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The dangers of writing and lecturing on WW2 history in a Europe where some of the old forces are still in control The final chapter of the prison memoirs of David Irving [ PREVIOUSLY ] They’re out for blood I NOW do, or at least I did before all this happened, most of my writing in the Old Town of Key West, a sub-tropical island town a few hundred metres from the southernmost point of the USA.
As I lay on my cot in Cell Block “C”, looking at the rungs of the empty cot above me, I reflected that I still had three bicycles chained to a tree in Key West waiting for my friends and me to return. And here I was in Cell 19, in what the Americans dismissively called “Old Europe”, locked down for twenty-three hours a day, imprisoned for an opinion I had expressed sixteen years ago — no, now seventeen. The summer had passed on.
The sun no longer rose above the rooftops five stories above the narrow prison yard. There was no longer that little crab-sized sunbeam crawling across my floor. I had made friends here among the prisoners, and tried not to prejudge them, though I eventually learned to believe none of them. One good-looking young African from Guinea-Bissaut — apart from his Creole he could speak only Spanish — muttered softly that he’d been caught with one just one gram, I did not ask of what.
Over the weeks, I helped him, translated occasional letters to the officials for him, and gave him some of my meagre rations.
A few mornings after he left, as I sat on one of the two iron chairs from my cell in the corridor outside and Zoran , a Serbian trusty (thirteen years for cocaine dealing), mowed my hair down to one millimetre all over, he whispered to me that the lad had in fact raped a thirteen year old Viennese girl. “They’ll all make up stories rather than admit to that in the prison yard,” he said. My other existence, as a professional historian, had by this time resumed.
The monastic existence gave me a great opportunity for analyzing the more complex sources. I had obtained from the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich the verbatim transcript of one of Heinrich Himmler’s secret speeches, in August 1944, and I could now take the time and trouble to analyse its text and language, and to ponder what was really going on in the Reichsführer’s mind as he spoke — to see beyond what he actually said, to why .
At the same time I continued my own long-range battle with the government-appointed trustees in London who had seized my correspondence files and archives and either destroyed them — or sold them to my enemies. I kept no count of the passing months. So long as I was working productively, the days and weeks no longer mattered. A friend had sent me Gitta Sereny ‘s book about Albert Speer’ s twenty-year imprisonment (seen at right, with Mr Irving in 1979 ).
Other prisoners sketched calendars on their cell walls and marked off the weeks and months with crosses. My walls were freshly painted and blank, apart from my family’s photos. BY October we had a date: Dr Herbert Schaller , my lawyer, told me the next time he visited, that the OLG, the Oberlandesgericht or court of appeal, would hear my appeal
on December 20, 2006. We wondered why they had set a date so far ahead, and one well hidden in the penumbra of Christmas too: it was clearly not by chance. As I was escorted