A Radical’s Diary (May 2007)

Documents on the Churchill said, The job of the historian is to find out what happened and why. Why do the Marxists like Richard Evans have a problem with this? May 19, 2007 (Saturday) Warsaw – Mrogowo (Poland) UP at 6:50 a.m. and I complete a claim to Ars Polona, with the attached covering note: “I regret yesterday’s events, as I am sure you do too.”

At 3 pm yesterday, having evidently invited television companies and reporters to witness what you were doing, you forcibly halted the display of our books at Stand A50 at the Book Fair, despite our valid agreement; and you prohibited the talk I intended to give at 5 pm, for which we had validly leased a hall and for which many visitors had announced their coming. (Fortunately we were able to post on the Internet a warning that the event was cancelled, to spare your Show inconvenience).

You are quoted in the press as making a number of defamatory statements, which were quite untrue. The Associated Press last night reports that you stated: “‘I told [Mr Irving] his message was in violation of Polish law and that I would not allow him to deliver it at the book fair premises, and I asked him to leave,’ Guzowski said.” Your quoted statement is quite untrue. You did not know my “message” (there is none). You admitted that you had read none of my books.

My thirty books are international best-sellers published by the world’s leading companies. Eight of my books have been published by companies in Poland, including Bellona. None of them breaks Polish law, nor do any statements that I may make. I invite you, in a friendly manner, to reconsider before making such statements in future. After setting out the amounts claimed in compensation, I conclude on an amiable note.

Today’s The Scotsman reports the episode, and solemnly adds: “Irving plans to remain in the country for a few more days to visit Auschwitz . . . ” I do hope our change of plan does not inconvenience the security authorites at Auschwitz . With Alan at the wheel, we drive all day northwards across Poland, in the opposite direction, and into what used to be East Prussia. We have an eight hundred kilometer trip ahead of us. The highway is little more than a country lane.

The differences in the architecture of these former German towns are measurable. There are busloads of German visitors, and German signs, everywhere. What a relief: Polish is all consonants and accents, worse even than Hungarian. At 6:15 pm we check into a hotel at Mrogowo, on a Masurian lake. My friend in Hungary has written: “It’s strange but not too surprising that you had to leave the exhibition two days earlier than planned.

They are the same all the world over and all of them afraid of men like you.” I reply in similar vein, and add: “I am in northern Poland and East Prussia with Alan, we are visiting Hitler’s old headquarters tomorrow. Very exciting for me.” David Irving visits Hitler’s bunker at The Wolf’s Lair, formerly East Prussia May 20, 2007 (Sunday) Mrogowo – Rastenburg – Warsaw (Poland) A DAUGHTER has emailed from Madrid. I report: “I was evicted from the Book Fair . . .

What nonsense; they will pay me compensation though. I am in northern Poland visiting Hitler’s old headquarters today. A historic site, half a million people a year now come to see it.” We set out from Mrogowa at 10:30 a.m. for Rastenburg (Polish: Ke,trzyn) and arrive there after a twenty-mile drive around eleven a.m. The parking area is already crowded with campers and cars from all over northern Europe. The signs in hotels and stores are in German.

It is like Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, though less busy. (As we leave, I count seventy-two people standing around the parking lot at that instant, which suggests a visitor-total of perhaps 2,000 today, or several hundred thousands every year.) Photo: Polish daily Dziennik frontpages the expulsion from the Book Fair and has four pages of comment Hitler has lost none of his magnetism, it seems.

I don’t think many Germans would pay much to see where Richard von Weizsäcker ran his lackluster, lickspittle presidency. Like a giant’s hors d’oeuvre before the feast, we already find clumps of concrete, some ten feet tall, littering the parking lot, from where they fell during the demolitions of 1945. The Russians overran the Wolf’s Lair

on January 27 of that year. There are several memorials in the forest, including the inevitable one to the assassin Claus von Stauffenberg next to the barrack ruins (above) where he killed four of Hitler’s staff with his bomb, including the chief of air staff, a stenographer, a colonel, and Hitler’s chief adjutant (their deaths are now seldom mentioned).

I tell Alan of Hitler’s stenographer, Berger , whose legs were blown off; his widow came to visit me in East Berlin, clutching the original telegram reporting his death, and sobbed all over again. There is also a fitting memorial to four Polish sappers who died post-war while clearing the thousands of mines from the surrounding forest. It is hard to guess how dense the forestation here was at the time Hitler was present, 1941-1944.

It is now very dense, and the monster bunkers that are hidden around the compound are overgrown with moss and grass, and have flora growing out of the cracks. In some places trees have taken root in the crevices. The surrounding trees are everywhere taller than the tallest bunkers, but these are twenty and even thirty feet tall. My friend Professor Peter Hoffmann of McGill University, Montreal, is credited with identifying them on the site map.

Alan has been here before; he says the site maps used to credit my book Hitler’s War too, but so far as I can see today those credits have now vanished into the Memory Hole. As we approach the biggest of these constructions, the grim and forbidding building 13 — the Hitler bunker itself — Alan says quite rightly that they remind him of the pre-Columbian Mayan temples in the South American jungle. I HAVE been re-reading Hitler’s War in preparation for this visit .

Arriving here for the last time on July 14, 1944, Hitler saw the work his engineers had done to reinforce the headquarters against the big new British ten-ton bombs. “We got