David Irving Speech on Winston Churchill in Toronto Canada 1988 | Untold History Channel
Summary
Transcript
Good afternoon, everybody. Ron Partan, untold history, really, I’m doing this kind of as a test. I’ve been trying to figure out how to remedy the echo situation when I play videos. And another thing I’m trying to figure out is what I can do to stop the. The drag and the. The, like, kind of like the stainless of the videos. So I’m gonna. This is really more of a test. Um, and I’m just gonna let this play and see how it goes. So, um. Uh, but you know, this is a great speech, about an hour and a half hour and 45 minutes long.
So it’s a really, really. It’s really good. Actually, David, this is a. On, uh, the other night when I. On Tuesday night with Mike, we talked about David Irving, and he said, you know, he’s actually a really good speaker. He’s not a boring guy. And I think you’ll find that that is the case here. So without further ado, I’m going to play the David hurting speak. So here we go. Our speaker tonight has taken some very controversial stands on a number of historical issues. Some having to do with World War Two, some having to do with the hungarian revolution.
And I know that’s why many of us are here tonight, because we’re admirers of his book uprising. And more recently, he’s working on a book on Sir Winston Churchill. And his interpretation, or I should say reinterpretation, of Mister Churchill’s role in history is going to be very controversial. It’s certainly not a flattering interpretation, and he may be right. But the point is, he has a right to be heard. And that is the right we are giving you today, this evening. And we’re very, very proud to have a man who’s done a tremendous amount of research. And I might say, unlike a lot of the historians who write in North America and Britain about Germany and the second world War, our speaker tonight speaks German.
Now that you may not know, think that that’s all that significant, but how can you write a history? How can you pretend to deal with documents of the second World War if you can’t read German? And there are many historians with PhDs after their name, who signed their names to learned works of history, supposedly, that can’t read German. In other words, they can’t get past kindergarten in terms of their research, and yet they’re presenting a particular interpretation. Without any further ado, I’d like you to give a really big Toronto welcome to David Irving, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you, Ron Fromm, for introducing me in that magnificent way I’m going to speak as slowly as I can, because we do have language difficulties between the English and Americans. Those of you who’ve listened to the tape that I gave of a speech to the Institute of Historical Review in Los Angeles will remember my opening remarks about the word homely and the fact that I had great difficulty once when I had lunch with the one of the directors of the National Archives in Washington, who produced his wallet after a time and showed me the photographs of his wife and children.
And the wife looked very pleasant. A good cook, good looking woman, a little bit plump, but congenial, a smile on her face, a kind of generally amiable, nice looking person. And I said, is that misses wolf? And he said, yes, it is. And I said, she looks very homely. Did you say homely? I said, yes, misses woolf looks extremely homely. Homely? And I said, you get frantic. I said, she is the most homely woman I have seen all week. Indeed. These are the problems that you have. I mean, my books are published very widely around the world.
We have language problems in Germany and France and Italy and Japan and so on, of course. But the biggest problems I have when my books are translated into Americans, my books are written in a kind of mid atlantic jargon. I have some there which are the war between the generals. It has the benefit or the disadvantage of having been edited by one of the finest editors in the world, a man called Tom Condon, who in fact first made his name with editing Jaws, the famous book about the fish that terrorizes a village. And after I spent 15 years writing books, I first encountered jaws as I called Tom Condon, and he taught me how to write again all the silly little things about how to write things in sequence.
You don’t say that he sat down, having gone into the room, you got to write. He went into the room and sat down. Little things like that help to smooth the book so it reads mellifluously. But you have other problems. My Hitler book, Hitler’s war, the famous biography I wrote, which was published in 1977. The major problem there was that the editor I had in New York, a man called Stan Hochman, Jewish, but extremely pleasant. Very, very nice. One of the nicest guys I’ve met. He would say things to me like David on 20 July 1944, after the bomb attempt on Hitler’s life.
You’ve got him sitting in your manuscript. You’ve got him sitting on the edge of his bed, feeling his pulse after the attempt on his life. The pulse is 73. He was very pleased. It was normal and yet you’ve got him sitting on his bed in his shirt sleeves and braces. You can’t do that. We’re going to have to change that to sitting on his bed and his shirt sleeves and suspenders. Well, in England, suspenders are what you call a garter belt. And the idea of Hitler sitting on the edge of his bed after this traumatic attempt on his life, revealing to his staff that he wears a garter belt, this was out of the question.
So the center. The tyranny of the american language. I had to cut the sentence out altogether again, Ribbentrop. On one occasion, I say, for the foreign minister von Ribbentrop, he had a skeleton, a skeleton in the cupboard. Stan Hoffman said, I’m sorry, David, that’s going to have to be a skeleton in the closet. Now, in England, of course, a closet is what you would call a bathroom, which is what I look for when I want to have a bath, which is what the Australians call a dunny and so on. I mean, you have this tyranny of the language far worse than the tyranny of the language, though.
And this is something which a lot of you readers out there, I very seldom meet my readers, but a lot of you readers don’t understand, is that the author is not the only person who decides what ends up in a manuscript. The lawyers have a say, of course. The editors have a say, of course. They tell you how many commas to put in and how to take out the semicolons, and they rewrite a page. A good editor will really rewrite a page probably 50 or 60 times. 50 or 60 minor changes per page of typescript, and he makes a better book out of it.
But in the final analysis, there are subtle changes and shifts. They will say things like, David, I don’t think you’ve made your point there about Hitler and the Jews, so we’re going to have to change that. Do you mind? And bit by bit, the book changes shape. I’ve got one example of that. When Winston Churchill wrote his very famous history after the war, the six volume history, the Second World War, it was published in America, of course, by the Time Life Corporation, in a series and marketed all around the world by them, which meant that when I went to New York and I looked in the papers of the Time Life Corporation, the chief editor, a man called Daniel Longwall, all his papers are now in the archives of Columbia University in New York.
I found there the private correspondence between Churchill and time life at the time that he was writing this famous work of history. The Americans who sent editors over to England to chart all side by side with the grand old Englishman the greatest living englishman as we called him to help him write this book and of course help him steer it in a certain way because he was about 70 by then. And I must say that I hope that when I’m 70 I’m capable of writing a six volume work as big and as important as the one that Churchill wrote.
But you can see the Americans gradually shifting the way the book is tilting. And Churchill trying to put things in and being prevented from putting it in not only by the Americans but also by people around him in the files of time life for example is a very illuminating exchange of correspondence between Churchill in 1947 and the german chancellor Heinrich who had been a chancellor before Hitler round about 1928 to 1933. This chancellor had sat in the highest office in Germany under the president and had watched with great apprehension as the Nazis came to power. And Heinrich Breuning of course had known full well who was behind the Nazis and who was financing them during their period in the wilderness.
Very interesting question. Was it just the brown shirts? Was it the ordinary man in the street the 6 million unemployed in Germany or who was putting up the money? Breuning found out who was putting up part of the money to put Hitler into office. And in 1937 in fact on August 28, 1937 Breuning wrote to Winston Churchill a letter about it. This was, of course four or five years after Breuning had been tossed out of office. He’d taken refuge in England. He was in exile in Oxford. And he wrote a private letter to Mister Churchill who was also out of office in the wilderness like himself explaining to Churchill who had put up the money for Hitler the sinister men behind the nazi rise to power.
And Churchill wanted to reproduce this letter this 1937 letter in his six volume work of memoirs. You can look in vain in the memoirs volume one or volume two or anywhere else for that letter because Bruening asked him after the war not to publish the letter because it was so embarrassing and so painful. I quote the letter. In fact Bruning wrote to Churchill in 1947 explaining why he didn’t want the letter published. And that’s the letter that’s in the fowls of time life he says. I did not and do not even today for understandable reasons wish to reveal that from October, 1928 the two largest regular contributors to the nazi party were the general managers of two of the largest Berlin banks.
Both of. Well he goes on to explain what faith they were of but I don’t want to be accused of anti semitism. So I won’t say what faith they were. These two people were. One of them was the leader of Zionism in Germany. So writes bruning in his letter how embarrassing in 1947 to have to explain that part of the money a substantial part of the money behind Hitler mysteriously and inexplicably came from these two Berlin bankers. Why? What was the point of it? We don’t know. Because Churchill bowed depression on Breuning. The letter was never published.
Breuning, in fact also reveals that a lot of the money for the Nazis came from french intelligence sources from certain french arms factories and that the guns that provided that were used for equipping the SA and the brown shirts and the SS in those early years before the rise to power largely were provided by Americans by american arms firms rather the same as the Americans providing some of the weapons used by the IRA in Scotland today in Ireland today. This is the kind of unknown side of the history of the war. And when you see things like that it begins to make you think what else is there that we don’t know? And this is the kind of question I’ve been asking myself ever since I started out to become a writer all those years ago 1963 in fact before then after I’d finished my university education I went to Germany in 1959 as Paul indicated and became a steel worker for a year in Germany working on the furnace stage as an ordinary steel worker it’s a very unpleasant job.
I’m sure that our gentlemen from Detroit in the next room know what an unpleasant job it is. You can see how brown the heat has burned them. When you work on the furnace stage it’s a very hot place indeed. And I worked there for a year and one of the men who shared the dormitory with me. The dormitory was a tiny little room about this size not much bigger than that table with five beds in it. And 15 steel workers shared this dormitory on a kind of rotation basis. We each knew which shift we worked and we each knew when we were allowed to use the bed.
And the man who shared my bed in the nicest possible way was an elderly gentleman from Leipzig who had been in Dresden during the air raid the Dresden air raid the british american air raid on Dresden on February 13, 1945. In fact I know there’s one survivor of that air raid in this audience tonight the only person who survived from his entire school. He happened to be off school that day. He came up to me and bought a book from me and he told me this just the same as we hear so often. I was the only survivor from my village.
All the rest went to Auschwitz. So I was shocked when that gentleman in the street steelworks told me that he had been in Dresden, that he had seen himself. What? I didn’t know anything about it. When he told me that over 100,000 people had died that night, I was very, very shocked. And I thought to myself, here I am. I feel like a complete idiot. I’m an Englishman. 1960, and then a German is telling me something that we did to Germany, which I’ve never heard of, 15 years after the end of the war. And I decided to write a book about it which became a best seller.
It’s still in print all the way around the world. I think I sold about 2 million copies now, one way or another. And Macmillans of Canada still have it in stock. I know the destruction of Dresden. That book became a best seller. So I decided not to worry about getting a PhD or getting a degree or any kind of further university education. I was studying political university college. I decided to become a writer, become a historian. Why not kind of journalist to do more books like that? This is the advantage. If you’ve had one bestseller, which the newspapers around the world picked up and serialized all around the world.
They went wild over this book because I reproduced the photographs in that book. Photographs of bodies, heaps of bodies, six or 700 at a time being heaped up and set on fire in open air mass funeral pyres in Dresden, in the city center, which, incredible, unconceivable, they were not the photographs that had been reproduced before. And so I became a writer. I remember I wrote a string of books after that. I wrote a book and I had a baby and I wrote a book and I had a baby and I wrote a book. All daughters. Four daughters, four books.
And then I ran out of steam completely. And I just wrote books after that. This is serious business. And my publisher said to me at the end of the first book, he said, what are you going to do next? And I said, zakimba, the next book I’m going to write. I want to spend a long time, perhaps five years even writing a biography of Hitler using the same techniques. Let’s find out if we’ve been lied to about him as well. The book eventually took ten years to write. I spent a great deal of time talking to all Hitler’s surviving staff members, his secretaries, the private people that worked with him, the colonels, the ADC’s, the generals, the field marshals, persuading them to dig out of their files in the hidey holes and hiding places.
All their private diaries and letters. And eventually, at the end of ten years work, I had produced the book, which I consider in my immodesty to be probably the standard work on Hitler, which is gradually displacing all the old hackneyed versions about that man. And again, I was seriously alarmed as an Englishman to find that a lot of what we had been told about him was lies. And I asked myself why it was lies. And the answer really is, it was lies, because Churchill had done the lying. This is natural. We were fighting a war. And in wartime, you do lie.
You do tend to set up a great big subsidiary, auxiliary army of lies, to help your soldiers of the truth fight forwards, or as wins. Winston Churchill himself put it, in his inimitable oratory style. He said, the truth is so fragile that it needs a bodyguard of lies to protect it. Winston Churchill, and he provided the bodyguard himself. He was our most outstanding liar. And he continued to do the lying long after the war had ended, because he had to. How could we admit? How could Churchill admit. How could any of his cabinet admit that the war had been a pointless journey from 1940 onwards? That in fighting the war from 1940 onwards, we British had ruined the British Empire.
We bankrupted ourselves, we’d caused immense carnage throughout Europe. We destroyed most of Europe’s most beautiful cities. We’d killed 20 million people and we had bankrupted our own empire. How could we admit it? We had to pretend it was all worthwhile. And I must say, if I may make this very small side excursion, that having spent the last five weeks at the behest of the organizers of this speech as well, this evening, evening for evening, I’ve been in a different city around the world, a 35,000 miles tour in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, western Canada, and now here.
Every evening, I’ve been speaking in a different city. I must say that from what I have seen of this british empire tour, the white man, and the British in particular, have no reason to hang their head in shame. We have done magnificent things over the last two or 300 years, and I’m very, very proud of what we have done. So in no way what I. What I’m saying this evening can possibly be regarded as anti british in any sense. What I’m trying to do is detract from a central part of the british legend, namely Winston Churchill himself and the war he fought and whether it was a true and a just war.
You see, when you fight a war, you do use lies. Churchill was the biggest liar. What is rather like a flywheel begins to spin. It’s set in motion by the propaganda ministerium, by the propaganda officials, whatever they’re called. In England, they were called political warfare. Executive PWE. Some of our most important subsequent politicians, like Richard Crossman, were leading figures in Pwe, and they set out the lies that persuade the soldiers that the war is worth fighting, and they create the war aims for the soldier. We British, we never had war aims. Of course. We went into the war ostensibly because of Poland.
But by 1939, by the end of that year, of course, that war aim had completely vanished. Poland had gone up the spout or down the tubes, whichever the way you look at it, and invaded from the east by the Russians, from the west by the Germans, Poland as such, it had ceased to exist by the spring of 1940, really, the war had no further point. So Churchill, when he became prime minister, set up the big lie that the british empire was endangered, that Hitler planned to attack the British Empire, that he was going to invade Britain.
And then this made the war of great importance for Britain. We had to fight. Otherwise it meant perdition and oblivion for ourselves. Of course, the Americans weren’t interested in preserving the british empire. Quite the opposite. We find out that President Roosevelt was saying in the spring of 1942 that his great dream and ambition is the destruction of the British Empire, beginning with India. He says that in a cabinet meeting in May 1942 and one of his secretaries of state, the vice president, in fact, Henry Wallace, wrote that down in his private diary, the destruction of the british empire was the president’s aim, and that man was our ally.
How extraordinary. And yet we find at the same time now in the german papers the secret german records of the time, and also pale reflections, pale echoes in the british papers. We find that at the same time Hitler was telling us both before the war and during the war, right through 1940, indeed, right through to May 1941, the famous mission of Rudolf Hess. Hitler was telling us that he had no aims against the British Empire at all. No desires, no wishes, no claim on the British, although we declared war on him. He wanted, in fact, the British Empire to remain as a great force for world civilization and stability.
He said in private, as I know from his private staff, again and again, what point would there be for me to destroy Britain now or to attack London, the heart of the British Empire? If I destroy Britain as I can, the only beneficiaries, the people who will make benefit from the British Empire will be the Americans and the Japanese. And what purpose have I got in wasting good european blood to benefit those two races? Again and again he said, both in private and through intermediaries to the British, that he wanted to help the british empire even after the war had begun.
He sent secret people across, he sent messages. He approached the ambassadors of the british and their various far flung capitals and said, I make no claim on Britain or the British Empire. I am prepared to withdraw the german forces from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Apart from the territories that have, course, the whole war was about in the first place, the former german territories that he had recovered. He was going to withdraw his armies from France. Of course he wanted a free hand in the east, but what care? What does that, why should that concern us? What concern had we to protect the peoples of the Ukraine or elsewhere in the east? This was entirely a matter, in my opinion, between uncle Joe Stalin and Hitler.
And if Hitler fell upon uncle Joe Stalin, then as far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. But, of course, the trouble was that we were being told something completely different in England. We were told that Hitler was determined to destroy Britain and the British Empire. This was the great lie that Churchill set up and it through until the end of 1941, when, of course, the Americans came in who were not concerned with preserving the British Empire. In fact, they were, quite frankly, telling Churchill that we weren’t going to get Hong Kong back, we weren’t going to get Singapore back, we weren’t going to get India back, none of this was going to be returned to us.
After the war, the Americans were bent on destroying it. So gradually and imperceptibly, a third war aim emerged, rather like two television pictures, one melting into the other. And by the end of the war, the war aim has become fighting the devil incarnate, fighting the man who did all this and all this. Of course, we didn’t know what it was at the time, but lo and behold, when we marched into Germany, we found what all this was. It was Bergen Belsen, it was Dachau, it was Buchenwald, it was the awful pictures of bodies of emaciated, starved, infected people being bulldozed into lime filled pits by british army bulldozers in the concentration camps.
Of course, nobody claimed that this kind of starvation, this kind of killing or death on this scale had been going on throughout the war in those camps. But this was the picture that was put to the British in the newsreels, in the cinemas, in the newspapers, vivid, ghastly pictures which seemed to justify, in retrospect, by their sheer bedazzlement, the war that we had fought. Suddenly it all seemed worthwhile. Because we saw what had been going on in Germany. Nobody asked logical questions like, surely all this kind of death on this scale only happened in the last two or three weeks.
Or if people died of typhus and starvation and Bergen Belsen and Buchenwald, then possibly, weren’t we British and Americans partly responsible? Because we deliberately produced the chaos and the conditions behind the german lines that led to starvation and typhus epidemics. Because we deliberately bombed the pharmaceutical factories, we bombed the bridges, the railroad lines, the autobahns, to prevent the transportation of food from one part of Germany to another. But of course, those are logical questions. And in the heat of an aftermath of a bloody war, you don’t ask logical questions, you are out for revenge. You are thirsting for revenge.
But now 40 years have past, so surely after 40 years, we should be able to look around and ask logical questions. Logical questions. However, the questions that professors can’t ask and politicians try to prevent. You see, there’s a certain grisly logic in all this. Our paid professors of history can’t do the research which I, as an untrained, plain mister, can do. You see, I’m not a professor and I’m not a doctor and I’m not even a lord like you, Trevor Oberys. Now I’m just plain mister. And I’m rather proud of it because I have to support myself entirely by the books that I sell, like the ones on that table there.
If I don’t sell books, then I can’t pay my bills and I can’t keep on writing the next book. But if I write a bad book, or if I write two or three bad books with the boobs in it, which the newspapers pick out, which I’m ashamed to admit are probably right, then of course, the comes when publishers turn their back on me and say, Mister Irving, I’m sure it’s a very interesting book, but try another publisher this time you end up out of the cold again. I’ve got to be a bit more careful in the way I do my research than the average university professor who rests on his academic title, who says, how dare you impugn my integrity as a historian.
I am Lord Dacre. And we saw what happened to Hugh Trevor Roper over the Hitler d’Artagnan. He fell flat on his face when I stood up in the press conference on the day of their publication and announced that they were fake. You may have seen when I announced that those diaries were fake in the middle of the press conference, the magazine that was actually launching them onto the world markets I had been smuggled in in their midst by rival newspaper that morning, much to my delight, when I announced that they were fake. And I’d ask the four important questions, like where is the ink test, the paper test, the glue test, and how do you explain that Hitler is actually shaking hands with Mussolini with his left hand on the day at the bomb clock because his right hand is so badly damaged? And yet your diary apparently continues to rub it.
That evening, with no change in his handwriting, that’s when they cut off my microphone and had me thrown out of the press conference, right into the arms of the NBC team who were waiting to put me on. I did good Morning America order today. I forget which it was. So within only a few minutes, I stick in the 20 million Americans with all the documents proving the face. I like being plain mister. And I let the professors run around in circles trying to establish the truth by cribbing from each other. You see, this is the way the Americans and the Germans and the british historians do it.
They can’t afford the research that I do, the Germans least of all because a german writer who writes a book, his book stays in the german language and is very, very seldom translated into other languages. So if his publisher, Ulstein or Provilan or the Deutsche Verlagtite says, I’m sorry, professor so and so, but what you’ve written isn’t exactly nice, is it? Would you mind changing that paragraph? He kicks his hero and says to a favor, yes, of course. What’s going to change? The german publishers who got my Hitler biography, Bulstein, they did that. They refused to let me see the proofs.
They refused to let me see the manuscript of the translation. I had to wait to buy my own book in the Munich bookstores on the day it came out. And I saw they changed everything, all my hypotheses, all my theories, all the facts that I found out over ten years of writing, they had changed without telling me. They’d written in paragraphs of their own, all fitting in, of course, with the modern german hypotheses. When I protested about some of these months earlier, they said, but Mister Irving, these extracts you give from the Canaris diary and things like that, they’re completely unfamiliar to our historians.
We’ve shown it to two or three of our historians and they say they’re completely unfamiliar with them. And so, frankly, our sources are rather suspect. Dutch, I said, I worked ten years on this man. We have these pages of the Canaris diary in the cabinet office files in England. That’s why your german historians haven’t seen them. They said, well, unfortunately too late. We’ve cut them out. On publication day in Germany, I banned my own book. I sent a telegram to Ulstein saying, you will print no more copies of this book and you will withdraw all copies from circulation.
They had to do so for eight years. I fought a legal action to get the rights back and the book is now being published in Germany. Finally the right form. But could a german professor afford to do that? Of course not, because that would ruin him. Needless to say, I spent the next ten years, since 1975, writing a Churchill biography. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. But suffice to say that in America they’re publishing our double days. Tried to do exactly the same. They’ve asked for all the money back, all the advance. They said, Mister Irving, you found out things about Mister Churchill that the american reading public does not wish to be told.
Say, $100,000. And I said, get lost. Pay the money back. But I’m going to write the book the truth as it really is. You see, I’m not interested in writing history the way the professors do. They don’t have time to go to Stanford University in California, to Moscow, to Czechoslovakia, to Prague, to Poland to look in all these foreign files and try and find out the truth. And it costs a lot of money. Of course they don’t have the time, they don’t have the interest. Why do it? If you can buy 20 books on Winston Churchill and write number 21 and nobody will notice, particularly if you’re a wonderful writer and your style is good.
When you buy ten books on adult 13, write number eleven. It’s what I call the x plus one method of writing history. I don’t do that because what’s the point? One’s own life is too precious. One wants to produce something original. All these professors do. Along comes Professor Jacobsen in Cologne, in Bonn he writes a particular theory. Along comes Hilgren and he quotes what Jacobson and then comes Professor Jeckel in Stuttgart, who incidentally said that Hitler dies of genuine. And he quotes what Hill, Gruber and Jacobsen have said. And so you’ve got three professors all saying the same thing.
It looks like three independent sources because they’re all called professor. And then along comes Professor Prechart, a famous name in Munich. And he equates what Hildruber, Jacob and Jakobsen are set before him. And there’s four sources. And so it goes on. Four dogs chasing each other’s tail around and round in a circle not ever getting close to the truth is five dogs, six dogs, these professors. The circle gets bigger and bigger. It’s like a little soap bubble. It gets bigger. They puff hot air into it. And the soap bubble on the end of this pipe, there’s blowing hot air into it.
More and more hot air goes in and it’s soap bubble gets more and more technicolored and multicolored, like Jacob’s jacket. So put in more and more color and detail, it begins to wobble. It becomes unstuck the way the soap bubbles do. You’re just calling out to some idiot to come along and prick it. And I’m that prick. Over their faces we say in the modern idiom. And all they can say is then, Irving is a fascist. He’s a neo Nazi. Arrest him. Don’t let him into Vienna, for God’s sake. He’s done enough damage in Germany as it is.
And so on. Enough to say that this is for the german members of the audience. When President von Weizaker recently said in his speech before Christmas that he had been receiving letters from all over Germany protesting about the incarceration of Rudolf Hess. 92 years old, 46 years in prison, 18 years in solitary confinement. This is my fault because I’ve spoken 60 times in Germany protesting about the Rudolf Hess case and advising people to speak to von Bye, to write to him and protest about it. And when they protested, he got these letters over Christmas, he said in his broadcast.
But of course, Hess deserved it because of course, he was a war criminal and crimes against peace and the rest of it. And I spoke at a big Munich beer seller two months ago. The Leebench Wier Salad of 3000 Germans. Great fun. And I said, I hear rumors that some of the letters were not addressed to her, Ernst von Weizcecker, but to her, Ernst von Spiechelwecker. You don’t know what it means in German. Speichelecke means Herr Dickspittle. And I said that the rumor is that the german federal post office knew instantly whom to forward the letters to and that they were all delivered to the presidential palace.
You can have great fun with the german language. No, you see, the professors, they can’t find out what the truth is because they’re just running around in circles and they don’t get near the documents. But I took the trouble to interview the people. For example, I went to Weizzerka’s mother. President von Weizzecker’s mother is the widow of the number two man under Ribbentrop. In the foreign ministry when I visited her on Lake Constance, near Switzerland. Oh yes. I’ve got my husband’s diaries and letters. And I said, your husband? The second man in the german foreign ministry, you’ve got all his letters and diaries? She said, yes.
Do you want to use them? I said, why haven’t you given it to the german historians? She said, because you’re the first one to ask for them, Mister Urban. None of them bothered to come and see me. And it was the same with Walter Havel. Walter Havel, who was the top liaison officer between Ribbentrop and Hitler on Hitler’s staff. He’d been in prison with Hitler. He committed suicide with Hitler on the same day. You can hardly imagine somebody was closer to Hitler. I found his widow. She’d married again, living in Biederfeld, had a different name, but I found her.
And after 5 hours of buttering her up, she eventually, over tea, she eventually came out with these private dials of husband. She said, oh yes, I did mention. Well, all right, now I’ve talked to you, I’ll admit I got all my husband’s diaries. Are you interested? I said, it’s the same. I just gasped. She gave me the 1941 diary straight away to take back to England to have a look at. I said, why do I get it? She said, because nobody else has bothered to visit me. Mister Irvine, you’re the first one to come and see me and ask about my husband’s diaries.
I’ve got a page of it here. June 2, 1941. You can’t see it, it’s very bad. Negative xerox copy of the copy that she gave me some years ago. But the last line, 2 June 1941. As a private man, I would never break my word. This is Hitler speaking. The havel just before he attacks Russia. As a private man, as privatmen als Paulitiker Deutschland aber ven is not wendigest thousandtmal. As a private man I would never break my word. But as a politician, for Germany’s sake, if necessary, a thousand times. You see, this dire is absolutely vital.
And that’s why private dahres are worth their weight in gold. You’ll find this in a minute when I mention the private diary of a wife, of Mister Churchill’s entourage. You see Churchill during the pre war years, rather like Hitler before 1933, was in the wilderness. He had been a cabinet minister. He’d been first lord of the Admiralty in the great War, the first World War, during which time he had masterminded such great triumphs. As Gallipoli and the Dardanelles campaign when my father fought, incidentally. But then in the interwar period, he had rather gone downhill and he began to suspect that he was out of office for good.
And for ten years, in fact, from 1930 until 1939, he was in the wilderness. He had no office. He was just an ordinary member of parliament earning 500 pounds a year. 500 pounds a year wasn’t very much money in those days and it isn’t very much money now. But he had huge expenses. He had this house, this country house, Chartwell. He had 42 gardeners, secretaries, nurses, governors, chauffeurs and all the rest of them support somehow out of this 500 pounds a year that he earned as member of parliament. So he did various things to pick up extra money.
One of them was he faked paintings. Well, I mean, don’t we all? When we need money, we go around doing oil paintings and signing the name of a famous mastron like Picasso or something else. We don’t all do that. Churchill did. I only found out about this by chance when my publisher in London, William Kimberly, he telephoned me, David, do you know the name that Winston Churchill painted under as a painter, what his nom de plume was? And I said, well, yes, it was Charles Morin. He said, yes, but I got a Charles Morin in my corridor.
I said, you can think yourself lucky you’ve got a Churchill. He says, no, no, no, the one I’ve got is by the famous french post impressionist painter Charles Morin, who died in 1906. They’re worth quite a bit of money. So I say, you mean there was a real Charles Morin? He said, that’s what I’m getting at, David. Now this is a very, very established english publisher who would never dream of saying anything about Churchill. But gradually the penny had dropped that in the 1930s when Churchill ran out of money, he sent some of his famous paintings, which you’ve all heard about across the water to Paris, had them put on display in a little known gallery in Paris and painted onto them the name of a well known french post impressionist painter to increase their price.
And one person found this out, President Roosevelt. I knew this because working in the Roosevelt Fowls and Hyde Park, York state, I came across an unpublished file of correspondence in the back of the safe, so to speak, which isn’t included in any of the volumes published in Roosevelt Churchill letters. And it came about like this when Churchill made his first visit to Washington after Pearl harbor in December 1941. It was announced in the press that he was there and the chairman of the American Fine Arts Commission, who knew about the Charles Morin scam, wrote a letter to Churchill at the White House addressed not to Mister Churchill, but to Charles Moran, care of the White House.
Washington. I mean, a very nice little joke. But the trouble was it didn’t reach Churchill because it had to go through this rather ponderous, leaden footed White House mailroom who didn’t know anybody called Charles Moran stayed at White House. It wasn’t open until February 1942 and immediately sent up to Roosevelt because it was quite plain who it was about. Roosevelt in the letter, actually says, dear Monsieur Morin, we are very happy to hear that you are not dead, as we had presumed from the biographers, but you’re very much alive and well and you’re visiting Washington. We admire some of your works, though not all of them.
Would you like to come round to a coffee party? Which, of course, given Mister Churchill’s reputation for sobriety, cannot have been much of an attraction. Would you like to come round to a coffee party when we can discuss the matter further? And Roosevelt read this letter and gradually the penny dropped. And he got in touch with the american secret Service and said, just check out what the name Churchill himself used when painting. And he found out all the background and the fact that Churchill had painted these paintings. And Roosevelt wrote a letter to Churchill in February 1942, which I have got, saying, I’m frightfully sorry, I hope I haven’t caused trouble, but I actually asked Scotland Yard if they were aware of the real identity of Monsieur Charles Morin before I realized it was you yourself.
And I hope I haven’t caused you any trouble. Winston. There’s a nice little stranglehold that Roosevelt got over Winston by this method. The letter is there in the files. Faking paintings was not Churchill’s own listening source of income in the pre war years. You’ll be interested to hear when he became very short of money, which was at the beginning of the 1930s, he did little tasks like writing war and peace, crime and Punishment, Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Wuthering High. You think you’ve heard these titles too, don’t you? Well, you have, because, of course, they’re very well known books.
War and Peace by Tolstoy, crime and punishment, Dostoevsky and so on. Churchill’s job for the Chicago Tribune North American newspaper Syndicate was to rewrite these books in 25 pages of foolscap typing with double spacing about, what, 10,000 words each for the Chicago Tribune syndicate to print on one page of the newspaper on a Sunday. And he got $1,000 a time for doing this. Not a very honourable job, but he did it, and he did it very well. His digests of these great works are extremely good. The records on that are in Eugene and in Oregon and the University of Oregon.
All the records of that particular syndicate are there, including the manuscripts corrected in Churchill’s own hand. All this is harmless. In fact, I even allow him to go around faking a painter’s signature, because that cannot be said to have upset his political alignment. But in the middle of the 1930 wilderness period, he started accepting what I would call slush money. It came about like this. A pressure group was set up, a secret pressure group called the Focus. And Churchill was the centre of this group called the Focus, which consisted initially of about a dozen top ranking british dissident politicians, people who were out of office and wanted to get back in and were willing to go to any lengths to do it, including overthrowing the government and Neville Chamberlain, or Baldwin, overthrowing that government and putting Winston Churchill in their place.
It became his vehicle. This group called the focus. Initially, they were set up by a kind of loose conglomerate of the trades Union Congress in London, the American Jewish Congress in New York, and associated bodies in London. What is significant is that it really started to become active in the middle of 1936, in July 1936, with a huge fund set up by the board of Deputies of British Jews in London. Now, these are facts. I mean, I’m not inventing this. The evidence comes actually from the authorized biography of the president of the board of Deputies of British Jews, a man called Sir Bernard Whaley Cohen, a very famous english jewish family.
He was, in fact, a chairman of the british shell, I think, at that time, or BP or one of the big oil companies. And he had a dinner party on the night of July 29, 1936, at which he passed the hat round for the focus and the number of city financiers who crawled out of the woodwork for this dinner party in Hampstead and north London to Whaley Cohen’s flat. They wrote out checks on the spot for 25,000 pounds for the focus, backed up by a promise of another 25,000 pounds when that lot ran out. In other words, 50,000 pounds.
A huge sum of money in 1936, multiplied by 40 to get canadian dollars today. And you see how much money this group put up for the Churchill secret group, the focus, in July 1936, the price was small because Churchill was, by that sum of money, bought. He was hired. He became a hired help. My chapter of my Churchill biography, in which I deal with this extraordinary situation is called the hired help. The only thing he was asked to do was to realign his gun and point his cannon securely on Nazi Germany. Germany had to be the only target of Mister Churchill in the future.
Forget about India, forget about colonial policies, forget about unemployment at home. He had to attack only Nazi Germany. That was what he was being hired to do. And he was a brilliant orator, wonderful speaker. He used all his powers of colorful language to bring the gun to bear on Nazi Germany from that point on, writing articles in the great national newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard, they all hired him. And of course he was getting money the whole time from the people who were backing the focus. I know who the members of the focus were.
You won’t find anything about the focus if you read Churchill’s history work. You won’t find anything if you read about the focus, if you read the other great books on that period. Because Churchill himself wrote to the man who was the secretary of the focus called Eugen Speer, a german emigrant who came to England in the mid 1930s. Very wealthy german emigrant who came to England and whom Churchill rewarded in 1930, 919 40 by locking up and sending off to Canada’s not unwanted alien. But by that time, of course, he had done his, his bit in setting up the focus for him.
Eugen Speer Speers papers are now available. Speer wrote a little book about the focus, a little brochure. And right at the beginning of the brochure is a letter from Mister Churchill, Speer back in the 1940s, saying, dear Mister Speer, I’d be very grateful if you give me your word that you will never publish what you plan to publish about the focus in my lifetime, after my lifetime, I don’t mind so much. Very interesting that Churchill was in a way ashamed about this. In fact, Churchill writes to Randolph Churchill in one letter saying, I’m perfectly well aware of who are the people behind the money that are being pumped into my group now.
And I’m aware what this involves. There’s a rather sinister letter that Churchill admitted in a letter to his son, Randolph Churchill at the time. The focus. The files of the focus are now gradually becoming available. Largely. We can reconstruct them as we often have to, not through the central file itself, but through the mirror image and the files of the members of the focus. One of the principal members of the focus was, for example, General Edward Spears, conservative member of parliament for Carlisle in Britain, a Tory member of parliament. His papers are now available in the archives.
And if you know what to look for, you know, the various code names under which the focus ran, like the Anti Nazi Council for Peace and Freedom was one of its code names, but they always refer to themselves in secret as the focus. You can see how it operates right from that time in 1936 until the outbreak of the war. With the outbreak of the war, of course, Churchill had been levered into office as the first lord of the Admiralty. And the focus suddenly becomes of no interest to him at all. He dumps it like an unwanted horse, like an old nag he doesn’t need anymore.
But it is not without significance to see how the people in the focus and how Churchill themselves financed themselves during those final years in the wilderness before the war break out, because it explains how the great lie began. I’ve explained who put up the money in the middle of 1936. That money continued to trickle along until the outbreak of the war. But Churchill’s financial problems grew worse and worse, not just because of the cost of running his house, Chartwell, which was the apple of his eye, but because of Randolph Churchill’s gambling habits, which his father had to pay sometimes 1000 pounds at a time.
Huge sums of money in modern currency multiplied by 40 in February 1930, just as the austrian crisis is boiling up, the first great major political crisis in central Europe. In February 1938, Churchill got a letter from his London stockbrokers, Vicar da Costa, Vickers da Costa, one of the biggest stockbroking firms in London, who were handling his share account. They wrote to him saying, dear Mister Churchill, we regret to have to inform you that all your american stocks and shares have become valueless overnight through a collapse on the american stock market. You owe us 19,600 pounds. Will you please take immediate steps to rectify this situation? It’s like a bank manager writing to any of you about an overdraft.
You’ve got an overdraft suddenly, which is completely unexpected of, multiplied by 4800 thousand dollars overnight, which you didn’t know was there. And the bank manager’s giving you seven days to bring the matter into order to find funds to pay into the account, or else. Or else that foreclose on Chartwell. That’s quite plain. Churchill is frantic. This is February 1938. He writes a letter to his crony Brendan Bracken, who later became Lord Bracken, and said, can you ask your friends in the city what they can do to help me in this awful situation? If they can’t help me now, then I’m faced with the choice only of getting out of pOlitics, going into the city, taking on directorships, and of devoting myself to city directorships and my writing career.
Because if I finish my great work, the English history of the English speaking peoples, then I can find enough money to pay off this appalling debt. See what you can do in the city, however, he puts his house, CHARTwell, on the MarKeT. If you look in the newspaper libraries and you see in the Times of the 2 April 1938, you’ll see the Chartwell Churchill’s private house is on up for sale. 25,000 pounds. That would have paid off the debt and left him a little bit to spare. So that’s the evidence of all this as well as the letter that I just quoted.
The austrian crisis comes to its height. The chancellor Schuschnigg goes to see Hitler. An ultimatum agreement is signed under duress. Schuschnigg goes back to Vienna. Schuschnigg proclaims a plebiscite. Churchill should be fighting mad, he should be making great speeches. But he’s not. He’s muted by his own financial impotence. And out of the city woodwork, which I mentioned before, crawls an austrian multimillionaire with the name of Sir Henry Strakosh. Brendan Bracken has found him there, lurking in the woodwork like a weevil. And out comes Strakos and announces in a letter through Brendan Bracken that I will buy up all your debts.
Strakos agreed to buy all Winston Churchill’s debts to the firm Vickers da Costa paid him 20,000 pounds, which left a few hundred pounds to spare. Bought up all the debts. The letter of agreement actually read that Strakos would buy off all Churchill debts. He would run the account. If the shares account in future made a profit, then the profit would go to Churchill. If it made a loss, then Tzakosh would very kindly cut that loss off with a knife and pay it himself. A very nice situation for Mister Churchill. Above all, it removed this overnight nightmare for him.
Strakos was an Austrian. He had fled to England in 1906. He had come to England as an emigrant. He had then gone to South Africa where he had become a multimillionaire in the gold mines. He returned to England as a financier and used his finance in the City of London to become even richer. Sir Henry Strakosh. All this is true, there is no doubt about it, because if you go back to the files of the times again on the 1 February 1944, you will see that Strakos has died a few weeks earlier under english law. His testament has been published in the Times and he has left exactly 20,000 pounds to the prime minister, Mister Churchill to wipe out the debt because otherwise the estate would not recognize the agreement and would go to Mister Churchill and ask for the repayment of what had been ostensibly a loan.
So exactly that sum is left to Mister Churchill under the Strakos debt not only to Churchill. Strakosh has also left 10,000 pounds to the Lord Chancellor, Sir John Simon and 10,000 pounds to another british cabinet minister who was therefore clearly in his pay, in his bribe, in his employ, just as Mister Churchill was. Churchill’s immediate insolvency has settled by this 20,000 pounds payment. But his financial misery continues. He’s still not getting enough money to pay for the cost of Chartwell and all his extravagant living, his governesses, his secretaries, his ghost riders and all the rest of them.
So the problem arises where does he get money from now? Well I’ve got the answer because I’ve done a lot of work in the files of the czech government. The czech government started paying not only Mister Churchill but also every member of his political group. The focus colossal sum of money we’ve heard before about 500 pounds, about 2000 pounds, about 20,000 pounds. The czech government sent a payment July 1938 because obviously Czechoslovakia is next on Hitler’s menu. The czech government sent a payment in July 1938 to the ambassador in London, the czech ambassador Jan Masrick for 2 million pounds.
Two separate payments. Not exactly 2 million pounds of course it was. The equivalent number of all these payments are recorded in the czech files and I’ve actually seen the chequebook stubs. They were paid into a special account that Jan Mazarik set up in the Midland bank in London. Not even the proper embassy account after Czechoslovakia vanished at the time of the Munich agreement in March 1930, in September and the subsequent entry into Prague in March 1939. After those events. When the subsequent czech government sent investigators to London to find out where the money had gone, Jan Mazda refused to answer.
He said he’d used money in the interests of Czechoslovakia and he didn’t consider himself bound to answer to the new government as to whom he had paid the money to. But we know who he paid the money to from several sources. Firstly the principal czech intelligence agent in London was a catholic priest and he wrote a report in October 1938 after the Munich agreement which really wrote finis to Czechoslovakia. And this report is in the czech files. And this principal czech agent says it wasn’t until the 2 million pounds came in the summer of 1938 in July 1938 and were made available by our ambassador in London that I was able to begin active subversive work among the opposition members of parliament, the conservative opposition MP’s, the Labour and the liberal members of parliament who were all agreeing to overthrow Neville Chamberlain if they could.
That made my work much easier. The funds made available through Jan Masarik. Jan Masaryk himself frequently telephoned to Doctor Benesh, the czech president in Prague. London, Prague. The telephone line ran across german territory. The Germans listened in in their rather ungentlemanlike way. We know how ungentlemanlike the Germans can be when they try. They had ways of finding things out and they listened in to this telephone call between Bennish and Mazarik repeatedly. And the Germans. The forschungsamter was called the research office, Hermann Goering’s Watap agency. They wrote the transcripts of these czech conversations on Braun pages of paper, the famous Brauner Blette or Brauner Fugel as they were called in the german intelligence parlance.
And on 23 September 1938, seven week days before the Munich agreement, Hitler was tactless enough. Tactless. He gave the entire folder of the transcripts to the british ambassador in Berlin, Senegal, Henderson and said you’d better show your boss what is going on behind his back. Churchill. According to Jan Mazarik, Mister Churchill is asking for more. Mister Attlee is asking for more. But they guarantee that they will bring down Neville Chamberlain and his government before any harm comes to Czechoslovakia. Churchill asking for more. The transcripts were handed by Neville Chamberlain by Henderson in Berlin immediately by courier to the Foreign Office in London.
You can see them in the british archives now that’s where you find these brown pages. The British can’t read them because they’re in German. They don’t understand the meaning of brown paper anymore. The fact they don’t understand what the initials Fa stand for or fas forsungsamt, which was Goering’s Wahtap agency. What is quite plain though is that they were horrified by these references to Churchill’s machinations because they put three lines in the margin with pencil and a row of exclamation marks. This is what Winston is up to. And Chamberlain writes to his sister saying I have proof now from the most extraordinary source of what Churchill is getting up to behind my back.
Not only Churchill, members of his group, the focus were also taking huge payments from the checks. And this isn’t the lunatic fringe writer David Irving who deserves only to be arrested for saying this. I mentioned before the danger of having wives who write diaries. Edward Spears, conservative member of Parliament for Carlisle, one of the leading members of the focus. He had been in the First World War with Churchill between the wars. As I say, he was one of his principal political allies in the Second World War. Churchill made him as liaison officer, general to gold, no less.
Edward Spears was one of who’s on the payroll of the cheques. He had married a famous american novelist, Mary Borden. I think this Borden was in. Mary Borden was in some way related to your canadian borden, the famous I think Sir Robert Borden and Mary Borden or Lady Spears as she became upon her marriage. Her private diaries are now in the University of Boston, Massachusetts. Let me quote from her private diary of October 3, 1938, three days after the Munich agreement which, which finally sets seal upon Czechoslovakia. The agreement signed by Chamberlain, Roosevelt, Daladier and Hitler.
No hope of a seat in the commons, writes this. Wife of General Edward go to the cinema with Helene. Hitler is hiss during the newsreel. Duff Cooper’s statement good, but not, in my opinion, inspired. There’s talk of a general election. Kingsley Wood is trying to work it. If there is one. If there is a general election, my husband will lose his seat. Probably faced with the prospect of losing 2000 pounds a year from the cheques and his seat in parliament. Oh dear. Faced with the prospect of losing 2000 pounds a year and his seat in parliament.
What a tragedy. How shameful it is for me now as an englishman to come along. Born in that very year, 1938, when our empire was at its zenith. In fact it grew even larger over the next seven years with the territories that are mandated to us out of the hostilities. And then to see it all go pop like that soap bubble I mentioned earlier because of the feckless follies of one corrupt politician into whose hands it had been vested in May 1940, a drunken poltroon, as Hitler called him. And I think that he used the word drunk with great temerity and absolute veracity.
When I was in Durban three or four weeks ago now, it seems like a lifetime ago. On this world tour I mentioned Churchill’s drunkenness in office and the fact that during large sections of his political career he was responsible for many drunken excesses. Board of Admiralty meetings, cabinet meetings, war cabinet meetings, defence committee meetings were conducted by Churchill in a state of complete intoxication. This was recorded in the private diaries of those who were present but never published. Churchill was alive at the time those diaries were published, if they were published at all. And so the diary, the wording was always changed.
This journalist in Durban, after I’d mentioned that fact, which I do mention now she wrote to me, she telephoned me and said, Mister Irving, you said in your speech that Roosevelt had routinely described Churchill as that drunken bum. Not very nice. I said, what do you mean not very nice? She said, well, the word routinely is not very nice. I say, well, on May 10, 1940, when Churchill became prime minister, as we know, we also know now from the private diary of the secretary of state for the Interior in Washington that at that moment Roosevelt looked up across his cabinet table and said to the assembled american cabinet, getting the news, well, it’s a pity Churchill is, I suppose, the only man that the British have.
It’s a pity that he’s a drunken bum. It’s in the diary. And this south african journalist, this female journalist, and by God you have to admire the tenacity of some women. She says to me, Mister Irving, you used the word routinely. One quote doesn’t justify the word routinely, surely. I say, you want more, right? April 20, 1940. A couple of weeks earlier, Mackenzie King, the canadian prime minister, visits Roosevelt in warm Springs in Georgia. He writes in his diary afterwards that famous Mackenzie King diary which you can go and see to your great enjoyment and entertainment now in the public archives in Ottawa.
Mackenzie King writes, Roosevelt said, what a pity it is that the only other statesmen that the British have of any kind of format size at all is Winston Churchill and he’s a drunken bum, right? So this Durban south african liberal journalist says, mister Irving, all right, you’ve got two sources. Does this justify the use of the word routinely that Roosevelt routinely called him a drunken bum. I say, well, how about this? March 12, 1940. You see, I’ve got a head that’s just full of dates, completely full of dates. If I unscrew one ear and like that, dates tumble out all over the floor.
My head is full of dates. I never put them back again in the right order again, so I won’t do it. But believe me, it would happen. March 12, 1940. You see, Roosevelt has sent his assistant undersecretary of state, the second man, the most important man in the State Department, on a tour of Europe, a final peacemaking effort, a fact finding tour I suppose they call it now. And Sumner Wells has visited London. He’s seen Churchill on March 12, 1940 in the board room at the Admiralty. And he writes in his report to Roosevelt that when I arrived at 05:00 p.m.
this evening, when I arrived, I found Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty that was then blind drunk, sitting behind his desk with a three quarters empty bottle of whiskey on the little table next to his desk, completely incoherent. And at the end of this long report, son of Welles writes the words. By this time an hour and a half had passed and he had become relatively sober again. And I was able to understand what he was saying. Now you see, the problem is that if you were historians, there would be several among you who would put up your hands and say, but Mister Irving is proof that you are falsifying history.
You are inventing quotations just as that Berlin publisher accused you. Remember I mentioned Ulstein and the Canaris diary, because we know that historians will say, we know that in Sunder Worlds report of March 12, 1940, which is available freely to all, there is no reference to church for being drunk or to a whisker bottle or to getting sober again. So you’ve invented it. To which I will reply, this is because you historians can never be bothered to go into the original archives and dig out the documents. You always prefer to use the printed volumes which are published by the official governments.
The printed volumes, because they’ve got nice indexes, of course, and page numbers and sometimes they even got pretty pictures to keep you awake in between the pages. And if you go to the printed records of the foreign relations, the United States, the official government publication of these diplomatic files, you’ll find, as he says, no reference to the drunkenness. But you will see Dot Dot, dot at the beginning and dot dot, dot near the end of the report where those sentences have been cut out by the government census in Washington, because it’s considered indelicate to say that Mister Churchill was drunk.
And so it goes on, you see again and again that the documents are being faked. They’re being faked for our own edification and for the purification of history. Mister Churchill is represented whiter and white. I’ll come back to his drunkenness towards the end of my talk because it isn’t just for hilarity that I mention it. He did do. He made disastrous mistakes at the time. At the same time as the record of Winston Churchill is being whitened. So of course the record of Adolf Hitler can hardly be blackened because it was black from the moment it began, the moment we began to pay attention to it during the second world War, we had to believe that the record of of Hitler was black because otherwise we couldn’t justify having wrecked our own empire.
In order to fight that war through to a finish, we had to paint him as being the devil incarnate. Well, as I mentioned earlier, there was Bergen Belsen, there was Dachau, there was Buchenwald. And subsequently, of course, the great big Holocaust legend has been built up into its almost impregnable form now, where the whole world now believes that one man, Adolf Hitler, mad. Of course, one mad man, Adolf Hitler, killed 6 million people in Auschwitz, etcetera, on this great big romantic notion, which is kept alive for various reasons of international finance and high politics and statesmanship, has been kept alive because nobody dares attack it in Germany, it is now a criminal offense to attack.
The last few words of that you are not allowed to question the 6 million or the notion that they were killed. And the notion that Adolf Hitler was responsible for it is absolutely invulnerable. You mustn’t even begin to question it. So when in my biography, I came to the conclusion, having spent eight or ten years writing the life of Adolf Hitler, I came to the astonishing, in fact, bewildering fact that I had not come across any evidence that Hitler even knew it was going on. Whatever was going on. All the other crimes are there. The killing of the russian commissars, the killing of british commandos, the lynching of allied airmen, the orders to wipe out, to kill off the mentally insane, euthanasia order, which has Hitler’s own signature on the document, those end of files, all the way through from the top right down to the bottom, from Hitler’s headquarters, right down the street level, you’ve got the documents, but not this one.
Now, the historians, of course, have solved this problem quite simply by not mentioning the gap. I remember when I told my literary agent, Max Becker in New York, that I’d come across an awful gap in the evidence, which I was going to have to. To explain openly and honestly by saying, you have to explain the gap by saying, by postulating that perhaps Hitler didn’t even know anything was going on because no documents crossed his desk showing that he did know what was going on. My agent, Max Beggar, said, for God’s sake, David, if you do that, you’re bankrupted.
And of course, I am, too, because he’s mister 10%. He gets 10% of what I do get or what I don’t get. And he said, invent evidence. If you can’t find the evidence, just invent evidence. Plug that gap somehow, rather like the dutch boy plug in the gap in the dike. God knows what would happen if that gap was left there. Invent evidence. Just stuff. Any old kind of newspaper articles in, anything to plug the gap and make it look as though Hitler knew, because otherwise you’re going to lose the Sunday Times. We’ve got a big deal lined up for the Sunday Times in England who were going to serialize the book.
You’re going to lose the Reader’s Digest, you’re going to lose the book of the Month club, you’re going to lose the military book of the Month club, and you’re going to lose any hope of doing a paperback deal in Madison Avenue. They’re not going to publish the book if you don’t plug that gap somehow because your thesis is completely unacceptable. And I explained to him that I couldn’t do that. In fact, we did. We lost all those deals. Anybody who says, as occasionally they do, Irving, just by saying that about Hitler, by raising that absurd hypothesis, of course, he made the book very well known and he must have made a mint out.
It must have made a bomb out of saying that shows that he doesn’t know the first thing about publishing economics. You don’t make money out of the hardback book. You make money out of all those deals I mentioned, the subsidiary deals, and by deliberately turning my back on them, I must have lost probably two or $300,000 at a minimum, probably far more. And Max Becker just then had to groan and say, well, if you’re determined to commit suicide like this, then go ahead and do it. And I must admit I was nervous because I thought that perhaps somewhere in the files there might be evidence that I was wrong.
I couldn’t find it. I spent a lot of effort trying to find it. But I’ve been heartened in my approach by the knowledge that the documents that I had found about Hitler and the jewish question, remarkably enough, all the genuine documents about that showed him extending his hand to protect them. So anything that had been done to them had been done by people far lower down the scale, ordinary common criminals like you have in any national army or in any great police forces, or as the psychopath who, who will do things for whom, really, the head of state can’t be personally held responsible, even if he is constitutionally responsible.
But, of course, that’s a different shooting match altogether, and very different from this romantic notion which I mentioned earlier about the madman Adolf Hitler personally ordering and having knowledge of the killing of 6 million jews. That’s very different if you accept my notion that the whole tragedy, on whatever scale, occurred just as a result of these wretched people falling into the hands of a large number of psychopaths wherever they were. This is one reason why I’m coming under increasingly vehement attack on this world tour. I’ve had to see one university after another closing its doors to me in Sydney, in Perth, in Western Australia, in Auckland.
Universities came under pressure from certain groups. I saw the leaflets that were sent out, very well financed by that body. I mentioned before in New York. They were sent out to New Zealand and to Australia and to South Africa to try and persuade the media not to give me a platform. And only at 20% of the cases did it really work. 20% of the universities then withdrew the permission for me to speak on the campus. And as I said, it’s rather like the war in England, when we thought that by shooting down 20% of the flying bombs that were reaching London, we were doing a wonderful thing and that we’d bring the campaign to a halt.
The trouble was, 80% of those flying bombs got through. And so it is with me. Even if 20% of David Irving gets shot down, 80% of David Irvin gets through and the damages done to the enemy target. We have to explain, you see, that the documents which do exist in the fowl, the genuine documents, show Hitler trying to protect the Jews. The night of broken glass, that famous event in November 1938, when thousands of jewish shops were smashed and burned down and looted and plundered. 60 or 70 Jews were murdered by individual gangsters. That night, 100 or 200 synagogues were burned down.
We have to explain how it is that when Hitler gets the word of that at 02:00 in the morning, I know, because I’ve spoken to all the people who are with him at that precise moment. I know how he got the news. He pulls out every organ stop to try and stop this madness. He calls in his govern, his ministers, Himmler, chief of the SS, Goebbels, chief of the propaganda. He calls them in and all their officials. He has messages sent out all night by telex and teleprinter to stop the madness. In particular, one document in the files of the German, in the files of the second man under Hitler, Rudolf Hess, issued that very night, 10 November 1938.
It’s only three lines long. In fact, those of you who bought a copy of my book today, the warpath, you’ll find that I print that as a facsimile. Three lines on Hess’s headed note paper saying, on explicit orders from the very highest level, which must be Hitler, there are to be absolutely no acts of arson or outrages whatsoever against jewish property or the jewish community. This means Hitler’s intervening. That’s repeating explicitly, the document says, repeating the teleprints that we sent out this evening frantically trying to stop what’s already started. The next document, November 1941. Himmler’s come to him with a proposal to liquidate jews being sent out from Berlin.
Train. I’ve got Himmler’s own telephone notes. What he wrote down, paid day after day. All his telephone conversations. I’m the only person who bothered to read them because they’re in handwriting. And I mentioned before how lazy these are, the historians are. They only read the printed volumes. And here are Himmler’s handwritten notes on every telephone conversation he made during the war. Trainload of jews, he writes. November 30, 1941. Trainload of jews from Berlin not to be liquidated. He’s making the telephone call from Hitler’s bunker to the chief of the Gestapo, Heydrich. Obviously, Hitler is intervened once again to say, are you out of your mind? What are you planning? What are you plotting? Don’t do it.
A few weeks later, April 20, 1942. Exactly the same. Himmler in Hitler’s bunker telephoning Heydrich in Prague, the chief of the Gestapo saying gypsies not to be liquidated. Kine fernichtungdeze geiner. Again in Himmler’s own handwriting, a document of the highest authenticity. You won’t find these documents quoted anywhere in the entire body of historians who are against me, Raoul Hilberg, all the other historians who’ve written about the Holocaust. You won’t find these documents quoted. There’s another one. It’s in. I’ve got a facsimile I can show you later on if you’re interested in. In my brochure, which I’ve been using on this worldwide tour.
It’s from the fowls of the Ministry of Justice. The spring of 1942, about April 1942. The chief civil servant has written to Himmler. To Hitler. I’m sorry, say that again. The chief civil servant, Doctor Hans Lammers, rather like a prime minister, directly between Hitler and the civil service, has written to the chief of the foreign minister, the minister of justice, the deputy minister of justice, a man called Schlegelberger. And in this document he says, according to Schlegelberger’s own typescript note, that Lammers has telephoned to say that the Fuhrer has repeatedly ordained that the solution of the jewish problem is to be postponed until after the war is over.
You see, you’re all silent because the very notion that there are documents saying this kind of thing. But there’s no documents saying the other thing, of course, that Hitler wants it done, or that he knows is going on. There are documents where Hitler is actually individual to say he wants a solution to the jewish problem postponed until after the war is over is actually in the power of the ministry of justice. Now this document vanished after the war. It wasn’t available at Nuremberg. It vanished from the Nuremberg Doc files and it mysteriously reappeared around about 1950 when it was no longer of any use in the great war.
Crowns Charles after the war. It’s in the archives again now in the fowls of the german ministry of justice. You won’t find that document referred to anywhere by the historical historians either. The historians of the Holocaust. They act as though these documents don’t even exist. They’re authentic, there’s no question. They can’t challenge the authenticity. But they act rather like a card, sharp, like somebody who cheats at cards, who drops the incriminating ace of spades or whatever it is on the floor and then he puts his flat foot on it and then with that foot he shuffles it under the table and hopes nobody has seen him doing it and you’ll pick it up later.
So it is with the historians, these documents. They can’t fit into the acceptance acceptable hypothesis. They pretend that these documents don’t exist, which of course is not the scientific way of doing things at all. A scientist has to set up a hypothesis and make his hypothesis fit. The documents fit the facts and not make the documentary archives fit into his prearranged, preconceived notion. That’s all the wrong way of doing it. They take these documents, the archives, and they cut off the head and the feet and the arms because they can’t make it fit into their bed otherwise.
And that way, of course, they don’t really deserve the title of historian. I said to the german bodies of students that I’ve spoken to, I’ve spoken to a thousand students in Bonn only two or three years back and I told them about this document, about on the explicit orders, on the very highest level and so on. They were absolutely silent. They hadn’t heard it either. I say the reason why you’re silent is it’s taken me as an Englishman to come 40 years after the event and tell you about documents that your own professors sitting here in the front row, they all were, all the rector and the dean and the professors of history they haven’t told you about.
The only explanation why they haven’t told you about these documents is either they didn’t know the document existed, they were ignorant of this document, in which case they’re really incompetent and not fit to be your professors or more likely they did know about this document, but they’ve decided to suppress it because they can’t make it fit in with the accepted theories, in which case they shouldn’t be your professors either. And that is the situation today. And it isn’t good enough for the historians of the world to go around shouting and screaming blue murder at me. I offer a thousand pounds and I repeat the challenge here today.
Any historian, any private person who can find one wartime document showing that Hitler knew about Auschwitz or Treblinka or any part of the jewish tragedy that’s now propagated again and again and again by our opponents, I will give 1000 pounds for one wartime document showing that it should be there. It should be easy. After all, they’ve been saying it for 40 or 50 years now. They should have the documents on hand. How can you stake a claim like that without having the documents already available? AJP Taylor. AJP Taylor, the british historian. Of course, I remember coming up against him in a television program in England a year ago and he says, Mister Irving, how undignified for you as a historian to offer a thousand pounds.
I occasionally go around with it in my pocket and I bring it out of my pocket and wag it. I don’t do it today, not with all the brethren from Detroit running around, because I might be relieved of the money in a most unhistorical way. But occasionally I do that. And he says, how undignified to do that. Historians don’t operate like that. And I said, what you mean is how embarrassing for us historians that you do that and we can’t prove you wrong. And that is how it is. The historians are faked and faked and faked.
They faked to blacken the name of Hitler to justify our war against him, and they faked to purify the name of Winston Churchill, who fought this drunken war against Germany and against Europe for no other purpose than the glorification of his own name. Now let me justify that because it’s a very, very severe charge to level at this great englishman. Churchill came to office in May 1940, in June 1940, when France had also been knocked about out by a brilliant military campaign that Hitler himself had masterminded. In June 1940, Hitler repeated its peace offer to the British.
You remember the peace offer? I want nothing from Britain, nothing from the British Empire. I am prepared even to give german forces to help defend the British Empire against the Italians, the Japanese, the Russians or any other aggressors. This was the extraordinary, magnanimous secret german offer to the British. Churchill received this offer by various channels during June 1940, and on various occasions was on the point of accepting it. We know this because in his cabinet were members of his war cabinet, Lord Halifax, Lord Beaverbrook, the Great Canadian, the minister of aircraft production, Neville Chamberlain, who was the former prime minister, three members of his six man cabinet.
Half the cabinet wanted peace on those terms. And Chamberlain and Lord Halifax actually wrote descriptions of these cabinet meetings in their private diaries, and they described Churchill as being inclined to accept the german terms. The word terms is too harsh because terms implies there was something disadvantageous to us. The german offer. He was inclined to accept the german offer, provided that Britain and Britain, the empire’s sovereignty, integrity and independence, were safeguarded, as they appeared to be. But you can imagine Churchill slapping himself on his wrist the same day, that night, when he’s left the cabinet, saying, what am I saying? Am I mad? If I accept these terms, I am finished.
Because on his personal record, ever since the beginning of his miserable life, there had only been one military fiasco after another. Gallipoli, 1921. Between the wars, he had tried to declare war on Turkey. World War Two would have begun then. It was a drunken cabinet meeting attended by Fe Smith and Mister Churchill. Both had a very heavy dinner, a lot of drinking, and you will find the references to that in the private diaries of Mackenzie king. Again, privy councillor, to whom all this was related under the seal of secrecy as a privy councillor. 1940, we have Dunkirk, one of our most shameful episodes in british history, when Churchill personally gives orders to the british general in charge, Lord Gort, to withdraw, to retreat, to pull out of the line without informing either of his.
Of his brother generals to the right or the left, Belgians or the French, explicitly ordered not to, to tell his allies that he was pulling out, or, as Churchill said, advancing to the coast. This was the way the Churchill put it. In any order to Lord God, you had to advance to the coast without notifying either the french or the british high command. The French or the belgian high command. The most shameful order. If you look in the british archives now you’re writing a book about Dunkirk, perhaps you will be given the premier files, the prem.
Three files on Winston Churchill and Dunkirk, which are. You’ll be given the photocopies of those files. You won’t be given the original folders. You’ll notice that there are blank pages all the way through those folders interspersed. And you think, how kind of the people to have bound them with blank pages to keep the documents apart. The blank pages are documents that have been withdrawn because they’re too sensitive for us to be seen. Even now, 46 years after the event Hui, the 30 year rule that we’re allowed to see everything after 30 years, those documents withdrawn, I went to the french prime minister’s widow, the widow of Monsieur Paul Reynaud, who was the french prime minister in 1950, and persuaded her with trembling hand and fragile eyesight, to write out an agreement for me to be allowed to see all her husband’s papers.
In the french archives, there are the letters that Mister Churchill had removed from the british files. So we can see the truth about Dunkirk. And it’s one of the most shameful episodes in british history. The fact that we sank the french fleet in July 1940 because of a french translation error. A translation error? A faulty translation of the word control. Churchill translated the word as control, which is reasonable enough, but controller in German, control in French, in the wording of the armistice commission. The armistice of June 23, 1940 does not mean control. It means supervision, something completely.
Because of this false translation, Churchill orders the sinking of the fleet and the killing of 12,000 french officers and seamen, another of the great scandals of the Second World War. You won’t find it in the files because the british fires are also closed. But most significant is to see that these cabinet meetings of June and July 1940, where Churchill is on the point of accepting Hitler’s offer, has been blanked out. You can see it in the private diaries of Chamberlain and Halifax who are present, but the paragraphs in the cabinet protocols have been blanked out in the photocopy that you’re given to read.
So you can’t read the paragraphs relating to the Hitler peace offer and the fact that Mister Churchill was on the point of accepting it. Because, of course, how embarrassing to admit. I mean, it’s like my own case. This huge libel action I lost in 1970. Eventually it cost me and my publishers Castles in London, a quarter of a million pounds, because we thought we were right. We fought it right through to the House of Lords twice. It lasted four years. A quarter million pounds was a huge sum of money in those days, big sum of money now, I suppose, over a million canadian dollars.
But we fought it through. We considered that we were right. How absurd and embarrassing to have to admit, as we must now, that back at the beginning, we could probably have settled out a quarter thousand pounds right back at the beginning. But we thought we were right, so we fought right through to the end. And poor old Cassilis, this great english publishing house, went bankrupt over that case. They’re no longer in business it’s exactly the same as what happened with the empire. Churchill could have settled out of court in June and July 1940 on honorable terms which would preserve Britain and the British Empire, which I’ve always considered to be one of the great civilizing, culturing influences in the history of the world.
We would now have been the predominant force on the world. The British, not the Soviets, not the Americans. We would have been there. We could have been dictating the terms of peace and civilization today instead of those newcomers, the Americans, or those barbarians, the Russians. But Mister Churchill frittered that all away because he knew that if he did so, if he accepted the peace terms in June and July 1940, he would, and Churchill would be out. He would be into oblivion, down the tubes of history. There would be no bronze monument to Mister Churchill in Parliament Square in London, and he couldn’t afford it.
So he cast around for ways of killing off the peace movement, which was beginning to gather momentum in Britain, not only in his own cabinet, 50 50. As I mentioned, half the cabinet wanted peace. More than half the british people wanted peace. Because incredible though it now seems, when we will look back at that time in the summer of 1941, german bomb had yet fallen on a british town. Mister Churchill knew why. Because we were reading the british codes, the famous outra secret that is now common knowledge. At that time, we had begun reading the german air force code in May 1940.
We were reading the german navy codes, and above all, we were reading the german embassy codes. So we were reading what Hitler’s orders were more often than not. And Churchill knew by the summer of 1940 that that man in Berlin had given wicked, wicked, wicked orders that no british town was ever to be bombed. The British were to be allowed to begin the bombing war and above all, an absolute embargo on the bombing of London. Churchill must really have wrung his hands in despair. How could he hope to bring the british people behind him for a prosecution of the war under those terms? He had told Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, the famous father of the later president Joseph P.
Kennedy, whose diary I’ve partly read, the parts that matter, and whose telegrams to Washington I’ve also dug out of the archives in Maryland and read as well. Well, he had told Ambassador Kennedy that he actually wanted Hitler to start bombing London because this would bring an end to the awful peace movement that was causing him such problems in England. And above all, when the Americans saw the barbarity and frightfulness of the nazi air raids on England begin and towns like Lincoln and Boston beginning to suffer, then surely that must bring the Americans into the war. On the british side.
Cynicism and hypocrisy. To actually want the bombing of your own capital city to begin. Not that Mister Churchill would have minded, of course. He alone had an air raid shelter with 17ft of concrete in the roof. The famous cabinet war rooms that you can go and visit now. When you go as a tourist to London, you’ll see the cabinet war rooms. Buckingham palace didn’t have a shelter. The king and Queen didn’t have a shelter. Harry Hopkins goes to London a few months later, in January 1941, and he finds the king and Queen taking shelter in a cupboard under the stairs.
Buckingham Palace. Mister Churchill had 17ft of concrete in the roof. He didn’t feel safe there. He used to go, in fact, to an underground tube station on the Piccadilly line, the old down street station, and he would be there, 400ft underground, and he would take refuge there. That underground station remained permanently closed. Now, because of the reconstruction work that was done for Mister Churchill in 1940, he didn’t care. But until the summer of 1940 1940, not one bomber dropped on an english town. He had to provoke it somehow. Now I ask you to consider one date in english history.
It’s not a famous date like the Battle of Britain Day, September 15, or the 1 September when war broke out. Look at July 20, 1940. This is one of the most significant dates. On that day, Churchill is lying in bed, as is wont in Chequers, his country house, the prime ministers residence out in the country on Sunday morning. And he gets the intercept, the decode, the decrypt of a german embassy telegram from Washington to Berlin. The german ambassador in Washington, one Hans Thompson, reports. The british ambassador, Lord Lothian, has secretly put out feelers to me to ask what our peace offer is through an intermediary, through a Quaker intermediary called Loveman or Loveday or Lovejoy or something.
Lord Lothian wants to find out the peace offer and this is the one thing that Churchill can’t possibly afford, that the British find out what the Hitler peace offer is. That will be the end of Churchill, of course. He sends an immediate telegram to Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, saying, put the stop on your ambassador of Washington immediately. He’s not allowed to contact the german ambassador. He sends a telegram to hands to Lord Lothian in person, the british ambassador saying, you are not to have any further dealings with german ambassador, whether directly or indirectly and on the same day.
And this is what makes July 20, 1940 so important. Churchill sends for Sir Charles Portal, Air chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, the commander in chief of Bomber command. And he says, when is the earliest day that you would launch a savage attack on Berlin? And Sir Charles Portal says, prime Minister, we can’t do it yet because the nights are too short. We can’t get our squadrons from London, from England out to Berlin and back in the hours of darkness. We can do it in September, but not yet. And in September, of course, we will have the new generation of bombers.
The Stirling heavy bomber will be there, and we can use them. We’ll have a hundred of them. Them. But I warn you, if you do that, then the Germans will retaliate. At present, they are not bombing our cities or our towns. Their entire attack is being dedicated to the RAF fighter defences, the airfields, the radar system. The sector stations were being remorselessly knocked out one by one by the german attack. The battle of Britain had begun, of course, but it was only being devoted at that time to the dockyards, the blockade, the shipping and the fighter stations, not to the towns or the cities.
And Churchill went when Sir Charles Portal uttered this warning that the enemy might retaliate, Churchill just twinkled. Well, we know why. Because he wanted the attack to begin. But he was reading the german signals which said that they had no intention of attacking London. So we can understand why, two weeks later, when General Charles de Gaulle visits him out at Chequers again a Sunday, he finds him on August 4, 1940, Mister Churchill, standing in the middle of his lawn, shaking his little fist at the sky, his little pink fist, and saying, why won’t you come? You read Chagall de Gaulle’s memoirs, and you will see this.
De Gaulle doesn’t understand what this little scene was all about. But we now know Churchill was wondering why the Germans were not going to start bombing, why they were refusing to start. He couldn’t understand it. And he gets his chance. On August 24, 1940, when one german plane flying in from the west along the Thames, flies one loop too far along the Thames and drops it, its bombs. Not on Rotherhithe, where the oil refinery is, that it was supposed to be bombing the oil tanks, but on the east end of London. A stick of bombs falls on the east end of London, just inside the boundaries of greater London, and kills a large number of chicken and blows in several windows and flattens a couple of these old dickensian tenement buildings.
And Churchill has his pretext. He gets the news that Saturday night, Sunday morning. And on Sunday morning, August 25, 1940, at ten minutes past nine in the morning, Churchill personally telephones the headquarters of Bomber Command. At High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. And he speaks with the deputy commander in chief of Bomber Command, Air Vice Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley, and says, I want a minimum of 100 bombers to attack Berlin tonight in retaliation for this savage series of raids on London. This is Mister Churchill, and I mean, you don’t need to have access to the Churchill files to know this because it’s in the files of Bomber Command, in the records of Bomber Command, which have now, of course, been placed in the public archives in England.
You can see the actual transcript of Churchill’s telephone conversation between Churchill himself out in the country and Air Vice Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley in Bomber Command headquarters. You note the chain of command, a direct telephone link from Churchill to the Bomber Command headquarters, bypassing the cabinet, bypassing parliament, bypassing the air ministry and the secretary, this wet liberal serge of old Sinclair telephone call direct Bomber Command headquarters, although it’s going to have immense political consequences. And that night, 100 bombers go out to Berlin and 30 get through and do quite a lot of damage in the west end of Berlin, killing several people.
And over the next ten days, RAF Bomber Command repeats this raid six or seven times, sometimes missing completely, sometimes getting through and doing considerable damage and causing civilian casualties. Still, Hitler refuses to respond. This is the interesting thing. Hitler, in his madness, still thinks that he can persuade the British to accept his offer. On that final day, September 4, 1940, after there have been seven raids, Hitler sends for a lawyer called Doctor Ludwig Weissacher and sends the lawyer to the Stockholm embassy of the British to speak to the british ambassador and tell the british ambassador there what the peace offer is.
But the ambassador, Victor Mallet, tells this lawyer, I’m sorry, my orders are I’m not allowed to accept any german emissary on the embassy premises, and I’m not allowed to listen to anything about german offers. Mister Churchill’s personal orders. Hitler sends for Rudolf Hess that same day, September 4, and says to Rudolf Hess, you’ve told me so frequently about your contacts in England and Scotland. Please, will you do your utmost now to establish contact personally with these people and tell them what our offer is? We don’t seem to be getting through to the british public. And this, of course, is the famous beginning of the Rudolf Hess peace mission, his tragic flight in May 1941, his first ever parachute jump in his life.
In the middle of the velvety hours of blackness, he makes his first ever parachute jump and lands only 12 miles away from the man he’s gone to see, the Duke of Hamilton. And on the same day, that same September 4, 1940, Hitler makes a speech in the sport palace in Berlin in which he says, if that poltroon, that drunken poltroon in England once more attacks, if he sends aircraft with 10 bombs, we will send 1000 kg. If he sends 100 planes, we will send 1000 bombers to attack their cities. If he attacks our cities anymore, then I will eradicate theirs.
One of Hitler’s most famous speeches. Churchill’s ears prick up. This, of course, means he’s getting exactly what he wants. He sends an order to bomb in command. You are to launch another violent air raid on Berlin at the earliest opportunity. That same afternoon, and on the following day, September 5, the bombers return to Berlin, whereupon Hitler lifts the embargo. I’ve got the diaries of the deputy chief of operations on the german air force. I have the diary of the chief of the number two undergirding, and so on. We know the exact sequence of events. There can be no doubt whatsoever as to the sequence.
On the afternoon of September 6, 1940, the east end of London reverberates to the approach of enemy bombers for the first time on a colossal scale. A thousand bombers come up the Thames, far past the military oil refineries, the oil tanks along the Thames. The dockyards, they come right into the east end and bomb the dockyards. The east end, the factory, the workers homes, they set street upon street, entire suburbs in flames. The whole of the east end of London is covered in fire and smoke. That afternoon, that Saturday afternoon, we in the west end pour out into the streets and into the parks and the open space at the embankment of the river to see this extraordinary spectacle.
The whole of the east end of our capital on fire. We’ve never seen anything this vivid picture, this proof of nazi frightfulness is there for us now to see. We can hear what the people are saying behind us, this wicked man in Germany who’s done this to us. And during the night, the planes come back and they repeat the damage, because, of course, they’ve got the fires as a beacon to guide them on their way. Between the hours of dusk and dawn, 1000 Londoners were killed in this air raid between the 6th and 7 September 1940, the first great opening raid of the blitz on London.
Mister Churchill has his way. He’s been out in the country, of course, because he knew from code breaking the raid was coming. He comes back the following day in his big black Humber limousine, puts on an air commodore’s uniform. I don’t know why he wears an RAF air commodore’s uniform. To tour the east end of London to see the damaged areas. He climbs out of his car, he finds entire streets have been leveled, pathetic heaps of rubble with english Union flags sticking out on top, that have been issued the hour before by Ministry of information officials.
That’s part of the propaganda story, of course. You need the pathetic people, the Union flag bravely fluttering, Mister Churchill walking around with his air commodore’s uniform, the old women who’ve lost everything, their family, their household, their radio sets, their budgering, everything has gone up in flames. They’ve saved perhaps just the kitchen stove, but there’s Winston Churchill, their prime minister, waddling around with his cigar, and they’re saying to him, good old Winnie. Good old Winnie. We knew you wouldn’t desert us. We knew you were here. London can take it. And this became the title of a famous film, London can take it.
That’s the. That’s the title of one of my chapters of my Churchill biography, London can take it. The trouble was that Mister Churchill could not. He was never once in London when an air raid came. He knew in advance when the air raids were coming from the code breaking, and only once or twice, out of accident when the code breakers failed him, was he caught in the midst of an air raid in London, in the depths of his bunker. He no longer went out to Chequers when the air raids came, because Chequers also the famous residents of the british prime minister, were also endangered.
He had selected the private country house of a conservative member of parliament, one of his focus group. Of course, he had rewarded the focus group, members of parliament and Labour, liberal and conservative opposition, people who had backed him up in the wilderness. He rewarded more with cabinet posts and high office. One of them, Ronald Tree, had a country house out in Oxfordshire called Ditchley. And Churchill drove out there every time the code breakers told him a raid was due 150 miles away, there he felt safe and he would drive back the following morning in order to be seen in the streets of London.
This is the true image of Churchill. And if you think I’m being unjust on Churchill, then consider the case of Coventry, the famous, legendary air raid on Coventry. When we think of legends, romantic notions like the Holocaust, what about the other legends like Coventry and Hiroshima? Coventry, of course, we all know what it means. The most barbarous air raid on, on Britain during the war, 300 people were killed there, I believe altogether slightly over 300, perhaps enormous industrial was damaged to the aero engine. But the real story of Coventry is where Mister Churchill was that day.
You see, Churchill was told two days before that there was going to be a barbarous air raid on Coventry. A barbarous air raid on Britain. The air ministry sent him a message which is in the air ministry files now. And they said, prime Minister, we have just received intelligence from our code breaking office that the Germans are going to carry out a vicious air raid in three consecutive nights with their entire air force. All three Luftslotten, all three air fleets, over 1000 bombers escorted by fighter planes are going to attack a target. We know the second priority is outer London.
The third priority is the Thames estuary. The fourth priority is the home counties. So it stands to the reason. The top priority is the center of London. They’re going to attack it night after night for three nights. Codename Moonlight Sonata. Montsheim’s Renata. So it stands to reason that the first night is going to be the first full moon night. Churchill says, when is this? And the amenities says, well, the first full moon night’s the night of November 14 to the 15th. Well, one of the documents I’ve managed to obtain I’ve managed to rent for 5000 pounds the private desk diaries of Mister Churchill.
I rented them from the gentleman who stole them, who is his bodyguard, his Scotland Yard detective, Tommy Thompson. Commander Tommy Thompson’s godson rented them to me. And here is the extract from the desk diary for the actual Coventry period I mentioned. As I said, mount shines are an art. Was going to be the first full moon night, November 14. I’ll give it you bigger. Here we are a blow up of that. As you see, it was November, November 14 was going to be the first full moon night. And the raid is going to last for three days.
Three days beginning probably on the dusk of November 14, 15th. So Mister Churchill draws a bracket of three days with no appointments in London, please. Because he’s been told. He has been told that the target number one is London. And he says, when will we know when this doleful event is going to take place? And the air ministry says, the documents are there. And the air ministry files the amnesty says, well, prime minister, we will know for certain when the date of the raid is because the Germans always send out in the morning of a raid, a spotter plane to check the weather over the route.
And we intercept its radio signal back to Berlin. So that will give us warning of the actual day of the raid. We will know of the actual target of the raid when the Germans that afternoon switch on their blind bombing beams. And we will send up a radio plane, a radio intelligence plane to see where the beams intersect. And that tells us what the actual target is. Churchill says, very well then, keep me informed. And comes the morning of the raid, November 14, he goes about his business as usual. He’s got a full program that morning, November 14, he goes to Westminster Abbey at midday for the funeral of poor old Neville Chamberlain, who’s died a few days previously of cancer.
That’s one reason why he wasn’t able to continue in office, in fact. And then he comes back from Westminster Abbey. Churchill asks the latest state of play and the air ministry tells him in a message which is in the files. Well, in the meantime, we have now intercepted the radio report of the weather plane. So tonight, Prime Minister, is the night. And on our information we believe the target is still central London. Churchill looks at his appointment calendar. 245, Lord Halifax. 03:00 Mister Attlee. No more appointments after that. He sees these two. I know that the appointments are confirmed in their private papers.
And round about 04:00 when he’s finished with Mister Attlee, he goes trundling out of the back door of number ten, down the garden to the wall at the end of the number ten Downing street. The garden, a big brick wall where there’s a gate in it. And his car is parked behind the garden gate. The big black Humberly museum. He never drives off from the front when he’s on this escape. He only dries off on the front when the press are there for big state official visits and state business. When he’s escaping to his hidey hole in the country.
The car is waiting around the back in horse guards parade. I know this because his private secretary, who is with him at this moment, is a man called John Martin, still alive. So John Martin has been foolish enough to give me complete access to his private diary, which confirms the whole event. Except that Sir John Martin himself doesn’t realize what he’s shown me because he only has half the picture. He doesn’t have the desk diary, he doesn’t have the ambition signals, which I’m quoting to you. At 04:00 Churchill climbs into his big black humble machine to get out before the bombers come.
As he’s about to drive off, a dispatch rider arrives from the air ministry. Sir John Martin told me this. He said that the envelope was handed in through the window. And as we are driving off, Winston and I, past Hyde park. We just got past Hyde park when Winston leans forward and raps on the glass driver. Back to number ten Downing street. The message from the air ministry has said, prime minister, we have now received word from our radio intelligence plane that they have detected the german blind bombing beams intersecting, intersecting, not over London as we had thought, but over Coventry.
So the target for tonight is Coventry. Not London after all. Driver, back to number ten. He goes back to number ten, Downing street, where all his staff are waiting for him because he hasn’t told his secretaries to take the afternoon off. He hasn’t said to them, girls, wouldn’t you like to go and have three days by the seaside or something? Or go and visit your aunt up in Newcastle? He’s let them all work on in the centre of London. He himself has betaken himself to the countryside. He comes back and they look at him, astonished, round eyed with astonishment.
And they say, boss, you are back. And he says, this is what Sir John Martin tells me. I have just received the most doleful intelligence from the air ministry. And he waves the closed brown envelope in his hand, which he doesn’t tell them what’s in it. A most violent and barbarous enemy air raid is expected on London, our fine capital city on London. And it would not be right for the citizens of this hard pressed metropolis to gain the impression that I’m not willing to suffer the same trials and tribulations, to go through the same misfortune and sacrifice that I’m asking them to bear.
I have therefore decided to come back and share their misfortune with them. And that night at 08:00 according to Sir John Colville in his private diary, another of the secretaries, Churchill, goes up onto the roof of number ten Downing street, bares his portly waistcoat and says, I am ready for them to attack now. Let them now start bombing and do their damnedest. I will stand here and take it, knowing full well that the target for that night is coventry, 350 miles away. It’s a rather sad story about Mister Churchill, but as President Reagan might say, you ain’t heard nothing yet.
I mentioned earlier his habit of attending a cabinet in a certain condition. It first comes to our attention, in fact, when we find out that the famous wartime broadcasts of Mister Churchill, blood, sweat and tears, we shall fight on the beaches. All these famous speeches of Mister Churchill, which were broadcast in the evening by the BBC, were not broadcast by him at all. Because in the evening he was in no condition to broadcast. The actual broadcast voice was that of Norman Shelley, who I became quite a close friend of those of us who were in England during the war and heard the broadcast.
We may remember also that at 05:00 p.m. every evening we’d be listening to children’s hour and at 05:00 p.m. in children’s hour, there was this long running children’s series called Toy Town and Toy Town, one of the principal characters was Larry the Lamb. Larry the Lamb, bleated like that. And the man who did the Baa was Norman Shelley. Norman Shelley was also the best mimic of the Churchill voice, and he was the one. The BBC had to read the Churchill speeches in the evenings because Churchill himself could not. Norman Shelley has confirmed all this to me and is confirmed in the archives of the BBC.
You see Churchill, and this was one of the great tragedies of the Second World War. Well, he was clinically an alcoholic. There are various clinical definitions of what an alcoholic is. The signs you look for. I mean, we all know what they are, but there are various other things, like a rudeness, when you come for a meal and you find that no alcohol is served. This happened during the war, 1943, when Churchill arrived for a state banquet with the sultan of Morocco. And of course, there was no alcohol served at all there. And he was not any rude.
He was outrageously rude. President Roosevelt was also present and had been warned and he was better behaved. And if you read the private diaries of many of those who were present, this rudeness of Churchill on that occasion went down in the memories of many of General Patton, for example. He was present, and he records this in his private diary. The Sultan of Barnaco was hideously offended by Churchill’s behavior. But Churchill’s cabinet members and the people who served with him in the admiralty and the board of Admiralty all referred to Churchill’s drunkenness repeatedly at Admiralty and cabinet meetings, but none of them had the courage to print it in their memoirs.
If you read the famous diaries of Lord Alanbrook, for example, General Allenbrook, the chief of imperial general staff, he writes it in his diaries repeatedly about Churchill’s drunkenness. The diaries that are published under the title in two volumes, the turn of the tide and the triumph in the west, you won’t find a word of it because Churchill was still alive. But if you go to the King’s College library and read the original diaries in leather volumes, which are held together by brass traps with locks on them, you need a key to open these diaries. There you can see it.
Or the private diaries of Captain Ralph Edwards, for example, who was the director of operations in the Admiralty under Churchill as first lord at the time of the norwegian operation. We haven’t got time to read them all, of course, but I’ll read just the salient points, of course. What happened? Churchill had wanted to invade Norway himself. He’d got an invasion force aboard, three cruisers. The three cruisers sailed. He then called them back. He unloaded the forces because he thought the german high fleet was sailing. He had visions of another battle of Jutland. He sailed the force in the wrong direction, realized his mistake, recalled the cruisers, put the guns and the ammunition and the men back on the ships, but all on the wrong ships.
He put the guns on one ship, the men on another ship, the ammunition on another ship. He landed them on different parts of the norwegian coastline. There was a gallipoli like fiasco of which Churchill had proven himself so magnificently capable. The result was the fiasco which finally cost Neville chamberlain his seat. The Germans, in the meantime, landed a brilliantly executed hazardous operation which cost them almost navy. But they managed to carry it off. They landed everywhere. Norway invaded during the early hours this morning. So writes Captain Edwards. 9 April. Invasions everywhere, including even Narvik. What a chance we missed.
Then later on he writes, pure cold feeder. Should have been done. Winston ratted. And so did the first sea lord. Never win a war like this. Blast and damn them. Winston’s and infernal menace may well lose the war for us. Then. April 11, two days later, a very long meeting with Winston Churchill, who was again half tight. Now, you read this reference in the original dialysis I had written in ink. You can’t mistake the handwriting. It’s not a question of that. But you see that the official british historian, Captain Stephen Roskill, who quotes this in his books, has re quoted it, has reworded it to read meeting with Churchill, who was very tired.
Now, there’s a significant difference between half tight and very tired. Or again. July 6, 1944. The private diary of another sea dog, Admiral Cunningham. Admiral Sir Andrew B. Cunningham, who became our first sealord the year before this. He attended, therefore the cabinet meetings, the defence committee meetings. He too was horrified to find the condition Churchill was in as he conducted his war. Blind drunk again and again I read out only one entry. July 6, 1944. There’s no doubt the PM is in no state to discuss anything. Too tired and too much alcohol. He was in the terrible mood this evening, rude and sarcastic.
Had a couple of blows with him about the Far east. The next result was that we sat from 10:00 p.m. till 01:45 a.m. listening to him talking mostly nonsense and got nowhere. And you may think that this is a bit much. The hour is getting late and you don’t want to hear any more about Churchill’s drunkenness. But the decisions he ordered on this particular day show what he was capable of when he was drunk. Here we have the actual documents he issued to the chief of staff that day, July the 1944, signed by him. He orders the dropping of poison gas bombs on german towns and cities, the opening of poison gas warfare, forbidden ever since World War one, with signed solemn conventions and treatises promising that we would never, ever launch poison gas warfare without being attacked first.
In this manner, we signed the treatise. And yet Hills church will say do it, because the flying bomb offensive has begun against England. The V one flying bombs are coming over and they’re causing havoc in England. British morale is almost completely at an end. And now, out of the blue sky, suddenly come the flying bomb offensive. 30,000 days, 30,000 homes a day, being wrecked in the south of London by the V one flying bombs. And on the 6 July, Churchill orders the dropping of poison gas bombs. Not only poison gas, he also orders the release of 2 million anthrax bombs, bombs laden with anthrax.
Very little of this is known, of course, now, because he’s our great hero. We tried one anthrax bomb on a scottish island during the war to see its effect, and that island is uninhabitable today. It’s prohibited territory. You’re not allowed to set foot on it because it is still completely. Well, you’re a farming community yourselves, a lot of you, and you know what anthrax does. If we had released 2 million anthrax bombs that were prepared and charged in England, if we’d released them on Germany at that time, the whole of western Europe would still be completely uninhabitable today.
Not just West Germany, of course, because it would spread, and not just for the duration of the war. In his drunken stupor, Churchill ordered even that. Heedless of the conventions, heedless of Geneva, he ordered this war crime. I want you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas, he says. Then, arguing why it’s reasonable to turn a blind eye on Geneva. He says it is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the church. On the other hand, in the last war, the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden.
Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing, as she does between long and short skirts for women. You imagine what the enemy would have made if the boot had been on the other foot in 1945 to 46, if Mister Churchill had been in the dock at Nuremberg and the Nazis on the judges bench. What relish they would have had in reading out a document like this. I wonder. Cold blooded calculation made as to how it would pay us to use poison gas. And for a month, our magnificent chiefs of staff argued against it, not on the grounds of morality, as they should have done.
Saying, Winston, what you are arguing for is just like your norwegian campaign, a violation of the laws of war, a breach of the Hague Convention, a violation of the Geneva Convention on poisoning gas. It would be a war crime and you would be a war. They’re not saying that to him because nobody dares to stand up to this prime minister. Nobody, of course, resigns. They argue on the grounds of strategy and tactical expedience. They say the wind is blowing the wrong way for the use of poison gas. It would favor the Germans. Or they say, even they admit it, the german civilian morale is tougher than ours.
We have seen what the flying bombs have done in England. If a poison gas exchange now begins, we would probably lose it. What they don’t realize, of course, is that the Germans have secretly designed poison gases far more diesel than anything we had. Mustard gas, and the rest of them, they were phooey. They were peanuts compared with the poison gases the Germans had designed. The Germans had the first nerve gases already stockpiled. Taboon and Cyrine had already been designed, the nerve gases against which we had no defense. They argue against it on these grounds, the military grounds.
And Churchill replies on July 29, clearly I cannot make head against the parsons and the warriors at the same time. That’s Mister Churchill, our magnificent hero, the greatest living englishman. Now, thank God, passed on. But his image is still unturnished. His image is still, unfortunately, there we worship the image of Winston Churchill as though this man was not the grave digger of Britain, the empire, and all that we once held dear. We worship him and we look around and we say to ourselves, the sad truth is that if we regard these great figures of the second world War, Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Truman, then there is ample evidence that power corrupts.
Were therefore no great statesman. And the answer is certainly from my researchers. Some of our Commonwealth statesmen were men of format and decency. They weren’t all tarnished and corrupted by the power that they found thrust upon them. Robert Menzies, for example, of Australia, a fine man. His private diaries, which I’ve read in the National Library in Canberra, show him to have seen through what was going on in London. He visited London in 1941. He saw the dictatorship that Churchill was executing over his cabinet, the way that he was taking military decisions that were costing the lives of, of tens of thousands of Commonwealth troops, including those of Australia.
And he went on around the commonwealth, blowing the whistle on Winston Churchill and his methods. And, of course, your own fine prime minister, Mackenzie King. You read his diaries in Ottawa. Great shelves full of the original diaries. Ignore the printed volume by Pickersgill, the selection, you won’t get the flavor of the man. Mackenzie King. There’s no doubt at all that he was one of the upright, honest, decent, forthright, pious and religious leaders of the second world. 20 years he was your prime minister. I don’t see very much reference to him. Canada. Now, you don’t see many streets or buildings named after him, and yet he was one of the few decent men that the second world War produced.
And yet, for all his uprightness and decency, we can’t escape the fact that dear old Mackenzie King was completely batty. He was. I mean, how else can you explain? We know this. Now, you read the private diaries of Mackenzie King. And you, you see, there he is talking to his dog the whole time, which is harmless enough, but he was taking advice from his dog. This is true. I mean, he was taking advice from his dog and going down and reporting to his cabin the next day what decisions he had reached without revealing to them that it was dog Pat who had taken the advice.
And later on, of course, he’s taking advice from his mother, which is even more serious now. I mean, it’s serious because his mother had been dead for ten years. He was consulting his mother through the uncertain medium of a medium and again telling the cabinet. And during the war years, of course, he hardly took a decision without consulting Adolf Hitler. At night, in his sleep, he would have long dreams and conversations with Hitler, sometimes long telephone conversations with Hitler. And he would go and tell the cabinet in Canada, his cabinet, his decisions, the following morning, without imparting to the vital piece of intelligence that the piece of advice of be given to him during the night by Adolf Hitler himself.
Now, this was Mackenzie King. The most important decisions were taken by Mackenzie King. However, on the advice of the hands of the clock. Now this, you don’t know the hands of the clock. If you don’t know it. When they’re in a straight line, like 06:00, that is a good omen. When they’re covering each other, like 01:05, that’s a bad omen. And of course, the hands of the clock are doing it the whole time. If you keep an eye on the clock. He was a clock watcher. If you look through his diaries, Mackenzie King, August 1943, you find on some days he’s dictating into his diary day after day, 18 or 20 times what the hands of the clock are doing to him.
In the midst of the famous first summit conference in Quebec, Roosevelt, Churchill, Mackenzie King, all their cabinets and chiefs of staff, Mackenzie King has consulted in the hands of the clock without anybody seeing. Serves to see whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that is going on at that moment. The treaties being signed, the peace office coming from Italy, all the rest of it. Is it good or bad? Not just the rainbows outside the window, the way that the canadian flag was fluttering before, of course, Lester Pearson destroyed it. The way the old canadian flag was flying between the british and the american flags on the flag master outside the citadel? No, the hands of the clock.
What he would do today with our digital watches. I think Canada would have floundered. But never in his most evil dreams did he imagine the day would come when hand, when clocks would no longer have hands. The greatest day, which I may say in conclusion was the 17 August 1943. On this day, as they all arrive, Mister Churchill is already there. President Roosevelt is arriving from Washington. Churchill has arrived with his chiefs of staff and cabinet aboard one of his Majesty’s finest battleships. They go down to the Wolfs coast station in Quebec. Churchill sitting in the car beside Mackenzie King.
And he says to Mackenzie King, you know, we submitted this memorandum to you asking for 25,000 cases of whiskey and gin. Mackenzie King replies, as he says and is done what his secretary thought, of course, Mackenzie King, Secretary David A. Had to type up the discs, the dictaphone discs. She must have thought to herself, the boss has gone batty. The boss has gone batty. But I’m not telling anyone because they don’t want to lose my job. I mean, this is characteristic. The dial is all there, all beautifully typed up with all the hands at the clock, all the times faithfully recorded.
And on this morning, they go down to the Wolfs Cove station and Churchill says, we need 25,000 cases of whisky and gin, most urgently because it is affecting the morale of the british officers corps. What he means is it was affecting the morale at number ten Downing street. And Mackenzie King is teetotal. Hes a dedicated 100% teetotal, like myself. I mean, people like us, theres no getting around us. We will not be influenced. Were convinced of our own rectitude. Mackenzie King says, if I have closed down all the refineries and distilleries as I have for the duration of the war, producing vital raw materials for this fight for the preservation of civilization.
It would be most wrong of me to have to open distillery just to produce the demon drink for yourself and your officers. You’re going to have to put forward a better memorandum than you have done so far. And frankly, I consider the memorandum that your quartermaster general provided most impertinent. Churchill says, very well, if you promise to consider it most faithfully and studiously, I will have a new memorandum drawn up. And the new memorandum is drawn up by 25 August 1943. It’s there. The memorandum of the Quartermaster general of the British army is submitted to Mackenzie King.
20 years, your prime minister. Liberal, upright, forthright, man of integrity, teetotal, pious and religious. It arrives in his hotel suite at the Hotel Frontenac in Quebec at 25 to eight. The hands of the clock are covering each other. Mackenzie King tears it up. He says this is assigned to him. He tears the memorandum up. He tells Mister Churchill only that he has decided to deny the application. He never explains why. But now, thanks to the truth that we find in the original documents, you know, and I know, and it makes us all a little bit happier.
Thank you. I forgot. Man Doc on it, I had my mic muted. Well, thank you, Safara. Well, that was David Irving. And remember what I was saying? That was Irving. And, you know, just an amazing, amazing guy. You know, as Mike King said on the other night, at the end of our show, or, you know, during our show, he said that David Irving is not. He’s not a guy, that he’s not a historian that’s going to put you to sleep. He’s a very good storyteller and will, you know, just. He enthralls you with his history. Come alive, so.
And I agree with that. So anyway, that’s David Irving. And I’ve got a lot of stuff to do of David Irving that I can play, but I just wanted to test out, like I said, I’ve been trying to figure out some things to make it so that I can improve the quality show. And this really was a test, so, mid midday. But I may start doing this a lot more often where I just, you know, instead of, you know. You know, I like having the Friday night watch parties, but this is. There’s so many things that I can play and, you know, I mean, I think just by withholding them, I’m probably doing more harm than good, because, you know, it’s.
I’m not. If you guys are working during the day, and you need to have something during the day instead of you going and finding it, you know, by me not playing, you guys are, you know, I’m taking away the opportunity for you guys to learn. So I may start doing this, you know, more often. So. And during the middle of the day, just play something like this, and then leave the Friday night watch party for something that’s a little bit more enjoyable. Not that this wasn’t enjoyable, but. But. But I think, you know, man. So, anyway, um.
Well, I hope you guys have a great day. I’m gonna try to get back on here in a couple hours and get back into the, uh, uh, into the Eisenhower book. Uh, I just been having a really busy, and for some odd reason, I just. I feel like. I just feel drained and exhausted. It’s like, ugh. Like taking every ounce of energy I have to move. So, you know, it’s really lethargic. But. But what I can do about getting up tonight and getting on and finishing that Eisenhower book, I’m really, really interested in doing that. So hopefully I’ll see you here in a couple hours, guys.
Have a great day, and until I see you next time. All right, bye.
[tr:tra].
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