David Irving responds:
I HAVE received many messages about this latest seemingly phony act of desecration at Aldershot.
I also have my readers to thank for their selfless research into the town’s population statistics. From all the noise that they make, I would never otherwise have guessed that Mr
Hillman’s ilk make up only one-tenth of one percent of the town’s population.
At least three of my readers have pointed out that all the swastikas shown in photographs of the (one) defaced tombstone were correctly orientated, and the SS runes as well. Yer average skinhead doesn’t pay that much attention to such details, in our experience.
I might also add that although I offered a ten-thousand dollar reward (publicised throughout the New Zealand media, underwritten by a well wisher in
California) in September 2004 there have been no arrests or convictions for the well-timed and globally publicised acts against the two equally obscure Jewish cemeteries in
Auckland (the nationwide Jewish percentage is exactly the same as in Aldershot, one-tenth of one percent, or one in a thousand).
AS for our above correspondent’s passing allegation about dodging National Service: I come from a Service family. My father fought in both world wars, was present at the 1916 Battle of Jutland and did convoy duty with the Royal Naval Reserve to North Russia in 1942.
My older brother served in the RAF, retiring as Wing
Commander; the other brother, my twin, was invalided out as a flight lieutenant. I alone went to university.
On leaving
Imperial College in 1956, my draft deferment would be automatically cancelled, and I at once volunteered for a three-year short-service commission in the RAF.
I signed on at the RAF’s Holborn recruiting office, and took their medical tests and examinations in Russian, etc (because I would have joined their Russian language course at Cambridge and gone on no doubt to RAF Akrotiri or elsewhere); I don’t mind adding —
since our above correspondent makes his sneer — that the officers at Holborn told me I had scored the highest marks in their IQ tests since they started recruiting.
Maybe they tell that to everybody, even the Hillmans of this world (Hillmen?)
I was baffled to receive a letter rejecting me as medically unfit for military service. It confirmed of course that I had volunteered. The letters were all in my files seized by the government Trustee along with all my other personal possessions in May 2002, and which I hope to recover by High Court action.
Deflated by the experience, I signed on with Thyssen as a Ruhr steelworker instead, a pretty tough job, where incidentally the initiation rituals involved a two-day medical exam for their health insurance, through which I apparently sailed quite easily. Make of this what you will; it does not quite earn Mr Hillman’s sneer, or match the record of recent US presidents for dodging the draft.