Documents on the Fight for Real History

 

Prof Jackel

Professor Eberhard Jäckel

Head of the History Department
at Stuttgart University

Forger and Fraud

Professor Eberhard Jäckel
History Department,
Universität Stuttgart
Sattlerstrasse 8
Germany

Jäckel is one of David Irving's most determined critics, and more than once procured Irving's removal from German television round-table discussion programmes like Berliner Salon on October 3, 1989. For one such book-length attack by him on Mr Irving, see the Nizkor site. In an article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on January 26, 1980 Jäckel argued that it was "pedagogically desirable" occasionally to lie about Germany's recent past.

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EXPLAINING away the seventy-six (76) forged documents contained in his imposing volume, Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905-1924, published by the prestigious German publishing house Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1980, the leading German historian Eberhard Jäckel apologised in the historical quarterly Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte published by the equally prestigious Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) in Munich*:

"Diese 76 Stück, die oft nur wenige Zeilen umfassen, füllen insgesamt rund 45 Seiten der Ausgabe, oder weniger als vier Prozent des Gesamtumfangs. . ."

TRANSLATION: "These 76 items, which are often only a few lines long, make up less than forty-five pages of this edition, or rather less than four percent of the total."

As Irving pointed out in a letter to the professor, the notorious poisoner Dr Crippen could equally have protested: "Less than four per cent of my victims' total body weight was strychnine." But dead is dead.

Jäckel had recklessly procured the questionable documents from the notorious forger and counterfeiter Konrad ("Hitler Diaries") Kujau. Even the document used for the dustjacket of the book Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905-1924, turned out to be a Kujau forgery. Jäckel also authenticated the Hitler Diaries in 1983.

* VfZ, No. 32, 1984, pages 163f.

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