IT IS the odious Ben Helfgott, who is chairman of the Yad Vashem Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and a member of the Yad Vashem Educational and Academic Sub-Committees, who organises a campaign under the auspices of the Board of Deputies of British Jews to exert pressure on Macmillan UK Ltd to stop the reported publication of Mr Irving's biography of Joseph Goebbels.

Helfgott approaches many British academics to lend their names to this surreptitious campaign. Among those whom Helfgott puts under pressure is Dr John Fox, a trained historian who worked from 1970-87 at the Foreign Office's historical research department at Cornwall House as British editor of the captured German documents, Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918 1945 .

Fox's specialisation is the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews; he is by 1991 editor of the internationally respected British Journal of Holocaust Education (published by Frank Cass & Co under the auspices of the Yad Vashem Committees and the Board of Deputies of British Jews). The independence is however only skin-deep. Jewish lecture audiences revile Fox for adopting any line which differs from their version of history.

Commendably, Fox refuses Helfgott's demands to stifle Irving's work. He knows Irving and his research, having met him at the F.O. library when researching one of his biographies.

"On basic points of principle concerning freedom of speech in the United Kingdom," reports Fox in an August 1996 letter, "I refused point-blank Helfgott's pressure."

Either foolishly or fearlessly he even lodges a formal complaint with the British government's Charity Commission about what he regards as unethical actions by the Yad Vashem Charitable Trust, a registered charity.

Later Fox will over-reach himself. A month after he publishes letters in February 1995 in The Times , The Guardian , and the Jewish Chronicle refuting the then current Jewish campaign to assign a partial responsibility to Britain for the gassing of orphaned Jewish children from Vichy France, he will be forced to resign the editorship.

That does it: Fox writes to The Daily Telegraph a letter, which the British national newspaper features with maximum prominence on April 18, 1996, revealing how Jewish organisations tried to blackmail him into joining their dirty little campaign:

In 1991, on behalf of a Jewish academic body, I was asked to exert direct pressure on Macmillan to stop its reported publication of the Goebbels biography by David Irving. I refused because this seemed an unethical and immoral attempt to deny him freedom of speech.[1]

On the same date the newspaper features a brave plea by Barbara Amiel, stating the belief that her fellow-Jews (namely those of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL) are by their tactics actually increasing anti-Semitism.

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