Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HITLER'S WAR by DAVID IRVING 926 pages. Viking...
Northwestern University Professor Arthur R. Butz raised hell last winter after he argued that the Holocaust was a gigantic hoax. A newly expanded and somewhat sanitized version of Hitler's Table Talk has been prepared in West Germany. At first such offerings seem variations on Comedian Mel Brooks' idea for a Busby Berkeley-type musical called Springtime for Hitler. In fact, they help to distort evidence and pervert history...
British Writer David Irving participates in the Hitler revisionism, though in a subtler fashion. His peculiar book, indefatigably researched for ten years and written to the size of a small footlocker, begins with a vaguely Brooksian premise: Hitler was "an ordinary, walking, talking human weighing some 155 pounds, with graying hair, largely false teeth, and chronic digestive ailments.'' He was not, Irving continues, the lone maniac exclusively responsible for bringing down European civilization in Götterdämmerung. This singular chronicle of World War II displays a quiet and sometimes fascinating empathy for its subject, viewing...
...fact, Irving advances a novel thesis that has already infuriated some historians. His question: What did Hitler know about the extermination of Europe's Jews, and when did he know it? Nearly everyone has assumed that the Führer himself ordered the final solution. Irving argues to the contrary that: 1) Hitler did not know about the programmed executions of the Jews until some time in 1943 or 1944, and 2) "the incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered on Nov. 30, 1941, that there was to be 'no liquidation' of the Jews...
According to this thesis, "Hitler's was unquestionably the authority behind the expulsion [of the Jews]; on whose initiative the grim procedures at the terminal stations of this miserable exodus were adopted, is arguable." Irving believes that Heinrich Himmler und the SS "pulled the wool over Hitler's eyes," keeping him in ignorance even while the gas chambers were working at capacity. It is also possible, the author argues, that the Führer possessed a familiar characteristic of heads of state-a conscious desire "not to know", what in a later era was called deniability...