You haven’t read Mein Kampf?

I AM amazed that “you haven’t read Mein Kampf”! I have just finished rereading your excellent Göring biography, and would like to refer you to the jacket blurb — The Times calls you “one of Britain’s foremost historians”. Until the Deborah Lipstadt
case the John Keegans of the world were quite comfortable in agreeing with that description.

Your failure to give in to the Spielberg/Hollywood version has made you unpopular in the “Holocaust” community, but the
“Holocaust denier” label is not accurate. In the
Göring biography for example there are numerous accounts of Nazi actions against the Jews, including the famous reference to the “final solution”, and there is no attempt whatsoever to “deny” the fact that the Jews were severely persecuted and killed in very large numbers.
Indeed you illustrate this quite clearly.

Have I read you correctly?

I merely wish to express amazement that you haven’t read Hitler’s book. You don’t really read
Mein Kampf, instead it screams at you. It is tedious and turgid and verbose, but no one who wants to understand
Adolf Hitler and the rise and fall of the Third Reich can possibly get by without studying what he has to say–least of all one of Britain’s “most distinguished historians” on the subject.

Hitler’s hatred of the Jews is expressed in the clearest of language, and his theories and ideas of race and history and his vision for Nazism and the German people are spelled out for the world to see. Nothing is hidden regarding his basic beliefs and purposes.

The German public lapped it up — it was a huge best-seller, the royalties made Hitler a lot of money, and was nothing less than his open platform for all the events that followed his attainment of power.

What is forgotten is that the American Henry
Ford (called a “great man” by Hitler in Mein Kampf) had earlier expounded equally vicious hatred of the Jews in his works The International Jew (1919) and his company newspaper The Dearborn Independent.

Anti-Semitism was not a German invention, and as historian David Kertzer has shown in his excellent book The Popes Against The Jews, last but certainly not least let’s not forget the good old
Catholic church!!

By the way– a personal voucher for your credibility as a researcher. In
Göring you describe how Russian prisoners were “eating grass.”

No historian except yourself has described this unbelievable scenario — and the only other account I have ever heard was from my father, who as a Serbian Royalist officer imprisoned in Germany in 1941 watched through the barb-wire as the first Russian prisoners were brought to his camp — and ate the tall grass in the field down to the ground.

Perhaps someday an historian such as yourself will also recount the SS massacre by machine-gunning of 51,000
Serbian, Polish and other prisoners-of-war at Moosburg in
1945. Did this really happen? Another totally forgotten event lost in the annals…..

Paul
Vuksanovich

German
Government tries to ban | Simon
Wiesenthal Center tries to ban book from giant Internet
bookstores | Internet
comment on antisemitism provoked by such bans |
Amazon
still banning sales at request of German justice
ministry | voted
one of the 100 books of the 20th century — banned from
Frankfurt book fair | Swedes
fail to ban | Czech
publisher charged | for
sale, in Arabic | a
blueprint of Hitler’s plans for WW2? | Royalties
to go to unspecified US charity |

H
A Fowler is indignant that Mr Irving has not read it
| Canada
bookstore chain bans | Unbanning
Hitler: the secret history of Mein Kampf