the Wisdom of Suing for Libel

Wednesday,
October 11, 2000 (Key West,
Florida)

A
CORRESPONDENT in Massachusetts reports that that the October 2000 issue of
Literary Review (London) has two references to me: The first is in David
“Ratface” Cesarani’s review of Ian
Kershaw’s Hitler 1936-1945
Nemesis:

Once
war started, Hitler lost
interest in domestic affairs and barely
appeared in Berlin. Germany became a
‘Fuhrer state without a Fuhrer,’ but
there were plenty of energetic fanatics
willing to fill the void. This explains
how the ‘Final Solution’ could emerge
without any evidence of Hitler’s direct
involvement. Like everything in Nazi
Germany, it was impossible without him,
but his ‘absence’ made it possible in
the first place.

Despite the shadow of
David Irving hanging over any
discussion of the ‘Jewish Question,’
Kershaw can confidently write that
‘Hitler authorized more than he
initiated,’ knowing that he will not
afford a scrap of comfort to those who
would exculpate the Fuhrer.

The phrase Führer state without a
Führer is of course lifted straight out of the Introduction to my book Hitler’s
War.
That is most flattering.

My correspondent tells me that the second reference to me is in Norman Stone’s glowing review of Gitta Sereny’s The German Guilt:
Experiences and Reflections, (Penguin). “I had not known,” writes my correspondent,
“that Sereny was the step-daughter of economist Ludwig von Moses.” He finds these remarks of Prof. Stone quite curious:

“…One
day it will be possible to write a book
about the whole postwar historiography
of the Nazi attempt to eradicate the
Jews in Europe. As a Russian editor
remarked to Sereny (right) when,
already at a serious age, she was about
to go to Siberia to interview a
Ukrainian who might or might not answer
a vital question about a
concentration-camp killer: ‘I cannot
understand you Westerners.

You go on
and on about the Nazis’ killing of the
Jews, but nobody writes about the 30
million Russians who were killed first
by Stalin and then by
Hitler.’

“In Sereny’s pages, as with any really worthwhile writer, there are little nuggets of an importance that she herself may not even have been aware of when she included them.

She has a piece here on a very strange figure, François
Genoud, a Swiss banker who in 1948 bought up the copyright for the works of senior
Nazis — Goebbels’s
Diaries and Hitler’s Table Talk. In that condition, he came across David
Irving.

On one level, it would all be Hitler-sympathisers together, and it is true that Irving knows a enormous amount about the Nazis. However, Irving was allowed to get at the originals of the Goebbels Diaries when they turned up in Moscow; in the middle of the
1970s, he had even been allowed into
Hungarian archives by a still-orthodox
Communist leadership.

It says in Le livre noir du communisme (1998 edn, p
415) that Genoud had been working with the Palestinian terrorist George
Haddad, whose ‘best pupil’ was a
Venezuelan, ‘Carlos’, an international terrorist of some fame, whose defense lawyer, the celebrated
Maître Verges, also acted for Klaus Barbie. We know now about the Stasi links with Palestinian terrorists.

In a roundabout way, would
Genoud have pressed for Irving to get access to documents in the Bloc? And were the KGB and the Stasi perhaps calculating that if they stirred up the extreme Right, then it would only destabilize Europe? Hitler continues to be destructive in death, as he was in life. Maybe we need a book on the world’s fixation with him, and could
Gitta Sereny not be persuaded to write it?”

Well, well, well (The Story of the Three Wells, as Jessica would have it). In Stone there speaks the voice of the frustrated
Embittered (or even Embattled) Academic, a species of which we saw so much during the
Lipstadt trial. The two articles are a partial answer to those who wonder the wisdom of my libel action.

Now, it seems, no discussion of the Endlösung and
Hitler is possible without academics stumbling over my own researches — and trying to adopt them as their own, or scuff them out of the way.

Related file in this website

The
coming libel action against Gitta
Sereny François
Genoud index