good time, arrive at 8:30 p.m. and watch another brain-numbing instalment of One Tree Hill, on DVD as I have no television connection yet. It all takes time.
October 2, 2007 (Tuesday)
Windsor (England)UP at seven a.m and resume correspondence. I write to pensioner John Woolloff, who is now in France:
Thanks for the fascinating information on your friend who visited Rudolf Hess; Hess was of course on a mission to end the war, which makes it all the more shameful that he was imprisoned for life. What cowards the war leaders were, and liars. Mrs Margaret Thatcher could of course have released him at any time she saw fit, when British troops had the guard role; but she did not.
I unload the three-quarters of a ton pallet of Bundesarchiv boxes, the Sammlung Irving, into its new home here. My mind goes back fourteen years to the famous final meeting in the Bundesarchiv in July 1993. [SEE THE DRAFT DAVID IRVING MEMOIRS FOR THE FULL ACCOUNT]
I had arrived at the archives to check up on two barely legible words in the Goebbels diaries -- words left blank in the official printed edition.
Until then I had been an honoured visitor. A year earlier I had brought the rest of my document collection to the building. But now they handed me a letter formally expelling me from the archives in perpetuity, "in the interests of the German people."
Result: they had to return my entire collection to me. Ten years of wrangling intervened -- they wanted to retain the pick of the items, but I insisted on everything being returned. It was 2003 before the collection finally regained England's shores. Today, at last, after fourteen years, it is all back under my roof.
B. phones to say she will come out here today. Today is grey and chilly. She arrives by train at Burnham station, and I escort her around the house and gardens. She turns up her nose at this and that, shrieks when I say that the pong is from a dead mouse under the boards, complains unconvincingly about the motorway traffic noise (which I can hardly hear, other than as the soothing noise of a swishing stream in the distance) but is perhaps nonetheless quietly impressed.
What a difficult person. I take her back to a train at 4:40 pm. and drive on to Chiswick to catch up on the day's emails. I deal with eighty there and then. We still have no phones connected, or broadband either: that is British Telecom for you. It is taking a long time to pull this new home together.
A Greek publisher makes an offer for my prison memoirs. I point out that what he is offering is barely two days' rent here.
Marissa Brostoff, a writer on The Forward, New York's foremost Jewish newspaper -- it was once the Yiddish Vorwärts and is over a century old -- asks for an interview about my views as reported in The Guardian.
"I'm writing a story about your recent announcements and their reception," she says, "and would very much appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to speak with me." She asks me to call, and since she sounds agreeably younger than a century I comply.
"I'll be happy to talk with you on your dime (Americanism)," I reply. "I have very great respect for The Forward, a fine newspaper of record. . . There are important things I have to say."
Hear David Irving speak in British cities. Register interest
Next city Birmingham , October 26, 2007, buffet and talk, 7-10 pm
AT eight p.m. I'm back at the house. Around nine Marissa phones for a lengthy chat. She asks straight away about the reaction of "the revisionists" to The Guardian interview, and I say that I have received a lot of feedback from them, some welcoming my statements as being true to my policy of always writing what I find, others angry that I am breaking the "revisionist front". But basically I am not saying anything I have not been saying for years: something did happen; it
was at other, less commercially exploitable, sites than at Auschwitz (I mentioned the hot-dog stand there), where the killings were on a lesser scale.
I am interested, as a biographer, not in the events of history so much as the people who create them -- in this case, Hitler, Himmler, Globocnik, and the rest, and the interplay between them.
What did Hitler himself know? This is one question that Jews hate me for asking; coupled with the other, even trickier, question for the Jews, Why Us?
She says that rivals accuse me of always creating fresh scandals. I say that on the contrary, it is the newspapers who phone me, not I them.
I tease her as I teased Bernie Josephs of The Jewish Chronicle yesterday. The Forward, like Ha'aretz, is an impressively objective newspaper, I say, despite the kind of people who write for them.
What, she asks with some heat, do I mean by that? --
She inquires curiously towards the end ("a delicate personal question") how I can afford to live in the large country house which The Guardian writes of. Good question. I can't.
I tease her with my reply, but I am glad the point is being made: not down, not out. I need the extra floorspace for many reasons, not least because the rest of my seized archives -- so far as it has not been stolen or illegally sold off -- is being returned to me on October 17, under pressure of the High Court action I have taken against the Trustees.
In the evening, I watch another episode of One Tree Hill; it is mindless brainslop. The sooner I can visit the United States the better. My own family is quietly grinding to a halt under the financial strain.
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