the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech

THERE IS in fact zero debate now among real historians about the 1933 Reichstag Fire David Irving comments: I ONCE wrote, “To historians and lawyers is allowed what even the Gods are denied – to change what has already happened.”

There is in fact zero debate now among real historians about the Reichstag Fire — ever since June 1992, when I brought back from the KGB archives in Moscow the entry in the Joseph Goebbels diary relating to that 1933 night, which confirmed other people’s accounts that both he and Adolf Hitler (who was with him) were taken by surprise by the conflagration and rushed downtown to see it: see the excerpt from my book “Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich” below. From “Goebbels.

Mastermind of the Third Reich” (London, 1996) The fire was a Godsend to the Nazi radicals. Goebbels was already disquieted by the speed with which Hitler and even Göring were succumbing to Hindenburg’s bourgeois spell. This lone communist fire-raiser had rescued the revolution. During the night he sent for the journalist Alfred-Ingemar Berndt to take down a fiery press release.

Goebbels’ press release announced the sweeping arrests, and described the Reichstag fire as a communist beacon, a signal for a marxist insurrection. This was as much a lie as the claim by Jewish and communist agencies worldwide that the Nazis had staged the fire. Even the authoritative Manchester Guardian published a dispatch from an anonymous special correspondent alleging that Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels had foregathered in Berlin that evening ‘awaiting their fire.’

The world’s press readily copied this Big Lie, and historians in time adopted it from them. The world’s press readily copied this Big Lie, and historians in time adopted it from them.