After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Jews in the occupied areas were forced into ghettos, where they were deliberately kept in overcrowded and insanitary conditions and isolated from the outside. The Nazi authorities restricted supplies of food and other vital resources. By the spring of 1941 the death rate in the Warsaw ghetto was running at nearly 4,000 a month. Conditions worsened still further after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The advancing German army was followed by four heavily armed task forces (Einsatzgruppen) organized by the Security Service of the SS. These task forces started shooting Jews found in the occupied territory. By 15 October 1941, Task Force A alone, working in the Baltic area, was reporting that it had executed 118,430 Jews. These actions continued through 1942 and well into 1943 and accounted for well over a million deaths.1
As these events unfolded, the Nazi leadership imposed fresh restrictions on the 164,000 Jews who were still living in Germany. From 15 September 1941 they were forced to wear a yellow star on their clothes.2 On 18 September, Heinrich Himmler informed Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter of the occupied Polish area of the Warthegau, that the “Führer wishes that the Old Reich and the Protectorate (of Bohemia and Moravia) be emptied and freed of Jews from west to east as quickly as possible.”3 On 23 October 1941 Jews were banned from emigrating voluntarily. The SS and Gestapo now began deporting German Jews to the Eastern ghettos. Some of them were shot on arrival, but the Nazi leaders seem to have become alarmed at the effect on those Jews yet to be deported, and indeed on public opinion more generally, of reports filtering back to Germany about the killing actions that did take place. The arrival of thousands of German, Austrian, and Bohemian Jews in the ghettos did, however, cause the Nazi leadership to accelerate the killing of native Jews in the occupied East in order to make room for them, and it was at this point that the SS began to set up special camps designed for rapid mass extermination by poison gas, initially in mobile gassing vans.4
The Nazi leadership paid particular attention to deporting the Jews from Berlin. As Joseph Goebbels, who besides being Propaganda Minister had also been the party Gauleiter of Berlin since 1925, noted in his diary on 20 August 1941, “Berlin must become a city free of Jews. It is infuriating and a scandal that 76,000 Jews can still loiter around in the capital of the German Reich, mostly as parasites.”5 According to Irving, however, “Hitler was neither consulted nor informed” about the deportations of Jews from Berlin. As proof for this assertion he referred to remarks made by Hitler on 25 October 1941. According to Irving, Hitler claimed that the Jews had started the war and said:
“Let nobody tell me,” Hitler added, “that despite that we can’t park them in the marshier parts of Russia!” “By the way,” he added, “it’s not a bad thing that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews.” He pointed out however that he had no intention of starting anything at present. “There’s no point in adding to one’s difficulties at a time like this!”6
The German original of this monologue was published in 1980. I looked it up and translated it. The whole passage read as follows:
In the Reichstag, I prophesied to Jewry, the Jew will disappear from Europe if war is not avoided. This race of criminals has the two million dead of the [First World] war on its conscience, and now hundreds of thousands again. Nobody can tell me: But we can’t send them into the morass! For who bothers about our people? It’s good if the terror that we are exterminating Jewry goes before us. . . . I’m forced to pile up an enormous amount of things myself; but that doesn’t mean that what I take cognisance of without reacting to it immediately, just disappears. It goes into an account; one day the book is taken out. I had to remain inactive for a long time against the Jews too. There’s no sense in artificially making extra difficulties for oneself; the more cleverly one operates, the better. When I read speeches from a person like Galen, I say to myself: pricking them with pins has no purpose; it’s better to keep silent; unless one doubts the future of the movement! If I believe that the movement will exist in a few centuries, then I can wait. I wouldn’t have dealt with Marxism either, if I hadn’t had the power behind me.7
It was obvious from this that the translation presented by Irving contained numerous errors. In the German original there was no reference to Russia, and the action described was not the innocuous-sounding park them, which implied some kind of reasonably long-term stay, but send them. What might well have been meant by his statement was illustrated by an order given by Himmler to the SS in the area of the Pripet marshes on 30 July 1941 three months prior to this monologue: “All Jews must be shot. Drive Jew-women into the marshes.” Reporting on their attempt to carry this order out, the mounted division of the second SS cavalry regiment noted on 12 August in terms that left no doubt as to the purpose of this action: “Driving women and children into marshes did not have the success that it was meant to, since the marshes were not deep enough for them to sink in. In most cases one encountered firm ground (probably sand) below a depth of 1 metre, so that sinking-in was not possible.”8 It seemed reasonable to me to suppose that Hitler was aware of these events by mid- to late October. Sending the Jews into the marshes in this manner was something very different from merely “parking them in the marshier parts of Russia.”
But I found even more serious errors in Irving’s version. Thus it had Hitler saying: “By the way . . . it’s not a bad thing that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews.” What Hitler was really reported as saying was: “It’s good if the terror that we are exterminating Jewry goes before us.” Irving’s book watered this down in several respects. The translation of Schrecken as “public rumour” was inadequate, as it failed to convey the element of terror and anxiety indelibly associated with the word Schrecken.9 “Public rumour attributes to us” implied that it was, as so often with rumors, untrue. Hitler said nothing about attribution, but presented it as a fact. The word plan, which was wholly absent from the German original, appeared in Irving’s book and made it seem that the rumored extermination of the Jews was not actually taking place but was still in the planning stage. In fact, of course, Hitler’s actual recorded statement was unambiguous in its recognition of the fact that Jews were being exterminated behind the Eastern Front as the German army advanced into the Soviet Union following the invasion of June 1941, and crystal clear in its approval of the effect this had in terrorizing the inhabitants of the areas that were still to be conquered.
According to Irving, Hitler “pointed out however that he had no intention of starting anything at present.” Irving here drew on his own account of the table talk in his book Hitler’s War (1991), where he claimed that Hitler said that “with the Jews too I have found myself remaining inactive.”10 However, the German original made it clear that Hitler saw himself no longer as being inactive toward the Jews: “I had to remain inactive for a long time against the Jews too.” This meant that the time of inactivity was over. Hitler was talking in the present tense about the Jews, not in the future tense.
Irving further reported Hitler as saying: “There’s no point in adding to one’s difficulties at a time like this!’’ But the German original said something subtly different: “There’s no sense in artificially making extra difficulties for oneself; the more cleverly one operates, the better.” Thus, Hitler was making the general point that when attacking one’s enemies, one had to wait for the right moment to strike. While he thought that the time had come to deal with the Jews, he wanted to postpone the conflict with the Catholic Church, personified by Cardinal von Galen, who on 3 August 1941 had publicly attacked the Nazis’ ‘euthanasia’ program (the killing of mentally and physically disabled adults and children). The translation presented by Irving completely obscured this important point.
As Irving himself pointed out when confronted with these criticisms, he had not translated the passage in question himself. In fact, he merely followed what he called the official translation in English, first published in 1953 by Weidenfeld. Indeed, as far as the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War was concerned, Irving had some justification for doing so. Until 1980, the German original was not officially accessible to historians, who had to rely on the English translation of 1953 instead.11 Yet, by the time he published Goebbels, in 1996, Irving had been familiar with the German original for almost twenty years. Irving claimed proudly that he “was the only historian in the world to whom the original German texts were made available by their physical owner, namely in October 1977.”12 He admitted in 1983 that the German original “is completely different from the published English translation.”13 Obviously the passages that he had used from the 1953 translation now had to be checked against the German original and amended if necessary. So for example, Irving dropped the phrase “terror is a salutary thing,” falsely attibuted to Hitler in the Weidenfeld translation, from his revised 1991 edition of Hitler’s War because it was not in the German original.14
But while Irving cut out this phrase, which made Hitler appear in a bad light, he deliberately continued to use the other parts of the flawed (and in no sense ‘official’) Weidenfeld translation, if the original German text implicated Hitler in a way that the Weidenfeld translation did not. Thus in his book on Goebbels, he continued to claim that Hitler said that he was planning nothing against the Jews at present (Weidenfeld translation), while the German original had Hitler stating that “I had to remain inactive for a long time against the Jews too.” In other words, Irving used both the German original, and the flawed translation, selecting from each of them whatever served his purpose of showing Hitler in a favorable light and dropping, if he could, anything that did not. Whether or not the Weidenfeld translation was accurate in any given case was of no interest to him; all that he was interested in was whether or not it supported his preconceived notion of Hitler’s innocence. His version of the Hitler table talk in this instance thus amounted to a conscious and deliberate manipulation of the source-material.
In describing the deportation of German Jews from Berlin to the East, Irving also laid great stress on the influence which, he argued, was exerted by an antisemitic article by Goebbels, published on 16 November 1941 in Das Reich, his propaganda paper. Irving summarized the article as follows:
“The Jews wanted this war,” he argued, “and now they have it.” They were getting their just desserts. An eye for an eye. All Jews alike, whether languishing in an eastern ghetto or whining for war from New York, were conspiring against Germany. The Yellow Star, he argued, was akin to a ‘hygienic prophylactic’, because the most dangerous were those otherwise not recognizable as Jews. To those who might bleat that the Jews were humans too he pointed out that the same could be said of muggers, rapists, and pimps. “Suddenly one has the impression that all of Berlin’s Jews are either darling little babies who wouldn’t hurt a fly, or fragile old ladies.” “Were we to lose this war,” he continued, “these oh-so-harmless Jewish worthies would suddenly turn into rapacious wolves. . . . That’s what happened in Bessarabia and the Baltic states after the Bolsheviks marched in, and neither the people nor the governments there had had the slightest sympathy for them. For us, in our fight against the Jews, there is no going back.”15
Irving claimed that “the article displayed a far more uncompromising face than Hitler’s toward the Jews. When the Führer came to Berlin for Luftwaffe general Ernst Udet’s funeral,” he continued, referring to an entry in Goebbels’ diary, “he again instructed Goebbels to pursue a policy against the Jews ‘that does not cause us endless difficulties,’ and told him to go easy on mixed marriages in future.”16
It seemed a good idea to test Irving’s account of these events by looking up the Goebbels diary entry to which he referred. The full entry in the published edition of the Goebbels diaries read as follows:
The Führer also completely agrees with my views with reference to the Jewish question. He wants an energetic policy against the Jews, which, however, does not cause us unnecessary difficulties. Evacuation of the Jews is to be undertaken city by city. So it is still uncertain when it is Berlin’s turn; but when it is, the evacuation is then to be completed as quickly as possible. With reference to Jewish mixed marriages, the Führer recommended to me a somewhat more reserved procedure, above all in artistic circles, because he is of the opinion that these marriages will in any case gradually die out, and one should not allow any gray hair to grow on one’s head over it.17
On checking this against Irving’s account of these events in his biography of Goebbels, I quickly realized that Irving had manipulated this diary entry by omitting all reference to the crucial first sentence and the first half of the second sentence (“He wants an energetic policy against the Jews”) from his text because it showed once again that Hitler thought about the ‘Jewish Question’ in the same way as Goebbels did. Irving only printed the first sentence hidden in the endnotes, directly followed by his comment that Hitler was “clearly” not in agreement with Goebbels.18 The average reader could hardly be expected to plow through all the endnotes in the book, and anyone who did would, it seemed, be put at ease by Irving’s gloss on the sentence, although to anyone familiar with the whole diary entry it would seem to lack any foundation in the document itself.
In his written submission to the court, Irving argued that Goebbels inserted the line concerning Hitler’s approval as an alibi “for his own wrongdoing.”19 But what was the ‘wrongdoing’ in this case? Irving did not say. If Goebbels was so keen falsely to present Hitler as just as radical an antisemite as he was, why then did he note down that Hitler wanted him to go easier on mixed marriages? Here, as in his account of the so-called Reichkristallnacht, I could not find any indication of guilt in Goebbels’ diary. As far as he was concerned, there was no ‘wrongdoing’ at all, nor was there any evidence that Hitler disapproved of his actions either. This seemed to me to be a clear attempt to make the sentence mean the opposite of what it actually meant.
As well as manipulating this diary entry by transposing a key part of it to an endnote, Irving also mistranslated it. According to Goebbels’ diary, Hitler explained that he wanted to avoid causing “us unnecessary difficulties” in pursuing an “energetic policy against the Jews.” What he meant by “unnecessary difficulties” was probably both the removal of Jews working in industries that were important for the war effort, and the printing of hostile reports about the expulsions in the foreign press.20 However, Irving mistranslated “unnecessary difficulties” as “endless difficulties,” thus removing the specific context and broadening the significance of what Hitler was saying beyond what the diary entry actually implied until it came to suggest a policy that would continue into the indefinite future.
Yet I found plenty of evidence that Hitler was voicing views concerning the Jews similar to those expressed by Goebbels at this time. On the evening of 10 July 1941, Hitler declared at his table: “I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the fermenting agent of all social decomposition.”21 Many similar statements could be found expressing Hitler’s extreme animosity toward the Jews at this time.22 Thus after a meeting with Hitler, Goebbels noted in his diary on 19 August 1941:
We speak about the Jewish problem. The Führer is convinced that his former prophecy in the Reichstag, that if Jewry succeeded once more in provoking a world war, it would end with the annihilation of the Jews, is being confirmed. It is being confirmed in these weeks and months with a certainty that seems almost uncanny.23
On 5 November 1941, Hitler was recorded as voicing similar sentiments in his ‘table talk’:
I have always said that Jews are the stupidest devils there are. They haven’t a single real musician, thinker, no art, nothing, nothing at all. They are liars, forgers, deceivers. Any one of them only ever achieved anything as a result of the stupidity of his surroundings. If he wasn’t washed by the Aryan, the Jew wouldn’t be able to see out of his eyes for dirt. We can live without the Jews, they can’t live without us.24
All of this, and much more, gave the lie to Irving’s claim that Goebbels’ article in Das Reich “displayed a far more uncompromising face than Hitler’s towards the Jews.”
Irving’s attempt to show that Hitler was not responsible for the mass killings of German Jews deported to the East made use of entries in the phone log kept by the SS leader and German Police Chief Heinrich Himmler. Reference to the entry for 30 November 1941 appeared repeatedly in Irving’s work, and formed a key link in his chain of documents supposedly exculpating Hitler from involvement in the extermination of the Jews. In Hitler’s War (1977), Irving wrote that Himmler “was summoned to the Wolf’s Lair for a secret conference with Hitler, at which the fate of Berlin’s Jews was clearly raised. At 1:30 P.M. Himmler was obliged to telephone from Hitler’s bunker to Heydrich the explicit order that Jews were not to be liquidated.”25 The phone log was made conveniently available while I was working on the report, in a printed scholarly edition, along with Himmler’s appointments diary, another of the documents discovered in the former KGB Special Archive in Moscow after the fall of communism.26 Irving had consulted the manuscript original of the phone log some years previously, although it was not until the late 1990s that he had access to the appointments diary. What did the phone log entry for 30 November 1941 actually say?
The phone log showed that Himmler had a phone conversation with Heydrich in Prague on 30 November 1941 at 1:30 P.M., summarized in the phone log as follows:
Verhaftung Dr Jekelius Arrest of Dr Jekelius
Angebl. Sohn Molotow. Supposed son of Molotov.
Judentransport aus Berlin. Jew-transport from Berlin.
keine Liquidierung.27 no liquidation.
In the introduction to Hitler’s War, Irving stated that this was “incontrovertible evidence” that “Hitler ordered on November 30, 1941, that there was to be ‘no liquidation’ of the Jews (without much difficulty, I found in Himmler’s private files his own handwritten note on this).”28 Later in the text, Irving several times referred to Hitler’s “November 1941 order forbidding the liquidation of the Jews.”
Yet, from the entry in Himmler’s phone log it was perfectly clear to me, as it would be to anybody, that the subject of the conversation on 30 November 1941 between Himmler and Heydrich concerned one transport of Jews from Berlin. It was easy enough to check out whether there was such a transport, since the SS in the East had kept records and their activities had also been the subject of legal proceedings after the war. From these sources I discovered that a trainload of Jews had been transported from Berlin on 27 November 1941 and arrived in Riga on the night of 29–30 November just before a massacre of the local Jews by the SS police chief in the region, Friedrich Jeckeln, who took the Berlin Jews off the train on 30 November and had them machine-gunned into pits with the rest.29
Thus the phone log did not contain any general order from anyone to stop the killing of Jews. The telephone conversation between Himmler and Heydrich clearly referred to a single trainload of Jews, which could only have been the one from Berlin to Riga. Moreover, there was absolutely no evidence in the phone log that Himmler had been summoned to Hitler’s bunker or had any conversation or meeting at all with Hitler before talking to Heydrich on the phone. The phone log did not record who had phoned whom, so it was at least possible that Heydrich had phoned Himmler and not the other way around, reporting on the situation in the Baltic and asking for instructions. It was doubtful whether Hitler and Himmler met that day before Himmler made the phone call to Heydrich telling him not to kill the Jews on the train from Berlin to Riga. The ‘order’ from Hitler was a figment of Irving’s imagination.
This manipulation of the phone log had already been pointed out by Broszat and Trevor-Roper in their reviews of the 1977 edition of Irving’s book.30 As Trevor-Roper, Broszat, and the Hitler specialist Eberhard Jaeckel also pointed out, if Hitler had intervened personally to stop the killing of a single trainload of Berlin Jews on their arrival in Riga, then this strongly suggested that he was making an exception here, and that he therefore knew that there was a general policy of killing them on arrival.31
Irving subsequently claimed that only after the publication of the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War had “colleagues provided him with the documentation which usefully narrowed down the reference in the Himmler-Heydrich phone note of November 30, 1941, to one particular trainload of Jews being shipped from Berlin to Riga at that time.”32 What was this fresh documentation to which Irving referred? The evidence that the phone call referred to a single transport of Jews from Berlin was unmistakably present in the document itself. Still, in Goebbels: Mastermind of the ‘Third Reich,’ published in 1996, as well as in the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War, Irving did appear to have stepped back from some of his earlier claims.33 All he argued in Goebbels was that the Berlin Jews who arrived in Riga on 30 November 1941 were killed “even as Hitler . . . was instructing Himmler that these Berlin Jews were not to be liquidated.”34
Fresh evidence made available after the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening up of the former KGB archive in Moscow, with its hoard of captured German documents, led to further changes in Irving’s position on the Himmler phone log. On his Focal Point website, Irving claimed that on 17 May 1998 he had received a document detailing Himmler’s appointments for the 30 November 1941 from the Moscow archive. He reproduced this document on his website, with a translation. As emerged from this document, Himmler met Hitler at 2:30 P.M., that is, after he had made the phone call to Heydrich concerning the transport of Jews from Berlin, not before. It also showed that Himmler only arrived at Hitler’s headquarters half an hour before his phone conversation with Heydrich, and recorded that he spent this half-hour ‘working.’ The likelihood of his having seen Hitler in this short period to receive a major policy order from him was thus vanishingly small. The summary on the Focal Point website (on which, oddly, Irving frequently referred to himself in the third person, as if it were being written by some neutral commentator) claimed: “This suggests that Mr Irving’s original theory that Himmler discussed the matter with Hitler before phoning Heydrich is wrong.” Irving, of course, had never presented this as a theory, but as “incontrovertible evidence” that Hitler ordered “that there was to be ‘no liquidation’ of the Jews.”35
So Irving had now retreated from his claim that Hitler had ordered a stop to all liquidations of Jews on 30 November 1941. He had been forced to admit that the Heydrich–Himmler phone call only referred to one trainload of Jews from Berlin. He had also been obliged to give up his claim that Hitler had ordered Himmler to make the phone call. Absolutely nothing remained of his original assertions, which he had set out with such certainty in Hitler’s War (1977) and repeated in modified form on a number of subsequent occasions, that the order referred to all Jews everywhere, and that it came from Hitler. So conclusive was the new documentary evidence that even Irving had to admit that a key link in his ‘chain of documents’ supposedly proving Hitler’s opposition to the extermination of the Jews, was completely without substance.
Yet, extraordinarily enough, while Irving admitted that information received on 17 May 1998 suggested that he had been wrong to claim that Hitler had ordered Himmler to call Heydrich on 30 November 1941, he still continued to support his earlier claims in some of his subsequent publications. Thus on 31 August 1998, he posted another document on his website in which he argued that on 30 November 1941, Hitler had “demonstrably . . . ordered” that the Berlin Jews on the transport to Riga were not to be killed. This document could still be accessed on Irving’s website on 11 April 1999. Evidently his ‘theory’ was not ‘wrong’ after all.36
Another key document that Irving repeatedly referred to in his ‘chain of documents’ proving Hitler’s innocence in the matter of the Nazi extermination of the Jews was what he described in the preface to the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War as
an extraordinary note dictated by Staatssekretär Schlegelberger in the Reich Ministry of Justice in the Spring of 1942: “Reich Minister Lammers,” this states, referring to Hitler’s top civil servant, “informed me that the Führer has repeatedly pronounced that he wants the solution of the Jewish Question put off until after the war is over.” Whatever way one looks at this document, it is incompatible with the notion that Hitler had ordered an urgent liquidation programme.37
According to Irving, “no other historians have quoted this document, possibly finding its content hard to reconcile with their obsessively held views” about Hitler’s responsibility for the extermination of the Jews.38 On various occasions, Irving had described this document as “the most cardinal piece of proof in this entire story of what Hitler knew about what was going on,” “the most compelling document” showing that “Hitler didn’t know about it” (the extermination of the Jews), a document that “refutes this lie” (that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews), and a document that “must acquit” Hitler because it proved that the “Nazis’ determination to liquidate all of the Jews” was not supported by documentary evidence.39
What did this document actually say? I found the typewritten original in a folder of Reich Ministry of Justice files held at the German Federal Archives in Berlin (R 22/52). The full text of the typewritten document was as follows:
Reich Minister Lammers informed me that the Führer had repeatedly explained to him that he wanted the solution of the Jewish Question put back until after the war. Accordingly the present discussions possess a merely theoretical value in the opinion of Reich Minister Lammers. But he will be in all cases concerned that fundamental decisions are not reached by a surprise intervention from another agency without his knowledge.40
It was not written on headed notepaper. It had no date, no signature, no security classification, none of the abbreviations usually used by the leading officials in the Ministry of Justice when signing memoranda, and not even an internal reference number (Aktenzeichen). The only direct clue to the background of the document was the name of the state secretary in the Ministry of Justice, Freisler, which appeared in the bottom left-hand corner. The notion that it was authored by State Secretary Schlegelberger was a supposition, although not necessarily a wrong one.
The file (R 22/52) was not, it seems, an original file kept by ministerial officials in the Third Reich but seemed to have been compiled from Ministry of Justice papers by the Allies after the war.41 If the document dated from the spring of 1942, then it was most probably linked to discussions at the time regarding the fate of ‘half-Jews’ and Jews in ‘mixed marriages’ which formed the context of three of the other four documents grouped with the memorandum in the file. This interpretation had been advanced by several historians of Nazi Germany,42 by one of the leading prosecution attorneys at the Nuremberg trials,43 and indeed even by David Irving himself.44
The question of ‘half-Jews’ and Jews in ‘mixed marriages’ had been discussed at length at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, at which there had been general agreement on the transportation and murder of ‘full Jews’ in the German sphere of influence–present and future–in Europe. But the question of ‘half-Jews’ and Jews in ‘mixed marriages’ had been left unresolved because of differences of opinion among the various different agencies involved. Were they to be deported? Or should they be sterilized and left where they were? Should they be divided into different categories and treated accordingly? Should ‘mixed marriages’ be forcibly dissolved? Opinions were divided. These matters of detail were thus debated at the meeting of fifteen lower-ranking state and party officials on 6 March 1942 under the very general heading ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage,’ ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’ This was left-over business from the Wannsee Conference. So it was not surprising that it continued to be carried on under this general heading, as did subsequent correspondence on the matter.45
Three of the documents in the file containing the ‘Schlegelberger memorandum’ dealt with the aftermath of this meeting. The acting Minister of Justice, State Secretary Franz Schlegelberger, wrote to Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, on 12 March 1942, complaining that the meeting of 6 March 1942 had prepared the ground for decisions “which I must hold to be in large part completely impossible.” Schlegelberger asked Lammers for a meeting to discuss the issue.46 This letter was followed by another, sent some three weeks later to seven of the state and party offices represented at the 6 March 1942 meeting, and also headed ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’ It reiterated Schlegelberger’s concerns about the treatment of ‘half-Jews’ and ‘mixed marriages.’ On 18 March 1942, Lammers, writing from Hitler’s headquarters, under the heading: ‘Re: Complete Solution of the Jewish Question,’ agreed to meet Schlegelberger. A date for the meeting would be fixed upon Lammers’ return to Berlin, which he expected to be at the end of March 1942.47
It seemed likely that Irving’s document (the ‘Schlegelberger memorandum’), if indeed it did date from the spring of 1942, was Schlegelberger’s record of this meeting with Lammers, which according to the historian Eberhard Jäckel took place on 10 April 1942.48 What then was the cause of the uncertainty shown by Hitler in this particular area of policy? Unlike those Germans classified as ‘full Jews,’ the ‘half-Jews’ and Jews in ‘mixed marriages’ were not yet totally cut off from the rest of the German population, as they still often had one parent classified as German, or were married to a German partner. That these ‘Aryan’ Germans would not necessarily allow deportations to go ahead without resistance was powerfully confirmed in February 1943, when a large crowd of ‘Aryan’ German women successfully staged a public demonstration against the Gestapo in the Rosenstrasse in Berlin to force the release of their arrested Jewish husbands and even the return of a handful who had already been sent to Auschwitz.49 For most of the war, Hitler was worried about repercussions such as these.
In the light of all this, Irving was misleading his readers and listeners when he argued that the document was “incompatible with the notion that Hitler had ordered an urgent liquidation programme” and showed that Hitler “ordered ‘No Final Solution.’ ”50 The “present discussions” to which the document referred were probably the discussions taking place in the spring of 1942 about divorce proceedings for Jews in ‘mixed marriages’ and measures against ‘half-Jews,’ discussions which took place under the general heading ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ (Endlösung der Judenfrage). In this context, the likelihood was that Lammers’ reference to views Hitler had expressed in the past that the solution of the ‘Jewish question’ should be postponed until after the war was over, referred only to the fate of ‘half-Jews’ and Jews in ‘mixed marriages.’ The fate of ‘full Jews,’ by contrast, had already been decided upon in principle. Yet, until the position of the borderline categories was finally clarified, the ‘Jewish Question’ as many Nazis understood it could not be regarded as completely solved. Lammers’ reference to a possible surprise intervention from another agency was probably meant to reassure Schlegelberger that more radical officials in other party or state positions who favored a more drastic solution would not be allowed to resolve the issue without Schlegelberger’s considerations being taken into account.
This interpretation of the document seemed to me to have the best fit with the surrounding historical context and with the other documents in the same file. Irving’s version, however, raised serious problems for his own views on a wider scale. It occurred to me that if the term final solution was really understood to mean here the total physical extermination of the Jews in Europe, as Irving implied in his writings, then the document would mean that Hitler did know about the policy of exterminating Europe’s Jews, even if he did want it postponed until after the war. Surely Irving would not have wanted this implication to be drawn from the document in question; the inference would have run counter to everything he had previously argued about Hitler. On the other hand, if it meant the deportation of the Jews to the East, then how could Hitler have repeatedly said he wanted it to be postponed, when he had ordered it the previous autumn and knew that it was in full swing? How indeed could Irving justify his reading of the Himmler phone log of 30 November 1941 as expressing Hitler’s command that deported Jews were not to be shot, a command which in Irving’s view showed that Hitler recognized that deportations were going on and yet also made it clear that he did nothing at all to stop them? Irving’s ‘chain of documents,’ when I looked at each one in context, seemed to be a chain of contradictions.51
In any case, the policy of the Ministry of Justice toward the Jews from spring 1942 on was absolutely incompatible with the Ministry officials having received any general order from Hitler that commanded no killing or deportation of Jews. In his own doctoral dissertation on Hitler’s prisons, my research assistant Nik Wachsmann had come across documents in the German Federal Archives indicating that on 16 April 1942, only six days after Schlegelberger’s presumed meeting with Lammers, the Ministry of Justice issued a directive to all chief state prosecutors in Germany stating that the Ministry supported the ‘evacuation’ to the East of the Jewish inmates of all German penal institutions. The same principle was applied to Jewish prisoners awaiting trial on remand, “unless,” the Ministry added in a revealing phrase, “it is expected that they will be sentenced to death,” showing that judicial officials probably understood that evacuation was a synonym for execution.52 This process was completed when the last remaining Jews in state penal institutions were handed over to the police (together with other selected ‘asocial’ state prisoners) after a meeting between Himmler and the new minister of justice, Otto-Georg Thierack, on 18 September 1942, “for annhihilation through labour.” More than one thousand Jewish prisoners were transported straight to Auschwitz following this agreement.53 Thus the Ministry of Justice was actively involved in the deportation and extermination of Jews in the months following the consultation with Lammers. So whatever Schlegelberger had come away with from his meeting with Lammers, it was clearly not the impression that it was Hitler’s wish that Jews generally were not to be evacuated or killed.
Ten years previously, after first demolishing Irving’s interpretation of the document, Eberhard Jäckel had written that Irving knew full well how limited its significance was. “But,” Jäckel added, “he only ever sees and collects what fits his story, and even now he will not let himself be dissuaded from understanding what he wants to by the phrase ‘postponement of the solution of the Jewish question.’ ” Jäckel predicted that Irving would soon repeat it in his books once more. That he would still be repeating it so many years after it had been disproved, would come as no surprise to him.54 This supposedly key document in Irving’s arsenal of alleged documentary proof of Hitler’s lack of culpability for the extermination of the Jews had long been regarded by professional historians as nothing of the kind. He could only present it as such by ignoring the logical contradictions in his reading of the document, by disregarding its immediate context, and by suppressing all the uncertainties with which it was associated.
By the time the discussions were being held in March and April 1942 about the future of ‘half-Jews,’ those people classified by the Nazis as full Jews were already being exterminated in large numbers, not just by mass shootings, but also by gassing, first in mobile vans, then in specially constructed facilities at camps, such as Belzec, behind the Eastern Front. In the first edition of Hitler’s War (1977), Irving claimed in several passages that Hitler was kept in the dark by other Nazi officials such as Goebbels and Himmler about the extermination of Jews in the East. This was part of his general argument that Hitler knew nothing of the ‘Final Solution.’ In one such passage, Irving wrote:
The ghastly secrets of Auschwitz and Treblinka were well kept. Goebbels wrote a frank summary of them in his diary on March 27, 1942, but evidently held his tongue when he met Hitler two days later, for he quotes only Hitler’s remark: “The Jews must get out of Europe. If need be, we must resort to the most brutal methods.”55
By this stage in my investigations, I had come to regard all of Irving’s references to the Goebbels diaries with a good deal of suspicion. So once more, I looked up the full diary entry in the published edition of Goebbels’ voluminous journals. What did it say?
The full–and very lengthy–diary entry gave a very different impression from that conveyed by Irving:
The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning near Lublin, to the East. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn’t work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophecy that the Führer issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realise itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters. If we did not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would annihilate us. It is a struggle for life and death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime could muster the strength for a general solution of the question. Here too, the Führer is the persistent pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, which is demanded by the way things are and thus appears to be unavoidable. Thank God, during the war we now have a whole series of possibilities which were barred to us in peacetime. We must exploit them. The ghettos which are becoming available in the General Government are now being filled with the Jews who are being pushed out of the Reich, and after a certain time the process is then to renew itself here. Jewry has nothing to laugh about.56
Irving did not tell his readers that Goebbels described Hitler as having pushed for this “radical solution.” He simply omitted the entire passage relating to Hitler, as he did in the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War, because this statement by Goebbels discredited his claim that Hitler knew nothing about the extermination camps in the East.57 If Hitler was ignorant, how could he be “the persistent pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution”? Thus, Irving manipulated the diary entry to argue the exact opposite of what it actually showed.
Irving claimed that Goebbels did not inform Hitler of the murderous activities taking place in Auschwitz and Treblinka when he met him on 29 March 1942.58 But it was clear from Goebbels’ diary entry for 30 March 1942, which recorded the events of the previous day, that the Propaganda Minister did not meet Hitler on the 29 March 1942.59 Hitler’s remark (“The Jews must get out of Europe. If need be, we must resort to the most brutal methods”) was made on 19 March 1942, as recorded in Goebbels’ diary on 20 March 1942, and could not therefore be used, as Irving used it, as evidence that Goebbels “held his tongue when he met Hitler” after writing his “frank summary” of the “ghastly secrets” of the extermination camps on 27 March. Nor did Irving publish the complete passage from Goebbels’ diary entry of 20 March. Goebbels recorded: “We speak in conclusion about the Jewish question. Here the Führer remains, now as before, unrelenting. The Jews must get out of Europe, if necessary, with the application of the most brutal means.”60 In both editions of Hitler’s War, Irving omitted Goebbels’ characterization of Hitler’s stance as unrelenting.
I found several other documents indicating Hitler’s knowledge and approval, to put it no more strongly, of the ‘Final Solution.’ For example, on 28 July 1942, Himmler wrote to the head of the SS Head Office, Gottlob Berger, and explained that “the occupied Eastern territories will be Jew-free. The Führer has laid the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.”62 At this time, between the end of July 1942 until the end of September 1942, some of the worst excesses of mass murder of the entire ‘Final Solution’ occurred in the Polish General Government. Apart from mass gassings, German police forces also exterminated entire villages by shooting their Jewish inhabitants.63 Historians later estimated that around 1.75 million women, men, and children were murdered in Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor by the time the camps were dismantled the following year.64
On 22 September 1942, at the height of this unprecedented mass murder operation, Himmler had a lengthy meeting with Hitler. Here we found another problem with Irving’s account of Hitler’s role in these events. Judging from Himmler’s handwritten agenda notes, one subject may have been the extermination of the Jews. Under the heading “Race and Settlement,” Himmler noted:
1. Emigration of Jews
how to be further proceeded?
2. Settlement Lublin– Circumstances
Lorrainers Gen[eral] Gouv.[ernement]
Germans from Bosnia Globus
Bessarabia65
The fact that Himmler discussed the emigration of the Jews, as well as Globus, his nickname for Globocnik, who was responsible for this program of mass extermination in the General Government, immediately raised in my mind the suspicion that the mass annihilation of the Jews was one of the topics of conversation between Hitler and Himmler on that day.
But such suspicions seem to have been far from Irving’s thoughts. In his written submission to the court, Irving conceded that he had neglected the Himmler note in question:
It is admitted that the plaintiff did not draw attention to this minute, but it is denied that this is relevant. . . . The Defendants have failed to inform us of the minute’s ‘obvious significance’, which escapes the Plaintiff. . . . Himmler’s jotted agenda for his meetings with Hitler are crowded with names, pet or otherwise, and in the absence of collateral evidence it is imprudent in the extreme to spin fanciful theories around them.66
Yet it was not a fanciful theory to suggest that the note indicated that Hitler was updated by Himmler on the mass murder of Jews in the East, or that the two men decided on the next steps in the ‘Final Solution.’ The documents left me in no doubt that at this time important decisions by the Nazi leaders were being made.67 Globocnik’s involvement in all this was as the man responsible for clearing out the Jews from Lublin to the death camps in order to make way for ethnic German settlers brought there from other parts of Europe, part of the vast plan of resettlement, deportation, and murder with which the Nazis were seeking to redraw the ethnic map of Europe.
Oddly enough, I discovered that Irving was in fact wrong in thinking he had not used the note by Himmler in his own work. In the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War, Irving used the minute to support his claim that Himmler did not enlighten Hitler about the true fate of the Jews in the East:
Himmler meanwhile continued to pull the wool over Hitler’s eyes. On September 17 (recte: September 22) he calmly jotted in his notes for that day’s Führer conference: “1. Jewish emigration–how is to be handled in future? 2. Settlement of Lublin,” and noted next to these points: “Conditions in Generalgouvernement,” and “Globus” (Globocnik’s nickname).68
Irving’s claim lacked all factual foundation. First, there was no indication that Himmler took down the agenda for the meeting “calmly” or kept Hitler in the dark about the mass annihilation of the Jews. Second, the fact that the mass murder of the Jews was not mentioned openly in Himmler’s notes, which Irving seemed to have taken as proof for Himmler’s having misled Hitler, was no surprise. The Nazis generally used camouflage terms when noting details of the extermination of the Jews at this time. There was no question of trying to pull the wool over Hitler’s eyes with regard to the mass killings. If anyone had spun fanciful theories around this document and pulled the wool over people’s eyes, it was Irving himself.
As the war progressed, the Nazis began to round up and transport Jews from all over Europe to the death camps. Even where they did not directly control areas with large numbers of Jewish inhabitants, they started to exert pressure for mass murder. The sovereign nation with the largest number of Jews untouched by the Nazis at the end of 1942 was Hungary. During the Second World War, Hungary was ruled by a strongly authoritarian, right-wing regime, which had come to power in a bloody counter-revolution at the end of the First World War. Led by Admiral Horthy, whose title derived from the defunct Habsburg Empire and who functioned as regent for the absent Habsburg emperor, the Hungarian regime allied itself to Nazi Germany from early on, principally in order to recover territory from small neighboring countries which it considered belonged to Hungary by the historic right of the Habsburg tradition.
In 1938–39 Hungary joined Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. In return for German backing in obtaining territory from Romania in August 1940 and Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Hungarian government sent troops to participate in the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. Having achieved its principal goals in annexing territory from its small neighboring states, Hungary now tried to pull out of the war on the Eastern Front, and withdrew substantial numbers of troops. Following the defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad, Hitler began to put pressure on Admiral Horthy to reverse this policy, and summoned him to a meeting on 16 and 17 April 1943, at which the German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, was also present. Hitler and Ribbentrop also used this opportunity to discuss with Horthy the question of Hungary’s Jews, of whom there were perhaps three-quarters of a million at that time. These people were already subjected to massive legal discrimination by the strongly antisemitic Horthy regime. However, the Hungarian government made clear that it was extremely jealous of its sovereign rights over native Hungarian Jews and insisted to the Germans that any ‘solution’ of the Hungarian dimension of the ‘Jewish question’ would have to take the specific circumstances in Hungary into account.69
The meeting between Hitler and Horthy on 16 and 17 April 1943 was in part designed to escalate the pressure that the German government had already put on Horthy to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish question’ in Hungary once and for all and to persuade Horthy to remove the obstacles that he had so far put in the way of the forcible deportation of all of Hungary’s Jews to territory controlled by the Nazi regime. The minutes of the meeting were taken by Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt, who confirmed them and added his own recollections at the Nuremberg trials.70 The minutes for the second day’s meeting, on 17 April 1943, recorded a statement by Ribbentrop, in Hitler’s presence, to a point made by Horthy:
On Horthy’s retort, what should he do with the Jews then, after he had pretty well taken all means of living from them–he surely couldn’t beat them to death–the Reich Foreign Minister replied that the Jews must either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other way.71
This blunt statement by Ribbentrop contributed to the conclusion of the judges at the Nuremberg trials in October 1946, that the foreign minister was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.72
Hitler almost immediately confirmed Ribbentrop’s explicitly murderous statement at some length:
Where the Jews were left to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had ruled. They were just pure parasites. One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland. If the Jews there didn’t want to work, they were shot. If they couldn’t work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body could be infected. That was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one spare the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism more? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished.73
Despite this remarkably open language, Horthy was clearly not convinced about the need to murder large numbers of Jews, much to Hitler’s annoyance.74
How did Irving deal with this incriminating document? I had by this time become familiar with his tactics when confronted with material such as this, and in this instance too, he did not disappoint. In the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War, Irving started off by hiding away in a footnote Ribbentrop’s statement that all Jews had to be either “annihilated or taken to concentration camps.” He resorted to the same tactic in his 1991 edition of Hitler’s War.75 Having disposed of this awkward remark to a place where many readers would not trouble to consult it, Irving then placed Hitler’s following references to Poland, bacilli, and so on in an entirely different context. Irving’s summary of Hitler’s statement read:
Events in Poland were pointed to as providing an ugly precedent: there were reports of Jews roaming the country, committing acts of murder and sabotage. . . . In Warsaw, the fifty thousand Jews surviving in the ghetto were on the point of staging an armed uprising–with weapons and ammunition evidently sold to them by Hitler’s fleeing allies as they passed westward through the city. Himmler ordered the ghetto destroyed and its ruins combed out for Jews. “This is just the kind of incident that shows how dangerous these Jews are.”
Poland should have been an object lesson to Horthy, Hitler argued. He related how Jews who refused to work there were shot; those who could not work just wasted away. Jews must be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, he said, using his favourite analogy. Was that so cruel when one considered that even innocent creatures like hares and deer had to be put down to prevent their doing damage? Why preserve a bestial species whose ambition was to inflict bolshevism on us all? Horthy apologetically noted that he had done all he decently could against the Jews: “But they can hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated,” he protested. Hitler reassured him: “There is no need for that.” But just as in Slovakia, they ought to be isolated in remote camps where they could no longer infect the healthy body of the public; or they could be put to work in mines, for example.76
Yet whoever said “This is just the kind of incident that shows how dangerous these Jews are,” Adolf Hitler certainly did not say it to Admiral Horthy at their meeting on 16–17 April 1943. Hitler did not mention the Warsaw ghetto uprising at all, which was not surprising, since it did not even begin until two days later. Nor did the uprising involve fifty thousand armed Jews, as Irving implied, but at most a few thousand of them. Nor was there any evidence that they had been supplied with arms by Hitler’s fleeing allies.77 Irving also watered down the expression used by Hitler to describe the fate of those Polish Jews who could not work–verkommen–by translating it as “wasted away,” as if they had no assistance toward this fate from Nazi authorities who deliberately starved them of food.
Most seriously of all, however, the exchange reported at the end of Irving’s account, beginning “Horthy apologetically noted,” did not occur on 17 April, as Irving clearly portrayed by placing it immediately after his summary of Hitler’s speech, but on the previous day, and in another context, during the first of the two men’s meetings. On 16 April, Horthy stated: “He had done everything which one could decently undertake against the Jews, but one could surely not murder them or kill them in some other way. The Führer replied that this was also not necessary. Hungary could accommodate the Jews in concentration camps just like Slovakia did.”78 At this point in the meeting, Hitler and Ribbentrop were not being as open as they became on the 17th. It was because he was not satisfied with Hitler’s response, and was aware that he had still not satisfied the Nazi leaders with his, that Horthy repeated his question on the 17th (“he surely couldn’t beat them to death”), eliciting this time far more explicit statements of what they expected him to do, both from Ribbentrop and from Hitler, namely that they were to be put in camps if they could work, and killed if they could not. Finally, it is worth noting that the majority of the Slovakian Jews were by no means only put into concentration camps, as Hitler claimed on 16 April 1943. In fact, they were killed. According to SS statistics, 57,545 Slovakian Jews had been transported to Nazi-occupied Polish territory between 26 March 1942 and 31 March 1943 (only about 25,000 Jews were still left behind in Slovakia). The transports went to the extermination camps at Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Majdanek.79
I could not avoid the conclusion that Irving, to use some of the phraseology employed by Lipstadt in her general criticism of his and the Holocaust deniers’ work, bent this reliable source to suit his argument, misprepresented the historical data, and skewed the documents on which he relied, by placing quotations in a false context, removing part of the record to a footnote, and mixing up two different conversations in the text so that it looked as if Hitler was telling Horthy that the Jews should not be killed, only interned in camps.
The significance of the meeting between Hitler and Horthy on 16–17 April 1943 was made clear by what happened subsequently. In May 1943 the Hungarian Prime Minister Kállay rejected the idea of ‘resettlement’ of Hungary’s Jews until he received a satisfactory answer to the question of where the resettlement was to take place.80 But the Nazi government did not abandon its designs for the extermination of the Hungarian Jews. In March 1944, Horthy was again summoned to meet Hitler. According to Horthy, at the meeting on 18 March 1944 Hitler complained that “Hungary did nothing in the matter of the Jewish problem, and was not prepared to settle accounts with the large Jewish population in Hungary.”81 Meanwhile, German troops marched into Hungary and took the country over, and a puppet government was installed in March 1944. On 19 March 1944, the Eichmann Sonderkommando arrived in Budapest to organize the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. By July 1944, over 430,000 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz. All of this demonstrated clearly the paramount importance the extermination of Hungary’s Jews had for Hitler.
Irving was clearly at pains to obscure this in his account of the German leader’s meeting with Admiral Horthy on 16–17 April 1943. He conveyed the impression in his book Hitler’s War that Hitler was actually opposed to the extermination of the Hungarian Jews, demanding merely their confinement in internment camps, a measure for which, Irving insinuated, events in Poland (including the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which had not actually taken place at the time of the meeting between Hitler and Horthy) provided the spur. On reading the actual minutes of the meeting, I had no doubt that Irving’s account of what Hitler was telling Horthy should be done with the Hungarian Jews could not be reconciled with what the minutes actually reported.
Hungary was not the only foreign country whose Jewish population the Nazis attempted to remove in the latter part of the war. Italy was another. Initially Germany’s allies, the Italians had pulled out in July 1943, following a string of military reverses. The Italian dictator Mussolini was overthrown. By the autumn of 1943, Italy was under occupation by the German army, and Mussolini had been installed as the head of a puppet regime in the north. These new circumstances brought a serious threat to Italy’s Jews. Once again, however, Irving did his best to dissociate Hitler from the attempted round-up. As he explained in the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War:
Himmler evidently also considered the eight thousand Jews in Rome a potential threat to public order; Ribbentrop brought Hitler an urgent telegram from his consul in Rome reporting that the SS had ordered that “the eight thousand Jews resident in Rome are to be rounded up and brought to Upper Italy, where they are to be liquidated.” Again Hitler took a more “moderate” line. On the ninth Ribbentrop informed Rome that the Führer had directed that the Jews were to be transported to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria instead, where they were to be held “as hostages.”82
This meant, as Irving explained in his written submission to the court, that they were to be “kept alive.” Irving had been using this document for over two decades, for the same example appeared, with variations, in the 1977 edition of his book Hitler’s War.83
How convincing was Irving’s reading of this document? In order to unravel its meaning, I had to get clear in my mind who was who in Nazioccupied Italy–not an easy task in view of the complex and overlapping sources of authority in that war-torn country in 1943. Basically, however, three different agencies of the Third Reich had a role to play, and all three were involved in the exchange of messages on which Irving relied: the SS, which had overall responsibility for the ‘Final Solution,’ the Foreign Office, since Italy was a foreign country, and the army, which had control of day-to-day events on the ground.84 Here the key figure was Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who had overall control in southern Italy, including Rome. Local control of Rome was exercised by military Commandant General Rainer Stahel, but he did not command all the forces in the city, since some of the police were under the German police attaché in Rome, SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler.85
On 12 September 1943, Kappler received a telephone call from Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia informing him that Himmler wanted him to proceed with the round-up and deportation of the Roman Jews.86 This telephone call was followed by a secret cable confirming this order.87 On 24 September Himmler’s office in Berlin sent a second secret cable calling for the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem in Rome. All Jews were to be arrested and sent to the Reich “for liquidation.” This action was to be prepared in secret and carried out by surprise.88 On 25 September Himmler’s Reich Security Head Office sent a circular to all its branches at home and abroad, announcing that “in agreement with the Foreign Office” all Jews of listed nationalities could now be included in the deportation measures. Italy headed the list.89
Although the cable from Himmler was marked confidential and personal, the military commandant of Rome, Stahel, read it and contacted the German consul in Rome, Eitel Moellhausen. By chance Moellhausen had become the chief representative of the Reich in German-occupied Rome when his superior, ambassador Dr. Rudolf Rahn, had been injured in a car accident the day before. Both Moellhausen and Stahel agreed that the action was a mistake. Regardless of their motivations, Moellhausen in turn agreed to take the matter up with Kappler, and proceeded to do so on 26 September. Moellhausen drew Kappler’s attention to Tunisia, where in 1942 the Jews had been saved by drawing them into forced labor on fortification work. Both Rahn and the current military commander of southern Italy General Field Marshal Kesselring had been involved.90 Moellhausen and Kappler then called on Kesselring, who told them that he would be unable to spare any soldiers for the action, and that if Berlin considered it necessary to do something about the Jews within his jurisdiction, he would approve using Jewish labor for fortification work around Rome.91
At the beginning of October SS Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker of Section IV-B-4 of the RSHA arrived in Rome at the head of a mobile ‘task staff.’ Dannecker had already played a prominent part in the deportation of Jews from France and Belgium. He had with him an authorization from Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller ordering the local police chief to furnish all necessary assistance.92 It was in this context that Moellhausen sent a cable on 6 October, cited by Irving both in Hitler’s War and in his submission to the court. It was marked very very urgent and addressed to the Reich foreign minister personally. This cable, Telegram 192, read in full:
Obersturmbannführer Kappler has received orders to arrest the eight thousand Jews resident in Rome and bring them to Upper Italy, where they are to be liquidated. The City Commandant of Rome, General Stahel, informs me that he will permit this action only if it corresponds to the intention of the Herr Reich Foreign Minister. I am personally of the opinion that it would be better business to employ the Jews for fortification work, as in Tunis, and, together with Kappler, I will propose this to Field Marshal Kesselring. Please advise. Moellhausen.93
Consul Moellhausen followed this with a second dispatch on 7 October, again marked very very urgent and to the Reich Minister personally. It was numbered 201 and headed “following telegram of 6th, no. 192+.” Irving completely omitted this document from his account, although the Foreign Ministry’s reply, document number 98 which he did cite, clearly read “in response to no. 201 of 7.10.” Telegram 201 read as follows:
Field Marshal Kesselring has asked Obersturmbannführer Kappler to postpone the planned Jew-action for the time being. But if something has to be done, he would prefer to use the able-bodied Jews of Rome for fortification work here.94
On 9 October, Moellhausen received an answer from Dr. Franz von Sonnleithner of the Foreign Office to his telegram 201:
The Reich Foreign Minister requests that consuls Rahn and Moellhausen be informed that, on the basis of a Führer instruction, the 8,000 Jews resident in Rome should be taken to Mauthausen (Upper Danube) as hostages. The Reich Foreign Minister requests that Rahn and Moellhausen be told under no circumstances to interfere in this affair, but rather to leave it to the SS. Sonnleithner.95
But Irving then omitted another vital document from his account. A few hours later a second, unequivocal message was sent to Rome from the same source:
The Herr Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs insists that you keep out of all questions concerning Jews. Such questions, in accordance with an agreement between the Foreign Ministry and the Reich Security Head Office, are within the exclusive competence of the SS, and any further interference in these questions could cause serious difficulties for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.96
Nowhere did Irving even mention the existence of this document, let alone cite or refer to its contents.
Moellhausen’s telegram of 6 October, not cited by Irving, made it clear that not merely was Stahel objecting to the Aktion, but that he was refusing to comply with it unless it was sanctioned by Ribbentrop himself. Moreover, he had not only the stupidity to use the word liquidate in official correspondence with the foreign minister, but also the audacity, before a response could be given to his first telegram, to contact Field Marshal Kesselring and obtain his agreement that the Jews of Rome be engaged in fortification work. The senior figures in Rome, Moellhausen, Kesselring, and probably also Kappler, had effectively formed a triumvirate to block deportation. Any prospect of a ‘clean’ round-up was fading fast in this entanglement. Hitler’s order cut decisively through the mess and made clear in no uncertain terms that the Jews of Rome were still to be deported and not to be kept in Italy on fortification work.
Appended to the order outlining the Führer’s instructions in this matter was a clear order that Moellhausen and Rahn were “under no circumstances” to interfere in the affair. They were instead to leave it entirely to the SS. It was clear to me that Irving manipulated this document by omitting all mention of this part of it both in the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War and in his submission to the court. I had no doubt that he was suppressing this important information in order to underline the impression that Hitler was intervening purely and simply to stop the Jews being killed.
Ribbentrop must have discussed with Hitler all the major aspects of the situation, including Himmler’s liquidation orders, the impending round-up by the SS, and the attempts to block it by the Consul and the army. Ribbentrop’s injunction to leave the “Jew-action” to the SS must have been an integral part of the discussion, and Hitler must have approved it. Thus Irving was caught here in the same logical trap into which he fell in a number of his other attempts to present documentary evidence that Hitler did not know about, or disapproved of, the mass murder of the Jews. If Hitler was intervening to stop the Roman Jews from being killed, then he knew that the Roman Jews were to be liquidated, he knew it was on Himmler’s orders, and he must have known it was part of a much wider pattern of mass murder of Jews by the SS, or in other words, he must have known it was part of an exterminatory ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.’
As it was, on 16 October 1,259 people were seized and after two days and a sifting process, just over a thousand Jews were shipped off, not to Mauthausen, but to Auschwitz.97 On arrival on 23 October, 149 men were admitted to the camp and given the numbers 158491–158639, and 47 women were admitted and given the numbers 66172–66218. Investigating the killings after the war, Robert Katz traced 14 male and one female survivor. The rest were gassed.98 Irving completely failed to mention the fate of these Jews in the account he gave in Hitler’s War in 1991 or in his written submission to the court.
Still, was it possible to reconcile “liquidation” in “upper Italy,” “hostages” in Mauthausen, and deaths in Auschwitz? The standard authority on the extermination of the Italian Jews made it clear that the first large concentration camp on Italian soil (Fossili near Carpi) was not operational until December 1943.99 “Upper Italy” was probably a convenient euphemism for “the East.”100 The verbal camouflage surrounding the ‘Final Solution’ was always hard to penetrate. That Moellhausen used the word liquidate was reason enough to surmise that Hitler’s order used Mauthausen and hostage to reassert the prescribed phraseology.101 As for Mauthausen, if Hitler did indeed mean what he said when he ordered the Roman Jews to be sent there, he was surely aware that it was perhaps the deadliest of all concentration camps. In January 1941 the head of the Reich Security Service SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich divided the concentration camps into three grades to determine conditions of detention and work in each.102 Grade III was intended to deal with the worst category of prisoner, and was reserved solely for Mauthausen. The mortality rate, especially for Jews, was terrible. Deportation to Mauthausen was effectively a death sentence, often by forced labor in the quarries or in camp construction.103
Thus Hitler’s intervention was not one that ‘mitigated’ the lot of the Jews of Rome. On the contrary, it counteracted a concerted local attempt to save them and condemned them to extermination. Hitler’s order was not a revision of Himmler’s, but a forceful reaffirmation of it. Hitler surely knew that for the Jews to be deported from Italy ‘as hostages’ was their death warrant, whether it was to Mauthausen or whether this was simply a euphemistic deception on his part. I could not avoid the conclusion that in this instance, too, Irving had manipulated and falsified the documentation. He suppressed material that he knew ran against his case, in order to support an untenable conclusion which was in fact the exact opposite of what the documents indicated.
After this lengthy examination of Irving’s ‘chain of documents,’ I had to conclude that Irving consistently and repeatedly manipulated the historical evidence in order to give the impression that it supported his view that Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews, or, if he did, opposed it. Irving’s method of working with documents had been noted by previous investigators, who had trodden the same path through the obscure undergrowth of his footnote references. Thus, for example, Irving’s use in Hitler’s War of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Nuremberg prison notes to support the thesis that Hitler knew nothing of the ‘Final Solution’ had already been exposed as a falsification in the 1970s.104 In a footnote on page 851 of the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War, Irving had reported:
Writing a confidential study on Hitler in his Nuremberg prison cell, Ribbentrop also exonerated him wholly. “How things came to the destruction of the Jews, I just don’t know. As to whether Himmler began it, or Hitler put up with it, I don’t know. But that he ordered it I refuse to believe, because such an act would be wholly incompatible with the picture I always had of him.”
The journalists Gitta Sereny and Lewis Chester had tracked down this reference for a critical assessment of Irving’s book in 1977. The original document in the Bavarian State Archives contained an additional sentence, not included by Irving: “On the other hand, judging from his (i.e., Hitler’s) Last Will, one must suppose that he at least knew about it, if, in his fanaticism against the Jews, he didn’t also order it.” When confronted with the omission, Irving had said that the sentence concerned was “irrelevant” to the logic of his argument and that he did not “want to confuse the reader.”105
Following the appearance of the article by Chester and Sereny, Irving had written to the editor of The Sunday Times on 14 September 1977 claiming: “The passage from Ribbentrop’s statement which I omitted is totally irrelevant to my claim that up to October 1943 there is no evidence for the claim that Hitler knew what was going on.”106 But this irrelevant observation did nothing to justify Irving’s manipulation of the record, which revealed, once again, how he had plucked out the part of a single statement which suited his purposes and suppressed the other part which did not. At no other point in this letter or in his subsequent correspondence did Irving try to defend his editing of the Ribbentrop note.107 Despite such devastating criticism by Chester and Sereny, the quotation remained intact and was still without the missing sentence on page 809 of the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War.
Irving’s argument that Hitler did not know or approve of actions against the Jews thus clearly rested on a substantial number of historical falsifications. Although some of them, looked at individually, might appear relatively insignificant, there were others that, in my view, were extremely serious. Above all, their cumulative effect was very striking. It became clear that, taken as a whole, they amounted to a systematic distortion of the historical record. To the unwary reader–and there have been many such–Irving’s books gave the appearance of scholarly solidity. The footnotes and sometimes the text cited innumerable archival sources, documents, interviews, and other material that seemed at first glance to conform to the normal canons of historical scholarship. All this conspicuous display of research was bolstered by Irving’s extravagant self-promotion as a discoverer of new historical material and his arrogant denigration of other researchers in the field. Again, to the unwary, this probably seemed convincing. It was only when I subjected all of this to detailed scrutiny, when I followed Irving’s claims and statements about Hitler back to the original documents on which they purported to rest, that Irving’s work in this respect was revealed as a house of cards, a vast apparatus of deception and deceit. Lipstadt was therefore right to describe Irving as a Hitler partisan who manipulated the historical record in an attempt to portray his hero in a favorable light.
Few historians or reviewers had had the persistence, knowledge, or time to expose Irving for the fraud that he was. Broszat, Trevor-Roper, Sydnor, and Sereny had already done so in 1977 in relation to Irving’s Hitler’s War, widely praised by reviewers who were less well informed than they were. Looking again at Irving’s record more than two decades later confirmed their diagnoses of deception and added fresh evidence. Too many writers and reviewers seemed to have forgotten their work in the intervening period. Many seemed to have assumed that Irving had been an honest historian for most of his career and had only recently gone off the rails. Yet Broszat and the others had already showed in 1977 that Irving’s falsifications of the historical record were not the result of some recent aberration in the career of an otherwise respectable historian. One of the most shattering things I had discovered was that Irving’s deceptions were there from very early on in his career and had remained an integral part of his working methods across the decades.