[German translation]  

continued, part 2

TWO pm flight to Copenhagen. Inside the terminal a noticeable police presence -- ten armed officers in each baggage hall; their chief says he knows who I am, and radios a message to those outside. Protestors have been cleared out of the airport buildings.

The 6:30 pm Danish Television bulletin announces: "Police expect disturbances because of Holocaust denier" -- sic. At 9 pm Danish Television bulletin shows the airport interview: [Den berygtede engelske historiker, David Irving, ankom i dag til København] "The notorious English historian David Irving, today came to Copenhagen". Note how the Holocaust denier becomes the historian when they show the Interview.

I sleep fitfully; difficult climate, strange room, etc.

A. says he tried two other locations; both asked if the planned meeting has anything to do with "Mr Irving", and refused when he admitted that it did. They do not want violence on their premises and I really can't blame them.

But two television programmes have asked for interviews. He has told them he will ask me. He doesn't get it. I educate him, "Alex, it doesn't matter if I can't speak to fifteen people in a room, if the outcry results in my speaking to fifty million people on television!" The programs cover all Scandinavia. He seems simple minded sometimes. He is very nervous, has to be led through every step.

I go downstairs at one pm. Two police officers in the hotel lobby, to provide round-the-clock security. That embarrasses me; I don't feel I need that kind of security. They know differently.

The first TV team is laid-back. They were also at the airport. The second asks more abrasive questions -- about the Holocaust. I say I haven't written about it -- I find it boring -- but I'll answer questions; the shootings on the eastern front happened, but even Judge Gray found it baffling that while these are documented, there is no documentary evidence of gas chambers, or of Auschwitz as being a "factory of death."

Responding to a question, I say I have hundreds of friends here in Denmark, including many academics who would like to hear me address university audiences, but all fear for their careers if I am invited. That is what universities are for, I say, to hear both sides.

I am not interested in money: I will be very rich long after my death; I will have the satisfaction of knowing that it is my books that are being read in the 22nd century, not those of my opponents. The books by the conformist historians all draw heavily on my biography, Hitler's War, I add; but I have not drawn on any of theirs.

AT two pm an unexpected visit. Pierre H., 87 years old, not known to me, brings two big packages: the diaries -- Terminkalender -- of SS Obergruppenführer Werner Best.

They are now in secret Swedish archives. He was in the Danish resistance, is highly interested in my work. I am effusive with my thanks; the diary will be of great help in the Himmler biography I am writing.

Alex is in a state of nerves. The hotel has informed him that his Visa card is cancelled. Phone calls establish that every other card he carries has also been cancelled following calls "from him" reporting them lost during the last 24 hours.

He is a state of rage, I am more laid back; it is his cards that are affected, not mine. I tell him that ten years ago the Deutsche Bank tried to cancel my account, which I first opened in Essen in 1959 as a steelworker, but backed off when I had German lawyers threaten them with a lawsuit.

There is something wrong with the other side's History, if they resort to methods like these to protect it from exposure.

Up at 9:30 am, the sun beaming in across a sea of Danish rooftops.

1:05 pm I go downstairs. Waitress reveals that the police informed the hotel of our intention of having the meeting there and has instructed them not to allow it, because of "trouble."

Alas, this is thanks to A., who trusted the police with the information yesterday evening. He is a novice. I lay it on him gently that the police have obviously leaked it to the enemy. Nobody else knew. He is abject with apologies. I ask what happened to the newspaper interviews: more apologies.

We hail a cab, to drive over to the Hotel Angleterre. A. asks why, and I say there may be stray enemy who will see us there which will disperse their forces.

A. unfortunately has no alternative location readied. A novice, as said. Once I ask him, as I am cramped in the back seat: "Can you see if we're being followed?"

He says we're not, but we are: a car with four heavily built men in their forties or fifties in it, wearing working clothing, open shirts, pullovers etc., has tailed us over to the Angleterre. As we pull up there, near construction barriers, their car screeches to a halt, and three of them jump out; one aims a film camera, as the other two start running over.

I shout to A., "Back into the cab. Quick!" We pull away just as the men reach it; the driver, suitably bribed, shakes them off by cornering several blocks at speed.

A. is rattled, but I am not: "That will convince them that we're planning something at the Angleterre after all," I chuckle. Over at the Radisson, Eric tells him a large police force is now surrounding the hotel.

I check into the Airport Hilton around 3:30 pm. Two or three hours later A. comes and says that Danish radio has contacted him to ask about a report that "Mr Irving has been assaulted by leftists outside the Angleterre." So it is pretty plain that the men's job was to rough me up while the third filmed the fight and the fourth manned the getaway car. Just like the Richoux episode, July 12, 1992, with Bente.

Back in London. At 3:21 pm I send this email to Post Office: "I am now back in Hertford Street, having been in Copenhagen over the weekend. We are now missing three packages from Key West, Florida."

Tidying up, this letter goes to Dr Christian Lindtner, "hero" of today's Ekstrabladet article:

As you know, I spent four days in Copenhagen, for two meetings which we had many weeks preparing. Without consulting myself as speaker or A. as organiser you invited three or four extra friends.

We naturally assumed that you personally vouched for the integrity of each one, and that you knew them all by name. One of them struck me as odd and that's why I refused his request for a photograph.

It now turns out that he was hostile journalist using a false name. The result was that the enemy was informed of all (or most) of our plans, causing great loss and anxiety to myself and cost to the police.

We take very great care with our security measures, because personal safety is involved. Your extraordinary carelessness in inviting these friends is unforgivable, and you will not receive any further invitations.

Evelyn P. asks why we did not respond to her latest missives. I send her letter to the Post Office: "A lady in Edinburgh wonders why we have not acknowledged her letters. They have all been stolen from our mail: she is out of pocket and so are we."

Larry M. informs me that our latest Action Report was on offer for $7.50 on eBay. I check up: it is our old friend Harry Mazal who has bought it.

No mail at all comes this morning. I tell the Post Office.

Persons have contacted me about publishing my books in France. Alas, I think they're extreme right-wingers, not a route I intend to take.

At twelve noon exactly we walk into the Court.

Registrar Jaques again hears the case [Deborah Lipstadt vs. David Irving and the Trustees]. The hearing, set down for fifteen minutes, lasts two hours. It revolves around the question of my historic "archive". Is it valuable or not? An expert shall decide.

It is immaterial anyway, as it is certain that the archive will be returned to my possession eventually, as a result of my application of Oct 15. But today I do not speak: I am a silent spectator in the back row of the Registar's Court room.

Andreas Gledhill, counsel for Lipstadt, speaks well, but on balance my own is better -- less clipped in his manner, though slightly indistinct in his elocution. The barristers are both experts in the Chancery division, but have different styles.

The final decision after much argument back and forth is this: that the "expert" will be an academic historian appointed by Lipstadt; but that Lipstadt shall pay his costs. That will run into thousands of pounds.

My barrister makes effective use of the fact that Lipstadt has published on her university's website several thousand pages of the documents which I provided by way of Discovery -- including my private letters and diary pages of the most private nature, which were never in the public domain.

Registrar Jaques directs that the new expert shall be allowed into the warehouse in Brighton to assess my archive's value, but that we are to be allowed to supervise. Quite right too -- no more thieving of my files.

We leave the Law Courts at two pm, well pleased. The other side -- both Lipstadt and the Trustees -- will now appreciate that I am a fighter, and don't take things lying down.

One ironic novedad: Lipstadt will be unable to visit England so long as she continues to violate what used to be called the "implied undertaking" -- given on using documents disclosed under Discovery rules -- unless she wants an unfriendly visit from the High Court tipstaff, who will escort her straight to Holloway (or Pentonville, as the case may be).

Saturday. I send the daily thief report to the Post Office.

Persecuted New Zealand historian Joel Hayward -- whom Dov Bing and others hounded out of his position as Senior Lecturer in Defence and Strategic Studies in New Zealand -- reports in.

"Dear Joel," I reply:

The whole world has been following the saga with baited breath, and I have to congratulate you on how you have kept your head in the midst of such an onslaught.

Well done too, finding such fine champions. Three cheers for the Internet; allowed a free rein, it will eventually defeat and confound our enemies.

Dr Hayward now responds in more detail.

Please accept my apologies for criticising you in 2000. I was then going through hell and, perhaps like a lot of others who followed your trial, felt bothered by your ditty.

I remain convinced that the number of citation and transcription errors in your works are very few and far between. I am saying precisely that, by the way, in my forthcoming autobiography.

I amplify that for his benefit:

The enemy (Professor Evans, whom you know) claimed to have found "nineteen" errors, after spending twenty man-years scrutinising all my books (thirty books). The judge reduced the figure to twelve. Not bad going: half an error per book.

But it makes me a "falsifier and manipulator."

I decide to start writing a chapter about Josephine for my memoirs to preserve her memory and honour her courage. I complete eight pages by 2:29 am, when I go to bed.

Up at eight am and take Jessica to school by cab; she looks pale and unwell today. Cab drivers, the Soul of England-As-Was.

Bente joins us upstairs for part of the evening, looking better. She is beautiful when she is well.

She even watches a movie with us. Today is a relaxed day again; I do virtually none of the jobs on my to-do list. We're down to our last ten pounds and searching pockets for coins again. Quoi de neuf.

Midday: a message comes from Tibor G., publisher of Felkeles, the new Hungarian language edition of my 1981 history of the anti-communist, anti-Jewish Budapest Uprising of 1956.

The first edition has sold out but they've run into problems:

The printer who printed the first edition has been put under pressure. Nevertheless we have finally found another printer and they are promising to deliver in a few weeks' time, approximately end of March.

The old enemy methods. If they can pressure my publishers, they do: they forced Macmillan Ltd to destroy their entire stock of my books in July 1992.

If they can't, they intimidate the printers. After our Swedish publisher lost every printer for my Goebbels biography, they signed up with the biggest print firm in Denmark; that firm then cancelled, explaining they had come under pressure.

In England too we lost the printers of both Hitler's War and Goebbels after both firms -- the most prestigious book manufacturers in the UK -- came under pressure.

Then Biddle & Co., in Guildford, tendered a satisfactory estimate for reprinting my Nuremberg, the Last Battle; we arrived there by appointment, with the production film and brasses, but after half an hour the production manager was called out, and returned to say that his bosses had ruled that they were not to print any books for our firm, Focal Point Publications.

"What us, a global conspiracy?" It reminds me of my attempt to bring a libel action against the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, for saying on Melbourne radio that I had a string of "criminal convictions" around the world.

I had to abandon the attempt after every firm of solicitors who accepted the instructions withdrew -- one of them apologizing, e.g., that his Jewish secretary had threatened to resign.

Which reminds me of the prestigious London law firm of Goldsmiths who accepted my instructions to act in the appeal in the Lipstadt Trial -- and then pulled out, because their senior partner, Mr G., had . . . etc.

BENTÉ is up all evening, looking much better; even comes with me to fetch Jessica, a real treat for the little mite -- who is no longer little: she's shooting up like asparagus, and I have a standing joke that I must buy some coarse sandpaper to wear down the top of her head and the soles of her feet a bit.

Up at 8, a chilly morning, biting wind; I take Jessica to school. She thrusts her warm little paw into mine as soon as we step out of the front door. She's looking very pale, however, does not get enough sunshine.

News bulletins bring graphic pictures of a shocking incident in Madrid: nearly two hundred commuters killed by ten bombs placed in or under commuter trains including two at Atócha.

It's a pity no journalist thinks of putting it to Mr Sanctimonious Blair or Mr Lugubrious Straw that bombing railroad trains is something which the British and American strategic forces have been practising with some expertise in recent wars.

I remember the vivid images from the camera in the nosecone of a cruise missile as it streaked towards a train on a bridge in Kosovo -- the final image being of terrified faces looking out of the train's windows. The brave pilot came round as the stricken train lay crippled on the bridge, and punched a second missile through its rear, along its length, ensuring the death of, one suspects, rather more than a hundred passengers.

Was not NATO's Secretary-General at the time of these outrages against the people of former Yugoslavia a mousy Spaniard, Javier Solana, who tried to mask his insignificance behind a dagoe's goatee? Did he not rejoice in front of the television cameras over each successful bombing raid?

And wasn't the former Labor politician, who followed him, Lord Robertson, below, that rotund little Scottish redhead, equally repulsive in his sniveling justifications of these mass murders?

Last year I posted on my website a shocking thirty-minute video of a US gun-ship attack on a mosque in Afghanistan; the soundtrack has the laconic drawl of the American gunners as they kill each shadowy figure trying to flee through the surrounding countryside.

It is the hypocrisy of these politicians that grates. They rely on the short memories of their voters: and it is our duty, out here in the real world, to remind, even if we cannot hope to see them called to account.

I spend the afternoon and evening down in Wiltshire, scanning a box of old photos which my brother John has inherited from Uncle Harry.

There is a score of photos from an old album of his father's, who was headmaster of a school in Oxford for forty years; his wife was Clara Cawdell, whose mother was a daughter of Sir Charles Napier.

The box also contains yellowing press clippings of the 1920s, covering my father's adventures in the Discovery. The Oxford Mail prints photos of the ship and her crew as she departs for the Antarctic.

I get back to London at 10:45 pm, and to my pleasure find Bente is up and about.

My website ranking has slipped in recent months to No. 28,854. We're still ahead of the ADL site however and have around 70,000 readers each day.

Off to America tomorrow. Bente sits up with us both in the drawing room, looking beautiful.

I get up at five am by mistake. Emory University's lawyers have sent a tough response.

The posting of the material on the Emory University website does not violate any copyrights which you may own, whether under the laws of the United States or the United Kingdom. Placement on the Emory website is fully authorized by the "fair use" doctrine of American law, 17 USC. 107.

See also the judgment in case number 199/0459/3 (Hyde Park Residence Ltd (Appellant) and David Yelland, et al. (Respondents)), in which the court explains inter alia that it will not enforce copyrights in works that are immoral or scandalous, injurious to public life, public health and safety or the administration of justice or which incite or encourage others to act in a way contrary to public life, health, safety or the administration of justice. must know.

In sum, Emory is fully authorized under the laws of the United States and the United Kingdom to continue to post these materials on its website.

Emory will vigorously defend its rights and take all appropriate measures to assure, among other things, that it recovers all expenses incurred in defending any frivolous proceedings or litigation.

Please govern yourself accordingly.

I spend the afternoon and evening putting more pages and photos into the genealogical file of the website.

What an illustrious, adventurous family.

I have been puzzled by the unexplained reference to American "civilian contractors" which has cropped up ever since four of them were killed in a SUV in Fallujah last week.

The pictures were probably as gruesome as the sights to be seen in Iraq after we, the "coalition of the willing," dropped our napalm on villages or sent cruise missiles into family villas where Ahmad Chalabi's henchmen had wrongly whispered we'd find Saddam Hussein and his friends.

What precisely is a "civilian contractor," however? We are familiar, from The Godfather and Sopranos, with the notion of putting a contract out on somebody; and these people seem to have been killers in the recent past, as their curriculum vitae includes employment by the Special Forces, or Seals, or whatever names Commandos nowadays operate under.

My problem: In military and international law are they combatants, protected by the 1949 Convention, or are they not?

Since the four hapless victims were said to have been escorting a food convoy (in itself a curious occupation for able-bodied men being paid rather more than the average US "grunt"), it's a fair guess that they had more than pea-shooters and slingshots in their pockets.

Why are the press not commenting on the odd fact that the Pentagon is employing "civilian contractors" as soldiers in plain clothes, who in the eyes of international law are francs tireurs, liable to be summarily executed if caught.

During the 1944 invasion of Normandy -- oops, "liberation" was the approved word there too -- the Americans adopted the tactic used by the Germans in their own occupied territories: young French women had to bare their right shoulder, and if a bruise was seen on it -- resulting from a poorly handled rifle recoil -- they were deemed to have engaged in unlawful combat, and shot on the spot.

The law becomes very murky when the military arms civilians, and sends them into a battle zone undistinguished by uniform or insignia. Why weren't four US soldiers sitting in that SUV, escorting the "food convoy" that day?

ALL evening working on Churchill's War, vol.iii.

I have begun exploiting the handwritten diaries of Admiral Sir Andrew B Cunningham which Susanna Scott-Gall pre-read for me in about 1986. Nearly twenty years have elapsed since then.

I signed the Churchill contract with Alan Brook at Michael Joseph Ltd in October 1972: so I have been toiling at it for thirty-two years so far.

That winter of 1986/87 Susanna and I made our first trip out here to Key West, after the heating in Duke Street broke down and the Grosvenor Estate said it would take three months to fix; I offered three months in South Africa, but she was politically correct -- a Guardian reader, as I have myself now become. So -- Florida it was.

While down here I completed Rudolf Hess, the Missing Years. I last saw that manuscript in the suitcase I propped up next to a cab outside the Algonquin in New York, while I went back in for other cases.

When I came out the suitcase had gone, stolen by a fast-working footpad. It was filled only with worthless junk: blank paper, shirts, and the like -- but also, I realized, the only copy of Hess. I was stricken. The MS was lost. "Not to worry," said Susanna brightly. "I took a Xerox of it yesterday, and mailed it to the German publisher."

Eighteen years down the highway of this life, I am now finally reading the Cunningham diaries. Like the Hess book, they have miraculously survived. I'll post them on my website over the next week or two.

Under April 13, 1945 I find this extraordinary entry:

The Prime Minister mentioned that [Heinrich] Himmler appeared to be trying to show that he wasn't so bad as painted and . . . if it would save further expenditure of life he would be prepared to spare even Himmler. I suggested there were plenty of islands he could be sent to.

So Churchill was prepared to "spare Himmler's life?" That'd have put the cat among the pigeons with his Zionist friends.

As things turned out, Himmler was frog-marched into a special house in Lüneburg on May 23, 1945, a day or two after his surrender to British forces; and within an hour of his arrival he had been conveyed from life to death under circumstances which still bear investigation -- I noticed that page 2 of the 1945 Second Army diary, which relates this episode at length, has been retyped on the same typewriter as used for pages 1 and 3, but by a different typist. Why?

Russian publisher Veche has made a meager offer for Hitler's War, Uprising, and Hess. Parforce UK Ltd rejects it as "too small by a very large margin." Bente also says there are two letters from the Trustee, one to her, and one to me.

To the latter I reply:

You raised further questions about how I am paying for solicitors, etc., and I told you of my circle of friends around the world. You have now asked for details of all those who have given me more than £500.

With respect, you are not entitled to ask me to identify friends who choose to give me sums of money, whether £500 or £4,999, to see us through this difficult time, pay school fees, and the rest. If you think differently please be so good as to advise me of the authorities on which you rely.

Please confirm that as per the undertaking given in your fax to Amhurst, Brown, Colombotti on June 24, 2002 and confirmed to me on February 3, 2003, no items have been disposed of from the stored possessions without my first being given two weeks' notice -- i.e., none at all as yet.

They make no reply. In the mail are a couple of small cheques, and from my barrister the Trustee's witness statement in my Court application.

Only now do shocking facts come to light: the Trustee, breaking the solemn undertaking she gave to me in writing, has already sold off many treasured possessions.

Accordingly at 2:06 pm this letter goes to my attorneys:

I am very depressed to read that the Trustees have sold off valuable items for pennies on the pound without telling me.

For example an antique éscritoire -- the only item left me by my Mother -- they have sold for £5. 'Unframed paintings,' by my daughter before she [died], for £10. A marble table, purchased seventeen years ago for £1,500, for £35. My desk, bought for £2,000 in Harrods many years ago, for £110 (and what has happened its highly personal contents?)

Printing cartridges, worth over £500, for a total of £18. Clearly tools of the trade, how can they argue differently?

In each case we would have paid ten times to regain possession of these, if we has been given notice.

Possessions accumulated over the years as a struggling writer have been secretly sold off for a little over £300; I am depressed by it for much of the evening.

The octagonal marble table, my pride and joy: how many books I wrote on that table! It was cool and heavy and stable, a delight to work on. I have a picture of little Jessica, just four months old, on her mother's lap sitting at its edge pinned above my typewriter at this moment.

The big partner's desk! Little Pilar's paintings.

All sold off for pennies, to punish me for daring to take legal action against Deborah Lipstadt and her friends, and certainly with no benefit to them.

The Trustee's balance sheet reveals that after selling off my apartment, home for 38 years, for rather under its million-pound value, they have swallowed up so much on their own legal fees that there is nothing whatever left for Lipstadt and Penguin Books Ltd, who ordered the seizure in the first place.

At 11:36 pm before going to bed I send a bitter letter to my attorney:

You cannot understand the grief that losing such items though this treachery has brought. What relief or claim for redress do I have in this case? It is all just so shocking.

A humid morning down here in the Keys. I write to Bente in London: "Spent a very depressed night, awake most of the time about the sale of those items. The TV cabinet was sold for £5! It cost £375 when new (from Selfridges). There must be criminality in it somewhere."

There seems to be a sign on Highway US.1 that I miss when I drive down here -- one that reads, Key West ahead, normal traffic rules do not apply, drive dead slow, no need for turn-signals.

Two days ago I disaffected Vicky [my latest assistant, from Colombia] by commenting on her slow driving up Whitehead Street -- she managed to stay behind a sloooow gaggle of bicycle tourists the entire two-mile stretch to the post office.

She flew off the handle, flounced off, and I guess that's the last we'll see of her.

When I worked in a Billericay woodwork factory, Samuel Wernicke & Co., for some months as a child, I first encountered the system of holding a week's pay "in hand." It sure prevented people from quitting.

It taught me not to quit, and I've been a non-quitter ever since.

I SPEND several hours outside until it rains, refurbishing the old Yalta 1945 chapter, drafted about ten years ago. It reads well, but differently from my present style.

Breakfast at the Banana Cafe with the gang. We agree that that Condoleeza Rice put on a much better performance before the Sept. 11 Inquiry than we had expected; she was very professional with her evasions. Perhaps a bit too clever. Her lip-trembling opening statement, like a sophomore chosen to deliver the valedictory, contrasted with her iron responses to the tougher questions.

There are certain signs, bits of body language, that can reveal when a witness is fudging or lying. She unconsciously tugs at the lobe of an ear, or strokes one finger down her cheek close to the nose, like wiping a tear, as she answers.

But there are also giveaway phrases. One Commissioner asks Condoleeza if she recalls the title of the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) of Aug. 6, 2001. She pauses, her eyes expressionless, then says: "I believe it was . . ." and gives the precise title.

The "I believe" is a seemingly harmless phrase, what the Germans call a Floskel, which a witness unconsciously uses when she has been caught.

"Where was your hand at that precise moment, Ms Rice?" -- "I believe it was in the cookie jar."

I watch George Bush's televised remarks at Fort Hood, Texas, to a pool of hand-picked poodles of the press. He says that if that PDB had said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack New York and Washington, and to fly planes into buildings, he would have been ready for him.

Fatuous! A little bell tinkles in my memory, and George Bush turns into Idi Amin. Another bell, and I realise why. Ker-ching!

A friend of mine, Gerd Heidemann, was among the first journalists to get into Idi Amin's office after his overthrow, and snaffled from his desk a blue official file, labeled Property of the Republic of Uganda, and Top Secret. An inch thick, it was the verbatim transcript of the official Court of Inquiry into the Israeli raid on Entebbe airport.

He gave it to me. There were all sorts of parallels with Sept 11. Idi was taken totally by surprise. (Israeli commandos had landed three large transport planes on the runway, uninvited, fought a running battle with the Ugandan army, rescued hostages held in the airport by Palestinians, bundled them into the planes, and taken off into the night sky).

Binyamin Netanyahu's brother was one of those killed in the operation (I offered the file to Israel years later, but they were sniffy about accepting it).

As a Court-designated "racist" I could not help chuckling at the exchanges. A Condoleeza was nowhere to be seen, just a bunch of dim-witted Blacks onto whom the buck has been passed.

A lieutenant in the Research Department (for Research, read Intelligence) was asked what he was doing when the shooting began.

"I was downstairs in de basement torturing ah sahspect."

He ran upstairs, saw men in uniform ("their faces were black"), took cover in a lady's lavatory, and panicked when somebody knocked on the door. "I shot at him through de door. Unfortunately it was not an Israeli."

The Ugandan Army colonel responsible for perimeter security was next called to testify.

"Colonel," said the barrister, and one can almost hear his West Point tones ringing round the courtroom.

"Colonel, tell us what -- in your expert opinion -- led to the success of the Israeli operation?"

"Dey did not tell us dey was coming. Dey take us completely by surprise. Nobody tell us. If the Israelis had told us dey was coming, we would have been ready for them."

What a pity we won't be seeing George Bush's testimony to the Sept. 11 inquiry on TV.

Terrific tropical thunderstorm during the night. The smoke detectors start to whistle frantically seconds before each lightning strike, as the static electricity builds up all around. It's like World War Three.

At 8:45 pm I send a witness statement to my barrister:

I am currently three years into a definitive biography of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for which of course I shall need to use all the same archival files, books, microfilms, and documents which I collected for my biographies of Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and other top Nazis, and the evidence files amassed for the Lipstadt trial, which bore so heavily on the Holocaust and Himmler's other "achievements."

These materials were and are indispensable for my work. But all of these have been wrongly seized by the Trustee and she has refused or ignored on several occasions my written requests for their return.

I am currently two-thirds of the way through my lifetime project, a Churchill war biography. . .

From the mid 1960s onward I visited the archives of the world collecting the source materials for these biographies of Churchill and the Nazi leaders. Specifically, I worked in archives in Canberra, Moscow, Ottawa, Washington, Berlin, Koblenz, Paris, Rome, New York, Abilene in Kansas, California, and elsewhere.

As many of the principal characters were alive, I interviewed them and compiled transcripts of the interviews.

Many of the papers were given to me by either the surviving top Nazis or Churchill's own staff to copy in confidence. Some of the papers were bound into blue volumes, others microfilmed before being donated to archives, while still others were housed in ring binders in my study.

I also collected hundreds of war-reference books which I often annotated in the margin, or card-indexed. Most of these are now long out of print. Still others, like the hideously expensive multi-volume printed edition of the Goebbels diaries, bought in for the Himmler project, I have not yet had time to unpack.

To exploit this vast archive I spent forty years compiling finding aids, microfilm catalogues and a card-index of tens of thousands of cards.

White cards were source-references, pink contained text extracts, green were extracts from the 90-volume typescript German Naval Staff war diary (held in Washington's classified naval archives, where my wife and I read every volume), blue were air force references, yellow were Judenfrage citations, orange were collected for the Goebbels biography.

At least half these cards (roughly, 1942-44) were seized by the Trustee. She has refused requests that she return them.

Reviewers have consistently commented on the quality of my archival research. Its value to me is beyond price: it is an indispensable historiographical tool, which I have spent forty years constructing.

Its value to any other author would be only a fraction as much. He would need to be working on the same subjects, and allowing himself the same time frame to write. Authors don't do that nowadays. The late Lord Halifax can count himself lucky that Andrew Roberts granted him 18 months for a biography.

Besides, these opponents have loudly proclaimed that I manipulate and distort to write my history, and how can they now purport to place any monetary value on the archive compiled by such a person?

Thanks to Lipstadt and organisations associated with her since 1990, I find myself banned permanently from Germany, Canada, Australia, and other countries; I am told that I am now persona non grata in the KGB archives in Moscow; and the last time I tried to enter Italy in June 1992 I was turned back there as well.

I watch more of the Sept. 11 hearings during the day.

Nobody has yet asked, and no witness has volunteered to answer, The Big Question:

"Can you think of any change that might be made in US foreign policy in the Middle East, that could have made the United States people much safer in the long run, and at far lesser cost to the taxpayer?"

Ariel Sharon is due to visit the White House the next day. Being just about to shake the hand of The Devil's Lieutenant, it is perhaps not surprising that at his evening press conference George W Bush seems more slow-witted, than ever.

Some journalists ask tougher questions, and more than one is unscripted (don't expect to get invited here next time, fella!) One asks the President if he can think of any mistakes he has made since election.

After snapping that he wished he had had written notice of that question -- implying that the other questions have been on notice -- Bush mumbles he can't think of any right now.

He makes no mention of the thousands of innocent Iraqis killed. He is in Iraq for freedom, peace; freedom and peace; and peace and freedom, and other combinations of those words, which just empty out all meaning even as he speaks them.

To my memory Iraq was at some semblance of peace before the American bombers and cruise missiles arrived -- it was a lot more peaceful than "the coalition" have made it since.

Somebody asks, "Mr President, why are you and the Vice-President insisting on appearing together before the Commission?" He answers insolently that the Sept. 11 Commission has invited them: the equivalent of "To get to the other side."

The questioner points out that the Commission invited them to appear separately. George Bush again ducks the answer.

There is no properly established criminal court in the world that would allow witnesses to testify in tandem like this.

I had an email a couple of years back from a US Army officer in Croatia. He had tried to log on to my website, he said, and got a screen advising that my website was deemed "not mission-related," and that any further attempts would be reported to his superiors.

Things have changed since I worked as a clerk-stenographer for US Air Force Strategic Air Command in 1960. The slogan then was "peace is our profession." Now it would be Peace-'n'-Freedom. Not freedom of thought, apparently.

I catch glimpses of CIA Director George Tenet's testimony before the commission. He is not an impressive figure -- he has the fleshy, thick-lipped features, gestures, and narrow vocabulary of a provincial plumber.

What was he before? Not a lawyer like Bill Casey, that I warrant. A British trade union steward has more intellect than he. His mouth lolls slightly open when at rest. He occasionally speaks out of the side of it, like a Hollywood gangster.

Fifty percent of his statements, if not more, are clichés, including "don't throw the baby out with the bath water," all accompanied by the same ingratiating smile. How depressing for Americans to realize that their security is in his pudgy hands.

What a difference Ambassador J Cofer Black makes: shrewd, intellectual, articulate, and believable, his every word inspires confidence and respect.

The horrors of Fallujah. It is unlikely that we shall ever see any courts martial like the one which followed My Lai.

What was then an outrage, an atrocity, has now become the commonplace, the dollar-currency of war. Harmless American tourists for the next generation will not have to look far for the reasons why they are despised around the world. Bush has squandered the legacy of Jimmy Carter.

I now do most of the writing on the final volume of Churchill's War in the afternoon and evening, as soon as the sun has moved off the surface of my table. At least here I have a table. In London, the Trustees took away my only desk, my only table, and my only chairs, in May 2002: "We are always called in for high profile political cases like this," they had advised me a month earlier.

A friend in Finland this morning sends me an article with this paragraph:

A journalist who attended a meeting at which Alan Dershowitz suggested legalising torture noted that the really shocking thing was that not one person in the audience replied that it might be wrong.

Even in this country [England], some no longer consider such views unacceptable.

Respectable universities would think twice before inviting someone like David Irving to speak, but Oxford, London and others welcome Professor Kamm to spread her views that it is fine to 'terror-kill' the innocent as long as you 'have the capacity to harm them as badly in some other way or for some other reason'. The boundaries of respectability have rarely seemed so fragile."

I shall be speaking at the University of Denver this September, but that invitation is a rarity. Only seldom do such invitations result in my finding myself before a student audience.

I think Cork was the most recent: I got within 100 yards of the building before the university decided it was too dangerous. Busloads of the traditional enemies of free speech, from all over Ireland, had arrived, and one thousand packed into that final 100-yard stretch.

I was invited four times in 2000 and 2001 to speak to Oxford's famous Union. Each time the invitation was canceled, because the police said they could not protect the building.

Once more the students invited. This time the General Secretary of the Association of University Teachers, David Triesman, announced he would enforce a global boycott against Oxford University, as his newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, unashamedly boasted.

LIPSTADT'S counsel, the not incapable Richard Rampton QC, asked me what I meant by patriotism (which I offered as an alternative to "racism"). I said that one possible definition was the duty to respect what one had inherited from ones ancestors.

I have spent a couple of days, while clearing up down here in the Keys, thinking about England, and pondering on my ancestors, and precisely that duty of patriotism.

My brother inherited the papers of our father's younger brother, who was a famous professor of inorganic chemistry; he seems to have been a bit of a Lefty, and why not? I fear I am slewing that way myself.

To my surprise and envy this uncle, Harry, the professor, earned a half-page Daily Telegraph obituary. He was the earnest and learned one; my father the adventurer, author, warrior, explorer, and scamp. A remote bay in the South Sandwich Islands is named after him.

I have now compiled these dusty photos into a Web gallery, and learned new things about their father, my paternal grandfather.

He was headmaster of a famous school at Oxford for forty years, and died at 62. The obituaries reported that he was "admired and respected by the thousands of boys who have passed through his hands."

Now, that is an epitaph one can honourably strive all ones life to achieve. It recalls the last harrowing line of the movie Goodbye Mr Chips: the retiring headmaster is shuffling down the cloisters for the last time, and hears someone remark, "What a pity he never had any children." "Children," Chips exclaims quietly. "Children? I've had thousands of them."

And here he suddenly is, before my eyes: a faded, brown photograph of a schoolmaster, writing at his desk. Hello, Mr Chips. My grandfather, and I never knew you.

COUNT Machiavelli once wrote, "Never allow your nation to be dragged into a war by immigrants."

Now the Iraqi immigrants have lured the great United States into this morass. Once again, as was that of the British Empire in 1939, a country's foreign policy is hijacked and manipulated by invisible immigrants with an agenda of their own.

In Iraq, the casus belli was the existence of sinister and mysterious Weapons, never closely defined or described but which, it was implied, could target Britain, or foreign British bases, if not the United States, themselves. Countless innocent lives later, this turns out to have been totally untrue.

The only lame excuse offered so far is that Saddam Hussein did not make it plain enough that he had not got these Weapons. Try that one on the Judge:

"Okay, so I wuz wrong. I smashed the guy's door down, shot his old lady and the kids, and broke his arms until he opened the safe. It's not my fault it was empty. Not guilty, Yer Honour!"

A decent prime minister, one for whom I would vote -- or an honest president -- would now do the honourable thing: admit the error, pull out, apologise, mop up, and offer to compensate for the damage and suffering inflicted on an innocent nation.

What I see now happening -- if I screw up my eyes and stand back far enough from the TV screens -- is the great American economy being dragged into ruin; just as Ronald Reagan and his brilliant CIA chief William Casey destroyed the Soviet Union by forcing them into an arms race they could not afford.

Fallujah has shown the Americans at their worst. Willing to wound but afraid to strike, eternally the mark of the bully.

Their forces have become accustomed to killing at extreme range, like a video arcade game. Videos can't hit back.

Urban warfare is different, as Hitler could have told them. "Avoid Voronezh," he told his generals in August 1942. "Don't get sucked into street fighting." The generals disregarded him, months were lost, and Stalingrad and ultimate defeat were the price he paid. 

Our dossier on the origins of anti-Semitism

 

Index to this Action Report

Dossier on Richard "Skunky" Evans

 

DAVID IRVING says: "Thanks -- See you in Cincinnati, Labor Day 2004!"