 I
have called it the Pottersman Factor in my
forthcoming memoirs, and readers will
therein see why. 
|
Photos
from David Irving: "Apocalypse
1945: the Destruction of
Dresden"
which is now available again in a new updated
edition April
14, 2007 (Saturday)
London
(England) PERHAPS surprisingly, The
Times has not published the
letter I sent them two days ago about the
late Werner
Maser. (The German historian had over-zealously
claimed the credit for exposing the "Adolf Hitler
Diaries" fraud, and for discovering key Hitler
documents which I had long found and
published). Evidently I am to get no credit in The
Times, and we hear again Giles
Coren's revelation, written when this cowardly
pensmith thought me safely locked away for three
years, that his editor had ruled that their
newspaper had a policy to "ignore" me, to pretend I
did not exist. That kind of admission looks bad, if
ever I again have to take action against Times
Newspapers Ltd in court; they are still smarting
after the last one. Only yesterday, their obituary of American
author Kurt Vonnegut kindly included these
words: Kurt
Vonnegut will always be thought of first as the
author of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which
expressed the Sixties' American generation's
rejection of war as a means of achieving either
state policy or human good. Published
in 1969, during the mounting protests against
the Vietnam War, it also increased public
awareness of the tremendous loss of life that
had been caused by the unnecessary bombing of
Dresden in February 1945, notwithstanding that
this had been eloquently enough described by
David Irving in his historical account,
The
Destruction of
Dresden,
several years previously (a well researched and
dispassionate account from the period before its
author turned apologist of Nazism). It is a
subject that has been often revisited since and
continues to vex consciences to this
day.
I suspected when I read those words that, while
the rest of the obituary was written long ago, as
such things are (the newspapers regularly take out
mine and rework it, each time they want to believe
I am finished) the ink on the phrase "from the
period before its author turned apologist of
Nazism" was still rather fresh. I remember that even Sir Arthur Harris,
the famous "Butcher" Harris who led RAF Bomber
Command from 1942 to 1945, wrote to me praising the
book, calling me in a handwritten letter -- which I
still have -- the only writer he would ever trust.
(We now know that the Air Ministry had vainly
warned him against speaking with me).  "Pedantic":
Dresden's streets after the 1945 British raid;
bottom picture - the thousands of victims
are cremated on makeshift pyres in the city
center. [gallery] 
TODAY The Times does something very odd. It
retracts yesterday's very reasonable judgment on my
book. The last time something like that happened
was in 1967, when Lord Beaverbrook ordered
The Evening Standard to publish a second,
and wickedly hostile, review of my book
on Hitler's atomic bomb project (two days after
it had just published a glowing whole-page
review).
Evidently yesterday the Board
of Deputies of British Jews sent a literary
fire-engine rushing down Pennington Street to the
newspaper building, bell clanging and bile
spewing.  Their
youthful fireman Oliver
Kamm* (right) is today given
half of page 23 to write attacking the late Kurt
Vonnegut and his "outmoded views" on Dresden,
and smearing me in person: "Vonnegut's philosophy
and history," he states, "are simplistic. Dresden
was hellish -- but there were not 135,000 deaths."
(Now that sounds like real holocaust-denial
to me. What if revisionists were to write mockingly
of "outmoded views on the Holocaust"?) Kamm
continues,
The
true figure was probably no more than a fifth of
that. Vonnegut's number came from the now
discredited work of the
Holocaust
denier
David Irving. (In Slaughterhouse Five,
Irving is cited by name, and a long passage, by
a retired air marshal [Sir Robert
Saundby] from the foreword to Irving's
book The Destruction of Dresden is
reproduced.) My "number," as Kamm calls it, came from
Hanns Voigt,
after February 1945 the director of the Dead
Person's Section of Dresden's Missing Persons
Bureau. That might seem a not unreasonable
source.  TRUE,
Professor Richard
"Skunky" Evans, another historian who lives
by the smear, ignorantly
dismissed Voigt in his High Court evidence (on
oath) as being a "virulent fascist". What else
could he say? In fact we now know that Voigt was a
trusted, highly esteemed, and much decorated,
member of East German society in the 1950s and was
allowed by the Communist regime to emigrate without
difficulty upon his retirement to West Germany.
These true facts on Voigt will be another dossier
on this website, later.
As Kamm curmudgeonly allows in today's article,
"To a prisoner of war digging up cadavers, accurate
numbers will ever after seem pedantic." Kamm
(like Coren) is obsessively concerned with Jewish
interests. To them, as witness Israel's 2006
attack on Lebanon, only the Jewish dead have ever
mattered: it is a kind of racism. His belated smear
of my 1963 classic is a continuation of their
assault on its central theme, that what I call
Innocenticide, the killing of innocents (and
not "genocide" -- their word-invention) is the true
atrocity in war and peace. The semitic anti-Irving campaign has been going
on for half a century now. I have called it the
Pottersman Factor in my forthcoming memoirs, and
readers will therein see why. It is frustrating to
see Rupert Murdoch's The Times, which
used to be an impartial newspaper of record, taking
sides so blatantly. 
*
Oliver Kamm: I am informed that Kamm has
a
history of obsession with Noam Chomsky whom
he believes to be a closet denier
too,
and he habitually defends the attacks on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. He was made a Times columnist
by Comment editor Daniel Finkelstein. Need
we say more? [Previous
Radical's Diary]  Donate
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 -
Dresden
index
Free
download: "Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of
Dresden"
Times
Columnist Robert Kamm responds to the above
diary entry-
More
on Prof Richard "Skunky" Evans and Hanns
Voigt
-
Prof
Richard Evans dismissed Voigt in his High Court
evidence (on oath) as being a "virulent
fascist"
(trial transcript)
-
Kurt
Vonnegut obituary: Satirical
novelist captured absurdity of war in
Slaughterhouse-Five
 
Dresden
photo gallery: air raid and
effects
| 
David Irving