eptember
1999
London,
England
Up at 4:16 a.m.,
can't sleep, worrying about
Benté, the Lipstadt case,
opening speech, etc. I go on-line,
check the position of my other Websites
and USA-mirrors, ready to start using
them next week.
I finish my reading of the reports
by Longerich and Browning. They are
good, but full of shocking lacunae. A
Mr May offers me a
manuscript
I am writing a book about
the use of wiretaps by the U.S. Army
to control members of Congress, who
opposed the Vietnam War, and other
scandals related to that conflict.
None of our members of congress seem
to be interested in considering an
investigation of this outrageous
subversion of our constitution.
I reply:
I would certainly be
interested in hearing more . . .
Benté has been up for most of
the afternoon and evening, and sat
outside with us at lunchtime for a
while.
Worked until 1:30 a.m. on listing my
archive boxes of 9,000 Judenfrage
documents for the Sereny case; nearly
completed box No. 1 (of three). A
useful exercise in many ways. Now that
was research, spread over nearly
thirty years. What Longerich and the
other "scholars" have done is sat in a
library and read other people's
books.
Up at 8 a.m. Jessica already up,
says Mummy is sick again today; it
doesn't seem to worry the little mite
one-hundredth as much as it worries
me.
A stranger emails me:
I used to be able to get
you by typing in your name then your
Website will come up under "Real
History." Now it no longer appears.
Only a number of maligning
information on a different Website.
Are you aware of this?
I answer:
No I am not aware of this,
and it seriously disturbs me. What
kind of maligning information then
comes up, and which is the Website
to which you find yourself directed?
It may be that you are using a
university or college computer with
filtering software surreptitiously
installed by the college
authorities, which has been provided
by a company called SurfWatch
or CyberPatrol,
which is designed to act in
precisely the Orwellian way you have
described. If you'll give me the
facts I'll do what I can to follow
it up. I am grateful to you for
alerting me to this latest outrage
against free speech, perpetrated
evidently by its traditional
enemies.
Today's London Sunday Telegraph
includes an interview with
Professor. Anthony Clare
[right] by one Anna
Picard, since a new series of
Clare's [BBC] radio programme
'In the Psychiatrist's Chair' began
this morning. Toward the end of the
interview, she writes these words of
undisguised hatred:
...With the notable
exception of Paul Johnson,
whom he disliked profoundly but
refused to go on record as to why,
Clare feels a fondness for his
subjects - even if that is rarely
reciprocated. "I read things and
sometimes I'm thinking, 'I don't
much like this person', but you
cannot talk intimately to someone
without getting a clearer
understanding of why they are the
sort of person you think they are."
Even the Holocaust revisionist
"historian" David Irving?
"You got a feel of how little
David Irving became big David
Irving. It was less of a mystery.
That's all you can ask."
But to be around such misery on a
daily basis, and then to compound
the stress with interviewing Nazi
sympathisers?
Clare's face became a soft,
sorrowful blank.
"That's the mystery of the human
condition. On the one hand we need
to believe there are monsters. On
the other hand you meet the monster
and he or she is a human being.
That's the problem. If they were
monsters it would be easy, I tell
you! In my work you meet monsters,
but they don't look like monsters
and whole chunks of their lives
aren't monsterish. They start the
same way as you or I." ...
Now Professor Clare, as he likes to
be called, is well known to me. He was
the BBC's Frasier. In 1982 I was one of
the first six personalities whom he
invited to sit in his famous Chair to
be grilled as though by a psychiatrist
(which is indeed his profession); the
terms being, "no holds barred" -- one
was not allowed to duck any
questions.
I was puzzled when I saw Clare's
hit-list -- the six names included the
playwright Arnold Wesker; George
Brown, one of my favourite
ministers, later ennobled as Lord
Georgebrown, who stumbled out of office
having (a) drunk a bit, (b) upset
certain people; the failing actress
Glenda Jackson, now a notorious
left-wing loony and member of Tony
Blair's government, and some others
equally well known. In fact I was the
only person I had never heard of, so to
speak.
In the interview I revealed candidly
my views and my aspirations for the
future, as I then projected them (never
dreaming for a moment of the magnitude
of the International Global Conspiracy
that was even then girding to do battle
with me). I also spoke so bluntly and,
alas, cynically about the female of the
species that friends and enemies told
me for years afterwards that they use
to play the tape at cocktail parties,
which I took as a compliment.
Clare
however turned out to be an
unreconstructed s-h-one-t, as my
Hitler-respecting friend Alan
Clark's delightful wife Jane would
have put it. During the interview, he
asked cruel questions about my daughter
Josephine -- one of the heroines
of my family who has been permanently
debilitated for the last twenty years
and is now crippled and horribly
disabled. The BBC was decent enough to
omit these painful moments.
When he asked permission to
reproduce the six programmes in a
money-spinning book in 1984, I granted
it, but only on condition that he
respect my family privacy and again
omit all reference to them; not only
did he leave them in, but he included
also passages omitted from the original
broadcast, and in an Introduction this
academic scholar added the nudge-nudge,
carefully-crafted-because-of-the
libel-laws wink-wink words: "Finally,
there is the issue of Irving's family
history of mental illness."
There is no such family history, and
under pressure from my lawyers --
Peter Carter Ruck, no less --
his publishers had to apologise, excise
the odious sentence from all future
editions, and pay legal costs. So Mr
Clare has lost no love over the name
Irving since then. He is a "monster";
or not, whichever way one chooses to
interpret his weasel words.
And what can we say about
The Sunday
Telegraph, whose features
section published this disgraceful item
today? I remember when the newspaper
was founded in 1963; its editor was
Donald McLachlan, a wise and
gentle man, a naval Intelligence
officer who became a close friend and
mentor.
His
newspaper serialised my first book,
The
Destruction of Dresden. Then it
serialised my second,
The Mare's
Nest, about the Nazi V-weapons.
Then hit serialised my third, about the
Nazi atomic bomb project -- still the
standard work on that subject. When he
drove off the side of a Scottish
mountain road his death was a stunning
blow to me.
The editor of
The Daily
Telegraph at that time was one
Maurice Green. He assured me
once in a public controversy (over a
play by my best friend, Rolf
Hochhuth, Germany's leading liberal
playwright) that he treated all parties
in the affair with equal dispassion; a
week later however
The Private
Eye obtained and published an
internal Telegraph memorandum, which
ruled that "the David Irving in the
Hochhuth controversy" was no account to
be referred to as "the historian". It
was an act of pettiness that I am glad
to say has long since been reversed and
atoned for by the great newspaper.
What can one say for
The Sunday
Telegraph's editorial staff now
however? Their new literary editor has
a penchant for works about the
Holocaust -- a word which did not exist
in 1963; when challenged as to why they
had not reviewed my latest work, after
her predecessors had accorded glowing
and prominent reviews to my thirty
books, this lady, Miriam Gross,
stated that they would
NOT be reviewing
any of my works; my staff member who
dealt with her noted at the time that
she was a haughty c-zero-w. I wonder
what Clare would have made of that?
I open up the new Website
focal.org, incorporate some neat
new Javascripts. Fall into bed
exhausted at 4 a.m., and up again at
8:50 a.m., as C. is coming to work
today. In the afternoon I hear her
spelling out her name over the phone to
Mishcon de Reya's staff -- complaining
that we have still not been supplied
with the Pelt diskette -- and I
admonish her never to reveal her
identity to such people, as they will
be vindictive enough to destroy her
career in the Law later on.
Jessica has yesterday extorted from
me a promise to take her to Hamley's,
which promise she cashes in today;
however she buys a (Barbie) camera,
£14.99, using her own money -- a
large collection of bronze coins she
has been hoarding.
Afterwards we sit in Grosvenor
Square; I read more of the Pelt
monograph while Jessica takes
photographs of flowers, leaves and,
reluctantly, of me. M. spends an hour
going through my 1991 and 1992 diaries;
he finds I describes him as
moist-knickered, and his mother as "a
daft old bat," and roars with laughter.
Long evening of somewhat strained
hilarity. The 1992 diary is full of
glimpses of the first months with
Benté.
D., one of my legal friends, has
never written a diary, and does not
understand why people do: but I do --
for a lone writer, it is an act of
penance, of self-discipline. It is like
the escapement of life's daily
mechanism: tick, tock.
Each day of the diary, once written,
is another tick of the escapement, and
brings closure to that day and
preparation for the next.
He begins to understand my proposed
High Court tactics .... On
[...], he thinks Professor
Levin will find he has been ambushed by
it. True.
Benté
is up most of the day, preparing
Jessica for tomorrow's first day back
at school. M. phones around 5 p.m. --
the radio has announced the death, on
Sunday, of Alan Clark, from a brain
tumour: already buried in a private
funeral. Just as I was writing about
him.
I work until 2 a.m. Benté asks
me to take Jessica; she is smart in her
uniform of grey jacket and dress; I
take two pictures of her on the school
steps, bursting with pride. The
newspapers are full of Alan Clark's
death at 71: four whole pages in
The Daily
Telegraph alone. They make
rather a lot of the old rogue's
sometimes mediocre books --
Barbarossa
in particular was a bit of a
pot-boiler, but his was a character
which certainly illuminated the whole
of the London political scene.
At ten a.m. my sister phones, sounds
subdued, with word that Josephine has
gone. I am calm at first, but shaken
and very, very sad. God has yesterday
gathered my oldest daughter up into His
arms: why did He have her suffer so
long first? Twenty years of nightmares,
of agony, of hatreds from
uncomprehending bystanders, of pain and
emptiness. I phone her sisters, even
reaching Beatrice in Brisbane,
Australia. I say, "God has finally
taken her."
When University College hospital
phones, matter of fact and bright, I
interrupt, I do not want details. For
me, Josephine is the little girl on my
lap, the girl pointing at the flowers,
the girl in the sea. I say I will be in
touch with them about the arrangements;
she said, not with us, with the
Coroner.
I phone The
Daily Telegraph to put an
announcement in tomorrow's paper.
IRVING.
On Tuesday, September 7, God
suddenly and mercifully gathered
into His arms our eldest daughter
Josephine Victoria Irving, the
beloved mother of Anthony, after
enduring a long and indomitably
borne illness. Family flowers
only.
Thirty-six years ago I put the
announcement in the same newspaper of
her birth. What pride! A year or two
ago, doing Discovery for the
Lipstadt action, I came across the
newspaper's bill for that bit of
boasting, and sent it to her as a
memento. I am stricken all day, grief
repeatedly welling over inside me.
I shut down the Website, leaving
only a memorial
to Josephine on the screen.
I collect Jessica from school at 3:35
p.m. Happiness bubbles out of her. We
drive to the bank, then to Sainsbury's,
then to the Mars shop to buy a Disney
comic. I say, "Were the school teachers
impressed with your reading?" "They
said they were very impressed with my
writing," and proudly shows the badge
they have smudged onto the back of her
left hand.
My daughters are flying in. Their
mother says in a flat, quiet voice,
"Our children are not supposed to die
before us."
During the night large numbers of
messages of condolences come in. I read
some at 3:20 a.m.
I must take Jessica to school. Do so
at 8:35 a.m. after a frantic hunt for
the rental car's key (Jessica has
hidden it down a sofa, as she pleaded
to go to school on her little pink
bike.) My twin brother phones, having
read the announcement. I chuckle at the
thought of somebody who reads the Death
Announcements in the
Telegraph
each day and looks immediately for his
own name. He has not got a phone.
At Farm Street Church, I talk
with Father O'Halloran. The
church agrees to hold the requiem
mass on Tuesday. Still no certainty
as to where poor Josephine will be
buried. I am still swept by fits of
grief during the day.
Afterwards, drained by it all, I
have a coffee alone outside the
Spaghetti House. A car-alarm of a
vehicle parked next to us starts to
wail, and keeps wailing at three
minutes intervals for half an hour. A
selfish flaw which seems unique to
English cars and their owners. Three
strangers cross the road, and I
recognise them belatedly as daughters
Pilar (first time home in two or
three years, back from Madrid), her
cousin Miguel, and
Paloma.
We talk over funeral arrangements.
The tailor shop manageress gets into a
car, sees me sitting there, cranks her
window open, screams, "Sieg Heil,"
several times and gives the
Hitler salute. In Germany, she
would be arrested for that. Where are
the (German) police when you need
them!
More condolences come in off the Web,
many from strangers. Does that enhance
their worth, or render them worthless?
I check in the evening, around 200
visitors to each of the funeral pages,
including one identified as
"rel14.religion.emory.edu" -- an
American university e-mail system. Now,
who is professor of religion at the
Emory University, Atlanta? Surely a
coincidence.
Perhaps Professor Lipstadt hopes
that Josephine's death has momentarily
incapacitated me: I would like to say
that she is wrong -- but I cannot. It
has devastated me, and reduced me to a
tenth of what I was. After the funeral,
however, I shall return to the battle
against the traditional enemies of the
truth with redoubled vigour.
Mr F. of the undertakers
[morticians] comes; the
business has been in the family for
three hundred years; they handled the
"arrangements" for Admiral Nelson. In a
quiet businesslike way we go through
the details. A hundred messages of
condolence have now come. But one email
reads:
This is not a hoax or some
kind of scam to extract sympathy and
money?
The enemy mentality.
I upload to a secret corner of my
Website the 1948
newsreel [of the Krakow
Auschwitz trial], and notify my
consultants:
I have confidentially
placed on my US Website at these
URLs two versions of the 1 minute 20
second January 1948 German newsreel
report of the Auschwitz trial in
Krakow -- the newsreel clearly
states that "nearly 300,000 died" at
Auschwitz.
A long letter comes from E., on his
own feelings of guilt when his mother
was taken away, as he was just twelve.
I reply:
I was very touched by your
long letter about your mother, and
recognised your grief and your guilt
for not waving back to your
departing mother. We all have such
moments of deep guilt, in
retrospect. Josephine will finally
leave us on Tuesday morning. I have
laboured for two days now to make
the service something memorable. It
is in one of London's most
fashionable and beautiful Catholic
churches. A choir, Fauré's
Requiem, readings, etc. I am a
novice at all this, and hope to
remain so. But I am dreading the
day, I have to confess.
I sit outside a restaurant in Duke
Street for more five hours in the
evening reading the Robert Jan Van Pelt
report. The bearded owner of the
Italian Suit shop assaults me
physically, hurling obscenities and
spitting at me.
I see that in his expert report,
Pelt has accused me of posting
the Kurt Aumeier report on the
Website only after I knew that [law
firm] Mishcon de Reya had
discovered it earlier in 1999. To which
is to be remarked: (a) I did not even
know until reading those lines that
they had seen it. (b) I explicitly drew
his attention to it in my
letter of May 1997 to which he
never replied; several others have
since drawn his attention to that
letter in e-mails, to which he also
never replied (I also sent him an
email, also with no result). (c) I
published that letter in full in Action
Report [No.12,
July 20, 1997]; and on
my Website in 1998 (d) I have made
no secret whatever of the letter, on
the contrary, I immediately shared it
with historians, including my notional
opponents, drawing it in writing to the
attention of Dr Gerald Fleming
etc. Ein klarer Fall.
Read more Pelt during the evening,
about three hours. It is heavy
going.
Half awake most of the night,
worrying and sorrowing. Up at 7:22 a.m.
This email to Ion Trewin,
managing director of Weidenfeld's:
Dear Ion, -- It would be a
pity if Alan [Clark]'s
diaries did not end up in print, as
he no doubt intended. (I knew him
quite well, and he sometimes dropped
past here: with catastrophic results
in 1992). If you really can't find
anybody to decipher the handwriting,
I have gained some expertise over
the years in reading other people's
difficult diaries for publication
(Goebbels, Rommel, Göring,
Milch, Dr Morell, -- and Hitler!),
not a few of them published by your
own illustrious firm; and the page I
have seen reproduced did not appear
too difficult. ... Goebbels's was
the hardest, I admit. We're just
releasing that book tomorrow as
a
free download (in Adobe Acrobat
.pdf format) on the Internet, by the
way: my gift to academia.
Mishcon's send another fax: still
playing tactical games. I have the
gravest trepidations about tomorrow's
service.
I
spend two hours reading my massive 1969
handwritten diary for clues to
Josephine's character: Her rivalry with
her sisters; her red-faced temper if I
annoyed her. Paloma's lisp; Beattie's
halting first words. Josephine's fine
art, the teachers' praise. I teach her
to draw trees better, to put more
detail in her houses. She remembers
seeing two men walking on the Moon, not
three. -- Also some items of interest
for the litigation.
I shall have to repeat this
harrowing, bittersweet reading exercise
on all the other diaries.
Bed around 1 a.m. A difficult day
before me, a really horrendous one
ahead.
Josephine's
funeral. Up at 7 a.m., as I
cannot sleep any longer; I work on mail
and preparing the flat for the midday
reception here. A sad, sad day begins
with Jessica appearing, telling me,
"Mummy is very, very, very, very sick.
She told me to say." Benté stays
in bed all day, unable to attend the
day's ceremony.
It is dark and overcast outside and
pouring with rain, the first time in
weeks: I heard the rains start during
the night.
At 10:20 a.m. I am already late and
drive round to Farm Street Church. The
hearse is waiting outside, with
Josephine in her final box. Four
pallbearers shoulder the coffin, while
I wait outside in the rain; I alone
follow the coffin in, slowly pacing
down the aisle, and take my seat. It is
all so hard to bear. I find that if I
look up at the stained glass windows, I
can avoid choking. The choir sings
beautifully from their loft, from
Fauré's Requiem; and the
organist plays majestically.
I read from the Old Testament, the
Rev. Mike Mellor -- Josephine's
local vicar -- from the Gospel. It all
goes so smoothly, but so it should: a
church like this sees two or three
funerals a week. It is the largest
foregathering of Irvings for thirty
years or so.
Toward the end of the service, I
deliver an Address, speaking in these
terms:
"This is the hour that
every father must dread. The moment
when he must dispatch his own
daughter on her last journey.
"We are aided in this awful
moment by the upbringing that we all
have as Christians, by the knowledge
that for Josephine this is the
moment of victory over death.
"Josephine has lived half of her
life in the sunshine, and half in
the shade.
"I remember so well the moment on
April 1, 1963, when the telephone
finally rang with the news of her
birth. I had called several times
before, but for two days there was
no news. Now the phone rang, and the
doctor's quiet voice said, I
remember the words so clearly, 'It
appears that you've had a little
girl.'
"We discussed, Pilar and I, what
to call her. We had made no plans.
Until that moment we had had no idea
what the baby would be -- in those
days you were not told. We chose two
names -- Josephine, and then
Victoria: Victoria, because April 1,
the day she was born, is La Dia de
la Victoria in Spain. I shall have
to answer for that choice in the
High Court next year, as my
opponents in the litigation
[Professor Brian Levin] have
deemed it particularly offensive
that I should call a daughter
Victoria for that reason.
"Over the years that followed, I
watched as she grew up, and I
wrote.
"For over thirty years I have
kept a very detailed private diary
-- rather like my good friend Alan
Clark, though rather different in
content. And last night at home I
decided to spend a few hours alone,
reading one year's diary, the diary
I wrote precisely thirty years ago
in 1969, when Josephine was nearly
six. It is a diary full of
happiness, as she turns out to be a
very talented child indeed. She and
her three sisters all went to the
French Lycée; I proudly
record the praise of her teachers --
she jumps a year at the
Lycée, she is so gifted --
her accomplishments in art, and
reading and writing. She gets her
first bicycle, and rides it without
the side wheels.
"Once, I record, she asks me in
puzzlement how there can be life
after death. What does it mean? At
first I am nonplussed by the
question, but I answer: 'Josephine,
when we die, we are remembered by
our friends and by our family. And
then by their friends and family,
and that is one way in which we live
on after death.'
"In her last year at the
Lycée, while at the
examinations, the disaster befell
her, and she began the illness which
overshadowed the rest of her life.
She was a bright girl, and she knew
what had happened, and sometimes she
asked me, 'Daddy, why does it have
to be me?' I replied, 'It is the
Lord's will.'
"It was not much of an answer,
but our Christian faith helps us in
such ordeals. It was the Lord's
will. I thanked the Lord then, and
in later years, that He had placed
Josephine, with this appalling
illness, in our family, where she
would be cared for, and not in some
other family inspired by less
Christian values. We cherished her,
but allowed her her own life, at her
own distance, while constantly
keeping a watchful eye and a caring
hand over her.
"In about 1982 she made the
acquaintance of the famous concert
pianist John Ogdon. John had
won the Tchaikovsky Prize of the
Moscow Conservatoire -- joint first
with Vladimir Ashkenazy. The same
debilitating illness had befallen
him. In an odd way, his crouching,
bent stature looked rather like
Josephine's. He would invite us
round to his Chelsea home, and he
played Wagner sonatas to her all
afternoon on his Steinway grand
piano. He consoled Josephine that
many people afflicted with this
illness are very great and
accomplished indeed, and we only had
to search for the Van Gogh in
her too.
"Josephine was unique, and we
shall sorely miss her. But her going
is cause for Christians to rejoice.
As the poet wrote, whom I shall here
only paraphrase: each of us is an
individual. We sail the oceans of
life alone, a little white sail on a
vast and sparkling sea. And the time
inevitably comes when the sail
begins to sink. For a brief instant,
many eyes are fastened upon that
sail, as the waves close around, and
then over its tip, and there is a
gentle murmur, of 'There she goes.'
And so we say of Josephine, 'There
she goes.'
"But at the same moment that
murmur is engulfed in a mighty
cheer, a roar from unseen multitudes
in Paradise: 'HERE
SHE COMES!'"
I repeat, "Here she comes!" and lay my
hand on the coffin at the side of which
I have spoken. As the choir's voice
rises, singing Fauré's In
Paradisum, my throat now closed, my
eyes stinging, I walk back to my pew.
The little congregation stands, the
pallbearers lift Josephine to their
shoulders, I turn sideways, she passes
by. I fall in behind. In the driving
rain outside I stand in the street,
watching as they fill the hearse with
so many wreaths and flowers that there
is not enough room, and they cover the
roof as well. I kiss the coffin, the
door closes, and the cortège
drives off out of sight around the
corner.
It has been a hard day, and it is
not even half over. I write the diary.
Life's escapement has clicked another
notch.
Funeral
guests: left, Jutta P., who was
David Irving's secretary for twenty
years to 1981, and transcribed
Rommel's shorthand diaries. Right,
his older brother Wing Cdr John
Irving, former Regional Commissoner,
and Wiltshire county
councillor.
Posted
Sunday,
October 10, 1999
click
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