David Irving
comments:EVERY mail brings letters from readers asking for
progress on my
biography of Heinrich Himmler. The task is
immense. Himmler's personal files cover hundreds of
thousands of pages, mostly on microfilm. The British have
released myriads of decoded messages sent to and received
by him and his SS and police officers. A facsimile sample
page is illustrated above (click to enlarge). There are
tens of thousands of interrogation reports to be read. I
still have months of work ahead in US archives also.
I have however decided to release already more of my
groundwork -- the kind of attention to bedrock-hard
detail, which my rivals eschew. My reading of the British
intercept files is almost complete, and I have prepared
an Internet anthology of excerpts for free download
(button at bottom). The anthology is of course my
copyright - lawyers will know what that means. I would
welcome input on these pages about these documents from
fellow historians, both "amateur" and highly paid
academics. 
I preface the anthology with a brief description. Many
of the more significant decodes (including, interesting,
one bearing anonymously on the Nazi atomic research
programme) are followed by an AT-number, indicating that
a translation has been made for a special file (not yet
identified). A minor point: in SS telegraphese,
mille is one thousand, and centa is one
hundred. Modern German spellings are used (ß) and
umlauts where proper, but I have slavishly followed the
eccentric abbreviations and punctuation of the
originals.
Bear in mind that these are typed transcripts, and
will contain transcription errors, and omissions
indicated by parentheses. They are my selection - items
that interest me, and seem significant for the reasons
that my biography's framework already indicates.
The pages chosen represent less than one percent of
the total materials available in these files, Record
Group HW16 at the Public Record office in Kew. As for the
biography, bear with me: slowly and surely, and not
helped by the four hundred days of solitary confinement
that I was forced to spend 2005-6 in an Austrian prison
by the traditional enemies of free research, it is taking
shape.
