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WHEN
he next spoke in Coventry, on September
21, the audience was already four times
bigger, as the Rugby listeners returned
bringing friends and family. “That’s the
way it always goes,” said Mr Irving.
Left wing demonstrators, mocked by him as the
Traditional Enemies of free speech, blockaded another hall in Coventry which his friends had hired as a decoy.
The
Windsor “garden party”
AT the beginning of September 2007 the long search for a home, which had begun the day the Austrian Courrt of Appeal ordered his release from political inprisonment in
Vienna, ended, as Mr Irving moved into a large, centuries-old house in Windsor. Its spacious grounds afford rest and tranquillity for writing.
Mr Irving invited a carefully screened list of friends living in fifty-mile radius to a house-warming function on Saturday,
September 22. Many of them were among the two thousand who wrote letters of support to him in prison; this was the first time he had been able to meet them and say thank-you. Most walked away carrying some of the thirty books he has written.
ASSEMBLING his guests in comfort on the edge of the rose garden, Mr Irving spoke to them for two hours on his imprisonment, and then on the main theme of the afternoon — Who was really the gravedigger of the British
Empire, Adolf Hitler or Winston
Churchill?
Referring to his months of solitary confinement in Vienna prison 2005-6, Mr Irving said: “If you hear that the conformist historians like
Andrew Roberts, or Martin
Gilbert, have not been imprisoned for the history they have written, but that
David Irving has — as an ordinary reader, whose history are you more likely to believe gets to the real root of the matter?”
A very lively discussion followed. Several of the listeners asked to hear his conclusions about Operation Reinhardt, the Himmler plan to liquidate the European Jews in camps along the Bug River; he talked about his personal visits this spring to the site of these camps and to Auschwitz, and advised the listeners to await the publication of his biography of
Heinrich Himmler.
Mr Irving undertook to visit many more towns and cities in Britain over the next weeks, and mentioned plans to speak next in
Birmingham and Halifax.
Photos:
S.K.