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His books are mostly about the second world war and the third reich including topics like Josef Goebbels, Winston Churchill and the bombings of Dresden.

In 2005 he was arrested and jailed for a year in Austria, for lectures he gave in 1989 in which he "trivialized the holocaust"]]> male Essex 1938/03/24 1136903 1840222050 9781840222050 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1181283253m/1136903.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1181283253s/1136903.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1136903.Rommel_The_Trail_of_the_Fox 3.53 15
Congdon had previously edited the book "Jaws" for a writer called Peter Benchley who had never written a book in his life; after this Tom edited my book The War Between the Generals and then Göring after that. He became a good friend -- his wife Connie was MUCH more difficult, a real southern belle, and very full of her ancestry -- but he has now long retired to Nantucket and I have lost sight of him, at least he does not respond to letters or e-mails.

In writing The Trail of the Fox I used some experimental literary devices: one was the use of the present tense (and italic type) to describe the hunt for the Rommel story, and the past tense to tell the story itself. The devices seem to have worked.

The book was really a spin-off from the Hitler biography, in the sense that Frazier spun-off from Cheers, though rather less lucratively.

There was a lot of hard research into the subject, but it was rewarding. I was always bemused, for instance, that German history doyen Professor Eberhard Jäckel, writing his much praised work Hitler und Frankreich, did not ever bother to read the original files of Army Group B (Rommel) or C-in-C West (Rundstedt, Kluge), but relied just on the published, and highly dubious, memoirs of generals like Hans Speidel.

Jäckel had no excuse. The records were in the archives in super-abundance, but the scholars have always preferred sitting in their book-lined caves to going out into the field where Real History is to be mined.

Lucie Rommel gave me permission to use her husband's 2,000 odd letters to her -- far more valuable than diaries, I have always felt, as letters once posted can't be retrieved and altered. But I did also find found several sections of the original and unpublished Rommel diary, scattered between The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, and Germany.

In the National Archives, in Washington DC, I found several hundred pages of shorthand, which I (rightly) guessed were his North Africa diaries; for six months I struggled to find somebody who could read that shorthand -- it was Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift -- and then my own secretary, Jutta Padel, picked up a page on my desk and found she could read it straight off. Therefore luck played an equally large part.

After transcribing the hundreds of pages of these unknown diaries, I placed them all on microfilm, and donated the originals to the German government's miitary archives. Since July 1993 I have been banned from those archives.

Reliance on these original Rommel letters and diaries (and those of Vice-Admiral Gerd Rüge, who turned out to have sanitised his own secret shorthand diaries in transcribing them himself) provided the clue to the book's main arguments: that Rommel was innocent of plotting against Hitler, and that a conspiratorial web was woven around him by his chief of staff Hans Speidel, who later successfully alleged to the Gestapo that Rommel was "one of them" (the traitors) in order to save his own skin.

Speidel, by then top NATO commander in Europe, threatened to sue; the German newspapers were full of his laments, but then he withdrew his writ, for evident reasons.

The family of the traitor Alexander von Roenne (he had been hanged in 1944) were equally displeased with the book, and pressed the German publisher to make modifications, more as a matter of good taste than for any other reason. I greatly admired the way that Roenne's sons had stuck up for their traitorous father in approaching me, which was the real reason why I allowed the minor changes.]]> 85384 3.84 90 11 1977 214122 0380758067 9780380758067 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1219370903m/214122.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1219370903s/214122.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214122.Hitler_s_War 3.62 8 85384 3.84 90 11 1983 2125798 0380708248 9780380708246 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1219371399m/2125798.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1219371399s/2125798.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2125798.Goring_A_Biography 4.60 5 In this major biography, based on hitherto undiscovered diaries and private and official documents, David Irving tells how Goring connived, intrigued, and conspired to bring Adolf Hitler to power, how he directed National Socialist Germany's industrial resurgence, commanded the mighty Luftwaffe, (Air Force), and served as Hitler's buttress through the years of struggle, triumph, and decline.

]]> 85384 3.84 90 11 1989 480289 0705700305 9780705700306 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175110442m/480289.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175110442s/480289.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/480289.The_Destruction_of_Dresden 3.83 6 85384 3.84 90 11 1974 277639 0316432385 9780316432382 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188709667m/277639.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188709667s/277639.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/277639.The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Luftwaffe_The_Life_of_Field_Marshal_Erhard_Milch 3.83 6 85384 3.84 90 11 1974 235261 1872197167 9781872197166 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172975939m/235261.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172975939s/235261.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235261.Nuremberg_The_Last_Battle 3.60 5 85384 3.84 90 11 1996 1442056 031229218X 9780312292188 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1442056.The_War_Between_the_Generals_Inside_the_Allied_High_Command 3.67 3 85384 3.84 90 11 1981 300124 0586206396 9780586206393 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300124.Secret_Diaries_of_Hitler_s_Doctor 2.50 4 85384 3.84 90 11 1983 368815 0586062750 9780586062753 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1254113544m/368815.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1254113544s/368815.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368815.The_Destruction_of_Convoy_PQ17 4.00 2 85384 3.84 90 11 1968 403711 0380763141 9780380763146 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1227541146m/403711.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1227541146s/403711.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/403711.Churchill_s_War 5.00 1 85384 3.84 90 11 1987