The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: people/i/irving.david//jackel/postscript-kirk-3


Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: David Irving's Hitler: Postscript
Summary: H. David Kirk's commentary on Irving's work and the Jaeckel
         Essays
Reply-To: kmcvay@nizkor.org
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Kirk,Irving,Jaeckel

Archive/File: pub/people/i/irving.david/jackel/postscript-kirk-3
Last-Modified: 1996/02/27

                       Irving's Use of Ambiguity 

   In that same biography one finds undisguised antisemitic passages,
   but it is left ambiguous whether they refer to Goring's or to
   Irving's outlook.  A story is told there of a 'benefactor' who lets
   Goring's parents and their son live with him in his sumptuous castle.
   But the man's generosity is deceptive: he keeps a suite of his own
   right next to rooms assigned to Goring's mother.  Surprise, surprise:
   the interloper is a Jew!  And added to the sexual stereotype there is
   a financial one: the later Nazi chieftain's pomposity and greed are
   explained by Irving as having arisen from Goring's erstwhile
   closeness to this Jewish 'stepfather'!

   Similarly, in Hitler's War the chapter 'Clutching at Straws' has
   Hitler and his Foreign Minister Ribbentrop arm-twisting Hungary's
   Regent Horthy to gain compliance with the policy of extermination:

      The Nazis found it intolerable that eight hundred thousand Jews
      should still be moving freely around a country im the heart of
      Europe--particularly just north of the sensitive Balkans.  For
      many months Germany had applied pressure for the Hungarian Jews to
      be turned over to the appropriate German agencies [!]<54> for
      deportation to 'reservations in the east.' It was argued that so
      long as they remained, they were potential rumor mongers,
      purveyors of defeatism, saboteurs, agents of the enemy secret
      service, and contact men for an 'international Jewry' now
      embattled against Germany.  

   By creating an ambiguity of voices--who speaks here, Hitler,
   Ribbentrop or Irving?  --the impression is given that Hungary's Jews
   were in fact nothing less than saboteurs and enemy agents.  If only
   they had had the opportunity to be saboteurs!  If only that imaginary
   power of 'international Jewry' had been able to shield them against
   Hungarian Fascist gangs hunting them for Eichmann's 'resettlement'
   machine!  If only they had not needed the Swedish diplomat
   Wallenberg, with his brave and ingenious stratagems, to hide those he
   could, and even to pull some of them off Auschwitz-bound cattle
   cars!  

                  Irving's Use of Innuendo 

   The same chapter continues, with the Fuehrer and his chieftains
   developing their crazed visions of Jewish evil incarnate:

      Events in Poland were pointed to as providing an ugly precedent:
      there were reports of Jews roaming the country, committing acts of
      murder and sabotage.  The eviction of the Jews ordered by Hitler
      had recently been intensified in Himmler's order that even those
      Jews left working for armament concems ...  were to be housed
      collectively in camps and eventually to be got rid of as well.  In
      Warsaw, the fifty thousand Jews surviving in the ghetto were on
      the point of staging an armed uprising with weapons and
      ammunition<55> evidently sold to them by Hitler's fleeing allies
      as they passed westward through the city.  Himmler ordered the
      ghetto destroyed and its ruins combed out for Jews, saying 'This
      is just the kind of incident that shows how dangerous these Jews
      are.' 

   Where is Irving's evidence for 'weapons and amrnunition evidently
   sold to them by Hitler's fleeing allies'?  There was in fact no such
   sale nor could there have been.  Jews planning the uprising were
   penned down in the ghetto and faced enormous obstacles trying to
   obtain any weapons at all, even light ones, even from the Polish
   underground armies.  This kind of innuendo runs through much of
   Irving's history.  

                Irving Alters the Sequence of Events 

   In the Goring chapter 'Sunshine Girl and Crystal Night' there is a
   scandalous inversion of the actual events, making it seem as if the
   murder of vom Rath had been in response to Poland's closing its doors
   against Polish Jews, rather than in response to Nazi Germany's having
   expelled to Poland thousands of former Polish Jews.  Here is Irving's
   version of the events: 

      Nobody wanted Europe's Jews.  When Jews who had emigrated from
      Poland began to flood back there in alarm, their own Warsaw
      government passed a law designed to keep them out.  A furious
      Polish Jew stormed the German embassy in Paris and pumped bullets
      into the ambassador's deputy, an impulsive action that was the
      beginning of the Jews' long journey into darkness, because a
      vengeful speech by Goebbels triggered a pogrom throughout Germany
      and Austria--a dusk of agonizing screams, of arson, and of
      shattered shop windows that would go down in history as 'Crystal
      Night.' 

   The New York Times reported these events as follows: 'the violence
   was unleashed after the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, Third
   Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris.  The killer was a teenaged
   Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan.  He said that he was avenging the
   treatment of his parents in Germany.  'Being a Jew is not a crime,'
   Grynszpan told police in Paris.  'I am not a dog.  I have a right to
   live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on this earth.
   Wherever I have been, I have been chased like an animal.' '

   Those terrible words--Nazi Germany did hold that being a Jew was a
   crime in itself--are not reflected in Irving's statement.  Herschel
   Grynszpan's elderly parents were among the thousands who were dumped,
   without food or shelter, in beginning winter weather in no-man's-land
   between Germany and Poland.  

   Germany deported thousands of Polish Jews to Poland on October 28.
   Vom Rath was shot on November 7.  The nation- wide 'Kristallnacht'
   pogrom was unleashed on German and Austrian Jews November 9-10,1938.

   Irving omits the fact that the expulsion of Polish-born Jews,
   resident in Germany, had preceded Poland's closing of her border.
   Beginning his paragraph with 'Nobody wanted Europe's Jews' he
   implicitly justifies not only Nazi Germany's dastardly act, but
   simultaneously also Poland's.<56> 


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