on the Eichmann and Goebbels Papers | TWICE THIS YEAR I've come under the scrutiny of journalists, entirely through no doing of my own. The first occasion was my acquisition of the Eichmann papers, about which I'll be speaking shortly. The second occasion was in regard to the papers of Dr. Joseph Goebbels. I'll show you the Goebbels papers first because these have aroused enormous interest. It came about like this: The Goebbels DiariesAt this, of course, my ears pricked up because any
historian worth his salt will tell you that the published
Goebbels diaries are complete except for everything that
matters. Few of the most important portions have been
published so far: the November 1938 Kristallnacht ("Night of
broken glass"), the 1934 Röhm purge ("Night of the long
knives"), the outbreak of the war in 1939, the Pearl Harbor
attack, you name it -- it is not in the published volumes
that came out in the 1950s, the 1970s or the 1980s. They hadn't got everything that mattered. We thought this
was because the Soviets were holding onto the good stuff, to
sell it for really top dollar later on. But that was not the
case. It was just the typical Communist, Marxist-Leninist
chaos. They didn't know themselves what they had. The diaries were recorded on Agfa glass plates stored in
boxes: here are my color photographs of one of the original
boxes. You can see the handwriting on it of Dr. Richard
Otte, Goebbels' own secretary, which my source immediately
recognized. Historians of the period all knew that during
the final weeks of the war, Goebbels feared that his
priceless diaries might be burned to a frizzle in some
thoughtless British air raid. So he took the precaution of
having them microfilmed on these glass plates, which at that
time was a totally new system. We knew that these glass
plates existed somewhere, and we've been looking for them.
Actually, we couldn't just look for them because no one knew
where to look. But if you stumbled across them, you'd know
what they are, rather like the diaries of Admiral
Canaris. |
My source's own institute, the Institute of Contemporary
History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) in Munich -- my
deadliest enemies now -- refused to finance a further
expedition for my source to go back to Moscow to purchase
these 1,600 glass plates. There are 92 boxes of these glass plates. Ninety-two
boxes, just loosely bundled up with string. The glass plates
are not in very good condition. They've got fragments of
glass splinters between them and they're often badly
scratched. But they are entirely legible. My source suggested that I raise the money to visit
Moscow to get hold of these glass plates. I contacted my
American publisher, Avon Books, and for ten days they acted
very enthusiastic. I estimated that I'd need about $20,000
in order to buy the glass plates outright from the Russian
archivists. They need money so badly just to keep the
archives running, they have to sell off the family silver
bit by bit, so to speak. I thought that $20,000 was a very
reasonable price. Suddenly, though, the bubble popped. Word came down from
the upper levels at Avon books that they wouldn't finance my
trip to Moscow to get these plates. They feared that it
involved "bribing" Russian officials, or something
unethical. So next I approached my British publishers,
Macmillan London, Ltd., and within two hours received the
same answer. Perhaps it was decided that they wouldn't help
provide David Irving with this scoop. So I approached the Sunday Times, which is Britain's
biggest, most serious, and most respected newspaper. They
immediately agreed to finance an initial expedition to
Moscow for me to have a look at these glass plates. A week
later, I returned to London having not only looked at the
plates, but having copied hundreds of pages from them --
everything that mattered except for a few gaps. When I then reached an agreement with the Sunday Times,
they insisted that I not breathe a word to anyone about this
arrangement. As Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil told me,
"Irving, my staff are not happy that we are doing this deal
with you." I replied, "Well, you've got no choice, have you?
Because it's my project." If you read the newspaper accounts afterwards, you get
the impression that this was the Sunday Times' project, and
that they had picked me for it because I'm the only person
who can read Goebbels' handwriting. Well, later, when the
big fight started, they were hoist by their own petard
because the fight in Britain became horrendous and hairy.
[See the IHR Newsletter, Oct. 1992, p. 5.] The Jewish community frantically organized ten-man-strong
gangs to go out and deface these posters. But as fast as
they desecrated, the Sunday Times went 'round renewing them.
This went on for a week until finally the community
concerned, our traditional enemies, brought their
traditional pressures to bear on the Sunday Times. As Mark
Weber mentioned, they themselves admitted this pressure, not
only from the English community, but the American Jewish
community as well, because the Sunday Times is particularly
vulnerable. Much of their finance comes from their American
banking system, and much of the advertising in Britain is
dependent on this particular community. The community left
Andrew Neil, the editor, with no doubt at all of their
displeasure. He told me at the height of this crisis that he
had never been through such a nightmare in his life. In consequence of this pressure the Sunday Times had to
turn the entire campaign around against me, their own
contributor, and try to pretend that it was their material,
and that they were obliged to call me in because I was the
only person who could read the handwriting. Let me just show
you what the glass pages produce. Dr. Goebbels' diaries were
recorded in miniature on glass plates; this is the contact
print of one of the glass plates. As you see, it's fifty
pages of the diaries in handwriting, very, very small. The
first week I was there I had no easy means of reading them
because there was no microfilm reader in Moscow. But by
chance I had a tiny little 12x magnifying glass with me, as
large as my fingernail, and with that I could read those
glass plates for the first week. Some of them we borrowed, with the permission of the
archivist, and had them blown up to produce these
photographs. You can see later on, those of you who read
German, that Dr. Goebbels' handwriting is truly illegible.
It took me two years to learn to read it. When the Sunday
Times said, "Irving is one of the three people in the world
who can read Goebbels' handwriting," our rivals scoffed and
said, "That's utter baloney, any German of that generation
can read his handwriting." So I sent pages of the diary to
these rival journalists, and I said, "I'll pay you a
thousand pounds if, within two weeks, you can supply me with
a transcript of one page with fewer than 50 percent errors."
Not one of them took me up on it. |
The Daily Mail, a rival of the Sunday Times, thought they'd scooped us by paying 20,000 pounds to purchase a few pages of the diary from the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, who were determined to spite me. The Daily Mail took their precious pages and hurried off back to London to get to work on them, only to find to their horror that their people could not read the pages they'd paid 20,000 pounds for! I had some happy moments during that July of 1992, as you can believe. Joseph Goebbels (right) with armaments minister Albert Speer (left) and labor leader Robert Ley at a mass meeting in Berlin in 1943 to honor outstanding workers. Mark [Weber] mentioned the publicity that surrounded this affair, and it's true: during those two weeks alone, I collected two thousand press clippings from around the world. It was exactly the same back in January when the Eichmann papers scandal broke. You see, when I was in Argentina in October [1991] delivering lectures in English and Spanish to audiences down there, one of those odd strokes of luck happened. When you're an internationally known historian, or when you're notorious, people come up to you and ask, "Are you interested in this?" Thus, an American autograph collector wrote to me a few weeks ago saying, "I've got Heinrich Himmler's 1939 diary. Would you like to have a look at it?" This kind of thing happens. The Eichmann MemoirsI'm grateful to them because recently I got a letter from
a Greek publisher saying, "Mr. Irving, I've been trying for
a year to contact you through your publishers so that I can
make an offer for the rights to your Adolf Hitler biography,
and your publishers were unwilling to let us have your
address. As I was in London shopping a few days ago, I
happened to notice a sticker on which your opponents put
your address, so I am happy now to make an offer for your
book." This is what happens. So, being notorious has its advantages. When I was in
Argentina, in October [1991], a man who had written
me vaguely a couple of years before, mentioning papers that
he thought I ought to see, came up to me at the end of one
meeting. The next day he came back and gave me two bulky
brown-paper parcels which turned out to contain the writings
of Adolf Eichmann when he was in hiding in Argentina in the
late 1950s. Adolf Eichmann, of course, is now the man with
whom the public most associates what they call the
"Holocaust." I hate that word. It's a word I don't like using. People
say to me, "Mr. Irving, do you believe in the Holocaust? Do
you deny the Holocaust?" I say that I mistrust words with a
capital letter. They look like a trademark, don't they? Like
Tylenol or something. We don't trust them; no matter how
much advertising they put into Tylenol. And so it is with
that word "Holocaust." You get the impression that it is a
neatly packaged, highly promoted operation, and you don't
trust it. Eichmann was born on the 19th of March, 1906. As an SS
Lieutenant Colonel (Obersturmbannführer), he was a
specialist of the Jewish question. He looked upon the Jews
with that same mixture of admiration and fear shared by most
of the non-Jewish population around the world. He went to Palestine in 1937 after he was made an officer
in the SS, and he actually (we have his own record of this)
entered into negotiations with leading Zionist underground
fighters in Palestine, some of whom went on after the war to
become members of the cabinet of Israeli leader David
Ben-Gurion. None of this was admitted by them at the time,
but of course the records are there in the files of the SS
in the National Archives in Washington. Eichmann was head of department IV B 4 of the Reich
Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA).
This was the desk of the Gestapo assigned to deal with
Jewish matters. Eichmann came under Heinrich Müller
(head of the Gestapo), who came under Reinhard Heydrich (the
chief of the RSHA) [and after January 1943, Ernst
Kaltenbrunner], who came under Heinrich Himmler (the
Reichsführer SS), who came under Hitler. Actually, Himmler was much farther under Hitler than you
would imagine from subsequent historical propaganda.
Relations between Himmler and Hitler were not close. They
seldom saw each other; Himmler was a bit of a loose cannon
who operated very much at arm's length from Hitler. He took
his own decisions and acted as he wanted. Hitler couldn't be
bothered with much that Himmler was up too. I think there
was a certain lack of affinity between the two, and this
became increasingly evident as the war went on. This is also
indicated by Eichmann's own writings. To the governments of the foreign countries from where
Jews were being deported, Eichmann denied that the Jews were
being killed. But from his papers we can surmise that he
knew or suspected different. These Eichmann papers -- the 600 pages which were handed
to me in Argentina -- are all typescript on very, very,
flimsy paper -- what you Americans call onion skin paper --
legal size. I am guessing that many, many carbon copies had
been made. We know that they originated with the
collaboration of a Flemish journalist named Willem Sassens
von Hildewor who was also in hiding in Argentina. Sassens
was a very dubious character. I think he's still alive in
Argentina, but he's gone into hiding because he fears for
his life, and probably with some justification because
there's good reason to suspect that he turned over the bulk
of these papers -- which he dressed up for the purpose -- to
Life magazine, in 1959 or 1960, and when Life magazine
published them they were the direct cause of Eichmann's
capture and kidnapping by the Israelis in the following
year. So Sassens is a very dubious character. As we know from
von Woltersdorf, an eyewitness who lives in Germany now and
wrote me a very long letter after the scandal broke (he was
present during a lot of these taping sessions with
Eichmann), Sassens persuaded Eichmann to talk at very great
length on tape recordings. Altogether there were either 67
or 72 tape recordings. Because they were recorded in the
1950s, the tape recorder was a primitive reel-to-reel model.
The tapes, once used, would then be erased and reused, so
unfortunately, very few of the original tapes survive. |
Sassens had taped the conversations with Eichmann in the
1950s. They are verbatim transcripts, which makes them very
useful, and as such they differ greatly from the books that
were published by Eichmann in 1985 -- Ich, Adolf Eichmann
(the German edition), or Yo, Adolfo Eichmann (the
Spanish-language version) -- because those books contain no
transcripts of conversations. They contain just a mildly
edited text of what Sassens himself put together. The transcripts themselves are very interesting because
Eichmann got very irritated with Sassens, and constantly
interrupted him: "I can't see what you're getting at," and
"You're very thick," and "why do you keep asking me about
who was giving me the orders? How was I supposed to know?"
And this kind of thing. It's the "back-chat" which was
interesting in the dialogues. In January 1992 I donated all these original papers to
the Federal Archives [Bundesarchiv] in Koblenz. In
fact, I turned them over even before I read them myself,
because obviously they are a historical source of very
substantial importance to anybody investigating the
"Holocaust." Since 1965, I've made a practice of turning
over my private papers and my research papers to the German
Federal Archives, both because they are such a huge volume
of paper, and so that other historians can use them. For a
time I turned over papers to the Institute of Contemporary
History in Munich, where they have a collection called "The
Irving Collection." But I changed that three years ago,
after a professor with the Institute, Helmuth Auerbach,
decided to write a letter behind my back, on Institute
letterhead, denouncing me to the German public prosecutor! I
decided no longer to deposit papers in their archives, and
until they apologize and retract that libelous letter, they
can say goodbye to receiving any of the rest of my
collection. Consequently, all my subsequent papers have gone
to the German Federal Archives. I didn't have time to open those brown packages until
Christmas-time. Christmas in London is an endlessly boring,
tedious, and desolate festival, so I decided to enliven my
festival by reading Adolf Eichmann's papers. I started reading on Christmas eve, and I carried on
through Christmas day. I decided very rapidly that I
couldn't continue reading the originals because they are so
flimsy that I might damage them. So I decided to copy them,
which I had to do page by page because they are so flimsy.
It took me all Christmas day, but I ended up with a much
better set than the originals I eventually donated to the
archives. Thus I began reading them in earnest about January 2nd or
3rd. Each evening, at the end of the rest of my day's work,
I would read 30 or 40 pages of these transcripts. When this journalist telephoned me, I said, "I can't tell
you my own impression about these figures, but what I will
tell you is that Adolf Eichmann himself said that
[Auschwitz commandant] Rudolf Höss' figures
were grossly inflated, and that Eichmann thought that
Höss was an outrageous liar." "How do you know this?" he responded. "Well," I said, "nobody else knows this, but as of two
months ago I've gotten ahold of all of Adolf Eichmann's
private papers. They were donated to me by a mutual friend
in Argentina who didn't know what to do with them, and he
thought they were safest in my hands. I've donated the
originals to the German archives, and I'm busy researching
through them now." By that time I'd read three quarters of
them, I think. Well, the journalist flipped. "You mean to say that
you've had Adolf Eichmann's diaries?" he asked. "No," I replied, "not his diaries, just his memoirs and
everything he dictated and his conversations, and it's all
pure gold." Then he asked, "Have you reached any new
conclusions?" I responded: "There's one sentence that has given me
cause for thought." (I'll speak about this later on.) And
the journalist then wrote an article that appeared the
following day in The Observer, and which was picked up that
same day by the Sunday Telegraph under the headline,
"Historian Recants." [See the IHR Newsletter, Feb. 1992,
pp. 3-4.] Okay, that's the kind of harmless thing newspapers do,
and the following morning they're wrapping fish and chips.
But in this case, the following morning it was wrapping fish
and chips all the way around the world. As the globe spun,
as the sun rose in the east and sank in the west, so my fax
machine churned out press clippings from all my agents and
sources and friends, in New Zealand, in Australia, in South
Africa, in Europe, then on the east coast of the United
States, then across Canada, then finally to the west coast,
then down in Hawaii, in China, in Hong Kong -- right around
the world. That one Observer article had instantaneously
been spread: "David Irving Recants." It was interesting to see that my original statement,
whatever I was supposed to have recanted, had not gone
around the world with the speed of light, had not been
splashed [on newspaper front pages], and yet my
"recanting" was sufficiently newsworthy to have gone around
the world, and been given this tremendous publicity
splash. |
At this, our traditional enemies went berserk. In a very
impressive example of damage control, they then called out
the fire brigades to spread the following message: "What
David Irving has published is not new. David Irving has
found nothing that the accepted, academic, reliable, decent,
serious professional historians haven't always known all
along. The Eichmann papers are not new. We have always known
about these papers. There is nothing in David Irving's find
that merits serious consideration." To which I said, "How do you know? The papers that I have
donated to the federal archives in Germany are subject to an
embargo by me which prevents anybody else from seeing them,
and nobody has seen them, except me and the archives
[officials] in Germany. So how do you know that what
I have is what you lot have known all along?" An interesting
point! "Oh, well, it's quite obvious, isn't it?" they said, and
then went into a kind of damage control on the damage
control. But it was too late, because the point was very
obvious: I had the papers, and they hadn't. The Institute of Contemporary History of Munich also
announced that what I had was nothing new, that it was well
known, and that didn't David Irving realize that Adolf
Eichmann's book had been published in 1985? I said that not only did I know that Eichmann's book was
published in 1985, I was the person who engineered it. After
no other publisher in the world would touch Eichmann's book,
I personally organized contacts between Eichmann's son, who
had those manuscripts, and Druffel Verlag [a publisher
in Germany], so that at least the manuscripts got some
kind of airing. So of course I knew about the book, but what I had was
totally different: I had the transcripts of the
conversations, which had never been published. The line of defense of the Jewish community was that what
I had was not all that serious; and, please, no further
publicity. This made me begin to wonder. What was it they
didn't want published? Why was it, I asked myself, that when
the Eichmann memoirs came out in 1985, first of all, nobody
was willing to publish them except Druffel Verlag in
Germany, and Planeta in Argentina, but no mainstream
publisher in Europe or the United States? Here, after all,
are the memoirs of "the biggest mass-murderer of all time,"
apparently, and yet for some reason they're being swept
under the carpet. And why was it that our traditional enemies had gone into
this frantic damage control exercise when, of all people,
David Irving had got control of the original transcripts and
had put them in the archives? Martin Gilbert, my deadly rival and enemy, the Churchill
biographer in Britain, said, "For many years Mr. Irving has
denied these facts about the Holocaust and now he makes a
virtue of finding them." But I didn't say the first, I didn't say the second. What
I do say now is: can we analyze these papers, these
transcripts, which are disorganized and not indexed, and in
rather an untidy mess -- can we analyze them in some way,
and ask ourselves why it is that they were swept under the
carpet in 1985, and why people were so anxious that the
press should pay no attention to the papers that had been
given to me in Argentina in 1991? The second interesting thing that emerges from Eichmann's
own papers is that he's chewing over in his mind-- he's
frightfully repetitive -- he keeps on coming back, again and
again, in his manuscripts and in these conversations to who
was behind it, and what was behind it. What was behind the
"Holocaust" (if we can use that word loosely here now)? He
keeps coming back to the appalling thought: Did they manage
to use us? Did the Zionists use the Nazis to further their
own ends? Was the Holocaust something that they themselves
inflicted on their own body, in order to bring about their
Zionist cause in the long run? This was Eichmann's theory, at the end of his life
(effectively, because a year or two later he was kidnapped
and a year after that he was at the end of a rope in
Israel). "Did they manage to use us?" He keeps on coming
back to it, and every time he comes back to it becomes more
and more plausible to him. And perhaps this is the reason
why the Eichmann papers were not supposed to see the light
of day. Thirdly, when he's justifying the cruelty of what he
himself has seen -- and in a minute I'll go into some of the
detail about what he saw -- he says, "But compared to what
they were doing to us at that time, this was nothing.
Compared to what they were planning to do with us, this was
nothing." He said, "I remember in Berlin an air raid...
[and] afterwards going through the streets past a
house that had collapsed, and hearing the screams of an
elderly couple who had been trapped by falling debris, and
the woman pleading to be put out of her misery by anybody
with a gun." He said, "When you hear screams like that, you
never forget them for the rest of your life." He describes
that two or three times in his memoirs. Now, that's not justification. One crime doesn't justify
another crime, that's plain. But this is in the memoirs. He
also says, "Besides, we had by this time already learned of
the Jews' plans for Germany." He mentions explicitly the
book by Theodore Kaufman, Germany Must Perish. This is most
interesting, because in the Goebbels diaries of August 1941
(which have also not yet been published), Goebbels also
mentions Kaufman's book as justification. |
He even mentions as mitigation the Morgenthau plan; but
of course here you've got to be careful, because the
Morgenthau plan wasn't initialed by Churchill and Roosevelt
until mid-September 1944, only a few weeks before Himmler
ordered Auschwitz closed down. So, that's an anachronism.
Eichmann's mind is rather confused and muddled by the time
he's writing or dictating all this in the mid-1950s. (We
know it's the mid-1950s, because he mentions things like,
"Why was it a crime for us to invade Poland, when it isn't a
crime for them to do what they're doing now in Suez?" So it
must have been around 1956 that he's dictating these
passages.) Round about 1958, he gets hold of the "memoirs" of Rudolf
Höss, which were published by the Institute of
Contemporary History in Munich in that year. Höss wrote
these "memoirs" while he was in Krakow, in Polish captivity.
They've always been a problem -- let's be frank about this
-- they've been a problem to Revisionists. Eichmann's comments on the Höss memoirs are
annihilating. Reading where Rudolf Höss is saying that
two and a half million Jews have been liquidated at
Auschwitz, the camp where he was commandant, Eichmann
comments, "Where does Höss believe that he got these
two and a half million Jews? Not from me. Because to have
liquidated two and a half million decrepit, elderly,
unworkable Jews, I must have had to feed to him three, four,
five, six or seven million Jews in that space of time, and
from the transport point of view alone this would have been
totally impossible." You see, the memoirs of Eichmann are very useful in this
respect. He was the transport specialist whose job it was to
round up the Jews in Hungary and Slovakia. and ship them off
to Germany for forced labor and for dissipation to the other
labor camps. He knew that shipping off millions of Jews
wasn't something you do at the snap of your fingers: you had
to have conferences with the railway officials and with the
road officials, and with the guards and with everybody else
who was going to be involved in all this. You had to provide
the food for the transports which were going to be on the
rails for four or five or six days. All this had to be
prepared and planned with typical German bureaucracy and
method, and that took meetings and conferences. And Eichmann
said, "If you're going to ship five or six million Jews
across Europe to Auschwitz at that time, let me tell you how
many trains that would have taken," and he worked out how
many trains it would have taken, because he knew. "You're not only going to have trains going that way full
of Jews, you're going to have empty trains coming back. And
you're going to have to have a circulation time, a time
where they're unloading at one end, a time where they're
loading at the other end... You're going to need so many
thousands of wagons" of rolling stock. He worked out exactly
how much rolling stock would have been needed, in these
memoirs, and he said, "This alone proves that Rudolf H_ss
was talking through his hat. These figures are totally
fantastic, and what the hell is Höss up to?" That is a
brief, lurid summary of what Eichmann writes as he's sitting
in what he believes to be safety in the underground in
Argentina, reading these memoirs of Höss, published in
1958. Two years later, of course, Eichmann is kidnapped, so
it's during those two years that Eichmann is writing this.
He mentions also in these memoirs how he received an
indirect approach from Nahum Goldmann. Nahum Goldmann was
one of the great Zionist leaders of the postwar era. Born in
Lithuania and living for many years in Germany, he was the
person who negotiated with Konrad Adenauer the billions of
German marks which subsequently went to Israel. Eichmann
mentions in these memoirs what purported to be an indirect
approach from Goldmann, pleading with him to back up the six
million figure. Anything he could do to support the six
million figure, because the Zionists needed it. You are
beginning to suspect, now, why these Eichmann memoirs should
not be published. Eichmann inspected Auschwitz. He went to Auschwitz
several times, as he recounts in his memoirs. He describes
being met by Rudolf Höss, the commandant, and he
describes several grisly scenes. He describes going past an
open pit where bodies were being burned, and he says it was
an infernal sight, the likes of which he would never forget.
He describes how the commandant, Höss, tells him that
they are doing these things on Himmler's orders and that it
is a sacred task that has been imposed on the SS. Eichmann describes many things, but what he does not once
mention during this vivid description of his visit to
Auschwitz is "gas chambers." He doesn't mention gas
chambers, he just mentions the disposal of bodies in open
pits by fire, and the comments to him by Commandant
Höss. I find that a very significant omission because, let's
face it, in these papers Eichmann is not exactly being
modest about what he's seen. He describes how in July 1941
(if you piece together the actual months and the dates) he
is summoned to Berlin to visit Reinhard Heydrich, the chief
of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Heydrich utters to
him the fateful words, "Ich komme vom Reichsführer SS.
Der Führer hat den Befehl zur physischen Vernichtung
der Juden gegeben." ("I've come from the Reichsführer
SS [Himmler]. The Führer has given the order
for the physical destruction of the Jews.") |
So why should Eichmann have written this and not that? By
1958, he is well aware that since Höss' memoirs have
been published and Eichmann is mentioned on 20 or 30 pages,
the hue and cry are on. They're out looking for him. He
knows his days may be numbered. Although I'm sure that --
given his German, scrupulous, bureaucratic mind -- he's not
doing this consciously, the mind has wonderful synthetic and
analytical functions; the mind has a habit of suppressing,
distorting, and embellishing in a manner which the owner of
that mind would wish. And I'm sure that Adolf Eichmann's
mind is already lying awake at night, feverishly looking for
extenuating circumstances. What more extenuating
circumstances would there be for an Adolf Eichmann than that
the Führer had "ordered the physical destruction of the
Jews"? Eichmann may well have adapted the sentence that
Reinhard Heydrich actually uttered to him. It's immaterial, one way or the other, because we must
never overlook one basic fact: this is a postwar document,
and any historian can now confirm that nowhere in all the
archives of the world has yet been found one wartime
document referring to a Führer's order to destroy the
Jews, or for that matter, one wartime document referring to
gas chambers or gassings. All the documents that refer to
Führer orders and gas chambers are postwar documents;
statements by people in the dock at Nuremberg, memoirs
written by the commandant at Krakow in Poland, and the like.
You can't overlook this basic watershed between wartime and
postwar documents. If there's no wartime document that says
there was a Führer order, if no wartime document talks
of gas chambers, then there has to be some explanation for
that. That's why I say I think I'm entitled to believe that
Adolf Eichmann's mind is synthesizing here. He is looking
unconsciously for extenuating circumstances which will
perhaps get him off the hook, literally, when the time
comes. Hoffmann went on, "Auschwitz was totally different from
Dachau. The scenes I saw there beggar description. Brutality
on the worst possible scale. I saw prisoners being beaten, I
saw cadavers being cremated in the crematorium..." You think, "Well, this is it." You read on, thinking now
you've got it, but then Hoffmann adds, "...but what Allied
propaganda is now claiming, that is totally untrue." So again, rather like Eichmann, you've got somebody who
is prepared to describe to a degree what he has actually
seen, which, God knows, isn't exactly decent, but he will
not go the final yard and say "gas chambers." Neither Adolf
Eichmann nor Albert Hoffmann -- eyewitnesses -- describes
having seen the gas chambers. So why does Höss describe
the gas chambers? I'll come back to Höss and his papers
in a minute. Rationalizing, Eichmann says, "From this I assume that
the conversation with Heydrich must have been sometime in
the late summer of 1941 because that would have to be after
the double battle of Minsk and Bialystok," because that's
where the anti-tank ditches were. Eichmann then says, "I
went out to Minsk, and I saw myself the mass shootings going
on." Now you probably know that I'm a Revisionist to a degree,
but I'm not a Revisionist to the extent that I say that
there were no murders of Jews. I think we have to accept
that there were My Lai-type massacres where SS officers --
the Einsatzkommandos -- did machine-gun hundreds if not
thousand of Jews into pits. On the Eastern Front, at Riga,
at Minsk, and at other locations, this kind of thing did
happen. Eichmann himself -- and I wasn't surprised to find it in
his papers -- actually witnessed this. He went to see one at
Minsk, and being a proper SS officer he went right to the
front to make sure that everything was being carried out. He
got so close, in fact, that he saw with his very own eyes
how the victims were being made to go into the pits and
stand there waiting to be shot. (We've all heard these
descriptions of it, and I've seen some terrible descriptions
from sources that I find credible.) He says he saw that one
woman was holding a little child in her arms, petrified, and
she held the child out to him, and he writes in his memoirs:
"I was a parent too, and I instinctively stepped forward as
though to take the child. But at that very moment the salvo
of shots rang out. Both were killed only a few feet away
from me. The child's brains were spattered over my leather
greatcoat, and my driver had to clean the mess off." I don't know why he recounted that kind of detail in his
memoirs. It's an ugly piece of circumstantial evidence. But
it lends credibility and authenticity to the descriptions,
what a writer calls verisimilitude. It didn't surprise me.
He also describes -- and I have to say this being an honest
historian -- going to another location a few weeks later and
being driven around in a bus; then being told by the bus
driver to look through a peep hole into the back of the bus
where he saw a number of prisoners being gassed by the
exhaust fumes. So I accept that this kind of experiment was
made on a very limited scale, but that it was rapidly
abandoned as being a totally inefficient way of killing
people. But, I don't accept that the gas chambers existed,
and this is well known. I've seen no evidence at all that
gas chambers existed. |
Eichmann constantly ravages the memoirs of Rudolf
Höss, as I mentioned. This is again another reason "not
to publish" the Eichmann memoirs, and not to grant them any
credence, because for our opponents the Höss memoirs
are a keystone of the Holocaust legend. Eichmann describes
the refusal of the government of Slovakia, and other
countries where he operated, to intercede on behalf of their
Jewish people. They were glad to get clean of them. And that
again is something these people wouldn't have wanted to be
published. He also describes an odd case in Theresienstadt. He
describes how one of the girls on a train-load of Jews who
were being shipped off to Auschwitz protested loudly and
vociferously that she wasn't Jewish. Giving her the benefit
of the doubt, she was unloaded at one station and taken to
Theresienstadt (which was a Prominentenlager for the Jews in
Czechoslovakia). But here the Jewish leader of the camp
protested noisily about having a non-Jew foisted on them.
This again is a rather ugly depiction of the way that man
behaves unto man. Eichmann describes these conferences in great detail. He
has almost total recall. His descriptions reveal all the
cunning and cynicism of the Zionist leaders at that time, at
that stage of the war [1944] in a manner which, I
think, the Jewish community today would find deeply
distressing. This, I think, is why the Eichmann memoirs had
to be suppressed, because of the detail. Kasztner was
subsequently assassinated in Israel, years later. There is no doubt about what happened because, working in
the archives, I've come across records relating to the
British end of these negotiations, which eventually became
the famous "Jews-for-trucks" deal. In this, Brand was sent
out to negotiate with the British in Turkey, in Palestine,
and Egypt; and the deal being that in return for thousands
of Jews the world community was to provide the Germans with
trucks and motor equipment for fighting on the Russian
front. (Not on the western front, of course: the deal had to
be the trucks would only be used on the Russian front.) In
return, the SS agreed to release a number of Jews. Eichmann
was the person handling this deal in Hungary for Germany,
and Brand and Kasztner were handling the deal for the
Zionists. It's a fascinating story; perhaps one day I'll write a
book about it. In the British archives I've now located all
the records relating to the British end of these deals, as
well as all the letters between Brand and Kasztner and the
Jewish agency and the Zionist leaders in Palestine, which
were intercepted by British postal censorship. It's a
fascinating, but deeply ugly, story. It certainly wouldn't
win any friends if I do it. In the introduction to his papers, Eichmann writes that
he is not a murderer: He does regard himself, however,
rather ruefully, as being an accomplice to murder, because
he helped round up the Jews who were then shipped off to a
fate that he could only surmise. You would have to accept,
of course, that what he is writing in his memoirs by the
mid-1950s is no longer just the pure product of his
recollection but also, to a certain extent, a symbiosis of
his memories with what he has read in Rudolf Höss'
memoirs, and in The Final Solution by Gerald Reitlinger,
which he has also read. He said, "I bought this book in a German flea market only
a few months ago and I want to ask you how much is it
worth." I said, "How much did you pay for it?" He said, "No, no, no, look. It's got handwriting all over
it." Here are some pages of it, and you can see the
handwriting -- it's got hand-written marginal notes all over
it. Says one note here, "That is a lying distortion of the
facts." The handwriting is Eichmann's. The book is Adolf
Eichmann's own copy of the Rudolf Höss memoirs! I don't
know how much money this man wanted for it. I'm not a rich
man, but I've got his address; one day, perhaps, I'll make
him an offer for it. Everywhere in that book Eichmann has written his own
comments. Rudolf Höss writes, "I had a private meeting
alone with Adolf Eichmann, and we discussed the Eichmann
program." Eichmann crosses this out: "A shameless lie. I was
never alone with Höss." So those of us who always
doubted the integrity of the Höss memoirs -- we
wondered why Höss should have written these things --
here in Eichmann's own handwriting we've got yet one more
piece of proof that the Höss memoirs are untrustworthy
as a source. |
Thank you very much. |
A: Yes, but I still stand by the validity of these
eavesdropping reports. They are, I think, primary sources of
the most fundamental quality. Two years after this
conversation, which was in April 1945, Bruns went into the
dock in Nuremberg and swore on a stack of Bibles that he had
seen nothing, he had only heard reports and rumors. But if
you read the conversation in which he describes what he has
seen, there is one particular passage where he says "I can
never forget the appallingly disgusting remarks the men with
the guns were making as they were shooting the people --
calling out things: 'Look at that Jewish beauty.' I can see
her now in my mind's eye, a beautiful girl about 20 with a
flame-red dress." When you read things like that you know
the man's not making it up. Q: [Faurisson] Now, Mr. Irving, I have so trained
myself in reading testimonies that I can tell you that, in
my personal estimation, this story of the dress and so on is
quite typical of inventions. Maybe I'm wrong, but don't you
think that if you tell us that Bruns said in April 1945, "I
attended [witnessed] this," (and he doesn't even say
"I attended this"), that you should add that two years later
he said that he had not attended? I think we should note
both sides of the story. Q: [Faurisson] It could be that, but we don't
know: We need both. Now about the text. It's not a
conversation taken on the microphone. As Ernst Zündel
said so well, do you know what the microphones were like in
1945, in Germany? They were huge and you had to shout into
them. Do you think that the British had microphones in the
bushes everywhere? A: Yes, that's why we won the war. We had the better
equipment. |
write to David Irving