May 24, 2003 (Saturday),
London (UK)

Still no ISP access. . . I write to Harry Mazal, who otherwise has little to commend him:

I have been visiting your very useful web page this last day or two (I have embarked 2 years ago on a Himmler biography). The organisation is very good, if I may say so, but I have one criticism of the large page images of the Pre Trial Interrogation Summaries. To post letter-size images of documents of around 750K each is not good. . . I mention this only because people with dial-up phone lines will be waiting two or three minutes to download each page if they are 750K."

At 10:30 AM I add to him: "Incidentally, on the Himmler Note of Dec 18, 1941 you have made one minor transcription error -- no doubt inadvertent! Not "i." but "d." In Gothic, the letters look very similar. For the correct transcription see my website at [link].

The two emails come back from Mr Mazal, seemingly unopened, "caught by his anti-spam device." None so blind as those wot won't see.

IN the evening, Jessica obliges us to watch the latter half of the Eurovision Song Contest. It comes to us from Riga, magnificently staged, and we are treated to a short tour of the Latvian capital.

I predict, "Wait for the pictures of the Holocaust," but there is only a brief and silent glimpse of a Star of David memorial in a mosaic floor. The Latvians have never liked the Jews, as they demonstrated with murderous efficiency in 1941.

Terry Wogan's commentary on the song contest seems intrusive; perhaps his Irish blarney would have been less irritating if there had been a vignette of his talking head in a corner. But he hits the nail on the head. Half way through the voting, it becomes cruelly plain that Israel, England, and Latvia (the hosts) are the only contestants still scoring zero points. Latvia shortly gets voted away from this very round hole, then two countries gallantly come to Israel's rescue.

I have never quite understood how Israel comes to figure in a European song contest, but then politics play quite a strong part in it: and of course there are so many European fugitives hiding out, safe from extradition, in that "sh*tty little country", as the French ambassador recently called it. That nice Lady Porter for one, who stole £20 million pounds from us Westminster City taxpayers and then hightailed it to her second Vaterland, from which she thumbs her majestic nose at us ("What us? Dual loyalty?")

Watching that zero score, Terry W remarks, about ten minutes after I do, that England "does not seem to be very popular" with the rest of Europe; shortly after I observe that this is Europe's payback for Tony Blair's absurd and criminal war against the people of Iraq, it dawns on Terry too that this is the "backlash from Iraq."

Dein Wort in Gottes Ohr. At the end of the programme, England is the only contestant not to have attracted a single vote from the other European countries. Not one point. Now that is democracy. In the eyes of the rest of Europe, Tony Blair's Britain stinks. The European Pong Contest, and we won, hands down.

The winner incidentally is Turkey, whose troupe of five twenty-year olds perform a writhing and sensuous song and dance with more than a hint of eastern promise about it. Turkish delight.

May 25, 2003 (Sunday),
London (UK)

Bob recommends a new ISP, and I shall shift to them this weekend....

Lenni Brenner sends an obscene one-line reply to my invitation to speak at this year's Cincinnati weekend, on the secret links between the Zionists and the Nazis. I have replied simply, "Have you any theories as to why Jews find themselves so hated in the world?"

May 26, 2003 (Monday),
London (UK)

The website has been frozen on its "May 16" front page, since Iomart's failure.

May 27, 2003 (Tuesday),
London (UK)

In the mail comes an unusual package of copies, colour and b/w, of new Adolf Hitler items that a gentleman in Fort Lauderdale is now offering. Some are very rare and I have no doubt as to their authenticity.

Professor Tom C of Brigham Young University, Utah, agrees to talk at this year's Real History weekend at Cincinnati. He is an expert on the train collections of the world's historic statesmen (Göring!).

I write to him: "That is great news and you can consider it a firm booking; we shall be delighted to see your wife as well. As a speaker, we will cover your accommodation costs of course."

WE have also invited Professor Michael Kater of Toronto's York University to speak at Cincinnati. An obscene reply has today come from him. I send a measured response, then another: "Oh, I understand; sorry, the penny has only just dropped. I had not realised you are Jewish, hence your obscenities; the funny thing is, I only get letters with obscenities from Jews. Of course not all Jews are obscene and foul mouthed, but in my experience, which I know others share, the obscene and foulmouthed letters all come from Jews. You nice folks appear to inhabit a very small, small world, mit dem Horizont eines Klosettendeckels."

It is one of my favourite insults, but I cannot claim paternity: it was used by Adolf Hitler to Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, left, to describe his generals. From one extreme to the other.

May 31, 2003 (Saturday),
London (UK)

Jessica, nine, hogs the computer all day, so I work on HIMMLER on the laptop. She is now deeply into the marvels of javascripts. What happened to her childhood. I take her to lunch at a restaurant.

June 1, 2003 (Sunday),
London (UK)  

I have written this letter to The Sunday Times: "You report that President Bush visited Auschwitz and bowed his head at the Wall of Death. Lucky he did not study the World War II aerial photos of Auschwitz first -- that particular wall did not exist then. But then, he must be getting quite used to this kind of fakery by now."

June 2, 2003 (Monday),
London (UK)

A letter comes today from a supporter, Reverend --, of Somerset, who comments:

You do choose your numbers! From No. 81 Duke Street to No. 36 [--], i.e. from 9 x 9 (or 3⁴) to 6 x 6. The numbers 1 to 8 add up to 36 where you are now! But the numbers 1 to 36 add up to 666, a hugely significant number whose true significance is very different from what most people think. Cheque enclosed.

I am glad he has not spotted that "Churchill's War", vol. i: "Struggle for Power" has 666 pages (somebody else did, last week).

June 5, 2003 (Thursday),
London (UK)

All day at the PRO. I have nearly completed reading the 1940 volume of the MI5 [US: equals FBI] Captain Guy Liddell's diaries. I have spent two months reading all twelve volumes. It takes eight full days to read each "year". The Liddell diaries are informative, amusing, witty, and packed with revelations.

Each day's entry is like a new episode of a rather sinister and long-running TV "soap". There are individual stories, and different threads to follow: Nazi agent expected from intercepted code messages -- detected -- shadowed -- captured -- broken -- confronted -- given choice -- put on trial -- hanged. In 1940 Liddell and his colleagues at MI5 begin running elaborate double-cross agents -- captured German spies who are given a stark choice: allow their radio sets to be used for sending a mixture of fake and true signals back to Berlin, or be hanged.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of Liddell's associates, boasted to me once that the Nazis never had one genuine agent operating on British soil in WWII. That seems, on the evidence of these diaries, to be true. I have extracted about 1,000 pages of typed extracts for the CHURCHILL and HIMMLER projects, and I will post them on the website in a week or two.

Today I came across these two entries, relating to Lieutenant Colonel A P Scotland, the interrogator used by the army's Intelligence set-up in London (he ran the notorious London District Cage at Kensington, where torture and brutality were the order of the day; the file on Hans Aumeier, deputy commandant at Auschwitz, was in Scotland's papers. I recall that at the Lipstadt trial, I wrongly assumed that Colonel Scotland's brutality was well known.

On being cross examined by Richard Rampton QC on Day 14, February 2, 2000, about the manner in which, under the interrogation of Scotland, Aumeier's recollections became increasingly lurid, and the numbers gassed at Auschwitz progressively larger and larger, I responded that it was well known that Scotland used brute force to get the "confessions" he wanted. Rampton for one did not know that: but then there was a whole lot that Rampton did not want to know.

Unhappily, the fact of Scotland's brutality was just one of those facts that I had subsumed into my knowledge-base over the forty years of writing, and I had no hard proof to offer from the witness box, so I did not press the matter.

Today, I come across these two entries in the Guy Liddell diary about the initial questioning of a German agent code-named TATE:

September 22, 1940: TATE['s] wireless set, which was a two-way one, and also his code, parachute, etc., were found. He explained that he had been dropped from a height of 3,500 ft, he had been caught up in some telegraph wires and for a brief moment was in a searchlight beam, he eventually succeeded in extricating himself from the telegraph wires but damaged his foot on landing. . . .

I have just been told that the officer from MI9 who was present at the interrogation of TATE yesterday [i.e., Lieutenant Colonel A P Scotland] took it upon himself to manhandle the prisoner without saying anything about it to Stephens, Dick White or Frost.

The interrogation broke off at lunchtime, when Scotland left the room. Frost, wondering where he was, followed him and eventually discovered him in the prisoner's cell. He was hitting TATE in the jaw and I think got one back for himself. Frost stopped this incident without making a scene, and later told me what had happened.

It was quite clear to me that we cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect of the thing, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run. We are taking the matter up with the DMI [Director of Military Intelligence] and propose to say that we do not intend to have that particular MI officer on the premises any more.

I am told that Scotland turned up this morning with a syringe containing some drug or other, which it was thought would induce the prisoner to speak. Stephens told Scotland that he could not see [+++++++] TATE, who was not in a fit state to be interrogated. Actually there was nothing seriously wrong with [+++++++] TATE.

September 23, 1940: We had a meeting here with VV, [Captain Felix] Cowgill, Frost, Dick, TAR [Robertson] and myself, when we discussed all the aspects of the cases of the various German agents through whom we were communicating with the enemy. . . . As regards [+++++++] TATE, it was decided that he must be worked if possible, but that much would depend on his frame of mind, after the treatment he had received from the MI9 officer [Colonel Scotland]. I suggested that we might possibly use him or one of the other agents as a very obvious double-cross, transmitting sometimes true and sometimes false information. . . .

A syringe? TATE was eventually turned round and became, with GARBO, one of Britain's most important double-cross agents in WWII. No thanks to Colonel Scotland.

Back at 8 p.m., absolutely exhausted and feeling right down; a long day, worked around seventeen hours out of the twenty-four. Quoi de neuf.

June 5, 2003 (Thursday),
London (UK)

Up early to take Jessica to school; she is such a happy child, she lightens the whole day right from the start. There is an article in the Harvard Crimson of May 23 regarding the controversy surrounding a donation from Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. By Rachel Lea Fish, this article states: "Not only does the Zayed Centre promote intolerance and hatred toward America, Jews and Israel, but it also attempts to deny the atrocities of the Holocaust and allows individuals such as notorious Holocaust deniers David Irving and Roger Garaudy, a forum to promulgate their propaganda."

This letter goes to the editor:

As those familiar with my books know (and there were forty-seven of them in the Widener Library [at Harvard University] the last time I checked) I have never written about the Holocaust (I find it boring, along with millions of others); and I have never set foot or eye on the Zayed Centre forum.