 uring
the fifteen years that British historian David
Irving worked on his two widely-acclaimed
biographies of Adolf Hitler (The Warpath and
Hitler's War), and on his biographies of the
Luftwaffe Field-Marshal Erhard Milch,
Göring's Number Two, arid of Field
Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, and on
numerous other successful histories of the Third
Reich, he amassed collections of official and
private German records, and Allied interrogation of
top Nazi officials, as well as interviewing many of
the leading actors on an intimate basis
himself.
Before transferring this Collection of his
records to the Munich-based Institut für
Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History),
David Irving allowed Microform Academic Publishers,
Main Street, East Ardsley, Wakefield WF3 2AP United
Kingdom, to prepare well-catalogued microfilm
copies for individuals and institutions to
acquire.* (Some of the records were omitted
from the microfilming programme for reasons of
restrictions imposed by the donors, but they can be
seen by permission in Munich.) The microfilmed
portion of the Irving Collection, about 95 per cent
of the total, includes all his research materials
collected on the Nazi atomic and secret (V-)
weapons research efforts as well as on the guidance
of the war from Hitler's and the top Luftwaffe
levels and on the political and military background
to the decisions that were taken on the German
side. Most of the documentary material is in the
original German, while most of the interrogation
and interview reports are in English. David Irving attached great importance in his
Collection to obtaining access to new or relatively
unknown private diaries of individuals, and these
are often filmed throughout, sometimes together
with his typed transcripts of the difficult German
handwriting. They include the diaries of
Milch, von Richthofen, von
Weizsäcker, Bormann, Koeppen, Hewel, Speer,
Himmler (and his ADC, Brandt),
Kreipe,. Koller, von Waldau, Schmundt, Eberhard,
Fiebig, Pickert, Greiner, von Vormann,
Tippelskirch, Lahousen, Jodl and fragments of
the tantalizing Canaris and Mussolini
diaries. These form an indispensable extension to
the published diaries on which historians have
hitherto chiefly relied like those of Goebbels,
Ciano, Halder, Hassell, Groscurth, Frank and
Rosenberg. The records collected for the Rommel biography,
including the personal diaries of Rommel and
his interpreter Armbruster and naval aide
Ruge, are particularly well catalogued and
provide essential material for the study of the
fighting in the North African desert (1941-1943)
and in Normandy in 1944. See the recent review of
this microfilm collection in Microform
Reviews, vol. 7, No. 6, pp. 351-3. 
* Microform Academic Publishers, Main Street,
East Ardsley, Wakefield WF3 2AP United Kingdom:
Telephone +44 (0)1924 825700; fax: +44 (0)1924
871005; email: [email protected];
websites: www.BritishOnlineArchives.co.uk
and www.microform.co.uk/archival-publishing.php
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He
was formally banned from setting foot in the
latter archives on July 1, 1993, and banned from
Germany as a whole on November 13, 1993, "in the
interests of the German people."
write
to David Irving