Miller: David Irving replies: I had the entire “diary” at my disposal in General Engel’s Düsseldorf office for a day in the late 1960s.

David Irving replies:

I had the entire “diary” at my disposal in General Engel’s Düsseldorf office for a day in the late 1960s. [Engel was
Hitler’s army (not SS) adjutant from 1938 to March
1943 when he was sent to the eastern front under something of a cloud, as the other adjutants hinted to me; he later distinguished himself in action, and became a post-war arms dealer]. With his permission, I made extracts. I became convinced then that it was not genuine.

It consisted of about
600 loose pages in two ring binders, typed on more than one typewriter. Engel himself told me that he had got into contract difficulties, and he asked me to keep secret the fact that I had seen the pages.

The Sunday Times (London) had bought certain rights in them, I believe, but then smelt a rat. The Institut für Zeitgeschichte also bought publication rights for 50,000 deutschmarks, and refused to let any outsiders like me use them;
I got many sniffs at them from their Institut für Zeitgeschichte card index however, and I began warning the institute of inconsistencies when compared with genuine diaries (Walter Hewel, Fritz
Todt, Frau Anneliese Schmundt, etc).

Thus the Engel “diary” related a showdown confernce between Hitler and Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring over the Stalingrad airlift on one date in November 1942 when the genuine diary of Field-Marshal von Richthofen proved that Göring was actually shopping in
Paris (when researching my Göring biography I later found actual purchase receipts of that date in Göring ‘s papers archived at Suitland, Maryland).

Klink, the MGFA (Militärgeschichtliches
Forschungsamt) historian of the Stalingrad battle, son of Reichsfrauenführerin Frau Scholz
Klink, then spotted another particularly bad error:
Engel’s “diary” quoted Field-Marshal Erich von
Manstein’s telegram from Stalingrad, advising
Hitler to get the 6th Army out; that was however from Manstein’s postwar memoirs, the actual wartime (November 1942) telegram, which Klink found in the army files, said the precise opposite!

Manstein had doctored his memoirs.

Dr Anton Hoch, the Institut für
Zeitgeschichte’s chief archivist, privately told me of the day they confronted Engel with the unfortunate fact that the paper had now been tested by a laboratory and shown to be of post-war manufacture. (That was after, and no doubt because,
I had warned them urgently that the diaries were not authentic).

The chief of the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg, Manfred Kehrig, then told me privately that when they too began warning the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte against their publication, there was a round table conference at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, which he attended, at which Prof Helmut Krausnick (I believe) or Dr Hildegard von Kotze, the published diaries’ editor, explained their institute’s predicament: namely that

several
Germans were in jail on the basis of “expert affidavits” (Gutachten) submitted by the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte at post-war German war crimes trials, based on the institute’s set of the Engel diaries; if those affidavits had to be rescinded now, as of course they should have been, at once, the trials might, ahem, have to be restaged. Better therefore to let sleeping dogs lie.

The fake “diaries” were published by the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte, with a very inconspicuous caveat in the brief Introduction about possible problems of authenticity. Flucht nach vorne, is what Germans call that. No wonder the Institut für Zeitgeschichte began disliking me when I started publicising the above disgraceful story.