David Irving

It is an unusual technique, but it works. The book sold 25,000 copies in its first UK hardback edition, and it was often reprinted (Macmillan, Ltd.) and translated. It became an approved reference work at West Point and Sandhurst, and it figures prominently in university libraries around the world, because it quotes documents that other historians have failed to find. In 1991 Focal Point, an imprint founded in 1980, published a new Deluxe edition, updated and including The War Path, the narrative of Hitler's prewar years.

Mr. Irving's other publications had by then come under a systematic campaign of attack. In July 1992, on the day after he returned from Moscow bringing the unpublished Goebbels diaries from the former Soviet archives, Macmillan's capitulated and secretly ordered all stocks of his books burned. Libraries came under pressure to pull his books from their shelves. Italian, French, Spanish and Scandinavian publishers were prevailed upon not to release their editions of the book.

The 1991 Focal Point edition incorporated all the latest archival finds, including the diaries of Hermann Goering and Hitler's notorious doctor Morell, and for the first time dramatic color photographs taken by Hitler's cameraman Walter Frentz. This new edition is further updated with evidence including the long-lost Gestapo interrogations of Rudolf Hess's staff, now in private hands, and signals intercepted by British codebreakers.

HB, beautifully and extensively illustrated, 1024 pages