http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10599718/Heinrich-Himmlers-love-letters-to-his-bunny.html As a German newspaper publishes Heinrich Himmler’s newly-discovered love letters to his wife Margarete, David Irving, the controversial historian, tells me that he has unearthed correspondence between the leading Nazi and his mistress, Hedwig Potthast, in which he is far more forthcoming.

Himmler had little, if anything, to say to his wife about the death camps which he ran for Adolf Hitler, but in July 1942 he confided to his mistress of his work at Auschwitz: “There are some things which I have to do for Germany which are not pleasant at all.”

Somewhat incongruously, the head of the SS addressed his mistress as “Häschen,” which means bunny rabbit. Irving is, however, convinced that the 200 handwritten letters that Himmler wrote to his mistress from 1938 to 1944 are genuine.

“They are in the hands of an American collector, who purchased them from a veteran who maintained that he found them in a bin in Berlin. They were with official papers, such as the birth certificate for one of Himmler’s children and hitherto unseen photographs, including one of him in his official car with the number plate SS-1.” He adds that Himmler was very much in love with his mistress. “He would frequently write two letters to her on one day, speaks about how much he thinks about her and would often send her gifts, such as bottles of wine,” he says.

Himmler records lengthy meetings with Hitler, but the letters are, adds Irving, “cautious and politically proper,” without giving details of the mass murder of the Jews with which he was engaged.
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Irving is shortly to publish the correspondence in his book Heinrich Himmler. He has lately been distracted by Jeremy Clarkson, who, he maintains, plagiarised his work in his BBC documentary about the wartime Navy Arctic convoys. Clarkson disputes this.