The Strange Case of David Irving

Well, as I say, I'm a big boy and can bear the thought of being offended. The biography, based largely on extracts from Goebbels' diaries, told me a great deal I hadn't known. I'll instance a small but suggestive example. Irving had in the past been associated with the British fascist movement led by Sir Oswald Mosley. In my hot youth, I'd protested at some of the meetings of this outfit and had circulated the charge that, before the war, it had been directly financed by the Nazis. This charge was always hotly disputed by the Mosleyites themselves, but here was Goebbels, in cold print, discussing the transfer of funds from Berlin to the British Black Shirts. On the old principle famously adumbrated by Bertrand Russell--of "evidence against interest"--it seemed that Irving was capable of publishing information that undermined his own position. He also, in his editorial notes, gave direct testimony about the mass killing of Jews in the East (by shooting) and of the use of an "experimental" gas chamber in the Polish town of Chelmno. The "deniers" don't like this book; on the strength of it you could prove that the Nazis tried to do away with the Jews. There was some odd stuff about Hitler's lack of responsibility for \o7 Kristallnacht \f7 but, as I say, I allowed for Irving's obsessions. I wrote a column criticizing St. Martin's for its cowardice and described Irving himself as not just a fascist historian but a great historian of fascism. One should be allowed to read "Mein Kampf" as well as Heidegger. Allowed? One should be able to do so without permission from anybody.

As a result of this, Irving contacted me when he was next in Washington, and I invited him to my home for a cocktail. He got off to a shaky start by refusing any alcohol or tobacco and by presenting me with two large blue-and-white stickers. Exactly the size of a German street sign, they were designed to be pasted over the originals at dead of night. "Rudolf Hess Platz," they said; a practical-joke accessory for German extremists with that especial sense of humor. Because they were intended to shock, I tried to look as unshocked as I could. Irving then revealed, rather fascinatingly, that some new documents from the Eichmann family might force him to reconsider his view that there had been no direct order for the annihilation of the Jews. It was a rather vertiginous atmosphere all around. When it came time for him to leave, my wife and daughter went down in the elevator with him on their own way out. Later, my wife rather gravely asked me if I would mind never inviting him again. This was highly unlike her; we have all sorts at our place. However, it transpired that, while in the elevator, Irving had looked with approval at my fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter, then 5 years old, and declaimed the following doggerel about his own little girl, Jessica, who was the same age: