David Irving | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
First posted Tuesday, April 10, 2012
© Focal Point 2012
The stores are full of Happy Passover cards; I can't remember seeing them before. That's like saying And a Happy Crucifixion to you too.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)H H-T. reports:
I expect you are aware of Himmler's alleged role in the affair of the sinking of the Cap Arcona and other ships in the Bay of Lübeck towards the end of April 1945. I found it on Wikipedia under 'Cap Arcona'. The ships held more than 10,000 prisoners from Neuengamme concentration camp and its subcamps. The order to transfer the prisoners from the camps to the prison ships came from Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann in Hamburg who was himself acting on orders from Berlin. Later, during a war crimes tribunal, Kaufmann claimed that the prisoners were destined for Sweden. However, at the same trial, Bassewitz-Behr, Hamburg's last Higher SS and Police Leader, (HSSPF), said that the prisoners were in fact slated to be killed "in compliance with Himmler's orders".I reply: "Very interesting. The accounts of Himmler's orders about killing KZ prisoners at the end are very conflicting. Please gather what you can so that we can balance word against word." I add: "I think it was actually around May 2, 1945. One Canadian pilot of the Second Tactical Air Force sank the Cap Arcona and the Deutschland drowning 10,000. I visited the grave on the beach there [near Neustadt or Timmersdorf] many years ago."
I refill half a dozen ink cartridges. It is impossible to do so without getting ink everywhere else too.
I cycle over to the Rusty Anchor with a following wind at six p.m. for supper, and back at seven pm. The sofa has been removed to put in one of the other suites where the sofa collapsed, so there is nowhere to sit in the evening. Mna. came in at lunchtime, picked up the mail. . . Nowhere near J., and we still do not know what cracked the latter.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)TERRIFICALLY humid, though not hot, and dew everywhere. --
I work all day on the Röhm Purge, (The Night of the Long Knives), final text. It is far too bloated and will now have to be edited down.
WHERE IS DAVID IRVING SPEAKING IN THE USA THIS MAY AND JUNE? Contact us: Apply for details. Register online [link].
Monday, April 2, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)JESSICA emails: "Most satisfying film ending ever! (The Shawshank Redemption)."
I reply at 6:45 p.m: "I told you so, and the lead actor [Tim Robbins] is such an agreeable person. Prison is however less agreeable than in the movie. I was locked up [in Vienna] 23 or 24 hours a day, in solitary confinement."
Somebody draws attention to a Scandinavian who has posted my books on lulu.com and is selling them, evidently pirate copies. Not much anybody can do about it, it seems. [Milch] [Dresden]
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)A STUDENT has written me:
I am a seventeen year old history student, and have been recently watching lectures by you online. . . What is your opinion on other famous historians of Nazi Germany, such as Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans and the late Hugh Trevor-Roper? Do you recommend any books by these historians, if so which? If not, are there any other books which you can recommend? Furthermore, where can I get a copy of your book Hitlers War?I reply: "Hugh Trevor Roper is good; Ian Kershaw quite good, though relies heavily on secondary sources; Richard Evans [left] is turgid."
"Why do you find Richard Evans 'turgid?"
I answer briefly: "Masses of unedited prose, copied and pasted from other works."'
To the dentist at one p.m.; Dr Eaton say the tooth has broken and there is nothing to glue it back onto. Wants to perform major things, which I brush aside in the nicest possible way, but he can straighten out all the teeth for $4,500 over a year, he says, including the anterior stray tooth that is pushing way out of line. They use multiple transparent plastic moulded strips, each slightly different from the next. Hmmm. Can't afford it.
I write Himmler all day.
SUPPER with Mna. (right) at [a local restaurant], then bed at around eleven pm after watching a great documentary on the Panama Canal construction. A female historian with odd, probably collagened, lips gives the appropriate anti-racist commentary that seems obligatory in all such films now: The majority of the unskilled heavy labour was done by Blacks from Barbados, it seems, while all the skilled jobs were done by Whites. They died like flies, from Yellow Fever, until an army doctor came down from the States and introduced a sweeping anti-Mosquito campaign, hunting them down insect by insect until the disease was totally eradicated.
He took his hospital staff into the morgue one day and showed them a body, saying, "Take a good look, that is the last victim of Yellow Fever that you will ever be seeing." He was a White, but the programme kinda did not harp on that. How many Blacks' lives did he save? Not mentioned either.
Meanwhile the television brings more and more real news of Blacks killing Blacks and Whites, and violent crime, and muggings, and the rest. Comment . . . superfluous.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)BOOKINGS are slowly trickling in, and most of them want to use money orders, not credit cards; presumably because all theirs are maxed out. Sign of the times. Thank you, Dick Fuld and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
Unexpectedly, J. has written to Jeannie, her successor at Irvingbooks.com, at 4:38 a.m. today, about the mailbox she leased at my request in Indianapolis:
Jeanette, David needs to fill out a change of address form to forward his mail from my PO Box. I can't do that for him and I'm not going to continue to deal with the hassle of his mail being in my mailbox. I will just throw it away - checks and all - if he can't be bothered to change his address.Jeannie replies:
I'll tell him to fill out a change of address form. I hope he can do that from Key West. Please don't throw away his mail.Without having really read J.'s inexplicably rather caustic letter I write to Jeanette:
Good reply Jeannie. Keep her sweet. She is a nice girl, and I worry for her.But I shall now have to complain to J.'s lawyer (!) about twenty boxes of books I autographed and put in her car on November 18 in Virginia, as these have NOT turned up at the location she stated, and the missing books are worth many thousands of dollars. If she has thrown away checks that would also be thousands -- we have received no mail through that box since January.
I then write to J. herself, with reluctance:
Jeannie has told me of your message, and I am sorry about this continued problem. . . . Meanwhile at risk of stating the obvious, do not destroy any mail addressed to me.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)
A REVIEWER of John Lukacs's latest Erguss, The Legacy of the Second World War, writes in his final paragraph:
Reading the book the historian that Beachcombing is sometimes reminded of is, of all people, the young David Irving; something that will make JL froth at the mouth should he ever read this. But JL, now in his eighties, has the younger David Irving's talent as a gifted outsider. Yet there is none of DI's grand-standing (Hitler's Diary) or perverse/obscene political positions (re the Holocaust) or unfortunate heroes (let's leave it at that). There is wisdom and a bubbling but always sensible moral impatience with the world. This might not be an ideal primer on WW2, but The Legacy is certainly the best advanced commentary Beach has read.
I thank Larry M. for sending it. "That's a weird backhanded kind of compliment, I suppose. Lukacs is an ex-Jew who hated me ever since The Viking Press published my book Hitler's War (1977), which killed his chances of getting his Hitler ideas published in the 1970s. So he wrote to John Toland at the time."
Jaenelle has replied rather unhelpfully to her successor, Jeannie:
No, I cannot send his mail. I'm not the one who collects it. The person who does has so far been instructed to return all David Irving mail to the sender. I'm told there's a lot of it.I don't know where the autographed books are, but I'm sure he can always sign more if he can't find them.
Jeannie comments: "It's deceptive and IRRITATING. . ."
I reply that it is more than just irritating. How can I autograph books which are 900 miles north of here, in Georgia? That was why I signed twenty boxes of them when I last saw her in Virginia.
Unhelpful to say the least. She could equally have instructed the person to mail it to this P O box here until it is sorted out. I have not the faintest idea what's biting her. Whatever it is it has brought out a strange and vicious streak in her that was not present the previous four years. Perhaps it is just the remorselessness of getting older that does it in women. Caveat Gerwich is all one can comment at this stage-- that's the name of the wealthy Australian who created the rainbow which J. has run off to pursue. I do hope the crock of Gold is still there when she reaches the rainbow's end.
I then sigh and write to J.'s chosen lawyer, yet again. "Dear Andrew
We must protest at your client's erratic and evidently felonious behaviour over the valuable mail she has collected from the mailbox, addressed to ourselves. In December, as you know she wrongfully, and perhaps mistakenly, carried these items to Australia with her, and mailed them back to us late in January. Since then all items mailed to us at that Indianapolis address have vanished.We have yesterday taken steps to ask the US Postal Service for such items to be automatically redirected to our Florida P O Box, but we cannot guarantee that the Indiana authorities will do so of course. Meanwhile it would be reasonable for your client to have the mail simply forwarded, at our expense if necessary, to our Florida P O Box. Instead she has yesterday said she intended to destroy it. . .
He replies immediately: "David, I will speak with Ms. Antas and try to provide you with a response by the end of the week. I am currently in trial."
I remind Jeannie that I went more than the extra mile to make her predecessor comfortable after she flounced out without notice in December: "I paid her four thousand dollars more than she was expecting, twice in fact what she was entitled to, in back pay. I included over a thousand dollars for her medical bills, incurred when she caught a bug during our 2008 tour in Oregon. She has had jaunts to the UK, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Poland as part of her not really arduous tasks." I comment that her weird antics now are a poor recompense indeed.
Jeannie replies wisely: "I better keep my mouth shut on this one. I'm not too happy with her myself."
I forward his message to Mna. -- I have sent her back to Poland to spend the Easter week with her family -- and she asks only, "Is he rich?"
I bike up to Stock Island (with a following wind) for supper, then back into the teeth of a gale. No sooner am I back than Albert wants to go to the Rusty Anchor for supper, and we do so at eight p.m. He stuffs himself with crab claws, and I sit watching. He is exuberant about documents he has been sent from up north, about an old enemy, which the said old enemy's ex-wife has clawed off ex-husband's computer before it "went missing". Women can be very vicious indeed.-- He thinks, as does H., that J.'s . . . I truly hope not, as I still wish her happiness in life, despite everything.
Image below shows Ernst Röhm (left) and Himmler
(center) in happier days: David Irving collection
Friday, April 6, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)Mna. reports from Poland that she arrived safely and is off to see her dog in Zlocieniec and I can call her any time.
Robert W. writes: "Mr. Irving, I just noticed that you wrote the following, 'I am now wading knee-deep in the blood and politics of the Röhm purge,' and I was wondering if, in your upcoming biography of Himmler, you had any plans on elaborating upon the role Theodor Eicke played in Rohm's execution?"
I send him this excerpt from my draft in reply:
Confined to cell No. 474 in Stadelheim prison, Röhm had survived the first bloody night. Hitler was minded to spare his life, but Darré witnessed Göring and Himmler arguing throughout Sunday July 1 for Röhm to be executed too. At one point Hitler demanded to be put through by phone to Röhm's deputy, Krausser. It was too late, Göring had ordered that man shot a few hours earlier. Eventually Hitler ordered that Röhm be 'offered' suicide, but when that offer was spurned, Hitler's old friend was shot out of hand on July 2 too.The killers were SS Brigadeführer Theodor Eicke and his deputy Michael Lippert. Later trials threw light on the SA commander's end. Eicke ordered the cell door unlocked, and slapped a copy of that day's Völkischer Beobachter on the table in front of Röhm. The headlines RÖHM REVOLTS and SA LEADERS SHOT were thickly underlined as usual in red. The SS men put a pistol with one round in its chamber on top of the newspaper, and wordlessly left the cell. After a while Eicke had the jailer open the door and retrieve the loaded pistol. He and Lippert loaded their pistols and stood in the gangway. 'Time's up,' said Eicke. Röhm was ready for them. He had spent his last minutes writing something. It was on the table. He faced them, his chest bared. Eicke said: 'Take aim calmly and shoot.' Each fired one shot. Röhm dropped to the floor. Eicke stepped back and holstered his gun; Lippert stepped inside, put another bullet into the dying man's neck, and left. The jailer shut the cell door. Eicke turned him: 'Do not resuscitate,' he said.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)AWAKE at two-thirty a.m. and thought a lot, brooded, over poor Josephine, God rest her soul, and her awful last moments alive. The loss of a daughter is something a father can never get over. The sense of guilt never leaves me. I forgot her birthday last week, too.
Historians are fighting back at Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans: A N Wilson has told him publicly, "The war is over. Hitler is dead. Get a life."
Evans has (wrongly) criticised Wilson for daring to write a book about Hitler without knowing any German. Well so did John Toland and countless others; as for Professor Evans, isn't he the one who during the Lipstadt Trial revealed that he didn't know the meaning of the common slang expression in German, daran glauben, which we wartime British might translate as "go for the high jump" or perhaps "go for a Burton". (When a bomber crew failed to return, their Lincolnshire comrades would say airily: "They went for a Burton" -- the name of a local brew). In the Lipstadt Trial, her chief expert and historian, "Skunky" Evans, translated daran glauben, used in a sinister 1938 document, literally as "they'll have to believe in it," and probably puzzled as he did so. I suspect that he used Google or some other online translation device.
Rolf Hochhuth, who is in permanent trouble for being my Dutzfreund since 1965 (he shared the same birthday as Josephine), finds he has to defend Israel in an open letter of his own in Berlin's Axel Springer tabloid newspaper BZ.
But back to Grass: During Israel's disastrous war against the Lebanon In August 2006, I wrote from solitary confinement in a Vienna prison cell to a friend:
BACK in 1977, Germany's leading leftwing novelist Günter Grass wrote to my main publisher in Germany, Hoffmann and Campe, who had just published my Rommel biography as a huge best-seller, and threatened that unless they refused to publish any more books by "the Nazi" David Irving, he would withdraw all his books from them, and so would others. HoCa complied.This week, Oh Joy!, the German press revealed that Günter Grass had a "dirty little secret". He had fought for the Waffen SS as a volunteer, 1944-1945. In a letter to Süddeutsche Zeitung I criticise him, not for that, but for his hypocrisy. [The SZ did not publish it.]
And there's another blasphemous question that troubles me: The United States' "closest ally in the Middle East" was just able to field 30,000 troops and massive weaponry [and lose 112 AFVs] for this latest aggression against the Lebanon. How come they have not volunteered one single man for [George W] Bush's adventure in Iraq? It's not as if he doesn't need them.
Today I shall write up the story of poor Rudi Brandt, Himmler's stenographer. I have completed two chapters on the Röhm purge, but they are very bloated and I shall need to stand back from them for a couple of weeks before editing them down to size. Meanwhile I press on.
I drive up the Keys to Marathon and back with Albert who is shopping for pots, plants, and furniture. A pleasant day's outing. Mna. reports from Poland that it is snowing and cold.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)EASTER. The stores are full of Happy Passover cards; I can't remember seeing them before. That's like saying "And a Happy Crucifixion to you too." They'll make money out of anything they can. I send a text to J., "Happy Easter from David". No response. Nor has she commented on, let alone thanked me for, the very expensive gift I sent her (in Minnesota) for her birthday-plus-Christmas. Albert agrees that her behaviour is now . . .
Monday, April 9, 2012
Key West, Florida (USA)JEANNIE suggests: She may just be "being a bitch" for no good reason. J.'s chosen lawyer evidently agrees -- he tells me that he has withdrawn from representing her. Never a good sign.
WHERE IS DAVID IRVING SPEAKING IN THE USA THIS MAY AND JUNE? Contact us: Apply for details. Register online [link].
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