Hitler's War and The War Path [Millennium Edition]

SIGNED by the author, David Irving on the title page and inscribed 'For Karl Swenson' on the title page. We purchased the book from the estate of Karl Swenson, a lawyer in Vancouver, Washington. A portion of the proceed from the sale of this book will be donated to the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. 985pp. Illustrated throughout with color and b/w photo plates. Sewn binding in black cloth. Front fore head corner just nudged, otherwise a FINE copy of this controversial and best-selling revisionist history. Revised 'Millennium Edition,' in which Irving narrates the Second World War from Hitler's perspective and leaves out any mention of 'The Final Solution,' explaining, 'What Hitler did not order, or did not learn, does not figure in this book.' It was published two years after Irving's conviction of Holocaust Denial in British court. Signed copies of Irving's books are quite scarce in trade. The outgrowth of Mr. Irving's long fascination with Hitler and Nazi Germany, Hitler's War introduced revisionist assertions and conclusions about Adolf Hitler of so startling a nature as to provoke an immediate and furious international con magazines, and on radio. Mr. Irving's book seems, at first glance, a kind of landmark in Hitler studies, a formidable challenge to established views, and a serious work whose revisionist conclusions appear massively and fastidiously documented with original sources. A closer analysis, however, reveals something a bit different. The foundation of Mr. Irving's thesis, the basis of his attempt to revise Hitler's image in history, is his now well-known contention that Hitler never ordered the physical annihilation of Europe's Jews (p. xiv); that on at least one occasion during the war, November 30,1941, he specifically ordered that the Jews were not to be liquidated; and that the program of extermination that evolved from 1941 on was partly an ad hoc solution . undertaken by the SS and Party satraps in the Eastern territories to solve the problems created by the massive deportations of Jews, and partly the work of Himmler, Heydrich, and other SS principals, who carried out the work in secret, behind Hitler's back, and against his express orders. This conclusion, in Mr. Irving's view, is due partly to the 'fact' that Hitler was the weakest German leader in this century whose immersion in running his war kept him from knowing what his subordinates were doing and progressively enfeebled his control over them. It is due additionally to the 'fact' that Adolf Hitler as a human being was much less than the monster that postwar historians have made of him. In view of this lamentable state of affairs, Mr. Irving, in writing his study of Hitler, 'eschewed as far as possible all published literature' (p. xxii), since in his approach to Hitler's war years 'I saw myself as a stone cleaner--less concerned with a wordy and subjective architectural appraisal than with scrubbing years of grime and discoloration from the facade of a silent and forbidding monument' to 'lay bare the factual bedrock on which the legend of Hitler had been built. But I believe that hard rubbing has disclosed a picture of the man that nobody until now had suspected' (P. xi). This is, in one respect, a masterpiece of understatement. In the bargain, as Mr. Irving tirelessly reminds the reader, he has worked diligently to discover new sources, 15 expose forgeries, 16 reveal canards,17 and unmask the ineptitude of his predecessors. he book. To assume, as Mr. Irving does, that the most important books of Hitler scholarship consist only of the biographies, and that the best works of historical literature related to Hitler, which he anonymously dismisses, 19 were not worth consulting, is--to put it generously--naively amateurish. By seeking to discredit the literature, Mr. Irving evidently excused himself from a good deal of reading, and thus from any confrontation with inconvenient facts contradictory thesis. This appears to mak.…