I once came very close to breaking a young girl's heart.
Before you jump to conclusions, no, I am not a wicked, wicked villain who twirls a thick black mustache whilst cackling evilly about seducing pretty coeds to satisfy my own lusts; not only am I a female who's as close to a 1 on the Kinsey Scale as it's possible to get, I have brown hair, do not cackle, and have no mustache to twirl. What I mean is that a couple of years ago I had to tell an aspiring writer that her assumptions about what it means to write were less than accurate.
It was right after the October Surprise snowstorm that dumped a foot of snow on the Pioneer Valley just in time to wreck Halloween. Branches went down, so did power lines, and here at the Last Homely Shack we were devoid of electricity (and heat) for four full days. I had to rewrite a good chunk of that week's diary, "Incorruptible Saints and Jungian Madonnas," because the power went out about five minutes before I was going to hit "post," and the only reason it got posted at all that week was because UMass has its own power plant and about a hundred public terminals at their main library.
UMass's main campus is over half an hour from the Last Homely Shack, so going there to check my email and post a diary was a one-off. Fortunately for me, the nearest Panettone Pseudo-Local Bakery and Kaffe Shoppe is only about fifteen minutes away, offers free wifi and free parking, and is used to writers hogging all the electrical outlets while pecking madly at their keyboards. I could check my mail, reply to posts here and elsewhere, and get my first cup of fresh, steaming, highly caffeinated brown liquid since Friday at the office.
Even better, this particular Panettone is in the same mini-mall as my gym, which meant I'd be able to get a lukewarm shower and wash my hair for the first time in several days, made it even better. "Paradise on earth" didn't begin to describe it.
I was sipping my blessedly hot coffee and contemplating how good it would be to soap up and rinse off without freezing my tender not-young flesh when a young woman at the next tale began chatting with another customer who'd asked if she could unplug long enough for him to charge his phone.
"Oh, that's fine. I'm almost done," she said, in the high, light voice of a teenager who hasn't yet learned that she can't conquer the world simply by existing. "I have enough juice to finish my blog post."
"Blog post?" he said, glancing up. "What do you blog about?"
"It's part of a multi-poster blog produced by local youth - you know, students at the high schools," she replied, tugging at her multi-colored Inca hat. "We're putting together an anthology as part of a project."
I hit "save" on my own laptop and started to pack up. I'd finished my coffee a few minutes earlier, and now it was time to beat back the nascent itch on my occipital region.
"We're thinking of launching a Kickstarter and trying to get this published," the girl continued. "I mean, writing is so easy, it shouldn't take us - "
"Easy?" I froze halfway through zipping my laptop bag. "Writing is easy?"
"Oh yeah!" she exclaimed. "You just start typing and - "
"Writing is not easy. It's actually - " I stopped when I saw how young she was - a senior in high school, tops - and flashed back to my own days of being young, confident, and certain that I'd be in print and accepting my first Hugo by the time I was thirty. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I'm a writer myself. What I mean is that good writing isn't easy. A first draft almost always needs to be polished and redone if it's really going to shine."
She blinked. Her gloves were even more colorful than her thickly knitted hat. "You're a writer? Really?"
"I have a few articles in print and I blog at a national website," I said, keeping my tone as gentle as possible. "You're right, sometimes it is easy. But most of the time, it's not just waiting for inspiration and letting it flow. My first article needed eight rewrites before it was finally accepted, and my first short story went through three drafts. It's not nearly as simple as you might think."
"I've never had any trouble," she said, a touch too quickly. "Guess I'm lucky."
"It's different for everyone," I said, and oh how I wished I'd kept my mouth shut. "It's as much work as pleasure, though, and not every editor will take your work as-is. You should keep that in mind."
The guy who was trying to charge his phone stepped between us at that point, and I took the opportunity to wish her luck and flee for the gym. Not only did I feel like a heel, I had the distinct impression that, like everyone with a dream, she thought that she'd be the exception to Gene Fowler's old statement that “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
I've never actually hemorrhaged for my art, such as it is, but I wasn't exaggerating when it came to rewrites. Every single piece I've had published had been improved by rewrites and editing, from my racy short fiction to my recent article on medieval patchwork. The latter in particular was greatly enhanced when a peer reviewer's comments drove me to contact an Italian conservation agency, which in in turn led to the information that turned an interesting paper from an academic conference into an article that was the first work in English to bridge the gap in quilt history between an early French lai and the elaborate silk patchworks of the late 17th century. I'm a real, genuine, card-carrying historian, albeit in a small and specialized field, and if I accomplish nothing else in this life, at least I've done that.
It’s something of a shock to learn just how much doesn’t make it into the standard American and World History courses. That this is due to many factors, including nationalism, cultural and ethnic bias, tradition, lack of sources, untrained teachers and poorly written textbooks, doesn’t make it any better, or any less insidious. I’m convinced that a good half the problems we’re facing now wouldn’t even exist if previous generations had been taught the true history of the grand, glorious, bigoted, painful mess that is the United States, not the rah-rah-red-white-and-blue patriotic version.
It’s a bitter disappointment to find out how much has been omitted or cast aside, and the toll ignorance takes on our children, our country, and our planet. At the same time, I have to admit that learning what really happened, then writing about it and bringing it to a wider audience, is one of the greatest joys of being a historian. There’s so much that has been misinterpreted, mislaid, or simply ignored that there’s more than enough work to keep both trained scholars and talented amateurs busy for centuries.
Many works that purport to bring to light lost secrets do exactly that. Others do little more than rehash what’s come before. Some, though…some are Books So Biased They’re Ridiculous.
Tonight I bring you the masterpiece of a historian who became renowned both for his research skills and his bias. Contentious, obstreperous, and unflinching, he actually seemed to be one of the rare amateurs able to crack the academic code and produce good work without professional training, at least until his personal beliefs caught up with him:
Hitler’s War, by David Irving – that Adolf Hitler was one of the most significant figures in world history is beyond question. How this failed artist rose the gutters of Vienna to the heights of power, how he persuaded an otherwise normal populace to follow him down the path to genocide and destruction, how he came within a single amphibious campaign of bringing down every major European democracy – even now, eighty years after he became Chancellor, it’s still hard to believe that Hitler was real and not the stuff of someone’s nightmare.
Historians have sought the answers to these and numerous other questions about Hitler almost from the day he first emerged as a major political leader. Whole forests have been devoted to the books, magazine articles, film scripts, plays, and graphic novels about Hitler, his associates, his girlfriends, his so-called art, his political thought, his taste in books…it’s hard to enter a bookstore, even a small one, and not find at least one or two books about the reason that the name “Adolf’ has suffered what it likely a permanent loss of popularity.
Or so we have all been lead to believe.
According to this book, which was the second of two volumes penned by a most unlikely author, it was time to look past the “years of grime and discoloration [that besmirched] the façade of a silent and forbidding monument” to reveal the truth about Adolf Hitler as leader and military strategist. Far from relying on the slanders of Allied historians, those), brainwashed post-war Germans, and of course the Jews, the author was determined to “view the situation as far as possible through Hitler’s eyes, from behind his desk.”
On the surface, this is a most laudable goal, especially in regards to so controversial a figure. Biographers really should like, or at least admire, their subjects; there’s little reason otherwise to spend so much time, money, and energy researching a single persona’s life. Seeing the world through one’s subject’s eyes would almost seem to be required.
But when a historian ends up empathizing with his subject so much as to absolve him of warmongering, unprovoked attacks on other countries, even genocide…that’s a different matter altogether.
Such is the case with Hitler’s War, the best known work of British historian, researcher, and Holocaust denier David Irving.
Irving, born just before World War II, was the son of a Royal Navy officer whose ship was torpedoed on convoy duty in 1942. Irving Senior survived, but was so traumatized by his ordeal that he abandoned his wife and twin sons. Whether this was why young David, described by his twin brother as a gadfly and contrarian almost from birth, developed the charming habit of running past bombed-out houses screaming “Heil Hitler!” at the top of his tiny little lungs is not clear. Irving himself denies that he ever did such a thing, but given that a) he speaks bitterly to this day about wartime rationing and deprivation, and b) he claims to have begun sympathizing with the poor, misunderstood Nazis thanks to British wartime cartoons and propaganda, it’s at least plausible.
Regardless of when Irving’s obsession with the Nazis and their supposed ill-treatment at the hands of the Allies began, his determination to clear Hitler’s name was clear as early as his university days. He started small – he seconded legendary British Fascist Oswald Mosley at a debate on immigration, which ended with both men being heckled off the stage – then called Hitler “the greatest unifying force Europe has known since Charlemagne” in an allegedly “secret supplement” to a student humor magazine. This latter effort was so controversial that other students quickly banded together to yank the “secret supplement” from the magazine before it could be distributed.
Soon after, David Irving dropped out of university and moved to West Germany, where he got a job in the Thyssen steelworks. He said it was due to lack of funds, but it’s hard not to wonder why he didn’t simply get a job in a British steel plant if he was strapped for cash. He stayed long enough to learn German, then moved to Spain (one of the last two Fascist countries in Europe, and isn’t that interesting?), married a local woman, and set about fathering a brood of five proto-fascists little Irvings.
He also began to write.
Sometime during his sojourn in Germany, David Irving had begun researching one of the greatest tragedies of the war: the firebombing of Dresden early in 1945. This campaign, which was intended partly to demoralize the German people, partly to avenge similar Nazi efforts against Rotterdam and Coventry, had all but obliterated the historic center of Dresden. Irving, who had used his knowledge of German to unearth what he claimed was fresh evidence, wrote a series of three dozen articles for a German magazine on the Dresden campaign, then distilled these into a book, The Destruction of Dresden.
This book, which was illustrated with a fine selection of graphic and frequently horrifying pictures, became a best seller. Even better, Irving’s estimate that the bombing had incinerated not just architectural masterpieces such as the Frauenkirche, but between 100,000 and 250,000 persons, most of them innocent civilians, made headlines throughout the world. These figures, which Irving claimed were supported by statements from the Chief Medical Officer of Dresden and an official German casualty estimate, became widely accepted, both by historians and the general public, and led to a debate over Allied bombing policy that continues to this day.
That his casualty figures were based on a piece of wartime propaganda personally ordered by Heinrich Himmler, and that the “Chief Medical Officer” was actually a urologist who was quite surprised to learn of his promotion, were beside the point. Irving simply shrugged when this was pointed out to him, revised his casualty estimates downward in subsequent editions, and continued to research and write about Nazi Germany. Some of his work was controversial – he was sued at least once by a captain who objected to Irving blaming him for the loss of his convoy – but at least one post-Dresden book, The Mare’s Nest, is still considered the best work on the V-weapons program. All of his books sold well, and Irving enjoyed a reputation as a groundbreaking if less than objective historian of Nazi Germany.
Then came 1977’s Hitler’s War.
This book, the second volume of Irving’s biography of Hitler, originally came out in 1975 in West Germany as Hitler und seine Feldherren. Its portrayal of Hitler was, to say the least, somewhat unusual; in place of the unstable, murderous, power-hungry dictator of legend, Irving presented Hitler as a calm, intelligent nationalist whose only goal was ensure the prosperity and security of his beloved Germany. The war was not Hitler’s fault, not at all; perfidious opponents such as Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin forced Hitler’s hand on the battlefield, and never mind that Churchill wasn’t even Prime Minister when Germany annexed Austria, gutted Czechoslovakia, and invaded Poland.
If that weren’t enough to ensure that Hitler’s War got plenty of press, Irving insisted, based on a September 1939 letter from Chaim Weizmann to the British government pledging Jewish support of the Allied war effort, was nothing less than a “declaration of war” by the stateless Jews against Germany. This was sufficient justification for Germany to intern any Jews her forces happened to come across as the panzers swept across the plains of Poland, the gliders attacked Eben Emal in the Netherlands, and the infantry converged on Dunkirk. Further, Irving claimed that Hitler had had no idea that associates such as Heinrich Himmler and Himmler’s minion Reinhard Heydrich were quietly planning to slaughter European Jewry. Irving had devoted countless hours to seeking out any documents that so much as implied Hitler giving the order to round up non-Aryans and ship them off to the death camps, and his failure to do so was proof positive that the Holocaust was not Hitler’s fault.
Irving even offered a reward of £1000 to anyone who could produce written proof that Hitler was behind the Holocaust. Talk about putting your royalties where your mouth is!
Needless to say, professional historians did not precisely embrace either Irving or his book with open arms. Luminaries who weighed in, and found Irving’s analysis very, very, very much wanting, included the likes of Eberhard Jaeckel, Alan Bullock, Lucy Davidowicz, Gordon Craig, and Charles Sydnor. One distinguished historian, Gitta Sereny, accused Irving of penning something “closer to theology or mythology” than actual history, while Martin Broszat called Irving a “Hitler partisan wearing blinders”
If that weren’t enough, reviewer Lance Morrow wrote in Time that Irving depicted Hitler as “a somewhat harried business executive too preoccupied to know exactly what was happening in his branch offices in Auschwitz and Treblinka.”
Can we say “burn,” Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea? Can we?
Pithiest of all was John Lukacs, who wrote a scathing review of Hitler’s War in, all place, The National Review. He called the book worthless, its author an untrained amateur, and openly accused Irving of making up his facts (most notably a battle in April 1945 that never actually took place, although the assertion that Poland had planned to invade Germany in 1939 came close). “Appalling” was his verdict, and it’s hard to find many who disagreed.
Just about the only historians who were willing to concede any points on Hitler’s War were John Keegan, who considered it “Irving’s greatest achievement” and “indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round,” and Hugh Trevor-Roper, who claimed to enjoy Irving’s prose style even if he found his conclusions unsupported and his sympathies obvious. Trevor-Roper, who’d served as an intelligence officer during the war and investigated Hitler's death afterwards, praised Irving’s skills as a researcher and a writer before ever-so-politely eviscerating the actual book.
Needless to say, Hitler’s War was a smash hit (especially in West Germany, gee, I wonder why?). It's still cited by some, uh, revisionist-minded war buffs as the best book on Der Fuehrer’s career, and continues to sell decently to this day. Irving soon was a wealthy albeit notorious man, and followed up with titles such as The Trail of the Fox (a biography of General Rommel that excoriates Claus von Stauffenberg and the other anti-Hitler plotters of 1944 as “traitors” and “cowards”) and The War Path (the first volume of his biography of Hitler, which confusingly came out a year later). Soon he had bought a house in Mayfair, acquired a fancy car, and divorced his Spanish wife to take up with a Danish model who enjoyed the good life as much as he did.
Alas for David Irving, his success as a Nazi apologist and all-time champion Hitler fanboy did not lead to similar triumphs in non-Hitler studies. His work on Winston Churchill was all but ignored thanks to what one reviewer called “excesses, inconsistencies, and omissions…and a tone which is at best casually journalistic and at worst quite exceptionally offensive.” Another book, The War Between the Generals, claimed that the members of the Allied High Command not only hated each other’s guts, but lived lives of such lurid excess as to make Herman Goering’s bacchanalian existence look positively ascetic.
Needless to say, reviews were not kind.
Irving’s fortunes revived briefly in 1983, when he was arguably the first major historian to expose Stern magazines’ “Hitler Diaries” as forgeries. This led to a cringeworthy incident where Irving popped up at a press conference at Stern’s offices to confront poor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who’d been taken in by the diaries. Irving had dealt with the same forger who had fooled Stern and Trevor-Roper, and waved a selection of bogus Nazi memorabilia about as he finally got revenge for Trevor-Roper’s bad reviews. This in turn led to Irving making appearances on The Today Show as a Hitler expert, and he seemed perfectly happy to gloat…
Until a week later, when he suddenly declared that the diaries were genuine after all, and oh yes, he’d just published his translation of the memoirs of Hitler’s doctor, isn’t that a coincidence! and wouldn’t you like to read them?
For all the publicity that the Hitler Diaries fiasco brought him, David Irving’s subsequent career was not the stuff of which dreams are made. His sales declined, he began openly associating with revisionists and Holocaust deniers, and statements that Hitler was “the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich” lead to him being taken less and less seriously. Within a few years he was giving lectures on the Holocaust denial circuit (yes, there is such a thing, God help us all) and giving lectures at neo-Nazi rallies where he claimed that only 30,000 people died at Auschwitz. He even made up a little lullaby for his daughter that has to set a record for sheer tastelessness, especially considering its audience:
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.
Yes, really, and if you feel like scrubbing your skin raw and scooping out your eyeballs with a grapefruit spoon after reading that, you are far from alone.
The low point came in 1996, when Irving sued historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel. Lipstadt’s book Denying the Holocaust had called Irving a Holocaust denier, claimed that he had falsified evidence and deliberately misquoted his sources, and charged him with being a bigot. Irving took offense, even though all of the above was amply supported by his works and his public utterances, and attempted to use British libel laws to force Lipstadt to withdraw her book and apologize.
This was not a good idea. Penguin's solicitor, Anthony Julius, lived up to his reputation as a juridical shark and went straight for the jugular. He hired experts on Holocaust history, the architecture of the death camps, and several noted historians, including Richard J. Evans of Cambridge University. Evans, tasked with analyzing Irving’s entire oeuvre, wrote a devastating report stating, in part:
Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
Needless to say, Irving did not win his case. The court not only found for the defense, it ordered Irving to pay Penguin’s court costs (around £2 million, or about $3 million at the time). Irving, who had just lost a book contract with St. Martin’s Press, was forced to declare bankruptcy.
Since then, David Irving has not an easy time of it. He’s been declared personal non grata by several countries, served a brief prison term in Austria, and been forced to depend on whatever he can earn as a freelance writer. A book and lecture tour of the United States geared to the extreme right was disrupted by a knife fight at one appearance, and he even had the nerve to give a speech at Treblinka (!) in 2010.
At last report he was giving lectures in secret locations on the menace of World Jewry and (of course) the over-exaggeration of Holocaust casualties. His website, which is sponsored by his self-publishing house, Focal Point Press, proudly casts him as a crusader for "Real History" and a champion of free speech. It also includes a curious statement, which I reproduce in whole, without altering a single line, so that you can decide for yourself as to why he felt it necessary to include one at all:
DAVID IRVING runs FPP as an equal-opportunity employer, allowing no discrimination on grounds of race, creed, or sex. His permanent salaried staff has included Barbadian, Sri Lankan, Jewish, and Punjabi staff. He will not publish manuscripts which do not meet his own criteria; he will not lend his name or authority to gratuitously offensive tracts, ad hominem attacks, or concealed or overt anti-Semitic, anti-German, or anti-anything-else propaganda. He accepts full personal responsibility for all the words published on this Website (but not for those to which, in the spirit of the Web, it offers links).
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Have you ever read a book on Adolf Hitler? Read one by David Irving? Do you remember the Hitler Diaries hoax? Now is the time to admit to any, all, or none of the above....
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