[Note:
What follows is a literal translation of what
is necessarily an abridged and sometimes
tendentious published account of a three-hour
tape-recorded interview. The Spanish
translator took many liberties with the
original spoken word, and for legal reasons
we should make clear that the words used
below are not necessarily the actual words
spoken by Mr Irving or the interviewer].
Madrid Saturday, September 5, 2009
Hitler was a
simple man for ever being hoodwinked by his
subordinates.
THE FIRST surprising thing about David Irving
is that he drives too fast. As if he had
somebody at his tail. It's less surprising that
his home is filled with files and microfilms. He
is an historian, after all. Or at least so he
says. Our conversation takes places in his
garden - marked by the noise of the planes
landing and taking off Heathrow.
Irving drinks a lot of coffee. The
girl who prepares it is called Gabriela. He
prefers to call her Miss Peru.
Q - Had Hitler
not existed, would there have been WWII?
A - Of course. In the '30s the war was
inevitable, but not because of the Nazis,
because Europe had ill-fitting frontiers.
Churchill occupied himself with the Nazis only
from 1936 on. And he did that because he was
helped into power by the Jews of London.
Q - How is it possible that you are the only
historian who says this?
A - Because it's not politically correct to
say it. Only Mel Gibson says it.
Q - Don't digress. I've asked you about WWII.
Would it have been possible without Hitler?
A - Yes. Then again, Hitler only wanted a
small war: to absorb Austria and the Sudetenland
and then provoke Poland by taking Danzig. But
then after a while he realized that the war
wasn't going to be a short one.
Q - You have once stated that Churchill was
as bad as Hitler.
A - What I did say is that Hitler, Churchill,
Roosevelt, and Truman are all burning in the
same hell.
Q - That is, in your opinion they were all
equally bad.
A - Of course. They had no respect whatsoever
for human life. The real crime of WWII was not
genocide; it was what I call innocenticide. The
killing of innocent people. The murder of the
Jews was a crime not because they were Jews, but
because they were innocent. But the Jews
don't want to hear this, because it lets the
Holocaust stop being something special.
Q - You mean that there were Jews who were
not innocent?
A - What I mean is that their murder was a
crime because they were innocent. Do you
want to say that all Jews are innocent? Because
in every segment of the population there are
elements that tend toward the criminal, and the
Jews are no exception.
Q - You put Churchill and Hitler on the same
plane, then.
A - I've read Churchill's papers, and I
remember what he told the officers planning the
invasion of France in spring '44. The generals
told him that a lot of [French]
civilians were going to die and he answered,
"How many?" - They told him "About 10,000" And
Churchill said, "Okay. That's the tariff they
have to pay." To Churchill, human life was
irrelevant. Think about the calculated brutality
of the
bombing of Dresden.
Q - And Hitler, wasn't he more
bloodthirsty?
A - The key question is how much Hitler knew
about what Himmler
and his SS were up to. And the answer is that
Himmler took very great care not to tell him
anything. On one occasion Himmler's chief of
staff, Karl Wolff, found him depressed
and asked him "What's the matter?" - And he
answered, "I am doing something that the Messiah
of the coming 2000 years must never know." By
"the Messiah", he was alluding to Hitler.
Q - But why hide the Holocaust from Hitler,
if they both had the same goal of exterminating
the Jews?
A - The allegation that the Nazi leader
sought to exterminate the Jews is a
propaganda lie. In Hitler's speeches he just
repeated the one anti-Semitic utterance.
Something about "if they ever begin a world war,
the Jews will be the ones to suffer". But it was
always the same stereotype expression.
Q - Do you mean that Hitler was the only
innocent in the Nazi circles of power?
A - Hitler was the Head of State, and because
of that, he was accountable for what was
happening. But one can be both accountable and
ignorant. Hitler was a simple man constantly
deceived by his subordinates.
Q - But you do accept that the Nazis wanted
to exterminate the Jews.
A - Goebbels
and Himmler, yes. But it would be interesting to
know why neither the UK nor Sweden nor any other
country wanted to accept Europe's Jews? And for
that matter also why when Germany asked the
Hungarians, the Rumanians, and the Slovaks if
they might take care of their Jews, all
willingly agreed. Even if as I suppose the mere
fact of raising these questions makes me an
anti-Semite.
Q - Are you?
A - I try not to be one.
Q - Are you or are you not one?
A - I try not to be one, but believe me, it's
not easy.
Q - In a nutshell, your thesis is that Hitler
was a good guy, but he was surrounded by bad
people.
A - Hitler himself said, nearing the end of
his days, that National Socialism was good but
he had trusted the wrong people.
Q - And that is also what you believe?
A - I am not interested in politics. National
Socialism worked well in Germany, but I am not
sure it would be as successful in other
countries.
Q - Has Hitler become a scapegoat for the
Germans?
A - He has proved useful to many people
because he is dead.
Q - How do you explain, that no historians
except you say that the real holocaust did not
take place in Auschwitz?
A - Because they all copy each other. To jump
those rails would condemn them to jail,
retribution, and poverty, which is what happened
to me.
Q - Are you a Nazi?
A - That's what they say, but it's not true.
The only thing that matters to me is that in a
thousand [actually said: hundred]
years people won't buy Ian
Kershaw's or Andrew Roberts'
books, but mine. Because I write Real
History.
Q - Wouldn't it be less pretentious to say
that what you tell is nothing more than just one
version of the facts?
A - I always encourage my listeners to read
other authors too. I am a very liberal guy.
Q - Was Hitler a democratically elected
leader or a tyrant?
A - There comes a moment when even a tyrant
is unable to rule without the people's support.
Hitler had that support until the very end. In
part that was because of Goebbels'
propaganda.
Q - What about Churchill? Was he a
tyrant?
A - He was a corrupt politician. He did what
the Jews told him to do, and he replaced
Neville Chamberlain, who was a man of
peace. He pushed the UK into the war and
destroyed the British Empire. Churchill was in
the hands of the Jews, and if he'd surrendered
[actually said: accepted Hitler's 1940
peace offer] he'd have gone down in
history as a failure. People would have laughed
at him. The war was a personal matter to
Churchill.
Q - So should he have done a deal with
Hitler?
A - Of course. We were very close to ending
the war in 1940 and then there probably would
not have been any Holocaust. Because you can do
such things only under cover of the smoke of
war.
Q - Do you think that the figure of Six
Million murdered Jews is exaggerated?
A - I'm not interested in figures. "I don't
do body-counts." Nor am I all that interested in
the Holocaust. I am interested in Himmler. A man
who died at age 44, built an enormous industrial
empire, raised the Waffen SS out of nothing, and
was the architect of the Holocaust. What an
"achievement" for a man of forty-four.
Q - You will agree with me that the people
responsible for the Holocaust are not the Jews,
but their killers.
A - The problem is that you can't even ask in
public whether they were not the architects of
their own destruction, because asking that you
would land you in jail. That's why no-one asks,
no-one answers; and it'll all end up again just
as in the 1930s. That's what I want to prevent.
I am a humanitarian person.
Q - Do you believe that the Holocaust is just
a footnote in history books?
A - Until the 1970s it was just a blip on the
horizon. The proof of that is that it doesn't
figure in any of the biographies of the great
leaders of the Second World War. But since then
it has become fashionable. The Jews have
marketed it as a brand, using the same
techniques as Dr Goebbels. They have invented a
slogan... and repeat it ad nauseam.
Q - In other words, in your opinion the
Holocaust is nothing more than a slogan.
A - A slogan yes. The Holocaust has become
just a slogan, a brand-name like Kleenex or
Xerox printers. Until the 1970s it was just a
haphazard concept, one which included gas
chambers, shootings, deportations, slavery... It
was a horrific phenomenon, but it was not
commercially marketable. They've turned it into
a commercial phenomenon, and succeeded in making
money out of it - producing films about it which
have made millions.
Q - You've been accused of absolving
Hitler.
A - I take the uncertainty out of
History.
Q - But you used to say that you had to
identify with him. Do you consider yourself an
admirer of Hitler?
A - I admire him because he persevered. In
the same sense that I admire Hillary
Clinton in her perseverance in pursuing the
presidency of the United States. Hitler had
ranged against him the most powerful armies in
the whole world, but he decided to resist until
the end. And had the war lasted another year, he
would have - not won, but he would have
not lost either. By 1945 the British and
the Americans were heartily tired of the war,
and they would not have wanted to go on any
longer.
Q - Was Nazism a step backwards for
civilization?
A - In some things, yes. For instance, there
was nobody controlling the police. But maybe
such a regime needs the police to be able to
conduct its social experiments.
Q - What kind of experiments?
A - Those regarding the welfare state.
Q - Do you really think that in a thousand
years the general judgment on Hitler will
improve?
A - Of course. There will be squares named
after him in Germany, and maybe
elsewhere.