 David Irving[Photo by Michael Hentz for The New York Times
]
Letter to the Editor
Times
Colonist, Victoria,
British Columbia
July 16,
1998 Letters
Editor Times
Colonist Victoria
B.C. |
|
London, England, Tuesday, January 11, 1994
YOU PUBLISHED (Jan. 2)
Brad Bird's review of Professor Eberhard Jäckel's
little paperback attack on me, David
Irving's Hitler: A Faulty History Dissected
(Ben-Simon Publications) and you quote Robert Fulford's
foreword: "Jäckel demonstrates with a scholar's precision the
ingenious ways in which Irving manipulates evidence, collecting
whatever fits his preconceptions, misinterpreting as he chooses, and
ignoring whatever fails to support his views. In my own defence may
I offer your readers some background data
on Professor Jäckel?
Basically, as Hamburg police themselves informed me during the
Hitler
Diaries trial
some years ago, he is a document-forger and falsifier of
history. It was none other than
he who authenticated the Hitler Diary in 1982, having briefly perused
the handwritten 1935 volume handed to him by a certain Konrad
Kujau (its actual author). (Jäckel then locked it away,
hoping that Kujau would not dare to ask for its return). Relying on
Jäckel's "expertise," Stuttgart businessman Fritz Stiefel
lost millions of deutschmarks, purchasing worthless scraps of paper
which Jäckel falsely advised were the long-lost "third volume"
of Hitler's Mein
Kampf. This same Jäckel
had meanwhile published
scores of Kujau's fabricated Hitler documents
in his "scientific" volume, Hitler.
Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905 -- 1924 (published
by the highly respectable DVA in 1980); even the dustjacket was a
Kujau forgery! When his carelessness
was finally exposed, Jäckel at first admitted that four of the
documents were fakes, then finally came clean: he admitted in a
learned journal (the Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte, 1984, page 163, which had also unwittingly
published his forgeries) that the volume was stuffed with fake
documents. But, huffed Jäckel: "These
seventy-six (!) documents ... fill only forty-five pages of the
edition, or rather less than four percent of the overall
volume." |
As I
pointed out, a pathologist who said that a corpse was
found to contain only four percent of strychnine could
scarcely overlook one fact: that it was dead.It would
already seem that Professor Jäckel is ill suited to
comment on my writings. But there
is more: Riding in tandem with his unappetising lady
friend Lea Rosh -- she falsely put it about that
she was Jewish in order to gain promotion to the highest
echelons of the German television networks --
.Jäckel produced one
of the most glaring forgeries
ever shown on the television screens. For Part
Three of their film documentary Der
Tod, ein Meister aus Deutschland (broadcast
on May 2, 1990) Jäckel and Rosh wrote these
words: "Meanwhile,
in 1941 tens of thousands of Jews are rounded up
aboard cattletrucks in Romania and shipped to the gas
chambers in Auschwitz." To
illustrate this text, broadcast thirty-five minutes into
the transmission, Jäckel used a carefully retouched
photograph. Unfortunately for him, the original negative
is still in Hamburg railway station archives: it shows
German citizens crowding aboard open coal trains in
British-occupied Hamburg in 1946, one year after the war
ended, to go on a shopping trip to the Ruhr. (Original
negative caption: "Hamburg central station, 1946.
Foreground, an empty coal train carrying travellers to
the Ruhr. Left, a double-decker train type LBET 12.") The
double-decker train was airbrushed out for the TV: there
was no such rolling stock in Romania. Jäckel's
little sleight-of-hand was exposed by Hamburg citizens
who had seen the photograph displayed in the station's
Intercity restaurant. In modem
Germany it is the lying, forging, cheating Jäckels
who head the history departments, while their chief
critic David Irving ("plain Mr and proud of it"),
who was the first to expose the Hitler Diaries as phony
(at the Der Stern press conference in Hamburg in April
1983) is arrested, fined $23,000, smeared worldwide,
handcuffed
(as in Victoria),
gagged, deported, and banned for "libelling the memory of
the dead" -- a trumped-up charge that does not exist
anywhere else on Earth. Yours
faithfully,
David
Irving |
