Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

In the final week of April they drove down to the West Country, to Longleat, one of the finest stately homes in England, ancestral seat of Sir Henry Frederick Thynne, sixth Marquess of Bath. Lord Bath, seventy-seven years old and deaf in one ear, but otherwise remarkably sprightly, took them up in his ancient lift to the third floor, a part of the house closed to the public. He unlocked a door next to the library and led Price and Priesack into a long, narrow room, cluttered with Nazi memorabilia. Dominating the scene at the far end was a life-size wax model of Hitler wearing a black leather overcoat and a swastika armband. But neither this, nor Himmler’s spectacles, nor the Commandant of Belsen’s tablecloth interested Price. What he had come to see was Lord Bath’s private exhibition of Hitler paintings. It ran all along one wall, the finest collection in the world: sixty paintings – worth, in Price’s opinion, $10 million.

A few days later, back in London, on the afternoon of Thursday 22 April, August Priesack telephoned David Irving in his flat in Duke Street, Mayfair. Priesack explained why he and Price were in Britain and asked him if he would like to come round to their hotel for dinner that night. Irving agreed.

Priesack had been looking forward to meeting the British historian for a long time. Of all Hitler’s biographers, Irving was the most controversial. In Hitler’s War , published in 1977, he had quoted one of the Führer’s doctors, who described how Hitler had expressed his admiration for an ‘objective’ biography of the Kaiser written by an Englishman. According to the doctor:

Hitler then said that for some time now he had gone over to having all important discussions and military conferences recorded for posterity by shorthand writers. And perhaps one day after he is dead and buried an objective Englishman will come and give him the same kind of treatment. The present generation neither can nor will.

Irving was in no doubt that he was the man the Führer had in mind. Hitler’s War , ten years in the making, had been based on a wealth of previously unpublished documents, letters and diaries. Irving’s aim was to rewrite the history of the war ‘as far as possible through Hitler’s eyes, from behind his desk’. This made for a gripping book, but one which was, by its nature, unbalanced. However ‘objectively’ he might piece together the unpublished recollections of Hitler’s subordinates, they were still the words of men and women who admired their ruler. And confined to Hitler’s daily routine, the biography had a curiously unreal quality: the death camps, the atrocities, the sufferings of millions of people which were the result of Hitler’s war were not to be found in Hitler’s War as it was reconstructed by David Irving.

Irving’s stated purpose was to portray Hitler as an ordinary human being rather than as a diabolical figure of monstrous evil. It was an aim which was bound to arouse offence: ‘If you think of him as a man,’ says one of the Jewish characters in George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. , ‘you will grow uncertain. You will think him a man and no longer believe what he did.’ Irving pilloried earlier biographers who had depicted Hitler as a demon: ‘Confronted by the phenomenon of Hitler himself, they cannot grasp that he was an ordinary, walking, talking human weighing some 155 pounds, with greying hair, largely false teeth, and chronic digestive ailments. He is to them the Devil incarnate.’ Central to Irving’s thesis ‘that Hitler was a less than omnipotent Führer’ was his argument that Hitler did not order, indeed did not even know of, the Holocaust. It was an assertion which provoked uproar. In Germany, after a dispute with his publishers, the book was withdrawn from sale. In Britain, he became involved in a furious row with a panel of academics during a live edition of David Frost’s television chat show. In America, the book was savaged by Walter Laqueur in the New York Review of Books and boycotted by the major US paperback publishers. Irving revelled in the publicity, aggressively offering to pay $1000 to anyone who could produce a document proving that Hitler was aware of what was happening in the extermination camps. He claimed that the book upset Jews only ‘because I have detracted from the romance of the notion of the Holocaust – that six million people were killed by one man’.

Irving admitted that in writing Hitler’s War he had ‘identified’ with the Führer. Looking down upon him as he worked, from the wall above his desk, was a self-portrait of Hitler, presented to him by Christa Schroeder. He did not smoke or touch alcohol. (‘I don’t drink,’ he would say. ‘Adolf didn’t drink you know.’) He shared Hitler’s view of women, believing that they were put on the earth in order to procreate and provide men with something to look at: ‘They haven’t got the physical capacity for producing something creative.’ He had married and had four daughters, but wished he had remained single: his marriage had been ‘my one cardinal mistake… an unnecessary deviation’. In 1981, at the age of forty-three, he had founded his own right-wing political group, built around his own belief in his ‘destiny’ as a future British leader. With his black hair slanting across his forehead, and a dark cleft, shadowed like a moustache between the bottom of his nose and the top of his upper lip, there were times, in the right light, when Irving looked alarmingly like the subject of his notorious biography.

When Priesack rang he was hard at work on his latest project: a vastly detailed account of Churchill’s war years, designed to prove his contention that Britain’s decision to go to war with Nazi Germany had been a disastrous mistake. But by 1982, though Irving still had his smart home and his Rolls-Royce he was going through a hard time. He was in the middle of a rancorous and expensive divorce. He was short of money, and smarting from the reception given to his last two books – one of which, Uprising , had been dismissed by a reviewer in the Observer as ‘a bucketful of slime’.

Irving arrived for dinner at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, overlooking Hyde Park, at 9.45 p.m. Billy Price and his wife were unable to join them, so he and Priesack dined alone. Priesack told Irving that he was in difficulties and needed his help. In October of the previous year he had at last brought out his book of unpublished pictures of the Nuremberg rallies. But on 27 November, the Bavarian authorities had decreed that the book contravened anti-Nazi legislation. They ordered that every one of the 5000 copies printed should be confiscated. ‘The printers and every bookshop in Germany were raided in a dawn swoop,’ noted Irving in his diary. ‘On 31 December the order was revoked and the books were returned. On 11 January this year the whole silly confiscation procedure was repeated.’ Priesack asked Irving if he would be willing to appear as a character witness at his forthcoming trial. Irving agreed. ‘It is difficult’, he wrote, ‘to distinguish between these practices and the book burnings of the thirties.’

But sympathetic as he was to Priesack’s problems, it was another of the ‘professor’s’ stories which most interested Irving that night:

He is in touch [he wrote in his diary] with a mystery man in Stuttgart whose brother is a major general in the East German People’s Army and about to retire to take over a military museum in Germany.

They have a nice racket going: Stuttgart man has acquired from his East German sources loads of Hitler memorabilia, for cash. These include the Führer’s Ahnenpass [proof of ancestry], bound in green leather, and revealing that his paternal great-grandfather was identical with his maternal grandfather, 27 half-annual volumes of Hitler’s diary, tooled in silver, including a reference to the 1934 Night of the Long Knives (‘I have dealt with the traitorous swine’), oil and water-colour paintings by Hitler, medals, photographs, letters, etc. In return for this, ‘hard’ West German currency, Saxon and Thuringian medals have been bought for the military collection in East Germany.