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Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate. |
Jeffrey
Anderson
writes from the United States, December 18, 1998:
Sir:
After
reading the rave reviews
of "Hitler's
War"
on amazon.com,
I was disappointed to see that the book is once again out of
print.
I should like to have an opportunity to read your account of what the war was like from the Führer's perspective. Are there any plans for another edition?
Cordially,
David Irving
notes:
This
book Hitler's War has had a checkered history. On the
day after it was published in Germany (by prestigious
Ullstein Verlag) in 1975, I had to telegraph the
publishers forbidding them to sell, reprint or market the
book any more: they had made unauthorised changes to my
text, in fact completely reversed my opinion on certain key
issues! In Britain it was published by the famous firm of
Hodder and Stoughton, in New York by The Viking
Press in 1977 and more recently by Avon Books
Inc. 
It triggered a historical avalanche: for the first time, as Holocaust historians now admit, they had to rethink the entire history of how the Final Solution happened, because they could not even prove that Hitler himself knew it was going on. The book was a best-seller in England, (and sold well in Japan, Spain, Germany and other countries; in Germany, the crooked Dr Herbert Fleissner has sold "rights" behind my back to an extreme right-wing publishing house Druffel, without paying me a penny).
The book went through many reprints, and was published in soft cover editions by Macmillan Ltd; coming under fierce outside pressure including a clandestine campaign by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, culminating on the day in 1992 that I returned from Moscow with the exclusive Goebbels diaries, Macmillan's chiefs panicked and issued a secret internal edict on July 6, 1992 ordering the total destruction of all remaining copies of my books (tens of thousands of books), without telling me. All of these confidential documents will become public during my libel actions in 1999.
This destruction order cost me tens of thousands of pounds in lost author's royalties. Under the same pressures, the gigantic Italian publishers Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, who had published most of my works since 1963 and had already paid for and translated the massive Hitler biography, also panicked and annulled the Hitler's War contract in 1997.
Anticipating just such "Nazi" tactics, -- I am after all one of the world's foremost authorities on the Nazis! -- I had set up the new independent publishing imprint, Focal Point.
In 1991 this firm republished an updated edition of Hitler's War, including the prewar volume (The War Path) in one massive book with fifty pages of exclusive colour photos. We sold out of this new edition very rapidly, and we have now prepared a new edition incorporating the latest information from the Himmler and Goebbels Diaries in Moscow and the Rudolf Hess Gestapo file. The Board of Deputies of British Jews attempted a brief "Nazi-style" campaign of intimidation and window-smashing in 1991 and 1992 but failed to shut down bookstore sales.
A better index has been commissioned and delivered to us, and we shall revise the text and update it for publication in, we hope, the summer of 1999.
We are short of capital to give the new Hitler's War the treatment it deserves. We have three thousand firm back orders from bookstores around the world, and from individuals like yourself. We are seeking short-term (12 months) capital, on which we pay a generous return. If you or other visitors are interested in investing, click here to learn of our terms! [For passwords needed to review the loan agreement e-mail a request to us
].
 write
to David Irving |
