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Aidan McMahon asks on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 about the War Diary of the German High Command written by Percy Schramm.
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shows: Keitel, Hitler, stenographer,
Engineer-General Jacob: The Thöt Diary: What about the War Diary of the German High Command (OKW)? I HAVE a question about the stenographic record from Hitler's headquarters. On your webpage about the stenographer Dr. Karl Thöt it says that the full record was destroyed at the end of the war. However, according to the book From Shadow to Substance, a history of West Germany, an historian who worked in the stenographic section, Percy Schramm, disobeyed the order and saved the whole record from destruction. It was published as Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht after the war and runs to 6,600 pages. Are you familiar with this work?
 David Irving replies: PERCY SCHRAMM was himself a mediocre historian, and the published volume of the Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht for 1942-3, written by his colleague Helmuth Greiner, is largely faked. I obtained Greiner's real diary and handwritten notes and private letters from his widow and you can see from them the post-war fakery that went into the published edition. I give details in the introduction of my biography "Hitler's War" (Millennium Edition, 2002). It is a pity. I used the genuine diary for my biography -- another reason the conformist historians hate (or envy me). I shall post the genuine Greiner OKW diary and dossier on my website in the next week or so. It is very labour-intensive work, and financially unrewarding, but somebody has to do it.
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David Irving