David Irving replies:
Hitler's Table Talk is the product of his
lunch- and supper-time conversations in his private circle from 1941 to
1944. The transcripts are genuine. (Ignore the 1945 "transcripts"
published by Trevor-Roper in the 1950s as Hitler's Last Testament
-- they are fake).
The table talk notes were originally taken by
Heinrich Heim, the adjutant of Martin Bormann, who attended these meals at
an adjacent table and took notes. (Later Henry Picker took over the job).
Afterwards Heim immediately typed up these records, which Bormann signed
as accurate.
François Genoud
purchased the files of transcripts from Bormann's widow just after the
war, along with the handwritten letters which she and the Reichsleiter had
exchanged.
For forty thousand pounds -- paid half to Genoud
and half to Hitler's sister Paula -- George Weidenfeld, an
Austrian Jewish publisher who had emigrated to London, bought the rights
and issued an English translation in about 1949.
For forty years or more no German original was
published, as Genoud told me that he feared losing the copyright control
that he exercised on them. I have seen the original pages, and they are
signed by Bormann.
They were expertly, and literately, translated by
Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, though with a few (a very few) odd
interpolations of short sentences which don't exist in the original -- the
translator evidently felt justified in such insertions, to make the
context plain.
Translation is a difficult chore: I have
translated four books, including Nikki Lauda's memoirs -- one can
either produce a clinical, wooden, illiterate version, like Richard "Skunky"
Evans' courtroom translations of Third Reich documents, or one can
produce a readable, publishable text which properly conveys the sense and
language of the original.
Try translating for publication the Joseph
Goebbels diaries -- written often in a Berlinese vernacular -- without
running into trouble with the courts! Louis Lochner succeeded in my
view magnificently.
Weidenfeld's translator also took liberties with
translating words like Schrecken, (see facsimile above),
which he translated as "rumour" in the sense of "scare-story". In my own
view such translations are acceptable, but they caused a lot of difficulty
at the Lipstadt Trial where I found myself accused of manipulating texts
and distorting translations (because although I relied on the Weidenfeld
translation, I had had access to the original document, and should have
known that the actual word was Schrecken).
The Table Talks' content is more important in my
view than Hitler's Mein Kampf, and possibly even more than his
Zweites Buch (1928). It is unadulterated Hitler. He expatiates on
virtually every subject under the sun, while his generals and private
staff sit patiently and listen, or pretend to listen, to the monologues.
Along with Sir Nevile Henderson's gripping
1940 book Failure of a Mission, this was one of the first books
that I read, as a twelve year old: Table Talk makes for excellent
bedtime reading, as each "meal" occupies only two or three pages of print.
My original copy, purloined from my twin brother Nicholas, was seized
along with the rest of my research library in May 2002.
I have since managed to find a replacement, and I
am glad to say that -- notwithstanding the perverse judgment of Mr.
Justice Gray -- Hitler's Table Talk has recently come back into
print, unchanged: Schrecken and all.
