From mvanalst@rbi.com Sun Jun 23 08:49:41 PDT 1996
Article: 45409 of alt.revisionism
Path: nizkor.almanac.bc.ca!news.island.net!news.bctel.net!newsfeed.direct.ca!op.net!fury.berkshire.net!news.albany.net!imci3!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.zeitgeist.net!rbi142.rbi.com!user
From: mvanalst@rbi.com (Mark Van Alstine)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: Irving's 'Goebbels' book now available
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 1996 15:49:15 -0700
Organization: rbi software systems
Lines: 117
Message-ID: 
References: <31C9EF37.6F9D@kaiwan.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: rbi142.rbi.com
X-Newsreader: Yet Another NewsWatcher 2.0.5b5

In article <31C9EF37.6F9D@kaiwan.com>, ihrgreg@kaiwan.com wrote:

> An announcement from the IHR

> ----------------------------
> <<  Now Available !  >>
> 
> 
> The Book 'They' Don't Want You to See!
> 
> 
>         Defying an international censorship campaign, =
> 
> 
>         here at last is David Irving's =
> 
> 
>         Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich =
> 
>         ---------------------------------------
> 

[neo-Nazi propaganda snipped]


_In the Shadow of Goebbels_, by Tina Rosenberg (The New York Times Book
Review, June 2, 1996; pp.26-27):

=============================================================================

"...But under its polished surface the book is in fact a sophisticated
blood libel. A look at just one sentance is enough to show why. In a
description of the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, Mr. Irving
writes, 'The upshot of the Jewish campaign overseas was that Goebbels
secured from Hitler - or so he claimed - approval to threaten a short,
sharp counterboycott of the Jews.' A 'counterboycott' provoked by a
'Jewish campaign overseas' - in other words, the Jews had it coming. 
These are not Goebbels words, they are Mr. Irving's, and the book is
strung with such gems. Consistant with his theory that the gas chambers
did not exist, Mr. Irving calls Auschwitz 'the most brutal of all
Himmler's slave-labor camps and the one with the highest mortality rate.'
By my count, the word 'holocaust' appears once in the book; it refers to
the British bombing of Hamburg.

"More subtly, the boycott snetance illustrates a larger problem. IN a
recent speech to the Institute for Historical Review - the center of the
UNited States Holocaust denial movement and the American distributor of
many of Mr. Irving's books - Mr. Irving said of the 1933 boycott:
'Goebbels organized the boycott, though if you read his diary you can get
the impression that Hitler authorized it, sanctioned it and possibly
suggested it.' Readers of Mr. Irving's Web site can find this statement,
but nowhere is it in the book, whose only reference linking Hitler to the
boycott is the sentance quoted abpve. Mr Irving has played down Hitler's
involvement.

"He was born to exonerate Hitler. That's his mission in life,' says
Michael H. Kater, the Distinguished Research Professor of History at York
Univeristy in Toronto and an expert on the Third Reich. Mr. Irving has
offered L1,000 to anyobe who can produce a wartime document showing that
Hitler knew about the extermination of the Jews before October 1943. He
expounds the thesis that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust in his 1977
book 'Hitler's War' (in which the bad guys were Himmler and Heydrich), and
he has extended it in other books. Gitta Sereny, the Author of "Albert
Speer:  His Battle With Truth," writes in the British newspaper The
Observer that Goebbels's diaries indicate he learned of the extermination
camps only when Hitler told him - months after they had begun operation.
But such passages do not appear in Irving's book. 'He's the premier
practitioner of selective evidence,' says Warren F. Kimball, a professor
of diplomatic hostory at Rutgers University. 

"'Every major history' of the deeds of the Nazis 'is built on a mass of
material, largely the Nuremburg documents,' says Francis L. Lowenheim, a
professor of history at Rice University and one of the few people besides
Mr. Irving to have have read both the Irving book on Goebbels and the
diaries themselves. 'We can see exactly what Hitler and the Nazis planned
to do. Mr. Irving has not simply broken with this material; he either
ignores it or dismisses it as forgeries.' By treating the Nazi leaders'
actions as if they were reactions to outside events and not part of a
planned extermination program, Mr. Lowenheim says, Mr. Irving diminishes
the horribleness of the Holocaust.

"Even the most cursory research turns up evidence of Mr. Irving's
duplicity. On the first page of the book he writes that he gave the German
Federal Archives ib Coblenz a complete copy of the Goebbels diaries;
archive officials say this is fiction. Over an over he crows that he was
the first to use the complete diaries, and he claimed to be their
discoverer when he sold portions to the Sunday Times of London in 1992.
Yet as he has been forced to acknowledge in the book, the microfiched
diaries were first found by Elke Fro"hlich, a researcher at the
Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History and the world's
pre-eminent Goebbels expert. The institute has so far published 15 volumes
of the diaries and will complete the series soon, Ms. Fro"hlich reports.
And for what Mr. Irving has that others don't, Ms. Fro"hlich and other
historians say it amounts to only 10 or 13 glass microfiche plates. 'We
all know what his character is,' she says. 'He tells lie after lie and
then it is left to others to show that he is lying.'

"...David Irving...is not just wrong, he appears to be engaging in
deliberate distortion. Worse, he is a sneak; the uncautioned reader will
absorb a version of history exhonerating Hitler and minimizing the evil of
the Holocaust without knowing it...."

=============================================================================


Mark


posted/e-mailed

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes 
not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties--but
right through every human heart--and all human hearts." 

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Home ·  Site Map ·  What's New? ·  Search Nizkor