David Irving answers qustions from London Rabbi Robert Chevins about proofs that Hitler ordered or knew about the extermination of the Jews, and the v

(i)
the Germans under Hitler were a nation of moral
cowards, who looked for alibis and cover whether they
needed it or not — what I call Deckungsschreiben
proliferate in the archives, a letter somebody has
obtained from his superiors to cover him, just in case.

In the case of the extermination of the Jews, had Hitler
given such a verbal order, one would have expected
Himmler, or Heydrich, or Mueller, or
somebody of that ilk to make a Note for the Record, “just
in case”; or, less formally, to have mentioned it in a
letter-home, or in a private diary (Goebbels!).
Even a cypher-clerk or telegraphic operator might have
written a letter home about a message he had seen.

Or we
British could have intercepted
and decoded
such a reference to a verbal order. That is why I made my
offer: not tongue in cheek, but just to concentrate the
minds of thousands of researchers around the world since
1977 (when I first made it, on the David Frost
Programme), in looking for any scrap of such wartime
contemporary evidence.

Proving a Negative is difficult,
and it is not my one aim in life; but I am challenging my
raucous opponents in this argument to prove their
Positive, to find that scrap of evidence. Even the recent
discovery of Himmler’s
pocket diary for 1941-1942
has not helped them, merely confused the issue further
(“Judenfrage. Als Partisanen zu behandeln.”)

(ii)
I questioned in the 1960s every surviving member of
Hitler’s staff, whose confidence I had indubitably gained, on precisely this issue: did they ever hear him even discuss the extermination of the Jews, let alone give any orders for it? The Americans carried out similar interrogations, particularly of his staff stenographers, in 1945-6.

All of these staff members stated quite sincerely that they had heard no such thing. (They could undoubtedly have profited highly from saying the opposite, particularly in latter years). His SS adjutant
Richard Schulze, now dead, was in the audience of the Frost Programme

on June 9, 1977, on my invitation, and he confirmed what I have just said above: Hitler had ordered him to be present during every secret Fuehrer conference 1941-1944, including those “unter vier Augen” with Himmler, so he too might be expected to have heard something. He did not. All of this disturbed me, and encouraged me in my offer, which still stands. I may add that they heard other things of an atrocious nature, which they did not hesitate to relate to me.

Answer:
I am not a Holocaust-expert or -historian, I am glad to
point this out. I have never written any books about the
tragedy. I have not read all the survivor-testimony, and
one day I may get round to doing so.

Those testimonies I
have had cause to read do not encourage me, as they seem
self-serving, emotional, contradictory, and — the early
ones — difficult and often impossible to reconcile with
known facts (i.e. facts known from the archival
documents, aerial and ground photographs of the
buildings). Many of the more prominent ones appear to be
concocted by congenital
liars
like Wilkomirski
or Wiesel,
and should be avoided. Others are more impressive.

The
overall corpus of survivor- and eye-witness testimony on
Auschwitz is roundly condemned as a useful source by
historians far more august than I, including Yehuda
Bauer,Raul
Hilberg,
and Arno Meyer.