The public prosecutor in Leoben had reviewed the actual tapes, and concluded that I had not broken any laws; so had the Stapo [Staatspolizei] officer who actually attended.

MEMOIRS DRAFT (A foretaste)

Vienna Imprisonment

FOR many weeks I brooded on where the Pottersman Factor fitted into all this. Apart from the eight police officers who had forced my car off the autobahn at gunpoint -- they had been informed that I was a car thief -- the Austrians could not have been friendlier.

As word spread round Vienna's Josefstadt jail on who I was, I received a stream of visitors. Jailers brought me magazines, mail, packets of coffee as gifts. One gave me a glass of whisky, "Nobody must hear of this." The enemy blubbered with fury in the national press when they learned that my books were in all the prison libraries, over a hundred as it turned out, including Hitler's War. The ministries reassured Parliament that my books had now been withdrawn. An unknown Austrian historian -- nearly all Austrian historians are unknown -- was appointed to check them. The books by me were burned. This would surely convince the world that Austria was not a Nazi state.

The criminal court permitted me to see a duly sanitized police file. Intelligence materials had been removed but it was still quite thick, and went back sixteen years. The top transcripts were laboriously typed and worryingly inaccurate, transcripts of my talks in Leoben (November 5, 1989) and Vienna (November 6) received by the police several weeks later, after ordering my arrest. The public prosecutor in Leoben had reviewed the actual tapes and concluded that I had not broken any laws; so had the Stapo [Staatspolizei] officer who actually attended. The Socialist Student society at Leoben University had kindly supplied to the Stapo their own tape of my talk.

Günther Bögl , the Vienna Polizeipräsident, had isssued the now faded, yellowing arrest warrant, before any of the transcripts were received, on the evening of November 8, 1989; that was the day before the Berlin Wall came down, an ironic counterpoint in European freedoms. Bögl's panic was evident -- the Viennese press that morning was reporting that Jewish and Communist organizations were calling for his resignation or dismissal for having failed to silence me completely in Vienna on the sixth.

Turning the page, I came to the pivotal documents. Although they now (2006) deny it and pretend in statements to the press not to have been involved, here was their actual Anzeige, their formal demand for my arrest and prosecution: the Communist-front and largely Jewish organization, the Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands (Document Centre of the Austrian Resistance) had addressed this Anzeige, calling for my arrest, to Bögl on the seventh, based solely on that morning's report in the far left newspaper Arbeiterzeitung (Worker's Newspaper); a report which the journalist concerned, Christa Zöchling, almost immediately partially retracted as inaccurate, when sworn before a judge two days later.

Police chief Bögl received this Centre's arrest-demand at midday on the eighth, as the copy in my hands showed, and he had acted on that alone.

There were familiar names on its letterhead, including Professor Erika Weinzierl; she still promotes the hate-filled dogmas of Austria's historians, and may God have mercy on her otherwise, as newspaper photographs suggest that Erika has the kind of ineffable beauty that can stop one thousand ding-ding-ding full-right-up Number 15 London buses charging pell-mell down Pall Mall.

The Archive Centre's Honorary President was Professor A. Maleta: it is not an unusual name: Maleta is not Rumpelstiltskin. Still, I confess I did really wonder if this was the same Professor A. Maleta who had sworn affidavits many years ago that he had personally seen homicidal gas chambers in operation at Dachau, Heinrich Himmler's first concentration camp? (The German Government has long ago dismissed that particular piece of nonsense history; there was no such installation at Dachau.) A lot of people served time because of Maleta's convenient little perjury.

Deeper in this public file I came across even uglier stuff, including letters from the Israelitische Kulturgemeinde of Austria: Their chief executive Peter Grosz* was applying for a permit to demonstrate outside my Vienna lecture on November 6, 1989, with a hatred-filled coalition of three to five thousand like-minded folks: the Vienna Gesindel would all be there, and Grosz appended a battle-order of participating bodies.

There was something about this Israelite Cultural Community, the equivalent of our own unduly respected Board of British Deputies, that reminded me of that Coalition for Human Dignity in Oregon, the mob-spitters. Perhaps it was the news clipping I found in this police file, reporting that Grosz, in his address to the Gesindel multitudes, had called on them to use Gewaltmassnahmen, violence, if necessary to stop me lecturing. My attorney Dr Herbert Schaller had read that item at the time and issued an immediate Anzeige against Grosz for criminal incitement to violence, but it was soon choked off in the conduits of Austrian justice.

Prosecutions are a one-way street in modern Austria. People like Grosz get special treatment; while I am reading this police file 16 years later in a Vienna prison cell.

GOTCHA! -- These Lilliputian swarms, Pottersman's people, these international midgets with their buckets and ladders and threads, must have thought that they had finally got me strung down. . . (etc.)

Donate | regular

David Irving arrest in Vienna (dossier)