After 10 Years With Hitler, a Biographer Declares His Liberation

by Ralph Blumenthal

Excerpts from Blumenthal’s review of Ian Kershaw, “Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis (W.W. Norton)

Picture below: The original unopened boxes of Goebbels
diaries microfiches on the desk in the Moscow
archives, photographed by David Irving, 1992

para.12: “Excerpts of Goebbels’s wartime diaries … Mr. Kershaw … said his biography was the first to fully exploit them.”

para. 13 in toto: “They showed as never before, he said, how Hitler pulled the strings on the genocide of the Jews while obscuring his own hand, to the point of leaving even some in his inner circle to wonder how much the Führer knew.”

para. 14 in toto: “But a revealing passage by Goebbels states, for example, that Hitler gave the order to pull back the police on Kristallnacht, the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938, when rampaging mobs attacked Jews and destroyed their synagogues and shops, a fateful step on the road to mass murder.”

para. 15 in toto: “With open discussion of the murder of the Jews taboo around Hitler, the closest to a smoking gun that historians are likely to find, Mr. Kershaw said, is a 1942 report to Hitler from Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the Gestapo [sic], documenting the execution of 363,211 Jews, listed officially as bandits, over a period of three months in southern Russia. The sham was transparent; Hitler was being kept up to date on the liquidation of civilians.”

para. 16: “It has also proved impossible, he said, to pinpoint an exact genesis of the Nazi decision to kill the Jews. ‘There’s no one point, no document,…He said Hitler’s wishes were so clear to underlings that they knew what to do to ‘work toward the Fuhrer,’ as the expression then went.”

para. 19 in toto: “Mr. Kershaw said he dismissed the idea of interviewing surviving members of the Nazi regime, including one of Hitler’s secretaries, Traudl Junge, (right) who was still alive. “I didn’t want to be involved with those people with their trite memories,’ he said. “

UPON READING this amazing review, David Irving has sent this letter to the British university professor Ian Kershaw (who admitted in a letter to him during the Lipstadt trial that his knowledge of German was not good enough for him to give expert evidence).

Tuesday, March 20, 2001

Dear Ian

Did you really say this: "[re] Excerpts of Goebbels's wartime diaries ... Mr. Kershaw ... said his biography was the first to fully exploit them.""

It is in today's New York Times. I don't remember seeing you in the Moscow KGB archives next to me in 1992 when I was the first to bring the diaries out and use them for my Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. But perhaps the New Yorkers pretend that that book does not exist!

Seriously, I am aware that journalists screw up their interviews, and I am sure you would not really have made such a claim.

Related items on this website:

 Dossier: Under ADL pressure, St Martin’s Press violates its contract to publish David Irving’s best-selling Goebbels biography

 Free download, Millenium edition of David Irving: Hitler’s War

 Other David Irving free books downloads

Reviews of Kershaw’s books:

 N Y Times, Dec 10, 2000: “In Volume II of his biography, Ian Kershaw shows that Hitler had the perfect personality for a cult leader”

 The Observer, Oct 15, 2000: “Ian Kershaw reveals a Führer who was a clinically insane monster but a dull amateur with bad breath in Hitler 1936-45”

 The Times, Sep 27, 2000: Hitler’s last days: Hitler screamed: “You have all betrayed me”