![[M]](../../../ActionReport/alph/m.gif)
AY
1982 FROM
THE STREETCAR
taking me to the Bad Cannstatt city hall
where the award was to be made I noticed
that the last few side streets were filled
with waiting police buses, and the Kursaal
itself was besieged by leftists,
persecutees, social democrats, Greens,
etc. Barricades had been set up behind
which were ranged several hundred police
in riot gear and carrying shields, and a
score of mounted police. According
to next day's newspapers a police horse
was stabbed and reared up, damaging a
banner being held by a rioter, who has now
filed suit against the police. The radical
left directed a barrage of complaints at
the city's lord mayor, Manfred Rommel --
son of the desert fox. He refused to
cancel the permission for the meeting: why
should he have? the audience was orderly,
the fascists were the mob outside. Eight
hundred of the DVU people managed to get
through but not without being badly
manhandled; the award was duly made to me
by Dr [Gerhard] Frey and I
made my speech of thanks -- I was tempted
to say that as we were accused of being
neo-Nazis no doubt the cash would turn out
to be in Reichsmarks, but decided on
balance that that might be in bad
taste.  On
the next day I found myself in an Austrian
university named after the astronomer
Wilhelm Kepler, speaking about
Allied post-war planning in Europe. After
that my scar-faced host proudly showed me
over their Burschenschaft headquarters and
its bloodstained album of colour snapshots
recording recent duels. Sitting
in the train that took me five hours
further south to the next university, I
caught up on the heavy newspapers. The
liberal magazine Die Zeit announces that
Karl-Heinz Kausch, suspended as
headmaster of Hannoversch-Gmünd, is
to be reinstated. So we have the last
laugh after all. Kausch
was suspended in 1978 and put on trial for
having written rather banal introductions
to Professor Herman Giesler's
memoirs and to a book of photographs of
the Waffen SS. Die Zeit is furious at how
Kausch's brilliant lawyer Augstein
got him off the hook by selecting me to
write a historical defence brief on his
behalf. I
recalled visiting Giesler some years ago
with Rolf Hochhuth. He showed me
his typescript memoirs, but would not
permit me to use them in Hitler's War. He
was the architect nominated by Hitler for
the post-war planning of Munich and Linz.
Comparison
of his book with unpublished sources
confirmed their accuracy, and I told the
Lower Saxony court as much: I found it
hard to fault the Giesler memoirs except
for literary construction. The burgers of
Braunschweig paid me a fee of several
thousand pounds, which was pleasant; how
much more pleasant it was now to see that
our side had prevailed over the careless
views of West Germany's establishment
historians and their cronies. Die
Zeit says that the score of leftist
teachers who ganged up on the elderly
headmaster in 1978 are trembling for their
future now that he has been reinstated.
Understandably. ("You, Schmidt, will be on
latrine duty this month; and you,
Müller, will take the boys for their
cross-country run..!") The worms are
turning with a vengeance. Near
the Yugoslav border I lunched with
Professor Dr. Dr. Ernst-Günther
Schenck. Dr. Dr.: that's not a
typographical mistake: Germans with two
doctorates show it. He was a top nutrition
expert in the war, and I needed his
expertise on the medical diaries of
[Professor Theo] Morell.
Schenck himself was tending wounded
Berliners in Hitler's bunker from April
21, 1945 to the end -- he saw some of
Hitler's staff kill themselves the same
way the Führer did: by swallowing
cyanide and shooting themselves
simultaneously. OUT
OF THE BLUE
I was telephoned by another doctor,
who invited me to lunch the next day with
somebody who wanted to meet me. He would
not say more. Sounded intriguing so I
accepted -- although it would add eight
hours to my crowded itinerary. The
doctor was waiting on the railroad
platform as my train pulled in. He looked
worried, as he did not at first recognise
me. He told me he had served with a flak
unit under Rommel, and added in
passing that the man we were to lunch with
was well off and that he was the man's
personal physician. The
heavy black Mercedes took us through the
outskirts of the city to a mansion on the
south shores of the lake. The
wrought-iron gates were already open and a
guard uniformed in brown serge motioned us
through with his walkie talkie. The gates
closed behind us. My driver apologised
that a man with £250m in the bank is
bound to be afraid of kidnap attempts.
Including the guards there must have been
fifteen to twenty men on the household
staff -- chauffeurs for the four Rolls
Royces, a homely lady housekeeper,
gardeners manicuring the lawns with
mowers, Oriental cook, butler, and two
plump young Carinthian girls in local
costume who served the lunch. The
rest of the house party was waiting in the
entrance hall. Several hundred pairs of
lifeless eyes looked down on me from its
lofty walls -- our host's hunting
trophies. The other six men were wearing
dark suits. I was wearing my blue
pullover, but I was after all the day's
special guest. Our host was a slim,
elegant man of around 70, in a tailor-made
dove-grey suit. He had heard about my tour
and insisted on meeting this Englishman.
His face was slightly freckled. He
reminded me of Paul Getty or even
Young Mr Grace in BBC television's "Are
You Being Served". He was the only one in
a family of Catholic Rhineland lawyers to
choose business instead of the Bar. He is
in that respect the black sheep of the
family. In the 1940s he was a leading
economist, and was interned by the British
from 1947 to 1949 for his general
cussedness. It
was clear that this Man in a Gray Suit was
a man of impulse and decision. When the
Socialists came to power in his country,
he sold out his huge business empire and
took the proceeds abroad. "The eventual
demise of the German economy became
inevitable," he explained to me softly in
his accountant's voice, and he has never
regretted that decision. He occasionally
visits England, has a villa in
Switzerland, another in the Bahamas, and a
third at Cap Antibes. A charitable and
philanthropic man, he endowed a foundation
in Germany, but when the Düsseldorf
tax office made a misguided grab at his
billions he took revenge by setting up
foundations in Switzerland and Austria
instead. I
looked around the mansion. The drawing
room was late nouveau riche. At
first we clustered round a cocktail bar --
there were giant brass sprays of lights
like some kind of underwater plant affixed
to the wall on either side. The Oriental
popped open more pink champagne and topped
up the glasses. Small talk ensued. It was
dominated by Gray Suit's hatred of
Britain's Tory elite, whom he considered
effete and treacherous, ruining our
country by their feebleness. "By
her actions Mrs Thatcher is
destroying Europe. She has acted as
though Europe and NATO don't exist!
Instead of conserving her forces
against the sole enemy, the Soviet
Union, she has without any discussion
at all withdrawn the British fleet and
sent it off to the South
Atlantic!" I
explained that in the short run she was
benefiting both in domestic politics (the
municipal elections) and in terms of
rallying the nation behind her. Wars had
that effect. Gray
Suit made a reference to Ireland which
revealed that he did not realise how
dependant Eire's economy is on Britain's.
I said that Ulster's problem, like most
others, could be cured by full employment,
which in turn enhanced the need to win the
working classes. No party was going to
restore Britain's position unless it won
their loyalty, and both Labour and the
Tories had little hope of this; there
seemed little point in discussing the SDLP
alliance. My host said that he was
originally a Conservative supporter but
that now he had become violently
anti-Conservative while seeing no
alternative emerging. He
sat me at the head of the long luncheon
table. I jocularly asked him whether he
would prefer me to address him in the
archaic Third Person. He was not amused:
he clearly expected to be treated with the
reverence due to the abominably rich. He
ate very little, avoiding starch and
carbohydrates. He had a little of the
venison but none of the strawberries and
cream. Prompted
by his doctor -- the man who had brought
me there -- I outlined what Focus was
doing. We realised, I said, that it will
be a long haul. On
the economic situation, I added that the
unions ought to be dismantled completely
and reconstructed along efficient lines
like the Industriegewerkschaften we had
ourselves created in West Germany after
the war. Somehow the British workers had
to be got back into the working custom.
This could only be done by stabilising our
inflation-cursed economy so that our
workers got the feel of real money again
-- money that was not constantly
shrinking. I was no economist, but I felt
that the best use we could make of our
temporary North Sea oil treasure trove
would be to create a flexible reserve for
the sole purpose of fighting back domestic
inflation. If one nation in Europe became
healthy, I argued, historical precedent
showed that would improve the health of
those around it too. Gray
Suit agreed on this, but on foreign
strategy our views diverged. He felt it
wise for Britain to have abandoned her
positions East of Suez, as our place must
be in Europe. I disputed this: those were
positions that should have been held as
NATO-leased bases even if Britain
temporarily could not afford their upkeep.
Did he envisage Europe as a group of equal
states; would not one have to become
primus inter pares? He said he did not see
why. "There
are many major companies," he said, "which
have ten equal men in the boardroom
running affairs." I found it difficult to
envisage our nation submerging herself
entirely in Europe, and abandoning
completely our ties with the old
Commonwealth countries like New Zealand
and Australia. "No need for that," he
said. "Those ties can remain." When
he tried to persuade me of the uselessness
of particular overseas bases like
Gibraltar -- "I am a frequent visitor to
Gibraltar," he said, no doubt a reference
to his £2m yacht -- I suggested that
it is difficult for us to judge their
value. For example, the British public
might have thought Cyprus a useless
colonial encumbrance, but it had housed
one of Britain's (and hence NATO's)
principal radio listening posts, favoured
by unique geographical and electronic
conditions for eavesdropping on a huge
area of the Soviet Union. Certain military
operations might also not make sense: why
we had concentrated on bombing operations
in the Falklands fighting, for instance.
The explanation is that the RAF has
weapons systems specially devised for
destroying Soviet advanced
airfields. Over
coffee he sat me in an armchair at the
head of the group and asked me to talk
about my work in England. I began with a
rather early date -- my initiation as a
steelworker, my meeting a survivor of
Dresden
-- and Gray Suit interrupted me firmly,
"That's not what I wanted to hear. Tell me
about die Lage in England. The
situation in England now!" I
did so. One of the doctors said, "We are
all looking for a strong man. We need a
strong man." Gray Suit nodded without
comment. There was discussion on
democracy. We don't have it in Britain, I
said, what we have is more of an oligarchy
(strictly speaking, I meant "oligopoly" --
the system ruling commercial life, where
two big soap giants fight each other.) I
added that Britain had two major parties
ruling alternately with little respect for
public opinion, as yesterday's decision by
Parliament not to reintroduce the death
penalty had again shown: eighty percent of
the public favoured it. Gray
Suit glanced at his watch, murmured
something I did not catch, and everybody
drifted to the door. As our Mercedes
crunched along the gravel drive, the guard
with the walkie talkie closed the gate
behind us.
[1998
note: "Gray
Suit" was Helmut Horten,
billionaire owner of the vast Horten
chain of more than fifty superstores
throughout Germany; born January 8,
1909, but now dead. The meeting with
him as described took place in May
1982. The above text, published in
David Irving's newsletter
FOCAL
POINT
in 1982, was a tactfully edited version
of that contained in his much fuller
private diary.] | 
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