Om David Irving [Utbrutet ur tråd i historieforumet]

David Irving was a prime-time guest on the 'Late Late Show'. Irving finally arrived, two main points he made:

- The Germans killed 3,000,000 jews, the majority by way of gassing in the Reinhard camps.
http://forum.yourforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=4876

Just a heads up that in Ireland, David Irving was a prime-time guest on the 'Late Late Show'. Irving appeared last on the show with a representitive from Cork University to debate. Throughout the show, the host billed him as: "A man who once denied the holocaust". Irving finally arrived, two main points he made:

- The Germans killed 3,000,000 jews, the majority by way of gassing in the Reinhard camps. Approximately 1,000,000 were executed where they were found.

- Himmler and Heydrich were responsible for the entire operation, Hitler knew nothing because he insisted the former keep their dirty business to themselves.

http://forum.yourforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=4876

He tells me he is writing a book on Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler's right-hand man until 1942, and his knowledge is formidable, but like all Germans he takes no risks. He mentions Himmler's famous October 1943 speech in Posen to the SS generals, but he has not spotted what I have -- that the page where Himmler makes his damning admission about killing the Jewish women and children too is a retype, done on a different typewriter, on different paper, by a different typist. As even Johnny Depp would say, "Now that's interesting."

After the television cameras come on, he claims that over ninety-nine percent of German historians support the conformist line, and that I am in a tiny (and by implication despised) minority. I tease him: "What happens to the one per cent who disagree? That's why the ninety-nine percent roll over and agree." He appears to know nothing about the prison sentences handed out by German courts to the unruly thinkers.

At one point he adopts pure bluff, or ignorance, and claims that in the Wannsee Conference ("of January 20, 1942", I remind him and the audience), Heydrich explicitly talks of killing the Jews; I state quite flatly that there is no such language used in the document.

He then mentions Hermann Göring's role, in signing the authority to Heydrich ("in July 1941," I add), as an accomplice. Wrong again. I know these documents off by heart, and educate the million viewers: in that document Göring talks only of a Gesamtlösung, an "overall solution," and there is no talk of killing.

In fact I detected, when I was the first to use Göring's 1941 handwritten diary for my biography of the man, that Heydrich had secured just a ten-minute interview with the Reichsmarschall on that date, July 31, 1941, at which he put before the no doubt harassed Göring the one-paragraph authority (Vollmacht) to sign; it is not even on Göring's headed paper -- that too had been typed by Heydrich and his staff. I do hope that Gerwarth gets these things right before he puts his biography to print. Or perhaps he won't. I hear that German prisons are somewhat less comfortable than the Austrian.