London, Monday, November 3, 2003
At
home with the Führer
Simon
Waldman came across a copy of Homes and Gardens
from 1938 which featured an article about Hitler's
house, and posted it to his weblog. This started a
bizarre series of events that saw him embroiled in
legal wrangles and denounced as a Nazi
sympathiser
ONE evening in May, my father-in-law
proudly took out an old magazine. It was a
November 1938
edition of Homes and
Gardens, featuring a modernist bungalow built in
Wraysbury, on the banks of the Thames, designed by his
father, Henry Carr. The 65-year-old magazine was,
and still is, one of his proudest family heirlooms, but
he had only ever looked at the article on his father's
house. I started to flick through it and found something
quite remarkable.
As a result of this casual browse through an old
magazine, I have struck up a friendship with an amateur
historian in Louisiana, been involved in a copyright
tussle with the UK's biggest magazine publisher, been
branded a Nazi sympathiser, been written about in the
New York Times, International Herald Tribune and
the Jerusalem Post, and become the subject of a
petition from 60 Holocaust scholars as well as protests
from David Irving.
My discovery was an article headlined "Hitler's
Mountain Home" -- a breathless, three-page Hello!-style
tour around Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler's chalet in
the Bavarian Alps. In it, the author, the improbably
named Ignatius Phayre, tells us that "it is over
12 years since Herr Hitler fixed on the site of his one
and only home. It had to be close to the Austrian
border". It was originally little more than a shed, but
he was able to develop it "as his famous book Mein
Kampf became a bestseller of astonishing power".
The great dictator, it seems, was quite the interiors
wizard:
"The colour scheme throughout this bright,
airy chalet is light jade green. The Führer is
his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as
architect... [Hitler] has a passion about cut
flowers in his home."
And he is seldom alone in his mountain hideaway, as he
"delights in the society of brilliant foreigners,
especially painters, musicians and singers. As host, he
is a droll raconteur... "
Oh, and look who's practising his archery in the
garden: "It is strange to watch the burly Field-Marshal
Göring, as chief of the most formidable air
force in Europe, taking a turn with the bow-and-arrow at
straw targets of 25 yards range."
And on it gushes, all accompanied by various photos of
Hitler and friends admiring the view, examining plans for
the house, and one delightful shot of Adolf relaxing on a
deckchair with "one of his pedigree Alsatians beside
him".
November 1938 was two years after Hitler had occupied the
Rhineland and six months after "union" with Austria. He
had just taken Czechoslovakia and Germany was weeks away
from the horrors of Kristallnacht. Yet here was a British
interiors magazine treating the architect of all this as
if he were the Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen of his day.
I scanned the pages of the article, and put them up on
my (not frequently visited) weblog. Nothing really
happened, and I forgot about it. In August, I revamped my
weblog, and wrote about the software I was using in the
pages of Guardian Online. I also gave a bit of
prominence again on my site to the Hitler scans. Within a
week or so, I noticed I was getting about 10,000 page
impressions a day on the Hitler pages. Given that I was
used to about 300 on a good day on the whole site, this
was quite remarkable. I emailed Isobel
McKenzie-Price, the editor of Homes and
Gardens, which is now published by the Time
Warner-owned publishing giant, IPC. I told her about the
piece, asked if she or anyone there knew anything about
it, and whether they had any other copies.
Two weeks later, I received an email from
McKenzie-Price saying:
"This piece, text and photographs is still in
copyright and any unauthorised reproduction is an
infringement of copyright. In the circumstances I must
request you to remove this article from your website."
This wasn't quite what I'd expected. But as I am
responsible for the commercial side of the
Guardian's websites, I am all too aware of
copyright issues, and so begrudgingly accepted their
stance. I sent a reply saying I was happy to take the
pictures down, as I respected their claim for copyright.
But
a) as I wasn't making any money from it, I
thought they were being a bit heavy-handed,b) as this was an important historical document,
with much to tell us about both the past and present,
they should really try to give it an official home on
the internet, making all the copyright information
clear, and
c) that as it had already been online for several
months, it was very likely to have been copied by
other sites, so getting me to take it down wouldn't be
the end of it.
I never received a response.
I posted our correspondence on my site. Suddenly, I
was deluged with comments from all sorts of people. Some
were supportive, some dismissive. There was one accusing
me of being a Nazi sympathiser wanting to promote Hitler
as a decent human being, and threatening to report me to
the Anti-Defamation
League. (I'm Jewish, so this was mildly insulting.)
There were a few bits of shocking anti-semitism from some
neo-Nazis; and some very, very detailed debate about
copyright. And, as I had predicted, the pages had already
been copied and appeared on sites around the world --
mainly in Israel and the USA. Unfortunately, one of these
belonged to the Holocaust revisionist David
Irving.
Journalists started to take an interest. The New
York Times wrote
about my copyright struggles, then syndicated it to the
International Herald Tribune and the Jerusalem
Post. Wired News covered it on the internet, with a
link to my site. And a US talk show host I've never heard
of, Jeff Rense, wrote about it on his alternative
news site (www.rense.com), which sent thousands more
people in my direction. Strangely, the story passed most
of the UK media by. In all of this coverage, I was rather
distressed to find David Irving arguing with me to
make the article available. Not my ideal partner.
Then, one Friday, I was checking my website for
comments, and I saw one from an E J Brock, which read:
"For the record, none of the photos in the
article are original to the article. All were
published previously in Germany and are in the public
domain."
The next few hours saw a flurry of emails between
myself and my new friend: Eric Brock, a Jewish
Louisiana-based historian and amateur collector of Nazi
memorabilia. It turned out that the photos were actually
taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's official
publicity photographer. Homes and Gardens hadn't
actually taken any photos, they had just called them in
from the Nazi's press office. Some of them were taken
years before the article had appeared.
Heinrich Hoffmann took thousands of publicity shots of
Hitler. Most importantly for his bank balance, he took
the photos of Hitler that appeared on Germany's stamps
during the war, and Hitler kindly let him have a royalty
on each stamp. As a result, after the war, he was
imprisoned for being a Nazi profiteer. (There was another
reason why Hitler favoured Hoffmann. He introduced the
Führer to his assistant, a delightful young lady
called Eva Braun.)
I put them back up on my site and quipped that if only
I could find out that the text was written by Joseph
Goebbels, then I'd be able to publish that as well.
Two weeks later, I received an email from Rachel
Zuckerman, a journalist on the US Jewish newspaper,
Forward. She told me that a group of 60 holocaust
scholars organised by the Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies had signed a petition asking for IPC to make the
article publicly available.
This took the whole story to a new level. IPC was no
longer dealing with an irritating bloke with a blog, and
it was no longer a simple matter of copyright. It was the
subject of a full-on assault from the US Holocaust lobby.
I was glad someone other than David Irving was now
demanding it. After weeks of silence and guarded
statements to journalists, IPC was prodded into action. I
received an email from IPC, who forwarded me a statement
it had sent to the Wyman Institute. It conceded that
"after extensive research ... there is no way
of ascertaining where copyright ownership lies after
65 years. Therefore, it is not in our gift to either
agree or withdraw use of these images and words."
For me, this prompted a mix of victory and fury. Yes,
I could put the scans back up on my site, but it was
clear that they simply hadn't made any detailed checks on
copyright when I first contacted them, and had hoped it
would all go away with a single stern email. Fortunately
for me, in this internet age, such clumsy tactics don't
work. Their attempt to squash the problem had simply
amplified it. The Wyman institute, however, is still not
entirely happy. It is glad that the article is now widely
available, but would like an apology from IPC. The two
sides are still in negotiations over this.
Personally, I have asked IPC if they will let my
father-in-law have a free subscription to his favourite
magazine, Practical Boat Owner, as compensation
for the way they treated me. I'm still waiting to hear
back.
Simon Waldman is the Guardian's director of digital
publishing.
Copyright Guardian
Newspapers Limited
[Cover]
[Page 193]
[Page 194]
[Page 195]
[Text of the article]
write
to David Irving