David Irving’s Radical’s Diary, 1999 (June 1999)

eptember 1999 London, England Up at 4:16 a.m., can’t sleep, worrying about Benté, the Lipstadt case, opening speech, etc. I go on-line, check the position of my other Websites and USA-mirrors, ready to start using them next week. I finish my reading of the reports by Longerich and Browning. They are good, but full of shocking lacunae. A Mr May offers me a manuscript I am writing a book about the use of wiretaps by the U.S.

Army to control members of Congress, who opposed the Vietnam War, and other scandals related to that conflict. None of our members of congress seem to be interested in considering an investigation of this outrageous subversion of our constitution. I reply: I would certainly be interested in hearing more . . . Benté has been up for most of the afternoon and evening, and sat outside with us at lunchtime for a while.

Worked until 1:30 a.m. on listing my archive boxes of 9,000 Judenfrage documents for the Sereny case; nearly completed box No. 1 (of three). A useful exercise in many ways. Now that was research , spread over nearly thirty years. What Longerich and the other “scholars” have done is sat in a library and read other people’s books. Up at 8 a.m. Jessica already up, says Mummy is sick again today; it doesn’t seem to worry the little mite one-hundredth as much as it worries me.

A stranger emails me: I used to be able to get you by typing in your name then your Website will come up under “Real History.” Now it no longer appears. Only a number of maligning information on a different Website. Are you aware of this? I answer: No I am not aware of this, and it seriously disturbs me. What kind of maligning information then comes up, and which is the Website to which you find yourself directed?

It may be that you are using a university or college computer with filtering software surreptitiously installed by the college authorities, which has been provided by a company called SurfWatch or CyberPatrol , which is designed to act in precisely the Orwellian way you have described. If you’ll give me the facts I’ll do what I can to follow it up. I am grateful to you for alerting me to this latest outrage against free speech, perpetrated evidently by its traditional enemies.

Today’s London Sunday Telegraph includes an interview with Professor. Anthony Clare [right] by one Anna Picard , since a new series of Clare’s [BBC] radio programme ‘In the Psychiatrist’s Chair’ began this morning.

Toward the end of the interview, she writes these words of undisguised hatred:With the notable exception of Paul Johnson , whom he disliked profoundly but refused to go on record as to why, Clare feels a fondness for his subjects – even if that is rarely reciprocated. “I read things and sometimes I’m thinking, ‘I don’t much like this person’, but you cannot talk intimately to someone without getting a clearer understanding of why they are the sort of person you think they are.”

Even the Holocaust revisionist “historian” David Irving ? “You got a feel of how little David Irving became big David Irving. It was less of a mystery. That’s all you can ask.” But to be around such misery on a daily basis, and then to compound the stress with interviewing Nazi sympathisers? Clare’s face became a soft, sorrowful blank. “That’s the mystery of the human condition. On the one hand we need to believe there are monsters.

On the other hand you meet the monster and he or she is a human being. That’s the problem. If they were monsters it would be easy, I tell you! In my work you meet monsters, but they don’t look like monsters and whole chunks of their lives aren’t monsterish. They start the same way as you or I.” Now Professor Clare, as he likes to be called, is well known to me. He was the BBC’s Frasier.

In 1982 I was one of the first six personalities whom he invited to sit in his famous Chair to be grilled as though by a psychiatrist (which is indeed his profession); the terms being, “no holds barred” — one was not allowed to duck any questions.

I was puzzled when I saw Clare’s hit-list — the six names included the playwright Arnold Wesker; George Brown , one of my favourite ministers, later ennobled as Lord Georgebrown, who stumbled out of office having (a) drunk a bit, (b) upset certain people; the failing actress Glenda Jackson , now a notorious left-wing loony and member of Tony Blair ‘s government, and some others equally well known. In fact I was the only person I had never heard of, so to speak.

In the interview I revealed candidly my views and my aspirations for the future, as I then projected them (never dreaming for a moment of the magnitude of the International Global Conspiracy that was even then girding to do battle with me). I also spoke so bluntly and, alas, cynically about the female of the species that friends and enemies told me for years afterwards that they use to play the tape at cocktail parties, which I took as a compliment.

Clare however turned out to be an unreconstructed s-h-one-t, as my Hitler-respecting friend Alan Clark ‘s delightful wife Jane would have put it. During the interview, he asked cruel questions about my daughter Josephine — one of the heroines of my family who has been permanently debilitated for the last twenty years and is now crippled and horribly disabled. The BBC was decent enough to omit these painful moments.

When he asked permission to reproduce the six programmes in a money-spinning book in 1984, I granted it, but only on condition that he respect my family privacy and again omit all reference to them; not only did he leave them in, but he included also passages omitted from the original broadcast, and in an Introduction this academic scholar added the nudge-nudge, carefully-crafted-because-of-the libel-laws wink-wink words: “Finally, there is the issue of Irving’s family history of mental

illness.” There is no such family history, and under pressure from my lawyers — Peter Carter Ruck , no less — his publishers had to apologise, excise the odious sentence from all future editions, and pay legal costs. So Mr Clare has lost no love over the name Irving since then. He is a “monster”; or not, whichever way one chooses to interpret his weasel words. And what can we say about The Sunday Telegraph , whose features section published this disgraceful item today?

I remember when the newspaper was founded in 1963; its editor was Donald McLachlan , a wise and gentle man, a naval Intelligence officer who became a close friend and mentor. His newspaper serialised my first book, The Destruction of Dresden . Then it serialised my second, The Mare’s Nest , about the Nazi V-weapons. Then hit serialised my third, about the Nazi atomic bomb project — still the standard work on that subject.

When he drove off the side of a Scottish mountain road his death was a stunning blow to me. The editor of The Daily Telegraph at that time was one Maurice Green .

He assured me once in a public controversy (over a play by my best friend, Rolf Hochhuth , Germany’s leading liberal playwright) that he treated all parties in the affair with equal dispassion; a week later however The Private Eye obtained and published an internal Telegraph memorandum, which ruled that “the David Irving in the Hochhuth controversy” was no account to be referred to as “the historian”.

It was an act of pettiness that I am glad to say has long since been reversed and atoned for by the great newspaper. What can one say for The Sunday Telegraph ‘s editorial staff now however?

Their new literary editor has a penchant for works about the Holocaust — a word which did not exist in 1963; when challenged as to why they had not reviewed my latest work, after her predecessors had accorded glowing and prominent reviews to my thirty books, this lady, Miriam Gross , stated that they would NOT be reviewing any of my works; my staff member who dealt with her noted at the time that she was a haughty c-zero-w. I wonder what Clare would have made of that?

I open up the new Website focal.org , incorporate some neat new Javascripts. Fall into bed exhausted at 4 a.m., and up again at 8:50 a.m., as C. is coming to work today. In the afternoon I hear her spelling out her name over the phone to Mishcon de Reya’s staff — complaining that we have still not been supplied with the Pelt diskette — and I admonish her never to reveal her identity to such people, as they will be vindictive enough to destroy her career in the Law later on.

Jessica has yesterday extorted from me a promise to take her to Hamley’s, which promise she cashes in today; however she buys a (Barbie) camera, £14.99, using her own money — a large collection of bronze coins she has been hoarding. Afterwards we sit in Grosvenor Square; I read more of the Pelt monograph while Jessica takes photographs of flowers, leaves and, reluctantly, of me.

M. spends an hour going through my 1991 and 1992 diaries; he finds I describes him as moist-knickered, and his mother as “a daft old bat,” and roars with laughter. Long evening of somewhat strained hilarity. The 1992 diary is full of glimpses of the first months with Benté. D., one of my legal friends, has never written a diary, and does not understand why people do: but I do — for a lone writer, it is an act of penance, of self-discipline.

It is like the escapement of life’s daily mechanism: tick, tock. Each day of the diary, once written, is another tick of the escapement, and brings closure to that day and preparation for the next. He begins to understand my proposed High Court tactics. On […], he thinks Professor Levin will find he has been ambushed by it. True. Benté is up most of the day, preparing Jessica for tomorrow’s first day back at school.

M. phones around 5 p.m. — the radio has announced the death, on Sunday, of Alan Clark, from a brain tumour: already buried in a private funeral. Just as I was writing about him. I work until 2 a.m. Benté asks me to take Jessica; she is smart in her uniform of grey jacket and dress; I take two pictures of her on the school steps, bursting with pride. The newspapers are full of Alan Clark’s death at 71: four whole pages in The Daily Telegraph alone.

They make rather a lot of the old rogue’s sometimes mediocre books — Barbarossa in particular was a bit of a pot-boiler, but his was a character which certainly illuminated the whole of the London political scene. At ten a.m. my sister phones, sounds subdued, with word that Josephine has gone. I am calm at first, but shaken and very, very sad. God has yesterday gathered my oldest daughter up into His arms: why did He have her suffer so long first?

Twenty years of nightmares, of agony, of hatreds from uncomprehending bystanders, of pain and emptiness. I phone her sisters, even reaching Beatrice in Brisbane, Australia. I say, “God has finally taken her.” When University College hospital phones, matter of fact and bright, I interrupt, I do not want details. For me, Josephine is the little girl on my lap, the girl pointing at the flowers, the girl in the sea.

I say I will be in touch with them about the arrangements; she said, not with us, with the Coroner. I phone The Daily Telegraph to put an announcement in tomorrow’s paper. IRVING. On Tuesday, September 7, God suddenly and mercifully gathered into His arms our eldest daughter Josephine Victoria Irving, the beloved mother of Anthony, after enduring a long and indomitably borne illness. Family flowers only. Thirty-six years ago I put the announcement in the same newspaper of her birth.

What pride! A year or two ago, doing Discovery for the Lipstadt action , I came across the newspaper’s bill for that bit of boasting, and sent it to her as a memento. I am stricken all day, grief repeatedly welling over inside me. I shut down the Website, leaving only a memorial to Josephine on the screen. I collect Jessica from school at 3:35 p.m. Happiness bubbles out of her. We drive to the bank, then to Sainsbury’s, then to the Mars shop to buy a Disney comic.

I say, “Were the school teachers impressed with your reading?” “They said they were very impressed with my writing,” and proudly shows the badge they have smudged onto the back of her left hand. My daughters are flying in. Their mother says in a flat, quiet voice, “Our children are not supposed to die before us.” During the night large numbers of messages of condolences come in. I read some at 3:20 a.m. I must take Jessica to school.

Do so at 8:35 a.m. after a frantic hunt for the rental car’s key (Jessica has hidden it down a sofa, as she pleaded to go to school on her little pink bike.) My twin brother phones, having read the announcement. I chuckle at the thought of somebody who reads the Death Announcements in the Telegraph each day and looks immediately for his own name. He has not got a phone. At Farm Street Church, I talk with Father O’Halloran . The church agrees to hold the requiem mass on Tuesday.

Still no certainty as to where poor Josephine will be buried. I am still swept by fits of grief during the day. Afterwards, drained by it all, I have a coffee alone outside the Spaghetti House. A car-alarm of a vehicle parked next to us starts to wail, and keeps wailing at three minutes intervals for half an hour. A selfish flaw which seems unique to English cars and their owners.

Three strangers cross the road, and I recognise them belatedly as daughters Pilar (first time home in two or three years, back from Madrid), her cousin Miguel , and Paloma . We talk over funeral arrangements. The tailor shop manageress gets into a car, sees me sitting there, cranks her window open, screams, “Sieg Heil,” several times and gives the Hitler salute. In Germany, she would be arrested for that. Where are the (German) police when you need them!

More condolences come in off the Web, many from strangers. Does that enhance their worth, or render them worthless? I check in the evening, around 200 visitors to each of the funeral pages, including one identified as “rel14.religion.emory.edu” — an American university e-mail system. Now, who is professor of religion at the Emory University, Atlanta? Surely a coincidence.

Perhaps Professor Lipstadt hopes that Josephine’s death has momentarily incapacitated me: I would like to say that she is wrong — but I cannot. It has devastated me, and reduced me to a tenth of what I was. After the funeral, however, I shall