David
Craigie
writes from Australia on October 13, 2002

Real
History and the 1937 Guernica incident

I WOULD like to alert you to a reference made to
your book “Göring”
by Piers Brendon yesterday [October 12,
2002] on Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio in
which he dismisses your account of the Guernica bombings
[by General Franco’s forces and
the Legion Kondor in April 1937].

See their Website reference at under heading
“Spin
Doctoring in Wartime…”, unfortunately no text available, there is however however streaming audio to be found.

David
Craigie

Related item on this website:

The Facts and Figures about the 1937 Nazi air raid on Guernica

Free
download
of David Irving’s books Bookmark
the download page to find the latest new free
books

David
Irving replies:

SO LONG as I have my arms tied behind my back —
I am not invited to a free debate with these geniuses –,
there’s not much I can do about them at this range; none
of them so afr as I know, and certainly not the indolent
Mr Brendon, has looked at the German archives or spoken
to the German and Spanish generals, let alone visited
Guernica to investigate on the spot with city officials
as we did in the 1970s.

For my references on Guernica, I
read the private diary of the later Field Marshal
Wolfram von Richthofen, who headed the Legion Kondor
(his widow Jutta made it available to me), and
years earlier we visited Guernica, and checked the city
archives and newspaper files: the local anti-Franco
newspaper after the air raid listed the names of the
30 injured, which gives an idea of the size of
the actual death toll.

After checking hospital and
mortuary records we concluded that 98 had died, most of
them in one incident where a German bomb struck an
asylum. This does not accord very well however with the
communist, anti-Franco legend that was put around
immediately after the event.