Real History and the Press Documents on the Fight for Real History David Irving [Photo by Michael Hentz for The New York Times] Letter to the Editor The Globe & Mail London, October 22, 1996 published today’s ” AR-online” again London, October 22, 1996 Sir ,– YOU published (Oct. 19) Jacob Heilbrunn’s amusing account of my lunch-time talk to a small private audience in Washington.
He disagrees with Professor Gordon Craig’s statement that dissident historians like myself play a key role in new scholarship. “Challenges to the accepted historical verities,” writes Heilbrunn, “have been produced by many scholars over the years, scholars who are constantly wrangling over every conceivable aspect of German history. Mr Irving has made no contributions to these debates.”
I beg to differ: the most famous debate of all, the Historikerstreit in Germany, was triggered by the late Professor Martin Broszat’s broadly hostile review of my biography Hitler’s War in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , October 1977, because Broszat accepted my main thesis that there is no evidence of any order by Adolf Hitler for the Final Solution. (Until then no historian had dared to state this obvious fact, let alone agree with me.)
In grudging praise at the end of this review Broszat acknowledged that thanks to me, my re-interpretation of the Führer had obliged everybody else to go