Goebbels diaries 'scooped and spoiled'

IN A CLASSIC Fleet Street scoop and spoiling exercise, the Daily Mail is to begin publishing extracts from the Goebbels diaries tomorrow, two days ahead of the Sunday Times, which was planning exclusive serialisation of the diaries brought to them by the historian David Irving.

Sir David English, editor of the Mail, confirmed last night that the newspaper would broadcast television advertisements today promoting the serialisation of extracts from previously unpublished diaries by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propagandist, from 1939 and 1944.

Sir David said the Mail had been given permission from the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich to reproduce extracts from diaries that the institute is thought to have obtained from the former East German government within the past few years.

Sir David said the institute was not being paid. But the Mail agreed yesterday to pay DM50,000 (pounds 17,360) for the copyright permission.

The Mail's Goebbels diaries are believed to be copies covering the same period as the originals of the entire collection of the diaries recently discovered in the Moscow state archives.

Mr Irving, an extreme right-wing 'revisionist' historian, who claims the holocaust was a hoax, was tipped off about the Moscow diaries and sold the serialisation ion rights to the Sunday Times for a reputed pounds 75,000.

Since the Independent revealed on 3 July the existence of the Sunday Times deal, the editor, Andrew Neil, has been attacked for being associated with and giving respectability to Mr Irving.

To scoop the Sunday Times, the Mail exploited the professional rivalry between Mr Irving and the Munich institute, whose Geobbels expert, Elke Frohlich, discovered the full set of diaries in the Moscow archives in March.

Mr Irving got to hear about them in May and, after being introduced to the Russians by a Sunday Times reporter as 'a famous historian', he was given permission to publish extracts. Although the institute persuaded the Russians to limit the material Mr Irving could see, by then he had seen and copied all he wanted.

Furious that its discovery was poached, the institute agreed this week to co-operate with the Daily Mail.

Mr Neil was said to be 'incandescent with rage' and was not returning calls last night. Last month, the Sunday Times was scooped over its serialisation of a biography of the Princess of Wales when the Mail revealed details of her suicide attempts.

Gleeful about his new scoop, Sir David said: 'It's very pleasing. As they have not been published before and they cover some very interesting key points before and after the war, I think we will probably have quite a few days of it.'