Diary: February 11, 2012

Real History, and a Radical’s Diary

Documents on the First

Much the same in Italian or Spanish, don’t know how to say it in Polish yet.
Probably just as well.

[Previous
Radical’s
Diary]

Friday,
February 3, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

K. emails that all my books have suddenly vanished from Jae’s online bookstore. No surprises there (though I did not really mind one way or the other): I reply,
“Bismarck once said: A man is as great as the things he allows to annoy him. Those are small things, far outweighed by the pleasure she gave for three years – by her presence and advice.”

Miss M., my new “Aryan” assistant who is managing the mail-run back in Key West for the moment, sends a nice picture. If she can learn not to cross her hands on the steering wheel, I shall take her on the spring tour of the US.
La donna al volante, peligro constante.
Much the same in Italian or Spanish, don’t know how to say it in Polish yet. Probably just as well.

Today I find myself tottering around the apartment without a stick, occasionally grabbing at a table edge. It is all such a natural development — like learning to walk all over again.

Tom
Robertson writes an interesting letter about the
Dresden death roll: “I’ve been told that
[you] admitted, in the Lipstadt trial, that between the time he discovered that the “0” had been added to the death toll numbers in the
TB47 document and the time [you] wrote the letter to The Times in 1966, [you were] presenting it as support for a 202,000
death toll, knowing it was false, but all I can see from the court transcript is

that from the moment
[you] realized that the numbers had been exaggerated, [you] admitted as such. Can you enlighten me?”

I reply at length: “Dear Tom

It
is an interesting debate and I really ought
to prepare a standard reply, as I get many
inquiries.

First,
I have no figure of my own, I am just a free historian, a reporter. I have no axe to grind. I had two brothers in the Royal Air
Force who were hauled over the coals by the
Ministry when my book came out in 1963.
Government files now reveal the attempts the
Government made in 1960 to prevent Marshal of the RAF Sir Arthur Harris talking to me (they failed, and he was full of praise for my book).

My revelations were an embarrassment for the Churchill family in his last years (he died in 1965).

My
1963 figure for the deathroll came initially from Hanns Voigt, an a-political
Dresden schoolteacher – his school had been wrecked in the raids and his pupils killed, so the city council had him set up a
Deathroll Division (Abteilung Tote) of its Missing Person Bureau; the job was still incomplete when the war ended. He built two indices: missing persons, and bodies found.
The latter stank, because of the clothing samples clipped to the file cards.

He collected buckets of wedding rings (because of the names engraved inside). He kept a diary. He gave me as his best estimate the figure I ultimately used, 135,000
dead.

See the lengths the Lipstadt team went to in the trial to discredit the long-dead Voigt — a “top
Nazi,” and the rest. Prof Richard “Skunky”
Evans even implied that the Missing
Persons Bureau did not exist. In 1966 I received from the Communist archive authorities in Dresden and the German federal republic independently just-found documentary evidence of a lower figure stated by the
Dresden police chief early in March 1945.

I at once wrote a letter to The Times, drawing attention to this differing figure; they published it on Thursday July 7,
1966
and I had 1,000 copies printed by The
Times at my expense to distribute as need arose. I wonder how many conformist historians would do that?

Voigt’s figure was however broadly and independently confirmed to me by Dr Max Funfack, the city’s chief medical officer (then still living in the Soviet zone, and subjected to secret-police harassment for having written to me), and the military commandant of the city, General Mehnert.

Fake documents one way or the other did not come into it — they were glitter-dust flung in the eyes of Mr Justice Gray by
Lipstadt’s million-dollar lawyers.

In
2001 I began preparing a document book for the
Appeal against Gray’s perverse Lipstadt
Judgment, with a section on the Dresden deathroll. (You can find rather more items on my website at http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dresden/deathroll/index.html

The
German Government (and one may suspect that the British had a hand in it) set up a commission of tame historians in recent years to investigate (i.e., shrink) the Dresden deathroll. That alone was a significant victory for me.

After due, and no doubt profitable, contemplation, the historians unanimously chorused that the
Dresden death-roll was “only” 25,000, which of course was noised with the speed of light around the world.

Alas
for them all, more recently and since their
report, methodically turning the pages of the
hundreds of thousands of decoded wartime
German and police radio messages for my
Himmler biography, I came across an
intercepted signal dated March 24, 1945
(above) in which the Lord Mayor of Dresden
specifically told the police authorities that
as of that date, six weeks after the
atrocity, 80 to 100,000 victims were still
registered as missing in the

district
registers set up by the Missing Persons
Bureau. “Missing,” in those messages, meant
dead, incinerated beyond recognition: an
earlier telegram had spelled that out.

Remember:
Entire families of refugees had been consumed by the flames — “basted” was the word
Churchill used — with nobody to report them missing. My figure was right. Since then the conformist historians have fallen rather silent.

“Sorry to have rambled on at length,” I concluded, “but had to get it off my chest. One day I won’t be around to defend my name.”

WORK on Himmler is progressing again. I can’t deny that these prewar chapters are causing me headaches and they will probably shrink drastically before publication. I thank R of Berlin, Germany, for his comments on chapter
18: He did not like that I called dress and uniform manufacturer Hugo Boss “shrewd” and failed to heap routine criticism on his ilk.
Or that I referred to Himmler as “this extraordinary man”.

He is however an expert on the era and his comments are normally of platinum value.

Thanks
for those comments [I reply], and you
will not be surprised that I have accepted
eighty percent of them. . . Of
course living inside a defeated Germany
[like yourself] one has a different
perception of things (“unnecessary whitewash”
[of Hugo Boss et al.]). The
constant brainwashing by the media is not
entirely without effect even on an
independent mind like yours! It would probably
affect me too.

But this biography is being
written for the non German world, and for the
coming century. It is not being written to
appease the Jewish Chronicle’s
reviewer! We
have to understand why Himmler became
obsessed with racial purity. I think your 0.1
percent guess of the racial pollution of
Germany is wrong (source?) but even 0.1
percent of strychnine or botulism would be
enough to finish off a healthy organism. Forgive me for being
grouchy, but the pain is to blame.

In four
weeks I think it will be over. I can already
begin to totter round without
crutches.

Saturday,
February 4, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

I RESUME work on Himmler, the troublesome chapter 19. Computer technology has slowed everything down endlessly.

We need somebody in the Indianapolis area to spend an afternoon helping us with the storage units.

I send Charles M. this message at 5:18
p.m.

As
you know I am stuck in London convalescing
post surgery. I reckon that, now I have known
you eleven years or more, I can trust you
with this mission:

My blonde super-assistant Jae, God bless her little over-strained heart, has left us stuck with a logistics problem, and I hope you can help us out. She quit on December 1 (without notice!), absconded to Australia with her new beau and took all the keys of everything with her. That was two months ago. I don’t begrudge it to her: that is how women are. We expect it of them.

I have found a very good replacement, a lady in
Atlanta, who is also one of us. (I have shipped a ton of our basic books to her from
England, which arrive in ten days’ time, and more from our printers in Nebraska.) But a lot of our inventory is in Indianapolis, a straight scoot down I-65 from you. . . Can I get you to drive down there, open up the three units, and describe roughly to us what is in each?

We are losing sales unfortunately until this mess is resolved.

ERIK Z. writes from North Carolina about my
Radical’s Diary and Jae I reply, “I just sent her $6,000 — twice the back pay she was (belatedly) asking for, including a $1,000
medical bill in Oregon. Some other bug, figuratively speaking, has got into her since, and I think it is without cure. What
. . . persuaded her to abscond without notice to Australia, taking all the keys and passwords with her! We have still not been able to access our inventory of books, etc..

A Blonde
Moment, I guess. — I hope to throw away the crutches next week.”

Hugo asks me to cover some of the costs he is incurring doing research for me in Berlin. No problem now. He urges me to send standard replies to some of the 300 e-mails I get a day, and reminisces about the good old days under
Margaret Thatcher.

I
was working in the Foreign Office at the time
when a hypocritical and sanctimonious world
was demanding that Britain join them in
applying sanctions against white South
Africa. Britain at the time was ruled by
Margaret Thatcher. She came under pressure
from every quarter but steadfastly refused to
impose sanctions for all the most common
sense reasons¸ including the fact that
sanctions would cause most harm to the very
people in South Africa we were trying to
help.

She received over 8,000 letters on the
issue from the public, all of which it was my
task to read and answer. We managed it by
making use of a general fact sheet which
answered 95% of the letters and standard
paragraphs which we drew upon when individual
replies were required.

In case you’re
wondering, 86% of the writers urged Mrs
Thatcher to remain firm and ignore the demand
for sanctions, 7% were critical and the
remaining 7% were unintelligible or so rude
that they were binned without further
action.

To Mrs D.: “I wear the plum cashmere pullover every day now, many thanks. Jessica has asserted rights to one of the others. . .
Jessica is over with her mother for four or five days so I’ve got to be careful not to slip up.
Tottered around the apartment all day without a crutch for the first time since the surgery.”

Sunday,
February 5, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

RÉKA informs me by text that
Malév [the Hungarian national airline] went bankrupt two days ago. She sent me a text from Damascus only two nights ago
— evidently her last flight. She and her flight colleagues are very shocked. I mechanically reassure her that a buyer will come along, and if not can I buy her please — I will fly her often.

I try to educate Mrs D., who has used the word “hopefully” wrongly.

Proper:
“It is better to travel hopefully than to
arrive.” Improper: “Hopefully the sun
will shine tomorrow.” — Americans will never
learn.

But we all make mistakes. Someone corrects a statement in my last Diary, where I refer to
Morris Dees: “You describe Morris
Seligman Dees as an ex-Communist Jew, which he certainly is not. He is an extremely rare case of a Southern White American male, totally selling out the interests of his people for money. The name ‘Seligman’ initially belonged to a Jew that Dees’s father was friends with, or something to that effect. Morris Dees is
100percent Southern White.

It is even questionable whether Dees believes an iota of what he does. Based on eyewitness accounts, he has the same privately held views on race as the people he fights. He does it all for the incredible amounts of money he made off the SPLC scam. He probably figures, he will make a nice living off the Jews, doing their dirty work.
Morris Dees comes first, let his country and people be damned.”

Monday,
February 6, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

HUGO reveals he does not like his name (in fact I have half decided to use it for any son I might yet have): “Hugo,” he says, “is quite bad enough. I’ve always disliked the name. Sounds so superior, especially when combined with a double-barrelled surname. Cost me many a bruising at school, that did. Have you noticed how many English villains in Hollywood movies (e.g., Titanic) are called Hugo? Ditto
Victorian melodramas.”

Fred Toben sends me an obituary to
Istvan Csurka, the Hungarian rightwinger who allegedly did not love the Jews enough. Did
I ever come across him? I reply: “Yes I did, he was one of the braver guys.” I add: “Hungary is in turmoil. Yesterday their national airline
Malév went belly up, bankrupt, which means my prison-visitor Réka is out of a job.”

Reminded of which, I write immediately to her again, rather regretting the flippant tone I adopted in my text last night.

AN Italian journalist writes tome today: “My name is Giuseppe Lian and I am an Italian freelance journalist. For some years I’ve been conducting a research about the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

My focus is on thirteen
Italian journalists and some diplomats that were at the Italian Legation of Budapest in the week from November 4 to 10, 1956. do you know who now has [Ambassador] Fabrizio
Franco’s diary? is it possible to put in touch with your interpreter Carla
Venchiarutti?

I am instantly transported back to the years spent with Carla, around 1976. I reply:

After
my book Uprising was completed I drove
to Berne, Switzerland, and donated my entire
research files to this archives:
Schweizerische
Osteuropa
Institut
in Berne. The director was Peter
Gosztony.
The address is from 1985, and I do not know
if Gosztony is still alive.

You will find
there my copies of the diary of Fabrizio
Franco and other materials including my
interview with him.

Scotland
Yard sends confirmation, couched in rather
Delphic language, that my complaint against
The Guardian for hacking into my computer is still under investigation:

This
is just a quick note to confirm we are still
searching our data sets for the criteria
outlined in your email to DS Matt Gibbs dated
29/06/2011. I can confirm that to date we
have not located any evidence of data
intrusion but will continue our research. The
process is labour intensive and time
consuming but I will keep you updated with
the results.

I thank them dutifully: “You are assured of my complete cooperation any time you need it.”

Just got back from the hospital. All well, but they have told me how to correct my
gait. Nice word that, gait.

Tuesday,
February 7, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

A VERY restful night, cruising just below the surface of consciousness. Physiotherapist lady told me the added sleepiness is a long-term effect of the anesthesia, which will wear off.
Wow. Man lernt nie aus. Nice dreams about
Susie T., as I mentally reconstructed the tumultuous events of 1992, twenty years ago, beginning with discovering upon my return from South Africa a beautiful young Danish blonde, B. Høgh, in residence in my apartment at Duke Street.

Another very difficult female, but I have never regretted our conjunction, nor has our daughter
Jessica; although I did occasionally wish B. would have accepted the piece of paper I have offered her so many times.

The Italian researcher Giuseppe tells me: “I read in the Internet that Peter
Gosztony died in 1999 but I’m looking for your research files, anyway. I’m looking for
Carla Venchiarutti too, and if I find her I’ll write it to you, of course.”

I reply: “I am sorry to hear that. The files should be in the archives of the Deutsches
Ost-Europa Institut in Berne, or whatever its name was. If they moved, please tell me. I regretted giving the files to him. — Carla
V. was a real beauty in the 1970s. I was very fond of her (but married).” [right, visiting Mexico]

Today I was able put on my right shoe unaided. Hurra. One small step for mankind.

Wednesday,
February 8, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

I HAVE resumed work on Himmler and am feeling fit. I change the status on my front page to read: “Hah! The Limp has gone!” For six years, ever since solitary confinement in that tiny prison cell in Vienna, the insidiously growing pain has totally
bouleversé my mental horizon. Now it has vanished. Three cheers for the NHS.

Thursday,
February 9, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

MRS D. says of Charles M.: “He is a very nice man to help us like this.” I agree: “Unbeknownst to Jae, I have a huge reservoir of friends eager to help. Without them . . . she would have ‘won,’ whatever her little game is.”

Above: left to right SS Gruppenführer Jeckeln,
Himmler, Karl Wolff, in Ukraine, August
1941.

Lew R. is suspiciously positive about Chapter
19, calls it “the most interesting chapter yet.”
But he does query:

“Treachery”
by [SS Obergruppenführer
Karl] Wolff ? why should he have
sacrificed thousands of his men when the war,
& certainly the Italian front, was
clearly lost ? It was rather an act of
patriotism towards his Germans, if “betrayal”
of the mad Hitler.

And he adds his usual bleat about the
Holocaust: “I cannot imagine that most people interested in this book do not primarily want to hear about Himmler’s overseeing the mass murder of millions, which you have not gotten to yet.
It should have come much sooner.”

I reply:

You
are incorrigible. You know very well it is
coming in huge detail never before narrated
from records that I alone have. As for
Wolff’s treachery: you may be right about the
inevitability of defeat, but that was not
what he got his pay and medals and rank for;
he got those for being a serving office and
obeying orders, and not for playing politics.
You will find I take a different slant on
many things in this book.

“But thanks for the comments, which I value especially from you each time.” I add: “I have a very clear concept of the way the whole book is to be constructed. It will gradually unfold for you too.

PS:
I met Wolff, and did not like him. I have
hours of tape recording of him chatting with
SS guys like Rauff. I have read thousands of
pages of transcripts. I still don’t like
him.

I have had two rather unnerving one-hour sleeps during the afternoon, and don’t really know why.

Friday,
February 10, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

I DID not hear Jessica return from work at midnight. Mrs D. emails that Charles M. has got into the storage units as we requested. I phone him — he is hanging around in the bitter cold and snow outside — and he talks me through the contents and condition of each unit.

I write to Mrs D. afterwards:

He
said the units were in a colossal mess and
chaos. He will email the pics to me from his
home, and I will ask him to copy them to you.
I am not optimistic that he has actually
found the autographed books. Maybe
[Jae] has them squirreled away in her
office in Y. We are deeply indebted to him
for this assistance. His words about
[Jae] verged on scathing. There are
many things he doesn’t know, I said, but I
guess he does.

Saturday,
February 11, 2012
Kew,
London (England)

THE
EMAIL torrent continues unabated. A stranger writes:

I
am grateful to you for making Hitler’s
War available as a free PDF online.
However, I am trying to read it on my iPad,
and the PDF format is less than desirable.
PDFs are easy to convert into the ePub format
(that’s viewable on iPad), but all of the
numbers in the book come across as blank
characters.

I have to explain to him: “Yes, the numbers are in an expert font. We are struggling with eBooks at present, and wish ‘they’ would get their act together. You can download a zip file of an HTML version starting here. I might be able to find a Word file of the book, but I am nervous about letting that out, because the world and its dog thinks it can
market PDFs which I have put free on the
Internet.”

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Radical’s
Diary]

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