Dear Editor:

I do not know if your esteemed journal publishes Readers' Letters, but if you do I would be grateful if you would print this:

Dear Sir, By chance I read -- and chuckled over -- Richard Hanser's amusing review of my recent book Hitler's War. He expresses frank and fashionable disbelief of my statement that Adolf Hitler neither ordered nor knew of the Jewish extermination program until late 1943 at the earliest. (I think my book contains enough documentary material, which Hanser cunningly neglects to print, to sustain my view.)

He cites no sources in opposition to my arguments, except one -- a book published many years ago by a Frenchman, Albert Zoller [Hitler privat]. Zoller' s main source was, as I also knew, Hitler's private secretary Christa Schroeder, who was forced while in captivity to write a memoir which Zoller then published under his own name, omitting hers. I am well aware of the sentences that your reviewer quotes against me, I remember well my delight at finding them as they at last seemed to provide some basis for Hitler's connivance in the atrocity.

However as Frau Schroeder is a good friend of mine I took the precaution of asking her to confirm the wording, as I tend to distrust all printed texts. With good reason, in this case! Frau Schroeder replied indignantly, "Monsieur Zoller published my writings without my permission, and interpolated extensive passages in them from his own imagination." She showed me her own copy of the book, where she has extensively scored through the pages where this occurred.

While Frau Schroeder did tell me many disturbing features about the Führer, which I disclose in the book, she emphasized: "Never once did he ever refer to, let alone show that he knew about, the extermination of the Jews." My book supports this view with evidence of the kind that would stand up in any court of law, and I defy any researcher to provide evidence that the view is wrong.

Yours sincerely,

(David Irving)