True Himmler

by David Irving

TWENTY years in the making, David Irving's biography of Heinrich Himmler, the man, is finally ready. In two parts, the first of which appears now, Irving describes from true documents the origins of Himmler, an educated man with a Classics teacher as his revered father, and his extraordinary career until the final dramatic hours of his life, raising an army of elite SS soldiers and men to stand for Germany and defend it against the secret Soviet plans to invade all of Europe in 1941. He becomes a most trusted ally of Adolf Hitler, and remains loyal to the end; when he hears of Hitler’s imminent death Himmler takes steps to contact the western Allies and offer them the assistance of the SS against the mighty Russian army. But the western capitals are by then powerless, sucked too far into the Soviet thrall. Why twenty years? It has not been easy – or inexpensive – to retrieve the thousands of missing private papers, letters and diaries which vanished into unfriendly hands at the end. Mr Irving, already the finder of other secret records surrounding Hitler, identifies the current holders of scores of private letters – partly American, partly Israeli, their identities now oddly concealed by Germany newspaper editors and historians still wilting under the glare of the draconian Morgenthau Plan. (Mr Irving published a facsimile of the secret Plan from Oxford University archives). He uses secret British intercepts of SS messages, as well as Reinhard Heydrich’s papers and KGB files in Moscow archives. The reputation of his young soldiers was systematically denigrated on the age-old principal Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Mr Irving’s suspicions, spelled out in the first and second part, are that Germany's enemies saw in the SS such a formidable enemy, and in Himmler such a formidable man, that they tracked him tracked down after the war ended, where his life was terminated; the very first chapter examines the circumstances of Himmler’s “suicide” more closely. .

Genres: History, Biography, World War II, Politics

639 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.

Irving's works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it. Though Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes in World War II (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were never taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents, which he held closely but stated were fully supportive of his conclusions. His 1964 book The Mare's Nest about Germany's V-weapons campaign of 1944-45 was praised for its deep research but criticised for minimising Nazi slave labour programmes.

By the late 1980s, Irving had placed himself outside the mainstream of the study of history, and had begun to turn from "'soft-core' to 'hard-core' Holocaust denial", possibly influenced by the 1988 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, led him to openly espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Irving's reputation as a historian was further discredited in 2000, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray determined in his ruling that Irving willfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.

Reviews

[Jesuitstea · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Irving is another rare bird, but despite his global notoriety I'm sure anyone in the Anglosphere has met a very similar breed of (formerly) middle-aged Englishman. Try not to be surprised by the end-date, this biography on Himmler is a study of life of a man before he passed into history as a monster, accounting for the events, beliefs and interactions that shaped him.

Irving has amassed a gigantic amount of material to create this book, which is rather sentimental in his own way. His treatment of the Jews, which osculates between "I told you so's" and the kind of propoganda you can read on Stormfront comes with the territory. Written after all the "controversy" Irving is definitely preaching to the converted at this point.

All in all I can't help but recommend it to anyone interested in the life of one of the most notorious but least understood Nazis before the Himmler craze really takes off. If you're seeing this review then you're probably already on the "dark side of the moon," but it's definitely worth reading something so outside the box of academia.

I had to read this on my kindle for some reason...

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know the true story of Heinrich Himmler, this is where you should start as True Himmler does exactly what is says on the tin. It is the story of a man that we think we all know about already, Himmler the 'monster', Himmler the head of the notorious SS, etc. But in this excellent biography we get to see the growth of the man behind that image. David Irving's narrative, quoting the letters, diaries and personal papers of Heinrich Himmler and his family, take us through the life of the pre-war Heinrich Himmler as he rises in the SS to become Reichsführer-SS in 1929 and then one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich.

There is very little about Heinrich Himmler after September 1939 in this volume, bar the chapter dealing with Himmler's suicide murder in May 1945, as clearly there will be a second volume covering Himmler's war years. If the second volume of David Irving's Himmler biography is anywhere near as good as True Himmler then it will be worth waiting for, as this is the best Himmler biography there is by far and it is the definitive account of Heinrich Himmler’s pre-war life.

[JW · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography (I assume it’s the first of two volumes) covers Himmler’s life up until September 1, 1939. As usual with Irving, he deftly mines primary sources, mainly the diaries of Himmler and his wife. The portrait of the SS chief that emerges is of a nerdish man who was totally devoted to Hitler. He went from being a devout Catholic in his youth to having pagan and occult interests, and from an initial awkwardness around women to having a wife and a mistress. The mass crimes that made him infamous are mostly still in the future when the book ends.
David Irving is more of a presence in this book than in his earlier works. It’s as if he’s with you, just telling a story, with his comments on how he interviewed this person or obtained that document.
A problem with the notes at the end of the book is that the text page references are sometimes off by one page.

[Hunger Artist · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often recall inaugural lines of David Irving's 'Hitler's War' when I read any book based on Historical events:
To historian is granted a gift that even the gods are denied- to alter what has already happened.

David Irving's brilliant and painstaking research on the second most hated man of the Third Reich- Heinrich Himmler destroys many of the myths accepted as truth by conformist historians. How in that Totalitarian state neither Hitler nor Himmler had total authority. How Gobbles pulled strings behind the curtain to engineer June 1938 riots against Jews and again in November 1938- Kristallnacht.

One must read David Irving's books to know what actually happened during second world war and why no conformist historian questions Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin who actually committed gravest war crimes.

[Mew]

David Irving’s book will stand the test of time for their sheer cumbersome detail of the ugly truth.

[John Locke · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with any other of Irving’s works, True Himmler is a definitive literary investigation into an oft deified historical figure, brought back down to earth through the use of personal interviews, primary source documentation, and lack of hysterical preconceptions.

I was not aware this was to be part 1 of 2, and that is why it is 4 stars (for the lack of a detailed webmaster at FPP.) This work covers up to the invasion of Poland in 1939, with a review of his alleged suicide when surrender to the British in 1945, in the first chapter. There is no tin foil hat needed with this subject matter, as Irving draws on the present members of that fateful evening and their own paperwork, as well as the lesser known secret directives of Churchhill to avoid possible sympathetic trials for Nazi top targets.

This is the definitive work on Himmler pre war through 1945, especially due to the document hounding that Irving is famous for, and his seeking out the missing year diaries as recently as the last decade.

I truly desire that Irving keeps up the steam to finish the second volume of Himmler, as well as his own autobiography. The pace of his work at his age is truly impressive.