Versions of history
Sir: Patrick Cosgrave (24 June) has so thoroughly demolished David Irving's pretensions at writing an objective historial work on the Hitler phenomenon that no further comment should be necessary. However, Irving in his reply last week has once again repeated his gimmicky offer 'to pay $1,000 to any person or institution who can produce even one line of wartime documentary evidence that Hitler ordered the liquidation [of the Jews] or was even aware of it while it was going on'. Irving adds that 'today, fourteen months later, that offer still stands!
I should like to make the prediction that the offer will stand fourteen years or forty years after — so long as Mr Irving is judge and jury as to whether those who take up the offer have met the required degree of proof. I should like to make clear that I have no desire to cash in on any of Mr Irving's blood-money, but if he is sincerely ready to part with the sum offered let him nominate an historian of impeccable scholarly reputation to act as arbiter and let him also remove the hedges he has so cleverly placed around the offer to ensure that nobody ever collects, namely that the evidence must be explicit, documentary and issued during the war.
Thus, a speech by Hitler delivered to the Reichstag early in 1939 and expressing his intention to annihilate the Jews would not be sufficient to persuade Mr Irving to part with a penny even though subsequently the intention was, in fact, manifested before all the world in such places as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen Belsen. That such a speech was made is attested to by Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments in Nazi Germany and a close confidant of Hitler. In an affidavit which appears in Six Million Did Die by A. Suzman and D. Diamond (1977) Speer wrote: 'I was present at the session of the Reichstag of 30th January, 1939, when Hitler assured us that in case of a war, not the Germans, but the Jews would be annihilated. This dictum was pronounced with such certainty that I would not have felt permitted to question his intention to carry it through. He repeated this announcement of his intentions on 30th January, 1942, in a speech I also know of: The war would not end, as the Jews imagined, by the extinction of Europeans, Aryan peoples, but it would result in the annihilation of the Jews.'
This repetition of his words of 30 January 1939 was not unique. He would often remind his entourage of the importance of this dictum. 'When speaking of the victims of the bomb raids, particularly after the massive attacks on Hamburg in summer, 1943, he again and again reiterated that he would avenge these victims on the Jews: just as if the air-terror against the civilian population actually suited him in that it furnished him with a belated substitute motivation for a crime decided upon long ago and emanating from quite different layers of his personality. Just as if he wanted to justify his own mass murders with these remarks.. .Hitler's method of work was that he gave even important commands to his confidants verbally. Also in the leader's records of my interviews with Hitler —completely preserved in the German Federal Archives — there were numerous commands even in important areas which Hitler clearly gave by word of mouth only. It therefore conforms with his method of work and must not be regarded as an oversight, that a written order for the extermination of the Jews does not exist.'
The all-important question is not whether a written order can be produced but whether Hitler was responsible for the mass murder of millions of Jews. Speer and respectable historians have no doubt that he was. Irving and those like him who wish to rewrite history in favour of the Fascists say he was not. I am confident that Spectator readers will consign Irving's thesis to the dustbin of history, where it belongs. Jacob Gewirtz Executive Director, Defence & Group Relations Department, The Board of Deputies of British Jews, Woburn House, London WC1
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