David Irving portrait

David Irving

[Photo by Michael Hentz for The New York Times ]


Letter to the Editor
Times Colonist, Victoria, British Columbia


July 16, 1998

Letters Editor

Times Colonist

Victoria B.C.

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London, England, Tuesday, January 11, 1994

 

YOU PUBLISHED (Jan. 2) Brad Bird's review of Professor Eberhard Jäckel's little paperback attack on me, David Irving's Hitler: A Faulty History Dissected (Ben-Simon Publications) and you quote Robert Fulford's foreword: "Jäckel demonstrates with a scholar's precision the ingenious ways in which Irving manipulates evidence, collecting whatever fits his preconceptions, misinterpreting as he chooses, and ignoring whatever fails to support his views.

In my own defence may I offer your readers some background data on Professor Jäckel? Basically, as Hamburg police themselves informed me during the Hitler Diaries trial some years ago, he is a document-forger and falsifier of history.

It was none other than he who authenticated the Hitler Diary in 1982, having briefly perused the handwritten 1935 volume handed to him by a certain Konrad Kujau (its actual author). (Jäckel then locked it away, hoping that Kujau would not dare to ask for its return). Relying on Jäckel's "expertise," Stuttgart businessman Fritz Stiefel lost millions of deutschmarks, purchasing worthless scraps of paper which Jäckel falsely advised were the long-lost "third volume" of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

This same Jäckel had meanwhile published scores of Kujau's fabricated Hitler documents in his "scientific" volume, Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905 -- 1924 (published by the highly respectable DVA in 1980); even the dustjacket was a Kujau forgery!

When his carelessness was finally exposed, Jäckel at first admitted that four of the documents were fakes, then finally came clean: he admitted in a learned journal (the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1984, page 163, which had also unwittingly published his forgeries) that the volume was stuffed with fake documents. But, huffed Jäckel:

"These seventy-six (!) documents ... fill only forty-five pages of the edition, or rather less than four percent of the overall volume."

As I pointed out, a pathologist who said that a corpse was found to contain only four percent of strychnine could scarcely overlook one fact: that it was dead.

It would already seem that Professor Jäckel is ill suited to comment on my writings.

But there is more: Riding in tandem with his unappetising lady friend Lea Rosh -- she falsely put it about that she was Jewish in order to gain promotion to the highest echelons of the German television networks -- .Jäckel produced one of the most glaring forgeries ever shown on the television screens.

For Part Three of their film documentary Der Tod, ein Meister aus Deutschland (broadcast on May 2, 1990) Jäckel and Rosh wrote these words:

"Meanwhile, in 1941 tens of thousands of Jews are rounded up aboard cattletrucks in Romania and shipped to the gas chambers in Auschwitz."

To illustrate this text, broadcast thirty-five minutes into the transmission, Jäckel used a carefully retouched photograph. Unfortunately for him, the original negative is still in Hamburg railway station archives: it shows German citizens crowding aboard open coal trains in British-occupied Hamburg in 1946, one year after the war ended, to go on a shopping trip to the Ruhr. (Original negative caption: "Hamburg central station, 1946. Foreground, an empty coal train carrying travellers to the Ruhr. Left, a double-decker train type LBET 12.") The double-decker train was airbrushed out for the TV: there was no such rolling stock in Romania. Jäckel's little sleight-of-hand was exposed by Hamburg citizens who had seen the photograph displayed in the station's Intercity restaurant.

In modem Germany it is the lying, forging, cheating Jäckels who head the history departments, while their chief critic David Irving ("plain Mr and proud of it"), who was the first to expose the Hitler Diaries as phony (at the Der Stern press conference in Hamburg in April 1983) is arrested, fined $23,000, smeared worldwide, handcuffed (as in Victoria), gagged, deported, and banned for "libelling the memory of the dead" -- a trumped-up charge that does not exist anywhere else on Earth.

Yours faithfully,

David Irving

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