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 Posted Sunday, October 10, 1999
Caricature by David Smith

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.

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ugust 1999
London, England

All day Jill works on distilling DRESDEN for Acrobat posting on Website. The computer then crashes and I spend the evening rebuilding the PageMaker item. Aaargh; but got it posted onto the Website in very nice form at 11:44 PM. Free, but in the spirit of the Web. I shall do the same with HITLER'S WAR very shortly!

Work all day with Jill on Acrobat version of NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE. Post it in the evening on the Website. Much praise already for the APOCALYPSE 1945, THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN posting.

Video of Wochenschau arrives from Hamburg. I ask them for permission to place one segment on our Internet Website.

Jill has started preparing GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH for the Website, a free download; the floppies we are working from are of course considerably longer than the published text; I edit them down at St Martins' Press's request, particularly the early chapters.

To a sceptic I reply:

When my books first appeared (1962) there were no such things as computers or floppies. I'm going only the Acrobat way. Get Acrobat ReaderIf people can't be bothered to get the free Acrobat Reader download, then I can't be bothered with them. Book sales won't suffer (a) they're mostly out of print; (b) students will prefer to read and quote from (my) on line books, as they can copy and paste. In my view anyway.

I phone the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) about doing a mail-out; they can send out 12,500 leaflets about Cincinnati.

Drive out to Heathrow at 5 p.m. to collect Benté and Jessica on their return from Denmark; I take a home movie of their arrival. It would be nice to visit her parents, but -- we know that Denmark sometimes acts as though the Wehrmacht is still in occupation. Benté does not spot me, Jessica does. Both looking very beautiful indeed.

Today there are thirty emails. One from a lady in Indiana offers

2400 self supporting acres in Southern Ind [Indiana] to be offered to white power groups and individuals esp vets who make up over half of the homeless. Yeh America, where the draft dodger sleeps in the White House and the vets sleep in the streets.

She gives her address, but sounds like an agente provocateuse to me. Why me, O Lord?

 

square A Dr David Meier asks:

Did you do the translation of Reinhard Gehlen's memoirs into English? Did you have contact with him at the time?

I reply:

I did. His memoirs published in German were a heap, purchased blind (unseen) by Peter Ritner of World Publishing Co. Ritner later exited from the company, taking an unusual and rather direct route from their 100th floor of the Empire State Building to the ground. I like to think that Gehlen's memoirs, as worked over by me, had nothing to do with that primitive attempt at flight. When Ritner saw the useless book he had spent $200K on, he hired me to put meat on its bones; I interviewed Gehlen ten or twenty times on tape, and fleshed out the MS with chapter and verse. In the process I reviewed all the clippings files on him and discovered the rather odd fact that chapters of his book were almost identical with articles in Dr Gerhard Frey's newspaper Deutsche Soldatenzeitung: either Gehlen had lifted (pirated) them, or he was the original author for Frey, writing under a nom de plume. Gehlen then chopped out a lot of what I put in, on security grounds. I put all the interview notes into my papers (collection, Sammlung Irving) at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, which I can no longer reach (banned from German soil since 1993). 

 


square A vicious and abusive email comes from Professor Arthur Butz, of North-western University, objecting that I describe John Bennett of Australia in my last Action Report as an "Aussie meathead" because he called me in the wee hours. I could have commented of course that as a tenured professor he has a rather cushioned existence, with no doubt a pension at the end of it all. Instead I reply:

I have noted your comments. Had John Bennett not repeatedly -- i.e. many times -- committed this infraction, he would not have earned the title. A meathead in my book is somebody who will not learn.

Perhaps that includes us all, but I at least try not to phone people around the world in the wee small hours of the morning. I have a short enough night as it is, without being phoned on the hour and half hour by my many thoughtless friends around the globe who cannot be bothered to work out for themselves what time it is in the land they are calling.

Shootings at DachauWork until 3 a.m. putting in rolling link Javascript on the front page of AR-Online.


square Charles Provan phones, delighted to speak at Cincinnati on the Dachau massacre. Things are shaping up well; I just hope we now get the numbers.

Alois S. congratulates us on the Adobe book uploads:

Dear Mr Irving, I would like to present my congratulations for the excellent quality of your .pdf files. The use of embedded fonts and clean typography makes the result really impressive! I don't know what impact these files will have on your book sales but it is surely a kick in the a... for the enemies of real history and free speech.

I reply:

Many thanks for your kind remarks. After I noticed that the FBI Website and other important Websites (among them, the Smithsonian) used .pdf files, I investigated and realised that with PageMaker 6.5 you can produce very clean files in that format for free downloading. One of my staff is currently preparing Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich in pdf. Trotz Verbot, nicht tot!

We attach importance to clean typography and the hyperlinks. You will notice that we use a generous leading (space between the lines) which would be impossibly extravagant in a printed (paper) book; this is to discourage Far East pirates from printing the pdf. files as books. I think that over the years it will help to spread my books, and not damage sales. It is anyway my modest contribution to the world we live in. Students will be able eventually to read all my 30 books in .pdf files (and very few books by my rivals are available in this manner). Your letter of encouragement suggests to me that I am doing the right thing...

Abusive and pornographic e-mail from "Nazi-hunter" threatening to wreck the Cincinnati function. It reads:

The infamous nazi-wannabe piece of sh*t "historian" has organized a "Real History" conference in Cincinnati September 24-26. This scumbag **** nazi pederast deserves a proper reception.

Accordingly, we are in the process of ascertaining the exact location, timetables, and schedules, of these proceedings. These will be published, together with the phone numbers of the hotel and organizers. We will also detail what our further actions will be.

Islamic radio in Iran phones asking me for an interview. I refuse and hang up. Mark W. has given them my phone number


square With Benté to Grosvenor Square. Jessica has her pink bicycle, on which she now pedals crazily around the flower beds. She has learned suddenly to balance, "got the hang of it." She pedals madly up and down the paved surface, past Benté who sits facing me, smiling proudly. She whooshes past with no feet on the pedals, then no hands. My heart too bursts with pride and joy about this little girl (and about Benté too).

I work until 2 a.m.

Set out with Jessica as driver's mate to Dartford with a load of books for America, at 3 p.m., but traffic is heavy and we won't make it by 4:30 p.m. so I turn back. Larry M. emails a picture of his five year old Sarah, who died last year. I reply

Thank you so much for your kind letter and for the picture of Sarah, which came through bright and strong and which I am printing tomorrow for Jessica, who is always with us. When I go out with Jessica, as I did today I am always mortally terrified that something may snatch her away.

This worrying email comes:

I have received several reports about a possible confrontation with ARA in Cincinnati in connection with your "Real History" weekend on September 24. People have written me that the ARA is gearing up to getting ugly, and some have expressed concern that, if you are caught unawares, bad headlines for the cause of truth in history might result.

The ARA is, in fact, a creation of Jewish interests. He knows this via an ARA dropout. ARA has replaced the JDL, which gave the Jewish community a bad name because of the name, "Jewish." They are an a Marxist-anarchist street gang for hire, to be used by more-or-less remote control - just like B'nai Brith did it in their campaign in Toronto, where BB supplied legal advice, signs and press contact as well as organizational support in their campaign against Ernst for several years.

Cincinnati is ARA Central Command Office. Money and directives come from a Jewish law firm who acts as a conduit in Cincinnati. ARA had their national (possibly even international) get-together there - marches, speeches etc. in 1996-97. They had demonstrations there where several of them were arrested. They are one ugly bunch.

That the Cincinnati Police Intelligence Unit seems to have penetrated this outfit at their last gathering, and the cops there did a superb job in boxing in or containing the illegal activities of ARA hotheads to a minimum.

Up at 8:30 or so. I go out with Jessica to Grosvenor Square, and she pedals madly around the perimeter for fifteen minutes.


square Around lunchtime or just after (we sit outside the Spaghetti House) I finally open the first of the thick blue binders of expert reports served up by Lipstadt. This one contains reports by Professors Roger Eatwell, Funke, and Levin. I know none of them, and having read the reports suspect my life has not been deprived of much. I spend the whole day until around midnight reading the first binder, 500 pages or so of double spaced typescript.

Of course I am alarmed that my private diaries for forty years, some seventy volumes, have been placed in the hands of experts overseas, over whom the British courts have no jurisdiction, and at the end of the day I write a letter to Mishcon de Reya asking if these experts have been warned about the implied undertakings.

I also noted that Mishcon have provided Levin with Mozzochi's affidavits, though both were ordered struck out by Master Trench as defective. This seems a clear wrongdoing to me, and they earn a sharp letter of rebuke and a request that they remove those passages, failing which I shall ask the court to do so.

Irritating is that they have cherrypicked the references to Mr Duke visiting me (with his nubile girlfriend Christy); the sentences which make plain that Mr Duke came to me as a budding author, that I then made pertinent suggestions about editing his work, and advised him to find a mainline publisher, and passed his name to my literary agent for that purpose are overlooked.

As edited by Levin, my diaries reveal me as the kind of person I for one would certainly not have liked to associate with!


square I spend until 2 a.m. reading the first six months of my 1995 diary, and this restores my self-esteem: many historic episodes, large and small, like Jessica's first steps; the admission by Auschwitz to L'Express in January that the gas chamber shown to tourists is a fake -- another great revisionist victory; and the shocking phone call in February with word that poor, obese old Tom Norman, Wheezy Tom, who had spent two weeks with us at the end of 1994, and was setting up our mail-order bookstore in North Carolina, had been found dead, shot execution-style in the back of the head while he slept, etc.

Two of the Professors reproduce my nonsense-poems hummed to Jessica. Those will rebound on them if they use them in court: wait and see. One of the Professors comments on the content of the Website, for its high "traditional enemies" profile (which they speciously and wrongly equate with Jewish): What do they expect? The Website was launched soon after the writs were served, with the aim of providing funds and Intelligence for the two big court actions (which are shortly to be joined by a third).

If they object to some of the (newspaper) items I have posted, they should see those that I have rejected!


square Phone John Fox to discuss revelations of Himmler diary, December 1, 1941.

Professor Toby Graham sends a letter regretting that he has had a stroke and cannot speak (on Churchill) at Cincinnati after all. I invite Count Tolstoy.

Dinner at the Spaghetti House. Kevin H. is there, which rather disturbs my plan to read more of Professor Longerich's epic statement, which is pure guff so far: I return to the flat, my brain deadened with professorial waffle, my ears ringing with clichés. Not much fear from his testimony.

Up at 7 a.m., unable to sleep; Viking Ltd delivered new office bookshelves, mahogany finish, they look good. Three of them, 8 feet tall. At last we can restore order to this flat after two years of chaos (legal Discovery).

Mishcon have refused to remove the offending passages from Levin's statement, based on the "forbidden" Mozzochi affidavits. I phone my legal friends, and they agree: Issue a summons. To High Court at midday to issue the summons. Only now it is called an Application, and the fee has increased by eighty percent.


square Rumours have begun circulating in Germany that I am dead. Gerd Sudholt phones in alarm two or three days ago. (He hasn't phoned me for years, and pirated HITLER'S WAR with Fleissner's help, so he may have hoped it was true). I reassure him. Today a letter from a retired lieutenant: same thing, and "Please tell me that it's not true." I reply, "Reports of my decease are premature and exaggerated. Who invents them! I presume, the traditional enbemies of the truth."

It's a familiar method of intimidation by proxy. I do not fear being bumped off either -- yet: "they" will wait until after the two High Court trials, or at least the first one.

HistoryChannelReinhard T. emails me from California about the History Channel's documentary on the fake Hitler's diaries. "You were never mentioned while I watched. They may have given you some recognition at the beginning of the show but I doubt it. It consisted of a bunch of people claiming that they suspected them to be frauds. It looks like you are destined for the memory hole," to which I reply: "Indeed. I am told that if you see the newsreel coverage of the Stern press conference, April 1983, you can see me as the person denouncing the diaries are fake. But no name is given! For the story (in case you did not see it) go to my Website: http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/Torpedo/index.html."

Tolstoy hedges his bets about Cincinnati; has another date, otherwise he will come. I reply:

I should have mentioned that the 200 people attending include most of my heavyweight backers. They would undoubtedly be proud to assist you in your cause, after a well delivered address on the subject of your battles. I have of course read the Ian Mitchell book as well as your own, and wrote letters to The Times and the Telegraph commenting on the scandalous perversion of justice that has occurred. My own action against Lipstadt starts on January 11, no judge yet assigned (hope it's not Judge Davies). It's going to last three months, but I can take it.


square For my updating of HITLER'S WAR I have over recent days been dipping into GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH. I am immodest enough to say that I find myself now unable to put it down. I think it is the finest I have written so far. Hitler's WarEight years in the gestation: eight days in the suppression! Thank you, Mr Abraham H Foxman and other well-wishers of free speech.

Drove around all afternoon with Jessica, to builder's merchants, then to Sainsbury's. Very pleasant, in the sunshine, listening to her girlish chatter.

Quiet day. I am still reading Longerich. He claims to have worked in 44 archives, but there is little trace of it in the report; his reference notes are to published volumes, as though he sat in a library all his life, plucking volumes off the shelves and reading what was thus placed before him by other Peter-Longerichs in past decades. In other words, he has not added one iota to the sum total of human knowledge. Needless to say, no reference to the David Irving Collections in any of the German archives.


square The Times reports, BORMANN ASHES ARE BURIED IN THE BALTIC. I put the story on the Website with this footnote:

Bormann"Martin Bormann [left] was one of Hitler's most industrious henchmen, in a milieu where the hardworking triumphed over the indolent and malcontent. Hovering in the background, or seated inconspicuously at meals, Bormann had his notepad always ready to take down his Führer's remarks, convert them to commands, and order them executed without question. Hitler remarked one day that he had no shade to stand in as the thousands trooped past his summer home at the Berghof to see their Führer. Next day, he found a full grown lime tree standing there for him: brought in Bormann. He became indispensable. His private hatred of the Catholic church and of the Jews became the mainspring in the campaigns which were to prove the eventual downfall of the Nazis. The body of Bormann was eventually dug up after brilliant sleuth work by my friend Jochen von Lang, Stern journalist [born Piechocki, Vertreter der SS im RmfVuP who boasted that it was his voice on Berlin radio that announced the death of Hitler], in the 1970s. Buried next to it was found a second male corpse with a wedding ring -- the date engraved inside confirmed it as the corpse of Hitler's SS doctor Ludwig von Stumpfegger, as I confirmed with Stumpfegger's brother, then living at Ingolstadt. The two men had broken out of Hitler's bunker on May 1; trapped by Russian troops beneath the Lehrter railroad bridge, and dazed by a tank shell detonating just yards away, they swallowed their cyanide pills as Hitler had ordered all his staff to do. Dental evidence on Bormann at first seemed conflicting, until the doctors realised they were looking at the jaw the wrong way up. In his expensive leather greatcoat, which was stripped off the body by a Russian soldier, was found a pocket diary, which my Moscow friend Lev Bezymenski later published: these pages provided important evidence that the Hitler's Last Testament table talks published by Trevor Roper in the 1960s were fake. But that is another story."

A couple of hours sitting in Grosvenor Square in the sunshine reading the Longerich reports, marking them up, and watching Jessica pedalling around on her pink bike, and making friends with other families.

I write to one of my experts:

Yes, as you may recall in my abrasive (and as yet unanswered) letter to Van Pelt I asked him why he never bothered to make the drive down the road from Waterloo, Ontario, to Washington DC to have a look at all the verbatim Höss testimonies on microfilm there -- something which I, a non-Holocaust scholar, did out of sheer curiosity.

This trial certainly offers a chance to bring all the Höss materials out into the open, including Eichmann's comments on the Höss memoirs, which I am sure I can borrow in the original from their owner for the occasion.

I have nearly finished reading Longerich's report. He claims to have worked in 44 archives, but quotes only printed sources. He has sat in a library, on his butt, and not advanced the sum total of our knowledge one iota. Then he bleats toward the end that even now (after sixty years!) we have no real evidence as to how it all happened.

Perhaps in that case Germany should stop locking up scholars who "look askance" (schief schauen, to quote the famous July 16, 1941 memorandum), then! The evidence he quotes for the shootings in the east is watertight, and I do not dispute that. None of us does, right?

His star source is Von dem Bach-Zelewski. Now, what happened to Mr Bach-Z after the war, then? Did he survive? Uh, you say he died in his bed, at a ripe old age? You say he was relied upon by the Americans, and the IMT, and by Mr Longerich and countless others, this Nazi war criminal and mass murderer who gave orders for the liquidations of tens of thousands? What kind of deal did he cut with the Allies then, this worthless piece of uniformed crap?

The evidence that Longerich produces for "It was done on Hitler's orders" is all, without exception, from court verdicts of the 1960s and 1970s. Really safe, given the verdicts handed down from courts in a country where the Minister of Justice humiliates, publicly excoriates, and dismisses judges who get the wrong results, or sends them on "sick leave"; where a defence lawyer is beaten to a pulp with baseball bats in the court precincts, or lawyers are arrested and fined for defending their clients, under those same laws of defaming the memory of the dead, etc; and where defendants are not allowed to produce witnesses and documents.

Prof.LipstadtI think the traditional enemies of the truth are going to regret the day they commissioned Deborah Lipstadt to libel me.

In the evening, 11:30 p.m., I find a fax from Count Tolstoy: his Russian speaking tour has fallen through, and yes he will speak at Cincinnati. That's fabulous.

Replying to a good message from my experts I write:

The Pelt statement is voluminous, ca 500 pp., and illustrated with good facsimile documents. I am waiting for the lawyers to send me a diskette of it, which I am entitled to under the Rules.

Harald Turner document. My instinct is, it is probably genuine. It was first thrown at me by Gitta Sereny in 1977. I noticed the typed-in runes, but considered it was a one-off attempt by Turner. Although it must have taken a hell of a long time, and did he do that with every letter? One wonders if there are any other Turner letters to compare it with. The paper is an odd size, US letter size, which is in fact very odd. That I have NEVER seen in German archives before.

Oddly enough, I bumped into Turner's daughter in Torremolinos in about 1970. She was pretty bitter about her father having been hanged. I have her address somewhere (Marburg I think).

I must read up my diary on that talk with her some time. I was not interested in the Holocaust then (in fact it was not even called that then) and am not now.

The extraordinary thing about the BP decodes is that they support the revisionist line the whole way. Just one instance: I was excoriated for my printing the Nov. 30, 1941 Himmler phone call to Heydrich from Hitler's bunker, ordering "Keine Liquidierung" of a Berlin transport of Jews. But they had already been shot that morning on arrival outside Riga. Now we find (a) a furious Himmler, hearing of this shooting, signals Jeckeln twice on Dec. 1, 1941, telling him he has overstepped the Richtlinien [guidelines], and ordering him to report to Führer headquarters at once to explain himself! (The intercepts of the two signals are in PRO file HW16/32). Tail between his legs, Jeckeln turns up at Himmler's HQ on Dec. 4, 1941, as ordered (Himmler diary, just published), and the shootings of German Jews stop for many months (as the Peter Witte book admits: now where was all the hype about THAT in the press! Nowhere.)


square Jessica scampering around. Work until 3:30 a.m. on a seven-hour job, scanning the Völkischer Beobachter, January 31, 1939 edition (it's been hanging on my office wall these last twenty years), correcting tones, etc.

If the argument by Professors Levin, Evans and the others is that by having met and talked with D., V., E. and others I have become tainted, and that I am in the words of Professor Lipstadt also an extremist thereby, I shudder to think of the damage I have done, scattering my vicious extremist pollen around the world in talks with thousands of innocent liberals like the philosopher Karl Jaspers, with whom I spent an afternoon visiting him with the no less liberal playwright Rolf Hochhuth (my Dutzfreund since January 1965); people like Hugh Trevor Roper, CIA chief Bill Casey, etc., etc.

In fact like some AIDs-infected flight-attendant I must have cut an unwitting swathe of extremism through the entire liberal world since 1959 when I first came out -- or so it is alleged by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and its Gestapo-like army of sneaks and "monitors" -- as a mild fascist.

An exchange of messages during the forenoon with Tolstoy. He writes:

I shall certainly preserve confidentiality, and am glad we are not to be pestered by hacks or censors.

I reply: "I am telling individual audience members this:

"I'm delighted to say I have persuaded Count Nicolai Tolstoy to address the Real History function this year on "A British War Crime: Censorship and the Historian." He is the author of two great books on the 1945 British repatriation of Russians and Yugoslav civilians to their deaths at the hands of the Reds, with the secret connivance of Harold Macmillan and British army generals. The story of the massacres was hushed up, and one of the generals, who is now Lord Aldington, sued Tolstoy for libel. It was one of the most famous British libel actions of all time. The government concealed the archival records proving that he was right until the day the trial ended -- when the missing files mysteriously returned to the Public Record Office..."

In barest outline, I believe this is correct?

He replies:

This is quite correct, except that Douglas Hurd kept the material secret until threatened with exposure nearly a year later by Thames TV. The original cover-up was ordered by Geoffrey Howe, who had been appointed a Director of Sun Alliance by Aldington as Chairman!

Then disaster strikes. Count Tolstoy tells me Russia has just contacted him to go ahead, and he is withdrawing from Cincinnati.


square I worry all night about Benté, get up at 4:20 a.m., then go back to bed.

Jessica shows me a floppy disc she has labelled with a 101-Dalmatians label she has printed; she has dragged a number of her files onto the disc. Then she prints out a fax to J. (one of our secretaries) and sends it: It reads, "When I grow up I am going to look for lots of cats." Not bad for a five year old.

The History Channel announces the DRESDEN film, but adds the now obligatory slur and shinkick:

WORLD PREMIERE! Inferno: The True Story Of Dresden (September 19): On the night of February 13, 1945, Allied planes began Operation Thunderclap, a 24-hour bombing raid over the German industrial city of Dresden in the hope of delivering a knockout blow to break Germany's spirit. The bombing of Dresden caused a drastic loss of life and provoked worldwide horror and controversy. What were the wartime circumstances that caused the Allies to believe such a brutal attack on civilians was warranted? Experts from both sides, including controversial neo-Nazi David Irving, reflect on the motives of the attack.

I protest to the film production company Termite Art at once:

I am shocked to see that the History Channel in advertising the DRESDEN film refers to me as a neo-Nazi. I find this poor return for the unpaid work that I put in on assisting your staff on this project. . .

I am sure that your people who know me have not attached this label to the program, and that the guilty party is somebody else who has an agenda of his own. Please ensure that this label is removed forthwith from the film.

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