David Irving

David Irving
Born	David John Cawdell Irving 24 March 1938 (1938-03-24) (age 72) Brentwood, Essex, England
Residence	London, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Writer
Known for	Military history of World War II, Holocaust denial, Historical revisionism
Spouse	Pilar Irving (nee Stuyck), divorced 1981; Bente Hogh (common law relationship)
Children	Five
Parents	John James Cawdell Irving and Beryl Irene Newington
Relatives	An old brother, John, a twin brother, Nicholas, and a sister, Jennifer
Website
fpp.co.uk

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer specializing in the military history of World War II.^[1] He is the author of 30 books on the subject, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).

His work on Nazi Germany became controversial because of a perceived sympathy for the Third Reich and antisemitism. He has associated with far right and neo-Nazi causes, famously seconding British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a debate at University College London on immigration during his student days. He has been described as the most skillful preacher of Holocaust denial in the world today.^[2]

Irving's reputation as an historian was widely^[3] discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 1996. The court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism,"^[4] and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."^[4][5]

Irving was arrested during a visit to Austria and convicted of "glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party" in a speech he made in 1989, a crime in that country since 1992 in the Holocaust denial section of the Verbotsgesetz law. He served a prison sentence there from February to December 2006.

Early life

Irving in 1955

Irving, along with his twin brother,^[6] was born in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex, England. His father, John James Cawdell Irving, was a commander in the Royal Navy, and his mother, Beryl, an illustrator (Beryl Irene Newington was born at St. Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, on 24 October 1896, the daughter of Captain Charles Newington, formerly of the Indian Army, and his wife Frances (née Dolman)).

During the Second World War, Irving's father was an officer aboard the light cruiser HMS Edinburgh. On 2 May 1942, while escorting Convoy QP-11 in the Barents Sea, the ship was sunk by the German U-boat U-456. Irving's father survived, but severed all links with his wife and their children after the incident.^[7] Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum as: "Unlike the Americans, we English suffered great deprivations...we went through childhood with no toys. We had no kind of childhood at all. We were living on an island that was crowded with other people's armies".^[8] Irving went on to claim to Rosenbaum that his negationist views about World War II dated to his childhood, particularly due to his objections to the way Adolf Hitler was portrayed in the British media during the war.^[8] Irving asserted that his "sceptical" views about the Third Reich were due to his doubts about the cartoonist caricature of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders that appeared in the British press during the war.^[8] According to his twin, Nicholas, David has been a provocateur and prankster since his youth.^[9]

Student years

After completing A-levels at Brentwood School, Irving briefly studied chemistry (though never graduated, due to financial reasons^[6]) at Imperial College London. He gained notoriety by writing for Felix, the student newspaper, and in 1959 served as editor of the University of London Carnival Committee's journal, Carnival Times.

Irving later studied for a degree in political economy at University College London,^[10] which he dropped out of after two years due to lack of funds.^[11] During his time at university, he seconded British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a debate on Commonwealth immigration, and was heckled.^[12]

Carnival Times controversy

Irving's time as editor of the Carnival Times was controversial because of the contents of a "secret supplement" he added to the magazine.^[13] This supplement contained an article in which he called Hitler the "greatest unifying force Europe has known since Charlemagne", though Irving deflected criticism by characterizing the Carnival Times as "satirical".^[14] He also stated that "the formation of a European Union is interpreted as building a group of superior peoples, and the Jews have always viewed with suspicion the emergence of any 'master-race' (other than their own, of course)".^[15] Opponents also saw a cartoon in the supplement as racist and criticised another article in which Irving wrote that the British press was owned by Jews.^[13] Volunteers were later recruited to remove and destroy the supplements before the magazine's distribution.^[15] Irving has admitted that the criticism is "probably justifiable" and has described his motivation in producing the controversial secret issue of Carnival Times as being to prevent the Carnival from making a profit that would be passed on to what he considered "a South African subversive organisation".^[10] His actions as editor brought Irving to the attention of the national press. In the 1 May 1959 edition of the Daily Mail, Irving is quoted by a journalist as having allegedly told him: "You can call me a mild fascist if you like. I have just come back from (Francisco Franco's) Madrid... I returned through Germany and visited Hitler's eyrie at Berchtesgaden. I regard it as a shrine."^[11] Irving has denounced that article as libellous and while accepting that half is accurately reported the rest is the "handiwork of an imaginative Daily Mail journalist".^[16]

The Destruction of Dresden

Sometime after serving in 1959 as editor of the University of London Carnival Committee's journal, Irving left for West Germany, where he worked as a steelworker in a Thyssen steel works in the Ruhr area and learned German. He then moved to Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an air base. During his time in Spain, Irving married his first wife, a Spanish woman with whom he had five children. In 1962, he wrote a series of 37 articles on the Allied bombing campaign, Wie Deutschlands Städte starben (How Germany's Cities Died), for the German boulevard journal Neue Illustrierte. These were the basis of his first book, The Destruction of Dresden (1963), in which he examined the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. By the 1960s, a debate about the morality of the carpet bombing of German cities and civilian population had already begun, especially in the United Kingdom. There was consequently considerable interest in Irving's book, which was illustrated with graphic pictures, and it became an international bestseller.

In the first edition, Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 — notably higher than most previously published figures.^[17] These figures became authoritative and widely accepted in many standard reference works. In later editions of the book over the next three decades, he gradually adjusted the figure downwards to 50,000–100,000.^[18] According to the evidence introduced by Richard J. Evans at the libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, Irving based his estimates of the dead of Dresden on the word of one individual who provided no supporting documentation, used forged documents, and described one witness who was a urologist as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. The doctor has since complained about being misidentified by Irving, and further, was only reporting rumours about the death toll.^[19] Today, casualties at Dresden are estimated as 25,000–35,000 dead, probably towards the lower end of that range.^[20]

1963 burglary of Irving's apartment

By November 1963, Irving was in England when he called the London Metropolitan Police with suspicions he had been the victim of a burglary, perpetrated by three men who had gained access to his Mayfair apartment claiming to be General Post Office (GPO) engineers. Gerry Gable was subsequently arrested and held at Hornsey police station, where on 14 January 1964, along with Manny Carpel and another, Gable admitted breaking in with intent to steal private papers. At the trial, counsel for the defence claimed that this was no ordinary crime, telling the court, "they hoped to find material they could take to Special Branch". The case was reported in the Daily Telegraph, 17 January 1964 and other newspapers.^[21] Irving considered this incident important, and in his video 'Ich komme wieder' ("I'll be back") he describes this as the first indication he had that he was under attack for some reason.^[22]

Author

Irving at The National Archives, 2003

After the success of the Dresden book, Irving continued writing, including some works of revisionist history. In 1964, he wrote The Mare's Nest, an account of the German secret weapons projects and the Allied intelligence countermeasures against it; translated the Memoirs of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in 1965 (edited by Walter Görlitz); and in 1967 published Accident: The Death of General Sikorski. In the latter book, Irving claimed that the plane crash which killed Polish government in exile leader General Władysław Sikorski in 1943 was really an assassination ordered by Winston Churchill, so as to enable Churchill to "betray" Poland to the Soviet Union. Irving's book inspired the highly controversial 1967 play Soldiers by his friend, the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, where Hochhuth depicts Churchill ordering the "assassination" of General Sikorski. Also in 1967, he published two more works: The Virus House, an account of the German nuclear energy project for which Irving conducted many interviews,^[23] and The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, in which he blamed the British escort group commander, Commander Jack Broome for the catastrophic losses of the Convoy PQ-17. Amid much publicity, Broome sued Irving for libel in October 1968, and in February 1970, after 17 days of deliberation before London's High Court, Broome won. Irving was forced to pay £40,000 in damages, and the book was withdrawn from circulation.

Adolf Hitler. Irving in an interview with Ron Rosenbaum called his work an act of "stone-cleaning" in which Irving removed the "slime" which Irving claimed had been applied to Hitler's reputation.^[24]

After PQ-17, Irving largely shifted to writing biographies. In 1968, Irving published Breach of Security, an account of German reading of messages to and from the British Embassy in Berlin before 1939 with an introduction by the British historian D.C. Watt. As a result of Irving's success with Dresden, but prior to the conclusion of the Broome trial, members of Germany's extreme right wing assisted him in contacting surviving members of Hitler's inner circle. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Irving claimed to have developed sympathies towards them (referring to them as "the Magic Circle").^[25] Many aging former mid- and high-ranked Nazis saw a potential friend in Irving and donated diaries and other material. Irving described his historical work to Rosenbaum as an act of "stone-cleaning" of Hitler, in which he cleared off the "slime" that he felt had been unjustly applied to Hitler's reputation.^[24]

In 1969, during a visit to Germany, Irving met Robert Kempner, one of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg.^[26] Irving asked Kempner if the "official record of the Nuremberg was falsified", and told him that he was planning to go to Washington, D.C. to compare the sound recordings of Field-Marshal Milch's March 1946 evidence with the subsequently published texts to find proof that evidence given at Nuremberg was "tampered with and manipulated".^[27] Upon his return to the United States, Kempner submitted a memo about Irving to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.^[26] Kempner wrote in his memo to Hoover that Irving was a "young man, who made a nervous and rather mentally dilapidated impression", and who expressed many "anti-American and anti-Jewish statements".^[26] Kempner went on to write that "completely unsolicited, he [Irving] stressed twice very emphatically that Sirhan Sirhan did the right thing in killing 'that big fat-faced Kennedy'. If he, Irving, were an Arab, he said, he would done the same thing, because of Robert Kennedy's alleged pro-Israel remarks".^[28]

In 1971, he translated the memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, and in 1973 published The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, a biography of Luftwaffe Marshal Erhard Milch. He spent the remainder of the 1970s working on Hitler's War and the War Path, his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler; The Trail of the Fox, a biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; and a series in the Sunday Express describing the Royal Air Force's famous Dam Busters raid. In 1975, in his introduction to Hitler und seine Feldherren, the German edition of Hitler's War, Irving attacked the diary of Anne Frank as a forgery, claiming falsely that a New York court had ruled that the diary was really the work of an American scriptwriter Meyer Levin "in collaboration with the girl's father".^[29]

The description of Irving as a historian, rather than a historical author, is controversial, with some publications continuing to refer to him as a "historian"^[30] or "disgraced historian",^[31] while others insist he is not a historian, and have adopted alternatives such as "author" or "historic writer".^[1] The military historian John Keegan has praised Irving for his "extraordinary ability to describe and analyse Hitler's conduct of military operations, which was his main occupation during the Second World War".^[32] Donald Cameron Watt, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the London School of Economics, wrote that he admires some of Irving's work as a historian, though he rejects his conclusions about the Holocaust.^[33] At the libel proceedings against Irving, Watt declined Irving's request to testify, appearing only after a subpoena was ordered.^[34] He testified that Irving had written a "very, very effective piece of historical scholarship" in the 1960s, which was unrelated to his controversial work; he also suggested that Irving was "not in the top class" of military historians.^[34]

Revisionism

Hitler's War

The Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. A note in Himmler's telephone log from 30 November 1941 saying "no liquidation" was to be the centrepiece of Irving's efforts in Hitler's War to prove that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust

In 1977 Irving published Hitler's War, the first of his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler. Hitler's War had been first published in German as Hitler und seine Feldherren (Hitler and his Generals) in 1975.^[35] Irving's intention in Hitler's War to clean away the "years of grime and discoloration from the facade of a silent and forbidding monument" to reveal the real Hitler, whose reputation Irving claimed had been slandered by historians.^[36] In Hitler's War, Irving tried to "view the situation as far as possible through Hitler's eyes, from behind his desk".^[36] He portrayed Hitler as a rational, intelligent politician, whose only goal was to increase Germany's prosperity and influence on the continent, and who was constantly let down by incompetent and/or treasonous subordinates.^[36] Irving's book faulted the Allied leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, for the eventual escalation of war, and claimed that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler to avert an alleged impending Soviet attack (a view supported by some, notably Soviet GRU defector Victor Suvorov, and others; see Icebreaker). Irving commented that in light of the "preventive war" that he felt Hitler was forced to wage, the Kommissarbefehl was merely something that Stalin forced on Hitler.^[37] He also claimed that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust; while not denying its occurrence, Irving claimed that Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich were its originators and architects. Irving made much of the lack of any written order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust, and for decades afterward offered to pay £1000 to anyone who could find such an order.^[38] In addition, citing the work of such historians as Harry Elmer Barnes, David Hoggan, and Frederick J.P. Veale, Irving argued that Britain was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1939.^[39]

In a footnote in Hitler's War, Irving first introduced the thesis later popularized in the 1980s by Ernst Nolte that a letter written by Chaim Weizmann to Neville Chamberlain on 3 September 1939, pledging the support of the Jewish Agency to the Allied war effort, constituted a "Jewish declaration of war" against Germany, thus justifying German "internment" of European Jews.^[40] In 1975, when without Irving's permission the firm Ullstein-Verlag removed the passages claiming Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust from the German edition of Hitler's War, Irving sued Ullstein-Verlag.^[35] Despite his much-vaunted disdain for professional historians (most of whom Irving accused of slandering Hitler), Irving attended a historians' conference in Aschaffenburg in July 1978 to discuss "Hitler Today - Problems and Aspects of Hitler Research".^[41] Irving spent his time at the conference attacking all of the historians present for alleged sloppy research on Hitler, and promoting Hitler's War as the only good book ever written on the Führer.^[42] Ian Kershaw wrote that although Irving's thesis of Hitler's ignorance of the Holocaust in Hitler's War was almost universally rejected by historians, his book was of value in that it provided a huge stimulus for further research on Hitler's role in the Holocaust (which had not been widely explored until then) as a way of rebutting Irving.^[43]

Reactions and criticisms

Reaction to Hitler's War was generally critical. Writing in the Sunday Times, Gitta Sereny called Irving's work "closer to theology or mythology" than history".^[44] Lance Morrow wrote in Time that Irving's picture of the "Führer as a somewhat harried business executive too preoccupied to know exactly what has happening in his branch offices at Auschwitz and Treblinka" was hard to accept.^[45] In an article published in the Sunday Times under the title "The £1,000 Question" on 10 July 1977, Sereny and the journalist Lewis Chester examined Irving's sources and found significant differences from what Irving published in Hitler's War.^[38] In particular, while interviewing one of Irving's primary informants, Otto Günsche, the latter stated that "one must assume that he [Hitler] did know" about the Holocaust.^[38]

While John Keegan wrote that Hitler's War was "Irving's greatest achievement... indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round",^[45] Hugh Trevor-Roper objected to Irving's argument that one entry from Heinrich Himmler's phone log on 30 November 1941, ordering Heydrich to ensure that one train transport of German Jews to Latvia not be executed on arrival, proved that Hitler was opposed to genocide.^[46] Trevor-Roper argued that the message concerned only the people aboard that particular train.^[46] Trevor-Roper noted the contradiction in Irving's argument: it claimed that Hitler ordered Himmler to spare the people aboard that train, while also claiming that Hitler was unaware in the fall of 1941 that the SS were rounding up German and Czech Jews to be sent to be shot in Eastern Europe.^[46]

The German historian Eberhard Jäckel wrote a series of newspaper articles (later turned into the book David Irving's Hitler: A Faulty History Dissected) that attacked Irving and maintained that Hitler was very much aware of and approved of the Holocaust. In response to Jäckel's first article, Irving announced that he had seen a document from 1942 proving that Hitler had ordered the Holocaust not to occur, but that the document was now "lost".^[47] Jäckel wrote that he had "easily" discovered the "lost" document, in which the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, wrote to the Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger that Hitler ordered him to put the "Jewish Question" on the "back-burner" until after the war.^[47] Jäckel noted the document concerned was the result of a meeting between Lammers and Schlegelberger on 10 April 1942 concerning amendments to the divorce law concerning German Jews and Mischlinge.^[48] Jäckel commented that in 1942, there was a division of labour between the representatives of the Rechtsstaat (Law State) and the Polizeistaat (Police State) in Nazi Germany.^[49] Jäckel argued that for the representatives of the Rechtsstaat like the Ministry of Justice, the "Final Solution" was a bureaucratic process to deprive Jews of their civil rights and to isolate them, whereas for representatives of Polizeistaat like the SS, the "Final Solution" was genocide.^[49] Jäckel argued that Hitler's order to Lammers to tell Schlegelberger to wait until after the war before concerning him about the "impracticable" details of the divorce laws between German Jews and "Aryans" was simply Hitler's way of putting Schlegelberger off.^[50] Jäckel maintained that since Hitler expected to win the war, and to complete the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" by killing every single Jew in the world, Hitler would have had no interest in amending the divorce law to make it easier for those in mixed marriages to divorce their Jewish or Mischlinge spouses.^[51] Moreover, Jäckel noted that Hitler disliked dealing with the officials of the Justice Ministry, and Schlegelberger in particular. Hitler was to sack him as Justice Minister later in 1942, so it was understandable that Hitler would not want to see Schlegelberger.^[52] Jäckel ended his essay arguing that the "lost" document in no way proved that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust, and accused Irving of deceitfulness in claiming otherwise.^[52]

In an article first published in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte journal in 1977, Martin Broszat wrote that:

"He [Irving] is too eager to accept authenticity for objectivity, is overly hasty in interpreting superficial diagnoses and often seems insufficiently interested in complex historical interconnections and in structural problems that transcend the mere recording of historical facts, but are essential for their evaluation."^[53]

Along the same lines, Broszat maintained that the picture of World War Two drawn by Irving was done in a such way to engage in moral equivalence between the actions of the Axis and Allied states, leading to Hitler's "fanatical, destructive will to annihilate" being downgraded to being "...no longer an exceptional phenomenon".^[54]

In a review, the American historian Charles Sydnor noted numerous errors in Hitler's War such as Irving's claim that Andreas Hofer was shot by the French in 1923 for opposing the French occupation of the Ruhr (Irving probably had Albert Leo Schlageter in mind), and that the 1945 film Kolberg, which dealt with the theme of a Prussian fortress besieged by the French in 1806, was set in the Seven Years' War.^[55] Sydnor also speculated about just what motivated the East German government to allow Irving entry into the German Democratic Republic to search for information about Hitler, commenting: "That the East Germans assisted Mr. Irving in an effort that would culminate in a revisionist interpretation of Hitler is a fact of real interest - and some amusement if one speculates on the question of who may have been taken in by whom."^[56]

Sydnor was highly critical of Irving's unreferenced statement that the Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 were well supplied with weapons from Germany's allies.^[57] In the same light, concerning Irving's claim that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust prior to October 1943, Sydnor commented that Hitler had received an SS report in November 1942 which contained a mention of 363,211 Russian Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen between August–November 1942.^[58] Sydnor remarked that Irving's statement that the Einsatzgruppen were in charge in the death camps seems to indicate that he was not familiar with the history of the Holocaust, as the Einsatzgruppen were in fact mobile death squads who had nothing to do with the death camps.^[59] In response to Irving's claim that Hitler was ignorant of German massacres of Poles, Sydnor commented acidly that during the Polish campaign the SS-Gruppenführer Theodor Eicke had commanded Einsatzgruppe III and the SS Death's Head Regiment Brandenburg from Hitler's own headquarters train, "Amerika" .^[60]

In her 1981 book The Holocaust and Historians, the American historian Lucy Dawidowicz called Irving an apologist for the Third Reich who had minimal scholarly standards.^[61] Dawidowicz wrote that she believed that the term revisionist was inappropriate for Irving because revisionism is a legitimate historical method, whereas Irving was not entitled to call himself a historian, revisonist or otherwise, and only deserved the label apologist.^[61] Dawidowicz maintained that the "No liquidation" message in Himmler's phone log referred not to the German Jews being deported to be shot in Riga, but rather to a Dr. Jekelius, whom Himmler believed to the son of Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, who was also travelling on that train, and whom Himmler wanted to see arrested, but not executed.^[61]

Because of the controversy Hitler's War generated, it was a best-seller in 1977. In particular, Hitler's War was a best-seller in Germany^[62] The American author Gill Seidel summed up the appeal of Hitler's War to Germans this way:

"It is not difficult to explain its appeal. The argument of the book may be summed up as: "If only the Führer had known about the murder of the Jews, he would had stopped it.' For...Germans who do not want to face up to the past, it was easy to be persuaded that if Hitler did not know, then neither did the person on the street."^[62]

Irving's work of the late 1970s and early 1980s

Just months after the initial release of Hitler's War, Irving published The Trail of the Fox, a biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In it, Irving attacked the members of the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, branding them "traitors", "cowards", and "manipulators", and uncritically presented Hitler and his government's subsequent revenge against the plotters, of which Rommel was also a victim. Irving painted the men and women involved in the plot in the blackest of colours, and argued that their fate after 20 July was fully deserved. Irving challenged the popular notion that Rommel was one of the leaders of the rebellion: Rommel stayed loyal to Hitler until the end, Irving claimed, and the real blame for his forced suicide lay with his associates, who schemed against him so they could save their own lives and because they were jealous of Rommel's medals. In particular, Irving accused Rommel's friend and Chief of Staff General Hans Speidel of framing Rommel in the attempted coup. The British historian David Pryce-Jones in a book review of The Trail of the Fox in the 12 November 1977 edition of The New York Times Book Review accused Irving of taking everything Hitler had to say at face value.^[11]

In 1978, Irving released The War Path, the companion volume to Hitler's War which covered events leading up to the war and which was written from a similar point of view. Again, professional historians such as D.C. Watt noted numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Despite the criticism, the book sold well, as did all of Irving's books to that date. The financial success of his books enabled Irving to buy a home in the prestigious Mayfair district of London, own a Rolls-Royce car, and to enjoy a very affluent lifestyle.^[63] In addition, Irving, despite being married, became increasing open with his affairs with other women, all of which were detailed in his self-published diary.^[64] Irving's affairs were to cause his first marriage to end in divorce in 1981. In 1982, Irving began a common-law relationship with a Danish model, Bente Hogh.

In the 1980s Irving started researching and writing about topics other than Nazi Germany, but with less success. He began his research on his three-part biography of Winston Churchill. In 1981, he published two books. The first was The War Between the Generals, in which Irving offered an account of the Allied High Command on the Western Front in 1944-45, detailing the heated conflicts Irving alleges occurred between the various generals of the various countries and presenting rumours about their private lives. The second book was Uprising!, about the 1956 revolt in Hungary, which Irving characterized as "primarily an anti-Jewish uprising", supposedly because the Communist regime was itself controlled by Jews. Irving's depiction of Hungary's Communist regime as a Jewish dictatorship oppressing Gentiles sparked charges of anti-Semitism.^[65] In addition, there were complaints that Irving had grossly exaggerated the number of people of Jewish origin in the Communist regime and had ignored the fact that Hungarian Communists who did have a Jewish background like Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő had totally repudiated Judaism and sometimes expressed anti-Semitic attitudes themselves.^[66] Critics such as Neal Ascherson and Kai Bird took issue with some of Irving's language that seemed to evoke anti-Semitic imagery, such as his remark that Rákosi possessed "the tact of a kosher butcher".^[65] Speaking of Irving's work in the 1970s-80s in a 1992 interview, Gerry Gable was quoted as saying:

"In that stage he [Irving] was smart, because what he was trying to do was to say to the new generation was 'Hitler was no worse than Napoleon'. Everybody gave Napoleon a bad write-up, but when you put it into perspective, the man forged a modern Europe, and forged certain democratic legal systems, Code Napoleon and all these things. Well', Irving says 'give it another 30 years and people will view Hitler in the same way'. And this what he does with the book. So he says Roosevelt was a political cuckold. That Eisenhower was a womanizer. That Churchill was a drunk. That they were all corrupt. That Stalin was a mass murder-which is true. So what made Hitler the exception? And this what they try to sell to people".^[67]

Hitler Diaries

In 1983, Irving played a major role in the Hitler Diaries controversy. Irving had long been an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia, and in October 1982 purchased 800 pages of documents relating to Hitler, only to discover that many of the documents were forgeries.^[68] Irving was an early proponent of the argument that the diaries were a forgery, and went so far as to crash the press conference held by Hugh Trevor-Roper at the Hamburg offices of Der Stern magazine on 25 April 1983 to denounce the diaries as a forgery and Trevor-Roper for endorsing the diaries as genuine (Trevor-Roper had called the press conference to announce his withdrawal of his endorsement, arguably rendering Irving's attack on him irrelevant).^[69] Irving's performance at the Der Stern press conference where he violently harangued Trevor-Roper until ejected by security led him to be featured prominently on the news; the next day, Irving appeared on Today television show as a featured guest.^[70] Irving had concluded that the alleged Hitler diaries were a forgery because the diaries had come from the same dealer in Nazi memorabilia that Irving had purchased his collection from in 1982.^[68] At the press conference in Hamburg, Irving announced "I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here".^[68] Irving was proud of the "trail of chaos" he had caused at the Hamburg press conference and the attendant publicity it had brought him, and in particular took a great deal of pride in his humiliation of Trevor-Roper, whom Irving strongly disliked for his criticism of Irving's methods and conclusions.^[71] Irving also noted internal inconsistencies in the supposed Hitler diaries such as diary entry for 20 July 1944 which would have been unlikely given that Hitler's right hand been badly burned by the bomb planted in his headquarters by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg earlier that day.^[72]

However, a week later on 2 May, Irving reversed himself and claimed the diaries were genuine; at the same press conference, Irving took the opportunity to promote his translation of the memoirs of Hitler's physician Dr. Theodor Morell.^[71] Robert Harris in his book Selling Hitler suggested that an additional reason for Irving's change of mind over the authenticity of the alleged Hitler diaries was that the fake diaries contain no reference to the Holocaust, thereby buttressing Irving's claim in Hitler's War that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust.^[73] Subsequently Irving reversed himself again when the diaries were revealed as a forgery. At a press conference held to withdraw his endorsement of the diaries, Irving proudly claimed that he was the first to call the diaries a forgery, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call the diaries genuine.^[71] In his later accounts of his role in the Hitler Diaries matter, Irving has always mentioned his role as proponent of the theory that the diaries were fake, while ignoring his change of opinion about their authenticity.

Churchill

By the mid-1980s, Irving had not had a successful book in years, and was behind schedule in writing the first volume of his Churchill series, the research for which had strained his finances.^[74] He finished the manuscript in 1985, but the book wasn't published until 1987, when it was released as Churchill's War, Volume I. In it, Irving writes a revisionist portrayal of Churchill as a corrupt, racist alcoholic servile to Zionist forces. Irving also accused Churchill of "selling out the British Empire" and "turning Britain against its natural ally, Germany".

Göring

In 1989, Irving published his biography of Hermann Göring, in which he largely portrayed the Reichsmarschall as an overweight drug addict largely concerned with his own wealth and personal pleasures rather than his duties within the Third Reich. Irving downplayed Göring's role in the Holocaust, describing instead Göring's jovial personality and offering a wealth of lesser-known facts about his life. Irving also recounts various incidents and produces documents as evidence that Göring disapproved of the persecution of Jews and other Nazi crimes.

Goebbels

In 1992, Irving signed a contract with Macmillan for a biography of Joseph Goebbels entitled Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Following charges that Irving had selectively "edited" a recently discovered complete edition of Goebbels's diaries in Moscow, Macmillan cancelled the book deal.^[75] The decision by Sunday Times (who had bought the rights to serialized extracts from the diaries before Macmillan published them) in July 1992 to hire Irving as a translator of Goebbels's diary was criticised by historian Peter Pulzer, who argued that Irving, because of his views about the Third Reich, was not the best man for the job.^[76] Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, called Irving "reprehensible", but defended hiring Irving because he was only a "transcribing technician".^[76] Pulzer argued that it absurd to describe Irving as a "mere technician" translating the diaries from German into English, asserting that a translator working on a "set of documents others had not seen, you took on the whole man".^[76] Irving had been most anxious to examine the diaries in Moscow after learning of their existence from Elke Fröhlich, a German historian who had once worked as a researcher for Irving.^[77]

During his time in Moscow, Irving was given access to two microfiche plates containing 90 pages of previously unknown pages of Goebbels's diaries.^[76] Though Irving was only supposed to translate the diaries, he removed the plates, smuggled them out of Russia, and copied them.^[76] Lipstadt expressed concern that Irving may have destroyed or damaged the plates, thereby depriving the world of knowledge of what was on those plates.^[76] During his libel action against Lipstadt, Irving admitted to "illicit" behavior during his time in Moscow but denied breaking any agreement.^[78] He took the plates out of the archives during his lunch break, wrapped them in cardbox and hid them to be recovered later.^[78] Irving claimed to have been "deeply ashamed" of his taking the plates, but argued that his behavior was justified because he had no formal agreement with the Russians and because the plates were deteriorating under inadequate storage conditions and their contents risked being permanently lost.^[78] Irving claimed that his arrangement with the Russian archivists was entirely on a cash basis.^[79] Although the trial judge found against Irving in most respects, he accepted Irving's defence that no agreement had been broken and the plates had not been put at risk.^[80]

In 1995, St. Martin's Press of New York City agreed to publish the Goebbels biography.^[74] By this time, Irving's financial state was such that he very much needed this book deal to be completed in order to pay down the massive arrears on his mortgage.^[74] In March 1996, following widespread protests over allegations of antisemitism in Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, St. Martin's cancelled the contract, and left Irving in a situation where he was desperate for both publicity and the need to re-establish his reputation as a historian.^[81]

Holocaust denial

Drift towards Holocaust denial

Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust changed significantly. From 1988, he started to espouse Holocaust denial openly; he had previously not denied the Holocaust outright and for this reason, many Holocaust deniers were ambivalent about him.^[82] They admired Irving for the pro-Nazi slant in his work and the fact that he possessed a degree of mainstream credibility that they lacked, but were annoyed that he did not openly deny the Holocaust. In 1980, Lucy Dawidowicz noted that although Hitler's War was strongly sympathetic to the Third Reich, because Irving argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust as opposed to the denying the Holocaust, that his book was not part of the "anti-Semitic canon".^[83] In 1980, Irving received his invitation to speak at a Holocaust-denial conference, which he refused under the grounds that his appearance there would damage his reputation.^[82] In a letter, Irving stated his reasons for his refusal as: "This is pure Realpolitik on my part. I am already dangerously exposed, and I cannot take the chance of being caught in Flak meant for others!"^[82] Though Irving refused at this time to appear at conferences sponsored by the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review (IHR), he did grant the institute the right to distribute his books in the United States.^[82] Robert Jan van Pelt suggests that the major reason for Irving wishing to keep his distance from Holocaust deniers in the early 1980s was his desire to found his own political party called Focus.^[82] Typical of the ambiguity felt at the time was a letter written in 1984 by the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in the Journal of Historical Review, the official journal of the IHR. In an open letter entitled "A Challenge to David Irving", Faurisson praised Irving as a historian but criticised him for maintaining that the Holocaust had taken place, and challenged him to take up the cause of Holocaust denial.^[11] In his letter, Faurisson proclaimed his admiration for Irving, but argued he would be a better historian if he denied the Holocaust.^[84] It has been alleged by the Anti-Defamation League that the original draft of Faurisson's open letter was more critical of Irving, but Willis Carto persuaded Faurisson to tone down the criticism, lest it alienate Irving (who had spoken at an IHR-sponsored conference in September 1983) from the IHR^[11] It is not known what Irving's response to Faurisson's letter was.^[11]

Until 1988, Irving seemed torn between a desire to be taken seriously as a historian and to associate with those he seemed to share an ideological affinity with. In the first edition of Hitler's War, Irving footnotes, "I cannot accept the view… [that] there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich speaking of the extermination of the Jews". In 1982, Irving made an attempt to unify all of the various neo-Nazi groups in Britain into one party called Focus, in which he would play a leading role.^[37] Irving described himself as a "moderate fascist" who through his leadership of Focus would become the future fascist Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.^[44] The effort failed due to fiscal problems.^[37] One of the main writers for Irving's magazine Focal Point in the 1980s was John Tyndall, the leader of the British National Party.^[37] At the time, Irving told the Oxford Mail of having "links at a low level" with the National Front.^[37] Irving described Spotlight, the main journal of the Liberty Lobby, as "an excellent fortnightly paper".^[37] At the same time, Irving put a copy of Hitler's "Prophecy Speech" of 30 January 1939, promising the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" if "Jewish financiers" started another world war, onto his wall.^[85]

Following the failure of Focus, in September 1983, Irving for the first time attended a conference of the IHR.^[82] Van Pelt has argued that with the failure of Irving's political career, he felt freer to associate with Holocaust deniers.^[82] At the conference, Irving did not deny the Holocaust, but did appear happy to share the stage with Robert Faurisson and Judge Wilhelm Stäglich, and claimed to be impressed with the allegations of Friedrich Berg that mass murder via diesel gas fumes at the Operation Reinhard death camps was impossible.^[86] At that conference, Irving repeated his claims that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust because he was "so busy being a soldier".^[87] In a speech at that conference, Irving stated: "Isn't it right for Tel Aviv to claim now that David Irving is talking nonsense and of course Adolf Hitler must have known about what was going in Auschwitz and Treblinka, and then in the same breath to claim that, of course our beloved Mr. Begin didn't know what was going on in Sabra and Chatilla".^[87] During the same speech, Irving proclaimed Hitler to be the "biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich".^[88] In the same speech, Irving stated that he operated in such a way as to bring himself maximum publicity. Irving stated that: "I have at home...a filing cabinet full of documents which I don't issue all at once. I keep them: I issue them a bit at a time. When I think my name hasn't been in the newspapers for several weeks, well, then I ring them up and I phone them and I say: 'What about this one, then?'"^[87]

A major theme of Irving's writings since the 1980s was his belief that it had been a great blunder on the part of Britain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that ever since then and as a result of that decision, Britain had slipped into an unstoppable decline.^[44] Irving also took the view that Rudolf Hess should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his flight to Britain in 1941, and that Hitler often tried to help the Jews of Europe.^[44] In a June 1992 interview with the Daily Telegraph, Irving stated his belief that "Marriage is a detour" that prevents men from getting ahead in life, and praised Hitler for understanding this.^[44] In the same interview, Irving claimed to have heard from Hitler's naval adjutant that the Führer had told him that he could not marry because Germany was "his bride".^[44] Irving then claimed to have asked the naval adjutant when Hitler made that remark, and upon hearing that the date was 24 March 1938, Irving stated in response "Herr Admiral, at that moment I was being born".^[89] Irving used this alleged incident to argue that there was some sort of mystical connection between himself and Hitler.^[89]

In 1985, the German-Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel was brought to trial in Toronto for publishing false statements.^[90] At the time, Zündel wrote to Irving asking him to come to Toronto to act as a defense witness.^[90] Irving wrote back he willing to do so, but warned Zündel that "in some respects my evidence may be disadvantageous, but on balance it would help".^[90] Zündel decided not to use Irving as a defense witness.^[90]

In a 1986 speech in Australia Irving argued that photographs of Holocaust survivors and dead taken in the spring of 1945 by Allied soldiers were proof that the Allies were responsible for the Holocaust, not the Germans.^[91] Irving stated:

^[91] In the same speech, Irving claimed that the Holocaust was not the work of Nazi leaders, but rather of "nameless criminals".^[91] Irving claimed that:

In another 1986 speech, this time in Atlanta, Irving claimed that "historians have a blindness when it comes to the Holocaust because like Tay-Sachs disease it is a Jewish disease which causes blindness".^[92]

By the mid-1980s, Irving associated himself with the IHR, began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), and publicly denied that the Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II.^[93] Irving was a frequent speaker for the DVU in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but the relationship ended in 1993 apparently because of concerns by the DVU that Irving's espousal of Holocaust denial might lead to the DVU being banned.^[11] He also alleged that parts of The Diary of Anne Frank might have been forged by her surviving father.

In 1986, Irving visited Toronto, where he was met at the airport by Ernst Zündel.^[94] According to Zündel, Irving "...thought I was 'Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!'", and asked Zündel to stay away from him.^[94] Zündel and his supporters obliged Irving by staying away from his lecture tour, which consequently attracted little media attention, and was considered by Irving to be a failure.^[94] Afterwards, Zündel sent Irving a long letter in which he offered to draw publicity to Irving, and so ensure that his future speaking tours would be a success.^[94] As a result, Irving and Zündel become friends, and Irving agreed in late 1987 to testify for Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust.^[95] In addition, the publication in 1987 of the book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945 by Ernst Nolte, in which Nolte strongly implied that maybe Holocaust deniers were on to something, encouraged Irving to become more open in associating with Zündel.^[94]

The Zündel trial

In January 1988, Irving travelled to Toronto, Canada to assist Douglas Christie, the defence lawyer for Ernst Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust.^[44] Working closely with Robert Faurisson, who was also assisting the defence, Irving contacted Warden Bill Armontrout of the Missouri State Penitentiary who recommended that Irving and Faurisson get into touch with Fred A. Leuchter, a self-described execution expert living in Boston.^[88] Irving and Faurission then flew to Boston to meet with Leuchter, who agreed to lend his alleged technical expertise on the behalf of Zündel's defense.^[44] Irving argued that an alleged expert on gassings like Leuchter could prove that the Holocaust was a "myth"^[44] After work on the second Zündel trial, Irving declared based on his exposure to Zündel's and Leuchter's theories that he was now conducting a "one-man intifada" against the idea that there had been a Holocaust.^[96] Subsequently, Irving claimed to the American journalist D.D. Guttenplan in a 1999 interview that Zündel had convinced him that the Holocaust had not occurred.^[97]

In the 1988 Zündel trial, Irving repeated and defended his claim from Hitler's War that until October 1943 Hitler knew nothing about the actual implementation of the Final Solution. He also expressed his evolving belief that the Final Solution involved "atrocities", not systematic murder:

Irving testified for Zündel between April 22–26, 1988, where he endorsed Richard Harwood's book Did Six Million Really Die? as "over ninety percent...factually accurate".^[99]

As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited the Leuchter report by self-styled execution expert Fred A. Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving said in a 1999 documentary about Leuchter: "The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of cyanide in the brickwork. That's what converted me. When I read that in the report in the courtroom in Toronto, I became a hard-core disbeliever".^[100] In addition, Irving was influenced to embrace Holocaust denial by the American historian Arno J. Mayer's 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which did not deny the Holocaust, but claimed that most of those who died at Auschwitz were killed by disease; Irving saw in Mayer's book an apparent confirmation of Leuchter's and Zündel's theories about no mass murder at Auschwitz.^[101]

Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood (also known as Richard Verrall), published by Ernst Zündel's Samisdat Publishers . At Zündel's trial in 1988, Irving testified that Did Six Million Really Die? was "over ninety percent...factually accurate".^[99]

After the trial, Irving published Leuchter's report as Auschwitz The End of the Line: The Leuchter Report in the United Kingdom in 1989 and wrote its foreword.^[96] Leuchter's book had been first published in Canada by Zündel's Samisdat Publishers in 1988 as The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdenek.^[102] In his foreword to the British edition of Leuchter's book, Irving wrote that "Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved".^[96] The alleged swindle was the reparations money totating 3 billion DM paid by the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel between 1952-1966 for the Holocaust. Irving described the reparations as being "essentially in atonement for the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz", which Irving called a "myth" that would "not die easily".^[96] In his foreword, Irving praised the "scrupulous methods" and "integrity" of Leuchter.^[96]

For publishing and writing the foreword to Auschwitz The End of the Line, on 20 June 1989 Irving together with Leuchter was condemned in an Early Day Motion of the House of Commons as "Hitler's heirs".^[103] The motion went on to describe Irving as a "Nazi propagandist and longtime Hitler apologist" and Auschwitz The End of the Line as a "fascist publication".^[76] The motion read in part as follows:

"This House...is appalled by the allegation by Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving, that the "infamous gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidanek did not exist..."^[92]

In response to the House of Commons motion, Irving in a press statement challenged the MPs who voted to condemn him that: "I will enter the "gas chambers" of Auschwitz and you and your friends may lob in Zykon B in accordance with the well known procedures and conditions. I guarantee that you won't be satisfied with the results!".^[104]

In a pamphlet Irving published in London on 23 June 1989 Irving made the "epochal announcement" that there was no mass murder via gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp.^[105] Irving labeled the gas chambers at Auschwitz a "hoax", and writing in the third person declared that he "has placed himself [Irving] at the head of a growing band of historians, worldwide, who are now sceptical of the claim that at Auschwitz and other camps were 'factories of death', in which millions of innocent people were systematically gassed to death".^[105] Boasting of his role in criticizing the Hitler diaries as a forgery in 1983, Irving wrote "now he [Irving] is saying the same thing about the infamous 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. They did not exist – ever – except perhaps as the brainchild of Britain's brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare Executive".^[105] Finally, Irving claimed "the survivors of Auschwitz are themselves testimony to the absence of an extermination programme".^[105] Echoing the criticism of the House of Commons, on 14 May 1990 a leader in The Times described Irving as a "man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost everything of an innocent and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception".^[76]

The Holocaust denial lecture circuit

Interior of the gas chamber of Auschwitz I camp. In a 1990 speech, Irving stated: "I say the following thing: there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. There have been only mock-ups built by the Poles in the years after the war".^[106]

In the early 1990s, Irving was a frequent visitor to Germany, where he spoke at neo-Nazi rallies.^[93] The chief themes of Irving's German speeches were that the Allies and Axis states were equally culpable for war crimes, that the decision of Neville Chamberlain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that of Winston Churchill to continue the war in 1940 had been great mistakes that set Britain on a path of decline, and the Holocaust was just a "propaganda exercise".^[93] In June 1990, Irving went to the German provinces that had formerly been part of East Germany on a well-publicized tour entitled "An Englishman Fights for the Honour of the Germans," on which he accused the Allies of having used "forged documents" to "humiliate" the German people.^[104] Irving's self-proclaimed mission was to guide "promising young men" in Germany in the "right direction" (Irving has often stated his belief that women exist for a "certain task, which is producing us [men]", and should be "subservient to men"; leading, in Lipstadt's view, to a lack of interest on Irving's part in guiding young German women in the "right direction").^[107] German nationalists found Irving, as a non-German Holocaust denier, to be particularly credible.^[107]

In January 1990, Irving gave a speech in Moers where he asserted that only 30,000 people died at Auschwitz between 1940–45, all of natural causes, which was equal—so he claimed—to the typical death toll from one Bomber Command raid on German cities.^[106] Furthermore, Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at that death camp.^[106] In that speech, Irving said: "I say the following thing: there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. There have been only mock-ups built by the Poles in the years after the war".^[106] On 21 April 1990 Irving repeated the same speech in Munich, which led to his conviction for Holocaust denial in Munich on 11 July 1991.^[106] The court fined Irving DM 7,000.^[106] Irving appealed the judgement, and received a fine of DM 10,000 for repeating the same remarks in the courtroom on 5 May 1992.^[106] During his appeal in 1992, Irving called upon those present in the Munich courtroom to "fight a battle for the German people and put an end to the blood lie of the Holocaust which has been told against this country for fifty years".^[96] Irving went on to call the Auschwitz death camp a "tourist attraction" whose origins Irving claimed went back to an "ingenious plan" devised by the British Psychological Warfare Executive in 1942 to spread anti-German propaganda that it was the policy of the German state to be "using 'gas chambers' to kill millions of Jews and other undesirables".^[96] During the same speech, Irving denounced the judge as a "senile, alcoholic cretin".^[108] Following his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving was banned from visiting Germany.^[109]

The main gate of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. In 1992 during his appeal for his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving called Auschwitz a "tourist attraction".^[96]

Expanding upon his thesis in Hitler's War about the lack of a written Führer order for the Holocaust, Irving argued in the 1990s that the absence of such an order meant that there was no Holocaust.^[110] In a speech delivered in Toronto in November 1990 Irving claimed that Holocaust survivors had manufactured memories of their suffering because "there's money involved and they can get a good compensation cash payment out of it".^[11] During the same 1990 speech in Toronto, Irving claimed that "more people died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's motor car in Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber of Auschwitz".^[111] In that speech, Irving used the metaphor of a cruise ship named Holocaust, which Irving claimed had "...luxury wall to wall fitted carpets and a crew of thousands… marine terminals established in now virtually every capital in the world, disguised as Holocaust memorial museums".^[111] Irving went on to assert that the "ship" was due for rough sailing because recently the Soviet government had allowed historians access to "the index cards of all the people who passed through the gates of Auschwitz", and claimed that this would lead to "a lot of people [who] are not claiming to be Auschwitz survivors anymore" (Irving's statement about the index cards was incorrect; what the Soviet government had made available in 1990 were the death books of Auschwitz, recording the weekly death tolls).^[111] Irving claimed on the basis of what he called the index books that, "Because the experts can look at a tattoo and say 'Oh yes, 181, 219 that means you entered Auschwitz in March 1943" and he warned Auschwitz survivors "If you want to go and have a tattoo put on your arm, as a lot of them do, I am afraid to say, and claim subsequently that you were in Auschwitz, you have to make sure a) that it fits in with the month you said you went to Auschwitz and b) it is not a number which anyone used before".^[111]

On January 17, 1991 Irving told a reporter from the Jewish Chronicle that "The Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time".^[112] Irving went to say that he believed anti-Semitism will increase all over the world because "the Jews have exploited people with the gas chamber legend" and that "In ten years, Israel will cease to exist and the Jews will have to return to Europe".^[112] In his 1991 revised edition of Hitler's War he had removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust. In a speech given in Hamburg in 1991, Irving stated that in two years time "...this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka...which in fact never took place" will be disproved (Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were all well known Vernichtungslager).^[113] Two days later, Irving repeated the same speech in Halle before a group of neo-Nazis, and praised Rudolf Hess as "that great German martyr, Rudolf Hess".^[113] At another 1991 speech, this time in Canada, Irving called the Holocaust a "hoax", and again predicted that by 1993 the "hoax" would have been "exposed".^[111] In that speech, Irving declared, "Gradually the word is getting around Germany. Two years from now too, the German historians will accept that we are right. They will accept that for fifty years they have believed a lie".^[111] During that speech given in October 1991, Irving expressed his contempt and hatred for Holocaust survivors by proclaiming that:

A mass grave in Treblinka opened in March 1943 to allow the bodies to be removed for burning. In the background can be seen dark colored material believed to be ash from cremated bodies. In a 1991 speech, Irving claimed that in two years time, "...this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka...which in fact never took place" will be disproven.^[113]

In another 1991 speech, this time in Regina Irving called the Shoah "a major fraud...There were no gas chambers. They were fakes and frauds"^[115]

In November 1992, Irving was to be a featured speaker at a world anti-Zionist congress in Stockholm that was cancelled by the Swedish government.^[93] Also scheduled to attend were fellow Holocaust-deniers Robert Faurisson and Fred A. Leuchter, and Louis Farrakhan, together with representatives of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, the Lebanese militant Shiite group Hezbollah, and the right-wing Russian antisemitic group Pamyat.^[93] In a 1993 speech, Irving claimed that had been only 100,000 Jewish deaths at Auschwitz, "but not from gas chambers. They died from epidemics".^[116] Irving went on to claim that most of the Jewish deaths during World War II had been caused by Allied bombing.^[116] Irving claimed that "The concentration camp inmates arrived in Berlin or Leipzig or in Dresden just in time for the RAF bombers to set fire to those cities. Nobody knows how many Jews died in those air raids".^[116] In a 1994 speech, Irving lamented that his predictions of 1991 had failed to occur, and complained of the persistence of belief in the "rotting corpse" of the "profitable legend" of the Holocaust.^[111] In another 1994 speech, Irving claimed that there was no German policy of genocide of Jews, and that only 600,000 Jews died in concentration camps in World War II, all due to either Allied bombing or disease.^[108] At the same time, Irving started to appear more frequently at the annual conferences hosted by the IHR.^[117] In a 1995 speech, Irving claimed that the Holocaust was a myth invented by a "world-wide Jewish cabal" to serve their own ends.^[118] Irving also spoke on other topics at the IHR gatherings. A frequent theme was the claim that Winston Churchill had advance knowledge of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor, and refused to warn the Americans in order to bring the United States into World War II.^[119]

At the same time, Irving maintained an ambivalent attitude to Holocaust denial depending on his audience. In a 1993 letter, Irving lashed out against his former friend Zündel, writing that: "In April 1988 I unhesitatingly agreed to aid your defence as a witness in Toronto. I would not make the same mistake again. As a penalty for having defended you then, and for having continued to aid you since, my life has come under a gradually mounting attack: I find myself the worldwide victim of mass demonstrations, violence, vituperation and persecution". (emphasis in the original)^[116] Irving went on to claim his life had been wonderful until Zündel had gotten him involved in the Holocaust denial movement; van Pelt argues that Irving was just trying to shift responsibility for his actions in his letter.^[116] In an interview with Australian radio in July 1995, Irving claimed that at least four million Jews died in World War II, through he argued that this was due to terrible sanitary conditions inside the concentration camps as opposed to a delibrate policy of genocide in the death camps.^[108] Irving's statement led to a very public spat with his former ally Faurisson, who insisted that no Jews were killed in the Holocaust.^[116] In 1995, Irving stated in another speech that "I have to take off my hat to my adversaries and the strategies they have employed—the marketing of the very word Holocaust: I half expected to see a little TM after it".^[108] Likewise, depending on his audience, Irving during the 1990s has either used the absence of a written Führerbefehl (Führer order) for the "Final Solution" to argue that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust, or that the absence of a written order meant there was no Holocaust.^[117]

In October 2007 Irving threatened to sue The Jewish Chronicle for describing him as a "Holocaust denier". The Jewish Chronicle responded by printing their solicitor's name and address on its front page.^[120]

Racism and antisemitism

Irving has expressed racist and antisemitic sentiments, both publicly and privately. Irving has often expressed his belief in the theory of a sinister Jewish conspiracy ruling the world, and that the belief in the reality of Holocaust was manufactured as part of the same alleged conspiracy.^[64] Irving uses the label "traditional enemies of the truth" to describe Jews, and in a 1963 article about a speech by Sir Oswald Mosley wrote that "Yellow Star did not make a showing".^[64] In 1992, Irving stated that "...the Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time" and claimed he "foresees a new wave of antisemitism" the world over due to Jewish "exploitation of the Holocaust myth".^[76] During an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum, Irving stated his belief that Jews were his "traditional enemy".^[121]

Several of these statements were cited by the judge's decision in Irving's lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt.^[122] For instance, in his diary entry for 17 September 1994, Irving wrote about a ditty he composed for his young daughter "when halfbreed children are wheeled past":

I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.

Christopher Hitchens writes that after having dinner in his Washington apartment, Irving sang the rhyme to his daughter once they were alone in the building's elevator.^[123] In one interview cited in the lawsuit, Irving also stated that he would be "willing to put [his] signature" to the "fact" that "a great deal of control over the world is exercised by Jews".^[122]

And from a speech in 1992, given to the Clarendon Club:

In 2007, The Guardian reported that Irving said, "The Jews are the architects of their own misfortune, but that is the short version A–Z. Between A–Z there are then 24 other characters in intervening steps".^[125]

Libel suit

On 5 September 1996, Irving filed a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin Books for publishing a British edition of Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, which had first been published in the United States in 1993.^[126] At the same time, Irving also sued Gitta Sereny for libel for an article she had written about him entitled "Spin Time for Hitler" in The Observer newspaper on 21 April 1996.^[127][128] As of 2008, the claim has yet to be heard in a court. In letters of 25 October and 28 October 1997 Irving threatened to sue John Lukacs for libel if he published his book, The Hitler of History without removing certain passages highly critical of Irving's work.^[127] The American edition of The Hitler of History was published in 1997 with the alleged libelous passages included, but because of Irving's legal threats, no British edition of The Hitler of History was published until 2001.^[127] As a result of the threat of legal action by Irving, when the British edition of The Hitler of History was finally published in 2001 the passages containing the criticism of Irving's historical methods were expunged by the publisher.^[129][130]

In her book, Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt called Irving a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot, and said that he manipulated and distorted real documents. Irving claimed to have been libeled under the grounds that Lipstadt had called him a Holocaust denier when in his opinion there was no Holocaust to deny, as well as suggestions that he had falsified evidence or deliberately misinterpreted it.

Defence

Lipstadt hired the British solicitor Anthony Julius to present her case, while Penguin Books hired Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman, libel specialist from media firm Davenport Lyons. They briefed the libel barrister, Richard Rampton QC and Penguin also briefed junior barrister Heather Rogers. The Defendants (with Penguin's insurers paying the fee) also retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Also working as expert witnesses were the American Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, the German historian Peter Longerich and the Dutch architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt. The latter wrote a report attesting to the fact that the death camps were designed, built and used for the purpose of mass murder, while Browning testified for the reality of the Holocaust. Longerich testified about Irving's links to neo-Nazi groups in Britain, the United States, France, Australia, Germany and Austria.

Evans' report was the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of Irving's work:

Claimant

In the trial, Irving represented himself. He called the American Kevin B. MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist, to testify on his behalf. Irving made much of the statement by the American historian Arno J. Mayer, who Irving went to pains to point out was both a Marxist and a man who would have been considered Jewish in Nazi racial theory, in his 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, that most of the people who died at Auschwitz were the victims of disease rather than murder.^[132] In response, Peter Longerich argued that Mayer did not deny the Holocaust in his book, and that he was simply wrong about more Jews dying of "natural" as opposed to "unnatural" causes of death at Auschwitz.^[133]

Ruling

Irving unsuccessfully represented himself and his work during the trial. The Court found that Lipstadt did not libel Irving when she called him a Holocaust denier in her book.

In presenting his ruling, Mr. Justice Gray concluded^[134] that he found the following claims against Irving to be "substantially true" and of "sufficient gravity" to render the remainder of no "material effect on Irving's reputation.":

Aftermath

Not only did Irving lose the case, but in light of the evidence presented at the trial a number of his works that had previously escaped serious scrutiny were brought to public attention. He was also liable to pay all of Penguin's costs of the trial, estimated to be as much as £2 million (US$3.2 million).^[135] When he did not meet these Davenport Lyons moved to make him bankrupt on behalf of their client. He was forced into bankruptcy in 2002.

Criticism by historians

Irving was once highly regarded for his expert knowledge of German military archives. Much of his scholarship was disputed by historians to the point that his standing as a historian was challenged from his earliest publications.^[1] Contentious in large part for advancing interpretations of the war considered favourable to the German side and for association with far-right groups that advanced these views, by 1988 he began advocating the view that the Holocaust did not take place as a systematic and deliberate genocide, and quickly grew to be one of the most prominent advocates of Holocaust denial, costing him what scholarly reputation he had outside those circles. A marked change in Irving's reputation can be seen in the surveys of the historiography of the Third Reich produced by Ian Kershaw. In the first edition of Kershaw's book The Nazi Dictatorship in 1985, Irving was called a "maverick" historian working outside of the mainstream of the historical profession^[136] By the time of the fourth edition of The Nazi Dictatorship in 2000, Irving was described only as a historical writer who had in the 1970s engaged in "provocations" intended to provide an "exculpation of Hitler's role in the Final Solution"^[137]

Reaction to Irving's work (1960s–1970s)

In a review of 1977, the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that "no praise can be too high for his [Irving's] indefatigable, scholarly industry".^[138] Trevor-Roper followed up his praise by expressing severe doubts about Irving's methodology. Trevor-Roper argued that: "He [Irving] seizes on a small, but dubious particle of 'evidence'; builds upon it, by private interpretation, a large general conclusion; and then overlooks or re-interprets the more substantial evidence and probability against it. Since this defective method is invariably used to excuse Hitler or the Nazis and to damage their opponents, we may reasonably speak of a consistent bias, unconsciously distorting the evidence".^[46] Finally, Trevor-Roper commented: "When a historian relies mainly on primary sources, which we can not easily check, he challenges our confidence and forces us to ask critical questions. How reliable is his historical method? How sound is his judgment? We ask these questions particularly of a man like Mr. Irving, who makes a virtue of—almost a profession—of using arcane sources to affront established opinions".^[138][139] Trevor-Roper ended by writing "He may read his manuscript diaries correctly. But we can never be quite sure, and when he is at most original, we are likely to be least sure".^[139]

The British historian A. J. P. Taylor called Irving in 1978 an author of "unrivaled industry" and "good scholarship" regarding research in the archives.^[138] Taylor criticized Irving's double standard with historical judgements, using as an example Irving's claim that the lack of a written Führer order proves that Hitler did not know about the Holocaust while at the same time claiming that the lack of a written order "proved" that Churchill ordered the "murder" of General Sikorski (In Accident, Irving claimed that there was a written order for Sikorski's "murder", but that Churchill had it destroyed). The British historian Paul Addison in 1979 described Irving as a "colossus of research", but criticized him for his view of "Churchill as wicked as Hitler" and "a schoolboy in judgment".^[138] In a book review published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 18 June 1979, the German historian Andreas Hillgruber for the most part offered a highly unfavorable judgment of Irving's work.^[140] Despite his criticism, Hillgruber ended his review with the comment that Irving's work "amounts to an indubitable and in no way small merit of Irving".^[140] In 1979, the German historian Jost Dülffer wrote that Irving was very good at tracking down and interviewing Hitler's former servants, but went on to write that "One can draw no appropriate picture of Hitler from the perspective of his domestic personnel. What kind of importance has a questioning of Hitler's valet or of other such persons?".^[141]

Reactions to Irving (1980s–1990s)

1980s

In a review of Irving's 1988 book Churchill's War, David Cannadine criticised Irving's "double standard on evidence", accusing Irving of "demanding absolute documentary proof to convict the Germans (as when he sought to show that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust), while relying on circumstantial evidence to condemn the British (as in his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden)".^[142]

Writing in 1989 about Irving's Göring biography, the German-Canadian historian Peter Hoffmann declared:

Hoffman went on to write that though Irving had at one time played a useful role in the historical profession by making outrageous assertions that at least had the benefit of inspiring historians to undertake research to rebut him, the time for that had now passed, and that Irving was simply irrelevant to the study of the Third Reich.^[143]

In a feuilleton published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 18 October 1989 the German historian Rainer Zitelmann praised Irving for having "struck a nerve" with his provocative style and aggressive assertions.^[144] Zitelmann found much to be praised about Irving's claim that the lack of a written Führer order for the Holocaust suggests that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust, and argued that if that was true, then historians should stop holding the Holocaust against Hitler.^[144] Zitelmann ended his article with the claim that "Irving must not be ignored. He has weaknesses [but he is] one of the best knowers of sources…[and has] contributed much to research".^[144] The British historian John Charmley commented that "Irving's sources, unlike the conclusions which he draws from them, are usually sound", and that Irving "has been unjustly ignored".^[138]

1990s

In 1990, the American historian Peter Baldwin called Irving a historian who "…has made a career of seeking to shift culpability for the worst atrocities from Hitler and to draw also the Allies into proximity with the outrages of the war"^[145] In 1992, Robert G. L. Waite called Irving's work "a calumny both on the victims of Hitler's terror and on historical scholarship".^[146] About Irving's claims of Hitler's ignorance of the Holocaust, Waite commented that "no one but Hitler had the authority to give the orders to murder more than six million people in the mist of war"".^[146] In his 1994 book, A World At Arms, the American historian Gerhard Weinberg described Irving as "notoriously unreliable", and criticized those historians who used Irving to support their arguments^[147]

Prominent British historian Sir John Keegan wrote in 1996 in his book The Battle for History, "Some controversies are entirely bogus, like David Irving's contention that Hitler's subordinates kept from him the facts of the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews". In an 20 April 1996 review in The Daily Telegraph of Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, Keegan wrote that Irving "knows more than anyone alive about the German side of the Second World War", and claimed that Hitler's War was "indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round".^[142]

During Lipstadt's libel trial, Keegan—whom he had subpoenaed to appear as a witness—lambasted Irving by saying: "I continue to think it perverse of you to propose that Hitler could not have known until as late as October 1943 what was going on with the Jewish people" and, when asked if it was perverse to say that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution, answered "that it defies common sense".^[148] In an article in The Daily Telegraph of 12 April 2000, Keegan spoke of his experience of the trial, writing that Irving had an "all-consuming knowledge of a vast body of material" and exhibited "many of the qualities of the most creative historians", that his skill as an archivist could not be contested, and that he was "certainly never dull". However, according to Keegan, "like many who seek to shock, he may not really believe what he says and probably feels astounded when taken seriously".^[149]

In the 1990s, Irving featured on his Web site a translation of a letter by the prominent German historian Hans Mommsen, praising Irving's skill as a researcher.^[2] Mommsen, who had written the letter in 1977, unsuccessfully attempted to have it removed, but did succeed in forcing Irving to feature a second letter from him written in 1998 in which Mommsen completely disavowed his 1977 letter under the grounds that he did not wish to be associated with Irving's recent statements about the Holocaust.^[2]

In a six-page essay in The New York Review of Books published on 19 September 1996 the American historian Gordon A. Craig, a leading scholar of German history at Stanford University, noted Irving's claims that the Holocaust never took place and that Auschwitz was merely "a labor camp with an unfortunately high death rate".^[150] Though "such obtuse and quickly discredited views" may be "offensive to large numbers of people", Craig argued that Irving's work is "the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War" and that "we dare not" disregard his views. Craig called Irving a "useful irritant"; a devil's advocate historian who promoted what Craig considered to be a twisted and wrong-headed view of history, with a great deal of élan, but his advocacy of these views forced historians to make a fruitful epistemological examination about the current state of knowledge about the Third Reich. In his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein cited Craig's estimation of Irving as a person who has made an "indispensable contribution to our knowledge of World War II".^[151] Finkelstein favorably quoted Craig's testament to Irving's value in part thus: "His book Hitler's War remains the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War and, as such, indispensable for all students of that conflict..."^[152] In a speech at Yale University in 2005, Finkelstein said of Irving that "personally, I don't like the fellow ... I think he is a Nazi", but that he agreed with Craig's view of Irving as being useful as a devil's advocate.^[153]

The Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs in his 1997 book The Hitler of History has labelled Irving an apologist for Hitler who consistently mishandled historical evidence in Hitler's favor.^[35] Lukacs maintains that over the years, Irving's treatment of Hitler has gone from a barely concealed admiration to a Great Man treatment of Hitler.^[154] Lukacs argues that Irving's picture of Hitler is defective because of his tendency to confuse asserting that Hitler was a great warlord as being the same thing as proving Hitler was a military genius, which leads to a total neglect of the crucial question of why Hitler took particular decisions at particular times.^[155] Lukacs condemned Irving as a historical writer for his "twisting" of evidence (i.e. labelling Adolf Eichmann's statement before an Israeli court in 1961 that he heard from Himmler that Hitler had given a verbal order for the Holocaust as mere "hearsay").^[35] Lukacs described Irving in the 1997 American edition of The Hitler of History as the most influential of Hitler's apologists, and found it "regrettable" that many professional historians cite Irving as a source.^[156] Lukacs called Irving's historical opinions objectionable and inexcusable, and complained that too many of Irving's opinions were supported by footnotes that referred either to sources that did not exist or said something different from what Irving wrote.^[157] Some of the examples Lukacs cited in support of his claim was Irving's contemptuous statement mocking the Polish cavalry for charging German tanks (a legend discredited even in the 1970s when Irving wrote Hitler's War), asserting with no source that Hitler refused a lavish banquet prepared for him in Warsaw in 1939 out of the desire to eat the same rations as the ordinary German soldier, for crediting a statement again with no source to Hitler in August 1940 that he would let Churchill live in peace after defeating Britain, for falsely claiming Operation Typhoon, the German drive onto Moscow in 1941, was forced on him by his General Staff, and for putting his own words in a speech of Hitler in September 1943 implying Churchill was a decadent homosexual (not something that was in Hitler's speech).^[158] Lukacs asserted too many of the crucial statements by Irving in Hitler's War such as his claim that Hitler foresaw Operation Uranus, the Soviet counter-offensive at the Battle 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.^[159]

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).^[160] 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.^[160] In The Eichmann Memoirs, Eichmann claimed to have heard from Himmler that Hitler had given a verbal order authorizing 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.^[161] 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".^[161] 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.^[161] 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 for the Holocaust. Also in the same interview, Irving claimed wanting acceptance as a scholar by other historians and bemoaned having to associate with what he called the lunatic fringe anti-Semitic groups; he claimed he would disassociate himself from these groups full of "cracked" people as soon as he was accepted by the historians' community.^[110] Rosenbaum sarcastically wrote in his book Explaining Hitler that if Irving wanted to be considered a historian, he was going about it in a rather strange way by denying the Holocaust at neo-Nazi rallies.^[110]

Persona non grata

Irving as he was deported from Canada in 1992

After Irving denied the Holocaust in two 1989 speeches given in Austria, the Austrian government issued an arrest warrant against him and barred him from entering the country. This case came up again in 2005 when Irving was arrested and brought to trial (see next section).^[162] In early 1992 a German court found him guilty of Holocaust denial under the Auschwitzlüge section of the law against Volksverhetzung (a failed appeal by Irving would see the fine rise from 10,000 DM to 30,000 DM), and he was subsequently barred from entering Germany.^[11] Other governments followed suit, including Austria, Italy and Canada,^[163] where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported back to the United Kingdom.^[11] In an administrative hearing surrounding those events, he was found by the hearing office to have engaged in a "total fabrication" in telling a story of an exit from and return to Canada which would, for technical reasons, have made the original deportation order invalid. He was also barred from entering Australia in 1992, a ban he made four unsuccessful legal attempts to overturn.

On 27 April 1993 Irving was ordered to attend court to be examined on charges relating to the Loi Gayssot in France. The law, however, does not permit extradition and Irving simply refused to travel to France.

Then, in February 1994, Irving spent 10 days of a three month sentence in London's Pentonville prison for contempt of court following a legal wrangling over publishing rights. Irving's legal troubles continued as a Mannheim court indicted him for defaming the dead; because of this action, he would be fined 20,000 DM in mid-1997.

Early in September 2004, Michael Cullen, the deputy prime minister of New Zealand, announced that Irving would not be permitted to visit the country, where he had been invited by the National Press Club to give a series of lectures under the heading "The Problems of Writing about World War II in a Free Society". The National Press Club defended its invitation of Irving, saying that it amounted not to an endorsement of his views, but rather an opportunity to question him. "Mr. Irving is not permitted to enter New Zealand under the Immigration Act because people who have been deported from another country are refused entry", government spokeswoman Katherine O'Sullivan had told The Press earlier. Irving rejected the ban and attempted to board a Qantas flight for New Zealand from Los Angeles on 17 September 2004. He was not allowed on board. "As far as I'm concerned, the legal battle now begins", he was quoted as saying.

Arrest and imprisonment in Austria

On 11 November 2005, the Austrian police in the southern state of Styria, acting under a 1989 warrant, arrested Irving. Four days later, he was charged by state prosecutors with the speech crime of "trivialising the Holocaust". His application for bail was denied on the grounds that he would flee or repeat the offence. He remained in jail awaiting trial. On 20 February 2006 Irving pleaded guilty to the charge of "trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust".

Sentencing

The judge, Peter Liebtreu, summarized:

At the end of the one-day hearing, Irving was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in accordance with the Austrian Federal Law on the prohibition of National Socialist activities (officially Verbotsgesetz, "Prohibition Statute") for having denied the existence of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps in several lectures held in Austria in 1989. Irving sat motionless as Liebtreu asked him if he had understood the sentence, to which he replied "I'm not sure I do" before being bundled out of the court by Austrian police. Later, Irving declared himself shocked by the severity of the sentence. He reportedly had already purchased a plane ticket home to London.

On 28 February, Irving once again questioned the Holocaust, asking "Given the ruthless efficiency of the Germans, if there was an extermination programme to kill all the Jews, how come so many survived?" He claimed that the number of people gassed in Auschwitz was relatively small, and that his earlier claims that there had been no gassing at all had been a "methodological error". According to Irving, "You could say that millions died, but not at Auschwitz".^[165] Within hours, the Austrian government reacted by barring Irving from further communication with the media.

Time in prison

While in jail Irving wrote an account of his imprisonment and the Austrian justice system, which has now appeared online: Banged Up.

Release

In December 2006, Irving was released from prison. On 21 December 2006, Irving was technically "expelled" from Austria; he was banned from ever returning to the country.^[166] Upon Irving's arrival in the UK he reaffirmed his position, stating that he felt "no need any longer to show remorse" for his Holocaust views.^[167]

Post-release

Irving's reputation has suffered in recent years. He was drawn into the controversy surrounding Bishop Richard Williamson, who denied the Holocaust took place in a televised interview in November 2008, only to see Williamson convicted of inciting racial hatred in April 2010. In 2009, Irving's views were condemned by Spain and he found himself beset by protestors on a book tour of the United States.

Bibliography

Books

Translations

• The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel (1965)
• The Memoirs of General Gehlen (1972)

Monographs

• The Night the Dams Burst (1973)
• Von Guernica bis Vietnam (in German only) (1982)
• Die deutsche Ostgrenze (in German only) (1990)
• Banged Up (online only) (2008)

Collected articles in German

• Und Deutschlands Städte starben nicht (1963)
• Nürnberg: Die letzte Schlacht (1979)
• Wie krank war Hitler wirklich? (1980)

See also

• Historical revisionism
• Freedom of speech by country
• Faurisson affair

Notes

References

Bibliography

Reviews

News articles

Online resources

Film

External links

• David Irving's web site
• David Irving Archive from codoh.com
• Collection of Irving materials from nizkor.org
• Collection of Irving materials from holocaust-history.org
• Guilty of Falsifying History Ann Tusa review of Irving's Nuremberg: The last Battle"
• Stauber, Roni. "From Revisionism to Holocaust Denial – David Irving as a Case Study"
• David Irving & Revisionism
• Irving, Hitler and the Murder of the Jews
• "The World According to David Irving" by Gerald Posner, The Sunday Observer (London), 19 March 2000
• David Irving The Libel Trial Re-examined by Robert Fulford
• Holocaust Denial in England
• Irving Awaits Trial in Jail (25 November 2005)
• Nazi historian Irving finds his books in Austrian jail library 2 December 2005
• "This Wicked Man Hitler" Dawidowicz on David Irving by Lucy Dawidowicz
• Holocaust denier: 3-year jail term
• Felix Mueller - The Nazi Prohibition Act in Relation to Freedom of Speech - Legal Background to the Irving Trial in Austria - February/March 2006
• 'Irving? Let the guy go home' by Deborah Lipstadt
• David Irving and Holocaust Denial by Robert Fulford
• David Irving Jailed In Austria – critical review by J.R. Dunn of The American Thinker
• "Springtime for Hitler—and the History Channel" – about the History Channel hiring Irving as historian for a documentary about World War II, by Mark Greif in The American Prospect, (6 November 1999)
• "Pity for this Man is Out of Place" by Hans-Ulrich Wehler
• David Irving: 'Hitler appointed me his biographer' 17 January 2009 The Independent news article
• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Deborah Lipstadt from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Litigation

• Judgement by the Hon. Mr. Justice Gray in Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstadt [2000] EWHC QB 115 (11 April 2000), published as The Irving Judgment by Penguin, ISBN 0-14-029899-1
• David Irving vs Penguin & Deborah Lipstadt Trial – a collection of materials at Irving's web site
• Holocaust Denial on Trial by Emory University
• Expert Witness Report by Richard J. Evans Complete text of Professor Evans' lengthy report on Irving's work in a number of areas
• The Irving-Lipstadt case, special report from the Guardian newspaper
• International Herald Tribune Article