DAVID IRVING
25 Elgin Mansions,
London, W.9CUNningham 8426 4 May 1968
Dear Mr Kimber,
You would willingly have me spend the rest of my days writing long letters in reply to long letters. However, as you still seem puzzled by my decision on HITLER, here are the basic facts.
It is impossible for me to write books just by reading other people’s books. Therefore, as in the case of all the books I have written so far, I gather as complete a set of the related documents as possible and work from them, using published works only marginally, when the rest of the manuscript is virtually complete. This is my metier, so to speak. Unfortunately, HITLER 1938-1945 is a rather larger subject than I had thought — certainly larger than the exceptionally narrow scopes represented by atomic research, or an air crash.
In the year up to April 1965 my expenses audited by Leslie Andrews were £2,577; in the following year they were £3,647; in the year after, on which the firm is still working, they will certainly be above £6,000. Of these three sums at least two thirds has been incurred solely for the HITLER research.
For example, I have now gathered thirteen linear feet of Xerox photostats of diaries, records, reports, interrogations, etc., for the HITLER project; the cost of this can be assessed from the fact that I have had to purchase 700 microfilms at a cost of between $8 and $11 each, and fifty microfilms at a personal expense (specially made for me) of between £20 and £40 each. They are lining every shelf, cupboard and niche in my flat at present. As for the photostats, one linear inch contains about 150 pages; and each page costs between one shilling and one shilling and sixpence, according to the looseness of the original film.
To give one concrete example: the cost of microfilming the 2,100 pages of the Trevor-Roper Papers was £27 (Kodak-Recordak); the cost of printing them out at Rank Xerox onto 2,100 sheets of paper was a further £63.17.6d; the cost of binding them into five volumes will be a further ten pounds probably. It has taken me ten days to sort them and catalogue them for microfilming, and two weeks to type out 300 index cards from them solely for the HITLER project.
This was just the Trevor-Roper Papers! But I have done the same with the papers of Keitel, Koller, Jodl, Milch, von Waldau, Himmler, Assmann, the U.S. State Department (2,700 pages!), Morell, the German Foreign Office (3,000 pages) Goebbels (700 pages), Hitler (Reichskanzlei), Hewel (700), Linge, Bormann, Speer, (2,000 pages), Hoepner, von Weichs, Gfm von Bock, Beck, etc etc. There is no end to the project.
