[History of UK edition of this book]
David Irving recalls more of the history of this book:
continued —
DIFFERENCES will be observed between the Anglo-American version and the German version of this biography. The basic manuscript was the same, but it was “sliced” differently. I prepared two parallel versions, including one with all German words and texts in the original language, to avoid problems of double-translation back from the English.
The German publisher, Dr Albrecht Knaus of Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich, praised the resulting work and its expert translation by Richard Giese, but Knaus reproached me: “You have depicted Hermann Göring in all his criminality right up to the end of the war, and then when he gets to Nuremberg he turns into the book’s hero. That won’t do at all.”
In consequence, in the German edition of the work the Nuremberg Trial chapters of the biography are sharply cut, while in the English version they are a major element of the work.
In the English text on the other hand some 2,000 lines had to be cut out at the US publisher’s request, and I decided to shorten the passages dealing with the industrial infrastructure of the Luftwaffe and the aeronautical engineering problems.
Macmillan UK Ltd, who published the English edition of the work, mislaid the 2,000 original photos I collected for the work, finding them only two or three years after publication. The German publisher prepared a different picture section (pdf file: 7 MB), which we upload separately on account of its size.
This page uploaded Sunday, January 11, 2004 — Picture section will be uploaded later.
