David Irving's Claims About Hitler, Auschwitz and Nazi Orders

Consciously did it. More likely that Heydrich came to him one day and said, "Uh, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, has ordered, he wants the Jews all out of Europe."

And from that had then developed the, the more radical version.

Uh, clearly, if such an order existed, you would expect to find it on paper.

You would expect the British to have decoded it somewhere.

You would expect somebody to have written a letter home to their mother saying, uh, "Dear Mummy, I have today had to transmit the most terrible order to the SS Gruppenführers on the Eastern Front."

This kind of thing. And after 60 years, we're entitled to expect such an order to come.

As you probably know, for si- uh, for, for, for-- ever since my book on Adolf Hitler, uh, Hitler's War, was published in 1977, for 42 years, now 32 years now, I've offered 1,000 pounds reward for anybody who can find one wartime document showing that Adolf Hitler even knew about Auschwitz,

let alone gave orders for the killing of the Jews.

The only documents you gradually find run the other way.

We find that on the day that Auschwitz was overrun by the Russian army, the Red Army, in January 1945, the chief of the German General Staff, General Guderian, comes to Hitler and says at the war conference, which is written down by shorthand writers,

"Yesterday, the Red Army overran Auschwitz, mein Führer."

And Hitler, a few seconds later, saying-- Well, what does he say?

Does he say, "Oh my God, I hope he managed to destroy everything before the Russians find it so they've got no trace of what we've been up to"?

No, he just says, "Okay. Jawohl." Means nothing to him.

Uh, it's the same if you look at all the documents, if you follow the, the methods that I used when I wrote my Hitler biography.

I picked only genuine documents, ones that I was pretty satisfied that were genuine.

At that time, we didn't have any of the decodes, of course.

I picked documents that had been on Hitler's desk, documents of which he was aware.

I had a pretty strict criterion I applied, and you get a very different picture then.

You get a picture then of Adolf Hitler-