index (text) [From David Irving’s Telephone Log] May 28, 1984 Summary of a 40-minute Telephone Call from Peter Stahl , United States, on the evening of May 28th, 1984 INTRODUCTION: I had written to Stahl after his last call, expressing an interest in any papers he has of value for my Churchill biography.

Meanwhile John Costello [ British historian ] had visited me and told me (a) that he had seen Stahl in a Nevada hotel, which had cost him a lot but brought him nothing; (b) that Pacific Telephone had phoned him in New York, for details of a call Stahl made to him fraudulently using a phone credit card; (c) that the British Embassy in Washington is interested in Stahl. After the first ten minutes I taped the conversation. The tape will be retained.

COSTELLO had called [ Charles ] Burdick [ US historian ] up, said “It had to be true because he’d dug information out of the files that nobody else could have found,” wanted to know how Burdick could lean on Stahl to get information out of him. Burdick: ill-advised to try. I mentioned the Embassy story. COSTELLO went to see Stahl. “I was desperately ill, I had a streptococcal infection full of drugs.” Costello interested most by fact that ” Prince (Prinz?)

Philip (Phillip of Hesse?) had a brother who was in the SS during the war.” Costello felt that was “counterproductive and nobody should discuss these things.” STAHL: “Wait till the British Embassy reads my latest advertisements! I am about to put some of these microfilms, uh, copies of microfilms on the market to scholars if they wish to purchase them from me, and I’ve prepared a prospectus to that end which lists the contents of a number of these hints.

That ought to cause some uh,” (giggles helplessly.) GITTA SERENYI. He asked if I had read Serenyi’s articles in the “Moscow Journal” (meaning Sunday Times ?) about the Hitler documents [ Diaries ] and one M. “I did a great deal of ground work for her when she called me relative this fellow Merschinski (SP?) who was involved with the Hitler Diaries .

The stupid bitch is a liar — I tracked M. down, I found his unlisted phone numbers, I located his bank accounts, I found out where he had an island hide away, two different places where he had things put away, I listed his family, where they were. I dug up his East German contacts and at first she was interested, then suddenly became totally disinterested.” Serenyi was “very upset” to learn that Albert Speer made architectural sketches and passed them off as Hitler’s.

She thinks Albert Speer is wonderful. “Apparently Mrs Serenyi and her crew hate you with a passion.” I said this was not new to me. “She asked me repeatedly if I had any information about you, what I could tell her about you.” Stahl had told her only of our “totally innocuous conversations in a coffee shop” (Howard Johnson’s off Interstate101 at San Jose.) I said she is a “poison dwarf.” “You have to wash your hands after shaking hands with her.”

Stahl: “She claims she is the Gräfin von Serenyi.” But also claims to be Protestant. She was on the phone to Stahl “constantly,” after Billy Price and two or three other people, wanting to know all about them. Stahl told her all he knew about M. “I had a big file on him, his name isn’t M. anyway.” What unit he was in during the war, and where he was stationed. WALTER UNGER: “You know Walter Unger don’t you?”

Unger said Serenyi told her she had no knowledge and nothing to discuss. “He was out here. I showed him some documents and papers.” THE 800 MICROFILMS: “Papers in the sense that I had copies made.” “You run them through a processor and print pictures out.” Asked how old the microfilm is, Stahl replied: “Well the original microfilm was nitrate film and I had working copies made because the stuff is extremely fragile.

If you expose it to the light it has the tendency to change to change, and furthermore it is very explosive. So I’ve made a working copy and I’ve made a copy of SD documents and things for (from?) it.” SCHLABRENDORFF etc.: Unger “seemed to feel the stuff on [Eugen] Gerstenmaier and [Fabian von] Schlabrendorff should be published. Because they were both working for the SD. I suppose you know that!?

Note * When I first dealt with Stahl, phoning him at San Jose, Ca., from Abilene, Ks, he apologized that he could not read a word of German, and read out the fake “Himmler Document” of Oct 23, 1943, that he was trying to palm off onto me, in very stilted American-German. They were V-Leute for the SD.” (Note his perfect pronunciation of Fow -Leute.)* “After the 20th of July there were reports in there from Schlabrendorff and various people that he had had contacts with.”

Stahl reminded me that most of Sch’s plots against Hitler, like the Cognac/Cointreau bottle bomb on the plane, were fantasies. “Except that [Oberst] Brandt was not on Hitler’s plane.” (This is as stated in my book Hitler’s War , which he has evidently read!) He immediately added: “I have one of Hitler’s military caps. I assure you that there’s no ‘five pounds of steel’ inside of it.” HIS PLANS: I asked when he was going to release this material he’s got. “I don’t know yet.

There’s the question of expense and the question of having copies made.” He skidded straight onto a different topic (FBI, below). Later he said, when I pressed him: “How can I publish eight hundred reels of microfilm?” I said through Burdick or me or someone. He said: “That’s no problem at all.” (He then skidded straight off onto the [Anthony] Eden episode, below.) Later I asked, “How did you get these 800 reels of film. They must have cost you a fortune.”

He agreed, “They cost me a fortune and I want my Goddam money back! But how? I was told that if I put it on the market the Bavarian Government in conjunction with other people would press a claim as they claim to be heirs to Hitler’s