Irving’s Own Latest Word on Goebbels Book

Here's what David Irving has to say about the censorship campaign, in a not yet published letter to The Spectator (London):

“To kill off my biography Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich the Jewish Defense League and various other unsavory entities in the USA mounted a three-month campaign of telephoned death threats and obscenities against my publishers, St. Martin’s Press, whose editors had endorsed the manuscript after reading it no less than seven times, and against Doubleday's big Military History Book Club, who had selected it as their main book of the month for May.

“Undeterred by failure, these same people orchestrated a remarkable unanimous series of anonymous prepublication reviews in the key trade newspapers (Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal) which used such emotional words as “repellent,” “Nazi” and “insidious.” Associated Press and Reuters saw to it that they were published instantaneously under banner headlines around the globe (literally: the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the Sidney Morning Herald, the Cape Times, and South China Morning Post, etc.); for twenty-four hours my fax machine seemed to be receiving nothing else. Think about it: a book review — blazoned around the world.

“Since these ungentle tactics did not suffice, the campaigners prevailed on Elie Wiesel, the noted Holocaust survivor, to withdraw his endorsements from other books that St. Martin’s Press were publishing, and harassed various Jewish authors on their list into threatening to move to other publishers. Finally, their accomplices within the company staged a dramatic eleventh-hour mass meeting of the four hundred staff members and called for a strike if St. Martin's did not abandon production. Proclaiming that he had a number of Holocaust survivors among his kinfolk, their chairman Thomas McCormack now did a “Marlon Brando,” weeping profusely, he admitted his mistake and capitulated. Orphaned by his decision, the Book Club had to follow suit.

“This may not amount to censorship, as your American John Derbyshire protests (Spectator, May 18): but allows me to remark that ‘it will do until censorship comes along.’

“Acting as Jews, these organizations successfully stifled the U.S. publication of a book on which I toiled in the British, American, German, and Soviet archives for seven years, and which has, as your readers will have noticed, attracted wide acclaim in the United Kingdom. The bigots then have the wit to challenge people whether they are anti-Semitic: the answer is, in my case, not yet.”

Meanwhile, Smith’s Report has learned from David Irving that, according to Random House's Steve Wasserman, “after much deliberation” “this important work” was rejected for publication. Irving is now filling orders from America for Goebbels directly from London; he is still hopeful of finding a big publisher in America, but has talked to smaller, what he calls “off-Broadway” houses as well. If no American publishing agreement materializes, Irving plans to sue St. Martin's Press for damages.

Meanwhile, we will continue to make available on the Web important Irving materials (see the back page of this issue of SR, including his Introduction to Goebbels). The British edition of the book will soon be available from IHR, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach California, 92659.