David Irving |
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Friday, October 12, 2007
© Focal Point 2007
I write to a barrister friend that I am disenchanted the press thinking again it is open season. Seven years have passed since Great Lipstadt Trial.
October 6, 2007 (Saturday)
Windsor (England)I WRITE to my personal circle of editors apologizing for the hiatus in production of the Memoirs chapters.
From June to August I had to spend some months looking finally for a permanent home, which I now have here at Windsor. I moved in on September 3, and two or three times a week after that I have driven down to the Wiltshire-Somerset border to bring back a ton of our property from our warehouse.The house is still littered with opened and unopened boxes...
I did complete one editorial task -- with my left hand so to speak: I had written prison memoirs for a German publisher, and I have now edited this 120-page book which I shall print later this year: you will notice a different style, it is more chatty and introspective. You will find it at www.fpp.co.uk/books/Banged/
I am astonished at the growing uproar over my interviews with The Guardian and The Forward; there is acrimony from some supporters, but also solid backing from others.
AS Telecom have still not installed phones or Internet in our Windsor home, I have to go to Hammersmith every day for an hour, a forty-mile round trip, to go online. As I limp back to the car a burly man accosts me by name; I have my fists already clenched, but it turns out he's the Times photographer who photographed me at Duke Street after the Lipstadt trial. He will come out here to do a photo shoot next week.
October 7, 2007 (Sunday)
Windsor (England)Email to the Liverpool students. "How are we going? Did you receive the printed materials [cascade] I mailed? Are we still set for November 26? The moment you announce it you can expect massive counter pressure on yourselves and the university to begin."
James T. tells me that there is no expensive umbrella, all black silk and silver metal, in his house, so the one Benté asked him to look after while I was a prisoner in Vienna has evidently walked away with one of his visitors. He gave me a cheap imposter when I retrieved the other stuff; I only just noticed the switch. He blithely suggests that umbrellas can be bought for "a couple of pounds" in Oxford Street now. Not the one that is lost.
I fix the bookshelf -- it nearly blew off my truck two weeks ago on the M4 -- with panel pins and white glue, and feel rather useful at the end of it; I used the claw-hammer I bought as a boy, and which my older brother has sequestered for the last fifty years. He guiltily volunteered last week he had "found" amongst his own tools. When I was last its proud owner, in the 1950s, it had a bright wooden handle and gleaming chromium finish; now it is dull and rusty and black, its shaft impregnated with decades of grease; but I have ground and polished its face smooth on John's emery wheel, and it works again as well as any hammer should.
Paul Grubach, that persistent Hoosier, has begun screeching at me over the Guardian and Forward interviews. He is trying to lure me into a discussion of that awkward Hermann Höfle document (above), the piece of evidence that indicates -- by extension -- that about 2.4 million Jews were disposed of in Poland. Grubach is a (former) DIFF supporter and investor (which loan we repaid in full). Very unmannerly. He demands answers, in open letters posted around the Internet. Not my way of doing things. Irritating: he is like a wasp at a picnic, as Sir Alexander Cadogan once put it, and won't go away.
I had advised him to read my latest Radical's Diary where I give in brief the arguments for and against the Höfle document. He is a publicity hunter. It may suit him, but not me. I have my own fish to fry.
Rolf Hochhuth once advised me, back in the 1970s, never to reply to mail of any kind, especially not to fan-mail -- "There's no law that says you have to reply. If you do, they'll only feel encouraged to write again."
Ignoring Hochhuth's standing advice to the contrary, I did foolishly respond to Grubach.
He now nags: "How does the document refute the Holocaust revisionist viewpoint that the mass murder of Jews did not take place in Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor? How does it prove that the mass murder of Jews took place in those camps?"
I remember being the same as a child: Why? What? How? And then Why, all over again? -- Anything to attract parental attention. Foolishly, I again indulge him with a reply:
From 3 pm to 1 a.m., when I was in solitary confinement in that Viennese jail, after the jailers had all gone home leaving only a night skeleton staff, the 1,400 prisoners pressed their faces to their cell-window grids and the razor wire and shouted across the tiny exercise yards to their accomplices, getting their stories straight for the judge, in a Babel of 39 different Eastern European and West African tongues. It was cacophony, a nightmare.I did not of course join in, but sat by my open window as the temperature soared to the upper thirties Celsius, trying to shut the senseless Babel out of my mind while reading and getting my thoughts straight and writing - 4,000 pages of handwriting eventually, far more than I would ever have managed in 400 days in freedom.
"Conducting a raucous debate by Open Letter," I tell Grubach, "is much the same as that hollering through the cell windows. I listen sometimes with half an ear, and with less than half an interest, but I shall not join in the hubbub. Whatever I say is twisted a thousand times by a thousand hands, some well meaning, others not. Wait till the book comes out." -- meaning of course my new Heinrich Himmler biography.
Hear David Irving speak in British cities. Register interest
Next city Birmingham , October 26, 2007, buffet and talk, 7-10 pmI watch a DVD until 10:20 pm then go to bed.
October 8, 2007 (Monday)
Windsor (England)At 6 am I go downstairs to get an anti-histamine. I write to a barrister friend that I am disenchanted with the press thinking again it is open season. Seven years have passed since Great Lipstadt Trial. I intend to issue this blanket warning across the whole press to newspaper legal departments, putting them on notice to stop it. As for issuing a Writ, I mean it. (And I will shortly finalize the Peter Laskey one).
I send it to The Jewish Chronicle already. They are free to print the truth, but not lies.
I reply negatively: "I am sure I do not know what you are speaking about."
Paul Grubach has started a shouting match on the Internet, and I want none of it. He has sent out a second "Open Letter to David Irving on the Document that changed his mind on Holocaust." Since he discourteously circulated this before sending it to me, courtesy suggests that I do not this time reply.
Grubach of course has not set foot on the Reinhardt camps; nor has he seen the actual Höfle document as I have, close up, not once but half a dozen times, each time subjecting it to microscopic scrutiny. Even so, I should not reply.
October 9, 2007 (Tuesday)
Windsor (England)I WRITE to the School's finance director: "I have been paying school fees now for over forty years, or over fifty if I count in the years at university which I funded myself, and I do not regret a penny."
He has emailed a copy to me of a message he is circulating : "Boycott David Irving, No donations, no purchases !!" He gloats to me, "This has been sent far and wide."
The enclosure reads: "!! Boycott David Irving !! No donations, no purchases !! I suggest that all donations to David Irving cease immediately. All book purchases should be stopped until he comes clean. He refuses to speak truthfully and openly about his absurd assertions. Irving's behavior is unethical and distorts Revisionist efforts. Irving has become a fraud.... Pass this along."
Evidently not the most cerebral of my supporters, but just to be certain, I ask him: "Are you not the person who sent me a faked aerial photo of Auschwitz?" The photo had two identical columns of smoke, obviously created in Photoshop; I recall that that gentleman, also called Hannover, admitted later, when I exposed the fakery to him, that yes, he was responsi ble, hoping to prove how easily photos could be faked.
Very helpful. Rather like clergymen or television actors who are caught with smutty pictures on their computers, and who claim in court they were researching smut for a play or feature article.
Yes he is the same. He now sends another message, shrieking: "Why are you dodging Paul Grubach? Why don't you give your reasons for asserting that the 'Höfle telegram' equates to 2.4m Jews? Until you do, I will extend all efforts to get Revisionists to cease funding your duplicity. You call it 'real history', I don't think so, David. We're waiting. Hannover.
And once again, "DI: This has been sent far and wide. - Hannover ." Makes one wonder which side he is on.
I go online and find another Open Letter shouting at me, from Paul Grubach. This time I write him, privately,
Harping on money, you are beginning to sound like those nice folks next door. May I remind you that unlike you and your friends, I fought the Lipstadt action to the bitter end, lost four years of my life preparing it, had my home and entire possessions seized, my bank balances emptied; was lured to Austria and ambushed at gunpoint and imprisoned, losing my home again and the remaining possessions; despite that I repaid your generous loan in full. I have had to stand being vilified and smeared around the world by those nice money-orientated folks I mention in my opening sentence, who fear me far more than they fear you and the revisionist profanum vulgus; and still I stand upright and write what I find and believe to be true. I do not shout. I do not indulge in "Open letter" slanging. Carping and criticizing from the comfort of Ohio is all very well, but does not add one iota to our human knowledge.Bed around 10 pm after watching The Shop of Little Horrors "with Jack Nicholson" -- he does in fact appear, barely recognizably, aged about twenty, and for about three minutes only; it is a very old black and white film of New York-Jewish humor. Excruciating to watch, and most unfunny, as for that matter are most Charlie Chaplin movies now, but still interesting for the period settings. Turns out it was made in two days to fill a slot in a production timetable: who'd a thunk it.
October 10, 2007 (Wednesday)
Windsor (England)
THIS morning I check the phone, as I have done for the last five weeks, and -- it is working. BT finally switched it on. I mend the broken frame of the signed Churchill photograph, and screw it onto the wall (it is valuable of course). I wonder where the Adolf Hitler self-portrait is? Stolen from my possessions, or buried among the boxes which will be returned here on October 16 by the Trustee?
12:32 p.m Helen Fletcher of the Jewish Chronicle phones, and I explain to her that I am speaking in Liverpool November 26. She asks if I am worried about violence -- a threat I have heard them put that way so often before: I say I am 6 foot 2, and have not been deterred so far. Why are they alone trying to stifle free debate?
At present I am getting stick from both sides -- the Jews attack me as an anti Semite and racist, the revisionists as a traitor of sorts. Her editor Bernard Joseph has thrown his back out, she says, when I extend my good wishes, so I say to give him my best regards. Anything else, she asks? Yes, I say, feel free to phone me back any time for more negative answers! She laughs.
She phones later again, this time to ask if I am aware that Liverpool is hosting Holocaust Week next year. My leg is hurting badly, and I reply that I cannot give a toss. The Holocaust does not control my life. Like ninety-nine percent of the rest of the world, I am bored by it. It is all about raising money, as Norman Finkelstein says. I am interested in the people behind events.
John emails me from Wiltshire, and I reply: "Had some of the bacon two nights ago, it is superb. And stewed plums today also. Pigs and plums did not die in vain."
October 11, 2007 (Thursday)
Windsor (England)
SINCE I have run out of DVDs I last night fished out a DVD of Heinrich Himmler's Posnan speech of October 4, 1943 and watched it from beginning to end; Himmler always spoke freely, from jotted notes, not reading from a script; on this occasion he spoke to ninety-two of his Gruppenführer for three hours and twenty minutes.
A po-faced German actor reads the text on this film, and it is impressive. I disagree with those who say that Himmler was a poor speaker. The speech is well constructed, literate, and evidently held the attention of his audience, the leading figures in the Black Order of the SS.
He displays a surprising insight into human nature: he speaks of realizing the hideous burden, the lasting odium, that he inflicts on every family when he orders the execution of its head, for example; and of the grim rationale behind ordering that Russian women and infants be put to work building the anti-tank ditches needed to defend German blood.
The text used for the DVD is the actual words that Himmler spoke, taken from the sound recording, not the polished, edited version introduced at Nuremberg as document 1919-PS and used by subsequent historians (though not by me: I used the first typed draft transcript in Hitler's War, which I found in Himmler's files).
Accordingly this sound recording contains unexpected gems -- Himmler interrupting himself after twenty minutes to protest about the noise rising from the kitchens of the Golden Hall at Posnan Castle -- the female staff, excited by the testosterone-laden SS generals in their dress uniforms, chattering loudly and listening through the doorways. Himmler calls for silence, then orders the doors shut, and we hear calls for mattresses, "thick mattresses" to be laid against the doors and ventilation shafts to ensure secrecy. Lucky nobody tossed in a gas canister.
The film producers don't know what I know -- that Himmler has only two days earlier asked the general who had been running his Operation Reinhardt, Odilo Globocnik (right), to stay away from the Poznan function. Globocnik was evidently already on the road, in Austria; Himmler told him to turn back. I found the British decode of Himmler's urgent message to "Globus," telling him to stay away, and that has puzzled me for some weeks:
An B d O Alpenland, Salzburg.
Bitte über Veldes Gruppenführer Globocnik verständigen, daß Rf.SS ihn nicht in Posen erwartet. Gruppenführer G. soll zur Befehlsstelle zurückkehren.
Von B d O Italien, Chef des Stabes).In that part of the speech where he relates to his audience the new assignments and a reshuffle of his SS and Police Commanders, he regrets that Ernst Kaltenbrunner, "our friend Heydrich's" successor as RSHA-chief, is absent, suffering from an illness, as is police chief Kurt Daluege -- to judge from the decodes I have read, both men, like Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach Zelewski, whom he has appointed overall commander of anti-partisan operations -- appear to have been mild hypochondriacs. As for Globocnik, he says verbatim that unfortunately he "has not been able to attend."
The mystery deepens. Perhaps he wanted merely to allude to the killings, without giving the other generals a chance to grill Globocnik over beer and sandwiches later about their scale and other details. Two days later, speaking to the gauleiters, he is more explicit.
At 12:15 pm journalist Matthew Taylor of The Guardian phones to say that the Oxford Union has "confirmed" that I am to speak there. I reply that I have been invited seven times to speak there and seven times the invitation has been withdrawn [see links below], under pressure. There is no point my accepting invitations. I am beginning to wonder what is going on.
The Xerox engineer calls and gets our machine up and running (it sat imprisoned and disconnected in a dusty warehouse for two years while I was similarly housed in Vienna); when I asked if he needs a signature he says, "No, it's a contract job." Well, if he says so.
I drive in to Hammersmith at 5:40 pm, spend 50 minutes tilling the email fields. Paul Grubach is still screeching:
Mr. Irving, I am not shouting, I am just asking you a scholarly question. Please respond.I am tired of this. I reply: "I will be happy to discuss this when I have time; right now I do NOT."
He does not of course give up.
Me and many, many others who supported you in the past respectfully request that you answer the following question: etc etc etc]Disregarding his toe-curling, buttock-clenching bad grammar, I wonder what will silence him, short of something surreptitiously spooned into his bedtime Horlicks? With a sigh, I write: "How much time do you think I have at my disposal, Paul? I will answer, perhaps at length, later; it appears you have not read my writings on this issue for the last ten years, which have been consistent about the Reinhardt camps."
The revisionist Professor Robert Faurisson, for whose courage I have the utmost respect, has joined in the unseemly hubbub. He is circulating an abridged French translation of my reply to Grubach:
7 octobre 2007 Cher Paul, Quand j'étais en prison, à Vienne, et que, de trois heures de l'après-midi à 1 heure du matin, les gardiens étaient tous partis pour ne laisser qu'un personnel de garde squelettique, les 1.400 prisonniers pressaient leurs visages aux grilles de leurs fenêtres et aux fils de fer barbelés et appelaient en criant leurs complices d'un bout à l'autre des cours (...) dans un brouhaha de 39 langues différentes, des langues d'Europe de l'Est et d'Afrique orientale. C'était une cacophonie, un cauchemar. Bien sûr je ne me joignais pas à ce concert et je restais assis devant la fenêtre ouverte, la température était largement au-dessus de 30 degrés, et j'essayais d'évacuer de mon esprit ce brouhaha absurde en lisant et en essayant de mettre de l'ordre dans mes idées et en écrivant... 4.000 pages, en fin de compte, de texte écrit à la main, bien plus que je n'aurais jamais pu en écrire en 400 jours de liberté. Mener un rude débat au moyen de Lettre ouverte, c'est un peu comme de crier à travers la porte d'une cellule. J'écoute parfois avec une demi-oreille, et avec un intérêt encore moindre, mais je ne me joindrai pas à ce tohu-bohu. Tout ce que je dis est tordu mille fois par des milliers de gens, certains avec les meilleures intentions, d'autres non. Attends la sortie de mon livre. David Irving (actuellement en paix et en liberté à Windsor, Angleterre).and he adds,
Finalement, comme le prévoyait le professeur Faurisson qui a toujours qualifié David Irving de "romancier", ce dernier, au lieu de répondre d'une simple phrase à la simple question de Paul Grubach, "esquive le défi qui lui était lancé sur le plan de l'histoire et se lance dans un récit émouvant et coloré" à la fin duquel, en bon commerçant, il lui propose... d'acheter son prochain livre!!!Of course I wrote nothing to Grubach about "buying" my next book; I told him to wait for it -- and as my regular readers know, all my books now appear as free downloads online first, as I value the input I get from around the world.
The Oxford newspaper Cherwell now joins the chorus about my "forthcoming Oxford Union" speech. There will be no such speech! "We are currently writing a story," they write, "on your upcoming appearance at the Oxford Union alongside [British National Party chief] Nick Griffin." Aaaargh!
I repeat: I have no plans to speak at Oxford University, or alongside Mr Griffin, whom I do not know and have never met. I have no connections with the BNP or any other party. Sorry to kill what might have been good story. I have my head down right now, writing in peace: memoirs, Himmler, and Churchill volume III.Later, a different journalist in the same newspaper writes: "We have been told by the President of the Oxford Union that an invitation has been extended for you to talk at the Free Speech debate on 26th November 2007 and that you are in discussions with the Union at the moment. Can you confirm this?"
This is getting as bad as the Grubach letters. I reply: "There is no truth in this rumor, I have been invited seven times before and then seen such invitations discourteously withdrawn.
[Previous Radical's Diary]
Our dossier on the Origins of Anti-Semitism
- A partial History of Oxford Union seven invitations to David Irving to speak, all without exception so far cancelled under pressure from the traditional enemies of free speech:
