Record keeping redirects here.

Herodotus (5th century BC), one of the earliest nameable historians whose work survives.

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it.^[1] Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is concerned with events preceding written history, the individual is a historian of prehistory. Although "historian" can be used to describe amateur and professional historians alike, it is reserved more recently for those who have acquired graduate degrees in the discipline.^[2] Some historians, though, are recognized by equivalent training and experience in the field.^[2] "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century at roughly the same time that physicians also set standards for whom could enter the field.

Objective historian[link]

During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial it became evident that the court need to identify what was an "objective historian" in the same vein as the reasonable person, and reminiscent of the standard traditionally used in English law of "the man on the Clapham omnibus".^[3]

Justice Charles Gray leant heavily on the research of one of the expert witnesses, Richard J. Evans, who compared illegitimate distortion of the historical record practice by holocaust deniers with established historical methodologies.^[4]

In summarising Gray's judgement, Wendie E. Schneider distils these seven points for what he meant by an objective historian:^[5]

1. She must treat sources with appropriate reservations;
2. she must not dismiss counterevidence without scholarly consideration;
3. she must be even-handed in her treatment of evidence and eschew "cherry-picking";
4. she must clearly indicate any speculation;
5. she must not mistranslate documents or mislead by omitting parts of documents;
6. she must weigh the authenticity of all accounts, not merely those that contradict her favored view; and
7. she must take the motives of historical actors into consideration.

History analysis[link]

The process of historical analysis involves investigation and analysis of competing ideas, facts and purported facts to create coherent narratives that explain "what happened" and "why or how it happened". Modern historical analysis usually draws upon other social sciences, including economics, sociology, politics, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and linguistics. While ancient writers do not normally share modern historical practices, their work remains valuable for its insights within the cultural context of the times. An important part of the contribution of many modern historians is the verification or dismissal of earlier historical accounts through reviewing newly discovered sources and recent scholarship or through parallel disciplines like archaeology.

Historiography[link]

St. Nestor the Chronicler, the first Russian historiographer (by Viktor Vasnetsov).

Ancient[link]

Herodotus and Thucydides were as the founders of the discipline of history. Concerning Herodotus (5th century BC), one of the earliest historians whose work survives, his recount of strange and unusual tales are gripping but not necessarily representative of the historical record. Despite this, The Histories of Herodotus displays many of the techniques of more modern historians. He interviewed witnesses, evaluated oral histories, studied multiple sources and then pronounced his particular version. Herodotus's works covered what was then the entire known world of the Greeks, or at least the part regarded as worthy of study, i.e., the peoples surrounding the Mediterranean. Herodotus was also known for visiting the various battle sites he wrote about, including the battle of Thermopylae. About 25 years after Herodotus, Thucydides, perhaps the most important of historians, pioneered a different form of history, one much closer to reportage. In his work, History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote about a single long conflict that lasted 27 years between Athens and Sparta with its origins and results. But, as it was mainly within living memory and Thucydides himself was alive throughout the conflict and a participant in many of the events, there was less room for myths and tall tales. Moreover, he included transcriptions of speeches that were delivered by historic figures, although sometimes they were made up by Thucydides himself according to what those people should have said at the moment they delivered them.^[6]

Other noteworthy and famous Greek historians include Plutarch (2nd century AD), who wrote several biographies, the Parallel Lives, in which he wanted to assess the morality of its characters by comparing them in pairs, and Polybius (3nd century BC), who developed Thucydides's method further, becoming one of the most objective historians of classical antiquity. Polybius is also credited for being the first historian to write a History of the World, and to offer argued explanations and interpretations of history facts, and not only a record of them. The most important Roman historian of the classical world was Tacitus (late 1st and early 2nd century AD). The foremost Roman historian, he wrote an extremely influential account on Rome in the first century, the Annals. Due to his literary style and the thoroughness of his research—which seemingly included studying Roman imperial archives and heavily relying on Thucydides—and his apparent rigor—for he tended not to support any character or subject, taking an impartial point of view—he was by far the most read and admired historian during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Modern Era. Thus, his historian style has been imitated all through the ages, and had a strong impact in Edward Gibbon and Montesquieu.

Polybius, one of the first historians to attempt to present history as a sequence of causes and effects, carefully conducted his research—partly based on what he saw and partly on the communications of eye-witnesses and the participants in the events.^[7]

India[link]

India has a long record of historiography with chronicles being maintained by dynasties, monks and communities. The texts of ancient and medieval India are in verse, unlike Europe where serious work in history was in prose. The Vedas, Puranas and the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata narrate many events in ancient India although not always in a linear fashion. The Mahabharata is in fact an epic centered mainly around the House of the Kurus, who ruled a large part of northern India. It was progressively called Jai, Vijaya, Bharata and finally Mahabharata. The Puranas are also chronicles of past events and owe their name to the Sanskrit word Purah ( Before ). Jain and Buddhist monks also chronicled many events in ancient India in their scriptures.^[8]

China[link]

Sima Qian (145-86 BC), a Prefect of the Grand Scribes (太史令) of the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD), is regarded as the father of Chinese historiography because of his universal history, the Records of the Grand Historian (史記). It provides an overview of the history of China covering more than two thousand years from the legendary Yellow Emperor to Sima's contemporary Emperor Han Wudi (漢武帝). His work laid the foundation for the Twenty-Four Histories which, unlike Sima's independent endeavor, were government-sponsored works usually commissioned by new dynastic houses after the conquest of the previous dynasty.^[9]

Arabs[link]

Ibn Abd-el-Hakem was an Egyptian who wrote the History of the Conquest of Egypt and North Africa and Spain, which was the earliest Arab account of the Islamic conquests of those countries. Much like Herodotus' works, it mixes facts with legends, and was often quoted by later Islamic historians. Al-Jahiz was a famous Arab scholar and historian. Hamdani, an Arab historian, was the best representative of Islamic culture during the last effective years of the Abbasid caliphate. Ali al-Masudi was an Arab historian, known as the "Herodotus of the Arabs." Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a famous Arab Muslim historian who engaged in historiography philosophy of history. He is best known for his Muqaddimah "Prolegomenon".^[10]

Enlightenment[link]

Voltaire was a highly influential historian during The Enlightenment; he stressed the need to move away from great men and to study the people and their culture. Sakmann points out that he complained that too much historical writing combined boring detail, outrageous lies, and narrow-minded presentation. Good history, Voltaire argued, agrees with reason and natural science, and is based on the corroborating evidence.^[11] Equally influential was Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755). His wide-ranging Spirit of the Laws (1748) spanned legal, geographical, cultural, economic, political and philosophical studies and was greatly influential in forging the fundamentally interdisciplinary historian.^[12] Often called "the first modern historian", the English scholar Edward Gibbon wrote his magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788).^[13]

19th century Germany[link]

Modern historiographical techniques were dramatically advanced in the German universities of the 19th century. Leopold von Ranke (1795 – 1886) was a founder of modern source-based historiography. His research seminar for graduate students set professional standards for historical training at the University of Berlin (1824 - 1871). His many books demonstrated how to rely upon primary sources in writing narrative history on international politics (Aussenpolitik). He dug through the archives of Europe, especially those of the Vatican and Venice, whose ambassadors followed events very closely and reported on them at length. Ranke thus sent the research to the archives for primary sources; there he should transcend his personal predispositions and parochial loyalties, and write objective history "wie es ezgentlich gewesen" ("as it actually happened.")^[14] Highly influential German classicists historians were Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) and Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903)^[15] Historians of Germany included Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-84), Heinrich von Sybel (1817-95), and Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96). They deliberately avoided social, economic, and cultural topics because they might undermine the national political development which their writing celebrated. Von Sybel in 1859 founded the Historische Zeitschrift^[16], which set the world standard for a scholarly history journal.

Twentieth-century developments[link]

The whig approach emphasizes the origins of today's positive political features, with history seen as a force that pushes society forward. It studies the past with reference to the present."^[17]

Since the 1960s, academic history has seen the emergence of new approaches and topics such as social history, demographic history, ethnic history, women's history, environmental history and cultural history.^[18] There has been a shift of emphasis away from national topics to the experiences of ordinary people. For example, labor history has shifted away from the study of union leaders to the study of the workers. Slavery studies used to be about debates among politicians. In Roll, Jordan, Roll, historian Eugene D. Genovese ignored all that and focused on the interaction on the plantation between slaves and their owners. Edward Said's Orientalism examines how and why Western societies came to consider non-Western ones as inherently inferior.

While there has been a flowering of new historical approaches and microscopic studies there has been much less attention to the pre-1960 staple of teaching, the development of one's own nation state and its values and practices. As historians provide highly detailed narratives of increasingly smaller subjects there is less concern for the larger picture of the meaning of it all. Fewer historians try to tackle all of the various historiographies relevant to a broader interpretive or analytic synthesis, and some suggest that a post-modern perspectives does not allow any real synthesis. On the other hand many scholars have been calling for a "new synthesis" in American history for years. Thomas H. Bender has argued that synthesis raises its own unresolved issues such as teleology, causation, agency, and subjective meaning; and inclusion and exclusion.^[19] Richard D. Brown worries that if historians fail to synthesize they, "run the risk of confirming the anti-academic canard that "historians know more and more about less and less."^[20]

Education and profession[link]

An undergraduate history degree is often used as a stepping stone to graduate studies in business or law. Many historians are employed at universities and other facilities for post-secondary education.^[21] In addition, it is normal for colleges and universities to require the PhD degree for new full-time hires, and a Masters degree for part-timers. Publication is increasingly required by smaller schools, so graduate papers become journal articles and PhD dissertations become published monographs. The graduate student experience is difficult—those who finish take on average 8 or more years; funding is scarce except at a few very rich universities. Being a teaching assistant in a course is required in some programs; in others it is a paid opportunity awarded a fraction of the students. Until the 1980s it was rare for graduate programs to teach how to teach; the assumption was that teaching was easy and that learning how to do research was the main mission.^[22][23]

Professional historians typically work in colleges and universities, archival centers, government agencies, museums, and as freelance writers and consultants.^[24] The job market for new PhDs in history is poor and getting worse, with many relegated to part-time "adjunct" teaching jobs with low pay and no benefits.^[25]

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Historians

• Antiquarian
• Auxiliary sciences of history
• Historiography
• List of historians
• List of historians by area of study

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

• The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature (ed. by Mary Beth Norton and Pamela Gerardi (3rd ed. 2 vol, Oxford U.P. 1995) 2064 pages; annotated guide to 27,000 of the most important English language history books in all fields and topics vol 1 online, vol 2 online
• Allison, William Henry. A guide to historical literature (1931) comprehensive bibliography for scholarship to 1930. online edition
• Barnes, Harry Elmer. A history of historical writing‎ (1962)
• Barraclough, Geoffrey. History: Main Trends of Research in the Social and Human Sciences, (1978)
• Bentley, Michael. ed., Companion to Historiography, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0415285577990pp; 39 chapters by experts
• Bender, Thomas, et al. The Education of Historians for Twenty-first Century (2003) report by the Committee on Graduate Education of the American Historical Association
• Breisach, Ernst. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 3rd edition, 2007, ISBN 0-226-07278-9
• Boia, Lucian et al., eds. Great Historians of the Modern Age: An International Dictionary (1991)
• Cannon, John, et al., eds. The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians. Blackwell Publishers, 1988 ISBN 0-631-14708-X.
• Gilderhus, Mark T. History an Historiographical Introduction, 2002, ISBN 0-13-044824-9
• Iggers, Georg G. Historiography in the 20th Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (2005)
• Kelly, Boyd, ed. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. (1999). Fitzroy Dearborn ISBN 1-884964-33-8
• Kramer, Lloyd, and Sarah Maza, eds. A Companion to Western Historical Thought Blackwell 2006. 520pp; ISBN 978-1-4051-4961-7.
• Todd, Richard B. ed. Dictionary of British Classicists, 1500–1960, (2004). Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004 ISBN 1-85506-997-0.
• Woolf D. R. A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities) (2 vol 1998) excerpt and text search

External links[link]

Look up historian in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Selected texts by the most known historians

Robert Caro
Caro, 2009
Born	Robert Allan Caro (1935-10-30) October 30, 1935 (age 76) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Biographer
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Princeton University
Genres	Non-fiction
Notable work(s)	The Power Broker The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Spouse(s)	Ina Caro
www.robertacaro.com

Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his celebrated biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.

After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president.

For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, the National Book Award, the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that "best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist") two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the H.L. Mencken Award, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and an Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters.

Life and career[link]

Caro was born in New York City, New York, the son of Cele (née Mendelow) and Benjamin Caro.^[1] He "grew up on Central Park West at 94th Street. His father, a businessman, spoke Yiddish as well as English, but he didn’t speak either very often. He was 'very silent,' Caro said, and became more so after Caro’s mother died, after a long illness, when he [Caro] was 12." It was his mother’s deathbed wish that he should go to the Horace Mann School, an exclusive private school in the Riverdale section of The Bronx. As a student there, Caro translated an edition of his school newspaper into Russian and mailed 10,000 copies to students in the USSR. He graduated in 1953.^[2] He went on to Princeton University, where he majored in English. He became managing editor of The Daily Princetonian, second to R.W. Apple, Jr., later a prominent editor at The New York Times.^[3]

His writings, both in class and out, had been lengthy since his years at Horace Mann. A short story he wrote for The Princeton Tiger, the school's humor magazine, took up almost an entire issue. His senior thesis on existentialism in Hemingway was so long, Caro claims, that the university's English department subsequently established a maximum length for senior theses by its students. He graduated in 1957.^[3]

According to a 2012 New York Times Magazine profile, "Caro said he now thinks that Princeton, which he chose because of its parties, was one of his mistakes, and that he should have gone to Harvard. Princeton in the mid-1950s was hardly known for being hospitable toward Jews, and though Caro says he did not personally suffer from anti-Semitism, he saw plenty of students who did." He had a sports column in the Princetonian and also wrote for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine.^[3] He was a Carnegie Fellow at Columbia University and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Caro began his professional career as a reporter with the New Brunswick Daily Home News (now merged into the Home News Tribune) in New Jersey. He took a brief leave to work for the Middlesex County Democratic Party as a publicist. He left politics after an incident where he was accompanying the party chair to polling places on election day. A police officer reported to the party chair that some African-Americans Caro saw being loaded into a police van, under arrest, were poll watchers who "had been giving them some trouble." Caro left politics right there. "I still think about it," he recalled in the 2012 Times Magazine profile. "It wasn't the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the—meekness isn't the right word—the acceptance of those people of what was happening."^[3]

From there he went on to six years as an investigative reporter with the Long Island newspaper Newsday. One of the articles he wrote was a long series about why a proposed bridge across Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay, championed by Robert Moses, would have been inadvisable, requiring piers so large it would disrupt tidal flows in the sound, among other problems. Caro believed that his work had influenced even the state's powerful governor Nelson Rockefeller to reconsider the idea, until he saw the state's Assembly vote overwhelmingly to pass a preliminary measure for the bridge.^[3]

"That was one of the transformational moments of my life," Caro said years later. It led him to think about Moses for the first time. "I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: 'Everything you've been doing is baloney. You've been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here's a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don't have the slightest idea how he got it.'"^[3]

Work[link]

[edit] The Power Broker

Caro spent the academic year of 1966-1967 as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. During a class on urban planning and land use, the experience of watching Moses returned to him.

They were talking one day about highways and where they got built...and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: "This is completely wrong. This isn't why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don't find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest."^[3]

To do so, Caro began work on a biography of Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, also a study of Caro's favorite theme: the acquisition and use of power. He expected it would take nine months to complete, but instead it took him until 1974.^[3] The work was based on extensive research and 522 interviews, including seven interviews with Moses himself, several with Michael Madigan (who worked for Moses for 35 years); and numerous interviews with Sidney Shapiro (Moses's General Manager for forty years); as well as interviews with men who worked for and knew Moses’s mentor, New York Governor Al Smith.

His wife Ina functioned as his research assistant. Her master's thesis on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stemmed from this work. At one point she sold the family home and took a teaching job so Robert would be financially able to finish the book.^[3]

The Power Broker is widely viewed [2] as a seminal work because it combined painstaking historical research with a smoothly flowing narrative writing style. The success of this approach was evident in his chapter on the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, where Caro reported the controversy from all perspectives, including that of neighborhood residents. The result was a work of powerful literary as well as academic interest.

[edit] The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Following this success, Caro turned his attention to Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro retraced Johnson's life by temporarily moving to rural Texas and Washington, D.C., in order to better understand Johnson's upbringing and to interview anyone who had known Johnson. The work, entitled The Years of Lyndon Johnson, is projected to run to five volumes:

1. The first, The Path to Power (1982), covers Johnson's life up to his failed 1941 campaign for the United States Senate.
2. The second volume, Means of Ascent (1990), commences in the aftermath of that defeat and continues through his election to that office in 1948.
3. The third volume, Master of the Senate (2002), chronicles Johnson's rapid ascent and rule as Senate Majority Leader.
4. The fourth volume, The Passage of Power (2012), covers LBJ's life from 1958 to 1964.
5. In November 2011, Robert Caro also announced that the full project had expanded to five volumes with the fifth volume requiring another two to three years to write.^[4][5][6]

Caro's books portray Johnson as a most complex and contradictory character: at the same time a scheming opportunist and visionary progressive. Caro argued, for example, that Johnson's victory in the 1948 runoff for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate was only achieved through extensive fraud and ballot box stuffing, though this is set in the practices of the time and in the context of Johnson's previous defeat in his 1941 race for the Senate. Caro also highlighted some of Johnson's campaign contributions, such as those from the Texas construction firm Brown and Root; in 1962 the company was acquired by another Texas firm, Halliburton, which became a major contractor in the Vietnam War. In addition, Caro argued that Johnson was awarded the Silver Star in World War II mainly for political reasons, and that he later lied to journalists and the public about the circumstances for which it was awarded. Caro's portrayal of Johnson also notes his struggles on behalf of progressive causes such as the Voting Rights Act, and his consummate skill in getting this enacted in spite of intense opposition from certain Southern Senators.

Amongst sources close to the late president, Johnson's widow Lady Bird Johnson "spoke to [Caro] several times and then abruptly stopped without giving a reason, and Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, has never consented to be interviewed, but most of Johnson’s closest friends, including John Connally and George Christian, Johnson’s last press secretary, who spoke to Caro practically on his deathbed, have gone on the record".^[3]

Publisher-editor[link]

Caro's books have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, first under editor in chief Robert Gottlieb and then by Sonny Mehta, "who took over the Johnson project — enthusiastically — after Gottlieb’s departure in 1987." Gottlieb, five years Caro's senior, suggested the Johnson project to Caro in 1974 in preference to the planned follow-up to the Moses volume, a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia that was thence abandoned.^[7] The ex-President had recently died and Caro was also decided, before meeting with Gottlieb on the subject, to undertake the Texan's biography; he "wanted to write about power." Gottlieb has continued as editor of Caro's books since leaving Knopf and excerpted Volume 2 of the Johnson biography at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there.^[3]

Awards[link]

For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize.

In October 2007, Caro was named a "Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor" at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany but then was unable to attend.

In 2010, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama, the highest award in the humanities given in this country. Delivering remarks at the end of the ceremony, the President said, "I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was 22 years old and just being mesmerized, and I'm sure it helped to shape how I think about politics."^[8] In 2011, Robert Caro was the recipient of the 2011 BIO Award given each year by members of Biographers International "to a colleague who had made a major contribution in the advancement of the art and craft of real life depiction."^[9]

• 1964 — The Society of Silurians Award for outstanding achievement in the field of Public Service History for a series entitled “Misery Acres”, exposing fraudulent real estate sales by mail
• 1964 — The Deadline Club for outstanding newspaper reporting
• 1965 — The Deadline Club for outstanding newspaper reporting
• 1965-1966 — Nieman W. Lucius Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University Nieman Foundation
• 1975 — Washington Monthly American Political Book Award (The Power Broker)
• 1975 — The Francis Parkman Prize awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist”^{[citation needed]} (The Power Broker)
• 1975 — The Pulitzer Prize for Biography (The Power Broker)^[10]
• 1975 — AIA Special Citation
• 1982 — The National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year (The Path to Power)
• 1983 — The Blue Pencil Award from the Columbia Daily Spectator
• 1983 — American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
• 1983 — The Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters (The Path to Power)
• 1983 — The Mencken Award for the best book of 1982 (The Path to Power)
• 1986 — The Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters
• 1991 — Washington Monthly American Political Book Award (Means of Ascent)
• 1990 — The National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year (Means of Ascent)
• 2002 — The Power Broker was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest non-fiction books of the twentieth century.
• 2002 — The National Book Award (Master of the Senate)^[11]
• 2003 — The Los Angeles Times Book Award in Non-Fiction (Master of the Senate)
• 2003 — The Carl Sandberg Award in Literature (Master of the Senate)
• 2003 — The John Steinbeck Award in literature (Master of the Senate)
• 2003 — The Pulitzer Prize for Biography (Master of the Senate)^[10]
• 2010 — Inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame
• 2010 — The National Humanities Medal

Family[link]

Caro has described his wife, Ina Caro, as "the whole team" on all four of his books. She sold their house and took a job teaching school to fund work on The Power Broker and is the only person other than himself who conducted research for his books.^[12]

Ina is also the author of The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France, a book which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called "the essential traveling companion... for all who love France and its history".^{[citation needed]} Newsweek reviewer Peter Prescott commented, "I'd rather go to France with Ina Caro than with Henry Adams or Henry James. The unique premise of her intelligent and discerning book is so startling that it’s a wonder no one has thought of it before."^[13] Ina frequently writes about their travels through France in her Paris to the Past blog. In June 2011, W. W. Norton published her second book, Paris to the Past: Traveling through French History by Train.

The Caros have a son, Chase, who is in the information-technology business.

Caro has a younger sibling, Michael, who is now a retired real estate manager.^[3]

Pop culture references[link]

In the television series The Simpsons, the episode "Treehouse of Horror XVI" features the character Lisa seen reading Master of the Senate in the vignette "Bart A.I."

In the 2004 film The Stepford Wives, Nicole Kidman's character attends a book club meeting with the Stepford Wives and attempts to discuss the third volume of Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson but the group chooses to review a book of Christmas crafts.

Bibliography[link]

• Caro, Robert A., The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. 1974. Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394480767). ix + 1246 pp. + xxxiv pp.: illus.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. 1982. Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394499735). xxiii + 882 p. + 48 p. of plates: illus.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. 1990. Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394528352). xxxiv + 506 pp.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. 2002. Alfred A. Knopf Inc, New York. (ISBN 0-394-52836-0). xxiv + 1167 pp.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power. 2012. Alfred A. Knopf Inc, New York. (ISBN 978-0679405070). 752 pp.

References[link]

• Zinsser, William Knowlton (ed.), Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-395-48617-3

External links[link]

• Official website
• Caro, Robert A., Article on Robert Moses and the writing of The Power Broker, The New Yorker, January 5, 1998.
• Meis, Morgan, Short essay about Caro, 3quarksdaily.blogs.com.
• Robert Caro discusses a volume of his biography of President Johnson, LOC.gov video.
• Darman, Jonathan, "The Marathon Man", Newsweek, Feb. 16, 2009.
• "Robert Caro: Understanding Power", documentary on the life of Robert Caro, youtube.
• Booknotes interview with Caro on Means of Ascent, April 29, 1990
• In Depth interview with Caro, April 7, 2002
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Caro about the writing of his fourth volume, January 4, 2009
• Part one of C-SPAN Q&A interview with Caro about the finished book, The Passage of Power, May 6, 2012
  • Part two of C-SPAN Q&A interview with Caro about The Passage of Power, May 20, 2012
• Caro appears as an on camera expert in New York: A Documentary Film (1999) directed by Ric Burns for PBS.
• 2012 radio interview (47 minutes) at The Bat Segundo Show
• Jones, Chris, "The Big Book", profile in Esquire, May 2012.

David Irving
Born	David John Cawdell Irving (1938-03-24) 24 March 1938 (age 74) Brentwood, Essex, England
Residence	London, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Writer
Known for	Military history of World War II, Holocaust denial, historical revisionism
Spouse	Pilar Irving (née Stuyck), divorced 1981
Partner	Bente Hogh
Children	Five
Parents	John James Cawdell Irving and Beryl Irene Newington
Relatives	An older brother, John, a twin brother, Nicholas, and a sister, Jennifer
Website
fpp.co.uk

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer,^[1] best known for his denial of the Holocaust, who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. 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 his sympathy for the Third Reich, antisemitism and racism. 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".^[2]

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.^[3] The court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist, who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism,"^[4] and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."^[4][5]

Early life[link]

Irving in 1955

Irving, along with his twin brother,^[6] was born in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex, England. His father, John James Cawdell Irving, was a commander in the Royal Navy, and his mother, Beryl, an illustrator. Irving's twin brother Nicholas Irving has said that "David used to run toward bombed out houses shouting heil Hitler", a statement which Irving repudiates and says is "untrue."^[7]

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.^[8] 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".^[9] 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.^[9] Irving asserted that his "sceptical" views about the Third Reich were due to his doubts about the cartoonist caricatures of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders that appeared in the British press during the war.^[9] According to his twin, Nicholas, David has been a provocateur and prankster since his youth.^[10]

Student years[link]

After completing A-levels at Brentwood School, Irving briefly studied physics at Imperial College London, though never graduated, for financial reasons.^[6][11] He wrote for Felix, Imperial's 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,^[12] from which he dropped out after two years due to lack of funds.^[13] During his time at university, he seconded British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a debate on Commonwealth immigration, and was heckled.^[14]

Carnival Times controversy[link]

Irving's time as editor of the Carnival Times was controversial because of the contents of a "secret supplement" he added to the magazine.^[15] This supplement contained an article in which he called Hitler the "greatest unifying force Europe has known since Charlemagne", though Irving deflected criticism by characterizing the Carnival Times as "satirical".^[16] 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)".^[17] 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.^[15] Volunteers were later recruited to remove and destroy the supplements before the magazine's distribution.^[17] Irving has said that the criticism is "probably justifiable" and has described his motivation in producing the controversial secret issue of Carnival Times as being to prevent the Carnival from making a profit that would be passed on to a South African group which he considered a "subversive organisation".^[12][18]

[edit] The Destruction of Dresden

Some time 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 bases 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.^[19] 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.^[20] 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.^[21] Today, casualties at Dresden are estimated as 25,000–35,000 dead.^[22]

According to Walter Weidauer, mayor of Dresden from 1946-1958, Irving based his numbers on a falsified document promulgated by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, as well as claims made after the war by a former Dresden Nazi functionary, Hanns Voigt, without verifying them against official sources available in Dresden (Walter Weidauer, Inferno Dresden Dietz Verlag, 1965; Abridged edition, 1990, ISBN 3-320-00818-8). Irving published a letter to the editor in The Times of London on 7 July 1966, admitting that the data in his book were not credible.

1963 burglary of Irving's flat[link]

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 flat 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.^[23]

Author[link]

Irving at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, 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 program 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,^[24] and The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, in which he blamed the British escort group commander, Commander Jack Broome for the catastrophic losses of the Convoy PQ-17. Amid much publicity, Broome sued Irving for libel in October 1968, and in February 1970, after 17 days of deliberation before London's High Court, Broome won. Irving was forced to pay £40,000 in damages, and the book was withdrawn from circulation.

Adolf Hitler. Irving in an interview with Ron Rosenbaum called his work an act of "stone-cleaning" in which Irving removed the "slime" which Irving claimed had been applied to Hitler's reputation.^[25]

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.^[26] 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.^[25]

In 1969, during a visit to Germany, Irving met Robert Kempner, one of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg.^[27] 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".^[28] 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".^[27]

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

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

Revisionism[link]

[edit] Hitler's 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 to clean away the "years of grime and discoloration from the facade of a silent and forbidding monument" to reveal the real Hitler, whose reputation Irving claimed had been slandered by historians.^[35] In Hitler's War, Irving tried to "view the situation as far as possible through Hitler's eyes, from behind his desk".^[35] He portrayed Hitler as a rational, intelligent politician, whose only goal was to increase Germany's prosperity and influence on the continent, and who was constantly let down by incompetent and/or treasonous subordinates.^[35] Irving's book faulted the Allied leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, for the eventual escalation of war, and claimed that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler to avert an alleged impending Soviet attack.^[36] 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.^[37]

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.^[38] 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.^[39] 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.^[40]

Irving's work of the late 1970s and early 1980s[link]

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.^[13]

In 1978, Irving released The War Path, the companion volume to Hitler's War which covered events leading up to the war and which was written from a similar point of view. Again, professional historians such as D.C. Watt noted numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Despite the criticism, the book sold well, as did all of Irving's books to that date. The financial success of his books enabled Irving to buy a home in the prestigious Mayfair district of London, own a Rolls-Royce car, and to enjoy a very affluent lifestyle.^[41] 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.^[42] 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. After publication Irving’s work on Churchill received at least one bad review from Professor David Cannadine then of the University of London, now of Princeton University.

"It has received almost no attention from historians or reviewers...It is easy to see why.... full of excesses, inconsistencies and omissions... seems completely unaware of recent work done on the subject... It is not merely that the arguments in this book are so perversely tendentious and irresponsibly sensationalist. It is also that it is written in a tone which is at best casually journalistic and at worst quite exceptionally offensive. The text is littered with errors from beginning to end." ^[43]

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 antisemitism.^[44] 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 antisemitic attitudes themselves.^[45] Critics such as Neal Ascherson and Kai Bird took issue with some of Irving's language that seemed to evoke antisemitic imagery, such as his remark that Rákosi possessed "the tact of a kosher butcher".^[44]

Hitler Diaries[link]

In 1983, Irving played a major role in the Hitler Diaries hoax. 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.^[46] 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).^[47] 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.^[48] Irving had concluded that the alleged Hitler diaries were a forgery because they had come from the same dealer in Nazi memorabilia from whom Irving had purchased his collection in 1982.^[46] At the press conference in Hamburg, Irving announced, "I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here".^[46] Irving was proud of the "trail of chaos" he had created at the Hamburg press conference and the attendant publicity it had brought him, and in particular took a great deal of pride in his humiliation of Trevor-Roper, whom Irving strongly disliked for his criticism of Irving's methods and conclusions.^[49] 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.^[50]

A week later on 2 May, Irving reversed himself and asserted that the diaries were genuine; at the same press conference, Irving took the opportunity to promote his translation of the memoirs of Hitler's physician Dr. Theodor Morell.^[49] Robert Harris, in his book Selling Hitler, suggested that an additional reason for Irving's change of mind over the authenticity of the alleged Hitler diaries was that the fake diaries contain no reference to the Holocaust, thereby buttressing Irving's claim in Hitler's War that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust.^[51] Subsequently Irving made another U-turn when the diaries were revealed as a forgery. At a press conference held to withdraw his endorsement of the diaries, Irving proudly claimed that he was the first to call them a forgery, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call them genuine.^[49]

Other books[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2011)

By the mid-1980s, Irving had not had a successful book in years, and was behind schedule in writing the first volume of his Churchill series, the research for which had strained his finances.^[52] 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 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 recounted various incidents and produced documents as evidence that Göring disapproved of the persecution of Jews and other Nazi crimes.^{[citation needed]}

Holocaust denial[link]

Movement towards Holocaust denial[link]

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.^[53] 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 denying the Holocaust, that his book was not part of the "anti-Semitic canon".^[54] In 1980, Irving received an invitation to speak at a Holocaust-denial conference, which he refused under the grounds that his appearance there would damage his reputation.^[53] In a letter, Irving stated his reasons for his refusal as: "This is pure Realpolitik on my part. I am already dangerously exposed, and I cannot take the chance of being caught in Flak meant for others!"^[53] Though Irving refused at this time to appear at conferences sponsored by the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review (IHR), he did grant the institute the right to distribute his books in the United States.^[53] Robert Jan van Pelt suggests that the major reason for Irving wishing to keep his distance from Holocaust deniers in the early 1980s was his desire to found his own political party called Focus.^[53]

Until 1988, Irving seemed torn between desires to be taken seriously as a historian or to associate with those with whom he seemed to share an ideological affinity. In the first edition of Hitler's War, Irving footnotes, "I cannot accept the view… [that] there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich speaking of the extermination of the Jews". In 1982, Irving made an attempt to unify all of the various neo-Nazi groups in Britain into one party called Focus, in which he would play a leading role.^[36] Irving described himself as a "moderate fascist" and spoke of plans to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.^[55] The effort failed due to fiscal problems.^[36] Irving told the Oxford Mail of having "links at a low level" with the British National Front.^[36] Irving described The Spotlight, the main journal of the Liberty Lobby, as "an excellent fortnightly paper".^[36] At the same time, Irving put a copy of Hitler's "Prophecy Speech" of 30 January 1939, promising the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" if "Jewish financiers" started another world war, onto his wall.^[56]

Following the failure of Focus, in September 1983, Irving for the first time attended a conference of the IHR.^[53] Van Pelt has argued that, with the failure of Irving's political career, he felt freer to associate with Holocaust deniers.^[53] At the conference, Irving did not deny the Holocaust, but did appear happy to share the stage with Robert Faurisson and Judge Wilhelm Stäglich, and claimed to be impressed with the allegations of Friedrich Berg that mass murder via diesel gas fumes at the Operation Reinhard death camps was impossible.^[57] At that conference, Irving repeated his claims that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust because he was "so busy being a soldier".^[58] 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".^[58] During the same speech, Irving proclaimed Hitler to be the "biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich".^[59] 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?'"^[58]

A major theme of Irving's writings since the 1980s was his belief that it had been a great blunder on the part of Britain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that ever since then and as a result of that decision, Britain had slipped into an unstoppable decline.^[55] Irving also took the view that Hitler often tried to help the Jews of Europe.^[55] 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".^[55] 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.^[60]

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.^[61] Irving claimed that the Holocaust was not the work of Nazi leaders, but rather of "nameless criminals",^[61] and furthermore claimed that "these men [who killed the Jews] acted on their own impulse, their own initiative, within the general atmosphere of brutality created by the Second World War, in which of course Allied bombings played a part."^[61] 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".^[62]

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.^[63] 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.^[13]

In 1986, Irving visited Toronto, where he was met at the airport by Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel.^[64] According to Zündel, Irving "...thought I was 'Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!'", and asked Zündel to stay away from him.^[64] 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.^[64] 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.^[64] As a result, Irving and Zündel become friends, and Irving agreed in late 1987 to testify for Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust.^[65] 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.^[64]

Zündel trial[link]

In January 1988, Irving travelled to Toronto, Canada to assist Douglas Christie, the defence lawyer for Ernst Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust.^[55] 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.^[59] Irving and Faurission then flew to Boston to meet with Leuchter, who agreed to lend his alleged technical expertise on the behalf of Zündel's defense.^[55] Irving argued that an alleged expert on gassings like Leuchter could prove that the Holocaust was a "myth".^[55] After work on the second Zündel trial, Irving declared based on his exposure to Zündel's and Leuchter's theories that he was now conducting a "one-man intifada" against the idea that there had been a Holocaust.^[66] 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.^[67]

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."^[68] Irving testified for Zündel between 22–26 April 1988, where he endorsed Richard Harwood's book Did Six Million Really Die? as "over ninety percent...factually accurate".^[69]

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".^[70] 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.^[71]

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.^[66] Leuchter's book had been first published in Canada by Zündel's Samisdat Publishers in 1988 as The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdenek.^[72] 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".^[66] The alleged swindle was the reparations money totalling 3 billion DM paid by the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel between 1952-1966 for the Holocaust. Irving described the reparations as being "essentially in atonement for the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz", which Irving called a "myth" that would "not die easily".^[66] In his foreword, Irving praised the "scrupulous methods" and "integrity" of Leuchter.^[66]

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".^[73] 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".^[74] In the Motion, the House stated that they were "appalled by [the Holocaust denial of] Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving".^[62] In response to the House of Commons motion, Irving in a press statement challenged the MPs who voted to condemn him that: "I will enter the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz and you and your friends may lob in Zykon B in accordance with the well known procedures and conditions. I guarantee that you won't be satisfied with the results!".^[75]

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.^[76] 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".^[76] Boasting of his role in criticizing the Hitler diaries as a forgery in 1983, Irving wrote "now he [Irving] is saying the same thing about the infamous 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. They did not exist – ever – except perhaps as the brainchild of Britain's brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare Executive".^[76] Finally, Irving claimed "the survivors of Auschwitz are themselves testimony to the absence of an extermination programme".^[76] Echoing the criticism of the House of Commons, on 14 May 1990 a leader in The Times described Irving as a "man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost everything of an innocent and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception".^[74]

The Holocaust denial lecture circuit[link]

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".^[77]

In the early 1990s, Irving was a frequent visitor to Germany, where he spoke at neo-Nazi rallies.^[63] 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".^[63] In June 1990, Irving went to the German provinces that had formerly been part of East Germany on a well-publicized tour entitled "An Englishman Fights for the Honour of the Germans," on which he accused the Allies of having used "forged documents" to "humiliate" the German people.^[75] 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").^[78] German nationalists found Irving, as a non-German Holocaust denier, to be particularly credible.^[78]

In January 1990, Irving gave a speech in Moers where he asserted that only 30,000 people died at Auschwitz between 1940–45, all of natural causes, which was equal—so he claimed—to the typical death toll from one Bomber Command raid on German cities.^[77] Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at the death camp, stating that the existing remains were "mock-ups built by the Poles".^[77] 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 the judgement, and received a fine of DM 10,000 for repeating the same remarks in the courtroom on 5 May 1992.^[77] 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".^[66] 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".^[66] During the same speech, Irving denounced the judge as a "senile, alcoholic cretin".^[79] Following his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving was banned from visiting Germany.^[80]

The main gate of Auschwitz II Birkenau. In 1992 during his appeal for his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving called Auschwitz a "tourist attraction".^[66]

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.^[81] 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".^[13] During the same 1990 speech in Toronto, Irving claimed that "more people died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's motor car in Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber of Auschwitz".^[82] 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".^[82] 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).^[82] 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".^[82]

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".^[83] 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".^[83] In his 1991 revised edition of Hitler's War he had removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust. In a speech given in Hamburg in 1991, Irving stated that in two years time "...this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka...which in fact never took place" will be disproved (Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were all well known Vernichtungslager).^[84] 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".^[84] 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".^[82] 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".^[82] 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, 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 our contempt.

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".^[85]

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.^[63] 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.^[63] In a 1993 speech, Irving claimed that had been only 100,000 Jewish deaths at Auschwitz, "but not from gas chambers. They died from epidemics".^[86] Irving went on to claim that most of the Jewish deaths during World War II had been caused by Allied bombing.^[86] 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".^[86] 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.^[82] 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.^[79] At the same time, Irving started to appear more frequently at the annual conferences hosted by the IHR.^[87] In a 1995 speech, Irving claimed that the Holocaust was a myth invented by a "world-wide Jewish cabal" to serve their own ends.^[88] 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.^[89]

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)^[86] Irving went on to claim his life had been wonderful until Zündel had gotten him involved in the Holocaust denial movement; van Pelt argues that Irving was just trying to shift responsibility for his actions in his letter.^[86] In an interview with Australian radio in July 1995, Irving claimed that at least four million Jews died in World War II, through he argued that this was due to terrible sanitary conditions inside the concentration camps as opposed to a delibrate policy of genocide in the death camps.^[79] Irving's statement led to a very public spat with his former ally Faurisson, who insisted that no Jews were killed in the Holocaust.^[86] 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".^[79] Likewise, depending on his audience, Irving during the 1990s has either used the absence of a written Führerbefehl (Führer order) for the "Final Solution" to argue that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust, or that the absence of a written order meant there was no Holocaust.^[87]

Racism and antisemitism[link]

Irving has expressed racist and antisemitic sentiments, both publicly and privately. Irving has often expressed his belief in the theory of a sinister Jewish conspiracy ruling the world, and that the belief in the reality of Holocaust was manufactured as part of the same alleged conspiracy.^[42] 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 "Yellow Star did not make a showing".^[42] 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".^[74] During an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum, Irving stated his belief that Jews were his "traditional enemy".^[90] 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".^[91]

Several of these statements were cited by the judge's decision in Irving's lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt,^[91] leading the judge to conclude that Irving "had on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist."^[92] 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 wrote that Irving sang the rhyme to Hitchens following dinner in the family's Washington apartment.^[93]

[edit] Persona non grata

David Irving being deported from Canada, 1992

After Irving denied the Holocaust in two 1989 speeches given in Austria, the Austrian government issued an arrest warrant against him and barred him from entering the country.^[94] 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.^[13] Other governments followed suit, including Austria, Italy and Canada,^[95] where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported back to the United Kingdom.^[13] 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.^[96]

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.^[97] 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.^[74] 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.^[74]