Published by Focal Point for David Irving's world-wide legal Fighting
Fund (DIFF)
Update AR #11 - December 18, 1996
- David Irving: Why I am taking the Board of Deputies of British
Jews to Court
- Richard Nixon's and John F Kennedy's shocking views recorded in
private diaries
- Germany's "most democratic government ever" bans still
more books
- Revisionists and the Press: a Cartoonist's View from Oregon
- and, as always, "A Radical's Diary"
U.S. Judge Blasts Hotel Group's "Unlawful" Attempts to Suppress
Ideas, Free Speech
Pittsburgh Court Victory against Millionaire U.S. Hall Owner
PITTSBURGH -- In a satisfying victory over the massed forces of the traditional
enemies of the truth, a U.S. District Judge, Judith Friedman, ordered the
owners of the huge Expomart exhibition hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
to abandon their attempts to prevent writer David Irving from attending
the annual military exhibition there and showing his many works of history
to the thousands of collectors and enthusiasts who attend the show from
all over the world.
Later, hundreds of dealers and collectors signed a petion demanding that
these attempts at suppressing free speech should stop.
Mr Irving has attended the show annually for the last six years, and was
often in demand as an evening speaker there. A few days before the current
show was due to open, his London office received an urgent letter from the
exhibition organisers regretting that the hall's wealthy owners had instructed
them not to allow him to attend.
Pittsburgh newspapers reported that the local Holocaust museum had brought
pressure to bear. Mr Irving - who had signed a contract and paid for the
exhibition space one year earlier - went straight to Pittsburgh and hired
lawyer Robert Garber. They secured an emergency court hearing before Judge
Friedman that same afternoon.
"This is not Germany and not Canada," said Judge
Friedman. "This is the United States of America, and freedom of speech
is still not a criminal offence here!"
Rosenberg, lawyer for the Expomart, lodged an immediate appeal against the
injunction that the judge granted to the British historian. The appeal was
heard the very next day, and hall owners lost again.
Eddie Lewis, millionaire owner of the ExpoMart and a close Oxford-days friend
of President Clinton, has informed his attorneys however that money is no
object and they are to smash Mr Irving, by appealing all the way to Washington
against his victory if necessary.
One tiny triumph for Lewis: the judge had ordered the writer to post a cash
bond of $10,000 before she would sign the injunction. Lewis, Rosenberg and
the ExpoMart have so far prevented the court from returning the bond to
the Englishman, despite his two court victories.
He has now instructed his lawyer, Bob Garber, to institute proceedings
against them claiming damages for unlawful interference with a contractual
relationship, conspiracy, and on other counts.
Irving Accuses Prime Minister over Libels
Australia Reverts to Suppression of Speech
MELBOURNE -- Prime minister John Howard broke his promise to restore
freedom of speech to Australia in an unexpected about face in November.
Confronted with a tide of popular enthusiasm for Pauline Hanson, a newly
elected Member of Parliament, after her outspoken maiden speech on race
issues, Mr Howard had incautiously announced on September 22 that his country
would put forced "political correctness" behind it.
Journalists at once inquired if this would include British writer David
Irving? Could the prime minister's remarks be construed to imply that he
would now be given the visa that he had twice been refused?
Perched on the horns of a dilemma, Howard and immigration minister Philip
Ruddock prevaricated. For two months Australia's newspapers were filled
with stories and editorials on the Irving issue.
On Nov. 8, at a press conference in Sydney, Ruddock announced that nothing
had changed. Mr Irving would not be granted a visa even now.
Prime minister Howard, enjoying the freedom of speech which he had once
again denied to the British writer, stated on one radio programme that Mr
Irving was a "nutter"; on Melbourne radio he libelled him as a
"crackpot historian", with criminal records in Britain, Germany,
Canada, and elsewhere.
Mr Irving instructed his solicitors in Perth, West Australia, to write immediately
to the prime minister and extract an apology from him for these libels.
He has no criminal record in Britain and Canada, and his crime in Germany,
of uttering one sentence in a historical lecture, for which he was fined
$22,000, would not be considered a crime in any other country on earth.
If Howard fails to make a public apology, Irving's solicitors are instructed
to issue a libel writ. It is likely that the prime minister was wrongly
advised on the writer's "criminal record".
The Australian government retaliated with a newspaper story that they are
now to claim $50,000 from the writer for legal costs incurred in the fourth
round of his legal battle to force them to grant him a visa, to enable him
to speak on modern history to the thousands of Australians who have written
asking to hear him.
Earlier Appeal Rejected
PERTH -- Earlier this year, handing down its decision in July, the full
Federal Court had again rejected Mr Irving's attempts to overturn the entry
ban.
Judge Nicholson opened the opinion with words which indicated that she recognised
that the "bad character" criterion was just a ploy to suppress
freedom of speech [see page 4]. Judge Lee stated in his decision:
Counsel for [David Irving] submitted that the meaning of
"good character", as used in the 1989 regulations and in the 1993
regulations, was a meaning that was consistent with the maintenance
of public security and safety, and that if the presence of the appellant
in Australia would involve no such threat it should be concluded that the
appellant had satisfied the required test. The appellant's contention is
not without substance....
The court's negative opinion was however based on Germany's conviction of
Mr Irving for "defaming the memory of the dead" (he queried factual
details of the legends about gas chambers), his (illegal) detention by Canada
in Nov. 1992, which Jewish bodies had engineered, and his subsequent brief
imprisonment by the British High Court without trial for contempt of court
in 1994.
The Australian judges agreed with Canberra that these points suggested he
did not have the good character required of all visitors to their country.
(Mr Irving pointed out in one television broadcast that without the immigration
of deportees and criminals, there would not have been any Australia today.)
Laurence Maher, professor of law at the University of Melbourne, who has
already written a learned article disapproving of the government's attempts
to gag Mr Irving by immigration bans, has argued that the new regulation
is in its vague terms beyond the powers granted by the Immigration Act,
and also contrary to the implied constitutional entitlement to freedom of
expression on political and public affairs.
Irving's counsel, Peter Bates, argued before the court at its hearing on
Mar. 21 that the German law under which Germany handed down the conviction
and $22,000 fine on the historian which released this avalanche of worldwide
bans would have been unconstitutional in Australia.
It would violate the country's signature to the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights which is incorporated into Australian--but evidently
not German--law (in the second schedule of the Human Rights & Equal
Opportunities Act, 1986).
 By David Irving
From my base in Key West I phone John Sanders, a book publisher & distributor
in Tennessee, to take up his offer to handle the besieged GOEBBELS biography.
On the phone from London Benté says that Jessica has a nasty cough;
I speak with Jessica, she burbles piteously. Then I phone Andrew Page, lawyer
acting for The Observer and Gitta Sereny, to ask where is the Defence to
my libel writ?
In London, the Literary Review has asked Christopher Hitchens, the well
known Washington journalist, to review NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE: that's
good.
I send him this fax:
I fear they have sent you the version of the MS before my
three political correctness sub-editors got to work on it. You should discard
this text and wait for the proper text.
I RECEIVE A NICE LETTER [from one of Britain's top two publishers], asking
about CHURCHILL'S WAR, vol. ii. Then I cycle out to the Rusty Anchor eatery,
pedalling in blustery, stormy conditions along the Atlantic boulevard. I
have just reached Houseboat Row when the back tyre blows out. Great difficulty
flagging down a truck in pouring rain, which takes me and the bike home.
Work until midnight revising CHURCHILL. No food in the house, and all restaurants
here packed out.
I LIE AWAKE A LONG TIME worrying about Günter Deckert and his family.
[Deckert, jailed in Germany for translating Fred Leuchter's 1991 lecture,
has now been given a further two-year term for organizing a lecture for
David Irving in 1990. SEE FOOT OF THIS PAGE.]
I write him this letter, sending cop ies direct to him in prison and via
his lawyer Dr Bock:
Dear Günter,
I am shocked about what the police-state has done to you yet again. I shall
not let your case be forgotten, while you are held in prison.
On my September tour of various countries, I shall speak to many audiences,
and I shall always mention your case. Please ensure that a copy of the judgement
is sent to me, as I want to get the facts right.
* I PHONE MY OLD FRIEND Don F. at his new editorial posting, The Viking
Press in New York (full circle: they first published my HITLER'S WAR in
1977!); he sounds very congenial, says he's shown the GOEBBELS book to several
friends, calls it ironically "a hot property".
I say that in the USA the book is currently "dead in the water."
Don says that the muckraking Frank Rich phoned him to get dirt on the book
before writing his Op-Ed piece for The New York Times, but he refused to
help, saying he'd read it and liked it.
In passing he mentions that today's New York Times reveals that Tom McCormack
is retiring as chief of St Martin's Press (SMP)! I say I'll be in New York
City in September, let's do lunch; he's enthusiastic.
Somebody faxes to me today's Associated Press release about McCormack's
retirement; needless to say, half of it is devoted to smearing me. I wonder
if that's why McC. was forced out?
JOHN SANDERS PHONES. he has been discussing distributing the GOEBBELS book
with his partners. They have come up with some ideas but are as nervous
as kittens, not wanting to see the same bigots destroying their companies
as are trying to destroy me.
Virgin Atlantic flight home to England. I snooze and read during the ten
hour flight. I arrive at Duke Street at 9:20 a.m., just as Benté
is walking up to the front door from taking Jessica to nursery school.
Taxi to the High Court with Chitra Nadarajah to oppose The Observer's plea
for more time to work on their libel defence. Their lawyer Andrew Page is
a decent enough chap, of my generation. The judge reduces their 84 days
applied for to 56.
It is clear that they intend, while conceding defeat on Dr Elke Fröhlich
(they falsely accused me of cheating her out of the credit for finding the
Moscow diaries) and other issues, to fight me on the odious action of manipulating
documents and they intend reviewing all my works to date for this reason.
I warn Page that the action goes back to the late Professor Martin Broszat,
who first voiced it in 1977 in connection with my quotations from Hitler's
Table Talk--and he got it all wrong!
I subsequently write this letter to Page:
While reviewing my correspondence file with the Institut
für Zeitgeschichte, where Dr Elke Fröhlich works, to find the
documents relating to manipulation, I came across these
two letters which I had long forgotten. In my letter to the late Dr Hoch
I asked him to accord to [Ms Sereny] every courtesy and assistance in preparing
her article for The Sunday Times in 1977, and to give her complete access
to the Irving Coltion housed there, even the closed files, "in order
that she can obtain a proper impression of the depth and breadth of my research."
In his letter to me, July 15, 1977 Dr. Hoch reports on Ms Sereny's visit,
expressing astonishment that she seemed interested only in material opposed
to my views, and showing no intention whatever of reviewing the Irving Collection.
* I HAVE A FRIENDLY CONVERSATION with the non-fiction chief of [Britain's
second largest publisher]. He says they will be very interested in paperback
rights to Focal Point's edition of CHURCHILL'S WAR. Says he was discussing
me and the New York fracas with an American publisher only yesterday; did
Tom McCormack resign, or was he pushed, he asks? I can only speculate, reply
I.
We both have a chuckle when I tell him that only yesterday I noticed that
I signed the CHURCHILL'S WAR contract with him twenty years ago, in October
1976!
A mad Turkish female phones from Istanbul. How can they get their book onto
the Internet? I say I don't know.
I AM SENT A CLIPPING FROM VANITY FAIR. Abraham Foxman of the Anti Defamation
League (ADL®) has written them a swinish letter, mouthing incantations
against me and Christopher Hitchens.
The world-wide mudslide continues, with a vicious item in today's Svenska
Dagbladet, published in Stockholm. It is faxed to me anonymously. This newspaper
already published one libel about me on Nov. 11, 1993.
I fax this letter to the news s editor for publication:
Your journalist Lars Jakobson refers to me (July 21) as "nazistiska
historiker". This is an outrageous remark. My thirty books have been
published by the world's leading publishers, including Legenda in Sweden;
they are highly regarded by the world's leading historians; and they have
earned glittering reviews from every major newspaper (most recently for
my biography of the Nazi propaganda minister Dr Joseph Goebbels, published
in Britain this April).
I am getting so tired of this constant smear campaign, organised by well
funded international bodies. And the people writing it always, but always,
appear to be Jewish: Foxman, Jakobson, etc.
At the same time I write to Vanity Fair saying that Abraham H Foxman
is not unknown to me having pursued a career of malicious defamation against
me around the world for several years. "In the United States there
is little action I can take (New York Times v Sullivan, 376 us 254 [1964]);
the situation is very different indeed in the U.K., where your magazine
is also published "
I invite Vanity Fair to publish this letter:
Sir,
Your readers can find most of my thirty works in every book store and university
library around the world and make up their minds for themselves. But without
offering any evidence, Abraham H Foxman (letters, Aug 1996) accuses your
columnist Christopher Hitchens of "intellectual dishonesty and me of
"anti-Semitism"; he calls me "a well-known Holocaust denier
and Nazi apologist," and he writes of my "pattern of bias and
deceit." Then I see that he directs a league against defamation. How
odd.
Vanity Fair reply through their London lawyers Biddle & Co. agreeing
to publish this; theirs is a churlish letter, to which I reply sweetly.
From the Columbian, Clark County, Oregon
I DRIVE A RENTAL TRUCK out to Brentwood, my birthplace, and retrieve
half the palette of books that have arrived from Australia at F J Tytherleigh
& Co. Then on to Ongar, flowers on Mother's grave.
In the evening I phone my German lawyer in Mainz, who has asked me to return
the videotape of the Günter Deckert function, supplied from police
records. I have had no opportunity to view it, as I have no video machine.
The lawyer says that the German judge felt that the audience laughter during
my speech was proof enough to convict Deckert of Volksverhetzung (racial
incitement)!
I prepare to send out envelopes to benefit Günter Deckert with my replies
to contributors to my fighting fund; let's see what I can do to help the
"jailbird".
A FAX IS WAITING FOR ME as I rise, from my brave attorney Ed Wall in West
Australia: tomorrow the judges hand down their decision on our appeal to
the Federal Court against the govvernment's refusal to grant me a visa.
We discuss what I should say if as expected the decision is negative.
At 10:44 a.m. Ed himself phones from Perth: the judgement is short, about
thirty pages, and otherwise very positive for us: Judge R D Nicholson states
in her opening remarks:
In a democracy where free speech is cherished (even if not
recognised as a fundamental overriding consideration of law), the application
of a "good character" test to deny a visa to a person who espouses
controversial public views must necessarily raise the question in the mind
of the unsuccessful applicant or others whether the test has been applied
in truth to deny the opportunity for espousal by that person of his or her
views within the country in respect of which the visa was sought
The question also arises whether the denial by one country has an unmerited
snowballing effect; unmerited because the denials in other countries are
arguably founded on denial of an opportunity to espouse the view rather
than truly on grounds of character.
Ed thinks there is material for an appeal on constitutional grounds to the
Supreme Court.
Awake next day at 2:35 a.m. and find several faxes, including an item from
today's Sydney Morning Herald, with a caricature; sleepless for a while.
Channel 7 Australian TV phoned, wanting to make a programme about using
visa denials to suppress freedom of speech.
In the afternoon an uninvited Australian, a Mr H., a Federal policeman from
Queens land, turns up; I talk with him at the door, but don't invite him
in. Enough on my plate as it is.
In the evening I download the disc that J. T. has sent me, full of stinking
garbage about me that he has shed out of the Internet, including a totally
fictitious account by one David Katz of a speech by me in Johannesburg,
including talk by me of "niggers" etc. That is a word I have never
used in my whole life: but I imagine that the South African Katz's of this
world have more than once.
My barrister in Perth submits an opinion on what we should now do. I write
him:
Please don't feel aggrieved that Professor M. is taking an
interest in the case. If he continues to write favourable articles in the
SLR [Sydney Law Review], etc., it can only do good in the long run. Right?
My own confidence in you is unbounded, particularly having read your masterly
summary of the legal aspects, which make it so easy for me to take decisions,
tho' so far away.
These are--and I am so instructing Ed Wall--that
(1) we do not appeal to the High Court.
(2) We now start actions under the Commonwealth Freedom of Information Act
to establish precisely what facts have been fed to the Minister.
(3) I thereafter lodge a new application for a visa later this year.
Meanwhile I am manuvring to get from lawyers acting for the Board of Deputies
of British Jews a document admitting that the 40pp report on me which they
submitted secretly to the Canadian government in 1991 and 1992-which triggered
the whole avalanche-is defamatory and untrue, and to withdraw it. They have
incicated to me that they are prepared to (as part of a secret settlement
to avoid libel action). Would not such a document knock the tent pole out
of the whole case?
BUY THE PRESENT WINSTON CHURCHILL'S BOOK on his father Randolph, and read
it outside Garfunkel's for a couple of hours until 7:30 p.m. Some historical
mistakes, but a good attempt at an honest evalution of his father, who cannot
have had an easy life. I write him:
Dear Mr Churchill,
I wanted to tell you privately how much I am enjoying it. It is not easy
to write a book, and even less so for those who have not made it their life-time
profession; but it looks good, feels good, and--reads good. As an author
and, for my sins, still ploughing ahead on a biography of your grandfather's
war years, I particularly welcome that you have reduced so many documents
in their original texts, rather than pre-chewing them into unrecognisable,
bland lumps.
I confess that I had no idea your father was involved in operations like
the Benghazi raid you describe. He was obvously a very brave man
I think your father suffered from much jealousy of his contemporaries, who
no doubt did not like being at the wrong end of his rough tongue. He used
it on me once, in a television studio, in 1967, I recall; but that was the
fault of that oversmart gentleman David Frost.
I have incidentally drafted about four pages on the Harrimanp;Pamela
business, for vol. ii of my biography; I want to hurt no feelings, and I
would be happy to let you see them if you want.
Pamela, currently the United States ambassadress to France, was Winston's
mother; while still the wife of Randolph in 1941 she started a notorious
affair with the billionaire American lend-lease administrator Averell Harriman,
which prime minister Churchill condoned.
M PHONES, SAYS HE HAS sent Action Report to The New York Times's Doreen
Carvajal. She's told him she has learned that my name is now on a Black
List of publishers. I say (a) please don't send AR to third parties, it
is a private publication for contributors, and written as such; (b) I am
not pleased about the "Black List" chatter, and he does me no
service by repeating it.
* THE BOARD OF DEPUTIES OF BRITISH JEWS has now sent me a lengthy Questionnaire,
to establish just how deeply their forty-page report wrongs me.
[This vicious and libellous secret report, shorn of its identifying titles
and covering letters, was retrieved by Mr Irving's agents from Canadian
government files under the Access to Information Act].
All day until late working on the answers. Easier than I thought, and by
a fluke I find all the twenty-, thirty-, and even thirty-five-year old docments
the Board's lawyers have asked to be shown. I adopt a tough line at the
end, since reading the law books shows me that I have at best only twelve
months to serve a writ from the date on which I tentatively identified the
Board as the authors; this may well be why their lawyer, Anthony Julius
of the firm Mishcon de Reya, is playing for time.
I PICK UP A RENTAL PEUGEOT and drive overnight to southern France to join
Benté and Jessica, who have been holed up in a small mountain inn
for the past few weeks. I curse the car's radio most of the way, as I can
not get it to change stations except one half-wavelength at a time. Not
until south of Lyons do I discover that the mysterious and unmarked stalk-lever
on the control column does it all effortlessly!
Weather in northern France misty, damp, and patches of fog and drizzle;
gradually clears and sun breaks through as I drive into Provence. I plough
on all night, with occasional snooze stops; arrive at Le R. after 850 miles'
drive at 3:15 p.m., fresh as a daisy. Jessica looking in very good colour
and fit.
I phone my London answering machine. It is already as crowded as the beach,
about twenty messages, mostly vacous but they cost as much as our supper
to listen to. Among the callers: a Mrs B. has phoned, wanting to speak to
me in a matter of urgency; I call back the number she leaves, and a man
answers and says his wife has just gone off to Duke Street to see me. "She
was Charles Massey's daughter," he says, "does this ring a bell?"
I say, "And how! General Sikorski's plane crash!" "Precisely,"
he says.
In 1967 Massey was identified to me as the only other mystery-survivor of
that 1943 crash. But when I went to visit him a few days later, he had just
vanished forever. His family never saw him again.
At five p.m. Mrs B. phones me at the auberge. Last Wednesday, she says,
she discovered that her father, whom she had grown up believing to have
died twenty-seven years ago, had in fact died just one year ago in south
western England.
She wants to get to the bottom of it: she is shocked by the revelation.
I say that at the time we could not decide whether he was living a fantasy
life, or telling the truth, what with the hints he had dropped about actually
having been on the Sikorski plane when it crashed.
* A SECOND CALL FROM MRS B. She says her father's will names as executor
Terence Simms, a man of about fifty, identifying him as his "next of
kin" (to her bafflement).
Simms has remarked to her ("I don't know if this is important,"
she says) that at her father's funeral a very important man, "an air
chief-marshall" arrived from London in a chauffeur-driven car.
I RISE AFTER A FIERCE HEADACHE ALL NIGHT, like somebodyjabbing their fingers
in the back of my eyeballs. Then another poor night, with three exhausting
dreams, including a Technicolor one in which I blunder onto a British army
base wearing my old RAF raincoat, am arrested and told it will cost $10,000
to set me free. I am put on trial immediately. I deliver a speech to a room
surprisingly like a German DVU or GfP audience, with many enthusiastic standing
people.
Lunch up the road at Pré du Lac. Jessica alas turns into "Dr
Jessickel" (or is it "Mr Hydicca?) and we have to curtail the
luncheon be cause of her tantrums. Dinner there too. Jessica finds the proprietor's
little boy, same age, to play with and they romp round the tables to everybody's
delight. Benté remarks on how idyllic it is to see infants scampering
around. She's right.
Much of today spent (when it is not raining) in revising 1942 and the day
of the Convoy PQ.17 scatter-decision in CHURCHILL'S WAR. I find myself re-reading
my 1967 book THE DESTRUCTION OF CONVOY PQ.17. Albrecht Knaus, chief of Hoffmann
& Campe Verlag, always said it was the best I wrote and he may have
been right.
I BEGIN WORKING ON THE Deborah Lipstadt libel pleadings. Ponder the tactical
issue: whether to include four or five department heads of the Waterstones
bookstore group, who have expressly refused to stock any books whatever
by me while deliberately stocking La Lipstadt. How can the group afford
to let their department heads push business towards the rivals at Blackwells,
Foyle's, Dillons, etc., just because of their shambolic Marxistp;Leninist
views?
Down to breakfast with Jessica and a box of Kellogg's, singing
Down we go to the Breakfast Room
Jessica with her Plate and Spoon
Daddy's got the big Corn Flakes
This and That is all it Takes.
She's a little angel as always. When she is upset about something she sobs
and stretches up her arms to Mummy and pleads for "a coddle" (Benté
never can say her U's properly). Then there is her imperious squeal of "Baby
Do It!"-demanding to be handed the shower or car key or whatever so
she can manipulate it her self.
I phone lawyer Anthony Julius and speak with his secretary, saying I am
anxious now to press ahead to the envisaged amicable settlement with the
Board and has he received my Answers to the Questionnaire?
* I FINISH READING THE BOOK Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley
Park. Most impressive, though a little disjointed-I am not sure what
"the British Museum method" of codebreaking was, for instance-but
one enters an aura of genius in read ing the book's pages.
I never realised that the Nazis' Enigma cipher machine was largely bro ken
because of its simple foible that no one letter could be enciphered to itself-i.e.
an "A" could be any other letter of the alphabet in the coded
text but "A" itself.
I AM TO FLY BACK TODAY to the United States for another arduous tour that
will take me to all four corners of the Union. Before leaving London I work
through the night until 4:30 a.m., then sleep until eight. At 1:10 p.m.
a friendly Black-cab driver comes, and takes me to Heathrow (free!).
The British Airways flight leaves for Los Angeles at three p.m.: an awful
middle-aged Danish couple cramp me into my window seat, and swallow bottle
after bottle of free B.A. wine throughout the flight, one flagon of which
the plump woman knocks over onto me with one flail of her balloon arms.
Stinking like a Mexican bodega I reach my hotel around 10 p.m. A long day.
However I learn that Professor Gordon Craig of Stanford University, the
country's leading historian, has just published a six-page review of GOEBBELS
in The New York Review of Books.
Silencing Mr Irving [writes Professor Craig] would
be a high price to pay for freedom from the annoyance that he causes us.
The fact is that he knows more about National Socialism than most professional
scholars in his field, and students of the years 1933p;1945 owe more
than they are always willing to admit to his energy as a researcher and
to the scope and vigor of his publications.
He continues: It is always difficult for the non-historian to remember
that there is nothing absolute about historical truth. What we consider
as such is only an estimation, based upon what the best available evidence
tells us. It must constantly be tested against new information and new interpretations
that appear, however implausible they may be, or it will lose its vitality
and degenerate into dogma or shibboleth. Such people as David Irving, then,
have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not
disregard their views.
PHONE CALLS COME DURING THE NIGHT from the London Evening Standard about
the libel writs I issued yesterday against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt.
Benté says Andrew Page yesterday faxed through a lengthy de fence
on behalf of The Observer; it runs to over forty pages.
At 5:30 a.m. a stranger, claiming to be a nephew of William Bullitt, phones
for a long discourse about that man. I interrupt him after ten minutes and
tell him the time here in Los Angeles.
I speak to a large audience at Costa Mesa. Next day I set off at 2 p.m.,
taking the slow coastal Pacic Coast Highway instead of the Interstate. Spectacular
scenery, varying from industrial pipes and grime to forests, mountains,
and wind swept dunes. Stop at Buellton for a quick bite then on to Stanford.
Here I phone Professor Craig and thank him for his review of GOEBBELS. It
is ironic to see such a major review of a book which it is now impossible
to buy in the United States. I arrange for him to pick up free copies of
other books tomorrow for his university library (APOCALYPSE '45, the Goebbels
1938 diary, etc.)
WE HAVE A GOOD PUBLIC MEETING at Oakland, California, in a Black-owned hall
guarded by tight-lipped Blacks with bow ties. This time the volent opponents
from Berkeley's Hillel have not ventured down the road to protest, it seems,
though there is still a noisy contingent outside the door with loud hailers.
Journalists from Berkeley are there, and one tall White journalist who boasts
that he sent his man Joe Lehmann down to smuggle himself into the function
at Costa Mesa. So what!
I fly via Denver to Tulsa, Oklahoma. A small but well or organised meeting
there, then I'm up at 4 a.m. the next day to fly via Denver to Atlanta,
Georgia. I arrive downtown there at 5 p.m. A good meeting at the DeKalb
County public library, around 100 people.
Sam organies a collection for my Legal Fund and loudly guarantees to match
any contribution up to $500. To general laughter I at once offer to put
$500 into the hat.
At Atlanta airport a Black kerb side employee of United Airlines suggests
I give him $50 cash and no questions asked, to get the heavy boxes of books
through onto the plane. I fly to Washington's Dulles airport where I pick
up a gold-lacquered Lincoln Town Car and drive downtown feeling like an
Arab prince. Arrive at the Club where the dinner is to be held at 6 p.m.,
shower, change my shirt, and then down stairs to the exclusive invitation
only dinner.
It is attended by sixteen notables, including this time Gerald Livingston,
founder of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, and Christopher
Hitchens, a likeeble, open-minded man whom I do not recognise until the
meal is nearly over. Also Karl Bakke, former chairman of the Federal Maritime
Commission. My left hand neighbour is Professor Detlev Junker, president
of the German Historical Institute, who listens open-mouthed to the account
of what his government is doing to suppress free speech.
Hitchens says afterwards that a mutual friend once asked my old publisher
George Weidenfeld the secret of his renowned success with young females.
"Simple," replied the Austrian Jew, no Adonis he. "I am the
Nijinskii of cunnilingus." . A few weeks later he saw Weidenfeld referred
to in a cap tion in the New Statesman as the Diaghilev of Publishing, and
wrote the appropriate reader's letter, which was not published. Andrew G.,
the organiser, does well. This time nobody is obnoxious (unless I myself).
He also organises a function for a broader public at mid-day on Sunday.
It is 12 mid-day, held at the Polo Indian Club. I talk informally to about
fifteen interested people. Afterwards back to his apartment for coffee;
he is relentless in support of Willis Carto, and refuses to see any part
of his behaviour as criminal. I do not want to get involved, and say so.
Before we part he identifies to me the street where Brigitte Peck-daughter
of the late and unlamented Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss-lives in
Alexandria.
Drive down to Richmond for a television interview at a small public access
television station. I insist that the Confederate flag backdrop be removed.
S. needs to be shot, sucking me into something like that.
Back to DC in teeming rain-the really frightening kind, where trucks throw
buckets of slime over the windshield making the way ahead totally opaque
for seconds at a time.
I drive up the New Jersey Turnpike the next day through more teeming rain,
arriving at Newark 9 p.m. But the hotels there are full, so I have to drive
around and it is half past eleven before I finally find one, in the middle
of nowhere, at Pompton Plains, New Jersey. Exhausted. Straight to bed.
The local newspaper The Record reports under the unappealing headline that
the hall has cancelled the booking for our Friday meeting under pressure
from a female the newspaper identifies as a local Jewess, Andrea Pason of
Hackensack ("a local activist in liberal causes").
There is however a back-up hall. The organiser says that Ms Pason is a noted
drug-abuser and bi-sexual. How appealing. He mentions that he is getting
phone callers trying to get information on Friday's meeting. Among them
one "Albert Rich," whose number is however listed by Bell Atlantic
under his real name, Israel Richter.
SUDDENLY THE SKIES DARKEN. Benté phones from London to say that an
urgent fax has just come from Lieut-Colonel Tom Johnson, organiser of the
annual MAX military exhibition at Pittsburgh's ExpoMart, saying they cannot
allow my participation in this or future exhibitions. They have come under
the usual pressure from our traditional friends.
Benté faxes the letter through. Attached to it is one from ExpoMart
general manager Michael J Leone to Johnson, steeped in libels: "As
I am sure you are aware, David Irving, through his many writings and speeches,
is a notorious Adolf Hitler glorifier/apologist and one of the world's most
notorious Holocaust deniers. He is revered as an icon of the international
neo-Nazi movement and his inflammatory speeches and views have caused him
to be barred from numerous countries around the world including Ger ny,
Austria, Italy and Canada"
Under the terms of their Lease on the hall, Leo reminds Johnson, they claim
the right to "eject any objectionable person and to prevent any "performance
or entertainment."
Johnson says the local Holocaust museum has put pressure on the ExpoMart.
I warn that I may have to get an injunction to enforce my contract with
him.
This letter then goes from me to the ExpoMart:
Dear Mr Leone,
I have seen a copy of a letter written by your goodself to a third party
yesterday, in an attempt to induce that third party to violate a contract
with me []
Last year in the British High Court I obliged a major Sunday newspaper to
pay damages for precisely the same kind of libels uttered against me (Queen's
Bench 1995 No. Ip;1803). On May 1 this year I served a Writ under the
Defamation Act 1982 against The Observer for very much the same kind of
libels (Queen's Bench 1996 No. Ip;604). Only last month I settled out
of court, again with the payment to me of damages, an action which I brought
against a London West End hotel (CL.535062) which had been incited by people
none too distant from your own associates to violate a contract between
us.
I have also this month issued in the High Court a Writ against two firms
of publishers and the American authoress Deborah Lipstadt, and I have issued
the first warning letter to the British distributors of the Swedish newspaper
Svenska Dagbladet
When Vanity Fair magazine published a letter containing precisely the same
libels from Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League,
I obliged that magazine under threat of lawsuit to publish a retraction.
* I HAVE NOW READ THE LENGTHY DEFENCE served by Gitta Sereny and The Observer.
Very mushy, and they ignore much of the statement of claim. I make this
reply to Andrew Page:
I confirm receipt today of the Defence which I have read
with engagement, if not conviction. This looks like [it is] turning into
a very protracted, though not uninteresting, action.
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN has invited me to speak to them on freedom of speech
or on feminism. The first time that they invited me in the 1980s, a screeching
mob of a thousand leftist protesters stormed the building, doing considerable
damage. The next time, the university ordered them to retract the invitation.
We shall see if this invitation comes to anything.
I drive over into Manhattan for lunch with Steve Wasserman, a wiry, intelligent,
beardy-weirdy type of Jewish editor; it was he who phoned me in London a
few days after the SMP débâcle in April and asked if Random
House could take up the U.S. rights in the GOEBBELS biography. Unfortunately,
as he now describes to me, although Jason Epstein and other editors there
strongly favoured taking the book over, it met with another obstacle which
he does not identify to me. He is willing to do what he still can. He asks
if he can also see NUREMBERG.
I rubberneck around Manhattan until 5 p.m., then meet Don F. at The Viking
Press-he was the editor who originally commissioned GOEBBELS while at Athenæum.
He is still young, keen, blue-eyed, mild-mannered. He too wants to see NUREMBERG,
and hopes to be able to persuade his chief, a Mrs Grossmann, to take over
GOEBBELS despite all the fuss-"a slim chance," he admits. The
New York Review of Books article has helped them all.
I leave New York later than planned, around 7 p.m., and drive straight back
over the Hudson river to the New Jersey meeting, arriving at 8 p.m. Large
audience, about 150, including one Annie Alpert who identifies herself at
the end as a representative of the Nizkor project, the Holocaust revisionist-monitoring
(watch that word, "monitoring"!) outfit on the Internet. Some
body says she was spotted using a midget tape recorder. They're incorrigible.
* THEN I SET OUT AROUND 9 A.M. for New Hampshire. A God-given day of beautiful
sunshine, as I cruise across the Bronx and up through Connecticut, Massachusetts,
and Vermont. I reach the meeting house, after a brief detour, at 3:07 p.m.;
seven minutes late, not bad after a four hundred mile drive.
At once launch into the talk to a small audience in a garden marquee, about
seventeen people. Three of them are making videotapes, a practice which
I dislike. I hear that various bodies are offering large rewards on the
Net for such a video record of my talks. Unlimiteded funds!
Those there include several names from my Fighting Fund contributors' list,
including one family who have driven down from Canada and another from nearby
Peterborough. My host has a young wife and four beautiful children aged
one to eight. Over coffee afterwards he reveals his master plan for my survival,
which he and his wife have hatched: namely, I should make common cause with
Louis Farrakhan, and found a publishing empire with the Black Muslims' money.
Aaargh! I hope I am not too abrupt in my response.
There are three large clocks in and around my guest bedroom which chime
loudly on each hour-as I can verify-and each half-hour. I set out southwards
to return to New Jersey through torrential rain and thunderstorms.
I learn that Ms Alpert posted a triumphalist item on the Internet about
the Jersey meeting, having found out the secret venue, and invited others
to contact her to learn it and attend. Also that a Mr Rich Grange is claiming
on the Net to be a friend of mine (I don't know him) and to have attended
the Costa Mesa function, of which he has posted a garbled and wrongful account
on the Net.
Also that a Bill Rasmussen has contacted organiser Eric G. in Ohio, claiming
to have genuine Hitler paintings etc. which he wants to give to me. Ho-hum:
I know Rasmussen, having met him at Sch.'s house in Virginia fifteen years
or so ago. Not impressed: a key-knob from the Rhein Hotel Dreesen dangled
from his belt-"Hitler's Room," he intoned. (It was a modern hotel
key-knob however).
EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS NOW BEGIN TO UNFOLD. There is another fax from Benté
in London: my Australian lawyer Ed Wall wants me to call him urgently; he
says the Australian prime minister has made a statement about "freedom
of speech," and reporters are calling to ask if I am therefore going
to make a fresh visa application.
First I phone Coole & Haddock, lawyers acting for the four young Waterstones
booksellers, and state off the record that I am prepared to withdraw the
action against them (but not against Lipstadt et al) if they apologise and
agree to take her book off their shelves.
I say I bear them no maliice and do not wish to harm these four individuals,
while the action against Lipstadt herself and Penguin Books will continue.
He says that he doubts whether on principle they will agree to refuse to
stock a book. I say that they flatly refused to stock books by me!
Reporter Jenny Stein then phones for an interview for the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation; first I slot in a call to Ed Wall for advice. He says that
their prime minister John Howard has announced that a new era of freedom
of speech is dawning in Australia; so naturally all the media have immediately
thought of me.
The Stein interview broadcast nationwide on ABC Radio puts the fat in the
fire. I am wakened by a radio programme from Sydney wanting a live interview.
I repeat that the Howard government cannot afford to be seen to be preaching
freedom of speech, and then denying me entry.
Then Australian Channel 9's "Today" television programme phones,
wanting me to do a TV show this evening. We arrange for me to go to their
New York City studio at 4 p.m. for a live sattellite link. What fools our
traditional friends are: they try to gag me, and the net result is that
I end up speaking live to millions. The fteen-minute segment goes out from
No. 1955 Broadway via sattellite to Los Angeles and then on to Sydney for
the whole of Australia to see, prime-time.
I drive in rush hour traffic out of New York and down to Washington, getting
thoroughly lost at the end of the Baltimorep;Washington Parkway as the
signs are down: construction work. Arrive at the private house where I am
staying at 10:30 p.m. to find that a flood of messages is awaiting me there,
as friends in Adelaide have informed the media of the phone number, having
got it from other friends in Cleveland. The global cyber-village.
I do a radio interview. The interviewer is friendly, says the story is on
the front page of every newspaper in Australia. Prime Minister Howard has
now stated that when Mr Irving makes a new visa application it will be judged
on its merits. I shall not make it difficult for him.
There develops a hideous night with endless phone callers from Australia,
which is twelve time-zones distant: at 2 a.m., Radio 3RW from Melbourne,
for a fteen-minute Drive Time radio show, in which the host is really rude
to me and I am sorely tempted just to hang up. At five and six a.m. the
phone starts ring ing again, but I call out to my hosts not to bother with
them.
At eight-thirty friends phone me from Sydney; one national newspaper, The
Australian, wrongly calls me Dr Irving. I say that "Sir" or "Your
Excellency" would have been preferable.
I phone Benté in London; there have been one or two stray calls to
Duke Street from Australia. Family matters are more pressing. She says her
sister's husband has died during the night (a paraplegic after an automobile
accident); their little girl has cried and said, "Now I don't have
a Daddy."
During this hectic morning I complete an 850-word article that has been
commissioned by the Melbourne newspaper The Age. Then the Australian Press
Association phones from London, reporting that Prime Minister Howard has
said on television last night that I am "a nutter." One of my
more distant friends, evidently.
Australia's top Channel 7 television programme, the Jana Wendt programme
WITNESS, asks me to be available live on Monday from Washington; they want
me to promise them exclusivity. Mysteriously, they know I shall be "in
Cleveland over next few days."
In the evening the Adelaide Advertiser phones, can they interview me for
a major Saturday newspaper feature? I give an in-depth portrait of my life,
in which their reporter probes every nook and cranny in what seems to be
a most objective way. (She does not disappoint me, either.)
* AT THE PITSBURGH RADISSON the show's organisers come hunting for me. I
say that since I am banned, friends will be running the tables I have booked.
"Things have changed," they say.
Faxes come to my hotel room from the Sydney Morning Herald, which is today
running a major story and an editorial demanding I should be allowed in,
although "a crackpot"; clippings from the Australian Jewish community's
newspapers show that they are going ballistic. The game's up! The International
Campaign for Real History is about to invade their paradise.
Next morning I drive straight to downtown Pittsburgh, to the County Courthouse.
I instruct Robert Garber, a bearded, amiable attorney of around forty who
identifies himself to me after five minutes as having "a problem,"
namely he is Jew ish.
It is plain from the first moment that he is a highly capable attorney.
He initially dislikes the task, but warms to it as he realizes that (a)
I am being widely defamed and (b) there is a slim chance of success. Then
he sees I have already drafted the affidavit, and says we can just get in
for a mid-afternoon hearing. He works flat out while I go for lunch, after
I write out a $2,500 initial cheque on the Legal Fighting Fund for an advance
on his fees. Swallow hard as I do so. Money lost?
Into court at 3:30 p.m. Judge Judith L. A. Friedman, a plump, fortyish woman
of great serenity and urbane manner, rapidly makes plain that she views
this as a Free Speech issue. She flattens the ExpoMart's four lawyers with
scathing remarks: "Having and expressing differing opinions is still
legal in the United States, whatever may be the case in other countries,
like Canada," she snaps.
In her closing remarks she deftly turns the issue into a contract law one,
less capable of debate. Sitting outside the courtroom in the draughty hall,
I become alarmed as the clock drags on toward 7 p.m.-the hour I am supposed
to start speaking at Cleveland in Ohio, 150 miles or more away.
Seven p.m.: victory; she reads out her findings, dwelling at first on the
appeal remedies open to the losing party-but seeming to look only at the
Defendants as she does so. She finds squarely for me, but says I must post
a $10,000 cash bond tomorrow for her Order to take effect.
I then set out by road for Cleveland. The audience has waited, thank goodness.
I arrive there at 9:30 p.m. I speak forcefully until 11 p.m., devour an
apple pie at Denny's then drive back to Pennsylnia, arriving back at the
hotel after 4 a.m. It is nine a.m. in London. I phone Benté with
the result of the trial. Something of a Pyrrhic victory.
* I DRIVE THE NEXT MORNING BACK INTO PITTSBURGH and post the $10,000 bond
at the Courthouse. I have had to empty the Legal Fund and scrape the cash
together from every conceivableble source. Bob Garber will be in court again
this afternoon for me, as the ExpoMart lawyers are appealing. At 5:30 p.m.
Garber says the Superior Court has denied appeal. In two or three weeks
I should get the bond back therefore.
[At the time of going to press, not one cent has been repaid to Mr Irving;
the ExpoMart's lawyers are objecting to the bond's release].
Back to the hotel and sleep for an hour, whacked. Faxes come in from Australia
with more newspaper articles: the prime minister of Victoria, Mr Kennett,
has now stated that in his view I should be permitted to enter.
Two days late, we set up our book stand at the Show. The organisers warn
me that ten thugs have been seen invading the show and asking where my stand
is; nobody tells them, however, and it is a big show. Armed security near
my stand is stepped up.
A Rev. Donald W McIlvane comes to my stand and asks inane questions. His
card identifies him as being from the "Pittsburgh Area Religion &
Race Council. Were these not stated by the media to be the people who protested
to ExpoMart?
DINNER WITH BEN S., A FAMOUS DOCUMENT HUNTER. He tells me that he has been
offered a letter which Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, wrote
to his wife from prison apologising for "confessing to the atrocities
at the concentration camp, and explaining that he was tortured into making
the confessions. He says that he will not offer for it himself as it would
be dynamite in anybody's hands.
I urge him that we can put together a consortium which will raise the money
to buy it.-Some discussion about Peter Stahl, about whom he is also contemptuous;
he knows of his "Gregory Douglas" forgeries and his prison record.
* TONIGHT IS THE BIG TELEVISION BROADCAST TO AUSTRALIA. I phone London,
and gossip with little Jessica; she sings Baa-baa Black Sheep over the phone
to me. Goes shopping with Mummy, and always makes a point of inquiring,
"Have you got enough money?" Benté has sometimes had to
tell her that there is "not enough money" to buy something, Jessica
makes a point of asking.
I drive downtown to Washington DC around 5 p.m. A snack at The American
Café then over to H Street for the Jana Wendt broadcast. I buy a
five dollar bunch of flowers on the way in. Lori Butterfield, producer of
the Channel 7 programme WITNESS, asks curiously why I am carrying the flowers--is
it for some body after the show? I explain, "They are a prop- for during
the show."
The video feed from Australia, carried by satellite links around the world
over 200,000 miles of space to Sydney and back, shows my own image after
a time-lapse of around two seconds; a bit unsettling at first.
I see the Czech-born Jana Wendt on the monitor as she comes on. I was on
her show in 1987 when she had just been voted Australia's Most Desirable
Television Presenter, and she was very full of herself then; no change now.
There are the usual pleasantries (I say "out of her hearing" that
she reminds me of actress Kirstie Alley.) She seems very fussed over her
dark hair, getting it to look beautiful. She wears a white tunic jacket
to show off her figure.
I keep the flowers out of sight, intending to "present" them to
her early on, then to pluck out one flower at a time for each unpleasantness
she utters against me and toss it onto the studio floor in Washington. Things
go differently however.
The duel begins. Jana shows her nationwide audience a film montage of my
career, beginning with the TV clip of the Canadian Adjudicator at Niagara
Falls on Nov. 13, 1992 telling me to be quiet or be taken back down to the
cells, and my exclaiming to him: "I refuse to be railroaded like this!"
The screen shows me being bundled out in manacles, and asking the cameras,
"Why the hand cuffs? Is Canada afraid I may type something? Or use
my fountain pen?" Then scenes of me in a trench coat haranguing a crowd
in Halle, Germany, and shots of (TV-hired) skinheads shouting siegheils;
there are references to my being banned from other countries, and extracts
from our Focal Point video, THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN HISTORY, where I am
heard talking of the "traditional enemies."
Journalist Gerald Henderson, director of some self-important body called
The Sydney Institute, is with Jana. He objects obsessively that "traditional
enemies" is an obvious reference to The Jews and to them alone. Jana
points out that I remark in the video that I am going to be tasteless and
say the Jews have "dined out" on the Holcaust. I say that against
the criminal violence of a minority I have no option but to use such methods
of defence.
WHEN SHE ASKS-how hackneyed they all are-whether I am saying there is an
International Jewish Conspiracy, I ignore her question and say that our
researches into the files of the governments which have banned me reveal
that in every case the organisations behind the bans are international Jewish
bodies.
For instance that the Board of Deputies of British Jews sent a secret forty-page
file to Canada, and wrote to the German ambassador demanding my exclusion;
and that the ADL has tried the same tricks in the USA. I mention my Pittsburgh
court victory, saying that in every case we have had the law on our side.
In Germanny it is Herr Boobies, as I pronounce Bubis' name, who is leading
the fight against free speech.
"In Australia," I add, "it is the organizations led by either
Isi or Mark or Adolph Libeller"-- there is a scream of rage from Henderson,
who accuses me of deliberately mispronouncing the millionaire Isi Leibler's
name, which he tortuously pronounces "Leebler."
I say that any German scholar knows the correct pronunciation of Leibler.
There is another bellow at the smear implicit in the name "Adolph".
"There is no Adolph Leibler," shouts Henderson.
Maybe not, say I, but there are quite a few Little Hitlers, and the Leibler
brothers are the leaders among them.
When Jana asks me how, then, they have conspired against me in Australia
I say that the New Zealand Herald investigated this four years ago, and
established that the then ruling Labour Party had accepted handsome donations
from the Leibler brothers.
I also mention that I was fined $22,000 by the German government for saying
one sentence in a lecture, a sentence which the Polish government now admits
to be true.
Henderson reverts to the attack, saying that I am obsessed with The Jews.
I point out that until he and Jana mentioned them, I did not: they are the
ones obsessed. I deny anybody the right to call me an antisemite for defending
myself. Previously, I comment, an antisemite was somebody who hated the
Jews; now it is anybody whom the Jews hate.
They can not stand it that I have begun to defend myself, using the law.
They are trying to destroy me and to bankrupt me and my family, using Nazi
methods like smashing book store windows, arson, and violence. When I hear
the police barricades going up around my house at 3 a.m., I say, I know
that the "traditional enemies of the truth" are on the rampage
again.
Nor am I going to tolerate my good name being used as a political bludgeon
against Mr John Howard, their prime minister, who obviously has freedom
of speech dear to his heart.
She twice asks: do I really expect now to visit Australia? I raise the flowers
into view and say: "I have this bouquet for you, Jana, and I ex pect
to be able to hand it to you in a few days' or weeks' time!"
"Always the charmer," she gasps.
BEFORE LEAVING THE WASHINGTON STUDIO I HAND the bouquet to Producer Lori
Butterfield. Always the bridesmaid. "Oh, thank-you," she says.
I think that the references to "Adolph Leibler" and the bribes
paid to the Labour Government will be edited out. The rest was good, though
I say so myself.
I now draft a letter to the Australian Prime Minister. I shall enclose copies
of my latest books on GOEBBELS and THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, as well as
a video of my interview with the popular British television interviewer
Selina Scott ("a slightly less abrasive interviwer than Jana Wendt").
I tell Howard too of what Professsor Craig wrote in The New York Review
of Books [quoted above], particularly the words: "Silencing Mr Irving
would be a high price to pay for freedom from the annoyance that he causes
us."
It may well be, I write to Mr Howard, that, in line
with your desire to restore complete freedom of speech to your country,
you now reccomend that I be allowed to re-enter Australia. In that event
I would propose that to minimise any difficulties I postpone the full-length
six- to eight-week visit which I was originally contemplating until next
year, and stay only four or five days, visiting only three or four cities
beginning with Perth, delivering only one private lecture to invitation-only
audiences in or near each. This would defuse the situation; it would "draw
the claws" of my opponents, the traditional enemies of the truth.
Steve O'Reilly of The Sunday Age, Melbourne, phones from their London office.
I tell him as much about the secret Australian government docments that
have been released to us as I feel I legally can; I reveal that the previous
ban came from the office of the then prime minister, Paul Keating himself.
He phones again, querying whether it really came from Keating? I emphasise
that the ban came from "the Prime Minister's office." He: Why
has this not been pub ished before? I say probably be cause of the legal
constraints we were under. He says, "In effect the Jewish lobbies were
calling in a marker, then?"
I FLY BACK TO LONDON. The plane lands at 10:25 a.m.; bus back to Duke Street.
Benté looking very beautiful with a new outfit, brown slacks, hair
freshly cut etc. Jessica is at nursery school. I take a taxi at 4 p.m. to
Australia House, and deliver the new visa application. Ho-ho. At five the
Australian Broadcasting Company phones for an interview. I am statesmanlike.
In the evening Mrs B., daughter of the mysterious Charles Massey, phones.
Her late father had five different birthdates according to the official
file released to her by the Air Ministry.
I read a very favourable item in The Toronto Star. The journalist suggests
-- having read in puzzlement Professor Craig's praise for me and GOEBBELS
-- that I should now be allowed to re-enter Cansda. Is the icepack breaking
up?
Ed Wall phones from Australia and says the Courier-Mail wants to print my
letter to the prime minister; I say that out of courtesy they must wait
until Tuesday, to give the prime minister time to read it.
MRS B. CALLS ROUND BRINGING A FOLDER of documents on her late father.
She has now spoken with Air Chief-Marshal Sir William Wratten, who was the
mysterious high officer who attended her father's funeral (it was paid for
by the state, his coffin was draped with the flag). When she said that she
was Massey's daughter, and she wanted to know why he had attended the funeral,
there was an appalling silence. She confirms that the four photos I show
her are of her father.
She recalls that in about 1975 her mother received a note with letters stuck
onto paper like a blackmail note, reading only: "whatever happened
to charles?"
On Dec. 16, 1967 I recorded in my diary,
Letter from Lord Chandos: "Charles Massey" was
passenger in [the Sikorski crash] plane, and survived. He will look for
his address.
On Jan. 5, 1968 my diary records that I received a "letter from Lord
Chandos, encl'g letter from Sir A[lan] Lascelles." Lascelles was private
secretary to the king. I gave a copy of my book THE MARE'S NEST to Lord
Chandos. Eventually I find my diary entry for Feb. 20, 1968:
Left at 1:30 p.m. Drove on to Pelham Court SW7, and there
learned from office manager that "Charles Massey" was Rhodesian
ex-RAF type, injured during war, who did a moonlight flit "about September"
last year!
STEPHEN JONES, TIMOTHY MCVEIGH'S LAWYER, who caused me so much grief by
charging on Tulsa television in February this year that I "supplied
the trigger mechanism for the Oklahoma City bomb", now faxes to me
a fawning letter, having just read one of my books, UPRISING, the history
of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He invites me to lunch the next time he's
in London (no doubt at U.S. taxpayer expense).
My own legal actions go on. I send a fax to Barbara Kulaszka asking her
for an affidavit. She does not think I should add the three Canadian bodies
(League of Human Rights of the B'nai Brith Canada, Canadian Jewish Congress
and Simon Wiesenthal Centre Toronto) as Defendants to the writ against the
Board of Deputies of British Jews at this stage.
During the night an anonymous six-page fax comes with alleged details about
the true back ground of the forger "Peter Stahl." My machine's
electronic memory states that the fax originated from a New Jersey phone
number, 201 759 0798 (the 759-ex change covers Belleville, NJ).
I shall ask my friends there to run a Bell-Atlantic computer search. Meanwhile
I send this response:
Dear Friend,-thanks for the information about "Peter
Stahl". Please provide to me details of your source.
The document has blemishes like saying Stahl was behind the 1983 Hitler
Diaries scam; it also interestingly states that Stahl set up the smear story
that I produced the Oklahoma Bomb trigger mechanism.
The computer search fails to identify a subscriber. I suspect that if genuine
the data comes from either ADL or police (FBI) files. The New Jersey ADL
is located in The Oranges, which overlaps the Belleville area.
In the same post this morning I incidentally receive an article from Staatsbriefe
No. 5p;6/1996 subjecting the Peter Stahl / Gregory Douglas book on Gestapo
chief Heinrich Müller to an annihilating scrutiny.
Late at night our "friends" in New Jersey reply, again anonymously.
Their wish is to help, they say, as they too have been damaged by Stahl.
Methinks it may be Stahl himself.
BEFORE LUNCH ANTHONY HANCOCK, who sometimes does printing for us, phones.
Says his print works was rebombed on Sept. 6. That would be 6.9.96, and
he asks if there is a cabalistic significance in the numerals 6996. I jokingly
suggest there might equally be a more perverse significance. This time the
gangster Manny Carpel who was imprisoned for executing the last rebombing
of Hancock's works in 1982 (he already had a criminal record for raiding
my home in 1963 disguised as a telephone engineer) has a watertight alibi:
as the police officer investigating the fire himself pointed out, Carpel
is serving time for antiques fraud-in fact this of oficer was the one who
collared him. It's a small, small, small world.
My secretary returns from a reconnaissance and reports that Waterstones
in Charing Cross Road has removed the Deborah Lipstadt book from its shelves,
telling her that it is facing legal proceedings. I tell her she may well
have done them a favour.
I phone lawyer Michael Randall to say I am prepared to release the book
store official concerned from the libel proceedings.
Spend a while at the High Court discussing applications I must make to get
the writ served on Lipstadt, an American resident, out of the jurisdiction
of our own courts; I also discuss obtaining leave for action against the
Board of Deputies of British Jews since those proceedings will be out of
time. Then to the Reference Library-first time in ten years!-to read up
the Rules of the Supreme Court.
AWAKE PART OF THE NIGHT; I phone Ed Wall at 2:15 AM, and discuss the latest
outrageous libels published by the Australian Jewish Week. He thinks I should
contact the immigration minister. Do so at 2:47 AM:
I think my rights are best preserved at this late stage by requesting
that, if you are contemplating denying my latest visa application on the
basis of essentially the same information (character etc) as before, i.e.
that previously furnished to you by third parties, you so inform me in advance
as a matter of natural justice and invite my comments thereon; because there
is substantial fresh information now available to us which is capable of
neutralising and rebutting this information on each count.
THE WASHINGTON MAGAZINE New Republic carries an amusing story by a Mr Jacob
Heilbrunn who infitrated my Washington meeting, as he thought. In fact the
"meeting" Heilbrunn infiltrated was not the main one; the organiser
there filtered out into this lesser luncheon function a number of people
whom he could not fit into the main club dinner, or who he felt were security
risks, and Mr Heil whatever name he was using at the time-failed to cleart
his hurdle.
His report is a pretty objective account, if inevitably judæocentric.
This is a trait shared by many minorities as they view their own world,
they alone are at the centre of it. (I remember my amazement on seeing a
Hungarian news broadcast when researching in communist Budapest, in which
somehow the map of Europe had been morphed until Hungary was at the centre
of the world!).
One would have thought I talked of nothing but the Jews in the luncheon
talk; in fact I mentioned them only in passing.
THIS LETTER GOES BY REGISTERED MAIL to the Board of Deputies of British
Jews:
Writing to me on Sept. 7 last year you stated that the Board
did not hold any personal data (as defined by the Data Protection Act) on
me
Your Board now accepts that it originated the two lengthy reports on me
circulated to foreign governments in 1991 and 1992.
These quite manifestly originateded on an electronic database of a nature
provided for by your Registration under the Act, and not covered by any
exemption
Do you still maintain that you do not hold any personal data (as defined
by the Act) on me? I once again put you on notice herewith to provide me
with copies of said data.
I am prepared to accept that your original denial was the result of a genuine
misunderstanding.
I also write to four New York law firms inviting them to "tender"
for the lawsuit against St Martins Press.
I AM SENT A COPY OF THE TORONTO-BASED Simon Wiesenthal Center's latest fund-raising
mail shot. Mail fraud! I write to Sol Littmann, the Centre's director:
Dear Mr Littman,
In this [mailshot] you write the following mystifying sentence: "Thanks
to the support of our loyal friends and supporters, David Irving's book
denying the Holocaust has yet to be published."
I am not writing, and have not written, and have no current plans to write,
a book or manuscript denying the Holocaust.
You will appreciate that I have a legal objective in writing to ask this
question, and that failure on your part to respond will be taken to imply
that you accept that your attempts to raise funds by mail on the basis of
this claim are therefore fraudulent.
The Centre fails to reply.
The owner of the Gazette Book shop of Beccles in Suffolk phones me about
a book they have ordered from us; he says he was at Brentwood School forty
years ago, two years behind me. He is very friendly, reminds me that I "saved
his life" over a matches incident in the tuckshop, and has been grateful
to me ever since then.
In the evening, a fax from Don F., which makes it likely that The Viking
Press will not publish NUREMBERG; he does not even mention GOEBBELS, but
blames political correctness among his colleagues. I keep this to my self.
I FAX THIS READER'S LETTER to the Adelaide Advertiser, responding to a Doubting
Thomas:
Sir,
L C Collins (Oct. 18) disbelieves that our family was hard up, since my
father was a commander in the Royal Navy and I attended public school. My
father was away fighting WW2 until invalided out in the Arctic convoys;
fortunately for my mother, who struggled heroically to support us, I won
a free place at public school. We were very poor. I did not see my father
from the time I was two or three until I was twenty-six and he was dying;
we then worked together on his history of the 1916 Battle of Jutland, in
which he had served.
ANTHONY JULIUS, THE LAWYER instructed by the Board of Deputies of British
Jews, calls me. I say: "The proper title of the Board turns out to
be rather different from the one it is commonly known by." Julius says:
"Well, you must make your own decision on that."
Down to the Royal Courts of Justice at 4 p.m.; a judge has granted leave
for La Lipstadt to be served with the British libel writ outside the jurisdiction.
I then issue an originating Writ against the Board of Deputies, whose statutory
name turns out to be the London Committee of the Deputies of British Jews.
I have R. working on ling and clippings most of the week, clear ing the
decks for ac tion.
JESSICA IS A DELIGHT all day, though it makes for rather hard work-amusing
her on top of all everything else this week end.
For her Corn Flakes she has begun to demand the "birdie spoon"-the
antique silver one she found in the kitchen cutlery drawer, the one with
the little eagle stamped on its handle. When older she may ask the signicance
of the little letters AH stamped beneath the birdie.
Baldur von Schirach's wife gave it to me twenty years ago-in the best guest-tradition
she purloined it from Adolf Hitler's Berghof in the early 1940s; when I
only had four spoons to my name, many a pal found it randomly placed before
him when he came for supper; not all of my Jewish friends enjoyed it.
As David McWhinnie, a television producer friend, says, you never know where
such a relic has been. In and out of my dishwasher a thousand times, I tell
him: no false sentamentalism in our household.
WALTER B. SENDS ME AN ITEM from today's Toronto Globe & Mail-a reader's
letter from the odious Bernie Farber, National Director, Community Relations,
Canadian Jewish Congress. (What other ethnic group needs a national director
of community relations?) Farber is livid, just livid, that the paper published
my long letter last week. I send Walter this letter:
Thank-you. I think his letter merits no response: the average
reader will recognise it for what it is-Jewish pique.
Perhaps somebody might write in, commenting that the original article and
the latest Farber letter demonstrate not so much "Irving's hatred of
the Jews" but "the hatred of the Jews"-oftentimes, that's
all that some of them seem capable of doing: hating.
Other writers and newspapers seem to be awakening to what Germany is doing.
From Copenhagen, a press clipping is faxed to me from Information, Denmark's
national newspaper-a blistering whole page critique on the German government's
assault on freedom of speech.
JESSICA BRINGS IN A SYCAMORE LEAF from Grosvenor-square; I photocopy it
for her, then we enlarge that copy several times until the leaf is overflowing
off an A3 sheet, with all of its veins and pores showing. We then colour
it in.
These are otherwise strange and hate-filled times. I have just bought Full
Disclosure, the biography of former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neill. In
this he writes:
I made the huge mistake of using David Irving, the Nazi apologist
historian, to translate the Goebbels' Diaries. He was the only expert able
to read Goebbels' writing and all the excerpts we published rather refuted
Irving's views on Nazi history. But many were understandably appalled we
were having anything to do with him and did the paper damage-a good illustration
of the maxim that if you lie down with dogs you get fleas.
Fleas, eh? I did wonder where they had come from.
His memoirs make no mention of the fact that as editor-in-chief he signed
a contract with me in June 1992 to pay me £85,000 for episodes from
the Goebbels diaries which I exclusively retrieved from Moscow; that he
published those episodes with huge nationwide and global publicity in July
1992, then came under pressure from British and American Jewish organizations
to violate his contract and not to pay me what I was owed.
Under which pressure, mangy and flea-ridden dog that he was, Neil instantly
came to heel.
I SEND THIS FAX TO ANTHONY JULIUS, who is asking for a longer court hearing
to stave off the libel writ I wish to serve on the Board of Deputies:
Your letter of Oct. 31. I fail to see what should occupy
the Court for two hours, unless it be your intention at this late date to
deny that your clients authored and published the statements complained
of or in the alternative to suggest that I was apprised of the relevant
facts before Dec. 22, 1995.
I do not intend to countenance delays; I have suffered damages from your
clients' actions on a global scale, and these demand early and public redress.
A reply comes from Julius's law firm, Mishcon de Reya, and the mists clear.
They do not deny authorship of the report, but they will argue against the
court giving me discretion to proceed out of time. I.e., the time-honoured
legal defence known as, "Yah-boo, yer can't touch us now!"
Miss Dalya Alberge of The Times phones me for an interview, and mentions
that Julius is also instructed by the author Deborah Lipstadt in my suit
against her. He says I'm doing it because I am greedy for cash.
I accordingly send two more letters to the ubiquitous Julius:
As you may know, on my application on Oct. 22 the court has
granted leave for [Deborah Lipstadt] to be served out of the jurisdiction.
If you are indeed representing the author, have you intentions to accept
service on her behalf?
And:
I have heard today from the media (The Times) that you suggest
that my motive in pursuing a suit for defamation against your clients is
that I am greedy for cash.
Such a statement made after proceedings have been initiated would in the
normal course of things be further grounds for seeking aggravated damages,
going as they do to the conduct of the defence.
I am prepared to accept your assurances that you said no such thing, but
if you did it would be a shocking misrepresentation, given that I negotiated
in good faith with you for eleven months in an attempt to find an agreement,
having stated explicitly that I would not seek damages if we could reach
an amicable settlement.
Julius replies: yes he is representing Lipstadt; no, he has no instructions
from her to accept service; he boxes evasive about whether he said I was
doing it for the cash.
I WORK ALL DAY ON MY REPLY to The Observer's Defence. Easier than I feared.
They have made some very simple errors-e.g. accusing me of manipulating
translations from Hittler's Table Talk, when in fact I merely followed the
official version published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, etc.
Today's Weekend Australian reports that their Cabinet is meeting tomorrow
and will deny the IRA terrorist political leader Gerry Adams' application
for a visa to promote his book, and that the "visa application from
right-wing British historian Mr David Irving is also expected to be
rejected."
I send this dispatch when I get up at 4 a.m. It sounds like an authorised
leak.
I ponder for some time on a suitable statement to issue if and when the
time comes.
Gerry Adams' application muddies the issue badly. My views on him are largely
unprintable: many a cracked window pane in this building testifies to the
200-pound car bomb which the IRA let off on the corner of Duke Street and
Oxford Street fifteen years ago, and we are currently paying an additional
£1,000 per annum "IRA terrorism" insurance premium on this
property.
All evening long, the telephone wires from Australia run hot, then hotter.
Radio 2GB Sydney phones, will do an interview in three hours' time. They
have no news, but the Australian Council of Civil Liberties is loudly saying
I should be allowed in.
Then a Radio 2GB interview with Patrick Hinchy; he sounds grumpy, especially
when I say that I do not think Adams should get his visa, as he is a real
criminal (he served seven years' jail for terrorist offences, I believe).
He makes the point that I was discourteous to their prime minister in publishing
the letter to him-"Hinch" read it two days before the PM. I remark
that this is an unfortunate consequence of my having to fight this battle
at a range of 12,000 miles.
At 7:30 a.m. there is a message from Adelaide, the ABC Radio Keith Conlon
show has just interviewed that young Jewish muck-spreader Michael Kapel;
the transcript reveals more grotesque lies. More faxes confirm that their
Civil Liberties Union is demanding my entry.
This may get embarrassing. As things stand now, I do not really have the
money to pay the air-fare to Australia...
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH REPORTS that Berlin police have revealed that former
Reichsjugendführer Artur Axmann died two weeks ago, aged 83, on Oct.
24. The police kept the burial place of the one-armed war hero a secret
to avoid demonstrations either at the funeral or in the future; citing laws
protecting personal information, they also refused to identify members of
his surviving family to the media. Axmann was the last Hitler Youth leader.
I interviewed him one afternoon eight years ago but I discarded much of
what he told me as his memory had become corrupted by the images of what
he had read and seen since 1945.
Describing the closing events in the Führer Bunker in Berlin, he vividly
described seeing Dr Goebbels offer his wife Magda his arm as the two went
up the spiral staircase to take their lives in the Chancellery Garden. In
fact he had last seen them two or three hours before, and when he returned
to the Bunker he was told that they had already "gone." "Eye
witness evidenc" dangerous even at the best of times.
RONALD S. RAUCHBERG, OF THE New York law firm Proskauer Rose, Goetz, and
Mendelsohn, writes, "This firm will not be able to represent you in
connection with the suit you are contemplating against St Martins Press."
One down, three to go.
A long talk in the evening with a London barrister friend: he says I must
use the coming five-minute High Court hearing against the Board of Deputies
to get permission to issue a holding Writ under the Defamation Act. I cannot
do that after the twelve months of the extended limitation period are up,
and this is what Mishcon de Reya are trying stealthily to do.
AT EIGHT A.M. THE AGE PHONES from Canberra, then Julie from ABC Canberra
too, then Steve somebody, all to say that the immigration minister Philip
Ruddock is to make his announcement on my application at a specially-called
press conference tomorrow afternoon in Sydney. I phone the minister's office
in Canberra and say that as a matter of courtesy I shall not insist on being
informed first, given the obvious practical problems. I further send him
the following fax:
In answering journalists' questions, you will feel properly
constrained by the confidentiality attached to the dealings between the
ministry and visa applicants. With this letter I am formally waiving all
such confidentiality, in order that you may feel free to discuss your decision
in the fullest detail with out restraint.
I refer however with emphasis to the second paragraph of my letter dated
Oct. 18.
Ed Wall wants a much tougher line, telling the government they must not
act without first giving us the chance to comment on any fresh hostile material
that has been fed to them.
The phone lines again run hot as night falls here and dawn breaks in Australia.
At eight p.m. I am interviewed by 2GB Radio Sydney again. Two hours later
Channel 7 phones, can I do a four a.m. interview from Sky TV studio? This
is getting tedious. At eleven p.m. Michael Young of the Sydney Morning Herald
phones, can he call me at any time during the night? I say yes. A few minutes
later a Sydney Morning Herald female photographer (in London) phones, can
she come round at one a.m. to take photographs? Twenty minutes after midnight
Radio 6PR Perth phones, it's all over the broadcast news, can they phone
me in ten minutes for a live in view?
At two a.m. a fax from a Sydney station wanting to discuss my views on Women
(the "women" angle has been pounced on by the media).
At two-thirty the Howard Sattler programme phones again from Perth with
the news that the minister has just announced at the press conference that
my application has been denied. Quelle surprise! Six minutes later my fax
machine churns out the corroborating letter from the minister himself. They
must be running scared!
I issue a press release immediately:
Told of the Australian Governments negative decision by a
letter from Ruddock received by fax at 2:36 a.m.-after the radio station
6PR in Perth had already phoned him with the news-historian David Irving's
response was: "I did half-expect John Howard to go back on his promise
to restore freedom of speech in Australia. A man is as good as his word.
I shall stick my 'Liberal Party' file back where it was-between 'Libellers'
and 'Lick spittles'."
Mr Irving added that the Labour Party was no different. "The enemies
of Real History have both parties in their pocket. For all of them it will
be back to business as usual."
After that it is chaos for several hours. At 2:48 a.m. Stephanie of Adelaide
phones again to read out what's coming over their telex machines: women,
chewing gum, breeding, etc. Aaargh!
2:50 a.m. Radio 2GB Sydney phones, can I speak to their Ron Casey in about
ten minutes?
3:13 a.m. phone Michael Young at the Sydney Morning Herald.
3:19 a.m. Radio 2GB phones from Sydney, live interview until 3:31 a.m. with
Bob Burns (who reminds me that he interviewed me when I toured Australia
in 1987; has a German wife).
Chris Henning, the London stringer of the Sydney Morning Herald and The
Age, phones. The Age later quotes me as telling him, "I am one of those
troublesome red ants that you can hammer into the ground as often as you
like but it picks itself up and carries on marching."
3:49 a.m. Steve Price and Craig Wilson 3AW Melbourne phone and record an
interview until 3:58 a.m. Prime Minister John Howard is to speak about me
in Melbourne today, they say.
At 4:10 a.m. a taxi takes me to Millbank for the live Channel 7 television
interview. It turns out to be live interviews with Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide,
Brisbane, and Perth; all women presenters, some very bitchy.
I get some fun showing Jessica's picture to millions of Australians.
When I remark that unlike men, women have for instance not done any composing
of symphonies over the millenia, one female (Sydney?) replies, "Yeah,
and they haven't done any exterminating either!"
"Not if you ignore the abortionists," I retort. Yikes! Sudden
end of interview!
On balance, all of today's radio and television interviews are several shades
uglier and less friendly than of late; as though on autocue...... I remain
genial but firm.
Back at Duke Street, whacked, at 6:08 a.m. There the phones are still ringing.
At 6:45 a.m. 5DN radio phones for an interview. At 7 a.m. the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation phones. At 7:30 a.m. I have a long talk with Ed
Wall, then retire to snatch two hours' sleep.
THE MORNING MAIL BRINGS A DEMAND from the Legal Aid Board that I refund
to them £26,000 legal costs since my certicate was revoked in the action
against Andrew Neil and The Sunday Times, under pressure from you know whom.
I write ruhig to them:
Thank you for the enclosed letter. Please inform me the date
on which my Appeal against the revocation of the certicate was heard and
disallowed.
Not easy to keep one's nerve at times like these.
Fax from our friends in Auckland, reporting that the New Zealand Herald
carries the story about the scandal in Australia. It quotes Prime Minister
Howard as say Mr Irving has several convictions" Not true!
The president of an Australian national civil liberties group, the Free
Speech Committee, Mr Tony Katsigiannis, has joined civil libertarians in
attacking the ban.
The Australian reports the Labour Opposition spokesman on immigration, Duncan
Kerr, as saying that the decision to ban me is "correct" but not
that on Gerry Adams, and the latter should be reviewed if a cease fire is
called in Northern Ireland.
Millionaire Mark Leibler, spokesman now of some new chameleon-body called
the Ethnic Coalition of Australia, describes the government ban as "principled."
The articles, which I now read as a bunch, show that Howard seriously
libelled me on yesterday's ABC Radio 3LO in Melbourne. He said there,
I would have thought that that was an open-and-shut case
which, once again, has precious little to do with free speech. The movement
of people in and out of Australia is not so much a question of free speech
but of whether the Government of the country has a right to decide at all
times who can come in here for temporary purposes.
He added that I am a "crackpot historian." The Times further
reports Howard as saying,
It's got to do with the unfitness of both of them [Irving
and Gerry Adams] on character grounds to come here. This idea that it's
got anything to do with free speech is spurious. David Irving's books are
published in Australia... Nothing stops his views coming out here. But any
government has got the right to say to somebody who's got a record of criminal
convictions, 'You can't come here.' I think he's a crackpot historian, but
it doesn't alter the fact that he was convicted in the United Kingdom, he
was convicted in Germany, he was convicted in Canada, and two of the offences
as I understand it are related to passport, immigration or visa issues.
Late evening a fax from a barrister friend. He mentions that today's Daily
Telegraph publishes an ugly review of NUREMBERG. Aaargh! ¡Lo que me
faltava! All I needed to round off the week, a review of a book that is
still trapped at the printers.
I decide not to read the review until I am in rather better spirits than
now. Benté reads it for me; she says the reviewer is Ann Tusa (presumably
related to John Tusa, a Jewish-Czech BBC television personality, who is
friendly enough with me-I bumped into him in the Pubic Record Office some
years ago when he was writing his own magnum opus on the Nuremberg trials.
(A-ha!).
Ann Tusa calls my book "sloppy" because I did not use the 22-volume
record of the trial.
In fact I deliberately decided not to trust that record. Alerted by comments
in Field-Marshal Erhard Milch's private diaries, during my research for
the rise and fall of the Lüftwaffe, I found by combining the printed
volumes with the sound recordings of the trial that there were serious omissions
and distortions.
THE HEADACHE RETURNS DURING THE EVENING, so I retire to bed before 9 p.m.
A sinister voice phones a while later, "I want to say how very sorry
we all are." I ask drowsily, "Who are you?" The Voice says,
"This is The Financial Times." Obviously it is not. I put the
phone down. I try in the morning to get the caller's ID, but the exchange
computer states, "You were called yesterday at 21:16 hours, the caller
withheld their number."
I SPEAK WITH A BARRISTER IN PERTH, who agrees that if Prime Minister Howard
said those things in Melbourne the Wrongs Act 1958 will apply; but that
as prime minister he may plead qualified privilege. He adds that he heard
a Rabbi on Perth radio yesterday also saying I am a "criminal."
I wonder if Howard will apply the same criteria if Herr Ignatz Bubis, head
of Germany's Jewish community, asks to visit Australia: "Boobies"
has an unserved twelve-year prison sentence after a conviction for racketeering
in East Germany.
I write to Channel 9 in Australia suggesting they film my coming U.S. tour
instead. Radio 2KYp;1017 phones from Sydney. They know that I am planning
libel action against their prime minister, so that must have gone out on
the news wires.
MY PAST CATCHES UP ON ME, SOMETIMES PLEASANTLY. Guido Knopp, one of German
television's top producers, comes at 8 p.m. for dinner with us. It is fifteen
years since we last met: He organised a major speech function at Aschaffenburg,
attended by two thousand middle-class Germans. ("Do you want Total
Truth!" I challenged them.) Now he is one of the biggest names in German
television.
Jessica is fascinated by all the big pots: she has never seen her Mama cooking
in big pots.
A splendid evening alone with Knopp over an extended dinner. He proves ill-informed
about his government's punitive campaign against free thinkers; when I tell
him that the world is in uproar about twenty-nine dissidents held in Chinese's
jails, but there are that many held in each of Germany's big city jails,
he expresses shocked disbelief!
Ticks me off for my behaviour over the last years, says I could without
difficulty restore my old position of prominence in the German publishing
world, etc etc; I reply that I am not interested in doing so, not at their
price. I am hartnäckig, said the judge in January 1993, as he tripled
the fine on me to $22,000. Some body who is hartnäckig does not abandon
his sincerely-held positions as an historian, unless and until somebody
comes along with quality data to prove him wrong; and so far they have not.
But, I admit, I have been stunned by the world-wide scale of the campaign
that has developed against me. I did not expect that "they" were
as influential as that-or that my world-wide publishers were as weak kneed.
I tell him of the lawsuit we shall now bring against Australia's prime minister,
and I show him today's Australian newspaper reports on this. He asks curiously
how my family and I survive. I proudly tell him of the fighting fund-of
the hundreds of close friends around the world who are determined to hold
our cause afloat.
JUST BEFORE 5 P.M. A LONG AFFIDAVIT by Michael Whine, "defence director"
of the Board of Deputies of British Jews comes through. His name is appropriate;
the deposition is one long whine-for example, that the two-year delay, if
the writ is to be allowed, will put an impossible strain on the Board's
witnesses who cannot be expected to remember the basis of their allegations
against me, etc. (Tell that to Ivan Demjanjuk!)
I go to court at 9:30 a.m., for the first hearing before Master Tennant;
he savages me be cause I can not recall a particular Order or Rule number.
He curtly orders the hearing adjourned, and the Board of Deputies gains
a date for a full-length hearing tomorrow afternoon.
In court then all afternoon. This judge in chambers compliments me on my
"succinct" presentation; I deal pre-emptively with some of the
points which I apprehended the Defence will make about Knowledge and the
Judge's Discretion to grant leave to issue a writ out of time.
Defence counsel for the Board, whose name appears to be Mr Smoothheart,
stresses my enormous intelligence, but only when arguing that therefore
I "must have" known months earlier than the date I submit, that
the Board, his clients, authored the libellous report found in the Canadian
government files. Late in the afternoon, as the Defence deals with the delays
which occurred at, they say, my instance, they ask if they may put in, not
the reams of Without-Prejudice letters that passed between us, as they are
privileged, but just the dates of those letters.
I object that either they must introduce the whole correspondence or no
part of it: "I am prepared to waive privilege on the entire correspondence
I say. The judge reads the letters alone for fteen minutes.
While he is impressed by my good-faith attempts to reach a settlement, he
finds himself unable to grant leave to issue the writ out of time, since
he determines that more than a year has passed since I acquired knowledge
of "the relevant facts."
He expressly states that he is not impressed by the Defence argument
that this is a "trivial matter." . The Board had published the
(libellous) report, so they argued during their earlier submissions, to
only one party. "Yes, to the Canadian Government," replied the
judge, "and with catastrophic consequences for Mr Irving!"
I now prepare to adopt "Plans B and C" against the Board.
THE JEWISH CHRONICLE PUBLISHES A VERY FAIR REPORT by their Sydney Correspondent
on the renewed Australian ban. The phrase "holocaust denier" is
missing; the report remarks merely that I have "suggested that accounts
of the Holocaust have been exaggerated." It adds:
The Australian Jewish community strongly welcomed Mr Ruddock's
decision. Diane Shteinman, the president of the Executive Council of Australian
Jewry, expressed relief that the "elderly Holocaust survivors of our
community will not be subject to further trauma and aggravation," which
she said could be caused by Mr Irving's presence here.
At five a.m. the fax machine spits out rude letters about me that have been
published in today's New Zealand Herald and Sydney Morning Herald, both
alas from Jews. I reply to the latter:
Oh my, I seem to have got under Michel Kapel's skin (Nov.
20). Not at all a nice place to be. He accuses me of having no academic
qualifications. Yes, it is true, I admit: exactly forty years (and thirty
works of modern history) ago I was too poor to complete my university course.
So no qualifications.
So what: Pliny hadn't any qualifications either; Winston Churchill wrote
(and made) history without 'em; Gibbon wrote his Decline and Fall without
'em; and Macaulay wrote his History of England without 'em.
So I seem to be in good company.
TIME TO RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES and speak to my many friends there:
a ten-thousand mile drive from north to south and back again.
I finish all the outstanding work in London and complete the back log of
correspondence. It is 4:38 a.m. when I finish my fifty-page Reply to The
Observer's defence and mail it from the pillar-box on the corner of the
square.
After that I potter around until seven a.m., frightened that if I go to
bed I will sleep until afternoon; I snatch an hour on a sofa. Taxi comes
8:20 a.m.-my friendly Black-cab driver has offered me another free lift
to Heathrow in exchange for a signed copy of my Hermann Göring biography.
At ten-thirty I am airborne and falling fast asleep, heading back to Washington
DC.
Günter Deckert
Readers who wish to help Günter Deckert and his family while he is
jailed by the
German government can write and send cash and cheques to him while he is
in prison.
Herrn Günter Deckert, Plitischer Häftling, Schöbornstrasse
32 (JVA),
Landesgefängnis, 76646 Bruchsal, Germany.
Mark the envelope as follows:
"Aid for Günter Deckert--Just one of Germany's political prisoners."
One of our number in New York State has written to Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose inervention is credited with having forced
the German government to release American citizen Hans Schmidt from "investigative
custody."
I write now on behalf of Günter Deckert,"
writes our friend, "whose impisonment in Germany merely for inviting
David Irving to an audience of his Ger man readers [in 1991] is a gross
injustice in what is considered a democratic country."
"We are privileged to have here the inviolable
First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. As a country greatly influenced since
May 8, 1945 by the USA, Germany should now through osmosis have shown signs
of emulation of our Constitution. May I persuade you to do as much for a
law-abiding schoolteacher in Germany in your gentle inimitable fashion as
you did for the naturalised German Hans Schmidt?"
Book Reviews
They're All Still Here
H R Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries (New York, 1994).
Red faces in Washington. It seems that behind closed doors in Pennsylvania
Avenue people do speak their minds, especially at the highest levels. There
is a new book now which deals with much of what Richard Nixon believed in
private, while retaining his own mask like countenance for the benefit of
the media.
What those who visited the late President Richard M Nixon did not realise
was that his chief of staff H R Haldeman was keeping a genuine diary-writing
it up each night or dictating it onto a pocket tape recorder. Now Haldeman
is dead, beyond retribution. And the diaries are out.
How appalling! The evangelist the Rev Billy Graham has had to deny ever
having said during a conversation with Nixon on Feb. 1, 1972 that he had
"the strong feeling that the Bible says there are Satanic Jews."
The remark was allegedly uttered during a discussion with Nixon at which
the unspeakable allegation was raised (the London Jewish Chronicle called
it "paranoid") that "the total Jewish domination of the [American]
media" posed a terrible problem.
Nixon was certainly no saint when it came to his feelings about the Jews.
Recently released tape recordings have revealed his paranoia about them.
When he paid a visit to China, reports Haldeman, he was shown a list of
the reporters who were to accompany him and asked pointedly if there were
not going to be any non-Jewish reporters on the trip.
After American Jewish leaders boycotted a visit by the French president
Georges Pompidou in 1970, to protest against the French sale of jets to
Libya, Haldeman recorded that the U.S. president "really raged again
today against United States Jews because of their behaviour." After
the Jews of New York staged a demonstration on the same occasion, Nixon
"got going again against [the] Jews' attitude," and on account
of their "unconscionable attitude" the president decided to postpone
the delivery of American jets to Israel. Worse, in front of his secretary
of state Henry Kissinger-who was like Pompidou a Jew-Nixon rasped that he
would not talk to any Jews about the Middle East.
That being so, Nixon can hardly have wondered when the media and Jewish
legal inquisitors later used the trivial Watergate affair-whose piffiing
importance had the rest of the world's journalists baffied and perplexed-to
bring the house down on him; Judge Breyer, President Clinton's latest appointment
to the Supreme Court, was one of the inquisitors in the Watergate inquiry.
George Bush too learned the hard way that you can't hold back on a multi-billion
dollar loan guarantee to Israel and expect an even-handed media when it
comes to election time.
Of course as any historian who has worked in the U.S. presidential libraries
knows, Nixon was not alone in his anti-semitism, trifiing though Haldeman
makes it seem. After one trying train ride with Felix Frankfurter, Herbert
Lehman, and Bernard Baruch from Washington, DC, to Hyde Park, NY, a vexed
Franklin D Roosevelt told a staff member, who also kept a diary, that he
now understood why in some Middle Eastern countries the practice after circumcisions
was to keep the foreskin and throw the rest away. In only marginally less
questionable taste Harry S Truman expressed private dismay that even though
he had created the state of Israel "they're all still here."
False Witnesses
Elizabeth Loftus, The Myth of Repressed Memory (New York, 1994).
The world of medical science has produced another stunning book about the
phenomenon first identified as Holocaust Survivor Syndrome - the
manner in which groups of people genuinely and honestly come to believe
over the years that they have witnessed episodes which are, in fact, largely
products of trauma and fantasy.
"It is possible," writes Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the
University of Washington, in what Newsweek magazine calls a disturbing new
book, "to create an entire memory for a traumatic event that never
happened."
According to her some of the best neuro-scientific brains are trying
to find out how this can happen: this may throw light on the current
bitter debate about "recovered memory," which ranges across cases
of Satanism, childhood sexual abuse, and UFO abductions; and, as may fairly
be pointed out, otherwise inexplicable and unsubstantiated Holocaust eye-witness
survivor stories-the kind that were nearly the nemesis of Cleveland auto
worker John Demjanjuk.
Summary: hundreds of experiments have shown that people easily slip false
details (from a TV report for example) into their recollection of an event
they witnessed. "They even 'remember' events they have only heard about,"
wrote Newsweek, reviewing the 290-page Loftus book.
In May 1994 Harvard Medical School hosted a conference on the neurological
bases of false memories. James McClelland, of the Center for the Neural
Basis of Cognition at Pittsburgh, provided one explanation; Michael Nash,
of the University of Tennessee, another.
Nash calls it chilling that "there may be no structural difference"
between a true memory of an event and a false one. The problem is similar
to distinguishing a remembered dream from a recollected factual event: some
people, says Daniel Schacter of Harvard, cannot distinguish. "You could
be remembering a dream, a fear, or something someone talked about,"
he said. "What gives the memory a feeling of authenticity is that authentic
parts are included."
Only one person in four appears, from Loftus' studies, prone to this disorder.
But others can be conditioned by events. "Severe emotional stress overcomes
internal checks on plausibility," states neuro-scientist Marsel Mesulam
of Northwestern University, "and you are left with a false 'memory.'"
In the United States a False Memory Syndrome Foundation has been set up
to represent the interests of the victims of such retrieved "memories";
some people have been sentenced to forty years in jail on this evidential
basis alone.
Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman is however angry: "Scientists have
no business using the term false memory," she says.
Final Solution
Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy: A New Biography (London &
New York, 1994)
The late general Dimitri Volkogogonov, the Russian biographer, already set
the cat among the pigeons once with a Stalin biography for which he had
exclusive access to Stalin's secret safe file. Volkogonov is special assistant
to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and was chairman of the presidential
commission examining the Soviet archives. He found that Stalin's file
contained among items Stalin's panicky instructions on June 26, 1941, to
establish immediate contact with the German ambassador, if still on Soviet
soil, to negotiate a Soviet surrender).
He now prints a work on Lenin which quotes from the minutes of the Soviet
Politburo meeting of March 5, 1940, for which he gives an archival reference,
at which the communist leadership approved the order to exterminate the
Polish officers who had been in Soviet custody since Stalin invaded Poland
in mid-Sept. 1939. Under the orders of former NKVD officer Petr Soprunenko,
still living as a Jewish pensioner in Moscow, the NKVD murdered the fifteen
thousand captured Polish officers at Katyn and two other sites near Smolensk
over the following weeks.
After the war the Russians put several German officers on trial for the
'Katyn massacre' and publicly hanged them in Leningrad. The Katyn massacre
was chalked up against the Germans at Nuremberg.
It is accordingly today a criminal offence under the 1990 Gayssot Law in
France to suggest that the Russians were the true murderers.
Ich bin ein Berchtesgadener
Hugh Sidley (ed.), Prelude to Leadership. The European Diary of John
F Kennedy. Summer 1945 (Washington, 1995).
After making a 1945 pilgrimage, like millions of tourists every year, to
Adolf Hitler's famous mountain retreats at Berchtesgaden, with the Eagle's
Lair built on the Kehlstein high above it, the young naval officer
who would later become President of the United States wrote these words
in his diary (page 74):
"The lair itself had been stripped of its rugs, pictures,
and tapestries, but the view was beautiful-the living room being round and
facing out on every side on the valley below.
"After visiting these two places, you can easily understand how that
within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him
now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived.
"He had a boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace
to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that
he lived and in the manner of his death will live and grow after him.
"He had in him the stuff of which legends are made."
A True Pirate Tale
Edward Jay Epstein, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer (New
York, 1996)
At last the truth about oil tycoon Armand Hammer seems to be coming out.
From time to time over the past fifteen years we have highlighted the extraordinary
materials that we have found about this noted philanthropist in the various
archives, which revealed the man as an unreconstructed Soviet agent until
the very end of his life.
Now Edward Jay Epstein, one of the United States' foremost biographers and
historians, has unmasked him as just that, relying on newly released FBI
files and on secret papers disgorged by the new masters of the Kremlin.
FBI director J Edgar Hoover had known this since 1952 at least; the mystery
remains, how a Hammer could escape the fate that befell two other leading
Jews, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (or at very least the life sentence earned
by another trusted Jewish official who spied on his host country, Jonathan
Pollard).
Hammer's father Julius Hammer was already known to be a leading communist
agent.
Armand Hammer was a born survivor. Writes Epstein: "Pleading guilty
to illegal Nixon campaign contributions in 1976, Hammer "arrived in
Federal court in a wheelchair Two doctors attached dozens of wires to him
so they could monitor his heart in an adjoining room. Attendants stood by
with an oxygen tent and other emergency paraphernalia.
On leaving the courtroom, Hammer, as his lawyer put it, underwent 'a miraculous
recovery.'
"He checked out of the hospital, discarding like the props
they were his wheelchair, electrocardiogram, and oxygen tent. The next day,
he was back in his office."
Armand Hammer and Robert Maxwell: two of the biggest gangsters to grace,
or disgrace, God's earth.
Write to Action Report or to David Irving and his Fighting
Fund (DIFF) at:
P O Box 1707
Key West, FL 33041, USA
Or to: 81 Duke Steet, London W1M 5DJ, England
- Had a conversation with the editor's assistant (the man who was in
charge of your book before decision to cancel), in which he informed me
that you were the sole possessor of the entire Goebbels Diaries and that
therefore the validity of much of your book could not be checked. I remember
you informing me that you had travelled to Moscow to examine much of what
had been presumed "lost".
F J, Singapore
- David Irving replies: That editor's assistant was Neal Bascomb.
He should have asked me. I would have pointed out that had I chosen to manipulate
or distort what I found, I would surely have been exposed eventually when
the German government took possession of those diaries from Moscow. What
the traditional enemy objects to is not that I distorted what I found--but
that I did not: I quoted it just as Goebbels wrote it, without distortion.
- We are shocked to hear in the radio news that they are still refusing
you entry into Australia. What on earth is wrong with our country? I thought
in a democracy everybody is entitled to their own opinion. My husband and
I were outraged about the outcome of this court battle. Are you going to
battle on? I hope so, although it must be very nervewracking.
Mrs I Y, Clarinda, Australia
- REQUEST
I have two sets of very interesting letters from two German soldiers. One
soldier fought and died at Stalingrad, and I have twenty-seven of his letters
Aprp;Dec. 1942. The other is from a German soldier who wrote to his
sweetheart who later became his wife; he continues to write to her from
prison camp. I would pay a German language student a modest fee to translate
these letters for me.
Larry J Menestrina, 3934 Somerset St., Wichita, KS 67204 - 3527
- [Mr Menestrina is a well known US collector of militaria.]
- The GOEBBELS book arrived just in time to take with me on holiday.
A credit to your Customer Services.
D W, Merseyside
- Your beautiful book GOEBBELS: MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH is a landmark
indeed. Unbeknownst to you, I was fired from the chairmanship of my Dept
at Georgia State University for attending your Nov. 1992 lecture at the
Smyrna (Georgia) civic center. The chair of History, "monitoring"
the event for you know whom, saw me there and denounced me. I'm still on
the Faculty, but not allowed to teach a course in Twentieth Century Literature
because in 1993 I told a class that the four million figure at Auschwitz
was untrue and that all the deportations should be looked at as security
measures, whether from France, or the California Japanese, or of the Volga
Germans to Silesia. Outrage!
Once again, "keep punching" as my father used to say. When Western
Civilization eventually triumphs over the enemies of truth, your name will
be like that of George Washington today!
Prof D O, Atlanta, Georgia
- God Bless you for fighting for truth and justice!
R D, Cconomowoc, Wisconsin
- Dark Forces
I want you to know that I always read every single word of action report,
and think the format, diary, mixture of personal and public, is fascinating.
Your skilful pen makes one feel one is right there with you-and yet, truth
is, there you are, alone, fighting this terrible battle against such dark
forces. And yet, thankfully, not really alone, with your beautiful family
beside you.
Mrs M F, New Rochelle, NY
- Keep up the fight for truth and free speech!
B K, Ridgefield, Connecticut
- I am not indulging in flattery when I state that you are a remarkable
person. Even your enemies admit that you are an extraordinary researcher,
you are a riveting writer (I could not put down the latest action report
without completing it) and you have what is best described as intestinal
fortitude far beyond the norm. I do not know how you endured the financial
and physical attacks, the illness, and your daughter's horrible accident
while still pressing forward. You have my deepest respect, for I know that
I would have buckled under such pressure.
H F, New Jersey
- They'll have to be mad, these people, to hassle or pretend to jail
someone like you. I just finished your book on Mr Churchill: man, what a
masterpiece that is. "They" were all whinging and bitching on
ABC Radio, before a thoroughbred female announcer, about why David Irving
should be kept out of Australia, and why "Irving" should be ignored.
This was a couple of years ago, and you were in the news because the Australian
Government had just refused you entry to my country. I'd never even heard
of you then, but for the sake of Cosmic Justice I am pleased to report that
their little radio programme prejudiced me in your favour even before I
had read your book, Sir. Man, they were so rude and self-righteous. I pricked
up my ears also because I realised that you must be the same "Mr Irving"
who stars in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.
J S, Maleny, Queensland
- It is interesting that lord Merlyn-Rees [a former British Home Secretary]
trots out the old rubbish of equating open, honest questioning with antisemitism.
There may be some people who try to exploit the anti-Holocaust argument
simply because they dislike Jews, but they are a small minority. It seems
to me that certain vociferous Jews are fomenting antisemitism by their intolerant
attitude. Their malicious campaign suppressing civil liberties is an incitement
to hatred of the most hypocritical kind. I suspect that the truth of your
world-wide campaign leaks out, for as "silent" the great majority
may appear they are not all brainwashed idiots.
R E, Ramsgate, Kent
- Crematorium Builder
A recent time magazine article features a photograph taken inside a temple:
the cremated remains of aids sufferers are stacked against a Buddha. If
millions were cremated at Auschwitz, a mountain of remains would have accumulated.
Yet to date no mountain of burned bones has been found.
As a local contractor engaged in the extension of the Bristol Crematorium
in the 1950s I saw the remains of cremated bodies. Large bones remain burned
but intact, and have to be pulverised mechanically or with hand tools to
reduce them to powder or dust. The ordinary person assumes that only dust-like
ashes remain.
It is because of this lack of information-or lack of interest-by the public
that no one has ever questioned the "Holocaust." People believe
that the victims just disappeared in dust.
Gone with the wind!
F T, bristol
Law Report
Suppression of Free Speech in Germany Continues
Further Rare Cases in USA
A NASTY EPISODE In a case brought by the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL®) in the U.S. federal court three former employees of the state
of Florida, identified by The Miami Herald as Jewish, sued for $1 million
dollars each in damages for insults they alleged they had suffered in the
Miami office of the auditor general. Supervisor Abraham Azzam was found
by an internal investigation to have used offensive expressions about Jews
three times; since he was not formally disciplined, the ADL targeted the
office on behalf of the three employees. In a million-dollar out of
court settlement funded by Florida taxpayers, each of the three men and
a Hispanic woman who defended them was paid $90,000; their lawyers received
$280,000, while lawyers defending the auditor-general's office received
$340,000. Arthur Teitelbaum, southern area director of the ADL, called it
"a nasty episode."
WATCH LIST The U.S. Justice Department (heroes of the litigation
known as Israel v John Demjanjuk) announced on Dec. 1 that it has placed
the names of sixteen Japanese veterans of the country's infamous Unit 731
on the "watch list" of people barred from entering the United
States; these Japanese have been accused of conducting medical experiments
on prisoners or of forcing foreign women into sexual slavery during WW2.
The list, established in 1979, consists of thousands of Nazis banned as
suspected war criminals. Unit 731 operated in Manchuria; its work remained
secret for years as Washington had granted the doctors immunity from prosecution
in exchange for the data they had collected.
NOTORIOUS RESOLUTION Kurt Waldheim, Austrian Chancellor 1986p;92,
has blamed in his memoirs (The Answer, Amalthea Verlag, Vienna) the New-York-based
World Jewish Congress for having pressured the U.S. Justice Department into
issuing a ban on his entry to the United States. WJC chief Edgar Bronfman
had vowed revenge against Waldheim, secretary general of the United Nations
1972p;82, for having allowed it to pass its notorious resolution equating
Zionism with racism.
Speaking with Alan Cowell of The New York Times, Waldheim accused Mr Bronfman
of having told Edwin Meese, U.S. attorney-general at that time, that barring
Waldheim would be a "useful signal" to Jewish voters in the upcoming
1988 presidential campaign. Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress
has formally denied the monstrous allegation.
SACRIFICED, SUPPRESSED action report #10 published the last letter
left by Reinhold Elstner, one of the supporters of the Fighting Fund, a
veteran who decided to set an example for Germany's youth and immolated
himself in the centre of downtown Munich on Apr. 25, 1995.
Not only was his self-sacrifice hushed up by the horrified German
government and media. Now the contents of his last letter are being suppressed
too: the German publisher of Zirkelbrief, the newsletter of the Notverwaltung
des Deutschen Ostens, has been fined 9,600 DM (around $6,500) for publishing
the letter. The German courts have defined Elstner's farewell epistle
as posthumous "incitement".
ENDANGERED YOUTH The Federal German Bundesprüfstelle für
jugendgefährdende Schriften (Control Agency for Youth-Endangering Literature),
has placed a British computer game on its index of banned products, citing
"moral dangers" to German children and adults if they played it.
The computer game "Panzer General" enabled players to refight
some of the major battles of World War II.
What troubled the agency (popularly known as the Youth-Endangering Control
Agency)? The fact that by making the appropriate adjustments in mid-battle
the players had the opportunity of "enabling Germany to win the Second
World War." In the broadest sense, fretted the agency, this fulfilled
the criteria for "NS-Verherrlichung und -verharmlosung" (exalting
and minimalising the Nazis) a crime under Federal German law.
The computer game is still on sale worldwide except for Germany: with the
right mouse-clicks children and adults world-wide can still enable a German
victory, if they choose.
NO EXCUSE The Arkansas Democratp;Gazette reports that a Ms.
Debra Coleman Warner has sued the Chalmette Middle School in Chalmette,
Louisiana, because a letter which she wrote in 1992 asking that her son
be excused from a field trip to the Holocaust Museum was leaked to
the Timesp;Picayune, the New Orleans regional newspaper.
The newspaper published the letter two days before a November runoff for
parish council which Ms Warner lost. In the leaked letter, she stated "allegations
regarding treatment of Jews during war years have been grossly exaggerated."
PIRATE NEWS Oxford University Press have agreed to make a payment
to historian David Irving, copyright in whose standard work Hitler's War
was infringed in their university textbook Fascism; editor Richard Griffin
had reproduced several pages of the biography without permission.
He also reproduced this passage from a conversation between Hitler and a
Bavarian financier in 1922
'I combat Jewry not as a religion, but as a race...a solution
to the Jewish problem must come'
The full text of the conversation between Hitler and the financier
was recorded in shorthand by the latter's secretary. David Irving printed
this exclusive document in his new |