International Campaign for Real History

The David Irving Microfilm Collection
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During the fifteen years that British historian David Irving worked on his two widely-acclaimed biographies of Adolf Hitler (The Warpath and Hitler's War), and on his biographies of the Luftwaffe Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, Göring's Number Two, arid of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, and on numerous other successful histories of the Third Reich, he amassed collections of official and private German records, and Allied interrogation of top Nazi officials, as well as interviewing many of the leading actors on an intimate basis himself.

Before transferring this Collection of his records to the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History), David Irving allowed Microform Academic Publishers, Main Street, East Ardsley, Wakefield WF3 2AP United Kingdom, to prepare well-catalogued microfilm copies for individuals and institutions to acquire.* (Some of the records were omitted from the microfilming programme for reasons of restrictions imposed by the donors, but they can be seen by permission in Munich.) The microfilmed portion of the Irving Collection, about 95 per cent of the total, includes all his research materials collected on the Nazi atomic and secret (V-) weapons research efforts as well as on the guidance of the war from Hitler's and the top Luftwaffe levels and on the political and military background to the decisions that were taken on the German side. Most of the documentary material is in the original German, while most of the interrogation and interview reports are in English.

David Irving attached great importance in his Collection to obtaining access to new or relatively unknown private diaries of individuals, and these are often filmed throughout, sometimes together with his typed transcripts of the difficult German handwriting. They include the diaries of Milch, von Richthofen, von Weizsäcker, Bormann, Koeppen, Hewel, Speer, Himmler (and his ADC, Brandt), Kreipe,. Koller, von Waldau, Schmundt, Eberhard, Fiebig, Pickert, Greiner, von Vormann, Tippelskirch, Lahousen, Jodl and fragments of the tantalizing Canaris and Mussolini diaries. These form an indispensable extension to the published diaries on which historians have hitherto chiefly relied like those of Goebbels, Ciano, Halder, Hassell, Groscurth, Frank and Rosenberg.

The records collected for the Rommel biography, including the personal diaries of Rommel and his interpreter Armbruster and naval aide Ruge, are particularly well catalogued and provide essential material for the study of the fighting in the North African desert (1941-1943) and in Normandy in 1944. See the recent review of this microfilm collection in Microform Reviews, vol. 7, No. 6, pp. 351-3.


* Microform Academic Publishers, Main Street, East Ardsley, Wakefield WF3 2AP United Kingdom: Telephone +44 (0)1924 825700; fax: +44 (0)1924 871005; email: [email protected]; websites: www.BritishOnlineArchives.co.uk and www.microform.co.uk/archival-publishing.php | Search Microform Academic Publishers online catalogue
Postscript
IRONICALLY, Mr Irving can no longer access his own files of these records at the Munich based Institut für Zeitgeschichte and the Koblenz Bundesarchiv. He was formally banned from setting foot in the latter archives on July 1, 1993, and banned from Germany as a whole on November 13, 1993, "in the interests of the German people."

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