Adolf Hitler's World tour 2010

Cet étonnant article du journaliste Katie Engelhart publié par le magazine canadien McLeans étudie la diffusion mondiale du bestseller de Hitler Mein Kampf.

The return of Hitler

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler took his own life with a simultaneous bite into a cyanide pill and gunshot to the temple. The day before, he dictated his will from the dank confines of the Führerbunker, a concrete shelter buried some eight metres below the old Reich Chancellery, as Soviet forces encircled Berlin. What exactly happened next is still fiercely contested, but by most accounts, the bodies of Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, were carried upstairs to the garden by SS devotees, doused in gasoline, and burned to pieces—then buried, then later unearthed, and then buried again in an unknown location, or perhaps just scattered to the wind.

Almost 65 years later to the day, the man and the totalitarian regime he established continue to fascinate us. In just the last few years, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler’s poorly written, 700-page magnum opus, “turgid, verbose, shapeless,” to borrow from Winston Churchill, has earned bestseller status in some unlikely markets: India, Turkey and the Palestinian territories. His paintings are fetching record-setting prices, and trade in anything the Third Reich leader touched, or might have touched, is thriving. In some cases, the fascination is trivial, even absurd, such as the “Nazi chic” clothing that has been popular in Asia: T-shirts with Hitler portraits and swastikas. In others, though, it is more pernicious: the 65 years that have passed since Hitler’s death have not dulled the allure of the Führer, or his ideology, for the now-burgeoning extreme right.

Take the lead-up to last Sunday’s national elections in Hungary, which saw the far-right Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Movement for a Better Hungary) rake in 16.7 per cent of the national vote. In just a few years, Jobbik has grown from almost nothing, winning over a disenchanted electorate with its stark anti-Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric. Party officials have been careful to dismiss any direct links to Nazism; anti-Semitism is masked in attacks on Israeli investors and hatred of the Roma is justified with talk of “gypsy crime.” But members of Jobbik’s paramilitary wing, the Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard), have not been so cautious. Neither have its supporters, who gathered by the Danube River last week to lash out at “Jewish pigs” and to unite in a common cry against foreigners on Hungarian soil: “They should leave!” Jobbik’s leaders, now at the helm of the opposition, are ready to take their country forward—away from all that “commotion over the Holocaust.”


Hasnain Kazim, a journalist of Pakistani and Indian origin who is based in Islamabad, shies away from revealing where he was born: Germany. But it’s hard to avoid; Kazim says people in Pakistan jump at any opportunity to talk with someone from Germany. “They say: ‘Wow! Cool! So you’re in favour of Hitler!’ ” It’s even worse, he says, when family comes to visit him in Pakistan’s bustling capital. The embarrassment might begin on the busy drive home from the airport. “You’ll find cars with the Deutsches Kreuz, the German Cross. You’ll find people with stickers on their car saying ‘I LIKE NAZI’ or ‘I LIKE HITLER.’ ” And then there’s the banter. “People start talking about Hitler [in a] friendly way,” Kazim explains. Even though “the people aren’t Nazis,” he says that Nazi imagery is ubiquitous in Pakistan’s large cities. It took some time away, and then a move back to Islamabad eight months ago, for it to really resonate: “I only realized now how many people like Hitler.”

Jonathan Solomon, a lawyer in Mumbai, says the same revelation struck him when he was browsing for books. “I was shocked to see that Mein Kampf is available in Indian bookstores, even in the prestigious bookstores. It was not 10 years ago.” Moreover, pirated copies of the book, in a country where a 22-year ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses has still to be lifted, are available at street stalls. “It sells very well,” says P.M. Shenvi, manager of the Strand Book Stall in Mumbai. Today, publishers continue to churn out multiple reprints of Mein Kampf a year to meet what R.H. Sharma, an editor at Mumbai’s Jaico Publishing House, insists is a surging demand. In 2009, “we sold 10,000 copies over a six-month period in our Delhi shops,” Sharma has boasted.

Perhaps Solomon should not have been taken aback. In 2002, the English-language Times of India published a report showing that Indian college students found much to admire in the Führer: namely, his efficiency, military strength and nationalism. The newspaper asked 400 elite college students, “Who’s your favourite leader from history?” Hitler came in third, just behind Mahatma Gandhi. “Because he made Germany a superpower,” was one student’s response.

Of course, it’s not just India where Mein Kampf is topping the charts. In 2001, it became a hot item after being introduced in Bulgaria. Soon afterwards, an Arabic translation became the sixth best seller in the Palestinian territories, according to Agence France-Presse. (“National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald,” read its introduction.) Then, in 2005, the book took a top-seller spot in Turkey, selling over 100,000 copies in January and February alone—mostly, said publishers, to males between 18 and 30. And, it’s been flying off Croatian shelves for years.
Not bad, for a badly written book. (“A boring tome that I have never been able to read,” Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator, once jeered.) Hitler wrote Mein Kampf—part autobiography, part raving philosophical treatise—in 1923, while in jail for a failed plot to seize control of Munich. It eventually became the holy book of the German National Socialist Party.

Global sales figures are hard to estimate; the official rights to Mein Kampf are held by the German state of Bavaria, which bans it from being printed. In the U.S. and U.K., the rights were seized when Hitler was still alive, and are privately held today. Houghton Mifflin, the U.S. publisher, told Maclean’s that it sold 26,000 paperback copies in 2009. The U.K.’s Random House would not release its sales figures upon request. In many other countries, however, the situation is less controlled, and small publishers are apt to print Mein Kampf at will. Increasingly, they are feeding eager markets.

Ilhas Niaz, history professor at Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam University, says Hitler fares well in Pakistan in part because of a particularly Pakistani admiration for strong leaders. “The cult of personality is strong,” says Niaz. When “the current crisis cannot be met by any ordinary leader, people are looking into history for a charismatic figure.” Aurangzeb Nazir, a 24-year-old student in Islamabad, told Maclean’s, “Hitler united his nation and brought it from the brink of collapse to global prominence. That’s why we look up to him.” It’s certainly not a new phenomenon. One of Pakistan’s most beloved leaders, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, also saw the 20th century’s most famous mass murderer as someone to emulate. “Bhutto had silver-bound copies of Mein Kampf in his library,” says Niaz. “He incorporated lines from Hitler’s speeches directly into his own oratory.”

But much of the popularity, Niaz admits, has more to do with the present than the past: “It’s an emotional response to what is happening in Palestine.” Besides the struggle with India over Kashmir, it is Israeli-Palestinian relations that dominate Pakistan’s foreign policy consciousness, and sympathy for the Palestinians and a deep distrust of Israel help fuel the cult of Hitler worship. Maqudas Ghumman, a 21-year-old international relations student at Quaid-e-Azam, told Maclean’s: “We admire Hitler partly because we want to remind Jews about what happened to them and express our anger over what their leaders, the leaders they admire, are now doing to the Palestinians.”
Not surprisingly, the Israeli issue also plays strongly into Palestinian sales of Mein Kampf. Issa Ahwach owns Bissan, a Lebanese publishing house that prints an Arabic translation for the Palestinian region. Through an interpreter, he told Maclean’s that sales have held strong “because we are suffering a similar kind of oppression under the Israelis. We can relate to what the Jews suffered.”

In India, however, the situation is very different. “This admiration for Hitler that we do see in some circles is very much divorced from his anti-Semitic policies,” says Yulia Egorova, a social anthropologist and author of Jews and India: Perceptions and Image. Historically, Egorova says, Hitler’s popularity dates back to the 1920s and ’30s, when the nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose saw the German leader as his country’s ticket to independence from colonial British rule and formed an Indian Legion to fight at Hitler’s side. “But at the same time he denounced anti-Semitism,” Egorova says. Bose eventually became disenchanted with Hitler, but in some places, his dubious image as a defender of Indian sovereignty still stands.

How seriously should Indian interest in Hitler be taken? Rafique Baghdadi, who runs the Business India Book Club, calls Mein Kampf a cult book, “rather like Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. It isn’t a book that you see a lot of on local commuter trains.” More ominously, though, activist Teesta Setalvad, co-editor of Communalism Combat, a monthly journal aimed at promoting secularism, ascribes the revival of interest in Hitler’s ideology to the rise of right-wing Hindu fundamentalist politicians like the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Narendra Modi, and the “horrendous tendency of India’s upper middle class that has always liked authoritarianism.” Adds Egorova: “They [draw] parallels between the Jewish question in Germany and the Muslim question in India.”

Mumbai lawyer Solomon, who also heads the Indian Jewish Federation, agrees. “There is no anti-Semitism in India,” he says. But Muslims, Solomon adds, are not safe: “It is a peculiar situation where we Jews have to raise our worries about these Nazi tactics being used against our Muslim brethren.” Tensions have grown because of recent terrorist attacks by Muslim foreigners, but they have deep roots. One famous Hindutva ideologue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, said in 1949: “If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Muslim, that is what I believe in.”

In Turkey, the flourishing Islamic movement has spurred interest in Hitler and Mein Kampf. “It is the Islamists rather than the fascists who have fuelled the sales,” says professor Dogu Ergil of Ankara University. “It was a reaction against the war in Iraq and Israel’s actions in Palestine.” Ergil says Islamist factions consciously boosted Mein Kampf sales in 2005 by printing the book in large numbers and driving its market price down to $3: “This was done against Israel and Jews.” Arnold Reisman, author of Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk’s Vision, also suspects state involvement in the sales, but he thinks the target of the plot was broader. “They are essentially saying: ‘Up yours, Europe!’ ” says Reisman. Turkey was “lying on the floor begging” to gain EU membership for years, but “they’ll never get it—and they’re beginning to see that. And as a result, they’re turning away from Europe.”

In some instances of Hitler glorification there is a “wilful blindness” at work, says Syed Jamaluddin, a history teacher at the Khaldunia high school in Islamabad. In 2005, the Indian state of Gujarat came under fire for issuing a textbook to high school students that included a chapter on the “internal achievements of Nazism”; it instructed that “Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time by establishing a strong administrative set-up.” (Teesta Setalvad has been leading the battle to amend the texts—“Thankfully, young people in India today are realizing that economic growth is no justification for human rights violations,” she says.) But in Pakistan, says Jamaluddin, “The information is out there but our young people are ignoring it. They’re only seeing what they want to see. I try to nail Hitler in my class. I try to destroy him.” Some are not listening. Sales of Mein Kampf were reportedly boosted by business students who saw the book as a how-to guide to becoming a self-made man.

Elsewhere, Hitler’s continuing legacy is far less innocuous. In Hungary, the far right’s foremost self-made man seems to have engaged in a closer reading of the Führer’s message. In just four years, Gabor Vona, 31, a history teacher with closely cropped hair and a penchant for T-shirts, has catapulted his Jobbik party from the fanatical fringes to the mainstream, moving from only 2.2 per cent of the national vote in 2006 to almost 17 per cent in last Sunday’s elections.

Vona keeps his speech tempered, distancing himself from overtly National Socialist rhetoric. But for many, his party’s heated platform, which rests on an intense preoccupation with Hungary’s 80,000 Roma, a consistent slew of attacks on “Israeli colonizers,” and a solemn vow to ban immigrants from diluting Hungarian purity, draws comparisons that are tough to overlook. There are also the party’s more direct connections to neo-Nazi elements in Hungary. For starters, Jobbik’s platform is carried on the shoulders of the Magyar Gárda, the paramilitary corps founded by Vona in 2007. The uniformed wing is “redolent of the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross Party, who during the war were really important in carrying out the Holocaust,” says professor Jeffrey Kopstein, director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. The guard, illegal but still active, wears black and marches in military formation, carrying a red and white flag similar to that of the Arrow Cross. Ervin Nagy, a disillusioned former vice-president of Jobbik and a philosophy lecturer at Karoly Gaspar University, has admitted that the guard was established to attract the extremist vote for a party reluctant to openly display Hitlerian imagery.

There are also extremist elements inside Jobbik that, despite the party’s efforts, make their violent tendencies known. Some party members have been linked to the extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic news portal www.kuruc.info. All this could still be dismissed as the stirrings of a Budapest fringe—if Jobbik had not just won a place in parliament. “This is not acceptable in a democracy,” insists Andras Gero, history professor at Budapest’s Central European University (CEU).

Jobbik’s presidential campaign chief Zsolt Várkonyi is quick to defend his party from comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis—“nonsense,” he told Maclean’s. Indeed, Jobbik supporters are not the swastika-emblazoned skinheads of the ’90s; they are, largely, disenchanted voters under 40. And Vona has built his career not on a loyal adherence to Mein Kampf but on a blending of Hitlerian rhetoric that evokes Hungary’s past glory and more modern concerns about globalization. It clearly strikes a chord with today’s hard-luck Hungarians—one out of 10 are unemployed in the wake of the global recession. Says Geros: “Apart from the Nazi undertones, party propaganda plays heavily on Bolshevik ideals of anti-capitalism—Hitler and Stalin meet at the extreme ends of the political spectrum.”

In Austria, the Nazi-inspired Freedom Party (FPO), which become the third-largest national party in 2008, is also preoccupied by the immigrant question. Leader Heinz-Christian Strache has a solution: set up a ministry for the deportation of immigrants. Strache vehemently denies a Nazi link: “I was never a neo-Nazi and never will be.” But even Austrian courts are not convinced. When Strache sued a Vienna newsweekly for defamation after it branded him a neo-Nazi, the court ruled that he indeed showed “an affinity to National Socialist thinking.” It’s not hard to see why. Photos of Strache, allegedly taken at a neo-Nazi training camp, have been leaked. (Strache says he was out for a day of paintball.) He was also photographed giving the three-finger radical-right salute. (Strache insists he was ordering three beers, earning him the nickname “Three Beers Strache.”) He attacks Jewish bankers and veiled Muslim women (“female ninjas”); he loathes globalization and the EU; and he was once engaged to a girl whose father founded the Austrian branch of the German neo-Nazi National Democratic Party. Most recently, he campaigned to overturn the Verbotsgesetz, the 1947 law banning Hitlerian ideology.

Unlike Jobbik, a relatively new Hungarian product, the FPO has a history with real Nazis: the party’s founding fathers were two wartime SS officers. And many high-ranking FPO officials come from the Burschenschaften, a secretive network of right-wing duelling societies that was banned after the Second World War but made a resurgence in the 1950s. Nazi frontmen Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichman were Burschenschaften; so is Strache.

Because of Austrian law, of course, “the leadership of the party is careful not to play the Nazi card too directly [since] the Nazi party is not legal,” explains Anton Pelinka, professor of nationalism studies at CEU. “The Nazi manifesto is used indirectly. For example, with anti-Semitism, the party does not criticize Jews, it criticizes the ‘East Coast.’ The East Coast is a code word for the New York Jewish conspiracy.” And behind it all, Pelinka says, Hitler is there, “in the closet.”

In the U.S., “I don’t think there’s any doubt at all that the radical right as a whole in the U.S. has been Nazified over the last 30 years,” says Mark Potok, spokesperson at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal advisory group that tracks American hate groups. But it’s become a curious mix: in a 2009 SPLC report on the rapid-fire growth of American right-wing militias, Potok and his colleagues wrote: “Militiamen, white supremacists, anti-Semites, nativists, tax protesters and a range of other activists of the radical right are cross-pollinating and may even be coalescing.”

There’s also been a shift, says Potok, away from the archetypal enemy: African-Americans. “It’s not that the groups like black people,” he explains. But they “now believe that behind black people, brown people, gay people, stands the Jew. More of them have come to a National Socialist view of the world: Jews manipulate everyone else.” Of course, the old racism remains: in 2008, two white supremacist skinheads were arrested for plotting to kill Barack Obama and 88 more at a predominantly black school before beheading 14. In neo-Nazi circles, “88” is code for “Heil Hitler,” while “14” is a reference to “Fourteen Words” from Mein Kampf: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Changing racial demographics have undoubtedly fanned the U.S. flame. In 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau issued a report predicting that whites would fall below 50 per cent of the American population by 2050. “I can tell you that the year 2050 is imprinted on the brain of every white nationalist in this country,” says Potok. “That’s Armageddon for them.” As a result, the SPLC reports, hate groups, many of them with neo-Nazi elements, are thriving—the SPLC located almost 1,000. But Leonard Ziskind, author of Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, points out that today’s American National Socialists might be harder to spot than their 1990s forefathers. “You have radical neo-Nazis actually covering up their swastikas, trying to become more mainstream.” In a crowd, you couldn’t pick them out: “These are people who fly the American flag.”

Around the world, efforts to ban Hitler’s words, along with other evocations of his Third Reich, continue—an implicit acknowledgment of the Führer’s continuing political potency. Just last month, Russian prosecutors officially banned Mein Kampf as “extremist,” making the sale and distribution of the book punishable by fine. In a public statement, the prosecutor-general’s office judged that Hitler’s vitriolic rant deserves blacklisting because it “justifies discrimination and destruction of non-Aryan races.”

The action follows a spate of far-right violence, in this country that lost 26.6 million people in the war against Nazi Germany. Most were attacks on foreigners and migrant workers; SOVA, a Russian research centre that tracks xenophobia, estimates that last year 71 people were killed and 333 injured in hate attacks. Shortly before the ban was introduced, Mein Kampf was reportedly being distributed in Ufa, a region where ultra-right groups are active. Matthew Light, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on Russia, is not surprised to see officials panicking. “The Russian government has become more afraid of skinheads and other extreme-right organizations,” Light explains. “Whereas in the past they saw them as an outlet for people to vent their frustration, they now think this kind of movement is potentially threatening to the government itself.”

It is easy to dismiss Mein Kampf; Galina Kozhevnikova, deputy head of SOVA, says “it’s been a long time since this book by Hitler was of ideological importance. Hitler’s text is archaic and out of date.” And yet it remains a charged symbol. In China, Mein Kampf is forbidden except for research purposes and exists only in special libraries—as is also the case in Brazil. In the Netherlands, selling the book is illegal, although owning or lending it is not. In Canada, the book can be sold legally, but a de facto ban has been in place since Indigo CEO Heather Reisman banished it from her shelves in 2001. In France, it’s legal to sell the book, but only if it is historically annotated. In Austria and Germany, Mein Kampf is banned.

Recent efforts to challenge that injunction in Germany have been blasted by the state of Bavaria, which explained in a statement to Maclean’s that it maintains the ban out of respect for Holocaust victims. But in 2015, the state’s rights to Mein Kampf will expire, the book will enter the public domain, and officials are counting down the time with growing unease. “Once Bavaria’s copyright expires,” warned state science minister Wolfgang Heubisch in February, “there is the danger of charlatans and neo-Nazis appropriating this infamous book for themselves.”

As a result, Bavaria is maintaining its grip on Mein Kampf until the clock runs out, continuing to go after publishers that try to reprint it. When a small Czech publisher began printing Mein Kampf in 2000, the Bavarian prime minister wrote a letter to then-Czech president Vaclav Havel, begging him to put a stop to it. In 2005, when a Polish man’s plan to print a version was revealed by the Associated Press, state officials were urged to get involved directly with Warsaw. And when a Spanish translation appeared on iTunes in 2009, Bavarian officials forced Apple to take it down.

The fear of Hitler and Nazism as a political rallying cry remains. Germany, says Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge professor and one of the most prolific scholars of the Second World War, has been relatively successful in reining in its extreme-right wing. The grounds for that were laid in the postwar period, when the Allies directed an aggressive “de-nazification” campaign in the former Third Reich—one followed by a period of obsessive German self-scrutiny in the 1960s. But in other countries, like Austria, the process was never completed. “Austria,” says Evans, “never came to terms with the past.” (Note, he says, the dearth of Holocaust memorials there.) Evans explains that “most Austrians were happy to be incorporated into Germany with the Anshluss,” even though after the war they would “treat themselves as the first victims of Nazism, and that’s how the Allies treated them.” That incomplete postwar de-nazification might in part explain why, today, the political opposition is run by a party founded out of the SS.

But the state of the current world economy is also fuelling the trend. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, says Annette Timm, professor of European history at the University of Calgary, those Germans who joined up with neo-Nazis “were the ones who fell through the cracks after reunification and needed something to identify with.” Today, Timm says, it is again the down and out “looking for something to feel passionate about.” It’s not surprising that support for Austria’s Freedom Party is high among those without high school degrees, or that in Hungary, one of Europe’s most suffering markets, a Nazi-inspired party is faring so well.

Evans stresses that this can happen because Nazism “adapts and changes to present-day circumstances.” Rather than featuring thuggish skinheads, the far right now runs “young, good-looking white men” like Hungary’s Vona and Austria’s Strache. In most cases, it’s not exactly time to panic—Evans says that in spite of some gains, neo-Nazism still remains to a great extent “on the fringe of society.” But he still finds it all “worrying,” given today’s mass unemployment and recession. The cautious scholar grants that, as of now, the appropriation of Hitlerian ideology is mostly part of “a protest movement,” a way of sending a clear message of frustration to the government. But “that’s what Nazism started out as,” says Evans. “In the 1930s when people voted for the Nazis, they were voting out of protest: not necessarily because they supported the whole ideological package.” And, he adds bleakly, “We all know the results of that voting.”

Jeffrey Herf, professeur d'histoire à l'université du Maryland affirme dans son nouveau livre : Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World que la propagande allemande en direction du monde musulman durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale est à l'origine de l'antijudaïsme arabe et de la montée de l'islamisme. Voici comment le présente le journaliste Allan Hall dans les colonnes du Telegraph.

Roots of Islamic fundamentalism lie in Nazi propaganda for Arab world, book claims

The roots of Islamic fanaticism can be traced to Adolf Hitler's radio messages broadcast around the Arab world during the Second World War, according to a new book.

"Your only hope for rescue is the destruction of the Jews before they destroy you!" Hitler said in a 1942 message, one of thousands broadcast across the Middle East in an attempt to woo the Arab world.

In a broadcast aimed at provoking an anti-Semitic uprising in Egypt, he said: "A large number of Jews who live in Egypt, along with Poles, Greeks, Armenians and Frenchmen, have guns and ammunition.

"Some Jews in Cairo have even asked the British authorities to set up machine guns on the roofs of their houses," he claimed.

But the Nazi's wartime broadcasts had remained a largely hidden chapter in the history of the war until the transmissions were unearthed by a US scholar, who believes they have fuelled continuing unrest in the Middle East.

"The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts," said Jeffrey Herf, a history professor at the University of Maryland.

In his new book, "Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World", Mr Herf argues that Nazi propagandists offered a message that neatly dovetailed with underlying prejudice.

"Islamic fundamentalism, like European totalitarianism in the 20th century, was and is a mixture of very old and very modern elements.

"It is also a product of a mixture of some indigenous currents in the history of Islam with the hatred of democracy, liberalism and the Jews that were so central to National Socialism.
Mr Herf uncovered 6,000 transmissions, produced under the propaganda minister Josef Goebbels and sent around the Arab world from 1939 to 1945.

The transcripts of the broadcasts were made by the American embassy in Cairo during the war, and classified until 1977 in Washington. But it was not until two years ago that Mr Herf became the first scholar to be given access to the files.

The Nazis relied on radio broadcasts - translated into Arabic - to sow propaganda because of high illiteracy in the Arab world at the time. Although radio ownership was small, it was commonplace for cafes and bazaars to draw large crowds to listen to broadcasts.

"This propaganda campaign comprised an important chapter in the history of the war," Mr Herf said. "The Arab language propaganda produced in wartime Berlin was a significant chapter in the longer history of radical Arab nationalism and militant Islam."

Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World
Jeffrey Herf,
Yale University Press
352 p., 30 USD
ISBN: 9780300145793
ISBN-10: 0300145799

Lenine et Hitler se sont-ils rencontrés en 1909 ?

Le tableau qui représenterait la rencontre entre les deux grands bourreaux du XXe siècle.

Dans les colonnes du Daily Mail, le journaliste Fay Schlesinger rapporte qu'un tableau représentant une possible rencontre à Vienne en 1909 de Hitler et de Lenine va être mis en vente.

Your move Mr Hitler: Sketch said to show Nazi leader playing chess with Lenin is up for sale

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266030/Your-Mr-Hitler-Sketch-said-Nazi-leader-playing-chess-Lenin-sale.html#ixzz0l8mvY2qg

A drawing of Adolf Hitler playing chess against Vladimir Lenin 100 years ago is today expected to fetch up to £40,000 at auction.
For decades historians have argued over the likelihood that two of the world's most notorious dictators pitted their wits against one another over an innocuous chessboard.
But forensic evidence has suggested that signatures on the back of the pencil sketch are those of the Nazi leader and the Russian revolutionary.

Meeting of minds: The sketch of Lenin and Hitler playing chess is said to have been signed by the dictators
The etching, which made headlines last year when it was revealed, is said to have been created by Hitler's Jewish art teacher, Emma Lowenstramm. It is titled 'A chess game: Lenin with Hitler - Vienna 1909'.
The two men are thought to have lived minutes from one another in the Austrian capital in the early 1900s. The teacher's house was renowned as a meeting place for political free thinkers at the time.
But experts have disputed the sketch's authenticity because Hitler, on the left controlling the white pieces, looks too old for a 20-year-old man.
They have also argued Lenin was bald, while the picture shows him to have black hair.
The drawing, which measures 20in by 15in, is one of several versions, but the only one thought to have been signed by the dictators.
A wooden chessboard, found alongside the picture and believed to be the one used by the men could also sell for up to £40,000 at auction in Shropshire today.
Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Mullocks Auctioneers, said: 'Some historians will always debate its authenticity but the evidence it is genuine is compelling. Forensic tests showed an 80 per cent propensity that the signatures are genuine.'
The drawing was passed from Miss Lowenstramm's family to their housekeeper when they fled Vienna before the Second World War.
It was handed down to the housekeeper's great grandson Felix Ednhofer, who spent a lifetime compiling a dossier of evidence which will accompany it at auction. Mr Ednhofer died in the 1990s and his son is selling the sketch.

Actualité du livre : Mein Kampf

J'ai toujours eu du mal à comprendre l'hystérie attachée au livre écrit par Hitler durant son emprisonnement dans la prison de Landsberg. Il était parmi les usuels à la bibliothèque de l'Année préparatoire à Sciences-Po (rue de la Chaise à Paris) et je me souvins l'avoir lu avec ennui.

Un des plus exemples de cette hystérie, je l'ai trouvé dans un livre d'Amandine Rochas publié récemment en France :

Enfin, pour la première fois dans un travail qui se veut universitaire, le lecteur ébahi trouve dans la bibliographie la note suivante accompagnant Mein Kampf, le best-seller de Hitler : « Cet ouvrage, qui fut à partir de 1933 le livre par excellence du national-socialisme, a été utilisé avec précaution et dans le seul but de démontrer le racisme de Hitler ». Ouf, on a eu peur ! On songerait à lire cette note à un chirurgien effrayé à la vue du sang.

Lire cet ouvrage en Europe en 2009 est un pensum qui ne se compare en rien à son réel pouvoir dans la société allemande du début des années 1920. Vouloir l'interdire partout en multipliant les procédures judiciaires comme le font les Allemands est ridicule. Ces efforts vains ne servent qu'à redonner de l'actualité à un mauvais livre qui autrement tomberait dans 'loubli comme tant d'autres ouvrages de circonstance.

Comme le précise l'article de Mathieu Szeradzki dans le Figaro, cet ouvrage est en vente livre en France.

L'organisation juive LICRA avait voulu la faire interdire, mais les Nouvelles Editions Latines ont pu démontrer à l'audience que leur édition date de 1934 et qu'elle avait faite à la demande d'organisations juives.

Le 11 juillet 1979, la justice s'est donc contentée de demander à ce que soit inclus un avis pour dénoncer le contenu de l'ouvrage.

Voici comment son traducteur André Clamettes explique les raisons de son travail :

« Je n’ai pas traduit Mein Kampf sans but ni raison. Ce pensum de huit cent pages, je me le suis infligé de bon cœur pour les miens et pour mes amis, mais aussi pour tous les hommes et pour toutes des femmes de bonne volonté, surtout pour les jeunes. Je n’ai pas l’intention d’indiquer ici les conclusions que chacun doit tirer du livre ; autrement je l’aurais analysé et commenté, non pas traduit. Mais il ne me convient pas de laisser à la critique seule le soin de présenter mon travail ; je ne veux pas de malentendu sur mes intentions, ni les choisir après parmi toutes celles que l’on me prêtera. Certes, cet ouvrage qui fut livré au public allemand en 1926-1928 jette une clarté singulière sur la politique allemande de l’après-guerre. En l’ignorant, nous satisfaisant de manière bien facile de révélations au compte-gouttes, nous étions ridicules et stupides ; nous découvrions des fragments minimes d’une vérité que l’on nous jetait au visage en huit cent pages serrées. Certes aussi, les prophéties de cet ouvrage engagent l’avenir. La doctrine d’action politique, complaisamment développée, demeure actuelle. Le livre constitue le dogme du parti qui mène l’Allemagne actuelle, dogme d’une agissante majorité, dogme demain de l’Allemagne entière. Je dis bien dogme, et je pense au Coran. Mais il faut bien se garder de restreindre la portée du présent ouvrage. Il ne faut pas suivre Hitler polémiste qui dit quelque part d’un livre qu’il juge révélateur de l’esprit des juifs : « quand cet ouvrage sera devenu le livre de chevet d’un peuple, le péril Juif sera conjuré ». Il ne faut pas lire Mein Kampf en se plaçant au point de vue d’un « péril allemand ou au point de vue de notre seule mitoyenneté. Il faut se mettre sur un plan largement humain. L’ouvrage même autorise à le faire. Il s’agit d’un document ample, tiré à près d’un million d’exemplaires en Allemagne, traduit dans plusieurs pays. Il a été écrit par un Allemand pour les Allemands, mais il touche des problèmes politiques, sociaux, et de morale, qui se posent à tous les peuples. La traduction en est intégrale : on n’a pas le droit, sur quinze ou sur cent versets du Coran, de parler de l’islamisme, ni, sur dix pages de Mein Kampf de parler de l’hitlérisme ; et la lecture des passages secondaires sera aussi féconde que celle des passages réputés essentiels. Ainsi lu, cet ouvrage aidera à pénétrer la mentalité allemande, une des faces de cette mentalité anglo-saxonne que nous ne daignons pas étudier et comprendre, mais dont nous ne pouvons nous défendre de subir les manifestations ; attitude bornée et dangereuse : que l’on apprécie ce que nous a coûté depuis quinze ans notre incompréhension de l’Angleterre, des États-Unis, de l’Allemagne. Mon travail aurait atteint son but dernier s’il tournait les Français vers ce problème. Mais on me parlera de la guerre : elle naît bien souvent de l’avidité de quelques-uns et de la peur d’une multitude ; elle ne saurait trouver de terrain plus favorable que celui de l’ignorance et de l’incompréhension mutuelles que j’ai voulu combattre. »

— André Calmettes, Journal de l'École polytechnique, 25 février 1934.

HITLER, Adolf. Mon combat / trad. intégrale de Mein Kampf par J. Gaudefroy-Demonbynes et A. Calmettes. Paris : Nouvelles Éditions latines, 1934, 685 p.

Mein Kampf pourrait être réédité en Allemagne

Les droits sur le livre d'Adolf Hitler tombent dans le domaine public en 2015. Les juifs d'Allemagne ont donné leur accord pour une édition critique et commentée, afin de devancer les nostalgiques du Führer.

Le livre maudit réédité outre-Rhin ? C'est le souhait qu'a émis mercredi le président du Conseil central des juifs d'Allemagne en se prononçant en faveur d'une réédition annotée de l'œuvre d'Adolf Hitler. «Je pense qu'il est sensé et important de publier une édition du Mein Kampf d'Hitler avec des commentaires de chercheurs», a affirmé Stephan Kramer à la télévision ZDF. «Nous avons besoin de préparer dès aujourd'hui une édition universitaire assortie de critiques historiques pour éviter que les néo-nazis n'en tirent profit» lorsque les droits sur le livre tomberont dans le domaine public en 2015, 70 ans après la mort de l'auteur.

Mein Kampf est interdit en Allemagne depuis la fin de la guerre. Les droits d'auteur ont été confiés par les Américains au Land de Bavière, héritier des biens personnels d'Adolf Hitler. Celui-ci s'est toujours fermement opposé à une éventuelle réédition, même augmentée de toutes sortes de précautions et d'avertissements. Cependant, l'échéance du 31 décembre 2015 change la donne.

Des néo-nazis pourraient se saisir de l'œuvre

Il y a tout juste un mois, Wolfgang Heubisch, ministre des Sciences et de la Recherche de Bavière, s'était prononcé en faveur d'une réédition: «S'il faut que l'ouvrage d'Hitler soit édité, le danger existe que des charlatans et des néo-nazis se saisissent de cette œuvre ignoble lorsque la Bavière n'aura plus les droits. Je suis donc de l'opinion qu'une édition critique et bien documentée soit préparée». Heubisch a dans la foulée répondu favorablement à la proposition de l'Institut historique de la ville de Munich de débuter immédiatement les travaux pour une nouvelle édition du livre.

Rédigé par Adolf Hitler alors qu'il était emprisonné à Landsberg entre 1923 et 1924 pour une tentative de coup d'État, Mein Kampf pose les fondements de l'idéologie nazie. Limitées à sa parution en juillet 1925, les ventes ont explosé avec l'ascension politique d'Adolf Hitler. Diffusé par le régime nazi, plus de 10 millions d'exemplaires se sont vendus entre 1930 et 1940, auxquels on peut ajouter les traductions dans une quinzaine de langues.

En janvier, un éditeur britannique avait causé une polémique en republiant en Allemagne des fac-simile du journal nazi Völkischer Beobachter, associés à des commentaires d'historiens. Un procès intenté par la Bavière, là aussi propriétaire des droits, avait réussi à faire interdire la vente de numéros du journal datant d'après 1939.

En France, la vente est taboue mais autorisée

En France, la publication et la vente en librairie de Mein Kampf demeurent taboues mais ne sont pas interdites. Dans un arrêt du 11 juillet 1979, la Cour d'appel de Paris juge que Mein Kampf peut être autorisé à la vente compte-tenu de son intérêt historique, mais accompagné toutefois d'un texte de huit pages mettant en garde le lecteur. Celui-ci évoque les dispositions légales en matière d'incitation à la haine raciale et rappelle les crimes contre l'humanité du régime hitlérien.

Diverses éditions circulent aujourd'hui sous le manteau dans les réseaux d'extrême-droite ou sont tout simplement accessibles sur internet.

Ras le bol d'Adolf

Le fermier britannique Derek Gow avec ses aurochs.

Hier la presse britannique a consacré des pages et des pages aux « super vaches aryennes » voulues par Hitler pour dominer le monde des desserts lactés et qui se retrouver à paître paisiblement dans des prairies anglaises. Aujourd'hui, ce sont des lettres d'un prisonnier anglais, retrouvées par hasard, qui se font un chemin vers la une de la presse populaire.

Il est fascinant de constater que plus d'un demi-siècle après la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le régime hitlérien continue de fasciner ceux qui l'ont vaincu en dépit de sa diabolisation absolue.

Qu'en serait-il si dans nombre de pays, comme la France, des lois nombreuses ne venaient pas freiner cette fascination morbide au prix d'une sérieuse atteinte aux principes de la liberté d'expression et des droits individuels ?

Faute de considérer l'Allemagne hitlérienne comme un sujet d'étude comme peut l'être le régime stalinien, ces quelques années de l'histoire européenne vont rester l'objet d'une fascination démesurée et absurde.

Il est normal de critiquer et dénoncer ces marginaux qui se réclament des symboles du régime déchu pour symboliser leur refus du monde actuel. Mais il faut bien prendre conscience qu'ils sont le reflet en négatif de ceux qui se servent du même régime pour diaboliser tous ceux qui ne pensent pas comme eux, c'est la fameuse « reductio ad hitlerum ».

J'ai été fasciné, voici quelques années, par une jeune étudiante qui dans un mémoire d'histoire sur la Seconde Guerre mondiale avait écrit dans sa bibliographie la note suivante accompagnant Mein Kampf, le best-seller de Hitler :

« Cet ouvrage, qui fut à partir de 1933 le livre par excellence du national-socialisme, a été utilisé avec précaution et dans le seul but de démontrer le racisme de Hitler ».

Ces quelques mots résument une attitude qui n'a rien d'historique mais qui s'aventure dans le religieux.

La journaliste britannique Tanya Gold publie un article d'humeur ce matin dans les colonnes du Guardian dans lequel elle s'insurge contre cette victoire posthume d'Adolf Hitler et de sa troupe de bras cassés.

Nazi cows, Nazi cats, actors playing depressed Nazis. It's all just Hitler porn and it disgusts me

There was story in the newspapers yesterday about Nazi cows. Yes. Nazi cows. As opposed to Maoist cows. There is a breed of cattle, formerly extinct, that Hitler apparently wanted to revive because it has significance in Teutonic myth. It was his favourite cow - an über-cow, as opposed to an ünter-cow - and it needed to be given a Liebenshed. And now one has been found living in Devon. According to one newspaper, this cow is "a symbol of the Nazi vision for world domination". There was also a story in the papers yesterday about Coco Chanel's collaboration with the Nazis, after they invaded her shop in 1940, possibly looking for non-Aryan dresses.
At the weekend I went to the cinema. I sat and sucked Minstrels, and watched Good, a film about a depressed Nazi, played by Viggo Mortensen. He ponced around in a Swastika tiepin, looking wracked and smiling at Goebbels. This came a few months after The Reader, when I sat and sucked Minstrels, and watched another film about a depressed Nazi, played by Kate Winslet. This comes a few months after Valkyrie, which was also a film about a depressed Nazi, played by Tom Cruise. He tried to kill Hitler with leather goods, and failed. The briefcase exploded, but the tyrant lived on.

I could go on. I could fill your eyes and ears with Nazi tat, culture and non-stories, until you turn black and white and red and go and invade Poland. I could go all the way to Moscow without passing Go and without collecting 200 stolen Rembrandts. I could tell you about the Cats Who Look Like Hitler web page - "click here to add your Kitler". I could tell you about Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest, which featured Hitler's disgusting adolescence.

Hitler has guest-starred in South Park, The Twilight Zone, Red Dwarf, Monty Python and The Simpsons. He has appeared in a sitcom called Heil Honey I'm Home! (Not my exclamation mark.) He appears in a videogame called Snoopy Versus the Red Baron and a comic called the New Adventures of Hitler. In novels he has lived in a cage under the Kremlin and tried to clone himself. Salvador Dalí painted Hitler Masturbating. In the film Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn, he escapes from hell. Am I living inside Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn?

This disgusts me. It makes me wretch. I thought the whole point of the second world war was to eradicate Nazism from the face of the earth. No more swastikas, no more shiny boots, no more dwarf narcissists giving vegetarian dinner parties and shooting liberals. It was supposed to be over in 1945. But we seem to have a new kind of Nazi domination - a cultural domination - and it's silly. There is no point to it: it exists just for itself. And it turns our eyes from the evils that we should be noticing today. It is a big dressing-up box, full of distraction.

So I have Nazi ennui. Hitler fatigue. I have seen them all - Derek Jacobi as Hitler, David Bamber as Hitler, Zippy from Rainbow as Hitler. Sometimes I lie in bed and imagine actors' agents having conversations: "Could Tom Hollander do Goebbels? He looks like Goebbels. Is Eric Bana too handsome for Albert Speer?" I feel as if I am living in a Nazi-themed Saturday-night jaunt - a sort of militarised version of Dynasty, with Hitler as Alexis and Himmler as Sammy Jo. Why can't Adolf stay where he belongs, under a car park in Berlin, his bones staring sightlessly upwards into a Skoda?

There is a point to all this Hitler porn, you may say. Snoopy Versus the Red Baron has a valuable lesson to teach us about tyranny. Cats Who Look Like Hitler have something to meow about the dangers of genocide. Bollocks, I say. There are genocides happening today, and they are being shot off the front pages by Nazi cows - Nazi cows! - and interviews with Mortensen talking about playing a depressed Nazi: "I spent a lot of time in Germany just looking at people." Really? Five million have died in the Congo in the last 10 years, in a war for the minerals that we use. And Heil Honey I'm Home! has nothing to say about that.

I appreciate the superb culture about Nazism - the history books, the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the films The Pawnbroker and Judgement at Nuremberg, even Schlindler's List - although I hate the redemptive ending. But particularly since Life is Beautiful, the cinematic love story set against the backdrop of the Holocaust, Nazi-inspired culture has got bigger, and more stupid. Bill Nighy as a Nazi general in Valkyrie? Who will be next? I close my eyes and I know that we now face the terrifying prospect of Kylie Minogue as Eva Braun.

I don't need Tom Cruise in an eye-patch to teach me about humanity and I certainly don't need to see Winslet naked, or Mortensen being intimately caressed in his SS uniform to learn about the perils of tyranny. I own a copy of Sins, a 1986 Joan Collins mini-series about a businesswoman hounded by a Nazi, played by Steven Berkoff. (He didn't play Hitler but the performance was in homage to him - he marched like a broken Action Man doll.) I was a teenager when I first saw it, but I still knew that Sins was not designed to give me a warning from history. It is designed to thrill me by showing me pictures of Collins in a gold dress being chased round Venice by a Nazi in a gondola.

• This week Tanya watched Hug a Hoodie: "A 2007 pornographic movie inspired by David Cameron." Tanya also watched In the Night Garden: "I noticed the astonishing resemblance between Iggle Piggle and David Cameron. I dreamed about David Cameron. I will vote for Gordon Brown."

Crise économique : et si Hitler avait raison ?

Délégation française à la conférence internationale de 1931 qui ne put se mettre d'accord sur les mesures à prendre pour combattre les effets de la crise économique.

Voilà l'étonnante question posée par David Leonhardt du New York Times dans le cadre de la controverse entre Américains et Européens sur les mesures à prendre pour sortir de la crise économique.

Dans un article, le journaliste rappelle que les mesures de relance peuvent remettre en fonctionnement une économie et il appelle à la rescousse… Adolf Hitler !

David Leonhardt.

In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.

No sane person enjoys mixing nuance and Nazis, but this bit of economic history has a particular importance this week. In the run-up to the G-20 meeting, European leaders have resisted calls for more government spending. Last week, the European Union president, Mirek Topolanek, echoed a line from AC/DC — whom he had just heard in concert — and described the Obama administration’s stimulus plan as “a road to hell.”

Here in the United States, many people are understandably wondering whether the $800 billion stimulus program will make much of a difference. They want to know: Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century.

Yes, stimulus works.

When governments have taken aggressive steps to soften an economic decline, they have succeeded. The Germans did it in the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt did so more haltingly, and had more halting results. Even the limp Japanese recovery plan of the 1990s makes the case. Although dithering over a bank rescue kept Japan in a slump, government spending on roads and bridges made things better than they otherwise would have been.

No matter what happens in London on Thursday, President Obama and other world leaders are sure to claim the meeting as a success. (“I do not regard the economic conference as a failure,” Roosevelt said in 1933.)

But if the meeting is going to be an actual success, it will have to do more than put a happy face on trans-Atlantic disagreements. It will need to begin nudging the discussion about stimulus toward a more accurate reading of history.

The Americans and Europeans aren’t really as far apart as Mr. Topolanek’s AC/DC homage suggests. Europe is doing less than the United States, but the gap isn’t huge. It just seems so because European stimulus tends to arrive quietly, from existing safety net programs. In this country, where the safety net is weaker, stimulus comes largely from new laws.

Yet the rhetoric from Europe — even the more subdued recent remarks, like those of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — still creates a problem. Stimulus skepticism today will make it harder to pass more stimulus tomorrow. And more will probably be needed.

George Soros, the billionaire investor who was born in Budapest and works in New York, came to Washington last week and captured both the problem and the potential for a solution. “I think they can be brought around,” he said of the Europeans. “I am actually hopeful something constructive can happen.”

The objections to stimulus tend to come in two forms: Its costs are too high, and its benefits too small.

Mr. Topolanek and German officials have been pressing the first argument. They say that the additional government spending can lead to inflation and government debt. The Weimar Republic of the 1920s, where inflation helped lead to Hitler’s rise, casts a long shadow.

Stimulus opponents here in the United States — mainly Congressional Republicans (though not, tellingly, Republican governors of some large states) — have been warning about debt, too. But they have also been making the second argument. When the government spends money, they say, it simply displaces spending by the private sector. Republicans on Capitol Hill have taken to citing a recent book by the journalist Amity Shlaes, “The Forgotten Man,” which claims the New Deal didn’t work.

Theoretically, neither of these arguments is crazy. But they don’t have much evidence on their side.

The best takedown of Ms. Shlaes’s thesis came from Eric Rauchway, a historian, who pointed out that her favorite statistic did not count people employed by New Deal programs to be employed. Excluding the effects of the medicine, the patient is as sick as ever!

When Roosevelt stuck to a stimulus program, unemployment fell markedly, and the biggest stimulus of all — World War II — did the rest. It’s true that economic models say the economy shouldn’t work this way. When resources are sitting idle, businesses should find a way to use them profitably. But they often don’t.

People become irrationally pessimistic during a downturn. They are driven by what Keynes called animal spirits. Only government can typically change the dynamic.

Could the government spending eventually lead to inflation and crippling debts? Absolutely. But the mistakes of the last 80 years have gone in the other direction. During the Great Depression, Japan’s lost decade, the Asian financial crisis and even the last 18 months, governments didn’t act aggressively enough. Deflation and lack of growth ended up being the real risks.

These are precisely the risks facing the world economy now. In Spain, prices are already falling. Layoffs are still mounting around the world. Financial firms have more losses to acknowledge.

Given the diminished standing of the United States, Mr. Obama won’t be able to get the Europeans to fall in line behind him this week. But he can still make progress. He and the American delegation can, in gentle terms, ask the Europeans to live up to their own standard — and remind them of their self-interest.

Two weeks ago, responding to criticism, an executive of the European Central Bank wrote a letter to an Italian newspaper claiming, “fiscal stimulus in European countries is wholly comparable to that seen in the United States.” That simply isn’t true, as the chart at right makes clear. The difference amounts to about $200 billion over three years.

Because the global economy is in many ways integrated, Europe can benefit from American stimulus without pulling its own weight. But because the global economy isn’t completely integrated, European stimulus would still help Europe more than anywhere else. And that presents the American delegation with perhaps its most persuasive case.

Right now, Eastern Europe appears to be one of the world’s most vulnerable places. It is a relatively poor region, where the population is disaffected and where the economy is shrinking rapidly. In both Estonia and Latvia, the gross domestic product fell 10 percent last year.

At the G-20, the leaders of the richer European countries will be asking the world to help Eastern Europe. By all means, the world should help. But Europe should reconsider its part, too.

David Irving, l'avocat de Hitler

David Irving photographié chez lui pendant son entretien avec Johann Hari.

Le journaliste Johann Hari a publié hier un étonnant article dans les colonnes de l'Independent consacré à l'historien britannique (anglais) David Irving qui est probablement un odieux personnage mais aussi un curieux mélange de spéléologue des archives et de bon connaisseur de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Ces indéniables talents sont hélas compromis par une détestation du genre humain en général et des Juifs en particulier.

Sa misanthropie explique probablement pourquoi, dans ses livres, il prend plaisir à rédiger à contre-courant, hérissant les plumes des historiens universitaires, non seulement en affichant des opinions marginales, mais en s'appuyant sur une exploitation directe des pièces d'archives souvent inédites, citons sa biographie de Winston Churchill.

Dans cette méthode réside à la fois la force et la faiblesse de David Irving. Rédigeant directement à partir des documents qu'il extrait des archives, il a tendance à écrire des ouvrages dans lesquels on trouve beaucoup de pages sur les points où abondent les sources et fort peu là où elles manquent. Ses biographies de Goebbels ou de Goering illustrent les limites de sa méthode.

Autre exemple frappant, dans son Hitler's War, Irving s'appuie sur le fait qu'aucun document des archives allemandes des années de guerre relatifs à la tragédie des Juifs d'Europe dans les camps de concentration et de meurtre de masse ne porte la signature du Führer pour en conclure que Hitler n'y est pour rien.

Avec cette hypothèse, David Irving s'exonère à bon compte de toute tentative d'explication pour ce qui demeure un problème historiographique difficile à résoudre et que des chercheurs aussi différents que Jean-Claude Pressac ou Raul Hilberg ont tenté de résoudre à leur manière.

Ce qui apparaît à la lumière de cet excellent profil biographique de David Irving est à quel point l'historien autodidacte est fasciné par son sujet d'études. Je ne crois pas qu'il affiche des opinions aussi indulgentes au sujet de Hitler par le seul besoin de choquer son monde et jouer les enfants terribles de l'histoire. David Irving semble être devenu un admirateur sincère de Hitler mais en conservant assez de lucidité pour percevoir les contradictions quand elles le touchent à un niveau personnel. C'est ainsi qu'il doit reconnaître que sa propre fille aurait été la victime du programme d'euthanasie de son cher Führer.

Quoi qu'il en soit, avec ce papier, le journalisme britannique de gauche nous donne un superbe illustration de l'indépendance d'esprit et de qualité professionnelle.

David Irving: 'Hitler appointed me his biographer'

Hitler wasn’t anti-Semitic, and the Holocaust wasn’t his fault - David Irving’s take on Nazi Germany has made him many enemies. Johann Hari meets an unapologetic apologist

Blind faith or mischief? 'One hundred years from now, Hitler will get a very decent hearing,' says David Irving

“Hitler appointed me his biographer,” David Irving says. He is not laughing. He is announcing that the Fuhrer – the man he has revered since he was a child – saw him coming. Yes: Hitler prophesied Irving as the man who would clear away the smears and bring The Truth at last to an unwilling world. Irving discovered this prophecy when he was writing a biography of Adolf Hitler, but he is only prepared to disclose it baldly now. “I made a great point of tracking down all Hitler’s surviving doctors,” he says, “and I identified Erwin Giesing as the doctor who treated Hitler after the bomb attempt on his life in 1944.” He tracked him down in the 1970s to Aachen in West Germany, and when Irving called, he claims Giesing said: “Yes, I’ve been expecting you.”

Irving arrived at Giesing’s surgery and, he says, was immediately handed a 400-page file. “Giesing said it was his diary [of his time with Hitler]. ‘That’s what you have come for,’ [he said]. I asked why, why me? Why haven’t you given it to Jacobson or Hilburg or any of the other great historians?” Giesing said the answer lay on page 385. Irving flicked to this page, and, he says, “it is August 1944 and he is treating Hitler – cauterizing his eardrum – and he says, ‘Mein Furher you realize that you have the same illness now in your inner ear that the Kaiser had?’ Hitler said ‘Yes that is true, how did you know that?’ And Geesing said he had read it in the biography of the Kaiser written by an Englishman, J D Chamier.” And he says Hitler replied: “One day, an Englishman will come along and write my biography. But it cannot be an English man of the present generation. They won’t to be objective. It will have to be an Englishman of the next generation, and one who is totally familiar with all the German archives.”

Irving sits back with an expression of beatific calm. “So [when] I phoned the doctor and he said ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ the Messiah had come. The one he had been waiting for all these years. And of course all the other historians hate that because they don’t fit.” I stare silently for a moment. To clarify: you actually think Hitler wanted you to be his biographer? “Yes. Yes and I am not ashamed of that. Hitler knew that. Hitler himself said that for fifty years they won’t be able to write the truth about me.”

And I realize this interview isn’t about history; it’s about pathology.

How did this happen? How did a clever boy abandoned by his father in wartime Essex – as Nazi bombs fell all around – end up as the last man entranced by Adolf Hitler? How did a historian feted, for a while, by the English right end up in jail in Austria under laws banning the reconstitution of the Nazi Party? How did the father of a disabled daughter end up believing the great killer of the disabled was spiritually guiding him? And how did it end here, with this?

I: Swinging the lantern

David Irving has limped to the door of his large Berkshire country house, and is standing by a Christmas tree, waiting. I trudge up the drive, wondering how a recent bankrupt can afford all this, when he beckons me in with a rather severe look. As we walk into his kitchen, he explains his awkward movements: “If you spend four hundred days in prison, your muscles turn to Marmalade jelly. We were allowed to walk around once a day in a yard smaller than this room –” he waves his hand around the kitchen – “seventy men, walking clockwise. At my age,” seventy, “the muscles don’t come back. I have to crawl like a cockroach up stairs.”

He begins to make coffee and bleak chit-chat. He says that two days after he was released from prison, he fell over in Swiss Cottage tube station. “A woman came up to me and said ‘What’s happened to you?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been in prison for 400 days?’ and she scuttled away.” While the water boils, he takes me on a tour of the grounds. There are acres of rolling greenery, lapping over private tennis courts and spurting fountains. He lives here alone. His former partner – or “concubine”, as he calls her – Bente Hogh ended their relationship when he was imprisoned, and he is single now. Their teenage daughter Jessica visits sometimes. As he shows me the foliage proudly, he explains that he used to live half the year in Florida, but now immigration is “a nightmare.” He adds with a wag of the finger: “If you go to Florida, don’t go with a woman. Florida is very humid, and she will blame the humidity on you. It will be your fault.”

We settle in the living room looking out over the grounds, and our photographer begins to snap him. He mentions that the white coffee-cup Irving is holding works well against the green, and Irving says: “Well, it is an Aryan cup.”

A picture of his father, John, stares out from the mantelpiece. “I saw him very little,” Irving says. “The rumour in the family was that when he found out that my mother was expecting twins – me and my brother – he turned and fled. [That was] 1938. There were various attempts, sporadically, at reconciliation. In those days families didn't divorce. He came back once from Wales where he was living, and I've got a vague memory of him being there for three or four days and then kicking over the traces and going again. I remember in those two or three days, I went to Brentford school happy, nonchalantly mentioning that I was going to be having a chat with my father that evening. But then he was gone again. Then some time in the 1950s he came back for about another week. He tried and also failed.”

He only got to know his father in the last year of his life: 1964. John said he fought in the Battle of Jutland, so Irving got a contract for him with his publisher to write a book about it for the anniversary. But his mother warned him he would only be let down again: the book would never arrive. So Irving drove to Wales and took his father back to London to live in his flat. “I sat him at that table and I put out an old tape recorder in front of him and I said you dictate and I'll spend all afternoon typing [it] up. Between us we finished the book.”

He suspects now his father was a fantasist. He said he fought in the war and was invalided out after being on HMS Edinburgh, but “after a time, when you get to know your father, in retrospect you think – I wonder if that was true? My sister has done a lot of research and says, ‘You know David, a lot of what daddy told us wasn't exactly true.’? Oh, he was full of stories. He affected a mock Welsh accent when he told them.” Then he adds: “In the navy they call this make-believe and exaggeration ‘swinging the lantern.’”

Are you like your father, David? “Oh, everyone spots similarities between me and my father? In fact my first wife, Pilar, got on very well with my mother, and at one point [she told her] I was being just the same as my father. I know how he behaved.” How was that? “Oh, probably some chauvinism. I've got pronounced views on women. They're very useful but they have their place.” And he thought that? “Oh, I'm sure he did. When he died, his brother sent me a twelve page letter telling me what a rotter my father had been.”

David was left alone with his mother and his siblings in the village of Ongar, in Essex. She rose them alone, making money by drawing sketches for the Radio Times. I ask how she explained that their father didn’t return. “Oh, I take always with a pinch of salt what women say about how their husbands behave. I've heard equally bad stories about her having complained to the Admiralty about him, which didn't do his career any good.” Nonetheless he says she raised her four children “absolutely impeccably. She managed to get us all into public school in Brentwood.” But it was a tough wartime childhood. He says: “You're very indignant you've got no toys. Our toys were made of broomsticks and wood. My older brother John had a Hornby train, the only reason I've ever wanted to have a little boy was so I would have an excuse to have a Hornby train.”

And this is where Adolf Hitler first enters David Irving’s story.

II: That Man

“I was told you don't have toys because of that man Hitler,” he says, sipping from his Aryan cup. “He was called That Man. [In the newspaper cartoons] there were Nazis parading around – Mr Hitler with his crinkly boots and little toothbrush moustache, and there was Dr Goebbels with his club foot, and fat old Goering with his medals. And I thought – because of them I've got no toys?” He snorts. “You split away from your parents at a very early age. They tell you things and you nod and say ‘yes mummy,’ but at the back of your brain you think, well, I'm probably being sold a bill of goods. You make a little mental check?. I said to myself, if they’re such ludicrous people, then why are the Germans doing it for them?”

His twin brother, Nicky, remembers David at six years old running towards bombed-out houses after a Nazi air-raid, shouting “Heil Hitler!” Irving shakes his head. “Untrue, untrue,” he mutters. His infatuation began, he says, a few years later, when he was sent away to school. He got hold of a copy of Hitler’s Table Talk, and he would read it at night, allowing himself only a few pages at a time so it would last longer. “I don't know if you've read Hitler's Table Talk, but it's [in bites of] two or three page describing in the first person what Hitler said at lunch or dinner, from 1941 to 1944,” he says. “It’s fascinating to read what Hitler was thinking. A lot of it made sense.” Like what? “Oh, about women? Women have very special minds. They are superficially similar to us and they speak a very similar language to us but they are also rather like ants. They can communicate with each other, without actually [using] a language that you can hear? More than that I'm not going to say, I've got enemies enough already.”

What could be more taboo in the Britain of the 1950s than to embrace Adolf Hitler, the man the country had united to defeat, as an alternative father-figure? It was the most absolute and shocking way to reject everything around him. “I was beaten solidly throughout [school]. It was a very sadistic process? Our house master was the gym teacher, which meant he was very muscular? There was an umbrella stand with ten different bamboo canes of different calibre with a cushion next to it, which he would try them out on first” – he makes a repeated thrashing noise – “and he would say right come with me, follow me.” It was ritualised, I say. “Oh, absolutely, it was sadistic. And I wouldn't have missed it.”

When he was in his mid-teens, he won a school prize. He could choose a book to be presented to him on Speech Day by the Deputy Prime Minister, Rab Butler. Irving asked for Mein Kampf. “I arranged for all the local press to photograph the deputy prime minister giving a copy of Mein Kampf to Brentwood schoolboy David Irving,” he says with glee. “I stood there holding the book up long enough for all the people to get their focus and flash and I sat down. I looked at the book and it wasn't Mein Kampf, it was a German-Russian technical dictionary. They got their own back.”

After Brentwood he went to Imperial College, London to study science, but he believes he was thwarted by a “Communist” professor and had to drop out. He headed for Germany. “I was the only foreign labourer in the whole of the Ruhr,” he says. Working in the steelworks, he began to hear whispers of another taboo. “Dresden was a word which just didn't exist in the English vocabulary then,” he says. But the Germans told him their city – filled with civilians, with little military role – had been firebombed by the Allies. “The whole of the city centre was cordoned off while they were cremating the bodies, ten thousand at a time on the city square,” Irving says, shaking his head.

So he wrote his first history book, a densely researched account of the firebombing of Dresden. Suddenly he was an up-and-coming historian, acclaimed across continents. But he remained within the historical consensus: the book condemns Nazi atrocities. When I remind Irving of this now, he says these passages were inserted into the book without his knowledge. “My publisher William Kimber? felt very deeply about the Dresden air raid and he put in certain lines into my Dresden book without telling me. Okay?” He only realised this, he insists, “years later.” I must look incredulous. You didn’t see the proofs? “No.” Why would he do that? “Political correctness. Don't raise your eyebrows in great shock, this happens. You'd be surprised if you knew how many people have a hand in a book before it's finally published, lawyers, publishers, editors' sisters and wives.” Ah yes, women.

By telling the story of Dresden from the perspective of the Germans, he suddenly found another door opening – to Hitler’s ghost.

III: The Magic Circle

Scattered across Germany, silent and shamed, were Hitler’s secretary, his personal guard, his doctor. They were, he says, “a small circle of very frightened people who had had a very tough time. When one of them [died], they would meet at the graveside.” They had never spoken to anyone. Irving was the first outsider to penetrate this “Magic Circle”. Otto Gunsche had been Hitler’s personal adjutant, the man who burned his body at the end – and he liked the Dresden book. After a series of meetings, he led Irving to the rest.

“They were all very nice people,” he says. “This was something that impressed me from day one – these are people who've been to staff college, they've been to university, they're educated, upper-middle class people, chosen for their qualities and their abilities? and they all spoke to me in private in terms of glowing admiration of the Chief. And I thought to myself – there must be two Hitlers, there's the Hitler we're told about by Hollywood and Madison Avenue and there's the Hitler that these people worked for.”

They told him about a Hitler who was kind to children and animals. He recounts a very long story about how Hitler once noticed that two stenographers were cold, and insisted they be brought heaters.

When I suggest that all dictators have a loyal clique who like them – it means nothing – he keeps dodging the question. Eventually, he responds by arguing dictators are often misjudged: Idi Amin gets a unfair press, for one. Irving says he owns a medallion that belonged to the Ugandan dictator, and he likes to wear it secretly below his clothes when he is delivering a lecture. But, I respond, he ethnically cleansed the Ugandan Asians. He shrugs: “Expelling people is something that's been going on for a long time.”

From within Hitler’s circle, Irving began to develop an elaborate theory that “the Chief” was innocent after all. After the barrage of unanswerable evidence presented at his trial, Irving now concedes that the Holocaust happened – and there were “some” gassings at Auschwitz – but he insists Hitler had no idea it was going on. It was orchestrated by the evil Joseph Goebbels and his staff. They deliberately hid it from Hitler, because he was “the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich.”

Eva Braun “suckered him”, and Goring made him look anti-Jewish when, in fact, by 1938, Hitler “wasn’t anti-semitic at all.” Hitler wasn’t anti-Semitic? If you look at his career, both in detail and in general, Hitler was the person who protected the Jews,” he continues. “But he was repeatedly outsmarted by the Heinrich Himmlers, the Martin Bormanns.” When I start listing Hitler’s many genocidal rages against Jews, he says he was just “playing to the gallery.” Of course, to maintain his view that Hitler knew nothing, he has to tamper with historical documents – changing words, and deliberately ignoring all the contrary evidence, as was shown ad nausem at the trial. I am more interested in teasing out why Irving should contort himself to believe this.

If a raddled, aged Adolf Hitler appeared at your door now, what would you say to him? “I would switch on my tape recorder.” And after you had heard everything he had to say, would turn him in? “Then I would base my decision on what he told me he had done and I would adopt a very harsh measure on that. In the case of Herman Goerring, for example? a lovely, enjoyable buffoon but he was undoubtedly a hanging case. He committed murders, and in my mind if you commit one murder you're for the rope.” So you think it’s conceivable that Adolf Hitler could not have committed even one murder? “With his own hands?” No, not with his own hands. He goes off on a long side-track about how Winston Churchill did kill people with his bare hands. I have to drag him back to Hitler. “Oh, he's technically responsible, he's constitutionally responsible, but what interests me? [is] you find out again and again he's been duped, he's been duped by Eva Braun, he's been duped...”

The last time he saw his mother, she disowned him because of this Hitler-love. She had come to visit his new baby, Josephine, and she was sitting with the child when Irving tried to read her a passage from one of his books. In revulsion, she asked: “What is this viper I've nurtured to my bosom?” Irving says: “She wasn't interested and I said, ‘You just want to play with Josephine, you don't want to listen to what I'm [saying], you've just never been interested in anything I've done, have you!’ Afterwards you kick yourself that those are the terms you have parted company for ever.” But still he cannot stop. He says: “One hundred years from now Hitler will get a very decent hearing. Not so much his underlings.

IV: The Enemy

There were no Jews in the village where David Irving grew up, and he used to think there were none at his school. “But let me tell you a horrible little anecdote?” he says, leaning forward. “Immediately after the Lipstadt trial I flew to Florida so they couldn't touch me? On the plane a man came down the aisle towards me, and said ‘You're David Irving aren't you?’ I said no you're mistaken, and he said ‘I know you're David Irving, and I know why you're denying it.’ I said no you don't. Whoops!” But when he got to Florida, the man told him angrily: “I know who you are! I went to school with you and you made life unbearable for me and another Jew. I was a boy at Brentwood school, you called us filthy little yids, you screamed at us!”

Irving looks bemused as he recounts this story. He assured the man there were no Jews at his school, and he must be mistaken. But he was so shaken he got the man’s name from the checkout desk. (He claims the airline staff reassured him: “Them Jews, them Jews, they all want to have suffered.”) He checked with his old school and “I got all the details. He was a year behind me, two years behind me. Well, I don't know if you know anything about public school, but you never, ever, ever speak to boys in the year, or two years behind you. They don't exist, they are lower than low. No way would I have spoken to him.”

This story is, to Irving, yet more evidence of Jewish wickedness. He offers the old racist rote: the Jews organised “most” of the wars of the twentieth century, and sneer at “the goyim.” Who were the first Jews you knew? “At university. Mike Gorb. He was my flatmate in Kensington, very, very nice guy.” He is now uncontactibly dead, after a mountaineering accident. “John Blok, he was a kind of mentor for me at the university? Jaqueline Gross we employed and she was very nice, very jolly girl and she thoroughly enjoyed working for us. That was in 1982 or 1983 or something.” He insists these Jews were nice people – but when at a lecture a few years ago a Jewish man asked him if he was saying the Jews brought Auschwitz on themselves, he responded: “The short answer is yes.”

How were Mike and John and Jacqueline bringing on their own gassing? He shifts in his chair. “I know that I'm not liked and I know why I'm disliked and I know what I could do to become instantly liked. The Jews have never asked themselves, so far as I can see, over the last three thousand years why they are not liked.” But there is a vast literature by Jews trying to figure out why anti-Semitism happens. He backs off for a second. “I'm not familiar with Jewish literature, because I don't read it. But do they ever reach an objective and useful conclusion?” he asks ingenuously. Plainly is a mass hysteria, like the witchcraft craze – a long, mad search for a scapegoat. “Maybe you're right, I hope you're right, but then why would holocausts happen, why would the German people have turned a blind eye?” he says. When I don’t respond immediately, he exclaims: “Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha!”

Do you think every persecuted group in history brought it on themselves then? Did the “witches” cause their own murder? “Indirectly, yes, by not creating a society in which this wouldn't, couldn't happen.” I run through a long list of persecuted groups in history, and finally come across a few he thinks were just the victims of “mass hysteria.” So couldn’t anti-Semitism be a mass hysteria? “No.”

He believes Jews are responsible for their own persecution because they do not “police their own community,” and begins talking about the fraudster Bernie Madoff as an example. He believes Jews let him get away with it – even though a preposterously small proportion of Jews could possibly have been aware of his crimes. So if your Jewish researcher or your Jewish flatmate was to be killed by anti-Semites, they would be responsible because they didn't stop Madoff? “Or the Madoff of their days, yes.”

He seems incapable of seeing Jews as individuals for long. The faces of Mike and John and Jacqueline soon disappear into the amorphous monstrous mass existing only in his mind known as The Jew, which – intriguingly – suffers from many of the characteristics Irving’s critics ascribe to him: it is attention-seeking and greedy and brings about its own destruction.

Yet he insists that, like his Hitler, he is only saying this for the Jews’ own good. “I'm a great friend of them? I'm saying this in their own interest. I'm trying to stop it happening again, whether it's in America or wherever else the Jews flee to. They don't recognise the fact that it's just possible that they are the architects of their own misfortune, to use that wonderful phrase. They are so arrogant, they won't accept this. Every time some rich Jew dies, [they say in his obituaries he was] the noted philanthropist. He won't go down in history as being a noted philanthropist, he'll go down in history as being a Jew, and the non-Jews see the Jews and say ‘well how have they made all their money? From us.’ And that's one reason to dislike them. It's human nature.”

There will, he reckons, probably be another Holocaust in thirty years, when we realise we have been conned. Oh, and if the Jews are lucky, there will be a David Irving or an Adolf Hitler there to protect them.

V: Josephine

In a box in the corner of this room, there sits the ashes of a girl Hitler would have murdered. It is Irving’s eldest daughter, Josephine. Like in a moralistic Victorian parable, this Hitler-devotee ended up with a severely disabled daughter – and I want to know how he dealt with the dissonance.

“In 1981 she became schizophrenic and it was a terrible shock for us,” he says, his voice dropping from its confident strut. She had been getting into trouble at school for a while, but Irving assumed it was normal teenage turbulence until one day she left an exam and walked home. She told her father: “Oh, the devil was sitting in the road just in front of me.” Irving looks into the middle distance. “You hear your own daughter saying things like that and it begins to become very frightening. You don't realise what's going on.” A Harley Street doctor diagnosed her with latent paranoid schizophrenia. “It is not curable. It can be treated, but for the benefit of the rest of society,” he says. “My wife vanished for three months. She couldn't take it, left me with the children to look after. I can't begrudge her that, it was a terrible shock and it took a long time to sink in.”

He remembers walking with Josephine on the anniversary of her diagnosis, and he said she had been ill for a year “She turned those blue eyes to me and she said, ‘Oh no daddy, I've been ill for many more years than that.’ Imagine your oldest daughter saying that? For the next 18 years she struggled with this appalling affliction which got worse and worse. She heard these voices which speak with enormous compulsion. The voice that tells you to stand back from the edge of a platform as an express train rattles through, with equally the same cohesion tells schizophrenics to do the exact opposite.”

In 1996, he tried to commit suicide by hurling herself from a building, and ended up “a complete cripple”, as Irving puts it, with a broken back and both her legs amputated. She secretly married another seriously disabled man who “had a bad, bad brain,” but after three years, she attempted suicide again – this time successfully. The hospital staff, he says, told him “she must have been a very determined suicide indeed to pull herself out of a window, a fifth floor window, in that condition.” Their son is now grown up, and fighting in Afghanistan.

He says the experience has changed him. “I find myself becoming a lot more human towards people who have a disability?. Now if I find a Down Syndrome child or someone a paraplegic or somebody with some other obvious disability wheeled past me I will go out of my way to go over to them, to smile, to say hello because you realize that they are humans too.”

You do realize, I say as gently as I can, that Hitler would have killed Josephine? “Yes, Hitler had one of his own cousins killed, this is one of the appalling things.” He then quickly goes off on another tangent, talking about a radio programme he was once on, and I have – for once – to draw him back to the Hitler. I can almost see the conflict within him, as he veers back and forth from admitting Hitler did something wrong. “Hitler had the very best of reasons, if I can put it very oddly like that.”

He claims the first case of euthanasia authorized by Hitler was of “a child who had been born hideously disfigured in some way, and the doctors and the parents wanted to put the child down for its own sake? That was the kind of reasoning behind it, and then [Karl] Brandt [Hitler’s physician] came to Hitler and said of course this isn’t the only case, there are many many more cases like this, but this was the foot in the door. [It] provided a lawful basis for termination of people who were medical misfits and it became ever wider. When war broke out people said well, we need the hospital beds now for people who really need them, and gradually the field became broader and broader.”

And so he concedes with a sigh: “Had we been in Nazi Germany then Josephine would have been swept up in that procedure.” But then he adds quickly, in a sentence that uncharacteristically dissolves into meaninglessness: “Except of course that we now have drugs” to treat schizophrenia, “so I am not sure that [Hitler] would have [killed her] because, as I say, just at the end, by that time the drugs would have been there which would have made it possible to...” He stops and collects his thoughts.

“The way the Nazis did it was always in the nicest possible way,” he says at last. “The parents were told ‘oh she has succumb to pneumonia’, something like that. [It was] evil with good intentions.” Where were the good intentions? “The parents would not have been told.” But the child would know that they were being killed, and the parents would still have a dead child. “I don’t know, it is very difficult when you get into these fields, a what-if, a hypothesis.” It’s hardly a wild what-if: it happened to tens of thousands of real people just like you. He is silent.

So you really think the murder of people exactly like your daughter was an act committed “in the kindest possible way”? “Oh, I am quoting that television gentleman? what is he called? he crossed his legs all the time and wore a beard.” Kenny Everett? “Kenny Everett. I’m, uh, just quoting his catchphrase. The Nazis did these things, but they didn’t do it, they didn’t do it, they did it in a concealed way so that parents only later on found out to their horror what had actually happened.” Does that make it any less horrific? He clams up. “I think this argument is so stilted I don't want to get entwined in it.”

He looks over at the ashes, and then looks down, speechless for the first time in our interview.
VI: Silenced

In 1989, Austria’s Chancellor Franz Vranitzky said publicly: “Should Irving ever turn up here again, he’ll be locked up immediately.” His lectures had breached the country’s laws banning denial of the Nazis’ crimes and rebuilding a Nazi movement – and the punishment ran to twenty years in jail. Yet in 2006, Irving chose to return to the country, knowing there was a warrant out for his arrest. Was he seeking a confrontation? He shakes his head. “No, but I was prepared for it? I can't allow people to silence me forever. One day I shall have to go back to Germany. I have to continue research there, but I'm banned from Germany. I can't allow people to silence me or to stop my research.”

He was put on trial, and blames his conviction on the fact the fact that eight members of the jury were “stolid, slab-featured, middle-aged Viennese Hausfrau type women, with a bus-stopping range of perhaps a hundred yards or more.” But prison, he insists, was wonderful. “I thoroughly enjoyed it,” he says, pushing out his chest. He says it’s great for a writer to have all the distractions shut out. He quotes Evelyn Waugh approvingly: “Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.”

But is this true? This was the first time he was forced into close contact with black people, a group he believes are inferior. He says America used to have a “nicely stratified system, with the white on top followed by the coloureds followed by the blacks and the slave labour on the bottom,” until the Jews decided to shake it up with the wicked civil rights movement. Yet he says he made friends with a “young Black” called Momo, and with “lots of them. There were Africans in the prison from Nigeria of course. I suppose it's even racist to say of course, but I mean the Nigerians, blacks are going to be largely criminal. I spoke most of their languages, French or Spanish or whatever and so they came to me.”

In his new book about his time in jail, ‘Banged Up’, he describes an odd incident in which he “accidentally” drank detergent, saying he mistook it for lemon juice. Did you try to kill yourself? “Lord good Lord no!” he says with a great forced guffaw. “No, I would never commit suicide. Suicide is partly congenital like alcoholism. If you want to be an SS officer, which probably you don’t...” – he laughs – “one of the forms that you had to fill in looks at if there is a history of suicide in your family or a history of alcoholism then that is a black mark.” He then describes an elaborate scenario in which detergent and lemon juice became interchangeable.

As I get up to leave, his daughter Paloma, who is visiting from Madrid, wanders in. She asks our photographer nervously: “Did he behave himself?” Irving takes me around the house for one last time, proudly pulling himself up the stairs. He was declared bankrupt in 2003 – so how does he afford this gorgeous house? “I'm not going to talk about money very much, but I have an income.” I heard you were supported by a Saudi prince. “I tried it, oh I tried it,” he says. He claims that in 2003 Prince Salman Fahd – son of the Saudi king, and then Interior Minister – promised him £800,000, just before he died of a sudden heart attack. “I would say eighty percent of my income comes from the United States? It's very enjoyable showing that despite every effort the enemies make to smash me, provided my heart holds out, then I'm okay. I can survive.”

VII: The scamp

As we stand by the Christmas tree, with the door open and the cold wind blowing in, I wonder –does David Irving believe what he says? Does he actually think Adolf Hitler ordained him as his defender when he was just a toddler in Essex? His twin brother, Nicky, has said: “I’ve never been entirely convinced that, deep down, David really holds these ridiculous views. It’s possible that he was simply doing what we did when we were children – anything to get attention. It’s almost a sickness with him.” His former partner Bente agrees: “I never really felt he believed a lot of it. I still don’t really. He enjoys being provocative. He’s an extraordinary attention seeker, always has been.” Is he just swinging the lantern, like his father?

He laughs at this suggestion. “I am a scamp, yes a scamp,” he says. “Ever since school. I like to have one piece of mischief on every page I write so you go to turn the page and are thinking, well, what was that page about?” And he closes his eyes tightly in the freezing air. For one moment, it seems as though he is back at Brentwood School, asking for a copy on Mein Kampf for speech day, and thinking all this – all this hate, and all this hard work to rehabilitate the worst genodical killer of the twentieth century – is only a jolly, jolly jape.

For a forensic rebuttal of the holocaust denial myths, go to http://remember.org/History.root.rev.html

Johann Hari

Signalons qu'en avril 2008 Johann Hari avait gagné le prix Orwell du journalisme indépendant pour sa dénonciation du rôle de la France en Centreafrique.