Diary Extracts — Apr 1998

index (text) Stahl/Douglas has shown nobody anything original, whatever, whenever. No films, no documents. Just promises upon promises for decades. A true thief and forger. — David Irving, April 26, 1998 [Extracts from diaries and telephone logs] June 7, 1980 8:30 pm Telephone conversation with Peter Stahl in San Jose. I telephoned to ask if he would be in tomorrow evening and he said he would be.

I asked if has yet obtained the Tyler Kent document and he said he is still dealing with the source in Switzerland who owns them. He amplified that there were three sets of documents, the English original, the Italian translation and the German translation which were handled by an Italian agent called either Weil or Emil. He said that the man wanted some of his Hitler-Befehle in exchange. Stahl then phantasized a bit about remarks that Mrs.

Agnes Peterson (of Hoover Archives) is supposed to have made about me, and suggested that the Hoover Library now has the diary [of] Mohnke and that it is locked away, and that when they know that I am coming they take half their cards out of their index so that I won’t find the stuff.

I said that I find that hard to believe June 16, 1980 (Abilene, Ks.) 10:10 pm Telephoned Peter Stahl at his telephone number, (408) 923 3364, in San Jose, California, to inquire about the letter from Himmler to Pohl . He has not sent it to me yet, it is buried under a lot of stuff, he says. He is going to New York next week. I gave him my number here and that of Max Becker in New York. He says he will look out that letter straight away.

He also touched on the Mohnke diary (which he says Oppenheim can obtain for me from Hoover Library’s secret collection) and on the Walter Frentz colour photographs which he is interested in publishing, and on the Eva Braun letters: I gave him the address of Robert E. Gutierrez from memory in Albuquerque and stressed my continuing interest in the Tyler Kent papers. 11:15 pm Peter Stahl telephoned back unexpectedly from San Jose.

He had immediately gone and looked out the Himmler letter and dictated it to me, and invited me to take it down on my tape recorder: REICHSFÜHRER SS 1 Berlin SW 11 den 20. Oktober 1943. Prinz Albrecht Straße 8 Feldkommandostelle SS Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen SS Oswald Pohl, SS Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt Berlin Lichterfelde-West Unter den Eichen 126-135.

Sehr geehrter Herr Obergruppenführer, Der Reichsleiter Bormann hat mehrmals im letzten Monat eine besondere Interesse an der Degussa-Aktion und Ihr Verhältnis mit dem KZ-System. Wie Sie wissen, eine solche Interesse seinerseits völlig überheblich ist und gefährliche Folgerungen haben können.

Bis jetzt habe ich eine direkte Gegenüberstellung mit dem Reichsleiter vermieden, aber der gebraucht natürlich sein je näheres Verhältnis mit dem Führer um diese Einmischung in KZ-Gelegenheiten zu verlangen. Er hat dem Führer eingeredet, daß er erlernte Arbeiter von KZ-Insassen herausholen kann, und hat sogar den Reichsminister Dr. Speer wenigstens teilweise überzeugt von seine Fähigkeit eine solche Aufgabe durchzusetzen.

Der Führer hat mich gebeten in dieser Sache den Reichsleiter zu assistieren. Ich bin informiert worden, daß eine Kommission von fünf Männern der Bormann-Staffel wird in zwei Wochen das KZ Buchenwald besuchen. Zu dieser Zeit habe ich keine Liste ihrer Namen bekommen; ich habe gehört, daß ein Buchhalter unter ihnen sein wird.

Natürlich kann ich nicht gegen des Führers Wunsches die Erlaubnis für eine Untersuchung verweigern, aber unter keinen Umständen dürfen diese Einmischer die Akten der Degussa-Aktion nachprüfen. Weiter muß die äußerste Sorgfältigkeit gebt werden, daß irgendeine Nachricht über unsere Methoden in der Endlösung der Judenfrage den Ohren des Reichsleiters nicht gelangt.

Als der Führer keine Ahnung dieser Endlösung hat und glaubt, die Juden arbeiten in Übersiedlungsgebieten im Osten, es wäre höchst unratbar, ihn zu dieser Zeit zu informieren, besonders nicht mittels des Reichsleiters, der keinen Anlaß hat, uns sonst zu lieben. Ich verlasse ganz und gar auf Sie für die Sicherheit dieser Sache und erwarte von Ihnen einen vollen Bericht alsbald die Kommission abreist. Herzliche Grüsse und Heil Hitler H.

Himmler Reichsführer Of course, this text has errors: these errors cause me many doubts: they may result from the document’s lack of authenticity, or from Peter Stahl’s ignorance of the German language he is dictating to me over the telephone, or from my having heard wrongly or dictated wrongly. Alternatively, Himmler may have had cause to type the letter himself rather than use a secretary, and he may himself have made the errors. Receipt of the facsimile may clear up these doubts.

The conversation as recorded then continued. IRVING: “And you have the original of that?” (Yes). “Well of course it is an extremely important documentThere are one or two words in the German which are slightly odd. Maybe your eyesight is not quite good. The final word ‘Als” does not look rightBut the general sense does fit in with the October 1943 period. You know Himmler made a number of speeches in that month. ‘Als der Führer’ or something like that.

Could it be ‘auch’ or ‘da’?Here again I would have to see the document.” (Stahl explained that the document had been folded and clipped.) “What colour is the paper? White?” (Off white.) “What is its origin? Where did you get it from?From the same people as you got the Göring letters and the Führerbefehl and the things like that, yes. [ I.e., hinting at the Berlin Document Center ].

So there is no reason to doubt its authenticity, particularly because no propagandistic use has been made of it by anyone. And does the document show obvious signs of age?

Obviously what I would ideally like you to do is to trust me with the document for one or two weeks and I would not damage it or harm it in any way and I would get it authenticated by probably the Institute in Munich, who deal with thisThey are slightly oppositional, just like the Hoover Institution, and not rub their noses in it but just to them very politely, ‘would you please authenticate this document as genuine in your opinion.

A colour transparency” (suggested by Stahl) “would also be acceptable but ideally the original, because you know you get the feel by looking at an original straight away whether it is an authentic one or not.

If you supply only a transparency then people will get suspicious and say, ‘Aha, why won’t they trust us with the original!’ (Stahl became reluctant, said he would be happy to let me have the original free, but would not trust the mails and would send me first a photocopy.) “I would be very grateful for something like that.

Start off with an ordinary Xerox copy if you can, let me have that waiting for me in London and then we can carry this through, and it is really going to make a big noise I think.

Mr Stahl, I would be very happy to have a copy of that document, and I have complete faith in you that the document is authentic, but we must be in a position that later on we can say if necessary, the original document is available and open to inspection by any reliable and trustworthy authority.” (He said he would send me the copy by mail to Duke Street.) “As long as you get the address right, ’81’.” (He touched on the possibility of talking to Max Becker, about his desire to publish the

Frentz photographs, and I suggested he hand the document to Becker in New York. Stahl explained he would not be in New York long enough, as it was a one day round trip.) “He could meet you anywhere you are in New York, there’s no problem.” (Stahl said the man he was meeting in New York was bringing him documents of Gauleiter Giesler . He also mentioned papers of Karl Kriebel , Hitler’s friend.) I ended: “I am very very pleased indeed that you have found it. Goodbye.”)

June 20, 1980 Omaha, Nebraska 10:35 pm Telephoned Peter Stahl at San Jose. He was very exhausted having returned from his round trip to New York. He was rather disappointed that the man who had offered him documents of Gauleiter Giesler had only a file of very low level letters written by Gauleiter Giesler thanking him for crates of beer, etc. It was not worth the money, he said.

I came onto the subject of the letter from Himmler to Pohl, dated October 20, 1943, and said that I had been thinking it over in the few days since he telephoned me in the middle of the night, to dictate the contents of the letter to me, and I am more than ever convinced that it is genuine, but that I have been thinking in advance of a number of the questions likely to be asked when this particular dynamite is exploded, and that it occurs to me that it would be useful if he could give me an

answer to the question: How long has the document been in your possession? He answered, “Oh, at least ten years.” Later he said that it was definitely in his possession in 1970, and stated that the Hoover Library’s Dr Lassner could confirm this as it was shown to them around then; Lassner is an Austrian who understood German much better than he, Peter Stahl, did. Lassner saw only a photocopy of the document however and went so far as to suggest that Stahl had himself concocted the document.

Stahl said that he had looked at the document more closely since we talked, and the word he had read as “als” before was in fact “da.” I said this removed one linguistic difficulty. Another which I saw was that it included two or three foreign words like “informiert” and my belief was that the Nazis usually avoided such words.

However Peter Stahl said that in his view there was no doubt at all that it was genuine in view of the fact that it had been supplied to him along with a number of other completely genuine letters by a man of proven reliability. Without much prompting he now stated that one problem was that the letter had on it a rubber stamp, reading: “Library of Congress.” [Not true: it seems to read L of C.] This startled me and I asked how the stamp came to be on the document.

It turned out that there was a large collection of documents at the Library of Congress which according to Peter Stahl consisted of documents that had been withheld from the Nuremberg trials because of their embarrassing nature for the prosecution. This was one such document.

Because these documents were in a closed section of the Library of Congress and not available to researchers, an official at the Library of Congress had proved very accessible to offers from document collectors to purchase them from him. Peter Stahl had bought this and the Göring and Hitler documents from the man. I asked if the man is still at the Library of Congress and Peter Stahl said, No, he committed suicide a number of years ago. he did not mention his name.

In this connection however Peter Stahl said that I would find that a very large number of documents were still in the hands of document collectors. I said, “Who are you telling that to, Peter!” I explained that over the last four days I had mentally worked out in my mind various plans to ensure that the dynamite was exploded professionally and I had of course extrapolated forwards the subsequent steps in the controversy that might develop.

Of course I must have a facsimile first, but I could then predict that people would not be satisfied with a facsimile, because they could easily be faked, and they would insist on seeing the original. It would not be satisfactory from my point of view if I had to explain that it would take or three weeks for the original document to arrive. Peter Stahl repeated several times that he would very happily send me the original document when I wanted it.

I said I would happily buy it from him, and he said, No, he would be happy to give it to me (but he still seemed, in retrospect, slightly reluctant to let me have the document in the original, which may be because he fears it will be stolen en route to me, as he said several times, or alternatively it may just possibly be because he himself only has a photocopy and not the original, and talk about having the original was braggadocio.

On the other hand he did state that the signature was in green crayon.) He said that I stood the make a lot of money out of the controversy that would arise out of the document and that it would not exactly have a bad effect on the sales of my Hitler books. I quickly replied that the Hitler book is out of print except in England and it would not do much good to that. On the other hand it would do a great deal of good to my prestige to be proved right after all these years!

My plan of action now would be that I would hope that he would have a photocopy waiting for me in my postbox on my