Dr
Werner Maser, recently much-publicised
for his 'discovery' of a possible Hitler son,
did little better than Irving. For 38 minutes,
Maser lamented his supposed maltreatment by the
international press over a discovery which he
admitted to be trivial. 'I don't believe a thing
you say about him', snapped Professor
Jäckel. 'But if he is so unimportant, and I
so agree with you, why do you persist in dishing
him up?'David
Irving had proposed to invite some 50 former
Nazi bigwigs to lend him their support. The
organisers reduced this to five -- among them a
former Hitler aide, Richard
Schulze-Kossens, who last year -- though
unwittingly as be hadn't understood Irving's
thesis -- lent Irving a hand on the David
Frost show. Another Irving guest, who
slipped in under an assumed name, was the aged
SS general Karl Wolff, one-time head of
Himmler's personal staff, whose deplorable
record contrasts with his charm of
manner.
Called
on by Irving to authenticate Himmler's masseur,
Kersten, Wolff declined on the grounds that he
needed to keep his knowledge till he could find
a publisher for his memoirs. 'As you know' he
said, 'the German government has refused pension
rights to former men of the Waffen SS.' 'I
should hope so', commented Professor Tyrell
audibly.
Irving
gained some sympathy with a crisp attack on the
'old-fashioned' research methods of
establishment historians, claiming that they
merely copied out each others books. He, on the
other hand, spent long hours listening to the
stories of aged widows, admiring their
bric-a-brac and the views from their windows --
so as to be able to come out with valuable,
unpublished diaries of field marshals and
politicians. He immediately lost all sympathy by
claiming that only he consulted original
sources, and that German historians otherwise
were merely climbing on a conventional bandwagon
of all-embracing Hitler-condemnation.
Irving
clearly has little understanding of contemporary
Germans: he lives in a world of has-beens, plus
perhaps a few neo-Nazi sympathisers, failing to
see that special pleading on Hitler's behalf
does not pass muster merely by clothing it in
laborious detail.
When
during Sunday's public forum, one young member
of the audience asked Professor Jäckel to
take Irving on in general debate, Jäckel
replied that he was willing, but that he had
already twice refuted Irving's thesis in print.
Turning to Irving, he said: 'On your own
admission, you are a man who does not read
books; you cannot hear arguments; you only
listen to yourself. With a man such as you a
dialogue is impossible.'
Finally,
one of Irving's guests from yesteryear -- an
urbane Austrian, formerly of the Nazi Admiral
Canaris's staff -- rose to regret the
possibility that Irving's controversial thesis,
representing only a small part of his work,
might overshadow the remarkable contributions he
has made to Hitler research.
The
question of what sort of Hitler research is
worthwhile is not one which it is easy to
answer. It is, however, one very much worth
asking. It is certainly true that Irving has a
nose for documents, and is somehow able to
afford the time and money for searching them
out. But the question which troubles people in
Germany, if nowhere else, is whether it is right
to compose and publish -- for publishers too
must be responsible -- books on Hitler which
assume entirely Hitler's viewpoint? However
interesting the documentation may appear, unless
it is presented in conjunction with material
from other viewpoints, what results is not
history, but an exceptionally subtle, even
insidious, form of propaganda.
The
whole remarkable weekend closed with a showing
of Syberberg's epic Hitler, a Film from Germany.
Entirely unlike Joachim Fest's Hitler, A Career,
which, again, and dangerously, shows Hitler from
the Nazi's own perspective, Syberberg's film is
a ruthless analysis of the social morality which
made Hitler's brief success possible.
There
has been some doubt in Syberberg's mind about
whether this complex, difficult film can be
shown generally in Germany. He now believes that
it is possible.
One
left Aschaffenburg with the feeling that at
least in Germany, a counter attack against the
sentimentalising of the Nazi past had begun.
write
to David Irving