© Copyright 1993, H. David Kirk

[Continued]

Summing Up

Now we turn to Jäckel's dissection of Irving's thesis in Hitler's War. Let us keep in mind what these essays imply. They shout that the emperor has no clothes. The emperor, here Adolf Hitler, appears in Irving's portrait of him as a willful child but without guile. Jäckel's essays warn that the deception, if widely believed, can lead to dire consequences, reminiscent of this aphorism:

The attempt to justify an evil deed has perhaps more pernicious consequences than the evil deed itself. The justification of a past crime is the planting and cultivation of future crimes. Indeed, the repetition of a crime is sometimes part of a device of justification: we do it again and again to convince ourselves and others that it is a common thing and not an enormity.[20]

Footnotes

3. Bella Fromm, Blood and Banquets - A Berlin Social Diary, New York and London, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942.

4. The collection in which Eberhard Jäckel's essays appeared was called "Im Kreuzfeuer: Der Fernsehfilm `Holocaust' - Eine Nation ist Betroffen," edited by Peter Martesheimer and Ivo Frevel, with the collaboration of Hellmut Auerbach and Walter H. Pehle, Frankfurt, Fishcher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979.

5. John Toland, "Adolf Hitler," Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1979.

6. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, Cambridge, MA, and London, England, Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 35.

7. C.C. Aronsfeld, "The Bestial Policy of Cold-Blooded Extermination," Midstream, April 1993, pp. 10-11 .

8. David Irving, Hitler's War, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland, Hodder and Stoughton, 1977. This book is peddled at neo-Nazi meetings; Professor JäckeI's essays were written in response to it.

9. Goering, a Biography, New York, William Morrow and Company, 1989

10. Otto Dietrich, Hitler, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, Chicago, Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p. 41. I am indebted to Mr. John Weitz for directing my attention to this important primary source.

11. Quoted from Andrew Cohen, "Before we banish the past we must learn to accept it," The Canadian Jewish News, 13 August 1992. A more recent piece of information from a London correspondent suggests that Irving was not paid that sum and that he bitterly complained, publicly, about this breach of contract.

12. Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endloesung'," Vierteljahrhefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, Nr. 4, October 1977, p. 745.

13. Author of "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century."

14. C.C. Aronsfeld, "Holocaust 'Revisionists' are Busy in Britain," Midstream, January 1993, p. 29.

15. C.C. Aronsfeld, "The Bestial Policy of Cold-Blooded Extermination," op. cit., p. 11.

16. C.C. AronfeId, op. cit. p. 11.

17. James Bacque, Other Losses, Toronto, Stoddard Publishing Co. 1989.

18. Letter by a Dr. Herrmann, Professor of Political Science at Concordia University, appearing in The Canadian Jewish News, 8 March 1990.

19. Julius Pfeiffer, CA, The Canadian Jewish News, 19 April 1990, p. 10.

20. Eric Hoffer, The Passonate State of Mind, New York, Harper Brothers, 1954.

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