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Dav John Cawdell Irving (born March 24, 1938) is an English writer and Holocaust denier specializing in the military and political history of World War II, with a particular emphasis on Nazi Germany. He was born in London, England. He has written 30 volumes on the subject, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler’s War (1977), Churchill’s War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. 1996). Many people have criticized his writings on Nazi Germany for, among other things, his Third Reich sympathies, anti-Semitism, and racism. He has long been associated with far-right and neo-Nazi movements, most notably during his student days when he stood up for British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a discussion on immigration at University College London. According to some critics, he has been called “the most experienced Holocaust denial preacher in the world today.” An unsuccessful lawsuit against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books severely tarnished Irving’s image as a historian. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, anti-Semite and racist who “associates with right-wing extremists who advocate neo-Nazism” and that he “persistently and intentionally distorted and twisted historical facts” for his own eological purposes.
Dav Irving Net Worth : $ 19 Million
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Per year: $4,000,000. Month: $32,000. Per week: $8,000
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Dav Irving Wiki
Full name
Dav John Cawdell Irving
net worth
19 million dollars
Date of birth
March 24, 1938
Place of birth
Essex, England, UK
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writer
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writer
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Dav Irving Archive
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London, United Kingdom
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David Irving Net Worth, Income, Salary, Earnings, Biography
Dav Irving Net Worth, Income, Salary, Earnings, Biography. Dav John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer and Holocaust denier who …
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Dav Irving Wiki ; Net Worth, $19 Million ; Date Of Birth, March 24， 1938 ; Place Of Birth, Essex， England， UK ; Occupation, Writer ; Profession …
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Dav Irving Wiki 2022: Age, height, Net Worth and Full Bio … of Convoy PQ-17 and won and Irving had to pay £40,000 in damages.
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Early life/ family background
Born August 18, 1993 in America, David Irving is an American football defensive tackle.
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Real name David Irving Nickname N/A Occupation Player Date of Birth 18 August 1993 Age 27 years old Zodiac Sign Virgo Place of Birth Fowler, California, United States Nationality American Father’s Name N/A One spouse N/A Children N/A
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David Irving
British author and Holocaust denier
David John Cawdell Irving (born March 24, 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier[1] who has written about the military and political history of World War II with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler’s War (1977), Churchill’s War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works he argues that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about the extermination of the Jews, or if he did, he spoke out against it.[2] Although Irving’s negationist claims and views on German war crimes in World War II (and Hitler’s responsibility for them) have never been taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognized for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents.[3]
By the late 1980s, Irving had positioned himself outside of the mainstream of history studies and had begun to shift from “soft-core” to “hard-core” Holocaust denial, possibly influenced by the Holocaust deniers’ trial Seriously from 1988 Zündel.[4] This trial and his reading of the pseudo-scientific [Note 1] Leuchter Report of 1988 led him to openly advocate Holocaust denial and, in particular, to deny that Jews were murdered by gassing in the Auschwitz concentration camp.[5][6]
Irving’s reputation as a historian was discredited [note 2] in 1996 when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel action he brought against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray found in his judgment that Irving willfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians. [Note 3] The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, anti-Semite and racist[7] who “for his own ideological reasons persistently and willfully misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”.[7][8] Furthermore the court found that Irving’s books had distorted the story of Hitler’s role in the Holocaust in order to present Hitler in a favorable light.
Early life
David Irving and his twin brother Nicholas[9] were born in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex, England. They had a brother, John,[10] and a sister, Jennifer.[11] Her father, John James Cawdell Irving (1898-1967), was a career naval officer and in command of the Royal Navy. Her mother, Beryl Irving (née Newington), was an illustrator and author of children’s books.[12]
During World War II, Irving’s father was an officer aboard the light cruiser HMS Edinburgh. On April 30, 1942, while escorting convoy QP 11 in the Barents Sea, the ship was severely damaged by German submarine U-456. Two days later the ship was attacked by a surface vessel and was now irretrievably abandoned and sunk by a torpedo from HMS Foresight. Irving’s father survived, but severed all ties with his wife and children after the incident.[13]
Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum: “Unlike the Americans, we Englishmen suffered from great deprivation…we went through childhood without toys. We didn’t have a childhood island crowded with foreign armies at all”.[14] According to his brother Nicholas, David has been a provocateur and joker since his youth. Nicholas Irving has said that “David used to run towards bombed-out houses and say ‘Heil Hitler !’ screamed,” a statement Irving denies.[12]
Irving went on to tell Rosenbaum that his negationist views of World War II dated back to his childhood, particularly because of his objections to the wartime British media portrayal of Adolf Hitler.[14] Irving claimed that his skeptical views of the Third Reich were rooted in his doubts about the cartoonish caricatures of Hitler and other Nazi leaders published in the British war press.[14]
academic years
Irving in 1955
After graduating from Brentwood School, Irving studied physics at Imperial College London, which he left after the first year. He did not complete the course due to financial constraints.[9][15]
Irving later studied economics in the Department of Political Economy at University College London for two years.[16] However, he had to drop out again due to lack of money.[17][18] During this time at university he took part in a debate on Commonwealth immigration and supported the founder of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley.[19]
Carnival season controversy
Irving’s stint as editor of the Carnival Times, a student magazine for the University of London Carnival Committee, became controversial in 1959 when he added a “secret insert” to the magazine. That supplement included an article in which he described Hitler as “the greatest unifying force in Europe since Charlemagne.” Although Irving deflected criticism by calling the Carnival Times “satirical,”[22] he also noted that “the formation of a European Union is interpreted as the building up of a group of superior peoples, and the Jews always suspect the emergence of such.” considered ‘master race’ (other than their own, of course)”.[23] Opponents also saw a cartoon included in the supplement as racist, and criticized another article in which Irving wrote that the British press was owned by Jews.[24 ] Volunteers were later recruited to remove and destroy the inserts before the magazine was distributed.[23] Irving said the criticism was “probably justified,” describing his motivation in producing the controversial Carnival Times classified edition: preventing the carnival from making a profit that would be passed on to a South African group, which he described as a “subversive organization”.[16][25]
The Destruction of Dresden
Irving attempted to enlist in the Royal Air Force but was deemed medically unfit.[26]
After serving as editor of the magazine of the University of London Carnival Committee in 1959, Irving went to West Germany instead of national service, where he worked as a steelworker in a Thyssen AG steel works in the Ruhr area and learned the German language. He then moved to Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an air force base.[12]
By 1962 he was busy writing a series of 37 articles for the German tabloid Neue Illustrierte on the Allied bombing campaign, And Germany’s Cities Did Not Die. These were the basis for his first book, The Destruction of Dresden (1963), in which he examined the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. By the 1960s, a debate about the morality of carpet bombing of German cities and civilians had already begun, particularly in the UK. As a result, Irving’s book, which was illustrated with graphic images, aroused great interest and became an international bestseller.[27]
In the first edition, Irving’s estimates for the deaths in Dresden ranged from 100,000 to 250,000 – significantly higher than most previously published figures.[28] These numbers have been widely accepted in many standard reference works. In later editions of the book over the next three decades, he gradually revised the number down to 50,000–100,000.[29] According to Richard J. Evans, in the 2000 libel trial Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt, Irving based his estimates of the Dresden dead on the word of one person who produced no supporting documentation, used a Nazi-falsified document, and described a witness who urologist as deputy chief physician in Dresden. The doctor later complained that he had been misidentified by Irving and further that he, the doctor, was only repeating rumors about the death toll.[30] According to an investigation by the city of Dresden in 2008, the number of victims in Dresden was estimated at 22,700-25,000.[31]
Irving had based his figures on the alleged “Daily Order 47,” TB 47, a document released by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and on claims made after the war by a former Dresden Nazi official, Hans Voigt, were raised. without verifying them with official sources available in Dresden. Irving’s estimates and sources were first disputed by Walter Weidauer, mayor of Dresden 1946–1958, in his own account of the bombing of Dresden. When it was later confirmed that the TB 47 used was a fake, Irving published a letter to the editor in The Times on July 7, 1966, retracting his estimates and writing that he had “no interest in attributing false legends promote or maintain”. In 1977 the actual document TB 47 was found in Dresden by Götz Bergander.[32][33][34]
Although he acknowledged that the copy of “TB 47” he used was inaccurate, in the late 1980s and 1990s Irving argued that the death toll in Dresden was much higher than accepted estimates: said in several speeches during that time er that 100,000 or more people had died in the bombing of Dresden. In some speeches, Irving also argued or suggested that the crackdown was comparable to the Nazi murder of Jews.[35]
1963 burglary at Irving’s apartment
In November 1963, Irving telephoned the Metropolitan Police with suspicions that he had been the victim of a burglary by three men who had broken into his home in Hornsey, London, claiming to be General Post Office engineers. Anti-Fascist activist Gerry Gable was convicted along with Manny Carpel in January 1964. They were each fined £20.[36]
Subsequent works
After the success of the Dresden book, Irving continued to write, including some works of Negationist history, although his 1964 work The Mare’s Nest—an account of Germany’s V-weapons program and Allied intelligence countermeasures against it—was widely acclaimed upon its publication and continues to be enjoyed high reputation. Michael J. Neufeld of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has described The Mare’s Nest as “the most complete account of both the Allied and German sides of the V-Weapons campaign in the last two years of the war”.[37] [38] Irving once said he was working to remove the “slime” attached to Adolf Hitler’s reputation (pictured).
Irving translated Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel’s memoirs (edited by Walter Görlitz) in 1965 and published Accident: The Death of General Sikorski in 1967. In the latter book, Irving claimed that the plane crash that killed the leader of the Polish government-in-exile, General Władysław Sikorski, in 1943 was in fact an assassination attempt ordered by Winston Churchill to enable Churchill to betray Poland to the Soviet Union. Irving’s book inspired the highly controversial 1967 play by his friend, the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, Soldiers, in which Hochhuth portrayed Churchill ordering the assassination of General Sikorski.
Also in 1967, Irving published two other works: The Virus House, an account of the German nuclear power project, for which Irving conducted many interviews,[39] and The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, in which he blamed the commander of the British escort group, Jack Broome, for the disastrous losses of convoy PQ 17. Amid much publicity, Broome sued Irving for defamation in October 1968, and in February 1970 Broome won after a 17-day trial in London’s High Court. Irving was ordered to pay £40,000 in damages and the book became out drawn to traffic.
After PQ-17, Irving largely shifted to writing biographies. In 1968 he 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 British historian Donald Cameron Watt. As a result of Irving’s success with Dresden, members of the extreme right in Germany assisted him in contacting surviving members of Hitler’s inner circle. In an interview with American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Irving claimed to have developed sympathy for her.[40] Seeing Irving as a potential friend, many aging middle- and high-ranking ex-Nazis donated diaries and other material. Irving described his historic work with Rosenbaum as an act of “cleansing the stone” of Hitler, removing the “slime” that he believed had been wrongly applied to Hitler’s reputation.[38]
In 1969, while visiting Germany, Irving met Robert Kempner, one of the American prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials.[41] Irving asked Kempner if the “official records of the Nuremberg Trials were falsified” and informed him that he planned to travel to Washington, DC to compare the March 1946 audio recording of Air Force Field Marshal Erhard Milch’s evidence with the later published texts to find evidence that evidence presented at Nuremberg was “falsified and manipulated”.[42] Upon his return to the United States, Kempner wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, that Irving had made many “anti-American and anti-Jewish statements.”[41]
In 1971 Irving translated General Reinhard Gehlen’s memoirs and in 1973 published The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, a biography of Field Marshal Milch. He spent the rest of the 1970s working on Hitler’s War and The War Path, his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler; The Trace of the Fox, a biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; and a series in the Sunday Express detailing the famous Royal Air Force Dam Busters heist. In 1975, in his introduction to Hitler and His Commanders, the German edition of Hitler’s War, Irving attacked Anne Frank’s diary as a forgery and falsely claimed that a New York court had ruled that the diary was in fact the work of American screenwriter Meyer Levin. in collaboration with the girl’s father”.[43]
revisionism
Hitler’s war
Hitler’s war, Irving used a 1942 memorandum from In, Irving used a 1942 memorandum from Hans Lammers (pictured), the head of the Reich Chancellery, to the Minister of Justice and said: “The Führer has repeatedly stated that he has the solution of the Die The Jewish question will be postponed until after the end of the war.”
In 1977, Irving published Hitler’s War, the first of his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler. Irving’s intention in Hitler’s war was to remove the “years of filth and discoloration from the facade of a silent and chilling memorial” to reveal the real Hitler, whose reputation, according to Irving, had been slandered by historians. During Hitler’s war, Irving tried “to see the situation with Hitler’s eyes as much as possible from behind his desk”.[44] He portrayed Hitler as a rational, intelligent politician whose sole aim was to increase Germany’s wealth and influence on the continent, and who was constantly abandoned by incompetent or treacherous subordinates.[44] Irving’s book blamed Allied leaders, particularly Winston Churchill, for the eventual escalation of the war, arguing that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a “preventive war” imposed on Hitler to stave off an imminent Soviet attack.[45 ] Irving also argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust: although he did not deny its occurrence, he argued that Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich were its originators and architects. Irving made much of the lack of a written order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust; he offered to pay £1,000 to anyone who could find such an order.[46] As of 2019, his offer still stood.[47]
In Hitler’s War, Irving quoted a memorandum by Hans Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, to the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Schlegelberger, in 1942, which stated: “The Führer has repeatedly stated that he wants to postpone the solution of the Jewish question until after the war is over Irving took this as evidence that Hitler had ordered against the extermination of the Jews.[48] He falsely claimed that “no other historians have quoted this document, perhaps they found it difficult to reconcile its contents with their obsessively held views ” about Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust.[48] The interpretation of the document, however, is not as straightforward as Irving suggested in his book.[49] The memorandum is undated and unsigned, although historians estimate that it was issued sometime between 1941 and 1942 by looking at the other documents the memorandum is in. They have concluded that the memorandum more than likely dates from late 1941, when Hitler was still advocating the expulsion of the Jews, and not later when he was advocating their extermination.[49]
Critical reaction to Hitler’s war was generally negative. Reviewers questioned both Irving’s factual claims and his conclusions. For example, the American historian Charles Sydnor noted numerous errors, such as Irving’s unquoted statement that the Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 were well supplied with arms from Germany’s allies.[50] Sydnor pointed out that in November 1942 Hitler had received an SS report that contained a mention of 363,211 Russian Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen between August and November 1942.[51] Sydnor noted that Irving’s statement that the Einsatzgruppen were in charge of the death camps seems to indicate that he was unfamiliar with Holocaust history, since the Einsatzgruppen were actually mobile death squads unrelated to the death camps. 52]
Irving’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s
Months after the publication of Hitler’s War, Irving published The Trail of the Fox, a biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In it, Irving attacked the members of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, branding them “traitors”, “cowards” and “manipulators” and uncritically presenting Hitler and his government’s later revenge on the conspirators, which included Rommel’s victims . In particular, Irving accused Rommel’s friend and Chief of Staff Hans Speidel of implicating Rommel in the coup attempt. British historian David Pryce-Jones, in a book review of The Trail of the Fox in the November 12, 1977 issue of The New York Times Book Review, accused Irving of taking everything Hitler had to say at face value.[53] [18]
In 1978 Irving published The War Path, the companion volume to Hitler’s war, which covered the events leading up to the war and was written from a similar perspective. Again, professional historians such as Donald Cameron Watt noted numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Despite the criticism, the book sold well, as had all of Irving’s books up to that date. The success of his books enabled Irving to buy a home in London’s prestigious Mayfair, own a Rolls-Royce, and lead an affluent lifestyle.[54] Additionally, although married, Irving became increasingly open about his affairs with other women, all of which were detailed in his self-published journal. Irving’s affairs resulted in his first marriage ending in divorce in 1981.
In the 1980s, Irving began researching and writing on subjects other than Nazi Germany, but with less success. He began researching his three-part biography of Winston Churchill. After publication, Irving’s work on Churchill received at least one poor review from Professor David Cannadine (then of the University of London):
It has received almost no attention from historians or reviewers…It’s easy to see why…full of excesses, contradictions and omissions…the recent work on the subject seems unaware…It’s not just that The arguments in this book are so perversely tendentious and irresponsibly sensationalist. It’s also written in a tone that’s casually journalistic at best and exceptionally offensive at worst. The text is riddled with errors from beginning to end.[56]
In 1981 he published two books. The first was The War Between the Generals, in which Irving offered an account of Allied High Command on the Western Front in 1944–45, detailing the heated conflicts that Irving claims arose between the various generals of the various countries be, described in detail and presented rumors about their private lives. The second book was Uprising! about the 1956 uprising in Hungary, which Irving described as “essentially an anti-Jewish uprising,” ostensibly because the communist regime was itself controlled by Jews. Irving’s depiction of the communist regime in Hungary as a Jewish dictatorship oppressing non-Jews sparked accusations of anti-Semitism.[57] In addition, there were complaints that Irving grossly exaggerated the number of people of Jewish descent in the communist regime, ignoring the fact that Hungarian communists of Jewish background, such as Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő, totally rejected Judaism and sometimes expressed anti-Semitic attitudes themselves. [58] Critics such as Neal Ascherson and Kai Bird criticized some of Irving’s language that seemed to evoke anti-Semitic imagery, such as his remark that Rákosi possessed “the tact of a kosher butcher”.
In 1982, Irving described himself as an “untrained historian” and argued that his lack of academic qualifications did not mean that he could not be considered a historian. He cited Pliny the Elder and Tacitus as examples of historians without a university education.[59]
Hitler diaries
In 1983, Stern, a weekly German news magazine, acquired 61 volumes of Hitler’s alleged diaries for DM 9 million and published excerpts from them. Irving played the lead role in debunking the Hitler diaries as a hoax. In October 1982, Irving had purchased 800 pages of documents on Hitler from the same source as Stern’s 1983 purchase, only to conclude that many of the documents were forgeries.[60] Irving was one of the first to identify the diaries as forgeries, attracting media attention. He went so far as to crash the April 25, 1983 press conference held by Hugh Trevor-Roper at the Hamburg offices of Stern magazine to denounce the diaries as fake and Trevor-Roper for endorsing the diaries as genuine.[ 61] Irving’s appearance at the Stern press conference, where he verbally abused Trevor-Roper until he was thrown out by security forces, resulted in his being featured prominently in the news: the next day, Irving appeared on the Today television show as a featured guest. Irving had concluded that the alleged Hitler diaries were fake, since they came from the same Nazi memorabilia dealer from whom Irving had bought his collection in 1982.[60] At the press conference in Hamburg, Irving said: “I know the collection from which these diaries come. It’s an old collection full of fakes. I have some here.”[60] Irving was proud to have discovered and denounced the hoax material and “trail of chaos” he had created at the Hamburg press conference and the associated publicity it had brought it , and prided himself on his humiliation of Trevor-Roper, which made Irving strongly disliked for his sloppy work for failing to spot the hoax, and earlier criticism of Irving’s methods and conclusions. Irving also noted internal inconsistencies in the alleged Hitler diaries, such as a diary entry for July 20, 1944, given that Hitler’s right hand had been severely burned by the bomb previously planted at his headquarters by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg , would have been unlikely day.[64]
A week later, on May 2, Irving claimed that many of the diary documents appeared to be genuine. to woo Theodor Morell.[63] Robert Harris suggested in his book Selling Hitler that another reason Irving changed his mind about the authenticity of the alleged Hitler diaries was that the fake diaries contained no reference to the Holocaust, thereby supporting Irving’s claim in Hitler’s War that Hitler no one knew about it.[65] Subsequently, Irving conformed when the diaries were consensually declared a forgery. At a press conference held to withdraw his approval of the diaries, Irving proudly claimed that he was the first to call them fake, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call them genuine.[ 63]
Other books
By the mid-1980s, Irving had not had a successful book for several years and was behind on writing the first volume of his Churchill series, the research of which had strained his finances.[66] He finished the manuscript in 1985, but the book was not published until 1987 when it was published as Churchill’s War, The Struggle for Power.
In 1989 Irving published his biography of Hermann Göring.[67]
Denial of the Holocaust
Holocaust Denial Movement
Reichsfuhrer-SS A note in Heinrich Himmler’s telephone book dated November 30, 1941, which read “no liquidation” was later used by Irving as a key argument to prove that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust.
Over the years, Irving’s attitude toward the Holocaust has changed significantly. Since at least the 1970s he has either questioned or denied Hitler’s involvement in the Holocaust and whether or not the Nazis had a plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
Irving always denied that Hitler was an anti-Semite, even before openly denying the Holocaust.[68] Irving claimed that Hitler only used anti-Semitism as a political platform and that after coming to power in 1933 he lost interest in it, while Joseph Goebbels and other Nazis continued to champion anti-Semitism.[69] In 1977 he said on a BBC1 television program that Hitler “became a statesman and then a soldier… and the Jew problem was a nuisance, an embarrassment to him.”[70] In 1983, Irving summed up his views on Hitler’s Jews when he said, that “probably the greatest friend of the Jews in the Third Reich, certainly when the war broke out, was Adolf Hitler. He was the one who did everything in his power to prevent anything bad happening to them.”[ 70] In the same Year he went on to explain about Hitler and the mass murder of Jews: “There is a whole chain of evidence from 1938 to October 1943, possibly even later, that suggests that Hitler was completely in the dark about anything that might have been going on.”[70 ] Irving boasted that he had not been refuted.[70]
Irving argued in his first edition of Hitler’s War in 1977 that Hitler was opposed to the murder of Jews in the East. He claimed that Hitler even ordered a halt to the extermination of the Jews in November 1941 (British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper notes that this admission blatantly contradicted Irving’s claim that Hitler did not know what was happening to the Jews in Eastern Europe).[71] On November 30, 1941, Heinrich Himmler went to the Wolfsschanze for a private meeting with Hitler, where the fate of some Berlin Jews was discussed. At 1:30 p.m., Himmler was ordered to tell Reinhard Heydrich that the Jews should not be liquidated. Himmler telephoned SS General Oswald Pohl, head of the concentration camp system, with the order: “Jews are to remain where they are.”[71] Irving argued that “no liquidation” was “irrefutable proof” that Hitler ordered none killing Jews.[71] Obwohl das Telefonprotokoll echt ist, liefert es jedoch keinen Beweis dafür, dass Hitler überhaupt beteiligt war, sondern nur, dass Himmler Kontakt mit Heydrich aufgenommen hat, und es gibt keinen Beweis dafür, dass Hitler und Himmler vor dem Telefonat Kontakt hatten.[71] Dies ist ein Beispiel für Irvings Manipulation von Dokumenten, da es keinen allgemeinen Befehl gab, das Töten von Juden zu stoppen.[71] Der Historiker Eberhard Jäckel schrieb, Irving “sehe und sammle immer nur das, was zu seiner Geschichte passt, und lasse sich auch jetzt nicht durch die Formulierung ‘Aufschub der Judenfrage’ davon abbringen, zu verstehen, was er will”.[71]
Im Juni 1977 strahlte der britische Fernsehmoderator David Frost eine Debatte aus. Während der Debatte argumentierte Irving, dass es keinerlei Beweise gebe, die Hitler auch nur über den Holocaust gewusst habe. Frost fragte Irving, ob er Hitler für böse halte oder nicht, er antwortete: “Er war so böse wie Churchill, so böse wie Roosevelt, so böse wie Truman.”[68]
Ab 1988 begann Irving, sich offen für die Leugnung des Holocaust einzusetzen: Er hatte den Holocaust zuvor nicht direkt geleugnet, und aus diesem Grund standen ihm viele Holocaustleugner ambivalent gegenüber.[72] Sie bewunderten Irving für die Pro-Nazi-Einstellung in seiner Arbeit und die Tatsache, dass er ein Maß an Mainstream-Glaubwürdigkeit besaß, das ihnen fehlte, waren aber verärgert, dass er den Holocaust nicht offen leugnete.[73] 1980 stellte Lucy Dawidowicz fest, dass, obwohl Hitlers Krieg stark mit dem Dritten Reich sympathisierte, sein Buch nicht Teil der „antisemitischen Kanon”.[74] 1980 erhielt Irving eine Einladung, auf einer Holocaust-Leugnungs-Konferenz zu sprechen, die er jedoch mit der Begründung ablehnte, dass sein Erscheinen dort seinem Ruf schaden würde.[72] In einem Brief begründete Irving seine Weigerung wie folgt: „Das ist reine Realpolitik meinerseits. Ich bin bereits gefährlich exponiert und kann es nicht riskieren, in Flak erwischt zu werden, die für andere bestimmt ist!“[72] Obwohl Irving ablehnte Um zu dieser Zeit auf Konferenzen aufzutreten, die vom Holocaust-leugnenden Institute for Historical Review (IHR) gesponsert wurden, gewährte er dem Institut das Recht, seine Bücher in den Vereinigten Staaten zu vertreiben.[72] Robert Jan van Pelt schlägt vor, dass der Hauptgrund für Irvings Wunsch, sich von Holocaustleugnern in den frühen 1980er Jahren fernzuhalten, sein Wunsch war, seine eigene politische Partei namens Focus zu gründen.[72]
In einer Fußnote in der ersten Ausgabe von Hitlers Krieg schreibt Irving: „Ich kann die Ansicht nicht akzeptieren … [dass] es kein von Hitler, Himmler oder Heydrich unterzeichnetes Dokument gibt, das von der Vernichtung der Juden spricht.“[75] 1982 hörte Irving vorübergehend auf zu schreiben und unternahm einen Versuch, alle verschiedenen rechtsextremen Splittergruppen in Großbritannien in einer Partei namens Focus zu vereinen, in der er eine führende Rolle spielen würde.[45] Irving bezeichnete sich selbst als “gemäßigten Faschisten” und sprach von Plänen, Premierminister des Vereinigten Königreichs zu werden,[76] aber seine Bemühungen, in die Politik zu gehen, die er damals für sehr wichtig hielt, scheiterten an fiskalischen Problemen.[76] 45] Irving sagte der Oxford Mail, er habe “Verbindungen auf niedriger Ebene” mit der National Front (NF).[45] Irving beschrieb The Spotlight, die Hauptzeitschrift der Liberty Lobby, als „eine ausgezeichnete vierzehntägige Zeitung“.[45] Gleichzeitig hängte Irving eine Kopie von Hitlers „Prophezeiungsrede“ vom 30. Januar 1939 an seine Wand, in der er die „Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa“ versprach, falls „jüdische Finanziers“ einen weiteren Weltkrieg anzettelten.[77]
Nach dem Scheitern von Focus nahm Irving im September 1983 zum ersten Mal an einer Konferenz des IHR teil.[72] Van Pelt hat argumentiert, dass er sich nach dem Scheitern von Irvings politischer Karriere freier fühlte, mit Holocaustleugnern umzugehen.[72] Auf der Konferenz leugnete Irving den Holocaust nicht, schien aber glücklich zu sein, die Bühne mit Robert Faurisson und Richter Wilhelm Stäglich zu teilen, und behauptete, von den pseudowissenschaftlichen Anschuldigungen des Neonazis und Holocaustleugners Friedrich „Fritz“ Berg in dieser Masse beeindruckt zu sein murder using diesel gas fumes at the Operation Reinhard death camps was impossible.[78] At that conference, Irving repeated his claims that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust because he was “so busy being a soldier”.[79] In a speech at that conference, Irving stated: “Isn’t it right for Tel Aviv to claim now that David Irving is talking nonsense and of course Adolf Hitler must have known about what was going in Auschwitz and Treblinka, and then in the same breath to claim that, of course our beloved Mr. Begin didn’t know what was going on in Sabra and Chatilla”.[79] During the same speech, Irving proclaimed Hitler to be the “biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich”.[80] 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?'”[79]
A major theme of Irving’s writings from 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.[76] Irving also took the view that Hitler often tried to help the Jews of Europe.[76] 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”.[76] 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.[81]
In a 1986 speech in Australia Irving argued that photographs of Holocaust survivors and dead taken in early 1945 by Allied soldiers were proof that the Allies were responsible for the Holocaust, not the Germans.[82] Irving claimed that the Holocaust was not the work of Nazi leaders, but rather of “nameless criminals”,[82] and 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.”[82] 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”.[83] In 1986, he told reporters in Brisbane, Australia, without explaining how the Allied bombing raids on Germany had made non-Germans to be antisemitic that:
the Jews were the victims of a large number of rather run-of-the-mill criminal elements which exist in Central Europe. Not just Germans, but Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, feeding on the endemic antisemitism of the era and encouraged by the brutalization which war brought about anyway. These people had seen the bombing raids begin. They’d lost probably women, wives and children in the bombing raids. And they wanted to take revenge on someone. So when Hitler ordered the expulsion, as he did – there’s no doubt that Hitler ordered the expulsion measures – these people took it out on the person that they could.[84]
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.[85] Irving in his revised edition of Hitler’s War in 1991 removed all mentions of “gas chambers” and the word “Holocaust”. He defended the revisions by stating, “You won’t find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even in a footnote, why should [you]. If something didn’t happen, then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.”[86][87]
Irving was present at a memorial service for Hans-Ulrich Rudel in January 1983 after the latter’s death, organised by the DVU and its leader Gerhard Frey, delivering a speech,[88][89] and was given the Hans-Ulrich-Rudel-Award by Frey in June 1985.[90] 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.[18]
In 1986, Irving visited Toronto, where he was met at an airport by Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel.[91] According to Zündel, Irving “thought I was ‘Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!'”, and asked Zündel to stay away from him.[91] 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.[91] 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.[91] As a result, Irving and Zündel became friends, and Irving agreed in late 1987 to testify for Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust.[92] In addition, the publication in 1987 of the book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945 by Ernst Nolte, in which Nolte strongly implied that maybe Holocaust deniers were on to something, encouraged Irving to become more open in associating with Zündel.[91]
In 1988, Irving argued that the Nazi state was not responsible for the extermination of the Jews in places like Minsk, Kiev and Riga because according to him they were carried out for the most part by “individual gangsters and criminals”.[84]
In 1989, Irving during a speech told an audience that “there is not one shower bath in any of the concentration or slave labour camps that turns out to have been some kind of gas chamber.”[93] He described Jewish Holocaust survivors as “liars, psychiatric cases and extortionists.”[94] In 1990, Irving said on 5 March that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that “30,000 people at the most were murdered in Ausschwitz … that’s about as many as we Englishmen killed in a single night in Hamburg.” He reiterated his claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz on 5 March 1990 to an audience in Germany:
There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, there were only dummies which were built by the Poles in the postwar years, just as the Americans build the dummies in Dachau . . . these things in Auschitz, and probably also in Majdanek, Treblinka, and in other so-called extermination camps in the East are all just dummies.[95]
During the same speech, he said, “I and, increasingly, other historians … are saying, the Holocaust, the gas chamber establishments in Auschwitz did not exist.”[84] Later on in the same year, Irving told an audience in Toronto, “The gas chambers that are shown to the tourists in Auschwitz are fakes.”[84]
Irving denied that the Nazis gassed any Jews or other people, with the exception of admitting that a small number of people were gassed during experiments.[93]
In 1990, Irving told an audience in Canada that “particularly when there’s money involved and they can get a good compensation cash payment out of it” there would be people claiming to be eyewitnesses to gas chambers or extermination camps.[96] He continued:
And the only way to overcome this appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere that surrounds the whole of this immense tragedy called World War II is to treat these little legends with the ridicule and bad taste that they deserve. Ridicule isn’t enough, you’ve got to be tasteless about it. You’ve got to say things: ‘More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. You think that’s tasteless? What about this: I’m forming an association especially dedicated to all these liars, the ones who try to kid people that they were in these concentration camps. It’s called ‘The Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Lies’ – ‘A.S.S.H.O.L.E.S.’ Can’t get more tasteless than that. But you’ve got to be tasteless because these people deserve all our contempt, and in fact they deserve the contempt of the real Jewish community and the people, whatever their class and colour, who did suffer.[96]
In 1991, Irving espoused an antisemitic conspiracy theory when he stated that the Jews “dragged us into two world wars and now, for equally mysterious reasons, they’re trying to drag us into the Balkans.”[97]
In 1995 when Irving was confronted with a Holocaust survivor, he repeated the same claim and asked, “How much money have you made from that piece of ink on your arm, which may indeed be real tattooed ink? Yes. Half a million dollars, three-quarters of a million for you alone?”[96]
On 6 October 1995, Irving told an audience in Tampa, Florida, that he agreed with the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels that the Jews “had it coming for them”.[98] He continued:
What these people don’t understand … is that they are generating antisemitism by their behaviour, and they can’t understand it. They wonder where the antisemitism comes from and it comes from themselves, from their behaviour … I said to this man from Colindale, this leader of the Jewish community in Freeport, Louisiana, I said … ‘You are disliked, you people. You have been disliked for three thousand years. You have been disliked so much that you have been hounded from country to country, from pogrom to purge, from purge back to pogrom, and yet you never asked yourselves why you’re disliked. That’s the difference between you and me. It never occurs to you to look into the mirror and say, why am I disliked? What is it that the rest of humanity doesn’t like about the Jewish people, to such an extent that they repeatedly put us through the grinder?’ And he went berserk. He said ‘Are you trying to say that we are responsible for Auschwitz? Ourselves?’ And I said, ‘Well the short answer is yes. The short answer I have to say is yes … If you had behaved differently over the intervening three thousand years, the Germans would have gone about their business and not have found it necessary to go around doing whatever they did to you.'[99]
Thus, according to Irving, the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves.[97]
Ernst Zündel trial
Ernst Zündel, whom Irving met in 1986 and became good friends with and collaborated with to distribute Holocaust denial
In January 1988, Irving travelled to Toronto, Ontario, to assist Douglas Christie, the defence lawyer for Ernst Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust.[76] Working closely with Robert Faurisson, who was also assisting the defence, Irving contacted Warden Bill Armontrout of the Missouri State Penitentiary who recommended that Irving and Faurisson get into touch with Fred A. Leuchter, a self-described execution expert living in Boston.[80] Irving and Faurisson then flew to Boston to meet with Leuchter, who agreed to lend his alleged technical expertise on the behalf of Zündel’s defence.[76] Irving argued that an alleged expert on gassings like Leuchter could prove that the Holocaust was a “myth”.[76] After work on the second Zündel trial, Irving declared that 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.[100] Subsequently, Irving claimed to the American journalist D. D. Guttenplan in a 1999 interview that Zündel had convinced him that the Holocaust had not occurred.[101] In the 1988 Zündel trial, Irving repeated and defended his claim from Hitler’s War that until October 1943 Hitler knew nothing about the actual implementation of the Final Solution. He also expressed his evolving belief that the Final Solution involved “atrocities”, not systematic murder: “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.”[102] Similarly, Irving disputed the common held view among historians that the Wannsee Conference meeting on 20 January 1942 was when the extermination of Jews in the near future or later was discussed, he argued:
Several of the participants in the Wannsee Conference subsequently testified in later criminal proceedings that … none of them had an idea that at that conference there had been a discussion of liquidation of Jews … There is no explicit reference to extermination of the Jews of Europe in the Wannsee Conference, not in any of the other documents in that file.[103]
Between 22 and 26 April 1988, Irving testified for Zündel, endorsing Richard Harwood’s book Did Six Million Really Die? as “over ninety percent… factually accurate”.[104]
As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited The Leuchter report by Fred A. Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving said in a 1999 documentary about Leuchter: “The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of cyanide in the brickwork. That’s what converted me. When I read that in the report in the courtroom in Toronto, I became a hard-core disbeliever”.[105] In addition, Irving was influenced to embrace Holocaust denial by the American historian Arno J. Mayer’s 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which did not deny the Holocaust, but claimed that most of those who died at Auschwitz were killed by disease: Irving saw in Mayer’s book an apparent confirmation of Leuchter’s and Zündel’s theories about no mass murder at Auschwitz.[106]
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.[100] Leuchter’s book had been first published in Canada by Zündel’s Samisdat Publishers in 1988 as The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek.[107] 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”.[100] The alleged swindle was the reparations money totalling 3 billion DM paid by the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel between 1952 and 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”.[100] In his foreword, Irving praised the “scrupulous methods” and “integrity” of Leuchter.[100]
For publishing and writing the foreword to Auschwitz The End of the Line, on 20 June 1989, Irving together with Leuchter was condemned in an Early Day Motion of the House of Commons as “Hitler’s heirs”.[108] 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”.[109] In the Motion, the House stated that they were “appalled by [the Holocaust denial of] Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving”.[83] In response to the House of Commons motion, Irving in a press statement challenged the MPs who voted to condemn him, writing that: “I will enter the ‘gas chambers’ of Auschwitz and you and your friends may lob in Zyklon B in accordance with the well known procedures and conditions. I guarantee that you won’t be satisfied with the results!”.[110]
In a pamphlet Irving published in London on 23 June 1989, he made the “epochal announcement” that there was no mass murder in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp.[111] Irving labelled 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”.[111] Boasting of his role in criticising 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”.[111] Finally, Irving claimed “the survivors of Auschwitz are themselves testimony to the absence of an extermination programme”.[111] Echoing the criticism of the House of Commons, a leader in The Times on 14 May 1990 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”.[109]
Holocaust denial lecture circuit
[112] Interior of the gas chamber of Auschwitz I camp. In a 1990 speech, Irving stated: “I say the following thing: there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. There have been only mock-ups built by the Poles in the years after the war.”In the early 1990s, Irving was a frequent visitor to Germany, where he spoke at neo-Nazi rallies.[85] The chief themes of Irving’s German speeches were that the Allies and Axis states were equally culpable for war crimes, that the decision of Neville Chamberlain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that of Winston Churchill to continue the war in 1940, had been great mistakes that set Britain on a path of decline, and the Holocaust was just a “propaganda exercise”.[85] In June 1990, Irving visited 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.[110] 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”).[113] German nationalists found Irving, as a non-German Holocaust denier, to be particularly credible.[113]
In January 1990, Irving gave a speech in Moers where he asserted that only 30,000 people died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, all of natural causes, which was equal—so he claimed—to the typical death toll from one Bomber Command raid on German cities.[112] Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at the death camp, stating that the existing remains were “mock-ups built by the Poles”.[112] On 21 April 1990, Irving repeated the same speech in Munich, which led to his conviction for Holocaust denial in Munich on 11 July 1991. The court fined Irving DM 7,000. Irving appealed against the judgement, and received a fine of DM 10,000 for repeating the same remarks in the courtroom on 5 May 1992.[112] 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”.[100] Irving went on to call the Auschwitz death camp a “tourist attraction” whose origins Irving claimed went back to an “ingenious plan” devised by the British Psychological Warfare Executive in 1942 to spread anti-German propaganda that it was the policy of the German state to be “using ‘gas chambers’ to kill millions of Jews and other undesirables”.[100] During the same speech, Irving denounced the judge as a “senile, alcoholic cretin”.[114] Following his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving was banned from visiting Germany.[115] [100] Inside a barracks in Auschwitz II Birkenau . In 1992 during his appeal for his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving called Auschwitz a “tourist attraction”.
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.[116] 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”.[18] 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”.[117] 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).[117] 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”.[117]
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”.[118] Irving went on to say that he believed antisemitism 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”.[118] In his 1991 revised edition of Hitler’s War, he had removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust. In a speech given in Hamburg in 1991, Irving stated that in two years’ time “this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka … which in fact never took place” will be disproved (Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were all well established as being extermination camps).[119] Two days later, Irving repeated the same speech in Halle before a group of neo-Nazis, and praised Rudolf Hess as “that great German martyr, Rudolf Hess”.[119] 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”.[117] 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”.[117] During that speech given in October 1991, Irving expressed his contempt and hatred for Holocaust survivors by proclaiming that:
Ridicule alone isn’t enough, you’ve got to be tasteless about it. You’ve got to say things like ‘More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.’ Now you think that’s tasteless, what about this? I’m forming an association especially dedicated to all these liars, the ones who try and kid people that they were in these concentration camps, it’s called the Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars, ‘ASSHOLs’. Can’t get more tasteless than that, but you’ve got to be tasteless because these people deserve our contempt.
In another 1991 speech, this time in Regina, Irving called the Holocaust “a major fraud… There were no gas chambers. They were fakes and frauds”.[120]
In November 1992, Irving was to be a featured speaker at a world anti-Zionist congress in Stockholm that was cancelled by the Swedish government.[85] Also scheduled to attend were fellow Holocaust-deniers Robert Faurisson and Fred A. Leuchter, and Louis Farrakhan, together with representatives of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, the Lebanese militant Shiite group Hezbollah, and the right-wing Russian antisemitic group Pamyat.[85] In a 1993 speech, Irving claimed that there had been only 100,000 Jewish deaths at Auschwitz, “but not from gas chambers. They died from epidemics”.[121] Irving went on to claim that most of the Jewish deaths during World War II had been caused by Allied bombing.[121] Irving claimed that “The concentration camp inmates arrived in Berlin or Leipzig or in Dresden just in time for the RAF bombers to set fire to those cities. Nobody knows how many Jews died in those air raids”.[121]
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.[117] 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.[114] At the same time, Irving started to appear more frequently at the annual conferences hosted by the IHR.[122] In a 1995 speech, Irving claimed that the Holocaust was a myth invented by a “world-wide Jewish cabal” to serve their own ends.[123] Irving also spoke on other topics at the IHR gatherings. A frequent theme was the claim that Winston Churchill had advance knowledge of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor, and refused to warn the Americans, in order to bring the United States into World War II.[124] In 1995 he stated that, “We revisionists, say that gas chambers didn’t exist and that the ‘factories of death’ didn’t exist.”[93] In 1999, Irving said during a television interview, “I’m a gas chamber denier. I’m a denier that they killed hundreds of thousands of people in gas chambers, yes.”[93]
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 got him involved in the Holocaust denial movement: van Pelt argues that Irving was just trying to shift responsibility for his actions in his letter.[121] In an interview with Australian radio in July 1995, Irving claimed that at least four million Jews died in World War II, though he argued that this was due to terrible sanitary conditions inside the concentration camps as opposed to a deliberate policy of genocide in the death camps.[114] Irving’s statement led to a very public spat with his former ally Faurisson, who insisted that no Jews were killed in the Holocaust.[121] 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”.[114] Likewise, depending on his audience, during the 1990s Irving either used the absence of a written Führerbefehl (Führer order) for the “Final Solution” to argue that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust, or claimed that the absence of a written order meant there was no Holocaust at all.[122]
Racism and antisemitism
Although Irving denies being a racist,[125] he has expressed racist and antisemitic sentiments, both publicly and privately.[126] Irving has often expressed his belief in the conspiracy theory of Jews secretly ruling the world, and that the belief in the reality of the Holocaust was manufactured as part of the same alleged conspiracy.[55] Irving used the label “traditional enemies of the truth” to describe Jews, and in a 1963 article about a speech by Sir Oswald Mosley wrote that the “Yellow Star did not make a showing”.[55] 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”.[109] During an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum, Irving restated his belief that Jews were his “traditional enemy”.[127] 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”.[128]
After Irving was sacked by The Sunday Times to help them with their serialisation of the Goebbels diaries, he described a group of protesters outside of his apartment as, “All the scum of humanity stand outside. The homosexuals, the gypsies, the lesbians, the Jews, the criminals, the Communists…”[129][130]
Several of these statements were cited by the judge’s decision in Irving’s lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt,[128] leading the judge to conclude that Irving “had on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist.”[131] 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 half-breed children are wheeled past”:
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.
Christopher Hitchens wrote that Irving sang the rhyme to Hitchens’ wife, Carol Blue, and daughter, Antonia, in the elevator following drinks in the family’s Washington apartment.[132]
Persona non grata
Hitler’s War Irving during his trial in Austria with a copy of his book
After Irving denied the Holocaust in two speeches given in Austria in 1989, the Austrian government issued an arrest warrant for him and barred him from entering the country.[133] In early 1992, a German court found him guilty of Holocaust denial under the Auschwitzlüge section of the law against Volksverhetzung (a failed appeal by Irving would see the fine rise from 10,000 DM to 30,000 DM), and he was subsequently barred from entering Germany.[134][18] Other governments followed suit, including Italy and Canada,[135] where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported to the United Kingdom.[18] 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.[136]
David Irving being deported from Canada, 1992
In 1992, Irving signed a contract with Macmillan Publishers for his biography of Joseph Goebbels titled Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich.[137] Following charges that Irving had selectively “edited” a recently discovered complete edition of Goebbels’s diaries in Moscow, Macmillan cancelled the book deal.[138] The decision by The Sunday Times (who had bought the rights to serialised extracts from the diaries before Macmillan published them) in July 1992 to hire Irving as a translator of Goebbels’s diary was criticised by Austrian-British historian Peter G. J. Pulzer, who argued that Irving, because of his views about the Third Reich, was not the best man for the job.[109] Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times, called Irving “reprehensible”, but defended hiring him because he was only a “transcribing technician”, which others criticised as a poor description of translation work.[109]
On 27 April 1993, Irving was ordered to attend court to be examined on charges relating to the Loi Gayssot 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 extradition, and Irving refused to travel to France.[139] Then, in February 1994, Irving spent 10 days of a three-month sentence in London’s Pentonville prison for contempt of court following a legal wrangling over publishing rights.[citation needed]
In 1995, St. Martin’s Press 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.[140] 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 the British edition of Lipstadt’s book, Denying the Holocaust, which had first been published in the United States in 1993.[141] In the book, Lipstadt called Irving a Holocaust denier, falsifier and bigot, and said that he manipulated and distorted real documents.
During the trial, Irving claimed that Hitler had not ordered the extermination of the Jews of Europe, was ignorant of the Holocaust and was a friend of the Jews.[142]
Lipstadt hired the British solicitor Anthony Julius to present her case, while Penguin Books hired Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman, libel specialist from media firm Davenport Lyons. They briefed the libel barrister Richard Rampton QC and Penguin also briefed junior barrister Heather Rogers. The defendants (with Penguin’s insurers paying the fee) also retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Also working as expert witnesses were the American Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, the German historian Peter Longerich, and the Dutch architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt. The last wrote a report attesting to the fact that the death camps were designed, built and used for the purpose of mass murder, while Browning testified for the reality of the Holocaust. Evans’ report was the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of Irving’s work:
Not one of [Irving’s] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about … if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.[143]
The BBC quoted 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.[144]
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 ordered to pay all of Penguin’s trial costs, estimated to be as much as £2 million (US$3.2 million), though it is uncertain how much of these costs he would ultimately pay.[144][145] When he did not meet these, Davenport Lyons moved to make him bankrupt on behalf of their client. He was declared bankrupt in 2002,[146] and lost his home, though he has been able to travel around the world despite his financial problems.[147]
Irving subsequently appealed to the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal. On 20 July 2001, his application for appeal was denied by Lords Justices Pill, Mantell and Buxton.[148][149]
The libel suit was depicted in a 2016 film, Denial.
Life after the libel suit
Early in September 2004, Michael Cullen, the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, announced that Irving would not be permitted to visit the country, where he had been invited by the National Press Club to give a series of lectures under the heading “The Problems of Writing about World War II in a Free Society”. The National Press Club defended its invitation of Irving, saying that it amounted not to an endorsement of his views, but rather an opportunity to question him. 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 Qantas flight for New Zealand from Los Angeles on 17 September 2004. He was not allowed on board.[150]
On 11 November 2005, the Austrian police in the southern state of Styria, acting under the 1989 warrant, arrested Irving. Irving pleaded guilty to the charge of “trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust”. Irving stated in his plea that he had 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 Eichmann papers, I wasn’t saying that anymore and I wouldn’t say that now. The Nazis did murder millions of Jews.”[151] Irving had obtained the papers from Hugo Byttebier, a Belgian who had served in the SS during the war and had escaped to Argentina.[152][better source needed] Irving was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in accordance with the law prohibiting Nazi activities (Verbotsgesetz, “Prohibition Law”).[153] Irving sat motionless as judge Peter Liebetreu 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 had reportedly already purchased a plane ticket home to London.[154]
In December 2006, Irving was released from prison and banned from ever returning to Austria.[155] 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.[156] On 18 May 2007, he was expelled from the 52nd Warsaw International Book Fair in Poland because the books he took there were deemed by the organizers as promoting Nazism and antisemitism, which is in violation of Polish law.[157]
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.[158][159] Irving subsequently found himself beset by protesters on a book tour of the United States.[160] He has also given lectures and tours in the UK and Europe; one tour to Poland in September 2010 which led to particular criticism included the Treblinka death camp as an itinerary stop.[161] During his 2008 tour of the US, Deborah Lipstadt said Irving’s audience was mainly limited to like-minded people.[citation needed]
Irving and Nick Griffin (then the British National Party leader) were invited to speak at a forum on free speech at the Oxford Union on 26 November 2007, along with Anne Atkins and Evan Harris.[162] The debate took place after Oxford Union members voted in favour of it,[163] but was disrupted by protesters.[164] As of 2016 Irving was lecturing to small audiences at venues disclosed to carefully vetted ticket-holders a day or two before the event on topics, including antisemitic conspiracy theories, and at one such event, claiming to write the truth unlike “conformist” historians while asserting fabrications about leading Nazis,[165] the life and death of Heinrich Himmler and the saturation bombings during World War II.[166]
Irving established a website selling Nazi memorabilia in 2009. The items are offered by other people, with Irving receiving a commission from each sale for authenticating them. Irving stated in 2009 that the website was the only way he could make money after being bankrupted in 2002.[167] Items sold through the website include Hitler’s walking stick and a lock of the dictator’s hair. Irving has also investigated the authenticity of bones purported to be from Hitler and Eva Braun.[168][169]
In 2009, during an interview with Johann Hari, Irving claimed that Hitler appointed him to be his biographer:
Hari: To clarify: you actually think Hitler wanted you to be his biographer?
Irving: Yes. Yes and I am not ashamed of that. Hitler knew that. Hitler himself said that for fifty years they won’t be able to write the truth about me.[170]
During the same interview, Irving claimed that various Nazis hid what was happening to the Jews from Hitler because he was “the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich”.[170]
Controversy in Norway in 2008
In October 2008 controversy arose in Norway over Irving’s invitation to speak at the 2009 Norwegian Festival of Literature. Several[who?] of Norway’s most distinguished authors protested against the invitation. The leader of the board for the festival, Jesper Holte, defended the invitation by stating: “Our agenda is to invite a liar and a falsifier of history to a festival about truth. And confront him with this. Irving has been invited to discuss his concept of truth in light of his activity as a writer of historical books and the many accusations he has been exposed to as a consequence of this.” Although Irving was introduced in the festival’s webpages as “historian and writer”, the board chair leader defended the more aggressive language being used to characterise Irving in connection with the controversy that had arisen. Lars Saabye Christensen and Roy Jacobsen were two authors who had threatened to boycott the festival on account of Irving’s invitation, and Anne B. Ragde stated that Sigrid Undset would have turned in her grave. As the festival has as its subsidiary name “Sigrid Undset Days”, a representative of Undset’s family had requested that the name of the Nobel laureate be removed in connection with the festival.[171][172] Also, the Norwegian free speech organization Fritt Ord was critical of letting Irving speak at the festival[173] and had requested that its logo be removed.[174] In addition, Edvard Hoem announced that he would not attend the 2009 festival with Irving taking part. Per Edgar Kokkvold, leader of the Norwegian Press Confederation, advocated cancelling Irving’s invitation.[175]
Days after the controversy had started, the invitation was rescinded. This led to the resignation of Stig Sæterbakken from his position as content director as he was the person who had invited Irving to the event. The head of the Norwegian Festival of Literature, Randi Skeie, deplored what had taken place: “Everything is fine as long as everyone agrees, but things get more difficult when one doesn’t like the views being put forward.”[173] Sæterbakken called his colleagues “damned cowards”, arguing that they were walking in lockstep.[176]
According to editor-in-chief Sven Egil Omdal of Stavanger Aftenblad, the opposition to Irving’s participation at the festival appeared as a concerted effort. He suggested that campaign journalism from two of Norway’s largest newspapers, Dagbladet and Aftenposten, and Norway’s public service broadcaster NRK was behind the controversy.[177]
David Irving commented that he had not been told that the festival was going to present him as a liar,[176] and that he was preparing a lecture about the real history of what took place in Norway during World War II, contrary to what official historians have presented. Irving stated that he had thought the Norwegian people to be made of tougher stuff.[178]
Only days after the cancellation Irving announced that he would go to Lillehammer during the literature festival and deliver his two-hour lecture from a hotel room.[179]
Reception by historians
Irving, once held in regard for his expert knowledge of German military archives, was a controversial figure from the start. His interpretations of the war were widely regarded as unduly favourable to the German side. At first this was seen as personal opinion, unpopular but consistent with full respectability as a historian.[180]
By 1988, however, Irving had begun to reject the status of the Holocaust as a systematic and deliberate genocide. He soon became the main proponent of Holocaust denial. This, along with his association with far-right circles, dented his standing as a historian. A marked change in Irving’s reputation can be seen in the surveys of the historiography of the Third Reich produced by Ian Kershaw. In the first edition of Kershaw’s book The Nazi Dictatorship in 1985, Irving was called a “maverick” historian working outside the mainstream of the historical profession.[181] 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”.[182] Other critical responses to his work tend to follow this pattern.
The description of Irving as a historian, rather than a historical author, is controversial, with some publications since the libel trial continuing to refer to him as a “historian”[183] or “disgraced historian”,[184] while others insist he is not a historian, and have adopted alternatives such as “author”[185] or “historic writer”.[186] The military historian John Keegan 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”.[187] Donald Cameron Watt, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the London School of Economics, wrote that he admires some of Irving’s work as a historian, though he rejects his conclusions about the Holocaust.[188] At the libel proceedings against Irving, Watt declined Irving’s request to testify, appearing only after a subpoena was ordered.[189] 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 said that Irving was “not in the top class” of military historians.[189]
Personal life
In 1961, while living in Spain, Irving met and married a Spaniard, María del Pilar Stuyck. They have four children.[12] They divorced in 1981. In 1992, Irving began a relationship with a Danish model, Bente Hogh. They have a daughter, born in 1994.[190]
Irving’s daughter Josephine suffered from schizophrenia.[191] She was involved in a car crash in 1996 which resulted in her having to have both of her legs amputated. In September 1999, at the age of 32, she committed suicide by throwing herself out of a window of her central London flat.[192] One of the wreaths sent to her funeral contained a card which stated, “Truly a merciful death, Philipp Bouhler and friends”.[191] The reference to Bouhler was a reference to the Nazi who was in charge of Hitler’s euthanasia programme.[191] Irving described it as a “very cruel taunt”.[191]
In popular culture
Is working
Books
Translations
The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel (1965)
(1965) The Memoirs of General Gehlen (1972)
Monographs
The Night the Dams Burst (1973)
(1973) Von Guernica bis Vietnam (in German only) (1982)
(in German only) (1982) Die deutsche Ostgrenze (in German only) (1990)
(in German only) (1990) Banged Up (2008)
See also
references
Explanatory notes
quotes
bibliography
Reviews
Craig, Gordon A. (19 September 1996), “The Devil in the Details”, The New York Review of Books , pp. 8–14
Wright, Pearce (23 February 1967). “Nazis’ mighty atom”. The Times. p. 8th.
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