The Fuhrer as Hero

...All the diaries Irving draws on were composed by admirers, supporters and associates of Hitler who, as they wrote, were blinded by partiality and self-interest...

...But here it is, a big, handsome, glossy doorstop of a tome that repeatedly wrings its hands and drops its tears over the manifold misfortunes that befell the late Fuhrer on his way to Valhalla...

...He "bellowed with laughter" when Goering, that eager huntsman, turned greedy eyes on the forests of Bialystock...

...Having thus put a granite foundation under his theme, Irving goes on to say: "Surely British readers at least must ask themselves: What, then, were we fighting for...

...The source of this citation, Hitler Privat by Albert Zoller, is listed in Irving's bibliography...

...In Uganda right now "disappear" is a euphemism for what happens to those whom Idi Amin has ordered to be liquidated...

...Except for some bits of color and background, some passages of mild human interest, and much unwitting comedy, the innumerable passages that Irving quotes serve no purpose other than to shore up dubious suppositions and reinforce rickety conclusions...

...This was so rich that it was followed by "the loud belly laugh of which he was still capable in spite of the death and destruction he had loosed...

...And, on top of everything else, fetor ex ore—halitosis...

...Insomnia...

...But since Irving sets such store on the testimony of Hitler's female secretaries, one of them might in this instance be called to the witness stand...

...This must have been a remarkable bit of foolery, since Churchill's speech impediment was so minor as to have gone largely unnoticed in an oratorical style generally conceded to be incomparable...

...Didn't he order counterattacks and encirclements that never came off...

...Once they were seen bathing in a river "instead of fighting...

...He was surrounded at the highest level by bunglers, traitors and assorted incompetents...

...His second thesis is so preposterous, one hesitates to set it out for fear some of its foolishness might rub off...

...when GIs make their stand at Bas-togne their bravery is called "inexplicable...

...At a war council Hitler mimics Winston Churchill, making special fun of the Prime Minister's speech impediment...

...Stomach cramps (endemic to the Nazi hierarchy...

...Didn't he repeatedly order strong-points to be held to the last man, and weren't those strongpoints repeatedly overrun anyway...

...To illustrate further how insatiable was the appetite for clowning in the upper echelons of Nazidom, David Irving recounts with relish another incident...

...Hitler's War, in short, is a ramshackle attempt at revisionism which, one fears, may be only an early symptom of a spreading disease...

...The mot juste consistently eludes Irving, but his errors in semantics always, somehow, come down on the side of the Germans...

...We are never told how large...

...Sore throat...

...Truly, as his own Eva Braun so touchingly put it in words Irving does not fail to quote: "The Fuhrer is spared nothing...

...It is in the treatment of the Russian campaign, though, that Hitler's War touches its lowest depths of bias and distortion...

...Just when things were going nicely in his crusade to save Western civilization from the Asiatic hordes, the Russian weather closed in and spoiled everything...

...David Irving describes the Fuh-rer's bodily malfunctions in detail that even Dr...

...Irving knows that from "the most intimate sources—like Hitler's private conversations with his women secretaries...

...Bile pigments and increased amounts of urobilinogen in the urine...

...At the end, when he most needed to be in fighting trim, he was instead a physical wreck...

...In an incident over a missing flashlight, the Fuhrer assumed a Swabian accent for comedy effect and said, "Look, I steal other people's countries—I don't pinch flashlights...

...It is one of Irving's themes that Hitler "had neither the intention nor the desire to harm Britain or destroy the Empire...

...we learn only how he looked to those who were rooting for him, and we knew that already...

...The things that man had to put up with...

...The troops at Stalingrad goofed off...

...With his usual straight face, Irving records that at one point Hitler took heart because "Paulus's army at Stalingrad was tying down over seventy Russian divisions and brigades," which is like saying that the hamburger was immobilizing the meatgrinder...

...He was "sparkling with excitement" when he told his generals at the map table: "I have decided to destroy Jugoslavia...

...Not he but his generals blundered, all of them—Manstein, Rundstedt, Haider, Guderian, Man-teuffel, Bock, Rommel, Heinrici, the lot...

...In fact, as everybody knows, after holding their ground the Americans went on to capture the airfields of Foggia and the port of Naples...

...The publishers seem to be offering the book on the ancient principle of Tertullian: "It is to be believed because it is absurd...

...The author follows this unchallenged and uncontradicted statement with one of his own: "—and he spoke with deep conviction...

...He was "grinning from ear to ear" when Denmark, perforce, succumbed to his threats...

...It is that Hitler not only was unaware the Jews were being exterminated in the concentration camps but gave orders forbidding this and meant it...

...Somebody else is blamed for the egregious blunder of the German Army's being caught in the Russian winter in summer uniforms...

...He welcomed participants to a war council "with a friendly grin," and he "cackled" at having the French police under his thumb...

...Irving's method is simply to print what fits his thesis and to ignore what does not, and this makes for worthless history no matter how much research has been accumulated...

...Therefore it was just here that he perpetrated his greatest hypocrisy and basely betrayed the faith that his innumerable followers had in him...

...AH of the author's scorn is reserved for the Allied leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt...

...It does not occur to David Irving, or his editors, that Hitler's openly proclaimed intention to wipe the cities of England off the map?Wir werden ihre St'ddte ausradieren...

...Somebody should have warned him that it gets awfully cold in Russia in winter...

...Much to his surprise, evidently...

...He was a fellow of infinite jest, a barrel of laughs...

...The German word used is verschwinden, and a more ominous or unambiguous word could hardly be chosen for those who understood the code, as Himrn-ler certainly did...

...She is Christa Schroeder, whom Irving himself quotes or refers to 16 times without, however, producing the following statement by her: "I can assert with certainty that Hitler was informed in complete detail by Himmler as to what was happening in the concentration camps...

...It was a style that had no trace of the gross vulgarity of diction that marked Hilter's, whose speeches were delivered in a voice that one German described as having "a little of the odor of dirty underwear...

...The author's bias in this direction leaks from almost every page, and long before the book is over there is a pool big enough for his credibility to drown in...

...and his all-out efforts to do so outweighed by a good deal whatever he may have said to his women secretaries in private...

...It is never so much as hinted that perhaps the valor of the Russian soldier defending his motherland against a barbarous invader, or the skill of the Soviet marshals, may have had something to do with frustrating Hitler's designs...

...He regards any diary as on a par with the Dead Sea Scrolls and he copies off hundreds of entries from Nazi daybooks as if they required no testing, analysis or correction...

...The Fuhrer is given high marks for his fabulous grasp of, and attention to, detail...

...One does not have to burrow very far into the bloated bulk of the book before its pattern begins to emerge...

...Did the British sink the Bismarck, mightiest of German battleships...

...coauthor NBC documentary, "The Twisted Cross" Not very long ago it would have seemed to be sheer fantasy that anyone in his senses would write, or anyone at all would publish, a book calculated to make your heart bleed for Adolf Hitler...

...Consider: ?Behind his back, and against his express wishes, his underlings began killing Jews on a rather large scale...

...It is this: Any Nazi success is clear proof of Hitler's genius and of his superiority as a political and military leader...

...He repeatedly "guffawed" at the ineptitude of his field marshals, and he "chuckled" at the gullibility of one of them (Kessel-ring...

...Not really...

...A forecast by H. L. Mencken may be coming true...

...only that now the world is unjustly blaming Adolf for it...

...Once he "chuckled" to Mussolini: "America is quiedy and without much ado skinning Britain alive, pawning her into penury"—a chuckle one doubts ever got chuckled, even by so inveterate a chuckler as Adolf Hitler...

...But Irving would have you know that Adolf Hitler bore his staggering burdens with exemplary fortitude ("The nervous strain on Hitler would have overwhelmed most men") and with great good humor as well...

...Hitler's every sneer and libel on those two men is dredged up and spread on the page, and where that does not suffice by way of vituperation Irving weighs in with epithets of his own, as when he calls Churchill "mendacious...

...They foisted disastrous strategies on him, and he was putty in their hands...

...Examples are so numerous that they can be plucked at random: Hitler evacuated the Balkans not because he was driven out but "to provdde bait for his enemies to squabble over...

...For a study of Hitler's War they are about as significant as the testimony of Ron Ziegler and Bebe Rebozo would be in a definitive work on Watergate...

...He was feeling poorly a good deal of the time...

...In stating his peculiar case, Irving often gets in his own way...

...Irving's arguments are so muddled and tendentious, merely marshaling the evidence against them would consume more space than the limits of a book review allow...

...Listen to Irving: ". . . the Bismarck proved unsinkable to the end...

...She had scuttled herself under the guns of the British navy and sank with her colors honorably flying...

...It is a pity that the dead of Coventry and the London blitz are not around to hear Irving's assurance that Hitler meant them no harm...

...In preparing for his Ardennes offensive, we are told, he saw to everything including "the infantry's winter boots and blankets...

...There can have been only one explanation for this, and Irving duly records it in Hitler's own words: "AH our defeats in the East are solely the result of treachery...

...Kildare might find excessive...

...with an approach as virulently ex parte as this there cannot be...

...any setback or defeat is somebody else's fault...

...It does not dawn on him, or his editors, that a diary written by a biased man must necessarily reflect that bias...

...Take his passion for diaries...

...The root cause was that the Fuhrer was misled, deceived and betrayed on every hand by those whom he trusted...

...Dermatitis, puritis, tinnitus aurium (ringing in his ears), and a feeling that he was falling over to the right...

...But we hear nothing of that in a book where Hider's sayings, public and private, are recorded with a respect verging on outright applause...

...There are no reliable revelations or discoveries as to the unfolding of events during the War...

...An account of World War II written from the German side would be a legitimate undertaking if executed with some sense of balance and a disciplined respect for sources on both sides...

...They make much of Irving's eight years of research, but it hardly needs saying that mountainous research is no more a warranty of sound history than a slab of marble fresh from the quarry is a guarantee of a great statue...

...He thought it intolerable that his name should be associated with proceedings in the camps that made a mockery of all human decency...

...It was the stab-in-the-back all over again...

...For example, he quotes (in the notes, not the text) a Himtnler document declaring it was the Fiihrer's wish that the Jews "disappear...

...A head cold caught from his barber...

...He is already a sort of hero to David Irving...

...Perhaps he ought to get around to reading it sometime...

...He was, God knows, not much of a prophet, but he may have had something when he wrote in 1941: "Like Napoleon, Hitler will be denounced at first as a moral leper, but judgment will be revised and he will come to be a sort of hero...

...It's hard to win a war when you're not feeling up to snuff...

...In Normandy the German troops fight "unflinchingly...

...Not only were they incapable of grasping his brilliant strategic concepts but they actually sabotaged them...

...He is very free with superior sniffs and slurs at previous writers in his field, but his own procedures are often dubious when they are not laughable...

...The Normandy landings were an almost total surprise, and an enormous military success, yet Hitler is given credit here for predicting them "with remarkable prescience...

...At Salerno the Americans are said to have been "routed," a military term for overwhelming defeat...

...Here again der Fuhrer hat immer recht, as the Nazi party slogan had it: The Fuhrer is always right...

...Spots before his eyes...

...We learn nothing that adds substantively to the established portraits of Hitler...

...But what we have here is history written by Alibi Ike...

...He looked upon all those atrocities as necessary measures for the maintenance of his regime...

...But here, as everywhere else, he was most conscious of his good name...

...He "slapped his thigh and laughed uproariously" when Goeb-bels told him of a successful propaganda ploy...