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To the Editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. |
z.Zt. San Francisco, 8. Juli 1977
Sir,
Most foreign correspondent. who filed stories from London about my book "Hitler's War" had the courtesy, or curiosity, to visit me first. My home is in mid-London. Not however your Karlheinz Bohrer, (FAZ, 29. Juni 1977, S.23) and more's the pity. Because he evidently cannot have read the book, just newspaper articles -- and not the highly laudatory articles in The Times and The Sunday Times, by Hugh Trevor Roper either; yes, Trevor-Roper's article was full of commendation -- not that your readers will have guessed that from Bohrer's account of Trevor-Roper' s remarks.
Let me cite just one of Bohrer's untruths: "Irving beruft sich auf die kurze Notiz Hitlers (sic] der vom Führerhauptquartier aus im November 1941 Heydrich anwies, die beabsichtigte Liquidation eines Transportes Berliner Juden aufzuhalten." (In fact Himmler, (not "Hitler"), listed two separate themes in his telephone notes: "Judentransport aus Berlin." Und: "Keine Liquidierung.") Furthermore, claims Bohrer, "Irving aber leitet aus diesem einzigen Beweisstück eine ganze dramatische Theorie ab und vermeidet es tunlichst, die Gegenbeweise vorzutragen und seriös zu erörtern: beispielsweise die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels oder von Alfred Rosenberg." This claim is defamatory and untrue. I cite far more than just one Beweisstück, from Herbst 1941 until October 1943 at least, proving that Hitler did not initiate the Liquidierung der europäischen Juden and was kept in the dark about it. Nobody else -- not Alan Bullock, not A.J.P. Taylor, not John Toland, not Joachim Fest -- even mentions these documents; perhaps they did not know of their existence. There is not one comparable wartime document proving the contrary, and I defy Herr Bohrer to produce one. There is not one line in the Rosenberg or Goebbels diaries, published or unpublished, linking Hitler with the atrocity.
Every other Hitler crime, like the Kommissarbefehl, the Euthanasie order, the Aushungerung von Leningrad, is documented at every level right down to the executioners. Why not this one, too?
Hochachtungsvoll,
David Irving
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