of Stalingrad, or his claim that the Hungarian leader Major Ferenc Szálasi wanted to fight to the bitter end in 1944–45 (when he wished for a German-Soviet compromise peace) — were completely dishonest and untrue statements supported by references to non-existent documents. American writer Ron Rosenbaum questioned Irving about a memoir in his possession that was alleged to have been written by Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s. The precise authenticity of the Eichmann Memoirs is in doubt, but parts of the book, according to the German Federal Archives, appeared to be genuine (though the book was apparently the result of an interview between Eichmann and an Argentine journalist in the 1950s). Irving had received the alleged memoir during a visit to Argentina in December 1991, when it was presented to him after he had spoken at a neo-Nazi rally and was quite proud of his find. In The Eichmann Memoirs, Eichmann claimed to have heard from Himmler that Hitler had given a verbal order authorising the Holocaust, thereby contradicting Irving's claim in Hitler's War that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. Irving's response to the claim that Hitler ordered the Holocaust in The Eichmann Memoirs was to claim that Eichmann wrote his memoirs in 1956 at the time of the Suez War, and was fearful that Cairo, Egypt might fall to Israel. Irving told Rosenbaum that his philosophy of history is a strictly empirical one, and that: "I tried to apply the three criteria that Hugh Trevor-Roper thought were indispensable to reading documents. Three questions you ask of a document: Was it genuine? Was it written by somebody who was in a position to know what he's writing about? And why does this document exist? The third one is the crucial one with the Eichmann papers. He's writing in 1956 at the time of the Suez crisis; we know because he refers to it". Irving's reasoning is that if Cairo was taken by the Israeli Defence Forces, then the Israelis might discover the "rat-line", as undercover smuggling networks for Nazis were known, that had allowed Eichmann to escape to Argentina, and that therefore Eichmann had written his memoirs as a potential defence in the event of being captured by the Israelis. In this way, Irving argued that The Eichmann Memoirs were genuine but that the claim that Hitler ordered the Holocaust was false — made only to reduce Eichmann's responsibility