David Irving recalls something of the history of this book:

IN the course of writing Hitler's War, I assembled a large dossier of materials on Hitler's doctors and medical problems including the well known US Army (USFET) Intelligence summary, Hitler and his Doctors, and my own interviews with Hanskarl von Hasselbach, Karl Weber, Erwin Giesing, and the other physicians who had treated Hitler. I subsequently donated this file to the Bundesarchiv, where it is archived as a Kleine Erwerbung (Kl.Erw).

At the suggestion of my friend Rolf Hochhuth, Viktor Schuller, commissioning editor of Der Stern (Hamburg), asked me to write a three-part series of articles on Hitler's health, largely based on the Erwin Giesing diary. This proved such a success that the magazine stretched it into several more episodes (without augmenting the fee paid to me, I might add).

On the basis of the original manuscript supplied to Stern, Heyne Verlag published this pocketbook edition in 1980, which proved one of their best selling pocketbooks ever. Encouraged by their editor Countess Matuschka, Heyne eventually published around twenty of my German -language books as pocketbooks. Nowadays of course Heyne would not be seen dead publishing my works, as their chief editor Dr Hans-Peter Übleis made plain in a letter to me some years back, in February 1994, "in view of your political opinions." Their loss, not mine.

Wie krank war Hitler wirklich? ("How ill was Hitler really?") has been out of print for many years, and I am glad to see it restored to the public domain now. (It is still a copyright work, I hasten to add).

In 1981 of course I found in Washington the diaries of Dr Theo Morell, and after spending two years transcribing the difficult handwriting, and commenting and annotating them, I published them in 1983 as a separate full length volume, The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor (Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, and William Morrow Inc). That volume incorporates some of the materials published here. A slightly abridged edition of that volume published by Granada (cutting out the repetitions that are inevitable in a medical diary) is also posted on this website.

To this Heyne pocketbook edition, my inventive colleague Linda Nelson has now added a few Gray's Anatomy-type illustrations to make our readers' flesh crawl -- a drawing of the inner ear for the part where Hitler's eardrum is damaged; a stomach cross-section for Hitler's many mysterious tummy troubles; a writhing colony of Darmbakteria.

This page uploaded Thursday, January 22, 2004