| Coordinates | 16°53′26″N97°38′0″N |
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| Name | David Irving |
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| Birth name | David John Cawdell Irving |
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| Birth date | March 24, 1938 |
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| Birth place | Brentwood, Essex, England |
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| Nationality | British |
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| Residence | London, England |
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| Occupation | Writer |
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| Known for | Military history of World War II, Holocaust denial, Historical revisionism |
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| Spouse | Pilar Irving (nee Stuyck), divorced 1981; Bente Hogh (common law relationship) |
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| Children | Five |
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| Parents | John James Cawdell Irving and Beryl Irene Newington |
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| Relatives | An older brother, John, a twin brother, Nicholas, and a sister, Jennifer |
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| Website | fpp.co.uk |
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David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer specializing in the
military history of
World War II. He is the author of 30 books on the subject, including
The Destruction of Dresden (1963),
Hitler's War (1977),
Uprising! (1981),
Churchill's War (1987), and
Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).
His work on Nazi Germany became controversial because of a perceived sympathy for the Third Reich and antisemitism. He has associated with far right and neo-Nazi causes, famously during his student days seconding British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a University College London debate on immigration. He has been described as the most skillful preacher of Holocaust denial in the world today.
Irving's reputation as an historian was widely discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 1996. 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, Essex, England. His father, John James Cawdell Irving, was a commander in the
Royal Navy, and his mother, Beryl, an illustrator. Irving's twin brother, Nicky 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 Edinburgh. On 2 May 1942, while escorting Convoy QP-11 in the Barents Sea, the ship was sunk by the German U-boat U-456. Irving's father survived, but severed all links with his wife and their children after the incident. Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum as: "Unlike the Americans, we English suffered great deprivations...we went through childhood with no toys. We had no kind of childhood at all. We were living on an island that was crowded with other people's armies". Irving went on to claim to Rosenbaum that his negationist views about World War II dated to his childhood, particularly due to his objections to the way Adolf Hitler was portrayed in the British media during the war.
Student years
After completing
A-levels at
Brentwood School, Irving briefly studied physics at
Imperial College London, though never graduated, for financial reasons. He gained notoriety by writing for
Felix, the
student newspaper, and in 1959 served as editor of the
University of London Carnival Committee's journal,
Carnival Times.
Irving later studied for a degree in political economy at University College London, from which which he dropped out after two years due to lack of funds.
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. He also stated that "
the formation of a European Union is interpreted as building a group of superior peoples, and the Jews have always viewed with suspicion the emergence of any 'master-race' (other than their own, of course)". 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.
The Destruction of Dresden
Sometime after serving in 1959 as editor of the University of London Carnival Committee's journal, Irving left for West Germany, where he worked as a steelworker in a
Thyssen steel works in the
Ruhr area and learned German. He then moved to Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an air base. During his time in Spain, Irving married his first wife, a Spanish woman with whom he had five children. In 1962, he wrote a series of 37 articles on the
Allied bombing campaign,
Wie Deutschlands Städte starben (
How Germany's Cities Died), for the German boulevard journal
Neue Illustrierte. These were the basis of his first book,
The Destruction of Dresden (1963), in which he examined the Allied
bombing of Dresden in February 1945. By the 1960s, a debate about the morality of the
carpet bombing of German cities and civilian population had already begun, especially in the United Kingdom. There was consequently considerable interest in Irving's book, which was illustrated with graphic pictures, and it became an international
bestseller.
In the first edition, Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 — notably higher than most previously published figures. 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. Evans at the libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, Irving based his estimates of the dead of Dresden on the word of one individual who provided no supporting documentation, used forged documents, and described one witness who was a urologist as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. The doctor has since complained about being misidentified by Irving, and further, was only reporting rumours about the death toll. Today, casualties at Dresden are estimated as 25,000–35,000 dead, probably towards the lower end of that range.
1963 burglary of Irving's apartment
By November 1963, Irving was in England when he called the
London Metropolitan Police with suspicions he had been the victim of a burglary, perpetrated by three men who had gained access to his
Mayfair apartment claiming to be
General Post Office (GPO) engineers.
Gerry Gable was subsequently arrested and held at
Hornsey police station, where on 14 January 1964, along with Manny Carpel and another, Gable admitted breaking in with intent to steal private papers. At the trial, counsel for the defence claimed that this was no ordinary crime, telling the court, "they hoped to find material they could take to
Special Branch". The case was reported in the
Daily Telegraph, 17 January 1964 and other newspapers.
Author
, 2003]]
After the success of the Dresden book, Irving continued writing, including some works of
revisionist history. In 1964, he wrote
The Mare's Nest, an account of the German secret weapons projects and the Allied intelligence countermeasures against it; translated the
Memoirs of Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel in 1965 (edited by Walter Görlitz); and in 1967 published
Accident: The Death of General Sikorski. In the latter book, Irving claimed that the plane crash which killed
Polish government in exile leader General
Władysław Sikorski in 1943 was really an assassination ordered by
Winston Churchill, so as to enable Churchill to betray Poland to the
Soviet Union. Irving's book inspired the highly controversial 1967 play
Soldiers by his friend, the German playwright
Rolf Hochhuth, where Hochhuth depicts Churchill ordering the "assassination" of General Sikorski. Also in 1967, he published two more works:
The Virus House, an account of the
German nuclear energy project for which Irving conducted many interviews,]]
After PQ-17, Irving largely shifted to writing biographies. In 1968, Irving published Breach of Security, an account of German reading of messages to and from the British Embassy in Berlin before 1939 with an introduction by the British historian D.C. Watt. As a result of Irving's success with Dresden, members of Germany's extreme right wing assisted him in contacting surviving members of Hitler's inner circle. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Irving claimed to have developed sympathies towards them. 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. Irving asked Kempner if the "official record of the Nuremberg was falsified", and told him that he was planning to go to Washington, D.C. to compare the sound recordings of Field-Marshal Milch's March 1946 evidence with the subsequently published texts to find proof that evidence given at Nuremberg was "tampered with and manipulated". Upon his return to the United States, Kempner wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, that Irving expressed many "anti-American and anti-Jewish statements".
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". 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. At the libel proceedings against Irving, Watt declined Irving's request to testify, appearing only after a 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. In Hitler's War, Irving tried to "view the situation as far as possible through Hitler's eyes, from behind his desk". He also claimed that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust; while not denying its occurrence, Irving claimed that Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich were its originators and architects. Irving made much of the lack of any written order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust, and for decades afterward offered to pay £1000 to anyone who could find such an order.
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 Uprising 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 Einsatzgruppen 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 Marshal Erwin Rommel. In it, Irving attacked the members of the
20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, branding them "traitors", "cowards", and "manipulators", and uncritically presented Hitler and his government's subsequent revenge against the plotters, of which Rommel was also a victim. In particular, Irving accused Rommel's friend and Chief of Staff General
Hans Speidel of framing Rommel in the attempted coup. The British historian
David Pryce-Jones in a book review of
The Trail of the Fox in the 12 November 1977 edition of
The New York Times Book Review accused Irving of taking everything Hitler had to say at face value. 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 Churchill. In 1981, he published two books. The first was The War Between the Generals, in which Irving offered an account of the Allied High Command on the Western Front in 1944-45, detailing the heated conflicts Irving alleges occurred between the various generals of the various countries and presenting rumours about their private lives. The second book was Uprising!, about the 1956 revolt in Hungary, which Irving characterized as "primarily an anti-Jewish uprising", supposedly because the Communist regime was itself controlled by Jews. Irving's depiction of Hungary's Communist regime as a Jewish dictatorship oppressing Gentiles sparked charges of anti-Semitism. In addition, there were complaints that Irving had grossly exaggerated the number of people of Jewish origin in the Communist regime and had ignored the fact that Hungarian Communists who did have a Jewish background like Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő had totally repudiated Judaism and sometimes expressed anti-Semitic attitudes themselves.
Hitler Diaries
In 1983, Irving played a major role in the
Hitler Diaries controversy. Irving had long been an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia, and in October 1982 purchased 800 pages of documents relating to Hitler, only to discover that many of the documents were forgeries. Irving was an early proponent of the argument that the diaries were a forgery, and went so far as to crash the press conference held by
Hugh Trevor-Roper at the
Hamburg offices of
Der Stern magazine on 25 April 1983 to denounce the diaries as a forgery and Trevor-Roper for endorsing the diaries as genuine (Trevor-Roper had called the press conference to announce his withdrawal of his endorsement, arguably rendering Irving's attack on him irrelevant). 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 the diaries had come from the same dealer in Nazi memorabilia that Irving had purchased his collection from in 1982. 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.
However, a week later on 2 May, Irving reversed himself and claimed the diaries were genuine; at the same press conference, Irving took the opportunity to promote his translation of the memoirs of Hitler's physician Dr. Theodor Morell. Subsequently Irving reversed himself again when the diaries were revealed as a forgery. At a press conference held to withdraw his endorsement of the diaries, Irving proudly claimed that he was the first to call the diaries a forgery, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call the diaries genuine. He finished the manuscript in 1985, but the book wasn't published until 1987, when it was released as Churchill's War, Volume I. In it, Irving writes a revisionist portrayal of Churchill as a corrupt, racist alcoholic servile to Zionist forces. Irving also accused Churchill of "selling out the British Empire" and "turning Britain against its natural ally, Germany".
In 1989, Irving published his biography of Hermann Göring, in which he largely portrayed the Reichsmarschall as an overweight drug addict largely concerned with his own wealth and personal pleasures rather than his duties within the Third Reich. Irving downplayed Göring's role in the Holocaust, describing instead Göring's jovial personality and offering a wealth of lesser-known facts about his life. Irving also recounts various incidents and produces documents as evidence that Göring disapproved of the persecution of Jews and other Nazi crimes.
Holocaust denial
Drift towards Holocaust denial
Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust changed significantly. From 1988, he started to espouse
Holocaust denial openly; he had previously not denied the Holocaust outright and for this reason, many Holocaust deniers were ambivalent about him. They admired Irving for the pro-Nazi slant in his work and the fact that he possessed a degree of mainstream credibility that they lacked, but were annoyed that he did not openly deny the Holocaust. In 1980,
Lucy Dawidowicz noted that although
Hitler's War was strongly sympathetic to the Third Reich, because Irving argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust as opposed to the denying the Holocaust, that his book was not part of the "anti-Semitic canon". In 1980, Irving received his invitation to speak at a Holocaust-denial conference, which he refused under the grounds that his appearance there would damage his reputation. The effort failed due to fiscal problems.
Following the failure of Focus, in September 1983, Irving for the first time attended a conference of the IHR. 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 didn't know what was going on in Sabra and Chatilla". 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?'"
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",
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. According to Zündel, Irving "...thought I was 'Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!'", and asked Zündel to stay away from him. 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. 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.
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." Irving testified for Zündel between April 22–26, 1988, where he endorsed Richard Harwood's book Did Six Million Really Die? as "over ninety percent...factually accurate".
As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited the Leuchter report by self-styled execution expert Fred A. Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving said in a 1999 documentary about Leuchter: "The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of cyanide in the brickwork. That's what converted me. When I read that in the report in the courtroom in Toronto, I became a hard-core disbeliever". 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.
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. 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 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 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". German nationalists found Irving, as a non-German Holocaust denier, to be particularly credible. Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at the death camp, stating that the existing remains were "mock-ups built by the Poles". 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". 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 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 another 1991 speech, this time in Regina 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 Stockholm that was cancelled by the Swedish government. Irving went on to claim that most of the Jewish deaths during World War II had been caused by Allied bombing. 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 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.
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) 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". 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 Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.
Christopher Hitchens writes that after having dinner in his Washington apartment, Irving sang the rhyme to his daughter once they were alone in the building's elevator.
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 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. where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported back to the United Kingdom.
In 1992, Irving signed a contract with Macmillan for a biography of Joseph Goebbels entitled Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Following charges that Irving had selectively "edited" a recently discovered complete edition of Goebbels's diaries in Moscow, Macmillan cancelled the book deal. 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 Neil, 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. Then, in February 1994, Irving spent 10 days of a three month sentence in London's Pentonville prison for contempt of court following a legal wrangling over publishing rights. Irving's legal troubles continued as a Mannheim court indicted him for defaming the dead; because of this action, he would be fined 20,000 DM in mid-1997.
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 where 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 Holocaust, 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, as well as suggestions that he had falsified evidence or deliberately misinterpreted it.
Lipstadt hired the British solicitor Anthony Julius to present her case, while Penguin Books hired Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman, libel specialist from media firm Davenport Lyons. They briefed the libel barrister, Richard Rampton QC and Penguin also briefed junior barrister Heather Rogers. The Defendants (with Penguin's insurers paying the fee) also retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Also working as expert witnesses were the American Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, the German historian Peter Longerich and the Dutch architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt. The latter wrote a report attesting to the fact that the death camps were designed, built and used for the purpose of mass murder, while Browning testified for the reality of the Holocaust. Evans' report was the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of Irving's work:
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). When he did not meet these Davenport Lyons moved to make him bankrupt on behalf of their client. He was forced into bankruptcy in 2002.
Life after 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.
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" 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 Eichmann 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 denied the Holocaust took place in a televised interview in November 2008, only to see Williamson convicted of inciting racial hatred in April 2010. In 2009, Irving's views were condemned by Spain and he found himself beset by protestors on a book tour of the United States.
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 Kershaw. In the first edition of Kershaw's book
The Nazi Dictatorship in 1985, Irving was called a "maverick" historian working outside of the mainstream of the historical profession 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 work tend to follow this chronological pattern.
Bibliography
Books
The Destruction of Dresden">The Destruction of Dresden (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 ISBN 0-316-43238-5
Hitler's War">Hitler's War (1977)
The Trail of the Fox (1977), a biography of Erwin Rommel 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 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(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
Historical revisionism
Notes
References
;Bibliography
"Two Alibies for the Inhumanities: A. R. Butz, "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century" and David Irving, "Hitler's War"" by Bradley Smith pages 327-335 from German Studies Review, Volume 1, Issue # 3. October 1978.
"Caveat Lector Review of Hitler's War" by John Lukacs pages 946-950 from National Review, Volume XXIX, Issue # 32, 19 August 1977.
"Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses" pages 73–125 from Yad Vashem Studies by Martin Broszat, Volume 13, 1979; reprinted pages 390-429 in Aspects of the Third Reich edited by H.W. Koch, London: Macmillan, 1985, ISBN 0-333-35272-6; originally published as "Hitler und die Genesis der "Endlösung". Aus Anlaß der Thesen von David Irving", pages 739-775 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 25, 1977.
"David Irving and the 1956 Revolution" by András Mink pages 117-128 from Hungarian Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue #160, 2000.
Felix Müller. Das Verbotsgesetz im Spannungsverhältnis zur Meinungsfreiheit. Eine verfassungsrechtliche Untersuchung; Verlag Österreich, 2005, 238 Seiten, br., ISBN 3-7046-4685-7
Schiedel, Heribert. Irving sitzt in Österreich in Jungle World, 23 November 2005. ISSN 1613-0766
;Reviews
;News articles
;Online resources
;Film
Errol Morris (1999). . Transcript
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 in The American Prospect, (6 November 1999)
"Pity for this Man is Out of Place" by Hans-Ulrich Wehler
Category:1938 births
Category:English biographers
Category:English journalists
Category:David Irving
Category:Holocaust deniers
Category:Alumni of Imperial College London
Category:People from Brentwood, Essex
Category:Living people
Category:Old Brentwoods
Category:Holocaust denial in the United Kingdom
Category:People convicted of Holocaust denial offenses
Category:People deported from Canada
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