Posted Friday, December 31, 2004 With Christa Schroeder, Hitler's private secretary from 1933 to 1945   DAVID IRVING spent many years winning the confidence of Hitler's former secretary Christa Schroeder until her death in about 1983, and often visited her in her modest Munich apartment. She provided to him copies of her private letters and diaries from the Third Reich era, for use in his biography Hitler's War; he has donated these to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. Pleased with the effort he had made toward accuracy in the biography, she donated to him the original self-portrait (right) which Hitler had drawn on a card -- she had found it in his desk on the Obersalzberg, among his papers, which he had ordered her to destroy on April 23, 1945. Having fallen on hard times later, and needing an operation, she probably regretted the gift; but Mr Irving then made a generous gift to her, and retained it. It was among his possessions seized by the British authorities in May 2002 and is presumed lost. The rest of her memorabilia were acquired by the author who ghosted her memoirs, and he sold them to a Seattle businessman. -- Picture taken in May 1976 by Elke Fröhlich.