Thanks to
the buckets of slime poured over me by
Lipstadt and her gang, and before them for
thirty years by those nice folks at the
Anti-Defamation League, there is virtually
no risk of anybody deliberately trying to
steal my identity.
|
March
30, 2005 (Wednesday)
Falls
Church (Virginia) A SMATTERING of heavy dreams including one in
which I spy a Josephine, aged around seven, walking
towards me in a yellow top and white shorts. I
often think of her. Mail-out today to North Carolina addresses. This
message to Key West: "Just confirming once again my
arrival in Key West late evening of May 1,
departing July 1. I have 15,000 miles to drive
between now and then, God willing." March
31, 2005 (Thursday)
Falls
Church (Virginia) | The
David Irving dinner and talk in Washington
DC 
Host
Peter Gemma, organiser in Washington
DC 
Invited
stranger Avi Dov Klein seizes the
opportunity to interrogate the
guests |
B. is very worried about the passport situation. It
is likely that Jessica will not be able to travel
to France, or if she does, might not be readmitted
to the UK! How absurd. The third English chequebook
that the bank sent her has finally arrived today,
the other two have been stolen in the mail. In
which connection -- the $700 I sent her from
Tennessee has not yet arrived either. What criminal
times we live in.This comes from D. in Nevada: "As this is
written, I am negotiating with a Professor of
Political Science at UNLV for you to speak there.
He has expressed interest but they are just getting
back in the saddle after Passover. I called his
office this morning and missed him. I am thinking about St Tropez Hotel as an
alternative venue. They have a good restaurant and
offered us a good deal last time. A cook getting
sick at the last minute caused us to have to go the
other place. If the University is the venue, I
doubt that 'they' will have the power to stop the
talk. The Lipstadt Trial should be the topic in any
case. I will advise you the instant I know
more." At four pm I drive over to the Grill in
Washington DC to prepare for this evening's talk.
Peter Gemma (above right) has
organised. Big audience flows in to hear my
behind-the-scenes revelations on the Lipstadt
Trial, and eighty-four have paid him for the
dinner. Sophia C comes along displaying much
intelligence and cleavage, and wearing very
fashionable clothes, expensive leather jacket, and
exquisite Cleopatra make-up. Andrea Cr. has flown down on the red-eye from
Boston, with books to sign for her mother. Avi
Dov Klein 
also turns up; he comes very politely to say
goodbye afterwards, and reminds me that he has not
caused any disturbances, as per our agreement.  This is true, but Peter Gemma afterwards tells
me that he has observed this guest taking copious
notes throughout, and "interviewing" guests (see
picture, above). We do not normally allow
journalists, so I wonder what he is up to. Some old duffers hog the table with their
questions, and I am inadvertently quite brusque in
moving them along: "I live from selling books," I
explain to one, a German, who still tarries, and he
shuffles off muttering, much insulted. My own
fault, I am very exhausted by the time these big
events end. I must have shaken every hand in the
room, many of them twice.  Book
signing A lot of hands to be shaken
too April
1, 2005 (Friday)
Falls
Church (Virginia) I DREAM for what seems like hours that I am
fixed to speak in St Paul's Cathedral on April 6;
but that is not possible, as I am to speak in
Raleigh, North Carolina, that day, etc. A puzzling
kind of dream: a mixture of reality and fantasy,
just below the surface of daylight
consciousness. Beatrice sends a message from Australia; she has
had a lovely little girl, Olivia. "Hi Daddy, Mummy
has booked her flight arriving here from Madrid 8
April. The cost was 1,177 Euros." I say I will pay
half. That's what fathers are for. "What about
walking-around money," I ask. "Will she have
enough?" Thanks to their prime minister John
Howard, I shall probably never see either. 
ALL day today at the Manuscript Division in the
Madison Building of the Library of Congress. They
are tougher than ever now with their ID
requirements. Bin Laden must really hate all these
bespectacled students and books. I idly wonder if I
will glimpse Deborah Lipstadt here -- until
I realise of course that learned scholars, such as
she, are far above and beyond using original
archival sources for their lofty deliberations.
Press clippings suffice.
At first the staff are unable to locate the
Heinrich Himmler letters but later, after I
persist, they identify file PB 422 as emanating
from the Publications Branch, whose files are over
in the Science Division. That raises some hopes
that others have not yet seen the files. The file
has 27 "items" and will be produced to me in the
Adams Building tomorrow. I phone Jessica briefly from the Library
entrance. B. is too unwell to come to the phone.
Jessica says the £400 fee we have paid for her
school trip to France trip is non-returnable. No
passport yet. Unlikely she will get one. She is
stateless, thanks to Tony Blair, Bin Laden,
and the US terrorism hysteria epidemic. In the evening I watch an old Cary Grant movie,
very poor, in black and white, with wooden acting
and a wretched script. April
2, 2005 (Saturday)
Falls
Church (Virginia) I E-MAIL to both gentlemen in Nevada: "It is
unlikely I can speak at Tonopah on this trip; it is
cutting things too short; if I were heading north
after Las Vegas to Sacramento it would of course be
perfect; let's do it next time, in about a year.
Stay in touch." O S reports a "David Irving Sighting," in the
Canadian edition of Time magazine dated
March 28, a "Blogwatch" on the bottom righthand
corner of page eight. "Two mugshots of Deborah
Lipstadt and David Irving are shown side by side;
with a feeble effort at humour via conflating Mr
Irving with Osama bin Laden and Professor
Lipstadt with the somewhat less virile-looking
World Bank head, Paul Wolfowitz." I wonder
if that is in the US edition too? In Canada of course I cannot defend myself,
having been bündled out of the country in
November 1992 in handcuffs, and in rather less
luxury than the executive jet bestowed on Ernst
Zündel for his deportation.
TEN a.m. I produce my picture ID at the Adams
Building's Science Library. I reflect that thanks
to the buckets of mucous slime spewed over me by
Lipstadt and her gang, and before them for thirty
years by those nice folks at the Anti-Defamation
League, there is virtually no risk of anybody
deliberately trying to steal my
identity. My Library of Congress, Hoover, and other
archive IDs, and all my other cards were lifted
from my pocket at O'Hare airport two years ago: I
can just imagine the faces when the thieves
realized whose identity they now had within their
grasp. Their faces must have been black. - "You foo, Tyrone, don' you see -- he be da
no-tory-iss Holocaust
Denier!"
- "My bad, G! How c'I bin so stoopit!" "Hey
brutha, hode up. Wussuh holla cost?"
The Science & Technology Section holds
report PB 442; it turns out to be a report on
Himmler's family documents looted from his home in
1945 by a CIC Detachment under Special Agent
Lawless of Bad Tölz, on May 28 1945,
five days after Himmler's demise. The document is a disappointment, only two
pages. It is a description and inventory of
twenty-seven files seized from his home. The box of
papers ("in disorderly array" and throwing
"considerable light on Himmler's private life and
early activities") is described as measuring 30
inches by twelve inches by fifteen inches, but is
nowhere to be found. Just like the cache of
Hitler's
letters to Eva Braun and her diaries, which a
CIC detachment also seized in 1945. A more intensive search will now begin. "They
will be indispensable," assesses John T
Krumpelmann of the State Department in PB 442,
"should anyone ever want to write the real story of
Himmler." Quite so.
MIDDAY over to the Madison Building in a torrential
downpour, and I resume reading wartime Himmler
documents until five pm. There is one particular
box I shall ask for on Monday: It is a dossier
which Heinrich Himmler was evidently keeping on
Hitler's ancestry, rather as FBI director J
Edgar Hoover assembled fat dossiers of dirt,
ADL-style, on
rich and influential Americans, for President
Franklin D Roosevelt (and no doubt on FDR
himself). Himmler turned his dossier over to Martin
Bormann in January 1944. It contains
"photographic portraits 1890-1929 alleged to
represent parents and other relatives of Hitler.
These were confiscated by the SD
[Sicherheitsdienst] as they
supposedly indicate Hitler's real family
background."  Another
list identifies them as "Miscellaneous files re
Hitler family and relatives including the Alois
Hitler, Schickelgruber and Veit
families, originals with covering letter and
content list from Himmler to Bormann (January 23,
1944), 1844-77." The accompanying photos have been
transferred to the Division of Prints and
Photographs.
The Veit family was the branch that boasted of a
number of imbeciles and brain-damaged members. At
least one of them, Hitler's insane cousin Aloisia
Veit, left, was put to death in an Austrian
euthanasia hospital during the war. Odd that nobody else seems to have followed up
this lead, while willingly believing all the tripe
and psycho-babble which emerges from old OSS files
about the Führer -- and which is being
rehashed and served up again even as I write these
lines.
THE trawl through Himmler's files is productive. I
recall that in the Lipstadt trial Prof Robert
Jan van Pelt pooh-poohed the revisionist
argument that the metal gas-tight door with
peephole
being installed early in 1943 in Leichenkeller II
-- the reinforced concrete below-ground  mortuary
-- in Crematorium I at Auschwitz
was in fact a standard
steel air-raid shelter door (see advert in
German wartime civil defence magazine,
right), designed to keep (British) poison
gases out, rather than any lethal Nazi gases
in. Pelt had argued that this chamber was in fact a
homicidal gas chamber: in one video which I showed
the Court, he even called it the "geocentre" of the
Holocaust, a building in which half a million were
killed with Zyklon B cyanide pellets (even though
no significant residue of cyanide-compound has ever
subsequently been found in its fabric). Pelt
stolidly denied that there were air raids on
Auschwitz in 1943. There was no reason
whatsoever for Auschwitz to fear air raids, argued
this learned Dutch-Jewish-Canadian academic in his
hired testimony for Lipstadt, and he described the
whole air-raid shelter theory as absurd. In Box 403 of the Himmler collection I now find
a letter from Himmler to the two SS generals who
ran the concentration camp system between them,
dated Feb 8(?), 1943: "Lieber Pohl!" it begins, „Lieber Glücks! Je
länger der Krieg dauert, je
größer die Belastung wird und je mehr
wir mit Luftangriffen auch auf
Konzentrationslager rechnen müssen, umso
mehr haben wir alle Dinge vorauszudenken, um das
Ausbrechen von Häftlingen aus einem KL. zu
verhindern. Die Möglichkeiten sind
folgende: . . ." So Himmler was anticipating air raids on the
concentration camps themselves as early as that --
just about the time that the crucial changes were
made to the blueprints to ready that underground
chamber for us as an air-raid shelter. Gas-tight
doors! I find too the first report from Auschwitz to
Himmler of an air raid on the camp, dated May 8,
1943. Yes, sometimes -- when it suits them -- even
the most
expensively paid expert can get things wrong.
In the Lipstaadt Trial it was a key issue, as Mr
Justice Gray stated in his annihilating
Judgment
that the existence of this steel gastight door was
the clinching evidence in his mind that the chamber
was being built as a homicidal gas chamber, and
that no historian could reasonably conclude
otherwise. 
POPE John-Paul has died, the television news
announces. We are filled with profound and dutiful
sorrow. Many years ago, soon after he was first
installed by the College of Cardinals in 1979, the
story was whispered around that in 1939, as the
then nineteen-year old Karol Wojtyla, he had
participated in the "Bromberger Blutsonntag" in
Poland in which bloodthirsty and hate-crazed Poles
massacred around seven thousand ethnic Germans in
the town of Bromberg (today Bydgoszcz) on the first
Sunday of WW2.
I published this item, unnoticed, in my little
newsletter Focal Point in about 1981. The
rumours had it that he had in consequence been
sought by the Gestapo throughout the war, during
which he had gone underground in Krakow. After the war, said the same rumours, his name
had remained inscribed on Germany's Police Gazette
or watch list, the Polizeiliches
Fahndungsblatt, and it stayed there until the
Pope's first state visit to Germany; whereupon it
was swiftly removed. I dislike repeating such stories without a
foundation, and around 1980 I asked the Federal
German Archives for access to the relevant files of
the Polizeiliches Fahndungsblatt. No luck:
they had been misplaced or lost, I was informed in
the Bundesarchiv's reply. [Previous
Radical's Diary] 
Press reports:
Stalin's "Hitler Book" discovered
| 
David Irving