Diary: March 1, 2002

Tuesday,
February 26, 2002 London (England)

AS I am in writing mode, I also write to The Daily Telegraph about something that has worried me during the night.:

Afghanistan
shooting

I have been troubled by that
episode in Afghanistan two weeks ago
when our [British] troops
apparently shot up a car, several
hundred yards away.

The true facts were
reported only on the following day: the
unarmed car was carrying a pregnant
local woman to hospital; the shots
killed her husband and injured the
others. We had by then seen
on television news the battalion
commander praising his men for their
role “under fire” at a time when he
must certainly have known the facts —
it was already daylight and the victims
had been recovered.

We were told that
there would be an investigation, which
is proper. Has [British
Defence Minister] Mr Geoff
Hoon offered an apology on
Britain’s behalf to the family? Have we
made any kind of amends to them? — I
for one would wish to contribute.

If they won’t print it, I will send it to The Times.

To the Public Record Office for most of the day. As I get back in at 7:15 p.m., an official from the bank is phoning from Key
West: they can’t do the wire, as US Law (the new U.S. Patriot Act) now forbids it.
I am baffled, she can’t help me; I ask for the forms to sign, but she doesn’t know them.

Somebody e-mails me a query about
“plagiarism,” — the secret bane of all historians — and I come clean:

I am sorry to say I have
detected a small passage in my
Rommel
biography (about “rivulets of
molten aluminium”) that appears close
to something Martin Blumenson
wrote. I never read his book, and it
baffles me; perhaps we both used the
same source, or my US editor
[Tom Congdon] decided to
weave that thread into my tapestry
without telling me! These things
happen, I am sorry to say. But I ain’t
telling.

Wednesday,
February 27, 2002 London (England)

Don Guttenplan [writer, author of The Holocaust on
Trial] phones, he will come at
11:30 a.m. An enjoyable two hours. He’s writing something for, no doubt, The
Guardian, on the coming “bankruptcy” attempt by Penguin. I fill him in on the background, with much strictly off the record.

Rather startlingly he then starts asking me about specific names, including the late Henry Kersting, J., L., and N.: all of them, he claims, major contributors to our fighting fund or investors in Parforce UK Ltd. He twice refuses my invitation to reveal to me where he has got these names from.

I must admit I am baffled, as he never had access to my address lists — the only possible source — and those names are not in any Discovery documents in the Lipstadt libel action. He has obtained the names from lists stolen by somebody else. . . After these first few names, on which I am as open as is proper,
I formally refuse to answer any more questions on them, as they are commercial matters about which the people concerned would be very indignant if I talk to him.
Which is true.

These people may be placed at considerable risk if their names are identified as contributors or investors.

3:45 p.m. I phone the US embassy about the new banking laws, get the machine runaround and end up in telephone no-man’s-land (or no-human’s-land anyway).

Thursday,
February 28, 2002 London (England)

UP at eight to take Jessica to school.
She chatters the whole way and sings in time with the Danish songs record we have in the car. Ten days, but I shall still miss her.

The visit from Don Guttenplan has given food for thought. It is evident to me that
Guardian Newspapers Ltd (“Deathwish
Press”, as I call them) are about to launch a fresh smear offensive against me.
I suspect that they will try to construct some case of financial irregularity or fraud — their Observer article
[February 24] certainly went a long way in that direction, and we have already had Counsel’s opinion on that.

They realise that they can’t defend what Gitta Sereny wrote in her 1996
piece, which has landed them in hot water, and have evidently decided,
“In for a penny, in for a pound”; or is it being “hanged for a sheep as hanged for a lamb”?

That sheep-shearing time is approaching seems plain at 6:30 p.m., as Don
Guttenplan contacts me again, this time by phone, with further queries. He begins by asking if I am still talking to him, as Lady M. has implied that I am not; he has further questions about Mr
A. and Henry Kersting, and he now adds the name of H., of Florida. I reiterate that I have no intention of going into the names of the living with him.

Of Kersting, he says there is no mention of his U-boat career in the various articles about him. I express surprise that there were any such articles; I don’t know of any.

Kersting told me he was a U-boat officer until the end of 1939 when he was taken ashore and made an instructor. I mention that I have a photograph of the contribution that Kersting made to Real
History — without which we could not have equipped the entire website effort and done much that we have in the USA; I made the photograph, I add, precisely in order to obviate any kind of allegations of impropriety as to the source of such cash funds.

What is otherwise to stop some journalist from suggesting it came from drug dealings in Colombia!

I am not naïve about these matters, and this is the very reason why I started writing a detailed diary in 1963.
Out of fear of one day being framed.

Shifting his ground, he says he has now spoken with Mr A., who is indignant to hear from Guttenplan that the money he contributed to us for printing operations went to the litigation — that is not what it was for, he exclaims. Quite right too.

I say that it did not go to the litigation, and warn Don yet again that I have no intention of discussing the personal contributions made one way or other by my large number of supporters either to my fighting fund or to the
Parforce company.

Guttenplan asks how I differentiate between the funds of those who contributed to the one, and those who support the other.

By way of reply I tell him of the little old lady who imperiously commanded a Barclays Bank teller to check how much money was in her account, then demanded to withdraw it, then asked him to count out all the cash in fifties, twenties and tenners in front of her, then asked him to put it all straight back into her bank account: “I just wanted to make sure you still had all that money I gave you,” she said.

“I get the point,” says Don. A pound is a pound is a pound. Parforce UK Ltd already has, or will shortly have
[March 15], large stocks of books, against loans of around £100,000, and they are printing several more titles this year, so the position becomes even more secure. I repeat that I have no intention of going into detail on names and amounts, any more than he is likely reveal to me the source of the confidential data that he has illicitly obtained.

Afterwards I write to A. warning him of these Guardian toads:

The Guardian are up to
no good; they have somehow obtained
addresses of people who are either (a)
supporting my legal battle, nearly all
Americans, or (b) supporting our
publishing operations, including your
own name. I am very sorry about the
latter, and I have no certainty about
how they obtained these names, unless
it was from a dishonest employee (and I
have one suspicion there).

I have made
plain that I will never discuss names
and people, unless those supporters are
dead and no longer at risk. But we know
the kind of enemies who are confronting
us, and it should not surprise us that
they have stooped to these tactics. . .

I mention to B. that X phoned me yesterday, sounding very nervous — the first time he has phoned since I fired him in the spring last year: I could almost hear the sweaty palms gripping the phone.

A note on Henry K.

David
Irving writes — HENRY
Kersting was a very brave and committed man throughout our brief acquaintance, deeply committed to the cause of Real
History. He was one of our major financial supporters, of that there can be no doubt.

Like many people who find themselves pitted against the traditional enemies of free speech, he was concerned about his own safety, almost paranoid.
He telephoned me routinely from a payphone outside his own office
— he was the chief of a powerful financial concern in Hawaii.

He felt the need for long talks on war history, and telephoned ruthlessly, heedless of the time differences between his Hawaii and my London or
Florida. He rarely talked about the progressive cancer that was eating away at his body; he had the means with which to buy potent Oriental medicines and potions, and when I last saw him in Seattle in the spring of 1999
there appeared to be no degradation to his physique at all.

It is thanks to Henry that
Parforce and Focal Point were able to swing into action in cyberspace. He made his first contribution to Parforce in
February 1997, of nearly ten thousand dollars, and he contributed around a hundred thousand more by the time he died
— at the climax of the Lipstadt trial — three years later.

Yes, Henry was one of many unsung heroes of the fight for free speech and real history. In
June that year I wrote to him,

I am enclosing as
evidence of what I do a copy
of our special collector’s
print run of my biography
Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third
Reich, with my
compliments and repeated
thanks for the assistance you
are giving us. The latest book
Nuremberg,
the Last Battle is
also well printed, and I will
mail one to you in a day or
two.

I arrived here [Key
West] a few days ago — to write for two months, on
Churchill’s
War, vol. ii — after a gruelling stay in the mid-West, speaking at
Cincinnati and Cleveland, and exhibiting my books for the first time at the huge
BookExpo in Chicago.

It took the Traditional
Enemy some time to realise that I was there, and on the last night our stand was attacked with black spray paint. We were able to recover very rapidly, however. Next year I expect more violent opposition from them.

A few days later I sent him another message, so he could see where part of the contributions he was making went:

I am just about to
send out my next international
newsletter,
ACTION
REPORT. I enclose a
couple of proof pages as a
privileged foretaste — it
goes to the printer tomorrow.
Yes, the Der Spiegel
brochure
is a delight: I worked for a
long time to get it just right
— we are printing twenty
thousand; I have ten thousand
stacked up in my little abode
right here, and am sending
them out over the next few
days, again around the whole
world. Bonn will gasp with
rage.

On July 26, 1997 I noted after a long phone call: “He now reveals he was a U-boat second-in-command during the war; does not identify which
[boat]. The German navy was virtually acquitted at
Nuremberg; the senior service.” I sent him a copy of my book
The
Destruction of Convoy PQ.17.
Speaking with him a couple of weeks after that, we talked about the breaking of the U-boat codes, of which he was unaware. He himself handled the
Schlüssel-M code-machine.

He continued to make very large contributions to our fight.
No strings were ever attached.
Late in September 1997 he sent me a letter, couched in conspiratorial language, saying that if I would come to
Amsterdam, and meet him “at the
KLM desk at Schiphol airport” he would have “twenty-five flowers” for me.

The meeting was on October 14,
1997:

He had said “at the
KLM desk at Schiphol,” which
is like saying “at the British
Airways desk at Heathrow”.
Eventually we met, and he said
right away, “Ich habe
fünfzigtausend
für Dich.” At this I
brightened, as this investment
will make an immediate reprint
of Dr Goebbels possible
[It had sold out]. It
breaks the log-jam. Hurrah. We
talked for an hour in his
Business Class lounge.

I
detected a man seat himself at
the table behind me, the
closest seat to mine, and he
stayed there throughout. Well,
so what. Henry pushed a heavy
brown envelope into my blue
file; I didn’t open it. At 3
p.m. I escorted him and his
wife to the departure gate for
their flight to Vancouver and
Hawaii (he is a good friend of
D. too, it turns out).

4 p.m. flight back to
Heathrow. I had bought a huge box of coloured pencils for
Jessica, which was a real wow for her. I left it to B. to open the packet, without saying what was in it.

Like many former German officers, Henry seems to have felt genuinely pro-English sentiments. On November 2, 1997
he phoned me from Hawaii: My diary notes:

Rose at 7:20 a.m.
Henry Kersting phoned from
Hawaii ten minutes later, very
upset about the Louise
Woodward case; we talked
about it for ten minutes — he
inquires whether there is an
aid fund. I fax to him the
address of the Fund, run from
the local pub in Louise’s home
town, Elton. . . . I lay awake
for a second night, praying
for her release.

Despite my best efforts, it proved impossible to get Henry to invest in the publishing operations of Parforce; he was always a donor, not an investor.

In retrospect, we can suspect the reason for his generosity. In
April 1998 he revealed to me that he was fighting cancer, and it sounded terminal. In October he wrote me, “Es sieht nicht gut aus” — we always wrote and conversed in German. He feared dying in pain, as the cancer spread downwards through his frail body, then to his shoulder blades, but he was in no pain and sounded in good cheer when we spoke later that year.

On May 4, 1999 I saw him for the last time: as our paths crossed briefly in Seattle, I had supper with Henry and his wife, and a long talk. Henry was looking fit, though his eyes were sunken and his skin slightly sallow.

He is taking a
Chinese herbal remedy which
appears to have aided him in
spirit, as well as in body. I
am so pleased. He said, “The
cancer is now all over my
body.” It does not show.

I wrote a few days after that:
“Henry seemed totally fit when we saw him at Seattle, a miracle cure, I would have said. But the doctors carried out a new CAT scan on him two days ago and say the cancer has spread to 53
percent of his body. He feels nothing of it, but is understandably depressed. I cheered him up and said the machine is probably wrong, and next time they him the needle will have swung back again.

His PSA reading gradually climbed to 99 percent. As the new
Millennium 2000 dawned, I phoned him when we were three hours into the near year, and he was still left with several hours in the old: “They still have six odd hours to go; then this beastly
20th century is finally ad acta gelegt.”

I heard no more word from him until March 2000. After mid
January I was in the throes of the Lipstadt libel trial, and sent him regular reports on the progress in court. His family told me he was following, but unable to respond.

On March 6, 2000 I received from a stranger the word that
Henry had died about midnight on
March 4. “He was a great admirer and a supporter of you and your cause so I thought you may want to know of his passing. His death is considered a great loss as an intellectual and a wonderful friend. His friends numbered in the thousands around the globe.”

I wrote at once to his widow:
“I was thinking of him all day, and wondering whether I ought to try to phone him this weekend to find out how he was. You must be very sad. I do hope he was not in pain toward the end. I wish I could come to the memorial, but I am up to my neck with the great trial in London and cannot tear myself away. Closing speeches are due

on March 13. Please let me know, when you feel able, how he was these last few weeks. And do tell me if there is anything at all that I can do for you..” “The above is quite true,” I added to my diary. “It must have been telepathy. Poor Henry.”

The scale and energy of this free website, and the quality of the products of Focal Point, are lasting monuments to Henry
Kersting. We could not have done it without his aid, and the continuing quiet support of those like him.

His family sent me a touching note, signed in a faltering hand before he slipped beneath the waves: “Last farewell greetings from Henry. Goodbye.
Aufwiedersehen. Sincerely yours,
H-e-n-r-y.”

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