Our position at this point

David Irving writes:

IT IS well known that I am constantly searching for documents on Heinrich Himmler. Repeatedly strangers have provided me with genuine copies of missing Himmler diaries and letters.

On June 3, 2005 Steve Kippax emailed to me image-scans of the photocopies that his associate Dr Arnold Harvey had made of three extraordinary documents in the "Foxley" (SOE) files at the Public Record Office. Kippax was routinely double-checking file references in the recent Martin Allen book on Himmler. These documents indicated that Himmler had been liquidated, to silence him.

I posted the scans on this website, and discussed them in my Radical's Diary, tying them in to other documentary inconsistencies in the official "suicide" version of Himmler's death. (That genuine researchers willingly donate research which has cost them time and money to acquire should not surprise; it is in the original "potlatch" nature of the Internet.)

In private discussion by phone and email, both Kippax and I were puzzled that the documents had lain in the files for years; had escaped official weeding; had been discovered and published by a lesser-known British writer; and, even more perplexing, had been ignored by the media ever since their mentioning by The Mail on Sunday in May 2005.

[In fact we are now told that a BBC researcher, David L., using the PRO's Foxley files for a feature on assassination plots against Hitler, also noticed the same documents in 2002; but his producers decided not to use them, for whatever reason.]

Were they fake? We could not and cannot discern any motive for forging such high-quality documents and planting them in the files for years.

We put the press silence down to editorial politics. Newspapers are insanely jealous. They will pick up a rival's scoop only if they can kill it, or "spoil" it, in Fleet Street terminology. The silence in the foreign media (apart from Der Spiegel and ZDF which were known to be producing their own researched items), and the abstinence from the debate of the conformist historians was no less perplexing.

Internet debate began as to the authenticity of the documents. It culminated each time in the rock-hard realisation: "They are from the PRO, after all."

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On July 2 the pro-Churchill Daily Telegraph Newspaper Group sprang its spoiling operation. Fearing that Der Spiegel was about to scoop them, they published a well-researched but half-completed story by journalist Ben Fenton, whose regular beat is the PRO (and stories on the Holocaust).

He had engaged a forensic expert to examine the documents, he said, and the PRO had allowed this. In that part of her report quoted by Fenton (at this point he has not released the whole report), she claims upon superficial examination under a high powered microscope to detect signs of forgery, even of the use of modern laser-printing technology.

The PRO is at present neutral in this (as are we). It has expressed proper concern, even consternation. Investigation of its computerised user-records reveals that 21 researchers handled the files.

We hope that their independent forensic examination will include the age and make of typewriters used, and the proper chemical tests on paper, ink, and other materials, as well as professional typewriter-comparisons with other genuine letters written at that time, May 1945, by the same people. Unlike black-and-white Xerox machines, each manual typewriter has its own "fingerprint."

(We say black-and-white, because each color laser printer now has a unique digital code embedded in its dot-matrix to discourage banknote-counterfeiting. But that's another story.)

We will keep our readers informed, one way or the other.