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Posted Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Now a billion-dollar industry swirls around the wretched girl, built up partly by her late father in Switzerland, and partly by the house owners in Amsterdam, each at each other's throats.

[Previous Radical's Diary]

click for originJanuary 1, 2010 (Friday)
Windsor (England)

I OFFER Bente sincere congratulations ...: "Well, that's another year you made it through."

She asks: "Are you going to America again?" I say, probably not this year.

Another university in the Irish Republic asks me to come and speak: "You remember the previous Auditor you dealt with, my brother, and his attempts to give you a chance to address our house a few years ago? I'm just trying to look at the possiblity of you addressing our house in the future, with of course, the lessons of last time, in hand."

I sigh to myself. Here we go again: "I will be more than happy to come [but] my 2010 calendar will rapidly fill up."

Affecting not to worry, Jessica asks me about the school fees. I say they are first on my list of four big things to pay this month.

 

January 2, 2010 (Saturday)
Windsor (England)

I am writing around my many friends in the USA. It is a lot of addresses. Several now (forgetting themselves?) come clean. Among the respondents is a Mr Grant Arthur Gochin of 10900 Winnetka Ave, Chatsworth, California 91311: "Go f*ck yourself racist lying bigot." He is evidently only a distant supporter. I check my files. Two years ago he wrote me: "I collect autographs on first day covers, personalized to my seven year old son. May I send you a first day cover for autograph, and if so, at what address?" -- Ah, the enemy. I see I even cleared him as "OK". How wrong can one be.

An amusing ding dong exchange begins, ending with my macro: "This is an automatically generated response. We regret that we receive up to 300 emails a day and cannot undertake to read them all. If you wish your recent email to be considered for posting in our hate-mail section, please ensure that you have thoroughly checked its spelling and grammar, and resubmit."

Stephen D. writes from Florida: "We are all better off for the Key West snapshot.

I am at present reading Richard "Skunky" Evans' book Lying about Hitler. I wonder if you could send me some caveats about its text? In short, the man appears not only to hate your guts, but your spleen and colon also. His hatchet job is done via razor blades. But this Professor Evans is your biggest, most dangerous foe as his arguments are ruthlessly appealing … and appalling. He accuses you of willfully altering sources or using footnotes "without toes" (my term).

As a Yale graduate, Class of 1967, I should like to warn you that all academics are vainglorious and mainly interested in debunking other academics: they feed on blood. ... Work, work -- that's your new future. "Arbeit macht das Leben süss". Someone ought to put that up in iron!

I reply: "On my website there is an entire index devoted to Evans. We call him "Skunky" Evans, because of his lies. For instance, a decoded message of the Dresden police chief which I found [see below], reveals that the Lord Mayor of the city told him on March 24, 1945 that 100,000 people are still registered as missing after the air raid. So who was lying, Evans or I?"

Dresden air raid casualties, 100,000 missing

 

Tom H. who was born two years after me, but in Berlin, Germany, writes that he is one of those brave souls keeping up the pressure on Wikipedia to straighten out its lies about me. "Your profession is no longer a Holocaust denier", he writes, but: "Military history of World War II, Holocaust denial, Historical revisionism." Even that is wrong of course. I have never written about the Holocaust. "Your bio had been hi-jacked by zealots who refused to let any edits be included which they did not approve." Tom is an expert "branding" specialist, and minored in propaganda analysis at Dartmouth College, USA.

 

BUT wait, there is more on Professor Richard J Evans, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (right). Stephen D. now writes:

Two years ago I met a delightful family from Pennsylvania, where skunks are sold as pets. They had a little skunklet, neutered, of course, and could not dub it save for names like "Oleo Cologne" or "Pepe LePew" from cartoons.

"Why don't you give it a name like an English butler?" I asked. "Something like, well, 'Evans'"?

"That's cool," said the little girl, its owner.

So, if it please thee, somewhere, in Pennsylvania there is a much-loved skunk, sans scent glands, named "Evans."

I am glad to know that Evans has been memorialised as a real-life skunk in such a far-away place. I am now beginning to understand the word karma, which also comes into my Heinrich Himmler biography.

 

I WRITE to my perfect assistant Jaenelle Antas, who is in Indiana, about progress with editing our Classic Series. "I am working hard on Göring," I tell her. "It is such a fabulous book. It received the most glowing plaudits when it came out in the 1980s. You will love reading it. Working on page 137 right now:

". . . Soon the first embryonic stage of Carinhall would be ready, a simple timber lodge. Out here among the dark Satanic forests of pine, beech, and oak, Göring felt like a Teutonic knight of old. He would carry a spear, and command Robert to dress him in red top boots of Russian leather with golden spurs, in floor-length coats like a French emperor, in silk blouses with puffy sleeves.

Emmy or no Emmy, his waking thoughts were still overshadowed by the morbid memory of Carin. Her ghost haunted him more than ever now that the workmen were constructing Carinhall. Down by the lakeside, on the far shore, he ordered them to excavate a macabre mausoleum, with five-foot-thick walls of Brandenburg granite. In a few months' time it would be ready to receive the pewter sarcophagus from Sweden.

One day he expected to lie in it by his devoted Carin's side -- to spend all eternity with her beneath these moaning pines."

"You see now the effect women have on men," I comment. "Traffic stoppers, everyone of them." And then again at five-thirty p.m: "I have been wallowing in my own Göring book all afternoon. I can never write as well as that again." Later: "I am a GREAT story teller." She replies dutifully: "Yes, you are."

 

 

January 5, 2010 (Tuesday)
Windsor (England)

TOM H. sends me an image [above; click image to enlarge] of the updated Wikipedia entry into which he has inserted the fine words of praise for me as an historian, uttered by Mr Justice Gray in his April 2000 Judgment, which the press mysteriously never quotes: "It usually takes them about fifteen minutes to discover that their turf has been disturbed. We'll see how they try to weasel it away."

I reply: "I will post that image on my website, if 'they' try to take it down. Please keep me closely informed. As for the [Wikipedia] photo caption, it does not mention that the Judge agreed that in several points Lipstadt had lied in her book - e.g. claiming that I consorted with Hizbollah terorrists, that I have a life size portrait of Hitler in my study, and that I stole or damaged the microfiches of the Goebbels diaries in the Moscow archives. Under Section 5 of the UK Defamation Act, these smears however were considered outweighed by the highly damaging 'Holocaust denier' libel which claim by me was not sustained. I wonder if she removed the libels from later editions?"

An hour later, Tom H. reports:

As expected, my insert was quickly removed. Here is my complaint to the editors on that action:

[etc: see annex]

I do not really want to get dragged into this. I reply to him: "You may or may not understand, but I really do not want to get into a debate about Holocaust denial. It has absolutely nothing to do with me, except they use it as a bludgeon to attack me and my reputation as an historian. That said, it is amazing with what speed the enemy moves to neutralize anything favourable said about me."

He responds: "Exactly. But you must confront it head-on, in my opinion, to take that very effective ammunition out of their arsenal. Once you are on record in the mainstream media, their hand will be played -- and lost."

Dense snow lies heavily across South Buckinghamshire. I see three fully grown female deer strutting boldly across our main lawn toward the rose garden, foraging for food.

 

January 7, 2010 (Thursday)
Windsor (England)

KEVIN H. informs me: "One has to admire the Australian attitude and straight talking approach!" It seems that one T. B. Bechtel, a City Councillor from Newcastle, Australia, was asked on a local live radio talk show just what he thought about the allegations of torture of suspected Muslim terrorists. His reply prompted his ejection from the studio, but to thunderous applause from the audience:

HIS STATEMENT: "If hooking up one rag-head terrorist prisoner's testicles to a car battery to get the truth out of the lying little camel-shagger will save one Australian life, then I have only three things to say, Red is positive, Black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet."

Highly reprehensible. "Thanks for sharing that with me," I reply to K., adding however: "That's not what the aforementioned terrorist would say, no doubt."

Daughter Paloma has been staying here with her son for a week. Most airports have been shut down by the snow catastrophe. So much for "global warming." She checks the Gatwick airport website, which confirms that tonight's easyJet flight back to Madrid is still "scheduled" -- i.e., not cancelled. I take Paloma and Adam out to Gatwick and drop her off in good time, but before leaving the airport I wait for half an hour until they can check in, in case there is a snag.

Sure enough, she phones to say that all easyJet flights today have been cancelled -- Gatwick airport has omitted to update their webswite; she opts to stay at a local hotel and catch tomorrow's 7:30 a.m. flight. (If it flies). The hotels have tripled their overnight charges -- price-gouging, which in the United States is illegal. I drive back to Windsor, arriving six pm. I suspect these unnecessary flight cancellations are in fact an easyJet scam to consolidate flights and maximize profits.

 

J. and Jessica share the Pigmobile

Jaenelle and Jessica share the Pigmobile with archivalia returned by the German Federal Archives last year.

January 9, 2010 (Saturday)
Windsor (England)

I HAVE had elevated blood pressure for the last week, and last night a little nose bleed for no reason. I shall cut back on the coffee.

I cash a cheque at the Windsor bank -- they closed half an hour early yesterday for the convenience of their staff, forgetting that of their customers -- then drive into London for lunch with Jessica, picking her up at Sloane Street.

 

BENTE texts: "Thank you very much for the money. Sorry to hear about your car. What cheek!" Yes indeed. In the evening I also tell Jaenelle in Indiana about the disaster that has struck: "Sorry to say that the Pigmobile [our ancient white Peugeot van] was stolen from outside the restaurant while I was lunching inside with Jessica (who was facing the car through the window, but only noticed when it was gone) and with an American, M., a US embassy official; I reported the theft to the police within four minutes of the car being gone, but am not optimistic. My black overcoat was inside, with the apartment and other keys and checkbook. Fortunately nothing identifying this address, but I shall now change the house locks pronto."

She waxes sympathetic: "Your new year is not getting off to a great start, is it . . .? Poor thing."

"Yes, our only hope is that it will be caught on the CCTV cameras and found before they have trashed it. . . Hey ho."

She repeats, rather rubbing it in: "This is really a bad time. Now how will you get the pallets out of storage [in Wiltshire]? How can we do a book tour? I'm telling you, David, you need to get a Radical's Diary up very soon about all the misfortunes you've suffered lately. Who knows? Maybe someone will be kind enough to donate another van?"

Fat chance. She then rubs it in even deeper. Torture. Yes, Red is Positive, Black is negative: "Poor David. I really feel very bad for you having all these rotten things happening all once. It seems like it has been one major problem after another in recent months."

Very depressed this evening. Still rubbing, she writes again: "Poor darling. Maybe your evening would be best spent relaxing on the sofa with some beer and going to bed early. I wish there was something I could do to put things right for you."

Police phone at 7:20 p.m to ask for a report on the theft and the "trace-number", which I give, and they say that the car will now be reported as stolen. I say that I had assumed they had already reported it stolen. (So it has now probably gone beyond the CCTV cameras.)

Programmer Larry C. has installed a test store on our new server and just before 11 p.m. he calls from Seattle: "Let me know if you can see it." It's a start, I reply: "In depressed mood this evening unfortunately, as my car was stolen under my very eyes when I was lunching with my youngest daughter in London's west end this afternoon. London is overrun with Eastern European thieves at present. Leaves me feeling very sick."

 

January 10, 2010 (Sunday)
Windsor (England)

A WORRIED sleepless night, unsettled by the loss of the car. No woman will ever understand: for a man, losing a car is a bereavement. In one week last year the Pigmobile safely carried us 4,400 miles on a round trip down to Cadiz in south-western Spain and back. When nobody is looking, a man speaks to a car. It is a trusty friend. When I gave up my Ford Anglia in the 1960s, I gave it a final wax polish on the morning that Westminster Council came to haul it away, keeping the terrible secret from it until the last moment.

Today I have the same unforgettable sick feeling, for which no medical word has yet been offered, as when I returned to my student digs in Gloucester Road in 1959 and found that my typewriter was gone from its table.

I heard the phone ring downstairs at 8:10 this morning, it was the police, a Pc Harvey. I call him back, suppressing the hopes that have sprung suddenly. No, no news of the Pigmobile. He asks a few questions. It now has a "crime number," 6501610-10. I tell him that since the car has been missing so long they have probably changed the plates. Unless it is so worthless that they have gutted it and left it abandoned. Poor Pigmobile. I feel so guilty toward it.

 

January 11, 2010 (Monday)
Windsor (England)

NOT VERY helpfully, Jaenelle is still commenting on the Pigmobile misfortune: "Did it occur to you that the Pigmobile ran away because it was afraid you would put the wrong fuel in it again?" (It is a diesel). Aaaargh! If she weren't in Indiana, she'd be wetting the nuts too.

Emboldened by my own fecklessness, she ventures to shower criticism on the commas in my latest writings: "A comma indicates a brief pause. When you read those sentences out loud, would you pause? I doubt it." But she admits, "I didn't know we Americans use a different paper size [US Letter]. Looks normal to me."

"Lots of things you didn't know, Snowdrop ... The whole of the rest of the world uses A4 paper size. Which is half of A3, which is half of A2, which is half of A1, which is half of A0. I guess this is why America keeps losing wars."

"We march to the beat of a different drummer here," she retorts. "We're unique!"

 

January 12, 2010 (Tuesday)
Windsor (England)

UP EARLY, as Radio New Zealand phones; they want to interview me at six-thirty this evening about the news that Mrs Miep Gies, who sheltered Anne Frank in Amsterdam has died aged one hundred.

Is there no end to these stories? Eventually they must surely peter out. I tell the radio station routinely that the Anne Frank tragedy goes a long way to confirming what revisionist historians like myself have always said about Auschwitz. She was in that camp - quite wrongly - with her father Otto and sister Margot; but all survived Auschwitz, although they were Jews and unemployable - the girls too young, the father too sick to work. (They were held for six months, about half as long as the Austrians imprisoned me in solitary confinement 2005-6 for a lecture I gave in 1989).

That all survived Auschwitz alone calls one of the camp legends into question. Otto was looked after by SS doctors in the camp hospital and survived, opting to stay there until the camp was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945; his daughters Anne and Margot had already been evacuated in October 1944 to Bergen-Belsen -- as were thousands of other Jews, which rather negates their "Nazi genocide" legend -- and there they succumbed to typhus (which epidemic must be laid at least partly at the door of the Allied bombers and the Polish secret underground) in March 1945.

Somebody once sent me a list of all the teenage girls called "Ann" who had been burned alive during one British air raid on Würzburg in March 1945 - there were 170 of them. "I wonder if any of them wrote a diary?" he asked.

I mention to the New Zealanders that I had corresponded with Otto in the 1970s about the authenticity of his daughter's diaries, and that the German criminal-forensics agency (Bundeskriminalamt) sent a team to Switzerland to test the diaries' pages armed with a court order; they found some pages written in ball-point pen, Lipstadt's thugs bombard David Irving and Washington Post reporterperhaps by Otto himself, who had torn out passages where she had written caustic remarks about her parents.

Now a billion-dollar industry swirls around the wretched girl, built up partly by her late father in Switzerland, and partly by the house owners in Amsterdam, each at each other's throats.

At least poor Bente is no longer hanging around, ready to snatch the phone out of my hand when Radio NZ phones!

Photo: Under attack. Lipstadt's thugs bombard David Irving and Washington Post reporter Tom P Reid as they enter the High Court on the last day of the three month 2000 trial

 

TEN YEARS ago today the historic Lipstadt Trial began in London: DJC IRVING vs. PENGUIN BOOKS LTD AND PROFESSOR DEBORAH LIPSTADT, in which I accused them of libelling me in their book Denying the Holocaust.

Since then newspapers and authors have backed off repeating her libels, and wisely so: her Hollywood friends never recovered the thirteen million dollars which they poured into the British High Court in defending her, and smearing my name even more.

Her "expert witnesses" sashayed away down the Strand with pay-cheques of up to half a million dollars each in return for telling Mr Justice Gray their neutral opinions about my worth as an historian.

Since then she has trotted around the world, boasting freely -- depending on her audience -- about how she slew Goliath: But I'm still standing. To Israeli audiences she revealed in confidence some of the dirty tricks her forty-strong team used in their attempt to "destabilise" me, acting alone and in person, before the trial began.

My own side of the story? This will be detailed and documented when my own memoirs appear, and I fear it will do little to enhance the fair name of her community.

 

[Previous Radical's Diary]

 

Photo: Deborah Lipstadt speaks around the world
on her Jan 2000 High Court victory. She herself
took the Fifth, refusing to go into the
witness stand  >  

 
 
 

A devastating review of Richard Evans' book by Paul Grubach

Items about Anne Frank:

 
NOW ON ONE ENJOYABLE EASY-FIND INDEX: DAVID IRVING: A RADICAL'S DIARY 2005 TO 2009

 

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