oouDocuments on the She is emotionally in a bad state and I try to calm her in my usual tactless way — I advise her that when she blubbers she looks awful. [ Previous Radical’s Diary ] July 3, 2009 (Friday) St Louis — Kansas City (Missouri) Don B. has written: “Have you seen Albert Speer – Conversations with Hitler’s Architect by Joachim Fest (Polity Press, Cambridge 2007)? I received a copy yesterday, and there you are in the index.

The subject is an ‘argument’ about a 1944 Berghof episode which you had with Fest during a dinner at the Breidenbacher Hof. Fest states that [Field-Marshal Erhard] Milch intervened. I thought Fest’s description of it rather silly. With Speer and the erstwhile Field-Marshal Milch at the “Breidenbacher Hof”.

Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s air force adjutant, the historian David Irving and Johannes Gross also there…..To avoid any problems, Siedler gave a little speech himself as soon as we were seated in the far corner of the restaurant that Speer had reserved for us…..Later, an argument between Irving and myself.

Irving claimed something like exclusive rights to an episode related by von Below (Hitler’s farewell to the Berghof in mid-July 1944); I was not supposed to use it in my forthcoming biography of Hitler. He was loud and boorish, and then he repeated his well-known thesis. He insisted that he was the only historian of the Hitler period who worked on the basis of the sources; all the rest were just ‘copiers’.

Speer tried to mediate but did not get far until Mlich called over to Irving in a peremptory tone: ‘That’s enough now !’ Irving immediately fell silent and started to fiddle with the food on his plate. I reply: “I can only guess what it is about, Don. Joachim Fest and I got on very well with each other, but I guess he flipped after a while. Read chapter 22 of my draft memoirs . Also this draft: I received a phone call from Maria von Below, the wife of Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant.

Fest’s book, she related, described the episode she had related exclusively to me, of Hitler’s farewell tour of the Berghof and its paintings on the eve of his flight