DAVID
IRVING
25
Elgin Mansions,
London, W.9CUNningham
8426 4
May 1968
Dear Mr
Kimber,
You would
willingly have me spend the rest of my days writing long
letters in reply to long letters. However, as you still
seem puzzled by my decision on HITLER,
here are the basic facts.
It is
impossible for me to write books just by reading other
people's books. Therefore, as in the case of all the
books I have written so far, I gather as complete a set
of the related documents as possible and work from them,
using published works only marginally, when the rest of
the manuscript is virtually complete. This is my metier,
so to speak. Unfortunately, HITLER
1938-1945 is
a rather larger subject than I had thought -- certainly
larger than the exceptionally narrow scopes represented
by atomic research, or an air crash.
In the
year up to April 1965 my expenses audited by Leslie
Andrews were £2,577; in the following year they were
£3,647; in the year after, on which the firm is
still working, they will certainly be above £6,000.
Of these three sums at least two thirds has been incurred
solely for the HITLER
research.
For
example, I have now gathered thirteen linear feet of
Xerox photostats of diaries, records, reports,
interrogations, etc., for the
HITLER
project; the cost of this can be assessed from the fact
that I have had to purchase 700 microfilms at a cost of
between $8 and $11 each, and fifty microfilms at a
personal expense (specially made for me) of between
£20 and £40 each. They are lining every shelf,
cupboard and niche in my flat at present. As for the
photostats, one linear inch contains about 150 pages; and
each page costs between one shilling and one shilling and
sixpence, according to the looseness of the original
film.
To give
one concrete example: the cost of microfilming the 2,100
pages of the Trevor-Roper Papers was £27
(Kodak-Recordak); the cost of printing them out at Rank
Xerox onto 2,100 sheets of paper was a further
£63.17.6d; the cost of binding them into five
volumes will be a further ten pounds probably. It has
taken me ten days to sort them and catalogue them for
microfilming, and two weeks to type out 300 index cards
from them solely for the HITLER
project.
This was
just the Trevor-Roper Papers! But I have done the same
with the papers of Keitel, Koller, Jodl, Milch, von
Waldau, Himmler, Assmann, the U.S. State Department
(2,700 pages!), Morell, the German Foreign Office
(3,000 pages) Goebbels (700 pages), Hitler
(Reichskanzlei), Hewel (700), Linge, Bormann,
Speer, (2,000 pages), Hoepner, von Weichs, Gfm von
Bock, Beck, etc etc. There is no end to the
project.
write
to David Irving