FOR THIRTY-FIVE years author David Irving has kept a private diary. It has proven useful in countless actions. For the information of his many supporters he publishes an edited text in his irregular newsletter ACTION REPORT.

 

 

 

ctober 1998
London

 

 

JESSICA spends several hours on the computer, designing and printing invitations. I lunch alone with her and take her to Grosvenor Square in the afternoon for her first tentative sorties on the bike.

She finds several stationery trees, which can not complain, and one stationery sleeping woman, who can and does. I puff around the square holding her by the scruff of her dress, and she manages two or three wobbly runs. She is enthralled by it all, and eager to carry on.

I spend several hours scanning my 1992 diaries onto disc, as I shall have to with all the typed diaries, to aid our Discovery. Happy moments re-reading the spring 1992 days when I first got to know Benté.

I collect Jessica from school at three p.m., then to Grosvenor Square again with the bike; she now rides it for two or three minutes at a time, mowing down dogs, pedestrians, trees -- everything in her path. Whale of a time.

Historic moment. I say to her, "Once you have learned to ride a bike, like today, Jessica, you never forget for the rest of your life." She says twice, as she pulls on the brake, "Now I've got the hang of it, Daddy."

What she wants to show is that she has got the hang of saying "got the hang of," I think.

Scientists still can't explain the principles of physics on which a bike's motion depends. But the infant brain picks it up, and the information, or rather the instinct, clings like a barnacle.

 

After that it's Let's Scream at David Irving time. At ten p.m. I phone Rebecca Sieff -- for the first time since April -- and get a terrible shrieking-at because of the last Radical's Diary.

I say, is it not all true? Yes, she says; but that's not the point.

I have included about her smoking, and about her turning up here with her boyfriend wearing a large solitaire diamong ring, etc. I point out that that is precisely what she told me.

She has had the most terrible bollocking (her words) from her father, from Jacob Rothschild, and others. I say, "You'll have to learn to stand up for yourself."

After mature reflection, I put back onto the Website the items I have, out of decency, expunged. If true, why not? Hart, aber ungerecht, as Field-Marshal Milch once said to me.

Postman brings a package from D., a bookseller, of Portugal; he has had his lease cancelled by his landlord, a bank, after he had a window display of my books. La lotta continua.

At four p.m. two faxes come from Mishcon de Reya. Mozzochi's address they now give as the PO Box of Coalition for Human Dignity. Not good enough (he himself deposes that he has left that organisation!) Ho-ho. I fax a letter to the High Court to pre-empt any ambush by them.

 

Broadcast news is full of a wild hurricane bearing down on Key West, "the worst for fifty years." No doubt there is much hugging and panicking going on amongst the conchs.

Hope my two bikes are okay.

Bus to Edgware Road, and buy paints, to start repainting the guest room. First I must replaster patches in the ceiling. Time flies. Thirty years since I moved in here to Duke Street.

I work on the Website until one a.m. I post US Holocaust Museum book extracts, which credit my Hitler's War with having started the whole international historical debate on the Holocaust in 1977. That's what I always said.

Long call from Barbara K., from Ontario, about my giving evidence there that Holocaust revisionism is not "hate propaganda". I am banned from Canada -- triumph of the traditional enemies of free speech -- but yeah, why not. I have to apply to the local embassy, for which application there is a $400 fee. If I am allowed in, I also have to reimburse the deportation costs (around $1,900).

In the mail, postmarked Sept. 29, Mishcon finally supply a copy of the Lipstadt document No. 500 I have issued the High Court summons for.

To the Court at three p.m. Master Trench is practice master today and does not have enough time for everything. On Mozzochi's affidavit, Master Trench hears both sides. I argue that I do not believe a P O Box is enough. The rules are quite plain.

I have lived at the same address off Grosvenor Square for thirty years, I say, and I have had the same phone number for thirty years. To attack my name, Deborah Lipstadt has produced two scandalous affidavits written by a U.S. Pacific Coast fly-by-nighter, who gives only an "accommodation address" (Master Trench's word) for a job which he has since left by his own admission, and who appears to have a police record.

Julius makes a rather weakly stated plea that no doubt the Coalition operated from a P O Box for fear of firebomb attacks. Whatever the reason, Master Trench throws out both affidavits. He doesn't normally take this line, he adds, but they contain "allegations [which] are strongly made" and should not be allowed to stand.

The result is that the names of four alleged rightwingers listed by Mozzochi are removed from my Discovery obligations. It is the general smear effect of the affidavits that concerns me.

Anthony Julius, unwilling to give up too easily, reminds the Court that under Order 24 I am obliged to discover all my dealings with these gentlemen anyway. "Only if they are rightwing extremists," I point out. "And we had only Mr Mozzochi's word for that."

An Australian tells me his server has blocked access to my site.

My Australian server, One.net, is blocking access to your web site. I am confronted with the word "Forbidden" when attempting to access info from your page. It appears the thought police are on the march. . .

 

A Latvian supporter from Papua New Guinea drops by, and presses an envelope with five hundred dollars into my hands before fleeing with his native wife (who discreetly waits downstairs in a Black cab for him).

Young photographer comes, Belgian, seeking commissions from Focal Point. He shows me his work: grainy, washed-out colour images of rock stars; some very repulsive to behold indeed. I find myself wondering if they liked their own photos, and what their parents would say? I cannot use his work unless he changes his style.

Long talk with K. about Discovery. I must include all the material that Ernst Zündel sent me, listing it as "not opened and read". Agreement on Zündel's earlier nuttiness ("flying saucers from the South Pole").

Air Commodore Probert phones; was at the Air Ministry's Air Historical Branch when I researched there in the 1960s. Is writing a biography of Air Marshal "Butcher" Harris, and will come and see me in the New Year. Hugh Sebag-Montefiore then comes to see my PQ.17 files. I like him a lot. Turns out he's Jewish. Archbishop S.-M is regarded as the black sheep of the family, for having converted to Catholicism. I loan him my folders on Enigma.

I send this fax to Mishcon de Reya, Prof. Lipstadt's lawyers:

Complying with the Order, particularly the more detailed searches, is taking longer than we had anticipated. We have 55 boxes, each of two cubic feet capacity, to search for each paper item; each box holds some three to four thousand pages of paper; there is no short way.

I have two staff members working at it, as well as myself, and we have worked methodically at it without break ever since the Order was made.

The disruption to our normal routine, not to mention my writing obligations, has been substantial. We have completed the tape list, the book list, the amendments to the previous list, and are currently searching for the remaining items of which you have requested Discovery.

The affidavit is ready for me to execute, but at this rate it will be the end of this week before we are through the tunnel.

Even then it is unlikely that the diaries will have been adequately processed to surface the materials you have asked Discovery of: There are twenty to thirty thousand pages of diaries for the past two decades, all of which have to be examined.

I am having the diaries mechanically scanned to make them machine-readable, but it all takes time. I regret the delay, and can only ask for patience.

 

Odd things are developing with the BBC's plan to film me for a "Storyville" documentary on the suppression of free speech. I send them this e-mail in the evening:

Can you please give me a two line reason why the [Nick Fraser] interview is to be filmed in the open on Saturday?

I am wise to the ways to the BBC and other television companies, to the point of paranoia.

If the intention is to make me appear a rootless outsider, hence the filming outside, I won't go along with it. I have perfectly good premises here at Duke Street, with a study where I am normally filmed. . . . As said, two lines in writing, please.

In the evening I check the e-mails. One is a message from the BBC explaining (unsatisfactorily) the arrangements for tomorrow.

Up at 9:15 a.m. with a headache. Black cab to Hyde Park. Nick Fraser turns up. I refuse to be filmed at the Holocaust memorial. Nick says the Imperial War Museum refused to allow me to be filmed there, muttering something about "problems" they had after letting us hold the launch of Churchill's War, vol. i on H.M.S. Belfast in 1987.

Interviewed for an hour, in a biting wind, drizzle and sunshine, at Speakers Corner.

It goes moderately well, except they spring a minor ambush -- a printed Monopoly-style game board, called Pogromly (in Fraktur), with gas chambers and jackboots, which they claim to have bought off neo-Nazis in Germany; as they left, Customs at Frankfurt asked what it was and, told they were flying to England to film somebody, the officer said: "Would that be Mr Irving?"

Asked about the board, altho' momentarily nonplussed, I say it is probably manufactured by agents provocateurs, and I tell Fraser of the hired Skinheads who trooped into the front rank of my audience at Halle in Germany in 1991 and gave the Hitler salute and shouted Siegheil. It looks of suspiciously good-quality manufacture.

Fraser says he interviewed the head of the Verfassungsschutz, Germany's leftwing FBI, who dislikes me.

I reply: "Can't say I like him much, either." I remind Fraser he's on a BBC contract and will say nothing to jeopardize that; while I am free as a bird, constrained only by the limits of my own courage. At the end, I say I find the Holocaust boring.

"But you write about it!"

"No I don't. I never have. The reason the others make so much of it is that they are making money out of it, billions in the last year or so, and it is the only interesting thing that has happened to them in three thousand years; they are using it as an adhesive to keep their splintering people together."

He found that tasteless: So it is; much that is true is just that.

Work eight hours on Discovery. Lunch with Benté and Jessica. Jessica's reading is progressing by leaps and bounds, she wants to know what every word is. Today she pointed at a Miami Herald headline. "Daddy, What is j-e-w-s?"

What indeed? Hope she never has the same harrassment, the same grief as some of them have given me these last twenty years and more.

Then she spots h-i-t-l-e-r; I explain to her that he is the man who used to own her Birdie Spoon, and leave it at that. The other word is easier.

 

I've nearly completed going through all the Churchill boxes; interviews carried out for the book in 1973. Ouch.

But it is the only way to turn up the more abstruse stuff the Lipstadt lawyers are asking for.

A sad e-mail comes from H., whom I have phoned once or over the last few months. He has cancer. I reply at once

Das ist ja übel, und ich bete für Dich. Vieles hängt von der Willenskraft ab, und nachdem ich Dich kenne, weiß ich, Du hast mehr als genug davon. Ich würde wieder sehr gerne mit Dir klönen (Lübecker Jargon!) und vielleicht komme ich dafür mal nach Hawaii.

Bin Ende April sowieso in LA. Uns geht's gut, dem Kind besonders so: Jessica ist 4jährig, verschlingt alles an Büchern, was ich kaufen kann. Es ist jetzt two Uhr morgens, ich arbeite jeden Tag stundenlang an der Website.

Eine fabelhafte Erfindung. Hätte ich ohne Deine Hilfe buchstäblich nicht aufbauen können.

 

 

I have a curious dream at about seven a.m. I am on the quarterdeck of HMS Marlborough as the photo of Father is being taken.

After the first picture, I step forward -- wearing a raincoat, I think -- and hug him. I can feel the warmth of his body. I wake up soon after. I wonder if dying is like that -- you meet your parents again, and hug them

Hugh Sebag Montefiore calls round, and I give him stuff on PQ.17 and Ultra. While he is here, at 4:39 PM a slightly Jewish voice, anonymous, phones, asks how many Jews died in the camps during the war.

I state it is a problem of definition. What does he mean, "Died." He says, "No longer alive." I say, between one and two millions. He says, "More than thirty thousand anyway, the figure I've been told." (He also uses the phrase Holocaust denial, which puts him firmly in the enemy camp.)

I carry on working until three a.m., ten hours on Discovery: going through the second-copies files from left to right. I am exhausted. Bad dreams all night. Court hearings, etc.

My back is breaking from sitting at this computer day after day for around sixteen hours day. And -- no writing is getting done, week after week. I package books for America. Out in the rain to do shopping. Then work on Discovery from mid-day onwards. I am going through 1983--1984 now.

Work until 3:30 a.m. Total yesterday on Discovery, about twelve hours: the 1993/4 Day Books, around eight linear inches of A4 letters. I am determined not to let them wash me away with their Discovery demands.

Cleaning-lady Dawn says, "Is that the final colour scheme in the guest room?" The ceiling is a rather shocking pink, I admit to myself. I ask what she finds wrong with the colours. "A bit bland, aren't they?" she says in her Scottish accent. Eight hours today on Discovery.

I doze two or three times on the sofa. Seven more hours work on Discovery today: I am searching for individual documents, a time-consuming business.

Letters go to everybody who is anybody at Mondadori [the biggest Italian publishers] protesting at their delay in paying me. It is evident they have a policy of slow-paying their authors.

More hard work reading through boxes of Fighting Fund correspondence in case there is anything it from the eight gentleman listed in the Court Order. Eight hours work, 7,000 pages sifted. All other work at a standstill, apart from two hours on the Website.

 

Go to bed with a terrific headache at two a.m. (Monday); head really banging. At 6:10 pm I find in The Sunday Times' own Discovery a letter I wrote to [Editor] Andrew Neil on June 12 [1992], stating that I have "borrowed" two plates (in quotation marks) from the Moscow archives, but will be returning them next day.

It is awkward, and I shall have to discover it immediately to Sereny's lawyers: Though of course what her word "borrowed" leaves out is the addendum, "I shall put them back into the Moscow archives" tomorrow, which shows that "borrowed" is what it meant.

I write this letter to her lawyers at once (6:26 pm):

The enclosed item has surfaced this evening during our preparation of further Discovery in another action; I do not believe it is included in our previous List.

It is found by chance among documents discovered by Times Newspapers Ltd in my contract action against them (i.e. it is from their files); and it is clearly proper that I should supply this copy of it to you in advance of providing those other documents you have requested. Please acknowledge receipt of the document and this letter.

I have worked around five hours on Discovery today. Benté is scanning diaries all morning.

12:25 am phone H. in Hawaii. He's not feeling good. Had a look at our Website. I say again, without his help I could not have done it.

Work all day on Discovery, until my eyes droop. Also three hours painting the ceiling in Jessica's room. Alexis works five hours on clippings searches for Discovery. Benté four hours on diary scanning.

Sleep until nine a.m., when staff start arriving: Alexis, Benté, then R., who works all day on search-engines and operational analysis thereon. Discovery: Benté works on sorting the videotapes (three hours); Alexis on clippings (five hours).

I work literally all day on Discovery, ten or twelve hours right through.

Then two hours during the night on the Website, and deal with the sixty or so e-mails that have come during the day. No time for meals. Two hours at midnight painting Jessica's bedroom ceiling. It takes ages to prepare and then clean up afterwards.

I have to reorganise the entire publishers' correspondence into chronological sequence. Six feet of file boxes, some 20,000 letters to check through.

What a nightmare task, and no doubt they know it. I have done no productive writing for weeks. I have had no income whatever for three months.

However, we have a few surprises lined up for Prof. Lipstadt when the time comes.

I carry on working all day and evening, through to 5:10 a.m. on Sunday morning. Around three a.m. much noise from outside, the street full of first- and second-generation Black English, shouting and laughing drunkenly as they climb into their expensive cars, the wine bar in Davies-street having closed its doors. North Mayfair has plunged into an abyss.

Finally resume work around 10:25 p.m. My right arm and shoulder are aching badly; I do the page-turning standing up, as it is excruciating to do it sitting down. And with ten file boxes of document still to go through, there's a lot of "page turning" to be done.

Susie Töpler phones at one p.m.: The Daily Telegraph reports that Pedro Varela has been given a five-year jail sentence. Another victim of the enemies of free speech.

 

During lunch with Benté I decide to write a letter to The Times about Blair's plan to bomb Iraq: a war crime. [The Times rejects it, The Daily Telegraph prints it in full]

Our money is running low.

I work on Discovery (ten hours) during the day and night, again until 4:10 a.m., with the last two hours on the Website. I am losing track of day and night, and of time itself.

This fax goes to Ontario.

Ottawa has not yet responded. I think they are going to refuse.

I have made provisional air arrangements, but . . .

Work on Discovery all afternoon, and evening, and night.

Back from Selfridges next day at 7:20 p.m., there is a wad of stuff spewing from the fax machine, a Summons from Mishcon re Discovery. All evening until two a.m. on Discovery, then on the Website.

Bed at 4:10 a.m. Rise at 11:30 a.m.; when I go into the kitchen wrapped in a towel, I find a kindly old gentleman of 72 there, waiting patiently for me. He has brought a £50 contribution for the fund.

I labour all day on Discovery, until four a.m. on Sunday: Fourteen hours. Exhausted. Up at midday for Sunday lunch with Benté and Jessica, then resume at two p.m., and work right through the day and night, fourteen hours solid, until morning, Monday, on Discovery and affidavit.

I send Benté down to the High Court at four p.m. to give Master Trench the affidavit I will be using tomorrow. Resume at ten p.m., and all night until 7:30 a.m.; get the whole Discovery task complete, and the affidavit, and ready for printing.

Lie down for two hours, and am wakened by Benté at 10:15 a.m., and print everything out. Down to High Court, arriving at 1:50 p.m.

Anthony Julius, James Libson, and Andrew Bateman and others are there, grinning in triumphant anticipation. They are not pleased to see I have complied with the Order.

Hearing lasts until four p.m., with Trench's 3:15 p.m. case not materialising (a female attorney pops in, unopposed, to get a repossession order on a house). On my Summons for directions, we reach rapid agreement. Lipstadt is listing six historians and three political scientists as expert witnesses. Still seems like they hope to make a Moscow Show Trial out of it.

The tough part concerns the Irving Diaries. I have asked Master Trench to reduce the Order, as being oppressive.

He sees no way of doing that. I have lugged my 1969 diary in to the courtroom as an example of the size of the problem.

Julius says that if I am incapable of reading my personal diaries right through (a task that will take me six months), they'll be glad to do it for me! I seize on this, but say that such access must be carapaced by an Order of the most draconian sort.

"We must not forget," I say, "that we are dealing with a firm of lawyers who also act for an organisation which has been my sworn enemy for thirty years and have done all they can to destroy me."

 

Back at Duke Street at four. Jessica and Benté arrived home a few minutes earlier from school, where Jessica has been a giraffe in her first school pantomime.

She is desolate that I could not come and see, and I am sad too: these are life's milestones, and -- thanks to Prof. Lipstadt -- I have missed one of them.

So the Discovery phase is over. Tired. As tired as the radio-operator of HMS Amethyst in the Yangtse River. I try to stay awake for my family, but as I sit on the sofa my head rolls over two or three times, once with a perceptible snap. So I go to bed at nine p.m. Drained, but now over the watershed.

 

Up at midday, feeling groggy. A bad night, with wild dreams -- after-effects of all the documents I have read: I am sitting at a dinner in the United States with a surprisingly young looking Heinrich Himmler at my right. I remark on his evident youth, and ask how old he now is. I can hear my brain calculating. Himmler says, "Seventy-five." I reflect: doesn't look a day over forty. Outside, we have difficulty starting my car in the snow. I think it is ironic that Himmler of all people has got into the USA, while his SS minions and camp guards are forever being outed and ousted. Altogether an exhausting night.

There is still no response from the Canadian government. I have put a teaser on my Website, reproducing the Ottawa Sun's vicious November 1992 cartoon (right) which attacked me, just as the immigration "trial" was ending.

Work ten or twelve hours right through the night, now arranging the files of Discovery for "their" inspection, and (from four a.m.) arranging inspection room, etc. Bed around six a.m.

Lipstadt's lawyers then come late, around 10:30 a.m.

In the evening Himmler's son-in-law phones: the candid photo I have expensively bought is not of the late Reichsführer; they have compared it with many others.

Still no decision from Ottawa. This is absurd.

At 3:45 p.m. however the decision comes, negative, and for palpably absurd reasons. I draft this message to the Canadian High Commission:

Your letter of Dec. 3 states two grounds for the minister's continued refusal of my application for entry, even though subject to a witness subpoena issued by a Canadian Court. Neither ground is adequate:

1. You state that the German offence under which I am convicted, of Verunglimpfung etc., "has been determined" to be "equivalent to the offence of Public Incitement to Hatred." This is not so, and you are aware of the very high standards required by the Immigration Act which require that the conviction shall be for an offence which has an exact equivalent under Canadian criminal code.

2. You state that there are reasonable grounds to believe I would commit an offence. No properly constituted Court will accept this, given that (a) I have never been charged with any offence on my previous fifty or so visits to Canada, and (b) no requests for me to be so charged are evident in the files of the Attorney-General, which we obtained under your Access to Information Act.

Your decision is purely political, a violation of the Canadian charter of human rights, and an affront to freedom of speech. The Court will note that you waited until the very eve of my scheduled departure to inform me of the decision, although the application was made five weeks or more ago; I am entitled to construe this delay as being designed to ensure that no Canadian Court could be called upon to review the decision in good time.

Work on Website until 5:59 am., Friday. Eyes propped open

I have now had cause to re-read my 1993 diary, and read of Jessica's birth, five years ago to this day. What an innocent source of pleasure she has been through all these hard times. What an inspiration. Then far into the night on Website and publishers' brochure again, until six a.m.

Jessica's fifth birthday, but we can not afford a party for her. She is a bit bewildered.

Bob R. sends me an encouraging exchange between historians, earlier this year. On an Internet discussion group a Prof. Michael Kater wrote (dismissing the Christian Gerlach Discovery of an entry in the Himmler Diary): "So it looks as if David Irving can still not shell out his money."

I now repeat on my Website the famous $1,000 offer for any wartime document proving Hitler knew of the Holocaust. Maybe there is one, out there, but I doubt it.

 

I work until 4:20 a.m. and am up at ten. Benté has left for church, where Jessica is singing in a Christmas choir. She takes some photos. She is very proud of Jessica; we all are, we all are.

In the evening, my Mainz lawyer phones, proposing that I ask the Munich judge for a Strafbefehl (something like a plea bargain). I inquire what count has he in mind? Volksverhetzung, he says: I am indignant: not only am I not guilty, but if I agree to that, the traditional enemies of free speech will at once use it to get me barred from the USA.

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