© Copyright 1993, H. David Kirk
[Continued]
Why Clean up Hitler?
While Professor Jäckel's essays addressed
Irving's fantasy
about Hitler's guiltlessness in the murder of Europe's Jews,
he did not raise the question of what
Irving's attempt to
disinfect Hitler, if successful, would do for the neo-Nazi
movement. A clue to the potential utility of such a cleanup
appeared in an article by Martin Broszat [12] He said that a
majority of the German people had enthusiastically
identified themselves not with men like Himrnler, Bormann
and Heydrich, nor with the Nazi party, but with Hitler. Thus
it was the "Fuehrer" on whose posthumous stature the neo-
Nazi movement could bank for a possible political come-back.
But the demon in Hitler's reputation would have to be
exorcized if the figure of the Fuehrer were to serve a new
political purpose. That is what
Irving seems to have been
doing.
Revisionist Incest
That people who keep regular company would also share
outlook and ideas is hardly surprising. But in the case of
"revisionist" history and neo-Nazi ideology, that affinity
calls for special attention. If
Irving's cleanup of Hitler
is useful to the neo-Nazi movement's political ambitions,
in what sense is the neo-Nazi movement useful to
Irving? One
need only inspect the range of the man's books to find a
possible clue.
In his 1960s books, such as The Destruction of Dresden and
The Virus House,
Irving judged "even-handedly" Allied and
Nazi war guilt, equating the two combatants as "war
criminals." It was a very attractive message for the likes
of
Zundel,
Butz[13] and
Faurisson. Their world-wide
distribution networks enabled
Irving to gain attention far
beyond what his publishers alone have been able to do
for him.
Having become a valued client,
Irving shaped his later
books, such as Hitler's War and Goering with even more
partisan messages. He now feels free to back charlatans
like the self-styled "gas chamber expert"
Leuchter, who
denies that at
Auschwitz Jews were gassed with prussic acid
(
Cyclon B). Thus
Irving has put himself squarely in the neo-
Nazi camp. Whatever
Irving may once have been, and whatever
he may once have wanted his books to say, he has now become
the willing darling of neo-Nazi interests. And as his deal
with The Sunday Times of London has shown, even that
unvarnished bias does not seem to militate against
Irving's
drawing considerable profit from it.
[Continued]
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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