I would like to address myself to Mr Kaschner, with whom I think it possible to have a real debate.
First, on the issue of Dresden, I have never concerned myself about it to any great extent, since I considered it just another example, albeit a particularly violent one, of the bombing of population centres that was a common feature of the war. For that reason, I did not follow with any rigour the large part of the Irving-Lipstadt court action that dealt with that issue.
However, I note that Irving was by means the only person who believed that the civilian death toll at Dresden was well above the 35,000 or so bodies actually recovered and counted.
Here is a link to an article on the issue by the late Richard Crossman, a Labour member of the british Parliament, and a well-known philosemite and pro-Zionist, who can hardly be accused of being pro-Nazi.
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/war/dresden1.html
You will note that Crossman considered that the death toll could well be as high as 120,000, although he dismissed the figure of 260,000 publicised by Goebbels as propaganda.
I would now like to address the issue of the translation by Trevor-Roper of Hitler's sentence "Es ist gut, wenn uns der Schrecken vorangeht, daß wir das Judentum ausrotten", a translation that Irving borrowed and for which he was accused of "falsification".
Mr Kaschner, I do not think the essential issue is whether "Schrecken" is translated as "fear", or "terror" or "horror" (my dictionary gives "fright; shock; terror; alarm; panic; consternation; dismay; fear; horror", so there are a few possibilities to choose from).
Rather the issue is the message that Hitler was trying to convey with those words, and whether the translation that appeared in Trevor-Roper's "Hitler's Table Talk" (and was used by Irving) dishonestly distorted that message, making it mean something that it did not mean.
Mr kaschner, I ask you what you think was the message that Hitler was trying to convey, and why you think what you think.
I ask you why you think Hitler specifically said that it was "good" that the advancing German troops were "preceded" by the fear/terror/horror that they were exterminating or going to exterminate Jewry, ie that before the German forces even arrived at a locality, the inhabitants of that locality were already filled with fear/terror/horror (or panic, or consternation, or alarm) by the stories that had reached them about massacres of Jews.
I also ask whether you think Hitler's message was dishonestly distorted by the Trevor-Roper translation, and if so why.
I would then like to discuss the issue with you.
I would also like to discuss any of the "distortions" found by Evans and his team in Irving's works, if you are inclined to do so. We have previously discussed the issue if Irving's presentation of the Hitler-Horthy talks at Klessheim in April 1943, which to my mind was the only serious criticism that could be made of Irving's historiography (and even it did not to my mind have the cosmic significance ascribed to it).
