Why twenty years? It has not been easy – or inexpensive – to retrieve the thousands of missing private papers, letters and diaries which vanished into unfriendly hands at the end. Mr Irving, already the finder of other secret records surrounding Hitler, identifies the current holders of scores of private letters – partly American, partly Israeli, their identities now oddly concealed by German newspaper editors and historians still wilting under the glare of the draconian Morgenthau Plan. (Mr Irving published a facsimile of the secret Morgenthau Plan from Oxford University archives). He uses secret British intercepts of SS messages, as well as Reinhard Heydrich’s papers and KGB files in Moscow archives.

The age-old principle systematically denigrated the reputation of Himmler's young soldiers: Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Mr Irving’s suspicions, spelled out in the first and second part, are that Germany's enemies saw in the SS such a formidable enemy and in Himmler such a man that they tracked him down after the war ended, whereupon British army killers terminated his life; the very first chapter examines the circumstances of Himmler’s “suicide” more closely.

The book True Himmler is illustrated as will be Part Two with original black and white and colour photographs immaculately printed, including hundreds selected from Himmler’s albums now held by the Hoover Library in Stanford, California, and the U.S. “Holocaust” Memorial Museum in Washington DC.