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David Irving David John Cawdell Irving (born March 24,
1938) is a British World War
II historical researcher and author, whose numerous books are
considered widely discredited, highly influential, or both. From the
late 1960s to the mid-1980s, Irving's prominence arose from his
reputable and popular writings, such as Hitler's War and Apocalypse
1945: The Destruction of Dresden. When Holocaust historian Deborah
Lipstadt counted Irving among those who deny the Holocaust, Irving sued
Lipstadt for libel. In the highly-publicised trial, Irving lost both
the case and any remaining reputation as a historian. The judge upheld
Lipstadt's claims about Irving "that he is an active Holocaust denier;
that he is anti-Semitic and racist".Irving's continued disagreement with mainstream historical accounts of the Second World War, of Adolf Hitler, and of the Holocaust, complete with non-historical racist banter, has earned him iconic status among neo-Nazis and other Holocaust deniers. Relatedly, his books and speeches have led to his being barred from entering Germany and Austria, where it is a crime to claim publically that the Holocaust, or aspects of it, never occurred. He has been, at various time, barred from entering Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, perhaps in some cases under similar auspices to the Austrian events. On 20 February 2006 in a court in in Vienna, Austria, Irving pleaded guilty to the crime of hate speech relating to Holocaust denial. In addition he stated that he now believed millions of Jews to have died in the holocaust and that gas chambers were used to murder them.. Resultantly, Irving was convicted for three years' imprisonment. Irving was born in Essex, England. His father John James Cawdell Irving was a commander in the Royal Navy, his mother Beryl an illustrator. During the Second World War, his 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-456. Irving's father survived, but after the incident cut off all ties with his wife and their children. Irving first gained notoriety as a student at Imperial College London, where he attempted to study physics. He wrote for the student newspaper Phoenix and in 1959 served as editor of the London University Carnival Committee's journal, Carnival Times. His editorialship here stirred criticism, though Irving deflects such criticism by characterizing the Carnival Times as "satirical". In one editorial, he suggested the Jewish-owned media were against the formation of the European Union, referred to Adolf Hitler as "Herr Hitler". And, according to the Anti-Defamation League, Irving supported apartheid in South Africa, included racist cartoons, and gave an appreciative view of Nazi Germany . Covering the controversy, the 1 May 1959 edition of the Daily Mail, quoted Irving as saying, "You can call me a mild fascist if you like". Though Irving admits having had at the time membership in a conservative student group, he has denounced that article as libellous and "handiwork of an imaginative Daily Mail journalist". Irving's scholastic and financial difficulties led him to Germany, where he worked as a steelworker in a Thyssen steel works in the Ruhr area and first learned German. He then moved to Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an airbase. In 1962, he wrote a series of thirty-seven articles on the Allied bombing campaign, Wie Deutschlands Städte starben (How Germany's Cities Died), for the right-wing German journal Neue Illustrierte. These served as the basis of his first book The Destruction of Dresden, published in 1963. In it, Irving 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. The book subsequently became an international bestseller. In the first edition of the book, Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 - nearly an order of magnitude higher than previous numbers. These figures became authoritative and widely accepted in many standard references and encyclopedias. Over the next three decades, later editions of the book gradually modified that figure downwards to a range of 50,000 to 100,000. Forty years later, during the hearing of Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, these figures were publicly discredited. Today, the Dresden bombing casualty figures are estimated as most likely in the range of 25,000 to 35,000 dead, and probably toward the lower end of that range. 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, and in 1967 published Accident: The Death of General Sikorski, in which he suggests Churchill had a hand in the death of Polish government in exile leader Władysław Sikorski. Also in 1967, he published two more works: The Virus House, an account of the German nuclear energy project, and The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, in which he blamed the British convoy commander Captain 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 seventeen 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.  Irving with Hitler's
armaments minister Albert Speer in the late 1970s
After PQ-17, Irving shifted to writing biographies. As a result of Irving's success with Dresden, but prior to the conclusion of the Broome trial, members of Germany's extreme right wing assisted him in contacting surviving members of Hitler's inner circle. Many ageing former mid- and high-ranked Nazis saw a potential friend in Irving and donated diaries and other material. In 1972, he translated the memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, and in 1973 published The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, a biography of Air Marshall 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 Marshall Erwin Rommel, and a series in the Sunday Express describing the Royal Air Force's famous Dam Busters raid. Although Irving's works were generally ignored by academics, and often criticised as inaccurate when reviewed by specialists, his command of language and a wealth of entertaining anecdotes led generalists to write favourable reviews in the popular press, and many of his works sold well. He was particularly noted for his mastery of the voluminous and scattered German war records. The raw, biographical material he received from Hitler's inner circle bolstered Irving's claim as an authentic historian. So, throughout the 1970s, the populist perception of Irving as a mainstream British historian went unchallenged. In 1977, Irving published Hitler's War, the first of his two-part biography on Adolf Hitler. In it, Irving tried to describe the war from "Hitler's point of view." He portrayed Hitler as a rational, intelligent politician, whose only goal was to increase Germany's prosperity and influence on the continent. For instance, Irving's book faulted the Allied leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, for the eventual escalation of war. Where Irving's path to infamy truly began, however, was his controversial claim 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. Just months after the initial release of Hitler's War, Irving published The Trail of the Fox, a revisionist biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In it, Irving attacked the members of the July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler, branding them "traitors," "cowards" and "manipulators," and uncritically presented Hitler and his government's subsequent revenge against the plotters, of whom Rommel was also a victim. Irving challenged the popular notion that Rommel was one of the leaders of the rebellion: Rommel stayed loyal to Hitler until the end and the real blame for his forced suicide lay with Rommel's associates, who schemed against Rommel so they could save their own lives. Historians viewed the book as revisionist nonsense, yet it eventually became Irving's best selling book.  In 1978, Irving released The War Path, the
companion volume to Hitler's
War which covered events leading up to the war and is written from a
similar point of view.Again, professional historians noted numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Despite the criticism, the book sold well as did all of Irving's book to that date. However, with the publication of War Path, the prevalent view of Irving moved from that of a controversial historian to a Nazi sympathizer and propagandist. In the 1980s, Irving started researching and writing about topics other than Nazi Germany, but with far less success. He began his research on his three-part biography of Churchill. In 1981, he released two books. The first was The War Between the Generals, in which Irving offered a tabloid-esque account of the Allied High Command, detailing the infighting and politics Irving alleges occured 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. Both books were panned by reviewers, sold poorly, and cemented public impression that Irving was not just a historian of Nazism, but a Nazi historian. As Christopher Hitchens, the British journalist, quipped, "David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism." By the mid-1980s, Irving had not had a successful book in years, and was behind schedule in writing his upcoming first volume of his Churchill series, the research for which had strained his finances. By the time he finished the manuscript in 1985, his reputation was so diminished that no major publisher was willing to print his works, so it wasn't until 1987 that the book was published as Churchill's War, volume I. In it, Irving writes a revisionist portrayal of Churchill - a debauched alcoholic, a coward, an unabashed racist, and a corrupt warmonger servile to the interests of "international Jewry." Irving also accused Churchill of "selling out the British Empire" and "turning Britain against its natural ally, Germany." The book sold poorly to the general public and historians by now ignored him. The reviewers noted that Irving's once-praised writing style had deteriorated, and said that, for the most part, it was an incomprehensible and tedious propaganda piece that read as though it had come straight out of Goebbels' propaganda ministry. By contast with most critics, neo-Nazi readers celebrated Hitler's War and Churchill's War; for in the former he exonerated the beloved Führer, and in the latter he viciously attacked his hated enemy, Winston Churchill. In 1989, Irving published his biography of Hermann Göring, in which he highlighted, though not endorsed, the more "positive" features of the Nazi Reichsmarschall. Irving avoided discussion of Göring's role in the Holocaust but gave much information about his theft of art treasures and provided a wealth of information about Göring's jovial personality and brighter aspects, such as his outlawing of vivisection and promoting reforestation. Irving also recounts various incidents and produces documents as evidence that Göring disapproved of the persecution of Jews and other Nazi crimes. Irving acknowledged that between 1977 and 1988, his belief about the nature of the Holocaust evolved. In 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." By the mid-1980s, however, Irving associated himself with the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion, and made statements that moved him to clearly Holocaust-denier territory. For example, he denied that Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II, alleged that parts of The Diary of Anne Frank might have been forged by her surviving father, and in 1988 testified for the defence at Canadian-based Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel's trial. 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 implemenation 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. As to what evidence further led Irving's to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, Irving cited a report by self-styled "execution expert" Fred A. Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the trial, Irving published Leuchter's report in the United Kingdom and wrote its foreword. In his 1991 revised edition of Hitler's War, he had removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust. Other beliefs Irving has expressed other beliefs through public and private expressions similiar to anti-Semitism, but they are not limited to matters of historical disputation. From a 1994 diary entry revealed in court proceedings against Deborah Lipstadt in 1999, Irving's poem composed for his young daughter, and in the words of Irving, appropriate to use “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." Irving in 1992: "I am not anti-colored, take it from me; nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at an airport, or a station, or a seaport, and I see a colored family there — the black father, the black wife and the black children….When I see these families arriving at the airport I am happy, and when I see them leaving at London airport I am happy. But if there is one thing that gets up my nose, I must admit, it is this — the way…the thing is when I am down in Torquay and I switch on my television and I see one of them reading our news to us. It is our news and they’re reading it to me. If I was a chauvinist I would say I object even to seeing women reading our news to us. ...But now we have women reading out news to us. If they could perhaps have their own news which they were reading to us, I suppose [Laughter], it would be very interesting For the time being, for a transitional period I'd be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, following by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts..." In 1998, Irving filed a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books. In her book Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt identified him as a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot, and stated that because of his skilful manipulations and distortions of real documents, Irving was one of the most dangerous proponents of Holocaust denial. Though the author and publisher were American, Irving filed his suit in the United Kingdom, where the burden of proof in libel cases is on the defendant, and not, as in the U.S., on the plaintiff. As explained by the trial's Justice Charles Gray: 4.7 ... the burden of proving the defence of justification rests upon the publishers. Defamatory words are presumed under English law to be untrue. It is not incumbent on defendants to prove the truth of every detail of the defamatory words published: what has to be proved is the substantial truth of the defamatory imputations published about the claimant. As it is sometimes expressed, what must be proved is the truth of the sting of the defamatory charges made. Lipstadt and Penguin hired the respected British lawyer Anthony Julius to present her case, and retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Evans spent more than two years examining Irving's work, and amassed evidence of Irving's misrepresentations, including evidence that Irving had knowingly used forged documents as sources. Prior to Evans, no one had performed a lengthy, in-depth examination of Irving. Evans' final assessment of Irving's work was both blistering and damning: Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian. In the trial, Irving represented himself. Irving called to testify on his behalf, the American Kevin B. MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist. Rather than focus on the defence's evidence against him, or on whether or not Lipstadt had defamed Irving, he seemed to focus mainly on his "right to free speech," a matter one might consider ironic, given that he was suing Lipstadt for her speech against him. In his closing statement, Irving claimed to have been a victim of an international, mostly Jewish, conspiracy for more than three decades. At one point on 15 March 2000, during the course of Irving's closing argument, he appeared to refer to the Judge as 'Mein Führer' (page 193 of the transcript).  Irving unsuccessfully represented himself and
his work during the
trial. The Court found that Lipstadt did not libel Irving when she
called him a Holocaust denier in her book.Justice Charles Gray, the trial judge, praised Irving's "thorough and painstaking research into the archives" and commended his discovery and disclosure of many historical documents. He also noted Irving's intelligence and thorough knowledge of World War II history. However, he concluded that: Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism. Irving lost subsequent attempts at appeal. Not only did Irving lose the case, but in light of the evidence presented at the trial, a number of his works which had previously escaped serious scrutiny, were shown to be irredeemably flawed. What remained of Irving's reputation as a historian was destroyed. He was also liable to pay the substantial costs of the trial, which ruined him financially and subsequently forced him into bankruptcy. Prominent British historian Sir John Keegan wrote in 1996 in his book The Battle for History, "Some controversies are entirely bogus, like David Irving's contention that Hitler's subordinates kept from him the facts of the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews..." And during the trial, Keegan lambasted Irving: "I continue to think it perverse of you to propose that Hitler could not have known until as late as October 1943 what was going on with the Jewish people." He later stated that Irving's view "defies common sense" and "defies reason." After the trial, Keegan elaborated on his view of Irving, praising him for his understanding of Hitler's military strategy. In an 12 April 2000 article in The Daily Telegraph, reviewing Irving's Goebbels - Mastermind of the "Third Reich", Keegan wrote that Irving has an "all-consuming knowledge of a vast body of material" and "many of the qualities of the most creative historians," that his skill as an archivist could not be contested, and that he was "certainly never dull." Keegan also wrote, Irving "knows more than anyone alive about the German side of the Second World War," and that Hitler's War was "indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round." However, Keegan doubted that even Irving took himself and his claims seriously. In a six-page essay in The New York Review of Books, Gordon A. Craig, a leading scholar of German history at Stanford University, noted Irving's claims that the Holocaust never took place and that Auschwitz was merely "a labor camp with an unfortunately high death rate." Though "such obtuse and quickly discredited views" may be "offensive to large numbers of people," Craig argued, Irving's work is "the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War," and "we dare not" disregard his views. Indeed, Irving's views are anything but disregarded; consideration of them has earned him arrest warrents, bans, restrictions and his current internment in Austria.  By the late 1980s, Irving was barred from
entering Austria because of
his neo-Nazi ties and hate speech. In the early 1990s, a German court
found him guilty of breaking laws forbidding the denial of the Nazi
extermination of Jews, and he was subsequently fined and barred from
entering Germany. Other governments followed suit. In 1992, he was barred from South Africa and Canada, where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported back to the United Kingdom. In an administrative hearing surrounding those events he was found by the hearing office to have engaged in a "total fabrication" in telling a story of an exit from and return to Canada which would have, for technical reasons, made the original deportation order invalid. He was also barred from entering Australia in 1992, a ban he made four unsuccessful legal attempts to overturn. 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. The intended visit provoked an outcry among Jewish groups, who were not appeased by Irving's promise not to speak about the Holocaust. Irving had visited New Zealand twice before in the 1980s. His intended 2004 visit was refused on the grounds that he had been convicted of offences by a German court, and that at various times had been deported from, and/or refused entry to, Canada, the United States, Italy, and South Africa. "Mr Irving is not permitted to enter New Zealand under the Immigration Act because people who have been deported from another country are refused entry," government spokeswoman Katherine O'Sullivan had told The Press earlier. Irving rejected the ban and attempted to board a Qantas flight for New Zealand from Los Angeles on 17 September 2004. He was not allowed on board. "As far as I'm concerned, the legal battle now begins," he was quoted as saying. David Irving was arrested by the Austrian police in the southern province of Styria on 11 November 2005, under a warrant issued in 1989. He has since been remanded in custody and officially charged with denying the Holocaust, a crime in Austria which carries a custodial sentence of one to ten years in prison. Within two weeks of his arrest, Irving asserted through his lawyer that he now acknowledges the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers. An Austrian court began hearing the trial of David Irving on 20 February 2006.. Irving is currently incarcerated in the Graz-Karlau prison in Graz, Austria. The trial concluded with Irving being convicted and having to serve a prsion sentence of three years. The Destruction of Dresden (1963) ISBN 0705700305 The Mare's Nest (1964) The Virus House (1967), a history of the uncompleted German atomic bomb programme directed by Werner Heisenberg. The name derives from a sign on the project, intended to scare people away. The Destruction of Convoy PQ17 (1967) Accident -- The Death of General Sikorski (1967) ISBN 0718304209 Breach of Security (1968) ISBN 0718301013 The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe (1973), a biography of Erhard Milch ISBN 0316432385 Hitler's War (1977), Hitler in wartime The Trail of the Fox (1977), a biography of Erwin Rommel ISBN 0525222006 The War Path (1978) ISBN 0670749710 The War Between the Generals (1981) Uprising! (1981), ISBN 0949667919 The Secret Diaries of Hitlers Doctor (1983) ISBN 002558250X The German Atomic Bomb: The History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany (1983) ISBN 0306801981 War Between the Generals (1986) ISBN 0865530696 Churchill's War (1987), Churchill in wartime ISBN 0947117563 Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, reprint (1989) ISBN 0312911521 Göring (1989), biography of Hermann Göring ISBN 0688066062 Goebbels - Mastermind of the "Third Reich" (1996) ISBN 1872197132 Hitler's War (1991), revised edition, incorporating The War Path Nuremberg: The Last Battle (1996) ISBN 1872197167 Churchill's War Volume II: Triumph in Adversity (1997) ISBN 1872197159 Rommel: The Trail of the Fox, Wordsworth Military Library; Limited edition (1999) ISBN 1840222050 Hitler's War and the War Path (2002) ISBN 1872197108 Note: Most of Irving's books are available in PDF format as free downloads at his web site. http://www.fpp.co.uk/ See also articles: The Holocaust Holocaust denial Prosecuting serious crimes Our Law Some further cartoons - from the AEL |
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