Heil Hitler! Goring An den Leiter der Rei

David Irving v Penguin & LipstadtDeborah Lipstadt’s Defence (continued)All hyperlinks are added by this Website and are not part of the original documentMeaning (i)-(iii): the Goebbels’ book(unattributed page references are to the Goebbels’ book)(34) In the Goebbels’ book, published by Focal Point in 1996, the Plaintiff continues his exculpation of Hitler, this time transferring not merely the responsibility for the extermination camps but the policy of anti-semitism itself from Hitler to

Goebbels: his method is to dwell on Goebbels’ anti-semitism, and to attenuate, or slide-over that of Hitler. Thus, when Goebbels in his diary reported Hitler as being in support of the most radical programme of extermination, the Plaintiff commented (at pp.386-7) that where as Goebbels may be believed when he expressed his own views, his citation of Hitler’s statements to him need not be taken seriously: the diarist was merely repeating “threadbare phrases”.

The Plaintiff makes much of the fact that Hitler was not pleased by the violent anti-semitic riots which were orchestrated by Goebbels – the so-called “Kristallnacht” on 9 November 1938 (and see (36) below). By this variation of emphasis, the Plaintiff builds up a portrait of Goebbels as the driving force of Nazi anti-semitism, the “Mastermind of the Third Reich”, goading his reluctant Führer into ever more radical actions against the Jews.

As in “Hitler’s War”, Hitler is portrayed by the Plaintiff as a weak leader, fundamentally benevolent and constructive, but driven to occasional violent actions by evil or treacherous counsellors. (35) In that context, the Plaintiff omits the history of Hitler’s rabid anti-semitism. The first known political utterance of Hitler is a paper on the Jewish question, written in 1919.

In it, Hitler demanded that the Jewish question be solved, not by “emotional” attacks – sporadic pogroms which lead nowhere – but by “rational anti-semitism”, “the anti-semitism of reason”, “planned judicial opposition” whose “ultimate goal is the removal of Jews altogether.

An even stronger statement of Hitler’s intentions towards the Jews before he knew Goebbels is expressed in a newspaper interview from 1922 as quoted in Fleming’s “Hitler and the Final Solution”, 1984, p.17: “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.

As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows – at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example – as many as traffic allows.Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated.

Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany is completely cleansed of Jews.” In “Mein Kampf”, Hitler was explicit: the First World War, he stated, might not have been lost if a sufficient number of Jews had been eliminated at the start of it by poison-gas. Both these statements were uttered before Hitler had met Goebbels.

Hitler’s last political message to the world, the last sentence of his last political testament, dictated shortly before his suicide, was an adjuration to the German people “above all [emphasis added] … implacably to oppose the universal poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.”

None of these statements are cited by the Plaintiff in the Goebbels’ book (even in Hitler’s War, where the Plaintiff cites part of Hitler’s last testament, he fails to mention that last solemn adjuration). (36) In the Goebbels’ book, the Plaintiff seeks to minimize, by contorting and manipulating the evidence (see below), Hitler’s role in the “Kristallnacht” (the infamous pogrom against the Jews).

The tenor of the Plaintiff’s interpretation is that the pogrom was Goebbels’ work, though it got out of hand from what he intended, and that Hitler disapproved of it (the one concession to Hitler’s responsibility by the Plaintiff is that Hitler “made no attempt to halt this inhumanity …

and thus deserves the odium that now falls on all Germany” (p.277)):(i) Serious anti-Jewish riots and outrages occurred after a speech by Goebbels on 9 November 1938 at the Old Town Hall in Munich, which he gave in Hitler’s place, Hitler having left the meeting earlier. Hitler and Goebbels had travelled to that meeting together and had had dinner there;(ii) Goebbels’ usual practice then, was to record the events of each day the following morning.

Thus, his diary entry for 9 November 1938 would record events which occurred on 8 November, and the entry for 10 November 1938 would record events on 9 November;(iii) Goebbels’ diary entry on 10 November 1938 (relating first to events on 9 November 1938 and then to the morning of 10 November) indicate that Goebbels had heard of anti-semitic disturbances in Hessen: and in that diary entry he mentioned with approval the “big demonstrations in Kassel and Dessau” with details of the “burning

synagogues” and “demolished shops”;(iv) Goebbels’ entry that day continues:”I brief the Führer on the affair. He determines: demonstrations to continue. Withdraw the police.

The Jews must for once be made to feel the fury of the people.”(v) At p.274, the Plaintiff places that crucial diary entry (see (iv) above), which he mistranslated, out of context, namely immediately after a reference to Hitler’s comments on the intervention of the police against anti-Jewish demonstrators in Munich;(vi) The proper context of that diary entry of 10 November 1938 was the pogroms in Kassel and Dessau (see (iii) above) – and not the “demonstrations” in Munich, which only began much

later that night of 9 November (and of which there was no mention);(vii) By that manipulation, the Plaintiff falsely implies that the discussion between Hitler and Goebbels recorded on 10 November, and Hitler’s express direction that the riots be allowed to continue, referred to the Munich disturbances, (implicitly somewhat minor), thus allowing the Plaintiff to claim (for example at p.277) that Hitler was taken by surprise and furious about Kristallnacht;(viii) The Plaintiff further attempts

to distance Hitler from responsibility for Kristallnacht by suggesting that (contrary to the diary entry for 10 November 1938) news of the “big” demonstrations only Goebbels on the evening of 9 November, thus allowing the Plaintiff to imply that Hitler’s permission was not related to the pogroms which had already taken place;(ix) However, contrary to the Plaintiff’s claims the Goebbels’ diaries include that Goebbels already heard of riots and burning synagogues in Hessen on the morning of 8

November, writing about it in his diary on 9 November; when compiling his diary as usual on the following day, he mentioned the “big” demonstrations in Kassel and Dessau with approval; it was those demonstrations Goebbels had in mind when speaking to Hitler during dinner on the evening of 9 November; Hitler therefore knew of the pogroms directly, and this is what he directed should continue during that dinner on 9 November before the Munich demonstrations had begun;(x) On page 276, the

Plaintiff says in relation to the Kristallnacht, “What of Himmler and Hitler? Both were totally unaware of what Goebbels had done …” The Plaintiff then paraphrases Goebbels’ diary entry relating to the morning of 10 November 1938 as follows: “As more ugly bulletins rained down on him the next morning, Goebbels went to see Hitler to discuss “what to do next”.

Irrelevantly and confusingly, the Plaintiff adds, “There is surely an involuntary hint of apprehension in this phrase”;(xi) What Goebbels actually wrote in that diary entry was, “All morning new reports rainin. I ponder with the Führer our next moves. Shall we let them go on beating them [the Jews] up or stop it. That is now the question …”.

Thus the diary entry supports neither the Plaintiff’s claim that Hitler was livid about Kristallnacht (implicitly, because he was less radical about the Jews than Goebbels) nor the Plaintiff’s comment that Goebbels was apprehensive, (implicitly, because Hitler was “livid with rage” (p277));(xii) It is obvious, Hitler could not have been (as the Plaintiff claims at p276) “totally unaware” of what he had explicitly agreed to: the demonstrations he decided should continue (with a specific order to

Goebbels during dinner on 9 November) had already resulted in the extensive burning of synagogues and attacks on Jewish property in Hessen and elsewhere.(xiii) The Plaintiff correctly transcribed Goebbels diary entry for 11 November 1938 on Goebbels’ report to Hitler on Kristallnacht: “He [Hitler] is in agreement with everything, his views are quite radical and aggressive. The Aktion itself went off without a hitch.

A hundred dead, but no German property damaged”, but introduced it by suggesting that Goebbels had “perhaps slanted” this note which “stands alone and in direct contradiction to the evidence of Hitler’s entire immediate entourage” (p.278). (37) The Plaintiff was taken to task by reviewers for the crucial omissions in “Hitler’s War” from the diary entry of Goebbels for 27 March 1942, (see 22) above).

In the Goebbels’ book (at p.388), the Plaintiff still did not give the complete diary entry (leaving out the reference to “government” and “regime”), sought further to minimise its impact by interpolating an irrelevance (“he dictated to his poker-faced stenographer”), and then to undermine its significance altogether by referring, yet again, to the absence of an explicit order by Hitler for the murder of the Jews. |