[German translation]  

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, September 19, 2003: The last time I was in this city was in 1965, when I took a train through it, to interview Col. Knut Haukelid of the SOE for my book THE VIRUS HOUSE, in Norway.

Several Scandinavians have contacted me, asking to attend tomorrow's little luncheon, including some from Sweden.

Alex tells me that a (now former) friend of his has been phoning around the guests, suggesting that they not attend, as I am so "notorious." Three have cancelled; their loss, not mine. I am not talking tomorrow about the Holocaust, whatever it was, but about Adolf Hitler, whoever he was, and the problems of writing factually about him (and surviving afterwards).

Excellent supper, in a restaurant across the Nyhaven dock from the house where another writer, Hans Christian Andersen, once lived.

It looks like an office block to me. Copenhagen has hardly been damaged in the war. We'll have a look at the former Gestapo prison tomorrow, and at the site of a children's school which a low-level Royal Air Force attack flattened, in the city's worst tragedy, when we tried to breach the prison walls in March 1945.

That slick phrase "collateral damage" didn't exist in those times, but the military's insouciance about it certainly did.

Tomorrow too we'll go to a museum which has some Heinrich Himmler stuff, including his fake eye-patch, donated to the Danes by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery; I wonder what else Monty had that he retained?

I am still hoping one day to locate the diary of Werner Best, left, which I suspect is in this city. He told British interrogators that "the Danes" had taken it from him.

My hunt for new documents never ceases. Best, one of the most brilliant National Socialist officers, was the Gestapo official who interrogated General Werner von Fritsch in 1938, and then became governor of Denmark.

I WAKE TO FIND THAT MY sixth-floor hotel Copenhagen bedroom, which is on two levels connected by a spiral metal staircase, is on a level with the middle decks of a large ferry, Pearl of Scandinavia, which has throbbed into a dock fifty feet away, almost silently - you can feel the thud of its engines rather than hear it through the double glazed windows.

The rest of the boat towers thirty or forty more feet above my windows. Cars from Norway are clanking across the steel drawbridge onto Danish soil.

Alex picks me up with his driver. The Freedom Museum is well organised, and I take pictures of the Himmler eye-patch and other items. The operations of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) are well portrayed.

We drive across the town to the Shell House -- still Shell's headquarters -- of which the top floor housed the Gestapo cells holding the Resistance workers whom the air raid was supposed to liberate.

A small bronze plaque with the Royal Air Force crest names ten men with very English names, and bears just a date, March 21, 1945, but no other legend.

It commemorates a historic raid. Unfortunately one of the Mosquitoes crashed a mile away; the other pilots thought the blaze marked the target and unloaded their bombs there. It was a French convent school. A statue marks the site, showing a nun clutching two scared children looking up at the sky.

About forty hexagonal paving slabs surround the statue displaying, rather in the fashion of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the names and ages of the 170 who died, the youngest aged four or five, the oldest a Sister born in 1869, without stating that they died in a British raid.

It seems odd, but I suppose that respect for the sensitivities of the English dictates a proper element of tact, rather like that monument on the beach at Timmendorfer Strand in northern Germany: it records the burial place of the seven thousand refugees drowned aboard the liners Cap Arcona and Deutschland, sunk by a Canadian pilot of the 2nd Tactical Air Force in May 1945. It describes the victims as "concentration camp prisoners," which is rather less than accurate.

The folks meet me for the luncheon at the restaurant at one PM and to hear my talk on writing about Hitler. Nobody dies. Two guests have travelled from Sweden. Some bright questions at the end, and we'll do it again, this time with some students if we can convey the meeting time and place safely to them. We all know how the traditional enemies of the truth just love to let me speak.

So my visit to Copenhagen ends. Impressions -- a bright, clean, bustling town; ancient buildings, palace guards with bearskins, Disneyesque palaces; and thousands of blonde girls pedalling around looking like Benté. I see no Blacks, and no obese people, but I do once glimpse a gaggle of hooded, cotton-shrouded Somali "refugee" women huddling along the sidewalks to nowhere in particular.

THAT IS THE REAL MYSTERY OF this last half century, ever since World War Two. Why have the European countries, with all the ugly lessons of racial conflict offered by the United States before them, inflicted this same injury upon themselves, and unhappiness on the newcomers too?

When the Black hordes of Tamils were first being flooded into West Germany through East Berlin in the 1970s, I ventured that this was Moscow's new ploy: they were replacing the old Marxist Klassenkampf with Rassenkampf. Nothing that I see now diminishes that view.

Marxism feeds on social discontent, and what better way to degrade one society than by inflicting another, alien, society on it, to destroy it from within?

BACK TO LONDON. I HAVE posted yesterday on my website the startling news that Presidential hopeful Wesley Clark, the general whom we all learned to loathe during the Kosovo war, has now gone under the eugenic knife as well as the cosmetic: the Jewish Telegraph Agency has announced his revelation that he was born Mr Cann and comes from a long line of rabbis.

Not to be outdone, Senator John Kerry reveals today that he had a Jewish grandfather, Fritz Kohn. Well that certainly would give both of them my vote if I were an American.

The New York Times today mentions my humble person in an article on how the IPC publishing group has laboured to suppress a gushing feature-article which its Homes & Gardens published in 1938 about the H&G of Mr A Hitler, wellknown European artist and statesman.

Tom Zeller, a New York Times journalist, asked me last week what I would do if IPC tried to force me to take the 1938 article off my website; I replied:

My own website's policy is to reproduce articles but always giving full credit to the source (usually reproducing the masthead as an illustration -- another violation, I suppose).

Ha'aretz, one of the world's best newspapers in my view, once protested; I said that my posting of an article published by them, some days later, was equivalent to my finding a copy of their newspaper on a subway seat, and taking it home to show it to others. They should not object to such a spreading of their fame. They lost no subscriptions thereby, probably the contrary.

If I suspect that an attempt is being made to suppress an awkward item -- which I suspect may be behind the Homes & Gardens effort -- then I dig my heels in rather more, and hold out as long as I could.

The problem is, as you know, that under US law the affronted newspaper can complain to the web hosting service and insist on the item's removal.

I have lost two web hosting services (Powernet in the UK being one) in consequence: they wrote to me that as a small ISP they could not afford the legal costs of responding to letters from high powered law firms, so would I please take fpp.co.uk elsewhere, which I did (around 1999). Verio, in the USA, simply wiped the offending files off my website without telling me when outsiders complained.

The Anti-Defamation League objected to my using their logo as an illustration, and applied pressure to my web hosts; we then devised our own version of the ADL logo which is clearly a caricature or comment on it, and their lawyers evidently recognized that they had lost their last toehold and gave up on their attack.

I would add that in fighting any H&G attempt to suppress, I would plead (a) fair usage (b) First Amendment (c) matter of extreme public interest, given the identity of the home-and-garden owner involved.

In its article today, The New York Times has used my contribution like this: "British revisionist historian David Irving, who maintains an index of Hitler-related content on his website and believes that the Holocaust never happened, suggested he would be more intransigent if challenged."

True, but why the bit about the Holocaust? I have written neither a book nor article on that boring topic, and readers of my website know precisely what my position is: sceptical about some of the story, accepting some of the rest.

I AM TROUBLED TO FIND THAT I like more and more of what The Guardian, this left-wing liberal British newspaper has to say; and its Sunday sister, The Observer. Perhaps I am really left-wing after all, a socialist, as was the aforementioned artist and statesman. He too would probably have liked The Guardian in its present colours.

I have never felt comfortable with the right-wing tag applied to me by less discerning elements of the journaille. I am not sure however if it worth going the whole hog and claiming to have Jewish grandparents as well. I tried it during the Lipstadt trial, in conversation with a Jerusalem Post journalist, Tom Segev, and I think I detected a hint of panic in his eyes.

GEORGE STERN COMES for supper, and much good conversation until eleven PM. His views on Iraq are different from mine; he shares the not uncommon belief that Muslims are expendable. Is that the Austrian Jew in him coming to the surface after all?

UP AT EIGHT, I TAKE JESSICA to school. Holding hands as we walk briskly to the bus stop, she happily discusses the best ways of killing people -- "Inexpensive ways," she adds.

I say, "Yes, it must not be too expensive. It wouldn't do to have to tell the bank manager you need an overdraft 'cos you had to kill somebody expensively."

"Push them under a car," she volunteers, and giggles.

The post brings a copy of Mother's book The Dawnchild, which I thus see for the first time again in about fifty years. I will leave it lying around and see if Jessica gets into reading it. We want to republish it.

The new filing cabinets will be delivered tomorrow. Not an hour too soon, as all my shelves and cabinets were seized last May. We have to get some system going again.

John informs me that young Tony has been sent with his army unit to Northern Ireland, something to do with Intelligence; better than Basra, anyway. I am not happy. I would not want him to risk his life in that sh*tty little war of Tony Blair's. I pray that the ghost of his mother watches over him.

THE BBC STARTS LIVE covereage of the closing submissions by counsel in the Lord Hutton Inquiry. I settle down with a cup of tea and watch all day.

It reminds me of the day I delivered my own five-hour closing submission in the Lipstadt Trial in that same courtroom.

Indeed, one of the same counsel is there -- Heather Rogers, barrister for the BBC journalist Gilligan. I feel very sorry for him, he's been hung out to dry.

Just as in the Lipstadt Trial Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans (right) and his team scrutinised my thirty books for two man-years, detected nineteen "errors" (reduced to twelve by the judge, or less than half an error per book) and pronounced me a "falsifier of history" on the strength of them, here is a radio journalist being garrotted on the basis of one unscripted word spoken at six in the morning to a radio interviewer.

I feel less sorry for the late Dr David Kelly, who seems to have slit his wrists, unable to take the strain of the media and government onslaught after he exposed Tony Blair's mendacity. As the Government counsel cruelly put it, Kelly knew what he was doing. He was ratting to the press. He was a whistle blower. To do that takes physical as well as moral courage.

The shelves all round Court 73 are empty today; for the first three months of 2000 they were filled with the red binders of Lipstadt evidence.

Jeremy Gompertz QC, the counsel for Dr Kelly's family, inevitably pounces on the fact that what defence minister Geoffrey Hoon told the inquiry, on oath I hope (perjury!), is contradicted by the diary produced a few hours later to the Inquiry by Alastair Campbell, left, the "Martin Bormann" of prime minister Blair.

I DON'T LIKE HOON OR HIS type. This minister will surely hunker down and sweat it out until Lord Hutton pronounces his verdict later this winter.

I would hiss the two words "Crichel Down," if they meant anything to anybody in government today. But I am curious about how this document, this diary, surfaced at the last moment -- too late for counsel to cross-examine any of the witnesses about its content, including Campbell himself. In fact it reached the Inquiry in two tranches -- the first being largely innocuous, the second containing the sentences which will surely wreck Hoon's career.

How did the Inquiry obtain it? It had no powers to call for documents. The rules of Discovery seem not to have applied. If we stand back and view it from a distance, its most remarkable sentence is the statement that "TB" (Tony Blair) had insisted that the proper channels be pursued, rather than conspiring to hound Dr Kelly. "TB said he didn't want to push the system too far. But my worry was that I wanted a clear win, not a messy draw, and if they presented it as a draw that was not good enough for us."

I can't help wondering whether that most-helpful sentence was not a Machiavellian late arrival in a diary written with a pen otherwise dipped in nitro-glycerine -- whether Alistair Campbell and his master, in some late-night sitting, decided that in finest Gestapo fashion they might have to gun down one or two of their more expendable colleagues, in order to survive themselves: Hoon is exposed as a liar and cheat, and indeed a perjurer; but Saint Tony's posture is to be documented as having been above reproach.

I AM GLAD TO SAY an original of the photo of me dining with Albert Speer in October 1979 at Frankfurt (left) is among the pictures rescued from the disaster of last May.

I have not seen it for years. Yes, Nazi ministers who have served their terms in Spandau seem almost saintlike compared with what now rules in Whitehall.

I also find the photographs taken of my first meeting with playwright Rolf Hochhuth in the Stern offices in Hamburg, forty years ago (right). We've been good friends ever since, and he often phones me -- I cannot now visit him in Germany, and he feels under threat if he visits London. Odd world we live in, the great free democracies.

Jessica spends the evening tapping at her keyboard, building Javascripts.

UP AT EIGHT, TO TAKE JESSICA to school; she chatters about her website and discusses domain names. She wants to register pinkblossoms.com, but I fear that she will be inundated with the wrong kind of surfer.

I suggest something anodyne, like libraryresearcher.com, or londontransport.com. The trip to school is soon over, and I don't think she'll have her mind on math much this morning.

LUDOVIC KENNEDY, ONE OF the world's finest military historians (see his history of the end of the Bismarck) is in trouble with the newspapers this morning. He has spotted what millions of other White Englishmen have also seen, the sudden and disproportionate proliferation of Black faces on our television screens.

Any policy of positive discrimination must mean of course that White candidates for the same vacancies of equal or better qualifications are being wilfully ignored and set aside.

While it is wrong (and probably illegal) to talk of immigration as polluting any nation's culture-stream, it certainly dilutes it: when millions of immigrants of one culture are injected into another, the latter suffers: public services specific to the host culture are diluted: schools (as witness the school system in Vancouver, BC, where English is now a minority language), restaurants, parks, cultural events, broadcast media, policing -- all are hijacked by the newcomers, and the hosts are shortchanged in the process.

In England, the Bobby who for a century and a half could police the streets unarmed, now carries a Heckler & Koch, largely because of the Yardie scum carried in by the immigrant tide. Nobody is left truly happy.

The newspapers report the Ludovic Kennedy story with relish: it enables them to express vox populi, while mouthing hypocritical condemnation just in case. (The Daily Mirror once ran a headline: WE NAIL FILTHY PRINCE PHILIP LIE -- because it gave them a chance to repeat the "lie" they were nailing.)

It has taken Ludo long enough to find this irritation beneath his tongue. I have often remarked that one of the delights of British late-night television used to be the black-and-white Scotland Yard programs of the '50s -- Edgar Lustgarten's was one -- which showed an England as it used to be. Police cars with bells, empty highways, country lanes and . . . well, enough said.

I once angered a judge, I think it was Mr Justice Gray, by having remarked, in a light-hearted speech ten years ago [September 19, 1992], that if Britain must have multi-ethnic newscasts it should be done with discernment. In my view, "our" news should be read by a male, preferably in black tie and tails, as in the BBC heyday of Lord Reith; the female newscaster might deliver the latest cooking and sewing news; and Trevor Macdonald should bring up the rear with the latest drug-busts and muggings.

In fact Macdonald, a Black, is one of the few well spoken British news readers, which would otherwise count against him: see how Mike Smartt, the only newsreader able to talk the Queen's English without splitting his infinitives, has vanished from our screens.

Welcome to the world of Greg Dyke, the current BBC director-general; Dykespeaks reigns (yes, Dyke is his real name: if it were mine I would've changed it twice. Perhaps I have -- readers will never know).

WHAT LUDOVIC KENNEDY HAS now spoken out about, giving the appropriate percentages, is positive discrimination gone mad. For months I have been irritating Benté by patiently anticipating the Obligatory Black in each newscast, English sitcom, or children's play.

No matter how absurd, a Black is parachuted into every scene, stuttering his lines in his impenetrable Brixton argot.

Of late, the sitcom scriptwriters are encouraged to engage Black actors in liaisons with White girls. Small wonder that Ludo has emigrated to Wiltshire (a county where, incidentally, my brother John is chairman of the Racial Equality Council).

American tourists visiting London often tell me how startled they are at seeing the mixed-race couples that stroll around; I respond that the females usually appear to be White girls from the less distinguished end of the Bell Curve (while White men from that corner of the Bell Curve appear to have congregated in the media).

I tell our tourist friends that they will have to walk a long way down Oxford Street before they see an English man with a Black girl: or come to that nowadays, an Englishman at all.

Psychologists will have to explain to me what it's all about. I have heard White girls exclaimed, "Once you've had Black, you never go back." It is a matter of taste I suppose. What consenting adults do in private, I mean: but does it have to be forced down our throats on television, night after night? This cowardly mania for political correctness is hissing steam into a pressure-vessel.

In this respect the United States are more rational -- while preaching tolerance, they have Black schools, Black sports, Black television channels (UPN33 in Florida, for example), and much else; voices like Ludo's are not raised.

It is the element of compulsion which is obnoxious: Thou shalt have a grand, indeed irreversible, mixing-up of the races, and Devil take the hindmost.

IN WHICH CONNECTION ONE finding of the fearless Kevin Macdonald, professor at a California university, deserves highlighting. He has demonstrated that "pro-immigration elements in American public life have, for over a century, been largely led, funded, energized and organized by the Jewish community."

American Jews take this line, with isolated exceptions, because they believe, as Leonard S Glickman, president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, has bluntly stated, "The more diverse American society is, the safer [Jews] are."

Professor William Rubinstein of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth came to an identical conclusion about the immigration campaigning of Jews in this country in a paper which he sent me some time ago.

FEVERISH BAD DREAMS ALL night: for example, grandson Tony a casualty in Iraq; later, I am in the USA, borrow a Town Car from my friends, and walk out to find it gone with all my baggage. The Mont Blanc pen lies in the dust beside where the car had been. The luggage had my laptop -- everything I have ever written and all my work in progress. Nachtigall ich hör' Dir trapsen. Eight aspirins.

I invite Joel Hayward to come from New Zealand to lecture at Cincinnati in 2004 (I don't think he will accept):

The world has been following the saga with baited breath, and I have to congratulate you on how you have kept your head in the midst of such an onslaught. Well done too, finding such fine champions.

You may have noticed that I have established a file on www.fpp.co.uk containing all the relevant items. Three cheers for the Internet; allowed a free rein, it will eventually defeat and confound our enemies.

He does not reply.

A LENGTHY PERFORMANCE-anxiety dream about speaking to an audience of 2,500 (it looks like the University of Pretoria, -- Tuckies); but first I have to get two shirts off their hangers, and everybody must wait.

I BEGIN PLANNING DATES FOR a US tour; it is a squeeze to fit in all the cities I want to, before Christmas. Another warm night; excruciating long dream once again about my laptop, lost this time in a luxury hotel in, I believe, Düsseldorf; I run back to the bathrooms, restaurants, etc., but nobody has seen it.

In the evening, I take Jessica to the Odeon in Leicester Square, the first time I've been in this movie theatre in over thirty years. We see Finding Nemo. I have never laughed so much in my life; the tears stream down my face throughout the film.

How many daffy, disorientated women have I known like Dory the Forgetful Fish; the audience howls at her sniffy comments, e.g. "What is it with Men and Asking for Directions!" -- shades of Annette V and driving round bookstores in Glasgow in the late 1980s.

The plot takes unexpected twists, the characterizations are hilarious. There is a delightful Sharks Anonymous scene; the presiding shark, Bruce, speaks with a Sydney accent as he holds a meeting in the bowels of a sunken submarine amidst a minefield.

Jessica shrieks with laughter, but not at the scenes that tickle the adults in the audience. "What a pity Mummy didn't come with us," she says as we hail a taxi to go home. "She would have liked it too." Mummy has stayed at home to watch Fame Academy on the BBC. Chacun à son goût. Or, jeder wird selig auf seiner eigenen Weise.

THE SPEAKING AND booksigning programme lined up for me in Hungary next month is staggering, with three or for fixtures a day for ten days.

In the mail, there is unexpected news from German foreign ministry. The ten year old ban on me has been lifted. "Nach Auskunft des Bundesverwaltungsamtes besteht für Sie kein Einreiseverbot in die Bundesrepublik mehr. Die Einreisesperre wurde gelöscht." But - does that mean it is safe for me to cross into Germany? Or is a police ambush waiting?

I write to the German ambassador to thank him, and to Dr Gerhard Frey: "Also durchgestanden. Nun Sturm brich' los."

THEN THIS COMES FROM Auckland, New Zealand: "I saw mention in a magazine article that you are planning a visit to New Zealand early next year.

I am a member of a British Israel World Federation group here, who sympathise with your views on history. Would you be interested in privately addressing our small audience? Thank you for your tremendous contribution towards the Truth.

What's going on? I at once agree. Is it genuine, though?

I take Jessica to school; she forgets her sports stuff, so we have to do a U-turn and hail a taxi her to get her there in time. That's the stuff fatherhood is made of. What fun.

THE EVENING STANDARD HAS a review by Andrew Roberts of Traudl Junge's memoirs, published by Weidenfeld. I don't like Roberts; still, I write him:

I read your review of Traudl Junge's memoirs with interest, and for once it was an article finely written and without cant. A sign of growing maturity? It might have been generous to remark that I was the first writer she allowed to read her manuscript in the 1960s -- I used them extensively in Hitler's War (1975-77); and that I donated a copy, with her permission, to the Sammlung Irving in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, where they've been repeatedly rediscovered by lazier authors (dare I mention Ian Kershaw?) since then.

When I interviewed her she was still relatively unspoilt, and her recollections tallied with what she had written in 1948. Later, she went through a tectonic shift. It began visibly in the World at War TV series, when she began showing belated second thoughts, encouraged by the profit that Albert Speer had made from such tactics. In private, like Leni Riefenstahl, she remained unchanged until the end, and she sent greetings to our Real History function in Cincinnati the year she died.

Only three of the Inner Circle are still alive, to my knowledge: Otto Günsche, who burned Hitler's body; Walter Frentz, who took that ravishing photo of her, in an old people's home now and who was an eye-witness of the famous August 1941 Minsk massacre at which blood got spilt onto Heinrich Himmler's leather greatcoat; and Fritz Darges (above, with Hitler), Martin Bormann's adjutant, who was dismissed on July 16, 1944 over a famous incident with a fly.

After it repeatedly circled the conference room and landed on Hitler's shoulder, Hitler irritably told him to get rid of the insect; Darges, misjudging the situation, retorted that as it was a flying object, it was the job of the Luftwaffe adjutant.

Hitler: "Sie kommen sofort zur Ostfront!"

Darges was sent east, and four days later Stauffenberg's bomb went off just where he would normally have been standing. Traudl Junge confirmed the story to me, as did all Hitler's other adjutants.

Roberts does not reply; and somebody sends me a clipping from today's Newsday, reporting that Günsche has just died, on October 2. A fine life, well spent.

Günsche was a good man, with a strong sense of history. He refused to bow to the dictates of political correctness. I have related elsewhere how it was he who opened the door to Hitler's inner circle to me, after the son of Field Marshal Keitel introduced me in the late 1960s.

Günsche had never spoken to any other writer before then. I still have the tape of the interview he granted me, and the ink sketch he drew of the layout of the bunker room as he entered it on April 30, 1945 to carry out the corpses of Hitler and Eva.

OCTOBER 14, 2003: WITH Jessica to school, a joking, laughing, happy bus ride. Teasing me, she asks if she can go on her roller-blades tomorrow. I say, "Yes, and we'll ask the headmistress to look after them during the day, and clean and oil them before she gives them back to you in the evening."

Michael comes to pick her up, very excited, for their trip to Ireland. I go out into the street in my socks, and there is a shiny, heavy new car by the steps. But it is not Michael's. His venerable old car, standing behind it, looks very flakey.

It is twenty years old. He says he had the brakes checked yesterday. I hope he drives carefully, Jessica is now all we have.

She sits in front and automatically snaps on the seatbelt. Good girl. God protect her. Benté is very subdued in the evening, sits with me for a long time in the drawing room. It is very strange not have our little girl around. It'll be worse next week when I am in Hungary.

Somebody sends me an item from yesterday's Berlin Morgenpost: under pressure from this and other newspapers, the German ban on me has been reimposed. It's illegal under European law, so I must fight them in the courts if necessary. It is amazing, the lengths to which the traditional enemies of the truth go in order to silence one voice.

It's very quiet without Jessica.

I send this letter to the Post Office:

I have mentioned before the problems being caused to us by a Post Office employee who has fashioned an unofficial rubber stamp marking our incoming mail ADDRESS CHANGED, RETURN TO SENDER.

This trick is causing us many problems. The enclosed envelope came from a Greek publisher, enclosing a valuable contract. The Post Office returned it to him because of the rubber stamp, although it was correctly addressed.

We nearly lost all further business with this publisher, but he sent it back to us at a third address evidently not known to the culprit at your sorting office. Please inform us of the progress of your investigations into this nuisance; it has been going on for six months or more, and that is six months too long.

OCTOBER 20, 2003: Budapest. The last time I was here, in about 1979, the Janos Kádár regime was still in power. I was researching the anti-Communist, anti-Jewish, anti-Bolshevik, insurrection of 1956. My resulting book UPRISING appeared in October 1981, a sad year for my family.

I remember driving around London's East End in the Rolls all night on the Saturday before the book was published in London, on tragic family business, and stopping the car occasionally to pick up the early editions of the Sunday newspapers as they appeared, eager to see what the reviewers had to say.

Post-war Hungary was a departure from my normal subject -- World War II -- and my regular readers did not like it. Nor did the London reviewers, and as I bought each successive newspaper that night, their reviews got worse and worse, culminating in a violent attack in The Sunday Times by Communist renegade Arthur Koestler -- who later killed himself -- and The Observer's review by Neal Ascherson, the impartiality of which can be assessed from its title, "A Bucketful of Slime."

WHAT THESE TWO AND OTHERS like them resented was the list of dramatis personae published at the beginning of the book at the suggestion of my London publisher Hodder & Stoughton; the editor there directed that I should identify the religion of each person, whether Calvinist, Jewish, or Catholic, as this detail seemed to play an important part in the unfolding story.

Indeed it did; and as the top Communist leaders, secret police chiefs, and torturers, and the most despicable intellectuals in the story were all Jewish, while the book's heroes were almost without exception not, I can well understand the squirming that went on in the Koestler/Ascherson households.

I GLIMPSED THE SPARE, balding figure of Mr Ascherson in the public gallery of Courtroom 73 on several days of the Lipstadt trial in 2000, and particularly on Judgment Day, when no doubt they came, like the carrion that feast on the battlefields (and like the armed Israeli ambassador, Dror Zeigermann, right), to gloat.

Their articles are long since waste-paper -- the ink off them has dribbled back into the gutter from whence they fill their pens; my books however prevail, and will continue to do so into the coming centuries. Just see the prices offered for the rarer ones on the Internet!

On the plane to Budapest, I take out and read the introduction I wrote to UPRISING. It is the first time I've read it in a quarter-century; it is as though it was written by a different man; as, in a strictly biological sense, it was. All of our bodily cells renew themselves each seven years, so I am nearly four cell-generations distant from the David Irving who wrote the book. No matter, the writing then was strong, and it still is; my eyes may fail, but not my spirit. Not yet.

AT BUDAPEST AIRPORT AT TWO PM: I am met by publisher Tibor Gedes and his driver (another Tibor, a burly ex policeman). The city's suburbs are the ugliest I have yet seen: nothing in them has changed since the Fifties. Filth, squalor, peeling stucco, graffiti, stray dogs, exposed brickwork, grim faces, dust, and litter everywhere.

As for the book's promotion, Tibor tells me the familiar story: under pressure, local televisions stations have cancelled, bookstores are reluctant to take the book, distributors are having problems. A radio and a television interview are still lined up.

The Labour Party here is back in power. The last prime minister here was a self-confessed member of the hated AVÓ, the secret police. "And Jewish?" I venture, and the driver nods.

Most of the AVÓ officer corps in 1956 were Jewish: which is why the worker's insurrection started on October 23, 1956 as a pogrom. If these funkcionàriusok are coming back into power, the wheel is turning full circle.

I check in to the Ibis hotel, formerly the Volga, at three PM. The hotel is of grim, ex-Soviet style. The room's phone lines are dead, the staff are surly. Ten days here is going to be worse than Pentonville.

By six PM I have checked out into a different hotel. Tibor tells me that we have now lost two more locations, at Györ and Szeged; the hall managements again capitulated under pressure.

Never mind, alternatives have long been booked. We know the people we are up against, the same Traditional Enemies of Free Speech who've been fighting me for 30 years or more.

Dinner at nine with an interpreter, the publisher, and István Csurka; I'm told he's leader of a right-wing party, pleasant enough, but I prefer to choose my own dinner companions.

OCTOBER 21: IT TAKES fifty-five minutes to drive one mile along the Budapest Ring. There is not even the most primitive attempt at traffic engineering. No yellow gridlock boxes are painted on any major stoplight intersections, so everything just snarls. Aggression and foul language. The cost to the economy must be staggering.

At the theatre, a large audience is waiting, standing room only. Speeches by the book's translator and István Csurka. Book sales are brisk -- though I don't profit from them. I speak for forty minutes on the problems of writing history, and special problems of the UPRISING book.

Favourable mention of the name of Miklós Vásárhelyi produces audible cries of protest. He's my personal hero, but it seems that in the 90s he sold out to the enemy and joined the staff of György Sörös, the billionaire financier who has bankrupted entire national economies with his currency speculations.

It is difficult to speak through an interpreter and to hold an audience's attention. The normal rules don't apply. Perhaps I must learn Magyar, before the train pulls into the station, and the Divine loudspeaker commands, "Terminus. All change!"

Drenched in platitudes, not a few of them my own, I arrive back at the hotel at midnight, and take to my bed almost at once. Nothing seems really to have changed in the twenty-five years since I was last here.

IN THE MORNING I BEGIN sketching the big speech for tomorrow. My theme will be, trust the people, not the governments: I speak x-language, but x-nation bans me: not the people, who want to hear me, but their governments.

Who are the government? I mean, who are they really? Is it your own government, or is it in the pay of foreign super powers? So my message to the Hungarian people will be: Retain your national identity. Do you really want to become part of a new European empire, controlled by faceless men in Brussels, in the pay of who knows whom?

 

TWO BOOK-SIGNINGS today. At the first, I autograph around 100 books in a combined coffee shop and bookstore -- very pleasant. A visitor hands me a trophy from the revolution -- a heavy (eight kilo) Tommy-gun wrested by his father from an AVÓ secret policeman and used to attack Red Army troops during the rising. There are twelve notches on the wooden stock.

At the second bookstore a tall, rather shy elderly gentleman edges forward to have his book signed, and mentions that twenty years ago he christened his oldest son David in my honour. He moves away before it sinks in. I catch up with him just as he is leaving, to shake his hand and thank him properly for his touching act.

A message from Los Angeles tells me of a website called deadoraliveinfo.com, which lists more than six thousand people by various categories, such as fields of endeavour, birth dates, etc. "The category for historians includes only sixteen names. To my surprise, you are there - along with Hugh Trevor-Roper, Will and Arial Durant, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others. Conspicuously absent were the names of your conformist counterparts."

That's nice. A Real Who's Who?

BUDAPEST STILL. I SEE THAT in my absence for breakfast, somebody has surreptitiously entered the room; because when I return twenty minutes later the door is double locked, requiring two full turns of the key, whereas I had merely slammed the door on the latch when I went out. Nothing has seemingly been touched.

In fifty minutes I draft a reasonable speech for today's huge gathering on Heroes Square.

A reader asks:

I've read recently that the Operation Barbarossa was to destroy the Red Army and the Communist Regime. And not to occupy the Soviet Union, even though A.H. speaks in Mein Kampf of "Lebensraum". What was the goal of Barbarossa?

I reply testily: "Jeez!, you do ask questions. It would take a week to attempt an answer and as you'll know I have a lot on my plate this week.

In brief: Hitler never really knew what his goals were. That was the problem. He never drew a line on the map and said, There we stop. All his problems flowed from that failure. All you get..."

SOMETHING OF AN infuriating day. At midday Tibor telephones and asks me to be ready for pick-up after lunch as he is running late. I go downstairs at one PM and order salmon for lunch.

Almost at once his driver turns up. We drive to Heroes Square where a vast crowd is already building up in front of a good, professionally-built stage with big loudspeakers. Among many who come out of the crowd to shake hands with me is Sebastian G, the son of my old Slavic languages translator in London. She moved back to Hungary ten years ago. I ask how she is. "She died two months ago." Today is the anniversary of the 1956 uprising, the country's national holiday, and this is the day's biggest ceremony.

It is a great honour. It is a fine ceremony with hymns, poems, and a sonorous recital of the names of those executed. I am the first of three speakers. I go on stage to deafening cheers, and the interpreter takes the microphone to my right.

The crowd is the largest I have ever seen. It goes off perfectly, with rolling roars of boos when I mention the names of the evil men, Gerö, Fárkas, Révai, and the dictator Rákosi (right). My concluding declamatory phrases are met with a colossal ovation from the ten thousand people now standing in front of me in the increasingly cold square. In this country, I am evidently very popular, I don't know why.

Jean-Marie le Pen speaks after me, twice as long, to further applause, tho' perhaps not as rapturous.

Then Csurka speaks for over an hour, while I sign hundreds of books. It is snowing lightly and bitterly cold towards the end; we are penned in the VIP cage unable to get out. A strange mixture of professionalism and amateurism. I have not met Le Pen before; I was not told until yesterday that he was to be here; but I have nothing against him, so far as I know.

I find that I'm "expected" to speak again at the Congress Hall this evening. It is not in my program, and I will not go. I will attend the subsequent dinner, reluctantly, if invited. The publisher is unhappy at this mutiny, but I make plain that I have agreed to certain things, and he cannot just use my time as he sees fit. Quite apart from which, I am exhausted.

The dinner goes on until long after midnight. About a hundred present and no speeches. As I leave, Csurka announces that I'll be at a press conference with Le Pen tomorrow -- a car will pick me up at my hotel. To the publisher, I send this:

I was not aware until yesterday Tuesday that Le Pen would be speaking on the same platform as myself. . . I am a writer, and not involved in any political parties or movements, and people cannot use my name or person as they want. This is why I will not be at the Le Pen-Csurka press conference tomorrow.

They are nice enough people, but I am NOT part of their political programme, and they have no right to assume that I am. I am here in Hungary to promote our book, and for no other purpose.

FROM LONDON, BENTE reports: "Jessica seems to be having a nice time in Ireland; they went pony-trekking yesterday, which she enjoyed. Very quiet here without her!"

I address five hundred students and others at the Technical University on the far side of the Danube in Buda, on "My research of Real History and freedom of speech". I sign a hundred more books there. Afterwards, dinner with Sebastian G. He agrees to talk at Cincinnati in 2004 about the Hungarian secret service.

An early start for Miskolc. Three people, chain-smoking the whole way, plus me, in the car. Aaargh. Progressively colder as we head east, with frost covering the fields. Nice little bookstore, jam-packed with people waiting with my book in their hands as I arrive. I sign autographs till my arm aches.

A police car stands guard in the main street, trouble having been expected. I go over and chat with the officers, and later send out our driver with a book signed for the Rendörseg (police) -- for which the publisher makes me pay full price! At Debrecen, a two-hour drive away, I speak in the gloomy local MIÉP hall (Hungarian Truth and Light Party), to an audience of a hundred; again, it is hard to speak with an interpreter, it slows everything down and you can't get any real audience enthusiasm going.

We arrive back in Budapest at 10:15 PM. Benté says Jessica is due back at five in the morning, no doubt covered in vomit.

I say smugly that is Benté's fault, for telling her about "car sickness" -- it's all in the mind; I have been driven five hundred miles today, hemmed in by chain-smokers, and feel okay.

I DEDUCE THAT THE CLOCKS went back last night, after I spot time discrepancies.

The US tour is taking shape. An organiser reports in:

I would be more than happy to help you find a location for your December 20 meeting in Denver. I live in Littleton and would definitely recommend this area (or Lakewood). It is a convenient suburb of Denver and is in a good part of town.

At Szeged, the meeting has had to be moved to the Honved Club, as the first location has been squelched. The usual causes. The publisher is sour because I made fun of the ("ridiculous") Hungarian language in my talk yesterday; I said that any page of it looked like a bad case of measles, with all those accents on it. He says that several people took offence. I doubt it.

THE SUNDAY TIMES HAS TODAY thrashed Richard "Skunky" Evans' latest book. Thank you, reviewer Michael Burleigh. I think I sent him a copy of my CHURCHILL'S WAR, vol. ii: "Triumph in Adversity."

The turgid Evans tome has been published by Allen Lane, a Penguin subsidiary, as part of the deal they struck after he weaselled out of a contract to give them Telling Lies about Hitler, and sold it to Verso instead, I recall. He was also to be paid a huge advance for it -- one million pounds? I must check.

BELA L, BALDING EX-HUSBAND of my 1970s interpreter Erika, comes for a drink. He's a virologist, was at a Tennessee laboratory in the 1980s, had an FBI "minder." A jolly, friendly fellow.

He knows the inside story of the US anthrax scare (Zack, Hatfill etc). Says that any anthrax spore can immediately be traced by its "fingerprint" to the laboratory that produced it. He could have done it instantly. A friend of his has a huge collection of anthrax types.

I tell him my suspicions about Erika's Intelligence work. He scoffs, says she was very nervous type, would never have been able to conceal it from him. Well, there were other things she concealed from him, which led to the divorce.

Apparently a Hungarian newspaper Magyar Hirlap has called me names. Needless to say, the author is Jewish.

Our dossier on the origins of anti-Semitism

 

Index to this Action Report

Dossier on Richard "Skunky" Evans

 

DAVID IRVING says: "Thanks -- See you in Cincinnati, Labor Day 2004!"