Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

my first visit, I was able, through the generosity of theLondon Sunday Times, to donate a sophisticated film and fiche reader to the Russianson my second; the bulky machine arrived back in London, without explanation, oneday after I did in July 1992.6 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHWhat followed was a less enlightened episode. I provided extracts from these diariesto Times Newspapers Ltd in Britain. The Sunday Times published them alongwith Der Spiegel in Germany and other major newspapers around the world. I alsodonated complete sets to the German federal archives in Koblenz and to the archivesof Goebbels’ native city Mönchengladbach. Nevertheless, while the internationalpress celebrated the retrieval of the long-lost diaries many rival historians registeredsomething approaching a cry of pain.Their injured professional amour propre proved infectious. While spending half amillion pounds promoting its serialization of the diaries’ scoop, the Sunday Timesmentioned the name of the person who acquired them in the smallest type-size knownto man; Der Spiegel printed the series for five weeks without mentioning him at all. ABerlin university historian, whose team has been labouring for years on the othervolumes of the diaries, reported at length on the ‘new find’ to a symposium in theUnited States, again without reference to either Dr Fröhlich, the discoverer—towhom all real credit is due—or to myself.* The directors of Piper Verlag, Munich,who a few weeks later published an abridged popular edition of the other GoebbelsDiaries,† deplored in a German television news bulletin that ‘Mr Irving of all people’should have exclusively obtained these sensational missing diaries—and failedto mention either then or in their publication that without reward he had at the lastminute made one hundred pages available with which they had filled aching gaps intheir publication.Even more lamentable have been the actions of the German government’s federalarchives, the Bundesarchiv, to whom I also donated many Goebbels documents includinga set of all the diaries I retrieved in Moscow. On the instructions of the* Dr Jürgen Michael Schulz, of the Berlin Free University, ‘Zur Edition der GoebbelsTagebücher,’ a paper presented to the German Studies Association conference, 1992.See its Newsletter, vol.xvii, No.2, winter 1992, 34ff.† Dr Ralf Georg Reuth (ed.), Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, five vols. (Munich, Zürich,91992).GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 7minister of the interior, on July 1, 1993 the archives banished me forever from theirhalls, without notice, two hours before the conclusion of my seven years of researchon this subject. They had earlier provided a hundred photos at my expense—but onthe minister’s instructions they now also refused to supply caption information forthem. When I requested the Transit-Film Corporation, who inherited the copyrightsof Third Reich film productions, to provide still photographs of the leading actorsand actresses who play a part in the Goebbels story, the firm cautiously inquired ofProfessor Friedrich Kahlenberg, head of the Bundesarchiv, whether ‘special considerations’might apply against helping me! (A copy of their letter fortuitously cameinto my hands, but not the pictures I had requested.) The background can only besurmised. Professor Kahlenberg had hurried to Moscow in July 1992—too late toprevent the Russians from granting me access to the coveted microfiches of theGoebbels diaries. (There was no reason why the Russians should have denied meaccess: Several of my books, including those on Arctic naval operations and on Nazinuclear research, have been published by Soviet printing houses.) The Bundesarchivhas justified its banishment, which is without parallel in any other archives, on thegrounds that my research might harm the interests of the Federal Republic of Germany.The ban has prevented me from verifying my colleagues’ questionable transcriptionsof certain key words in the handwritten diaries. I had a list of twenty suchwords which I wished to double-check against the original negatives; pleading superiororders, the Bundesarchiv’s deputy director, Dr Siegfried Büttner, refused toallow even this brief concluding labour. As one consequence, evidently unforeseenby the German government, the Bundesarchiv has had to return to England its ‘IrvingCollection,’ half a ton of records which I had deposited in its vaults for researchersover the last thirty years. These include originals of Adolf Eichmann’s papers, copiesof two missing years of Heinrich Himmler’s diary, the diaries of Erwin Rommel,Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Canaris, Walther Hewel, and a host of other papers not availableelsewhere.I HASTEN to add that with this one exception every international archive has accorded8 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHto me the kindness and unrestricted access to which I have become accustomed inthirty years of historical research. I would particularly mention the efforts of DrDavid G Marwell, director of the American-controlled Berlin Document Center(BDC), in supplying to me 1,446 pages of biographical documents relating toGoebbels’ staff. However these now, like the collections formerly archived in Moscowand in the DDR, also come under the arbitrary ægis of the Bundesarchiv.Marwell’s predecessor, the late Richard Bauer, provided me with the BDC’s file onGoebbels (my film DI–81).* In the German socialist party’s Friedrich Ebert Stiftungin Bonn, deputy archivist Dr Ulrich Cartarius generously granted to me privilegedaccess to the original handwritten diary of Viktor Lutze, chief of staff of the S.A.(1934–43), on which he was currently working. Karl Höffkes of Essen kindly let meuse the Julius Streicher diary and papers in his private archives.The Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in New York also allowed me to exploittheir fine Record Group 215, which houses a magnificent collection of original filesof propaganda ministry documents, including Goebbels’ own bound volumes of pressclippings. I must also mention my Italian publishers, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore,and their senior editor Dr Andrea Cane, who made available to me for transcriptionGoebbels’ entire handwritten 1938 diary—it was a two-year task, but without that‘head start’ in reading Goebbels’ formidable script I should have been unable tomake the sense of the Moscow cache that I did. This is also the proper place to thankmy friend and rival Dr Ralf Georg Reuth, author of an earlier Goebbels biography,for unselfishly transferring to me a copy of Horst Wessel’s diary and substantial partsof the 1944 Goebbels diary, to which I added from Moscow and other sources.The attitude of the other German official archives was very different from that ofthe Bundesarchiv in