David Irving--Revelation's From Goebbels Diary Pt. 1 of 3.
Michael
This is Part 1 of 3 of Revelations From Joseph Goebbels Diary by David
Irving. This is a speech given by Mr. Irving before the Institute
For Historical Review.
My thanks to Greg Raven and the Institute For Historical Review
"http://www.kaiwan.com/~ihrgreg/" and the Committee for Open Debate
On the Holocaust(tm) "http://www.codoh.com" for this article.
For further information on David Irving and his books please visit:
==========================================================
Revelations from Goebbels' Diary
Bringing to Light Secrets of Hitler's Propaganda Minister
By David Irving
At the last IHR Conference, in October 1992, I spoke about my visit
to the secret Soviet state archives in Moscow, where I found the
private diary of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister,
microfilmed on eighteen hundred glass plates. [See: D. Irving, "The
Suppressed Eichmann and Goebbels Papers," March-April 1993 Journal,
pp. 14-25.]
I can't tell you just who tipped me off about this, as it would
breach confidentiality, but there are certain German historians who
are friendly to me, and one of them tipped me that the material was
just waiting to be found by someone. I went to Moscow and got this
material -- to the unbounded rage of rival historians around the
world, who couldn't believe that I, the "incorrigible," "neo-Nazi,"
"Fascist-scum" historian, had got the stuff for which they had been
looking for 50 years.
If you're a historian dealing with the Third Reich, you know that
Goebbels' diary must contain all the dirt from that era. And yet, all
the vital episodes of Third Reich history, the events we're really
curious about -- such as the June 1934 "Night of the Long Knives,"
when Hitler ditched SA Brown Shirt leader Ernst Röhm, or the "Crystal
Night" in November 1938, or the Reichstag fire mystery, or the inside
story of the rise of the Nazi Party -- are missing from the published
Goebbels diary, the portion that has been in the public domain for the
last 40 years or so.
One way and another, portions have trickled out. First of all there
was the original typed Goebbels diary for parts of the years 1942 and
1943, which is now in the Hoover Institution library in Stanford,
California. [Edited by Louis Lochner, it was published in 1948.] The
National Archives in Washington acquired a sheaf of diary pages from
August 1941. The French somehow got April 1943, and the Hoover library
obtained six diary pages from July 1944.
Most importantly, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich
managed to get hold of further portions of the diary through
negotiations with the East German Communist authorities. [See, for
example, Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels. New York:
1978.]
But vital passages were missing even from these, among them the year
1944 -- the year of D-Day, the Stauffenberg bomb plot, and the Battle
of the Bulge. And there were years for which only a couple of
notebooks have hitherto been available. One begins to suspect that
somebody knew they were sitting on a real treasure, and they weren't
going to release it. By holding back the good stuff, they were acting
in an almost capitalistic manner.
In the end, I didn't pay one bent nickel for this material. Visiting
Moscow in June 1992, I simply reminded the head of the Soviet state
archives that over the years three or four of my books had been
published in the former Soviet Union, and he just let me have the
material, assuming, I suppose, that I was therefore kosher.
It was a different situation when I returned for the second time in
July 1992 to complete the work. As the week progressed, I found it
getting stickier and stickier. They suddenly weren't able to find the
boxes and files I'd seen the time before. I had to fight and plead and
holler, and they still weren't turning up the stuff I really wanted.
On the last day, the secretary of the director came out to me and
said: "Mr. Irving, I've got a very embarrassing question to ask of
you. Have you been stealing any material from our archives?"
Now, this is something that a historian just doesn't do. When you
work in the archives, you're working on trust. You've an obligation to
posterity. You do not permanently remove stuff. I did, however, have
an arrangement with the director, who permitted me to remove certain
glass plates from the archives for copying because they didn't have
the requisite facilities there. They didn't even have a microfiche
reader. He allowed me to remove these glass plates on my honor, and
bring them back after having made the necessary photographic prints.
In an effort to stop me from gaining access, it turned out that
somebody had told the archives that I was stealing material. To
resolve the situation I signed a declaration stating that everything I
had seen in the archives was still there, and that nothing was
missing. That was, in fact, the truth.
The archives director was very pleased to have this declaration, and
the secretary added the pregnant words: "The information came from
Munich." Once again my traditional enemies around the world were
trying to trip me up. It didn't work because by that time I'd obtained
99 percent of the material I had on my "shopping list": diary portions
dealing with the Kristallnacht, the "Night of the Long Knives," the
Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor, all of 1944, the whole of the months
leading up to the outbreak of World War Two -- everything. I'd gotten
the lot.
It was difficult, because, as I said, the Russians didn't have a
microfiche reader. I suspected in advance that I might need one,
because in preparation for my trip to Moscow in the 1970s I had
brought with me toilet paper and a bath plug because I knew I wouldn't
find them in my Moscow hotel. On this occasion I had thought to
myself, "Suppose -- it's incredible, I mean this is a state archives
-- but just suppose they don't have a microfiche reader. I'd better
take something with me." So I went to Selfridge's and asked for the
most powerful magnifying glass they had. What I didn't know was that
the more powerful the magnification, the smaller the lens is. I wound
up buying a 12x magnifier that was about as big as my little
fingernail. So during the first week I was there, I had to hold it up
like this to read those glass plates. But if you don't mind straining
your eyesight, it works.
It's quite an unusual feeling looking at the original Nazi
microfiche glass plates in the original Agfa boxes -- there are
eighteen hundred plates, each with 25 or 40 images on them -- a total
of 70 or 80 thousand pages of paper. And you know you are the first
person to read them since Goebbels, in 1944 and 1945, ordered
the stuff to be preserved in case of damage to the originals. No one
knows now where his original notebooks are, or what happened to them.
They're probably gone forever. But fortunately they were preserved on
glass plates, and I was the first person to study them.
The Reichstag Fire
For example, I read for the first time Goebbels' hand-written entry
about the Reichstag fire. As he described it, he was at his home with
Hitler on that evening of February 27, 1933, when the phone rang at
nine o'clock. It was the prankster "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, saying: "The
Reichstag's on fire." Goebbels remembered that he'd been had twice by
Hanfstaengl already that week, and he thought this was another prank,
so he just put the phone down. Hanfstaengl phoned again and said,
"You'd better listen to what I'm saying, The Reichstag's on fire."
Goebbels realized this could be serious after all, so he made a phone
call to the police station at the Brandenburg Gate, which confirmed
that the Reichstag was on fire. Thereupon he and Hitler jumped into a
car and drove straight to the Reichstag where they found their worst
fears confirmed. This is in the hand-written diary, it is obviously
genuine, and it confirms what we know from other sources.
Early Entries
Goebbels' diary didn't start in 1933 when the Nazis come to power;
it started when he was a student at Heidelberg University, and carries
on all the way until a few days before he commits suicide in 1945 with
his family in Hitler's bunker. Never has there been such a contiguous
source of information for historians to use, but never has there been
a source more fraught with danger. Nobody's diary is genuine, because
everybody lies to his diary. Okay, "lie" is a bit sharp. Everyone is a
hero in his own diary. So what do you believe? That's the way it is
with diaries. You've got to know how to evaluate them. What Goebbels
writes in his diary about Goebbels, you treat with suspicion. What
Goebbels writes in his diary about a fight between Rosenberg and Koch
is probably more accurate, although he's got his sympathies there,
too. You have to learn to be very careful.
I'm saying this for a reason, because when we come to look at what
the diary says about the Crystal Night, it's not what you expect it to
say, and you can only really straighten things out when you accept
that Goebbels has his reasons for writing things in a certain way. I'm
something of an expert with diaries, because I've been looking at
people's diaries as an historian for the last 30 or 40 years, and I
know the things to look for.
It always amuses me the way people write in their diaries certain
euphemisms for relations with the opposite sex. I won't describe to
you which words I use in my diary, but -- okay, I will. I might write,
"Lucy came 'round, and was amiable." It seems pretty harmless, but
it's code. This becomes obvious if you slip up and write, "Lucy came
round and was amiable twice."
I had the private diary of Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who
had the habit of putting a little X on the line between two days in
his diary. Some days, however, there were two Xs, and on one occasion,
during the battle of Stalingrad when he was in Berlin, there were
three Xs followed by the initials "E.H.," all done into a kind of
monogram or logo: "XXX E.H." I happened to know that "E.H." was Edith
Hesselbarth, his private secretary. When I tracked her down at her
home on Lake Constance, she was most indignant about this imputation,
until I told her that Milch had written it in his diary, whereupon she
confessed.
In the case of Dr. Goebbels, everybody knows that he has gone into
history as the arch-Casanova of the Third Reich. He was the one with
the string of amours, and no film starlet could make headway in the
German film industry, so legend has it, without using the Minister's
casting couch. And yet, it turns out, unless I'm grievously wrong, he
was age 33 when he first had a sexual experience with a woman. If you
read his diary you could be misled. Very early on in his diary, he's
talking about how Else came 'round, and she was all his: "She was all
over me." It's an imprecise phrase, but you're willing to believe,
given his reputation, that this could only mean one thing.
In another passage, Anka Stalherm, the great heroine of his life,
comes to see him and there's an episode on the meadow in Freiburg:
"the first kiss." It's only when you start reading through the diary,
and the letters that pass between her and Goebbels over the next ten
years, that you realize that that first kiss was, in fact, a kiss
on the cheek. That's as far as he got with her.
I subsequently found Anka Stalherm's daughter. Because I thought it
would be a bit embarrassing to ask her how far her mother had gone
with the Nazi Propaganda Minister, I planned on making this my last
question before I beat a retreat. As I walked in through the door,
though, she said: "Mr. Irving, before you even begin this interview, I
want you to know what my mother told me about Goebbels, which is that
she never, ever, did it with him. She found him intellectually
fascinating, a man of enormous presence, but physically repulsive."
Goebbels was 5'4", just over 100 pounds, a club foot with one leg two
inches shorter than the other -- a bit of a freak, in other words. He
never got anywhere with Anka Stalherm, although if you read his diary
you would imagine that she was the great love of his life.
How do we know he was 33 when it first happened? The answer is that
he started going out with Olga, the girlfriend of Mr. Arnolt Bronner.
(He had a predilection for dating other men's girlfriends; a dangerous
habit if you're only 5'4".) He went out with this woman, and she comes
'round, so to speak. Obviously something happened because that night
he writes in his diary all the words of euphoria followed with the
figures in parenthesis: "(1, 2)." This might, by itself, mean
nothing at all, were it not for an entry a few days later, with Olga
coming 'round again, and new figures in brackets: "(3, 4, 5)." Well
this is rather like being "twice amiable," isn't it? It's a bit of a
give-away, and given what we know about the kiss on the cheek, which
was all he'd gotten in previous years, you can be pretty certain what
this denotes. This happened in December 1930, and he was born in
October 1897.
She is only one step ahead, so to speak, of Magda Quandt, who later
became Magda Goebbels -- the divorced, blonde, well-to-do wife of a
German industrialist, who fell for him. In mid-February 1931 -- after
many, many weeks of working for him in the archives and so on -- she
comes 'round to his apartment, and you get the same brackets
treatment. It's "(1)", and then "(2)", "(3)", and then, on March 1931,
"(4)" and "(5)". Five episodes spread over six weeks. There
again, you've got a certain amount of support for the belief that he
wasn't as active as he made out in later years. If there was anything
he was good at, it was propaganda. So we're demolishing a bit of a
propaganda legend in connection with Dr. Goebbels here. Amusing as
this is, it helps to teach us to be very cautious when dealing with
someone's diary as a source of information.
Growing Anti-Semitism
I've gone through the diary with a special interest in the Jewish
issue, and particularly the "final solution." There's no question that
whatever tragedy befell the Jews in Germany during the Third Reich,
Dr. Goebbels himself was the prime moving force behind it. He wasn't
just the person who created the atmosphere of hatred, he was also the
one who pulled the levers and started the trains in motion. What
happened at the other end is still a matter of debate, and this issue
is one of the moving causes of revisionism at this moment.
Goebbels didn't start out anti-Semitic. His very early diary pages,
back in 1923, contain no references to the Jews, or any anti-Semitism
at all, in fact. We do know that in his home town of Rheydt, a close
neighbor with whom his parents maintained very close relations was Dr.
Josef Joseph, a Jewish lawyer. There was a long-standing friendship
between him and Goebbels' parents, who often sent their son 'round to
spend the day with Dr. Joseph. (Goebbels' father, Fritz Goebbels,
was bookkeeper at a local textile factory.) I'm inclined to believe
that the fact that Dr. Joseph was such a close friend of Mr. and Mrs.
Goebbels, and not just the boy's Catholic upbringing and the fact that
his godfather was also called Joseph, may have been the reason for
Goebbels' second name: Paul Joseph Goebbels.
Goebbels met Anka Stalherm at Heidelberg University, where she was
one of the few women students. She was fabulously rich, had
shoulder-length blonde hair, and was a typically care-free, affluent
female student. Goebbels could hardly believe his luck when, of all
the young men at the university, she picked him. There
was undoubtedly a very close friendship between them, and all their
letters have survived. (I was able to read them in the German archives
until the German government, in an act of incredible spitefulness, on
July 1, 1993, ordered me banned from the archives, "to protect the
interests of the German people".)
In one letter to him, Anka made a mildly anti-Semitic remark,
typical of those that were common in the social circles in which she
moved. Indignantly he wrote back to his new girlfriend, putting her in
her place. In this letter, dated February 17, 1919, Goebbels
responded: "As you know, I can't stand this exaggerated
anti-Semitism. My view is you don't get rid of them by huffing and
puffing, let alone by pogroms, and even if you could do so, that would
be both highly ignoble and unworthy."
Furthermore, Goebbels' favorite professor at Heidelberg was
Friedrich Gundolf, who was Jewish. This didn't matter to Goebbels at
all. When Gundolf said that he wouldn't have time to work with
Goebbels on his doctoral dissertation, he passed him on to another
professor of literature, Max von Waldberg, who was also
Jewish. To the end of his life, Goebbels spoke very highly of these
two professors. It was typical of Goebbels that he was able to put
Jews into two categories, regarding individual Jews with respect and
admiration, while at the same time holding the Jewish people in
contempt.
Just a few years later, though, on October 30, 1922, he delivered a
lecture in Rheydt in which he commented approvingly on Oswald
Spengler's criticism of the Jewish people. So you can see that a
certain trend had begun to set in. I often wonder: Was this due to
something innate or was it his surroundings? We are not
able to pin down just what caused Goebbels to become anti-Semitic
around 1922. Certainly by the time he arrived in Berlin, in 1926, as
Gauleiter (district party leader), his anti-Semitism was in full
flood, and, as we shall see, what he saw there completed the picture
for him.
His formative experiences came in the aftermath of World War One, I
think. Because of his club foot, the army had refused to accept him as
a soldier, which was humiliating. In 1923 he worked in a bank in
Cologne, where he was shocked by Jewish banking methods. He saw Jews
ruining ordinary Germans, he saw speculation, and he saw inflation
wiping out people's savings. His colleagues at the bank undoubtedly
drew his attention to the Jewish role in all of it, as the private
banks in Germany were almost entirely in Jewish hands.
Another factor played a role. When he left the university Goebbels
was an aspiring writer of poetry, plays and newspaper articles. He
wanted to write for the great national newspapers and magazines, which
were largely controlled by the Ullstein and Mosse families, both of
which were Jewish. His approaches to these two publishing companies,
with articles submitted for publication, and subsequently seeking
employment, were rudely rebuffed. The Berliner Tageblatt alone
returned to him nearly 50 articles he had submitted.
No surprise, if you look at the private papers of Theodor Wolff,
chief editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, which was published by the
Mosse company. In these papers, which are filed in the German Federal
archives, you can see that Wolff was corresponding almost entirely
only with Jews.
It's what today we would call networking; if you're outside the
loop, you can't break in. One knows this when one is mature, but when
you are a young student fresh out of university, full of great
idealism and belief in your own superior talents, the first
realization that you can't break into the loop -- that the network is
there to keep people like you out -- makes a great impression, as it
probably did on the young Dr. Goebbels. And this undoubtedly had an
effect on his anti-Semitism, even though he still wasn't hostile
toward individual Jews.
After Anka Stalherm left and married another young man, Goebbels
started a long affair with a young woman named Else Janke. One day,
while he's commenting to her on his physical debilities, telling her
he realizes he must be quite unattractive because of his club foot and
all the rest of it, she says, "You think you've got problems? I'm half
Jewish." This was a great shock to Goebbels at that time. Her
half-Jewishness, which he described as her mixed blood, grew more and
more important in the relationship until it finally led to their
break-up. He was actually happy when he was named Gauleiter of Berlin,
where the Nazi Party was in disarray, because this gave him a chance
to leave Else Janke gracefully. In Berlin he had his eyes on another
girl by the name of Josephine von Behr.
At this time he also makes friends with Julius Streicher, Gauleiter
of Nuremberg and publisher of the notorious anti-Semitic weekly, Der
Stürmer. His views on Streicher vary widely throughout his diary.
Sometimes he's full of praise for him, rather the way we grudgingly
admire a person who is a bit bullheaded and plows ahead regardless of
the damage he does. He liked Streicher as a human being, he liked him
for his courage. But then again, he strongly deprecated his brand of
anti-Semitism, regarding it as needlessly vulgar. This comes out again
and again in the diary. It's a dichotomy that is never satisfactorily
resolved until we come to one of the last items in the archives: a
February 1945 letter from Goebbels to Streicher, congratulating him on
his birthday and sending him a valuable oil painting. Goebbels stayed
in touch with Streicher even after he fell out of favor with Hitler.
end of 1 of 3
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Also visit:
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http://www.webcom.com/~ezundel/english/welcome.html Zundelsite
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~lpauling/ Student Revisionist Resource Site
http://www.webcom.com/ezundel/english/LEUCHTER/leuchtertoc.html
http://www.codoh.com/irving/irving.html David Irving
http://www.codoh.com/ Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/ Arthur R. Butz
http://www.air-photo.com/ Air Photo Evidence (John Ball)
http://www.adam.com.au/~fredadin/adins.html Adelaide Institute
http://www.hoffman-info.com" Michael Hoffman's II Site
http://www.codoh.com/rudolf/rudreport/rudreport.html Rudolf Report
http://www.ussliberty.org/jim/ussliberty/welcome.html USS Liberty Site
http://www.first-amendment.com/ygg/ (Library of Yggdrasil)
natio...@juno.com
Michael
"http://www.natall.com"
National Vanguard Books
P.O. Box 330
Hillsboro, WV 24946
"No man has come to true greatness who has not felt
in some degree that his life belongs to his race."
----Phillips Brooks
Gord McFee
In <341e2c32...@news.pacbell.net>, on 08/21/97
at 11:53 AM, natio...@juno.com (Michael) said:
:>This is Part 1 of 3 of Revelations From Joseph Goebbels Diary by David
:>Irving. This is a speech given by Mr. Irving before the Institute
:>For Historical Review.
Let's check out what Goebbels *really* said in his diary:
<begin quote>
Aus dem Generalgouvernement werden jetzt, bei Lublin beginnend, die
Juden nach dem Osten abgeschoben. Es wird hier ein ziemlich
barbarisches und nicht n=E4her zu beschreibendes Verfahren angewandt, und=
von den Juden selbst bleibt nicht mehr viel =FCbrig. Im gro=DFen kann man=
davon feststellen, da=DF 60 Prozent davon liquidiert werden m=FCssen,
w=E4hrend nur 40 Prozent bei der Arbeit eingesetzt werden k=F6nnen.
(Begining with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported to the east.
Here a fairly barbaric process is being employed--one not to be
described more precisely, and of the Jews themselves, not many are left
over. Generally speaking, one can confirm that 60% of them will have to
be liquidated, while only 40% will be able to be put to work.)
Goebbels' diary, 27-Mar-1942
<end quote>
--
Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net>
I'll write no line before its time
Gord McFee
In <340177bc...@news.hollinet.com>, on 08/23/97
at 11:53 PM, natio...@juno.com (Michael) said:
> On Thu, 21 Aug 97 14:12:18, Gord McFee <gmc...@ibm.net> wrote:
> >In <341e2c32...@news.pacbell.net>, on 08/21/97
> > at 11:53 AM, natio...@juno.com (Michael) said:
> >:>This is Part 1 of 3 of Revelations From Joseph Goebbels Diary by Dav=
id
> >:>Irving. This is a speech given by Mr. Irving before the Institute
> >:>For Historical Review.
> >Let's check out what Goebbels *really* said in his diary:
> ><begin quote>
> >Aus dem Generalgouvernement werden jetzt, bei Lublin beginnend, die
> >Juden nach dem Osten abgeschoben. Es wird hier ein ziemlich
> >barbarisches und nicht n=E4her zu beschreibendes Verfahren angewandt, =
und
> >von den Juden selbst bleibt nicht mehr viel =FCbrig. Im gro=DFen kann =
man
> >davon feststellen, da=DF 60 Prozent davon liquidiert werden m=FCssen,
> >w=E4hrend nur 40 Prozent bei der Arbeit eingesetzt werden k=F6nnen.
> >(Begining with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported to the east.
> >Here a fairly barbaric process is being employed--one not to be
> >described more precisely, and of the Jews themselves, not many are lef=
t
> >over. Generally speaking, one can confirm that 60% of them will have =
to
> >be liquidated, while only 40% will be able to be put to work.)
> >Goebbels' diary, 27-Mar-1942
> ><end quote>
> And your point is........?
I thought it was obvious.