David Irving
From Metapedia
David John Cawdell Irving (born March 24, 1938) is a British historian specializing in the military history of World War II. He is the author of 30 books, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels — Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).
He served a prison sentence in Austria from February to December 2006 on charges related to questioning the so-called Holocaust.
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[edit] Early life
Irving, along with his twin brother, was born in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex, England. His father, John James Cawdell Irving, was a commander in the Royal Navy, 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 tragedy severed all links with his wife and their children.
[edit] Student years
After completing A-levels at Brentwood School, Irving briefly studied physics (though never graduated) at Imperial College London. He gained notoriety by writing for the student newspaper Phoenix and in 1959 served as editor of the London University Carnival Committee's journal, Carnival Times.
[edit] The Destruction of Dresden
Sometime after serving in 1959 as editor of the London University Carnival Committee's journal, Irving next 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 airbase. During his time in Spain, Irving married his first wife, a Spanish woman by 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 right-wing German journal Neue Illustrierte. These were the basis of his first book, The Destruction of Dresden (1963), in which he examined the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. By the 1960s, a debate about the morality of the carpet bombing of German cities and civilian population had already begun, especially in the United Kingdom. There was consequently considerable interest in Irving's book, which was illustrated with graphic pictures, and it became an international bestseller.
In the first edition, Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 — notably higher than most previously published figures. These figures became authoritative and widely accepted in many standard reference works. In later editions of the book over the next three decades, he gradually adjusted the figure downwards to 50,000-100,000.
[edit] Historian
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 General Władysław Sikorski. Irving claimed that the plane crash which killed General Sikorski in 1943 was really an "assassination" ordered by 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, which depicts Churchill ordering the “assassination” of General Sikorski. 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.
Irving then shifted to writing biographies. 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. Many aging former officials with the National Socialist regime 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.
[edit] Revisionism
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, and claimed that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a "preventative war" forced on Hitler to avert an impending Soviet attack (supported by some, notably Soviet GRU defector Victor Suvorov, and others; see Icebreaker). In addition, citing the work of such historians as Harry Elmer Barnes, David Hoggan, and Frederick J.P. Veale, Irving argued that it was primarily Britain that was responsible for the outbreak of war in 1939.
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 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 which Rommel was also a victim. Irving painted the men and women involved in the July 20 Plot in the blackest of colours, and argued that their fate after July 20 was fully deserved. Irving challenged the popular notion that Rommel was one of the leaders of the rebellion: Rommel stayed loyal to Hitler until the end, Irving claimed, and the real blame for his forced suicide lay with his associates, who schemed against him so they could save their own lives and because they were jealous of Rommel's medals. In particular, Irving accused Rommel's friend and Chief of Staff General Hans Speidel of framing Rommel in the attempted coup.
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. Despite some criticism, the book sold well, as did all of Irving's books to that date.
In the 1980s Irving started researching and writing about topics other than Germany, but with less success. He began his research on his three-part biography of Winston Churchill. In 1981, he published two books. The first was The War Between the Generals, in which Irving offered an account of the Allied High Command, 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", because the Communist regime was itself controlled by Jews. Irving’s depiction of Hungary’s Communist regime as a Jewish dictatorship oppressing Gentiles sparked charges of anti-Semitism.
In 1987 Churchill's War, Volume I was published. 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."
In 1986, Irving was one of the few English language authors to endorse the controversial thesis of the German philosopher Ernst Nolte who, in a 1986 article named Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will ("The Past That Does Not Want To Go Away"), claimed that because the President of the World Zionist Organization Chaim Weizmann wrote a letter to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain pledging the full support of his organization to the British war effort on 3 September 1939, that this constituted a “Jewish declaration of war” against Germany, and thus the German government was fully justified in “interning” the Jews of Europe in concentration camps.
[edit] The Holocaust Question
Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust has changed significantly. By the mid-1980s Irving began associating himself with Institute for Historical Review and began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion arguing the Germans did not exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II. He also suggested that parts of The Diary of Anne Frank might have been forged by her surviving father, and in 1988 testified for the defence in Canadian at the Ernst Zündel Holocaust trial. Irving was later to claim that Zündel had convinced him that the Holocaust had not occurred.
As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited a 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. After the trial, Irving published Leuchter's report in the United Kingdom and wrote its foreword. In Errol Morris' 1999 documentary about Leuchter, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., Irving said, "The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of cyanide in the brickwork. That's what converted me. When I read that in the report in the courtroom in Toronto, I became a hard-core disbeliever." In his 1991 revised edition of Hitler's War he had removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Official site
- Jewish Agencies generate Lying Allegations that David Irving "supplied trigger for the Oklahoma City bombing"
