Dear Sir David,

ON THE TRAIL OF A NAZI GRAIL

Among the relics: like the Turin Shroud, the tattered bloodstained uniform that Hitler had worn when the July 20 bomb went off; all his personal letters to Eva Braun (said to be some 250, in original envelopes); her dozens of photograph albums; rolls of Leica film and movie films; her diaries and replies to him.

The extraordinary story of the CIC search includes double agents, Americans masquerading as S.S. men planted in prison camps, midnight escapes on the way to the execution chamber, telephone tapping — a tale of postwar S.S. devilry and deceit pitted against the skills of the C.I.C., and all the time the risk that a Nazi “Holy Grail” might escape the Allied authorities and become the focus of a new Nazi Movement, as its custodians intended.

A summary of the State of Play is attached. . . . I have this weekend re-interviewed the S.S. officer involved, Johannes Göhler, and his ex wife. Would your newspaper or the Mail on Sunday like to nail this down provisionally?

Yours sincerely,

(David Irving)

Sir David English,

Editor,

The Daily Mail,

Northcliffe House,

London EC4Y 0JA

[An identical letter written to Editor in Chief Ned Chase at Macmillan Inc., New York, added: “Annexed is my digest of those files already released to me, which (like the photographs) prove that what I was told in 1973 and 1974 about the relics having survived at least to 1946 is true.”]

 Mr Irving’s Robert Gutierrez dossier