Beorn
01-20-2009, 12:52 AM
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
By Johann Hari
Thursday, 15 January 2009
“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?
Continued@Source (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/david-irving-im-hitlers-biographer-1366464.html)
I think we can finally assign David Irving a place in history as a fraud and a loony?
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
By Johann Hari
Thursday, 15 January 2009
“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?
Continued@Source (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/david-irving-im-hitlers-biographer-1366464.html)
I think we can finally assign David Irving a place in history as a fraud and a loony?