The Box on the Back Seat 101

The Box on the Back Seat 101 The Box on the Back Seat One theme overshadowed my interviews with Hitler’s People – the Jewish tragedy: the Final Solution. How much had they known, what had been said in Hitler’s presence? There had been virtually no mention of it in the post-memoirs of the Allied good and great; and for that matter, what place had it in a Hitler biography either? The answer was this: If I were William Shirer, writing on the rise and fall of the Third Reich, it would be quite proper just to lay responsibility at Hitler’s door. He was the head of State. I was however a Hitler biographer: I was dissecting the person, and not the post, and it became relevant to think the unthinkable, and to inquire how far he himself was involved, or had been shield- ed from the ugliest decisions. The absence of any direct paper trail, or any archival evidence, even after sixty years or more, was what required me to start thinking outside the conventional frame. Could it be, as SS Ober- gruppenführer Karl Wolff had put it, that Himmler, his chief, had The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem went through many different shades of meaning as the years passed, and depending on whose lips were speaking the phrase. The first Foreign Ministry file labeled Endlösung der Judenfrage was dated 1936. 102 david irving Confidential Draft of Memoirs decided to act on his own and that “the Messiah of the coming two thousand years” should be kept immaculate?1 So Wolff quoted Himmler in his private papers; but Wolff himself was quite defi- nitely in the know, however much he protested his ignorance later. Typical of the plight of my critics was one signal which they of- fered, signed by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller on August 1, 1941, asking for Anschauungsmaterial, visual materials, on the operations of the Einsatzkommandos, the SS task forces, to be sent in for Hitler to look at. The document was considered [robust] enough for de- fence lawyers to spring it on me in the Lipstadt Trial in 2000, but it had only the flimsiest of pedigrees – it came from a Moscow source, it was a typed copy, the file-number provided by Lipstadt’s lawyers did not exist, there were no supporting or contextual papers, and no reference to it, dated before or since, had turned up in the archives. Besides, what did “visual materials” mean? Or “activities” for that matter – because in addition to the more murderous ones, the task forces had a dozen different tasks to perform in the East, mostly Intelligence gathering. As for Hitler, there was not a single wartime document showing he knew of the Holocaust, and there isn’t one even now. Since 1965 I had trawled through the archives and found no Hitler order, nor even evidence that he knew what was going on. On January 19 (••) 1945, told by Generaloberst Heinz Gude- rian that the Red Army had now overrun Auschwitz, Hitler’s only mild response, recorded by the relays of stenographers, was a re- signed, “Jawohl” – okay. The name Auschwitz meant nothing to him. [Auschwitz was overrun Jan 27, 1945; the Lagebesprechung was however – mistakenly? - dated earlier, I think.] To my mind these stenographers, together with the adjutants and secretaries, were a vital source. On Hitler’s orders Bormann had recruited a dozen verbatim stenographers in September 1942, to write down every word spoken in his presence; they were the elite in a very specialized profession. The Americans interrogated them closely, and all said the same thing: the topic never came up in his presence. The Box on the Back Seat 103 I located the interrogating officer concerned (•• add name source), and he provided copies of his reports to me. I located sev- eral of the twelve stenographers – including Karl Thöt, Ludwig Krieger, and Heinz Buchholz (one, Heinrich Berger, had been killed by Stauffenberg’s bomb). I was not the threatening presence that the Americans had been, and I won these men’s confidence; but I got the same answer. I was very impressed by these civil servants; they all needed postgraduate degrees to qualify as government stenographers. I found that Dr Krieger lived only a stone’s throw from the Ger- man Parliament building in Bonn, where he was still employed as a verbatim stenographer. He had kept all his papers. In World War I he had been personal secretary to the legendary Colonel Walter Nikolai, head of Military Intelligence, and he produced to me his shorthand diaries of that earlier life as well; he had never been asked about them, and although I sent strong recommendations to both the Federal Archives and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, the diaries are to be feared lost by now. Krieger had much to tell me. He described the May 1943 war conference at which Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Abwehr Intelligence Chief, reported to Hitler that a body of a British officer had floated ashore, carrying in his document pouch top-secret let- ters which apparently revealed that the Allies were about to invade Sardinia, and not Sicily as common sense dictated. “I was dying to interrupt,” Krieger told me, “and say that this could well be a British Intelligence plant. But as a mere stenographer, of course I had to remain completely silent.” Canaris insisted that the documents were genuine. “Even as Hitler was leaving the conference room,” continued Krieger, “he suddenly turned back and said: ‘Herr Admiral, might this not just be a British trick, to fool us into believing that they will be invading Sardinia, instead of Sicily?’” Once again Hitler was right, as events proved; but since the Battle of Stalingrad he had lost his sureness of touch, his Fingers- pitzengefühl. 104 david irving Confidential Draft of Memoirs Karl Thöt showed me his shorthand diary covering his three years with Hitler. It was a curiously spectral volume, containing only frameworks, so to speak – settings and scenes, but not the actual top secret stuff that made up the twice daily situation conferences he was recording. I persuaded him to spend a day dictating the diary onto tape for me; it contained all the little detail, the local colour which is the very stuff of history and the personalities who make it come true: At the noon conference the heater promised by the Führer is indeed there – a small china stove. In the afternoon, before a brief reception of seven officers handpicked for special missions for which the Führer briefs them in a short speech, he inquired in General Schmundt’s presence whether the stove was warm enough for us. When we said it was, he was hugely pleased and laughed out loud.2 The horrors that these stenographers heard, the plain truth of their fatherland’s situation, crippled by the world’s onslaught, ablaze from end to end with horrifying air raids, undermined by treachery, eroded by starvation and pestilence – the grim truth was so frightful that two of the stenographers buckled under the mental strain and suffered nervous breakdowns within days of starting. Unlike the generals and admirals, who each heard only their own sector, then saluted, clicked their heels and left, these humble scribes, like their Führer himself, heard it all. Among the private papers of stenographer Ludwig Krieger I found a note dated December 13, 1945: “In the Führer conferences which I reported in shorthand there was never any mention of the atrocities against the Jews. For the present it must remain an un- answered question, whether Hitler himself issued specific orders . or whether orders issued in generalized terms were executed by subordinates and sadists in this brutal and vile manner.” As General Schmundt himself had advised Walter Frentz, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll destroy those negatives.” It was contraband knowledge, and it was not allowed into the Sperrkreis, the innermost, cordoned-off, zone of the Führer’s headquarters. The Box on the Back Seat 105 As his paranoia grew in the middle of the war, Hitler directed one adjutant, the lanky six-foot-two (188cm) SS officer Richard Schulze to attend every audience he gave, even the tête-à-têtes with Himmler. So what did he, Schulze, know? I already knew the answer and I invited him over to London for the David Frost programme on June 9, 1977, when my Hitler biography finally came out, and sat him in the second or third row of the audience, next to Pilar; when Frost, in a well-staged fit of adenoidal desperation shrilled at me the question – did Hitler know or not – I held up a hand, and asked for a microphone to be reached over to Schulze. Like a barrister examining a witness, I invited him to identify himself. “I was Hitler’s personal SS adjutant from 1942 to 1944.” “– In other words, throughout the Holocaust period?” “Yes. He ordered me to be present as a witness at every meet- ing.” “Please tell Mr Frost and our television audience at home what discussion, if any, there was in your presence about Jews and the Final Solution.” “Mr Irving, there was never even one word spoken on the sub- ject.” This is not verbatim, but an accurate rendering of our exchange – it was necessarily brief, because Frost had had no advance warning of Schulze’s presence, and I could see wild off-camera semaphoring going on to get this ambush over. As newspapers reported, it had a huge impact on the viewers.

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