David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer,
best known for his
denial of the HolocaustHolocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
, who specialises in the military and political history of
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, with a focus on
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
. He is the author of 30 books on the subject, including
The Destruction of DresdenThe Destruction of Dresden is a 1963 non-fiction book which describes the February 1945 bombing of Dresden in World War II. The book is based on a series of 37 articles written on the strategic bombing during World War II by David Irving called Wie Deutschlands Städte starben for the German...
(1963),
Hitler's WarHitler's War is a history book by David Irving. It describes the Second World War from the point of view of Adolf Hitler.It was first published in April 1977 by Hodder & Stoughton and Viking Press . Avon Books reissued it in 1990...
(1977),
Uprising! (1981),
Churchill's War (1987), and
Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).
His work on
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
became controversial because of his sympathy for the Third Reich, antisemitism and
racismRacism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
. He has associated with
far rightFar-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are...
and
neo-NaziNeo-Nazism consists of post-World War II social or political movements seeking to revive Nazism or some variant thereof.The term neo-Nazism can also refer to the ideology of these movements....
causes, famously during his student days seconding
British Union of FascistsThe British Union was a political party in the United Kingdom formed in 1932 by Sir Oswald Mosley as the British Union of Fascists, in 1936 it changed its name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists and then in 1937 to simply the British Union...
founder
Oswald MosleySir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, was an English politician, known principally as the founder of the British Union of Fascists...
in a
University College LondonUniversity College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
debate on immigration. He has been described as "the most skillful preacher of
Holocaust denialHolocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
in the world today".
Irving's reputation as an
historianHistorical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write histories in the form of accounts of the past. The question of the nature, and even the possibility, of a sound historical method is raised in the...
was widely discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian
Deborah LipstadtDeborah Esther Lipstadt, Ph.D. is an American historian and author of the book Denying the Holocaust and The Eichmann Trial. She is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University...
and
Penguin BooksPenguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
. The court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and
racistRacism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
, who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote
neo-NazismNeo-Nazism consists of post-World War II social or political movements seeking to revive Nazism or some variant thereof.The term neo-Nazism can also refer to the ideology of these movements....
," and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."
Early life
Irving, along with his twin brother, was born in Hutton, near
Brentwood, EssexBrentwood is a town and the principal settlement of the Borough of Brentwood, in the county of Essex in the east of England. It is located in the London commuter belt, 20 miles east north-east of Charing Cross in London, and near the M25 motorway....
, England. His father, John James Cawdell Irving, was a commander in the
Royal NavyThe Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...
, and his mother, Beryl, an illustrator. Irving's twin brother Nicholas Irving has said that "David used to run toward bombed out houses shouting heil Hitler", a statement which Irving repudiates and says is "untrue."
During the Second World War, Irving's father was an officer aboard the light cruiser
HMS EdinburghHMS Edinburgh was a Town-class light cruiser of the British Royal Navy, which served during World War II. She was one of the last two "Town"-class, which formed the Edinburgh sub-class...
. On 2 May 1942, while escorting Convoy QP-11 in the
Barents SeaThe Barents Sea is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean, located north of Norway and Russia. Known in the Middle Ages as the Murman Sea, the sea takes its current name from the Dutch navigator Willem Barents...
, the ship was sunk by the German
U-boatU-boat is the anglicized version of the German word U-Boot , itself an abbreviation of Unterseeboot , and refers to military submarines operated by Germany, particularly in World War I and World War II...
U-456. Irving's father survived, but severed all links with his wife and their children after the incident. Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer
Ron Rosenbaum-Life and career:Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish family in New York City, New York and grew up in Bay Shore, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program in English Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course...
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". Irving went on to claim to Rosenbaum that his
negationistHistorical revisionism is either the legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, or the illegitimate distortion of the historical record such that certain events appear in a more or less favourable light. For the former, i.e. the academic pursuit, see...
views about
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
dated to his childhood, particularly due to his objections to the way
Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
was portrayed in the British media during the war. Irving asserted that his "sceptical" views about the Third Reich were due to his doubts about the cartoonist caricatures of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders that appeared in the British press during the war. According to his twin, Nicholas, David has been a provocateur and prankster since his youth.
Student years
After completing A-levels at Brentwood School, Irving briefly studied physics at
Imperial College LondonImperial College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom, specialising in science, engineering, business and medicine...
, though never graduated, for financial reasons. He wrote for
FelixFelix is the award-winning student newspaper of Imperial College London. It won the Guardian Student Newspaper of the Year award in 2008. The newspaper is published weekly during term time, approximately 30 issues per year, and is distributed around the various Imperial College campuses.The FELIX...
, Imperial's student newspaper, and in 1959 served as editor of the
University of London-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
Carnival Committee's journal,
Carnival Times.
Irving later studied for a degree in
political economyPolitical economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
at
University College LondonUniversity College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
, from which he dropped out after two years due to lack of funds. During his time at university, he seconded British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a debate on
CommonwealthThe Commonwealth of Nations, normally referred to as the Commonwealth and formerly known as the British Commonwealth, is an intergovernmental organisation of fifty-four independent member states...
immigration, and was
heckledA heckler is a person who harass and try to disconcert others with questions, challenges, or gibes.Hecklers are often known to shout disparaging comments at a performance or event, or interrupts set-piece speeches, for example at a political meeting, with intent to disturb its performers or...
.
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. This supplement contained an article in which he called Hitler the "greatest unifying force Europe has known since
CharlemagneCharlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...
", though Irving deflected criticism by characterizing the
Carnival Times as "
satiricalSatire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
". He also stated that "
the formation of a European UnionThe Treaty of Rome, officially the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community, was an international agreement that led to the founding of the European Economic Community on 1 January 1958. It was signed on 25 March 1957 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany...
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)". 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. Volunteers were later recruited to remove and destroy the supplements before the magazine's distribution. Irving has said 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 a South African group which he considered a "subversive organisation".
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
ThyssenThyssenKrupp AG is a German multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Duisburg Essen, Germany. The corporation consists of 670 companies worldwide. While ThyssenKrupp is one of the world's largest steel producers, the company also provides components and systems for the automotive...
steel works in the
RuhrThe Ruhr is a medium-size river in western Germany , a right tributary of the Rhine.-Description:The source of the Ruhr is near the town of Winterberg in the mountainous Sauerland region, at an elevation of approximately 2,200 feet...
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
AlliedThe Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states...
bombing campaignStrategic bombing during World War II is a term which refers to all aerial bombardment of a strategic nature between 1939 and 1945 involving any nations engaged in World War II...
,
Wie Deutschlands Städte starben (
How Germany's Cities Died), for the German boulevard journal
Neue Illustrierte. These were the bases of his first book,
The Destruction of Dresden (1963), in which he examined the Allied
bombing of DresdenThe Bombing of Dresden was a military bombing by the British Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force and as part of the Allied forces between 13 February and 15 February 1945 in the Second World War...
in February 1945. By the 1960s, a debate about the morality of the
carpet bombingCarpet bombing is a large aerial bombing done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land. The phrase invokes the image of explosions completely covering an area, in the same way that a carpet covers a floor. Carpet bombing is usually achieved by dropping many...
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
bestsellerA bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and...
.
In the first edition, Irving's estimates for deaths in
DresdenDresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
were between 100,000 and 250,000 — notably higher than most previously published figures. 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. According to the evidence introduced by
Richard J. EvansRichard John Evans is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.-Life:Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College...
at the libel trial of
Deborah LipstadtDeborah Esther Lipstadt, Ph.D. is an American historian and author of the book Denying the Holocaust and The Eichmann Trial. She is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University...
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. Today, casualties at Dresden are estimated as 25,000–35,000 dead.
According to Walter Weidauer, mayor of Dresden from 1946-1958, Irving based his numbers on a falsified document promulgated by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, as well as claims made after the war by a former Dresden Nazi functionary, Hanns Voigt, without verifying them against official sources available in Dresden (Walter Weidauer,
Inferno Dresden Dietz Verlag, 1965; Abridged edition, 1990, ISBN 3-320-00818-8). Irving published a letter to the editor in
The Times of London on 7 July 1966, admitting that the data in his book were not credible.
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
MayfairMayfair is an area of central London, within the City of Westminster.-History:Mayfair is named after the annual fortnight-long May Fair that took place on the site that is Shepherd Market today...
apartment claiming to be General Post Office (GPO) engineers.
Gerry GableGerry Gable is a British political activist. He was a long-serving editor of the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine.-Background:...
was subsequently arrested and held at
HornseyHornsey is a district in London Borough of Haringey in north London in England. Whilst Hornsey was formerly the name of a parish and later a municipal borough of Middlesex, today, the name refers only to the London district. It is an inner-suburban area located north of Charing Cross.-Locale:The ...
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 BranchSpecial Branch is a label customarily used to identify units responsible for matters of national security in British and Commonwealth police forces, as well as in the Royal Thai Police...
". The case was reported in the
Daily Telegraph, 17 January 1964 and other newspapers.
Author
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 KeitelWilhelm Bodewin Gustav Keitel was a German field marshal . As head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and de facto war minister, he was one of Germany's most senior military leaders during World War II...
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 exileThe Polish government-in-exile, formally known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in Exile , was the government in exile of Poland formed in the aftermath of the Invasion of Poland of September 1939, and the subsequent occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which...
leader General Władysław Sikorski in 1943 was really an assassination ordered by
Winston ChurchillSir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
, so as to enable Churchill to betray Poland to the
Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. Irving's book inspired the highly controversial 1967 play
Soldiers by his friend, the German playwright
Rolf HochhuthRolf Hochhuth is a German author and playwright. He is best known for his 1963 drama The Deputy and remains a controversial figure for his plays and other public comments, such as his insinuation of Pope Pius XII's sympathies for Hitler's extermination of the Jews in the 1963 play The Deputy and...
, 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 projectThe German nuclear energy project, , was an attempted clandestine scientific effort led by Germany to develop and produce the atomic weapons during the events involving the World War II...
for which Irving conducted many interviews, and
The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, in which he blamed the British escort group commander, Commander
Jack BroomeCaptain John Egerton "Jack" Broome DSC, RN, was a Royal Navy officer who served in both World Wars. He commanded the escort group of the ill-fated Arctic Convoy PQ-17 in 1942...
for the catastrophic losses of the
Convoy PQ-17PQ 17 was the code name for an Allied World War II convoy in the Arctic Ocean. In July 1942, the Arctic convoys suffered a significant defeat when Convoy PQ 17 lost 24 of its 35 merchant ships during a series of heavy enemy daylight attacks which lasted a week. On 27 June, the ships sailed...
. 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.
After
PQ-17, Irving largely shifted to writing
biographiesA biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
. 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, 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-Life and career:Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish family in New York City, New York and grew up in Bay Shore, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program in English Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course...
, Irving claimed to have developed sympathies towards them. 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.
In 1969, during a visit to Germany, Irving met
Robert KempnerRobert Kempner was a German-born American lawyer.Kempner was a successful Jewish lawyer in Berlin during the 1920s who then became the chief legal advisor to the Prussian police...
, one of the American prosecutors at
NurembergThe Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany....
. 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.Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
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". Upon his return to the United States, Kempner wrote to
J. Edgar HooverJohn Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
, the director of the
FBIThe Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
, that Irving expressed many "anti-American and anti-Jewish statements".
In 1971, he translated the memoirs of General
Reinhard GehlenReinhard Gehlen was a General in the German Army during World War II, who served as chief of intelligence-gathering on the Eastern Front. After the war, he was recruited by the United States military to set up a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union , and eventually became head of the West...
, and in 1973 published
The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, a biography of Luftwaffe Marshal
Erhard MilchErhard Milch was a German Field Marshal who oversaw the development of the Luftwaffe as part of the re-armament of Germany following World War I, and served as founding Director of Deutsche Luft Hansa...
. He spent the remainder of the 1970s working on
Hitler's WarHitler's War is a history book by David Irving. It describes the Second World War from the point of view of Adolf Hitler.It was first published in April 1977 by Hodder & Stoughton and Viking Press . Avon Books reissued it in 1990...
and the
War Path, his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler;
The Trail of the Fox, a biography of Field Marshal
Erwin RommelErwin Johannes Eugen Rommel , popularly known as the Desert Fox , was a German Field Marshal of World War II. He won the respect of both his own troops and the enemies he fought....
; and a series in the
Sunday Express describing the
Royal Air ForceThe Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
's famous
Dam BustersOperation Chastise was an attack on German dams carried out on 16–17 May 1943 by Royal Air Force No. 617 Squadron, subsequently known as the "Dambusters", using a specially developed "bouncing bomb" invented and developed by Barnes Wallis...
raid. In 1975, in his introduction to
Hitler und seine Feldherren, the German edition of
Hitler's War, Irving attacked the diary of
Anne FrankAnnelies Marie "Anne" Frank is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.Born in the city of Frankfurt...
as a forgery, claiming falsely that a New York court had ruled that the diary was really the work of an American scriptwriter
Meyer LevinMeyer Levin was a Jewish-American novelist, known for works on the Leopold and Loeb case and the Anne Frank case.-Leopold and Loeb case:...
"in collaboration with the girl's father".
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" or "disgraced historian", while others insist he is not a historian, and have adopted alternatives such as "author" or "historic writer". The military historian
John KeeganSir John Keegan OBE FRSL is a British military historian, lecturer, writer and journalist. He has published many works on the nature of combat between the 14th and 21st centuries concerning land, air, maritime, and intelligence warfare, as well as the psychology of battle.-Life and career:John...
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". Donald Cameron Watt, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the
London School of EconomicsThe London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
, wrote that he admires some of Irving's work as a historian, though he rejects his conclusions about the Holocaust. At the libel proceedings against Irving, Watt declined Irving's request to testify, appearing only after a
subpoenaA subpoena is a writ by a government agency, most often a court, that has authority to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena:...
was ordered. 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.
Hitler's War
In 1977 Irving published
Hitler's WarHitler's War is a history book by David Irving. It describes the Second World War from the point of view of Adolf Hitler.It was first published in April 1977 by Hodder & Stoughton and Viking Press . Avon Books reissued it in 1990...
, the first of his two-part biography of
Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
. 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. In
Hitler's War, Irving tried to "view the situation as far as possible through Hitler's eyes, from behind his desk". 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. Irving's book faulted the Allied leaders, most notably
Winston ChurchillSir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
, for the eventual escalation of war, and claimed that the
German invasion of the Soviet UnionOperation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
in 1941 was a "
preventive warA preventive war or preventative war is a war initiated to prevent another party from attacking, when an attack by that party is not imminent or known to be planned. Preventive war aims to forestall a shift in the balance of power by strategically attacking before the balance of power has a chance...
" forced on Hitler to avert an alleged impending Soviet attack. He also claimed that Hitler had no knowledge of
the HolocaustThe Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
; while not denying its occurrence, Irving claimed that
Heinrich HimmlerHeinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
and his deputy
Reinhard HeydrichReinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich , also known as The Hangman, was a high-ranking German Nazi official.He was SS-Obergruppenführer and General der Polizei, chief of the Reich Main Security Office and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia...
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.
Reaction to
Hitler's War was generally critical. Reviewers took issue with Irving's factual claims as well as his conclusions. For example, American historian Charles Sydnor noted numerous errors in
Hitler's War, such as Irving's unreferenced statement that the Jews who fought in the
Warsaw Ghetto UprisingThe Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the Jewish resistance that arose within the Warsaw Ghetto in German occupied Poland during World War II, and which opposed Nazi Germany's effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Treblinka extermination camp....
of 1943 were well supplied with weapons from Germany's allies. Sydnor pointed out that Hitler had received an SS report in November 1942 which contained a mention of 363,211 Russian Jews executed by the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories...
between August–November 1942. 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.
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 MarshalField Marshal or Generalfeldmarschall in German, was a rank in the armies of several German states and the Holy Roman Empire; in the Austrian Empire, the rank Feldmarschall was used...
Erwin RommelErwin Johannes Eugen Rommel , popularly known as the Desert Fox , was a German Field Marshal of World War II. He won the respect of both his own troops and the enemies he fought....
. 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. In particular, Irving accused Rommel's friend and Chief of Staff General
Hans SpeidelHans Speidel: Born in Metzingen, was a German general during World War II and the first German NATO Commander during the Cold War.- 1914–1945 :...
of framing Rommel in the attempted coup. The British historian
David Pryce-JonesDavid Eugene Henry Pryce-Jones FRSL is a conservative British author and commentator.- Career :He was educated at Eton and read History at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied under A.J.P...
in a book review of
The Trail of the Fox in the 12 November 1977 edition of
The New York Times Book ReviewThe New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
accused Irving of taking everything Hitler had to say at face value.
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
MayfairMayfair is an area of central London, within the City of Westminster.-History:Mayfair is named after the annual fortnight-long May Fair that took place on the site that is Shepherd Market today...
district of London, own a
Rolls-RoyceThis a list of Rolls-Royce motor cars and includes vehicles produced by:*Rolls-Royce Limited *Rolls-Royce Motors , which was owned by Vickers between 1980 and 1998, and after that by Volkswagen...
car, and to enjoy a very affluent lifestyle. In addition, Irving, despite being married, became increasingly open about his affairs with other women, all of which were detailed in his self-published diary. 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 ChurchillSir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
. After publication Irving’s work on Churchill received at least one bad review from Professor
David CannadineSir David Nicholas Cannadine, FBA is a British historian, known for a number of books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy and Ornamentalism. He is also notable as a commentator and broadcaster on British public life, especially the monarchy. He serves as the generaleditor...
then of the
University of London-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
, now of
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
.
"It has received almost no attention from historians or reviewers...It is easy to see why.... full of excesses, inconsistencies and omissions... seems completely unaware of recent work done on the subject... It is not merely that the arguments in this book are so perversely tendentious and irresponsibly sensationalist. It is also that it is written in a tone which is at best casually journalistic and at worst quite exceptionally offensive. The text is littered with errors from beginning to end."
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 HungaryThe Hungarian Revolution or Uprising of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the government of the People's Republic of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956....
, which Irving characterized as "primarily an anti-Jewish uprising", supposedly because the
CommunistCommunism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
regime was itself controlled by Jews. Irving's depiction of Hungary's Communist regime as a Jewish
dictatorshipA dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
oppressing Gentiles sparked charges of antisemitism. 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 RákosiMátyás Rákosi was a Hungarian communist politician. He was born as Mátyás Rosenfeld, in present-day Serbia...
and
Ernő GerőErnő Gerő was a Hungarian Communist Party leader in the period after World War II and briefly in 1956 the most powerful man in Hungary as first secretary of its ruling communist party.-Life and career:...
had totally repudiated
JudaismJudaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
and sometimes expressed antisemitic attitudes themselves. Critics such as
Neal AschersonCharles Neal Ascherson is a Scottish journalist and writer.- Background :He was born in Edinburgh and educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, where he read history. He was described by the historian Eric Hobsbawm as "perhaps the most brilliant student I ever had...
and
Kai BirdKai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist, best known for his biographies of political figures.-Personal life:Bird was born in 1951 in Eugene, Oregon. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and he spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo and Bombay...
took issue with some of Irving's language that seemed to evoke antisemitic imagery, such as his remark that Rákosi possessed "the tact of a kosher butcher".
Hitler Diaries
In 1983, Irving played a major role in the
Hitler DiariesIn April 1983, the West German news magazine Stern published excerpts from what purported to be the diaries of Adolf Hitler, known as the Hitler Diaries , which were subsequently revealed to be forgeries...
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. 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-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
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). 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. Irving had concluded that the alleged Hitler diaries were a forgery because they had come from the same dealer in Nazi memorabilia from whom Irving had purchased his collection in 1982. At the press conference in
Hamburg-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
, Irving announced, "I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here". Irving was proud of the "trail of chaos" he had created 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. Irving also noted internal inconsistencies in the supposed Hitler diaries, such as a diary entry for 20 July 1944, which would have been unlikely given that Hitler's right hand had been badly burned by the bomb planted in his headquarters by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg earlier that day.
A week later on 2 May, Irving reversed himself and asserted that 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 MorellTheodor Gilbert Morell was German Führer Adolf Hitler's personal physician. Morell was well known in Germany for his unconventional treatments....
.
Robert HarrisRobert Dennis Harris is an English novelist. He is a former journalist and BBC television reporter.-Early life:Born in Nottingham, Harris spent his childhood in a small rented house on a Nottingham council estate. His ambition to become a writer arose at an early age, from visits to the local...
, 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. Subsequently Irving made another U-turn 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 them a forgery, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call the diaries genuine.
Other books
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. 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 EmpireThe British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
" and "turning Britain against its natural ally, Germany".
In 1989, Irving published his biography of
Hermann GöringHermann Wilhelm Göring, was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. He was a veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, and a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "The Blue Max"...
, in which he largely portrayed the
ReichsmarschallReichsmarschall literally in ; was the highest rank in the armed forces of Nazi Germany during World War II after the position of Supreme Commander held by Adolf Hitler....
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.
Movement towards Holocaust denial
Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust changed significantly. From 1988, he started to espouse
Holocaust denialHolocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
openly; he had previously not denied the Holocaust outright and for this reason, many Holocaust deniers were ambivalent about him. 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 DawidowiczLucy Schildkret Dawidowicz was an American historian and an author of books on modern Jewish history, in particular books on the Holocaust.-Life:...
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". In 1980, Irving received an invitation to speak at a Holocaust-denial conference, which he refused under the grounds that his appearance there would damage his reputation. In a letter, Irving stated his reasons for his refusal as: "This is pure
RealpolitikRealpolitik refers to politics or diplomacy based primarily on power and on practical and material factors and considerations, rather than ideological notions or moralistic or ethical premises...
on my part. I am already dangerously exposed, and I cannot take the chance of being caught in Flak meant for others!" Though Irving refused at this time to appear at conferences sponsored by the Holocaust-denying
Institute for Historical ReviewThe Institute for Historical Review , founded in 1978, is an American organization that describes itself as a "public-interest educational, research and publishing center dedicated to promoting greater public awareness of history." Critics have accused it of being an antisemitic "pseudo-scholarly...
(IHR), he did grant the institute the right to distribute his books in the United States.
Robert Jan van PeltRobert Jan van Pelt is an author, architectural historian, professor at the University of Waterloo and University of Toronto in Ontario and a Holocaust scholar. One of the world's leading experts on Auschwitz, he regularly speaks on Holocaust related topics, through which he has come to address...
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.
Until 1988, Irving seemed torn between a desire to be taken seriously as a historian and to associate with those with whom he seemed to share an ideological affinity. 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
HeydrichReinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich , also known as The Hangman, was a high-ranking German Nazi official.He was SS-Obergruppenführer and General der Polizei, chief of the Reich Main Security Office and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia...
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. Irving described himself as a "moderate fascist" and spoke of plans to become
Prime Minister of the United KingdomThe Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...
. The effort failed due to fiscal problems. Irving told the
Oxford Mail of having "links at a low level" with the
British National FrontThe National Front is a far right, white-only political party whose major political activities took place during the 1970s and 1980s. Its popularity peaked in the 1979 general election, when it received 191,719 votes ....
. Irving described
The SpotlightThe Spotlight was a weekly newspaper in the United States, published in Washington, D.C. from September 1975 to July 2001 by the now-defunct Liberty Lobby...
, the main journal of the
Liberty LobbyLiberty Lobby was an American political advocacy organization founded in 1958 that went bankrupt in 2001. It was founded by Willis Carto. In their own words,-Antisemitic world-view:...
, as "an excellent fortnightly paper". 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.
Following the failure of Focus, in September 1983, Irving for the first time attended a conference of the IHR. Van Pelt has argued that with the failure of Irving's political career, he felt freer to associate with Holocaust deniers. At the conference, Irving did not deny the Holocaust, but did appear happy to share the stage with
Robert FaurissonRobert Faurisson is a French academic who is a Holocaust denier. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles, published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers , which deny various aspects of the Holocaust,...
and Judge
Wilhelm StäglichWilhelm Stäglich was a World War II army officer, later a financial judge in Hamburg, and a prominent Holocaust denier....
, and claimed to be impressed with the allegations of Friedrich Berg that
mass murderMass murder is the act of murdering a large number of people , typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. According to the FBI, mass murder is defined as four or more murders occurring during a particular event with no cooling-off period between the murders...
via diesel gas fumes at the
Operation ReinhardOperation Reinhard was the code name given to the Nazi plan to murder Polish Jews in the General Government, and marked the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, the use of extermination camps...
death camps was impossible. At that conference, Irving repeated his claims that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust because he was "so busy being a soldier". 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' was a politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Before independence, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944,...
didn't know what was going on in
Sabra and ChatillaThe Sabra and Shatila massacre took place in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon between September 16 and September 18, 1982, during the Lebanese civil war. Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were massacred in the camps by Christian Lebanese Phalangists while the camp...
". During the same speech, Irving proclaimed Hitler to be the "biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich". 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?'"
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. Irving also took the view that Hitler often tried to help the Jews of Europe. In a June 1992 interview with the
Daily Telegraph, 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". 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". Irving used this alleged incident to argue that there was some sort of mystical connection between himself and Hitler.
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. Irving claimed that the Holocaust was not the work of Nazi leaders, but rather of "nameless criminals", and furthermore claimed that "these men [who killed the Jews] acted on their own impulse, their own initiative, within the general atmosphere of brutality created by the Second World War, in which of course Allied bombings played a part." 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".
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. 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.
In 1986, Irving visited Toronto, where he was met at the airport by Holocaust denier
Ernst ZündelErnst Christof Friedrich Zündel is a German Holocaust denier and pamphleteer who was jailed several times in Canada for publishing literature which "is likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group" and for being a threat to national security, in the United States for overstaying his visa,...
. According to Zündel, Irving "...thought I was 'Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!'", and asked Zündel to stay away from him. 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. 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. 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. In addition, the publication in 1987 of the book
Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945 by
Ernst NolteErnst Nolte is a German historian and philosopher. Nolte’s major interest is the comparative studies of Fascism and Communism. He is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 to 1991. He was previously a Professor at the University of Marburg...
, in which Nolte strongly implied that maybe Holocaust deniers were on to something, encouraged Irving to become more open in associating with Zündel.
Zündel trial
In January 1988, Irving travelled to Toronto, Canada to assist
Douglas ChristieDouglas Hewson "Doug" Christie, Jr. is a Canadian lawyer and far-right political activist based in Victoria, British Columbia.-Career:...
, the defence lawyer for
Ernst ZündelErnst Christof Friedrich Zündel is a German Holocaust denier and pamphleteer who was jailed several times in Canada for publishing literature which "is likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group" and for being a threat to national security, in the United States for overstaying his visa,...
at his
second trialR. v. Zundel [1992] 2 S.C.R. 731 is a landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision where the Court struck down the provision in the Criminal Code of Canada that prohibited publication of false information or news on the basis that it violated the freedom of expression provision under section 2 of the...
for denying the Holocaust. Working closely with
Robert FaurissonRobert Faurisson is a French academic who is a Holocaust denier. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles, published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers , which deny various aspects of the Holocaust,...
, 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. LeuchterFrederick A. Leuchter, Jr. is an American Federal Court qualified expert in execution technology and author of forensic Holocaust denial material. He claims to have improved the design of instruments for capital punishment and had execution equipment contracts with several states...
, a self-described execution expert living in
BostonBoston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
. 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. Irving argued that an alleged expert on gassings like Leuchter could prove that the Holocaust was a "myth" 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. Subsequently, Irving claimed to the American journalist
D.D. GuttenplanDon David Guttenplan is the author of The Holocaust on Trial. This book is about David Irving's trial for denial of the holocaust.He recently completed a biography of I. F. Stone, the American journalist, titled "American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F...
in a 1999 interview that Zündel had convinced him that the Holocaust had not occurred.
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 SolutionThe Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
. He also expressed his evolving belief that the Final Solution involved "atrocities", not systematic murder: "I don't think there was any overall
Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was." Irving testified for Zündel between 22–26 April 1988, where he endorsed
Richard HarwoodRichard Verrall is a former Deputy Chairman of the British National Front , he edited the magazine Spearhead from 1976 to 1980.-National Front career:...
's book
Did Six Million Really Die? as "over ninety percent...factually accurate".
As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited the
Leuchter reportThe Leuchter report is a pseudoscientific document authored by American execution technician Fred A. Leuchter. For the defense in the trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, Leuchter compiled the report in 1988 with the intention of investigating the feasibility of mass homicidal gassings at Nazi...
by self-styled execution expert
Fred A. LeuchterFrederick A. Leuchter, Jr. is an American Federal Court qualified expert in execution technology and author of forensic Holocaust denial material. He claims to have improved the design of instruments for capital punishment and had execution equipment contracts with several states...
, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal
gas chamberA gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...
s at the
Auschwitz concentration campConcentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
. Irving said in a 1999 documentary about Leuchter: "The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of
cyanideA cyanide is a chemical compound that contains the cyano group, -C≡N, which consists of a carbon atom triple-bonded to a nitrogen atom. Cyanides most commonly refer to salts of the anion CN−. Most cyanides are highly toxic....
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". In addition, Irving was influenced to embrace Holocaust denial by the American historian
Arno J. MayerArno Joseph Mayer is a United States Marxist historian originally from Luxembourg, who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.-Early life and academic career:Mayer was born into a...
'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.
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. Leuchter's book had been first published in Canada by Zündel's
Samisdat PublishersSamisdat Publishers, Ltd. was a small Canadian publishing house owned and operated by Ernst Zündel, a noted Holocaust denier, during the 1980s and 1990s...
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. 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". The alleged swindle was the
reparationsThe Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany was signed on September 10, 1952, and entered in force on March 27, 1953...
money totalling 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". In his foreword, Irving praised the "scrupulous methods" and "integrity" of Leuchter.
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 MotionAn Early Day Motion , in the Westminster system, is a motion, expressed as a single sentence, tabled by Members of Parliament for debate "on an early day" . Controversial EDMs are not signed by Government Ministers, PPS or the Speaker of the House of Commons and very few are debated on the floor...
of the House of Commons as "Hitler's heirs". 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". In the Motion, the House stated that they were "appalled by [the Holocaust denial of] Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving". 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!".
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. 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". 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". Finally, Irving claimed "the survivors of Auschwitz are themselves testimony to the absence of an extermination programme". Echoing the criticism of the House of Commons, on 14 May 1990 a leader in
The TimesThe Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
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".
The Holocaust denial lecture circuit
In the early 1990s, Irving was a frequent visitor to Germany, where he spoke at neo-Nazi rallies. 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 ChamberlainArthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. Chamberlain is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the...
to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that of
Winston ChurchillSir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
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". 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. 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"). German nationalists found Irving, as a non-German Holocaust denier, to be particularly credible.
In January 1990, Irving gave a speech in
MoersMoers is a German city on the left bank of the Rhine. Moers belongs to the district of Wesel...
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. Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at the death camp, stating that the existing remains were "mock-ups built by the Poles". On 21 April 1990 Irving repeated the same speech in
MunichMunich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, which led to his conviction for Holocaust denial in Munich on 11 July 1991. The court fined Irving DM 7,000. Irving
appealAn appeal is a petition for review of a case that has been decided by a court of law. The petition is made to a higher court for the purpose of overturning the lower court's decision....
ed the judgement, and received a fine of DM 10,000 for repeating the same remarks in the courtroom on 5 May 1992. 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". 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
propagandaPropaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
that it was the policy of the German state to be "using 'gas chambers' to kill millions of Jews and other undesirables". During the same speech, Irving denounced the judge as a "senile, alcoholic cretin". Following his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving was banned from visiting Germany.
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. 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". During the same 1990 speech in Toronto, Irving claimed that "more people died on the back seat of Senator
Edward KennedyEdward Moore "Ted" Kennedy was a United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. Serving almost 47 years, he was the second most senior member of the Senate when he died and is the fourth-longest-serving senator in United States history...
's motor car in Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber of Auschwitz". 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". 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). 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".
On 17 January 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". 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". 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-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
in 1991, Irving stated that in two years time "...this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz,
MajdanekMajdanek was a German Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, established during the German Nazi occupation of Poland. The camp operated from October 1, 1941 until July 22, 1944, when it was captured nearly intact by the advancing Soviet Red Army...
and
TreblinkaTreblinka was a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II near the village of Treblinka in the modern-day Masovian Voivodeship of Poland. The camp, which was constructed as part of Operation Reinhard, operated between and ,. During this time, approximately 850,000 men, women...
...which in fact never took place" will be disproved (Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were all well known
Vernichtungslager). Two days later, Irving repeated the same speech in
HalleHalle is the largest city in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is also called Halle an der Saale in order to distinguish it from the town of Halle in North Rhine-Westphalia...
before a group of neo-Nazis, and praised
Rudolf HessRudolf Walter Richard Hess was a prominent Nazi politician who was Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party during the 1930s and early 1940s...
as "that great German martyr, Rudolf Hess". 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". 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". During that speech given in October 1991, Irving expressed his contempt and hatred for Holocaust survivors by proclaiming that:
In another 1991 speech, this time in
ReginaRegina is the capital city of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The city is the second-largest in the province and a cultural and commercial centre for southern Saskatchewan. It is governed by Regina City Council. Regina is the cathedral city of the Roman Catholic and Romanian Orthodox...
Irving called the
Shoah "a major fraud...There were no gas chambers. They were fakes and frauds"
In November 1992, Irving was to be a featured speaker at a world anti-Zionist congress in
StockholmStockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
that was cancelled by the Swedish government. Also scheduled to attend were fellow Holocaust-deniers
Robert FaurissonRobert Faurisson is a French academic who is a Holocaust denier. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles, published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers , which deny various aspects of the Holocaust,...
and
Fred A. LeuchterFrederick A. Leuchter, Jr. is an American Federal Court qualified expert in execution technology and author of forensic Holocaust denial material. He claims to have improved the design of instruments for capital punishment and had execution equipment contracts with several states...
, and
Louis FarrakhanLouis Farrakhan Muhammad, Sr. is the leader of the African-American religious movement the Nation of Islam . He served as the minister of major mosques in Boston and Harlem, and was appointed by the longtime NOI leader, Elijah Muhammad, before his death in 1975, as the National Representative of...
, together with representatives of the militant Palestinian group
HamasHamas is the Palestinian Sunni Islamic or Islamist political party that governs the Gaza Strip. Hamas also has a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades...
, the
LebaneseLebanon , officially the Republic of LebanonRepublic of Lebanon is the most common term used by Lebanese government agencies. The term Lebanese Republic, a literal translation of the official Arabic and French names that is not used in today's world. Arabic is the most common language spoken among...
militant Shiite group
Hezbollah, and the right-wing Russian antisemitic group
PamyatPamyat is a Russian nationalist organization identifying itself as the "People's National-patriotic Orthodox Christian movement." The group's stated focus is preserving Russian culture.- History :...
. 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". Irving went on to claim that most of the Jewish deaths during World War II had been caused by Allied bombing. Irving claimed that "The concentration camp inmates arrived in Berlin or
LeipzigLeipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
or in
DresdenDresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
just in time for the RAF bombers to set fire to those cities. Nobody knows how many Jews died in those air raids". 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. 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. At the same time, Irving started to appear more frequently at the annual conferences hosted by the IHR. In a 1995 speech, Irving claimed that the Holocaust was a myth invented by a "world-wide Jewish cabal" to serve their own ends. Irving also spoke on other topics at the IHR gatherings. A frequent theme was the claim that
Winston ChurchillSir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
had advance knowledge of the Japanese plans to attack
Pearl HarborPearl Harbor, known to Hawaiians as Puuloa, is a lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. Much of the harbor and surrounding lands is a United States Navy deep-water naval base. It is also the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet...
, and refused to warn the Americans in order to bring the United States into World War II.
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) 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. 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. Irving's statement led to a very public spat with his former ally Faurisson, who insisted that no Jews were killed in the Holocaust. 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". 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.
Racism and antisemitism
Irving has expressed
racistRacism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
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. Irving used the label "traditional enemies of the truth" to describe Jews, and in a 1963 article about a speech by Sir
Oswald MosleySir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, was an English politician, known principally as the founder of the British Union of Fascists...
wrote that "Yellow Star did not make a showing". 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". During an interview with the American writer
Ron Rosenbaum-Life and career:Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish family in New York City, New York and grew up in Bay Shore, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program in English Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course...
, Irving stated his belief that Jews were his "traditional enemy". In one interview cited in the libel 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".
Several of these statements were cited by the judge's decision in Irving's lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, leading the judge to conclude that Irving "had on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist." One example brought was his diary entry for 17 September 1994, in which Irving wrote about a ditty he composed for his young daughter "when halfbreed children are wheeled past":
I am a Baby AryanAryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or RastafarianThe Rastafari movement or Rasta is a new religious movement that arose in the 1930s in Jamaica, which at the time was a country with a predominantly Christian culture where 98% of the people were the black descendants of slaves. Its adherents worship Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia , as God...
.
Christopher HitchensChristopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
wrote that Irving sang the rhyme to Hitchens following dinner in the family's Washington apartment.
Persona non grata
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. In early 1992 a German court found him guilty of Holocaust denial under the
Auschwitzlüge section of the law against
VolksverhetzungVolksverhetzung is a concept in German criminal law that bans the incitement of hatred against a segment of the population. It often applies in, though it is not limited to, trials relating to Holocaust denial in Germany...
(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. Other governments followed suit, including Austria, Italy and Canada, where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported back to the United Kingdom. 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 five unsuccessful attempts to overturn.
In 1992, Irving signed a contract with
MacmillanMacmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.-History:...
for a biography of
Joseph GoebbelsPaul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
entitled
Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Following charges that Irving had selectively "edited" a recently discovered complete edition of
Goebbels's diariesJoseph Goebbels, a leading member of the German National Socialist Party and Propaganda Minister in Adolf Hitler's government from 1933 to 1945, kept a diary from 1923, when he was an unemployed ex-student with no interest in politics, until shortly before his death by suicide in Berlin on 1 May 1945...
in Moscow, Macmillan cancelled the book deal. 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.
Andrew NeilAndrew Ferguson Neil is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster.He currently works for the BBC, presenting the live political programmes The Daily Politics and This Week...
, the editor of the
Sunday Times, called Irving "reprehensible", but defended hiring Irving because he was only a "transcribing technician", which others criticized as a poor description of translation work.
On 27 April 1993 Irving was ordered to attend court to be examined on charges relating to the
Loi GayssotThe Gayssot Act or Gayssot Law , enacted on July 13, 1990, makes it an offense in France to question the existence or size of the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at...
in France, making it an offence to question the existence or size of the category of crimes against humanity. The law does not extend to
extraditionExtradition is the official process whereby one nation or state surrenders a suspected or convicted criminal to another nation or state. Between nation states, extradition is regulated by treaties...
, and Irving 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 courtContempt of court is a court order which, in the context of a court trial or hearing, declares a person or organization to have disobeyed or been disrespectful of the court's authority...
following a legal wrangling over publishing rights.
In 1995,
St. Martin's PressSt. Martin's Press is a book publisher headquartered in the Flatiron Building in New York City. Currently, St. Martin's Press is one of the United States' largest publishers, bringing to the public some 700 titles a year under eight imprints, which include St. Martin's Press , St...
of New York City agreed to publish the Goebbels biography; but after protests, they cancelled the contract, leaving Irving in a situation in which, according to D. D. Guttenplan, he was desperate for financial help, publicity, and the need to re-establish his reputation as a historian. The book was eventually self-published.
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 HolocaustDenying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth & Memory is a 1993 book by Deborah Lipstadt which led to a libel action when David Irving objected to Lipstadt calling him a Holocaust denier, see Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt. The book gives a detailed and perceptive explanation of how...
, which had first been published in the United States in 1993. 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, and suggested that he had falsified evidence or deliberately misinterpreted it.
Lipstadt hired the British solicitor
Anthony JuliusAnthony Julius is a prominent British lawyer and academic, best known for his actions on behalf of Diana, Princess of Wales, Deborah Lipstadt and more recently Heather Mills...
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 RamptonRichard Rampton QC is a leading British libel lawyer. He has been involved in several high profile cases, with his defence of Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books against David Irving among the most famous. In Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt, he represented them against false accusations of...
QCQueen's Counsel , known as King's Counsel during the reign of a male sovereign, are lawyers appointed by letters patent to be one of Her [or His] Majesty's Counsel learned in the law...
and Penguin also briefed junior barrister Heather Rogers. The Defendants (with Penguin's insurers paying the fee) also retained Professor
Richard J. EvansRichard John Evans is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.-Life:Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College...
, historian and Professor of Modern History at
Cambridge UniversityThe University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
, as an expert witness. Also working as expert witnesses were the American Holocaust historian
Christopher BrowningChristopher Robert Browning is an American historian of the Holocaust.-Education:Browning received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1968 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999, eventually becoming...
, the German historian
Peter LongerichProfessor Peter Longerich is a German historian.In 2002-03, Professor Longerich was the third holder of the Visiting Chair at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt. In 2003-04, he was J.B...
and the
DutchThe Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...
architectural expert
Robert Jan van PeltRobert Jan van Pelt is an author, architectural historian, professor at the University of Waterloo and University of Toronto in Ontario and a Holocaust scholar. One of the world's leading experts on Auschwitz, he regularly speaks on Holocaust related topics, through which he has come to address...
. The latter wrote a report attesting to the fact that the death camps were designed, built and used for the purpose of
mass murderMass murder is the act of murdering a large number of people , typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. According to the FBI, mass murder is defined as four or more murders occurring during a particular event with no cooling-off period between the murders...
, while Browning testified for the reality of the Holocaust. Evans' report was the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of Irving's work:
The
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
quoted Professor Evans further:-
Irving, (...) had deliberately distorted and wilfully mistranslated documents, consciously used discredited testimony and falsified historical statistics. (...) Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all."
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) though it appears uncertain if they have the money owing to them or will ever get it. When he did not meet these, Davenport Lyons moved to make him bankrupt on behalf of their client. He was forced into
bankruptcyBankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....
in 2002 and risked losing his home but Irving has since recovered financially sufficiently that he can afford to travel abroad.
Life after libel suit
Early in September 2004, Michael Cullen, the
deputy prime ministerThe Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand is second most senior officer in the Government of New Zealand, although this seniority does not necessarily translate into power....
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. A government spokeswoman said that "people who have been deported from another country are refused entry" to New Zealand. Irving rejected the ban and attempted to board a
QantasQantas Airways Limited is the flag carrier of Australia. The name was originally "QANTAS", an initialism for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services". Nicknamed "The Flying Kangaroo", the airline is based in Sydney, with its main hub at Sydney Airport...
flight for New Zealand from Los Angeles on 17 September 2004. He was not allowed on board.
On 11 November 2005, the Austrian police in the southern state of Styria, acting under the 1989
warrantAn arrest warrant is a warrant issued by and on behalf of the state, which authorizes the arrest and detention of an individual.-Canada:Arrest warrants are issued by a judge or justice of the peace under the Criminal Code of Canada....
, arrested Irving. Irving pleaded guilty to the charge of "trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust" and was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in accordance with the law prohibiting National Socialist activities (officially
Verbotsgesetz, "Prohibition Statute"). After he was arrested, Irving claimed in his plea that he changed his opinions on the Holocaust, "I said that then based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the
EichmannAdolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now. The Nazis did murder millions of Jews." 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.
In December 2006, Irving was released from prison, and banned from ever returning to Austria. 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. Since then, Irving has continued to work as a freelance writer, despite his troubled public image. He was drawn into the controversy surrounding Bishop Richard Williamson, who in a televised interview recorded in Germany in November 2008 denied the Holocaust took place, only to see Williamson convicted for incitement in April 2010 after refusing to pay a fine of 12,000 euros. Irving subsequently found himself beset by protestors on a book tour of the United States. Irving has actively toured the United States, lecturing to far right groups and on one occasion a serious knife fight broke out. Irving has also given lectures and tours in the UK and Europe; one tour in September 2010 which led to particular criticism included the Treblinka death camp.
Reception 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. 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 KershawSir Ian Kershaw is a British historian of 20th-century Germany whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich...
. In the first edition of Kershaw's book
The Nazi Dictatorship in 1985, Irving was called a "maverick" historian working outside the mainstream of the historical profession. 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".
Other critical responses to his workCritical responses to David Irving have changed dramatically as David Irving, a writer on the subject of World War II and Nazism, changes his own public political views, further there are doubts as to how far Irving applies the historical method...
tend to follow this chronological pattern.
Books
- The Destruction of Dresden
The Destruction of Dresden is a 1963 non-fiction book which describes the February 1945 bombing of Dresden in World War II. The book is based on a series of 37 articles written on the strategic bombing during World War II by David Irving called Wie Deutschlands Städte starben for the German...
(1963) ISBN 0-7057-0030-5
- The Mare's Nest (1964)
- The Virus House (1967)
- The Destruction of Convoy PQ17 (1967)
- Accident — The Death of General Sikorski (1967) ISBN 0-7183-0420-9
- Breach of Security (1968) ISBN 0-7183-0101-3
- The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe (1973), a biography of Erhard Milch
Erhard Milch was a German Field Marshal who oversaw the development of the Luftwaffe as part of the re-armament of Germany following World War I, and served as founding Director of Deutsche Luft Hansa...
ISBN 0-316-43238-5
- Hitler's War
Hitler's War is a history book by David Irving. It describes the Second World War from the point of view of Adolf Hitler.It was first published in April 1977 by Hodder & Stoughton and Viking Press . Avon Books reissued it in 1990...
(1977)
- The Trail of the Fox (1977), a biography of Erwin Rommel
Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel , popularly known as the Desert Fox , was a German Field Marshal of World War II. He won the respect of both his own troops and the enemies he fought....
ISBN 0-525-22200-6
- The War Path (1978) ISBN 0-670-74971-0
- The War Between the Generals (1981)
- Uprising! (1981), ISBN 0-949667-91-9
- The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor (1983) ISBN 0-02-558250-X
- The German Atomic Bomb: The History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany (1983) ISBN 0-306-80198-1
- Der Morgenthau Plan 1944-45 (in German only) (1986)
- War between the Generals (1986) ISBN 0-86553-069-6
- Hess, the Missing Years (1987) Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-45179-1
- Churchill's War (1987) ISBN 0-947117-56-3
- Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (1968), reprint (1989) ISBN 0-312-91152-1
- Göring (1989), biography of Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring, was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. He was a veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, and a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "The Blue Max"...
ISBN 0-688-06606-2
- Das Reich hört mit (in German only) (1989)
- Hitler's War (1991), revised edition, incorporating The War Path
- Apocalypse 1945, The Destruction of Dresden, updated and revised edition, (1995)
- Der unbekannte Dr. Goebbels (in German only) (1995)
- Goebbels — Mastermind of the Third Reich biography of Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
(1996) ISBN 1-872197-13-2
- Nuremberg: The Last Battle (1996) ISBN 1-872197-16-7
- Churchill's War Volume II: Triumph in Adversity (1997) ISBN 1-872197-15-9
- Rommel: The Trail of the Fox, Wordsworth Military Library; Limited edition (1999) ISBN 1-84022-205-0
- Hitler's War and the War Path (2002) ISBN 1-872197-10-8
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
- Faurisson affair
The Faurisson affair is a term given to an academic controversy in the wake of a book by Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier. The scandal largely dealt with the inclusion of an essay by Noam Chomsky, entitled Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression, as an introduction to...
- Historical revisionism
External links
- 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"
- Irving, Hitler and the Murder of the Jews
- David Irving The Libel Trial Re-examined by Robert Fulford
- Holocaust Denial in England
- David Irving and Holocaust Denial by Robert Fulford
- "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
Mark Greif is the co-editor, co-founder, and contributor to the magazine n+1, as well as a frequent contributor to American Prospect and occasional contributor to the London Review of Books.-Background and education:...
in The American ProspectThe American Prospect is a monthly American political magazine dedicated to American liberalism. Based in Washington, DC, The American Prospect is a journal "of liberal ideas, committed to a just society, an enriched democracy, and effective liberal politics" which focuses on United States politics...
, (6 November 1999)
- "Pity for this Man is Out of Place" by Hans-Ulrich Wehler
Hans-Ulrich Wehler is a German historian known for his role in promoting social history through the "Bielefeld School", and for his critical studies of 19th century Germany.-Career:...