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Letter from David Irving to the Editor of The Independent, London:- MAYFAIR W.1 TELEPHONE 01 499 9409 Fax 409 7048
(Not for Publication. Personal to The Editor. Urgent)
November 29, 1991, 8 a.m. Dear Mr Whittam-Smith, I have to-day seen Gita Sereny's rather bilious attack on me, published in The Independent on Thursday. What a pity that she did not have the courtesy to contact me, as did your other reporter when I was in Buenos Aires! There are at least a score of defamations and easily demonstrable inaccuracies. May I take it that I can have proper space for a reasoned statement of my own case, subject of course to your usual prerogatives as Editor? If your secretary would phone or fax an affirmative to me, I would have the copy with you on Sunday. Clearly a reader's letter alone would not suffice for such a weighty attack on my integrity. Yours sincerely,
David Irving Andreas Whittam -- Smith, Esq., | |
[Handwritten] Not sent? | |
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transmission from David Irving 2 PAGES
Dear Mr Whittam-Smith
Further to my fax, you might like to reflect on the reasons why Gitta Sereny's (alias Mrs Donald Honeyman)'s view of my biography is different from, say, George Stern's (Literary Review this month, just received): attached! Yours sincerely,
David Irving
For Mr Andreas Whittam-Smith
By fax
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Facsimile transmission from David Irving | |
URGENT Letter from David Irving to the Editor of The Independent, London:- MAYFAIR W.1 TELEPHONE 01 499 9409 Fax 409 7048 London December 1, 1991 Reader's Letter: for Publication
"Dear Sir, Since you refused me proper space for a point-by-point reply to the spiteful and inaccurate attack on me by Gitta Sereny on Nov. 27 [(she writes in one sweet evasion, "Many of us who are not Jews feel . . . it is essential that the public is alerted to his perversion of history")]. Allow me to level one pertinent but brief question at [Mrs Donald W. Honeyman (her alter ego)]: you report that I am a poor speaker. In all my fifteen years' speaking around the world you have never heard me once; so -- how would you know? Yours faithfully,
David Irving
International Campaign for Real History.
To: Letters Editor, | |
The article was duly published. On July 19, 1992, jealous of Mr Irving's exclusive access to The Goebbels Diaries in Moscow, Gitta Sereny published a further attack, this time using documents obtained from an American, "Peter Stahl." Mr Irving wrote to The Independent:- | |
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transmission from David Irving
This Reader's Letter comments on an article on today's magazine Dear Sir, I appreciate that your shrivelled little Nazi-hunter Gitta Sereny (Independent on Sunday, July 19) probably has an obsession with Odilo Globocnik, the mass murderer; I appreciate too that, having accepted already a rumoured £20,000 for the same research from the more discerning Times only to see them (quite properly) decline to publish it, she was keen for it to appear somewhere. But why on earth did she not bother to contact established historians with a track record of detecting fakes before accepting "evidence" supplied by the American, Mr Peter Stahl, as the basis for her costly peregrinations? Among my now bulging files on forgers is a bulky dossier on Stahl (alias "Gregory Douglas," originator of articles -- and the supporting documents! -- "proving" inter alia that Adolf Hitler escaped by plane from Germany on April 26, 1945.) For twelve years my Stahl dossier has expanded, as historians around the world -- including John Costello, the "well known writer on secret service matters" whom Sereny coyly declines to identify -- have corresponded with me about Stahl's puzzling efforts to foist fake documents onto us. These include a letter allegedly written by SS Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl to Himmler, dated October 23, 1943, obligingly "proving" for me that Hitler knew nothing of the holocaust. Stahl told me of this in 1980; when he was finally coerced six months later into supplying me with a photocopy, it was written in impossible German on wrong-sized paper with a heading not found anywhere else in the archives and bereft of the SS-runes standard to every SS typewriter. Both the Library of Congress and the West Point archives, variously named by Stahl as his source, denied it; the "L of C" stamp on it was a fake. A letter ostensibly by Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, displayed the same curious lack of SS runes. Regular dramatis personae in Stahl's fantasy-archives are Prince Philip, Anthony Blunt, Hugh Trevor-Roper, the late Duke of Kent, and the files of Fort Meade, Maryland. It inspired little confidence that Stahl boasted to me of a criminal conviction for passing counterfeit Canadian currency; that he was involved in marketing fake Auguste Rodin bronzes; and that Pacific Telephone are still anxious to trace him about the use of fake telephone credit cards (which may have a bearing on his endless trans-atlantic telephone conversations). As for the Gestapo "microfilms" which figure in Sereny's article, historians including Costello, myself, and Professor Charles Burdick have all heard promising accounts of these from Stahl, but never seen them. Oddly, or wisely, he never asks for money. His references to Mrs. Sereny are not very flattering ("The stupid bitch is a liar," he said in one phone call which I -- I freely admit -- taped on May 28, 1984. He added, "Apparently Mrs Sereny and her crew hate you with a passion." I said this was not new to me. "She asked me repeatedly," Stahl continued, "if I had any information about you.") Stahl tried to tempt me with the "genuine" Gestapo files on Churchill's "homosexual misdemeanours" while at Sandhurst. Unlike Mrs. Sereny, I declined his temptations. In my 1984 notes on him I deduced, "His sole interest is in attracting trouble from government agencies like F.B.I., embassies, etc." Once, in that conversation, Stahl commented, "Now, how many hornets' nests will I kick over?" Yours faithfully,
David Irving
P.S. : I will willingly send you a Xerox of my Stahl dossier if your lawyers want to see it. Reader's Letter The above letter was agreed to be published, and minor corrections were approved but it never appeared in the pages of The Independent. | |
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