David Irving

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is a British historian specializing in the military and political history of World War II, biographies of WWII military commanders and top leaders. He is the author of many bestselling books on these topics. He was often praised for his extensive research and new findings using only primary sources. In 1977 the British historian Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote "no praise can be too high for his [Irving's] indefatigable, scholarly industry".

However, his reputation was attacked after Irving started to question several aspects of the orthodox view on the Holocaust. He has a complex relationship with Holocaust revisionism and has been involved in several trials related to this. Most well-known may be a 2000 trial involving Irving, which is often framed as having "disproven" Holocaust revisionism.

His stated views on the Holocaust have differed from both the politically correct views and the views of most other Holocaust revisionists and have changed over time.

David Irving (2012)

WWII (military) history and biography writer

Irving has stated that his skeptical views on the orthodox view on World War II dates to his childhood, and in particular the cartoonist and propagandist caricatures of Hitler and the other National Socialist leaders then published in the British wartime press.

Several of his WWII history and biography books are/were more or less politically incorrect and revisionist, such as by arguing for a high number of deaths due to the Allied bombing of Dresden, for Erwin Rommel as having been falsely accused of betraying Hitler, for the bankrupt Churchill as having been financed by Czech and Jewish sources, for Churchill as having caused a decline of Britain and the loss of her empire, for Churchill as having had a hand in the death of the Polish government in exile leader Wladyslaw Sikorski in 1943 in order to betray Poland to the Soviet Union, for National Socialist Germany not being primarily responsible for the start of WWII, for the German invasion of the Soviet Union having been a preventive war that was forced by an impending Soviet attack, and for criticisms of the Nuremberg trials and the Morgenthau Plan.

The political incorrectness contributed Irving being able to contact several surviving members of National Socialist Germany's leadership, other Germans who had been present during crucial events, and/or their relatives. Some of them donated and loaned diaries and other material to Irving. These sources often stated less politically-correct views on the events before and during the war, which Irving presented in his books. His books (in particular the biographies) cover not just the WWII time period and topics, but also events before the war and its aftermath. In his book Hess: The Missing Years 1941-1945 (1987 edition; 2010 Classic edition) one can read:

"Until now nobody has been able to explain the actions of Rudolf Hess. In previously ignored American and British archives David Irving found secret records kept by British medical officers during the internment of Rudolf Hess. He has also been able to obtain file from the Swiss government containing letters written by Hess during his imprisonment and suppressed by the British, including letters to King George VI. From these and other private sources, Irving has solved a riddle which has perplexed historians for more than half a century - the last great riddle of the Third Reich. This book tells the Real History of the dramatic flight which Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess made in 1941 to Scotland in an attempt to stop the war before the saturation bombing holocaust began. Intercepted before he could reach His Majesty the King, Hess vanished into the maw of the Secret Service, and was held as Winston Churchill’s personal prisoner. British files relate how experts used truth drugs and hidden microphones to try to prise the secrets out of him. Taken to Nuremberg in 1945, Hess outwitted - and eventually outlived - his tormentors. He died mysteriously in 1987 after spending 46 years in jail, strangled by his Negro GI guard, Tony Jordan. Jordan still lives freely in Berlin; the US State Dept and the British Foreign Office have chosen to draw a veil over the embarrassing killing."

Other books

The 1981 book Uprising about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 arguing that it was "primarily an anti-Jewish" uprising against the Jewish dominated Communist regime.

Research style

Before Irving became an outcast due to his less politically correct views on the Holocaust, he was often praised for his extensive research and new findings using only primary sources.

"Two virtues distinguish David Irving from other historians. First, he is quite innocent of formal education, or training, in history. In fact, he claims no college degree whatsoever, though he obviously commands erudition vastly in excess of the secondary education he received. Concerns for a secure and respected career as an academic historian have, therefore, never affected his pronouncements. Second, he bases his historical findings entirely on original sources—writings in most cases, and direct personal interviews in others. His application of this policy is rigorous—he in fact eschews not only translations, at least of German sources, but he also avoids even purported transcriptions. A striking example of this practice appears in the extensive personal diary of Joseph Goebbels, who wrote the journal in his own neat, but archaic handwriting, quite illegible to native readers of German today. Irving has painstakingly trained himself in deciphering this script to a level of accuracy probably attained by no other person since Goebbels’s death."

Irving has argued that "The green historian who is fresh out of university and not inquisitive, will be happy to accept the printed volumes of documents particularly if they have pictures in them and an index at the end. Later on, you learn not to trust printed volumes of documents. If I can give one example from my Churchill research, there is a report by the American Assistant Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, on a visit to Churchill in March 1940, describing how he found Churchill in a state of complete intoxication in the admiralty. The printed version of this document and the American government volumes omits those sentences describing Churchill's drunkenness, but the original report by the Secretary of State in the Roosevelt library contains those sentences. So, I can only say that a historian must be very careful about using printed or even photocopied documents."

However, Irving has also been criticized, and not just by non-revisionists, but also by other revisionists, as discussed in the sections on the Holocaust.

Alleged "Holocaust denialism"

Overview

Irving has a complex relationship with Holocaust revisionism and has been involved in several trials related to alleged "Holocaust denialism". His stated views on the Holocaust have differed from both the politically correct views and the views of most other Holocaust revisionists and have changed over time. This has occurred not just regarding different books and public statements, but also regarding newer editions of a book that may have significant differences with older editions of the same book.

Irving argued in his 1977 book Hitler's War (a biography that did not have the Holocaust as its main focus) that Hitler did not order and did not know of the Holocaust, which was instead secretly committed by underlings, such as Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. This theory has similarities with mainstream and politically correct "Holocaust functionalism" theories, which started to become popular at this time and that are not considered to be "Holocaust denial".

Irving after this made various other and more politically incorrect statements on the Holocaust. A 2011 article in Inconvenient History stated that: "Regardless of what his position(s) might be at the present moment, Irving’s statements and/or published works have expressed the following conclusions on his part:

1. Hitler did not order the extermination of the Jews, and was unaware of any measures others may have undertaken toward that end;
2. The Germans did not build or use gas chambers for mass executions; and
3. Considerably fewer than the claimed Six Million Jews were murdered or otherwise killed during the Holocaust."

This differs in several ways from the position of most Holocaust revisionists, who reject the existence of any extermination policy, therefore do not argue that underlings concealed mass killings from Hitler, criticize many of the claims regarding the Einsatzgruppen, and so on.

A 2009 article stated that Irving then wrote on the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka camps that "In my opinion, a mass extermination took place in the aforementioned three camps (it cannot be proved that it was carried out by means of gas; as you know, this is highly controversial)." This is also a position unlike that of most other Holocaust revisionists.

Holocaust revisionist critics of Irving have criticized his non-revisionist arguments and have suggested that Irving decided to openly admit to certain Holocaust revisionist views when he thought that such views would soon become generally accepted (and having been an early supporter would then be beneficial for Irving). However, Irving has been argued to more recently have partially retreated from these views, due to this general acceptance not occurring and the persecutions of Irving. His later books, such as the biography on Goebbels, have been criticized. He has been criticized for that "the drama that Irving has constructed in some of his "histories" requires that Himmler and Goebbels continue to be villains who deceive and betray a well-intentioned Hitler by doing bad things to the Jews behind Hitler's back." Irving has also more recently sold guided tours to some Holocaust camps located in countries where "Holocaust denial" is illegal and his stated views during these tours in these countries can therefore not legally "deny" the Holocaust.

According to a 2017 article: "Now he believes at least 4m and possibly 6m Jewish people died, many of disease, though unquestionably most were murdered. He does not believe many died at Auschwitz, however. [...] the full extent of the Holocaust was kept from Himmler by Reinhard Heydrich, who everybody agrees was the prime architect of the programme. [...] Hitler knew nothing of the Final Solution because Heydrich also kept it from him."

See also the article on Holocaust revisionism lite.

1988 Zündel trial

Irving testified at the Ernst Zündel's Holocaust trials in 1988. A long description of the testimony is available online with some excerpts below:

Irving's Hitler research failed to uncover any evidence that Hitler was aware of the alleged "final solution" of the Jews: "At the end of writing the Adolf Hitler biography in draft, I was aware of the fact that having written it from primary, original Hitler sources, I, as the author, didn't know about the Holocaust. I had found no documents showing any involvement between Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust which was very disturbing for me. So I re-investigated. I sent a researcher back into the archives where, with a specific job, the researcher, who was a trained historical scientist at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, I said to her, 'Go back to the archives in Freiburg, Munich and Berlin, and see if I have missed anything'. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the fact there were no documents whatsoever showing that a Holocaust had ever happened. I'm using the word 'Holocaust' in the modern sense that the newspapers tell us to use it. And certainly there was no evidence that Hitler had ever known such a thing was going on, whatever it was. This was very disturbing for me [...] my literary agent warned me of the severe consequences of the controversy that would develop from omitting Hitler's role in the Holocaust. He told me we would lose the Sunday Times deal, the Reader's Digest deal, the Book of the Month Club deal, and we would not sell the book as a paperback in the United States. We lost about one million dollars. Controversy is not necessarily good. [...] Do you have any opinion as a result of your research as to the number of Jews who died in concentration camps during the Second World War? [...] I have opinions, however, in the kind of statistical orders of magnitude, where you can see there's a minimum number and a maximum number, and I can only set these two limits and say that to my mind, it must have been of the order of 100,000 or more, but to my mind it was certainly less than the figure which is quoted nowadays of 6 million. [...] Irving estimated "over 90 percent of the brochure Did Six Million Really Die? to be factually accurate on the basis of the facts which I arrived at by an entirely different approach, namely, the documentary basis."

Pearson continued reading from Hitler's War: My own hypothesis, to which I point in the various chapters in which I deal in chronological sequence with the unfolding persecution and liquidation of the European Jews, is this: the killing was partly of an ad hoc nature, what the Germans called a Verlegenheitslösung -- the way out of an awkward dilemma, chosen by the middle-level authorities in the eastern territories overrun by the Nazis -- and partly a cynical extrapolation by the central SS authorities of Hitler's anti-Semitic decrees. Hitler had unquestionably decreed that Europe's Jews were to be "swept back" to the east; I describe the various phase-lines established by this doctrine. But the SS authorities, Gauleiters, and regional commissars and governors in "the east" proved wholly unequal to the problems caused by this mass uprooting in midwar. The Jews were brought by the trainload to ghettos already overcrowded and underprovisioned. Partly in collusion with each other, partly independently, the Nazi agencies there simply liquidated the deportees as their trains arrived, on a scale increasingly more methodical and more regimented as the months passed. [...] Do you repudiate those statements, sir?, asked Pearson. "I think [in] the first part of the paragraph there is not a line I would change," said Irving. "The last lines of the paragraph I think I would rubber stamp over the top of that 'at that time I believed'. At that time I believed there had been an increasingly more methodical liquidation. This is something which I am now increasingly inclined to challenge because over the intervening ten years, I still haven't seen any evidence that there was. [...] I don't now believe there was anything that you could describe as 'extermination machinery' other than the very disorganized ad hoc efforts of the criminals and murderers among the SS who were carrying out the liquidations that we described earlier.

2000 Irving v Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstadt trial

"Irving v Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstadt" was an English defamation court case related to "Holocaust denial".

David Irving filed suit against American author Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books in an English court, claiming that Lipstadt had libeled him in her book Denying the Holocaust. He lost the case in 2000.

"History on trial"

The trial has often been framed as being a trial on whether Holocaust revisionism is correct is not. However, the final judgment was careful to note that "it is important that I stress at the outset of this judgment that I do not regard it as being any part of my function as the trial judge to make findings of fact as to what did and what did not occur during the Nazi regime in Germany [...] it is not for me to form, still less to express, a judgment about what happened. That is a task for historians. It is important that those reading this judgment should bear well in mind the distinction between my judicial role in resolving the issues arising between these parties and the role of the historian seeking to provide an accurate narrative of past events."

Thus, the judgment was regarding only to the evidence presented by the parties at the trial and was not some final judgment on the "Truth" of Holocaust history. The judgment also stated that Irving accepted many aspects of the politically correct Holocaust version. They were therefore not debated during the trial. However, many of these aspects are disputed by most Holocaust revisionists. Conversely, some claims that were debated during the trial (such as whether underlings in some cases concealed mass killings from Hitler) are not claims made by most Holocaust revisionists.

Regarding specific Holocaust camps, the trial only related to Irving's views regarding "Auschwitz and not to Treblinka, Sobibor or any other alleged “Extermination Camp.” In fact, Irving really only challenged the operation of one gas chamber at Auschwitz, Krema II. Nor did the trial address operations of Einsatzgruppen." Furthermore, even on Auschwitz there was no "proving" of how many were killed. Lipstadt thus told an interviewer shortly after the trial that "I wasn’t proving how many people were murdered at Auschwitz. But when they say only 68,000 people were killed — it didn’t happen. We weren’t proving how many people were killed…'".

Lectures on the Holocaust

Germar Rudolf stated in ''Lectures on the Holocaust that Irving "lost the trial resoundingly. Since then the revisionist arguments are considered as having finally been refuted [...] but that is absolutely not so, for revisionist arguments were not dealt with in this trial but rather Irving’s arguments, and that is not the same thing. David Irving made a name for himself with his studies on World War II and with his biographies of personalities of this era. He has never even published a single article on the Holocaust, let alone a book. He has repeatedly expressed himself in a derogatory manner about the subject, which doesn’t interest him at all, and when I visited him in London in 1996, he said to me personally that he has never read a single revisionist book (cf. Graf 2009). Moreover, he refused even to consider, in the period preliminary to his trial, letting revisionists appear as expert witnesses. Consequently his situation was catastrophic, when during his trial he saw himself confronted with the concentrated argumentation of the world-wide Holocaust Lobby. Defeat for him was inevitable. This says little about the caliber of revisionist arguments. A revisionist refutation of the main arguments as presented by Lipstadt’s defense was published only in 2010 [...] Scientifically seen, the Irving-Lipstadt trial was largely irrelevant, not only because the arguments were not addressed, but also because ultimately a judge who had even less of an idea of the subject than Irving made the decision. One can just imagine how the judge’s career would have fared, had he decided the Holocaust was now to be considered as at least partially refuted!"

He also stated that "David Irving, who has little knowledge about the Holocaust, initially tried to not even address the issue, but by the time he had realized that the defense would make it center stage, it was too late for him to muster an appropriate defense (see p. 118). Additionally, the legal situation for revisionists had become so precarious by that time that few, if any, were willing to risk public exposure and thus extradition requests from all over Europe, should they testify publicly during Irving’s court case."

The Real Case for Auschwitz—Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed

A revisionist reply to the arguments at the trial is the book The Real Case for Auschwitz—Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed by Carlo Mattogno. The book has the following publisher description: "In 1993 Jewish theologian Deborah Lipstadt called British historian David Irving a “Holocaust denier.” Irving sued her for libel in return. Subsequently a court case unfolded in England which attracted the attention of the world’s mass media in 2000. The sharpest weapon in Lipstadt’s defense arsenal was Jewish art historian Robert van Pelt, who presented an expert report claiming to refute revisionist assertions about Auschwitz. Because Irving had neither the support by any expert witnesses nor was he himself an expert on the Holocaust, he inevitable lost the case. Robert van Pelt was therefore praised as the defeater of revisionism. When he published his revised expert report in his book The Case for Auschwitz in 2002, he even advanced to the foremost expert on Auschwitz in the public’s eyes.

Mattogno’s The Real Case for Auschwitz is the revisionist response to Robert van Pelt. On 750 pages, Mattogno thoroughly scrutinizes van Pelt’s assertions by juxtaposing them to material and documentary facts. The author's first revelation is that van Pelt has committed plagiarism: he plundered and basically regurgitated the research results published in 1989 and 1993 by French researcher Jean-Claude Pressac – yet without naming his source even once. Mattogno’s analysis is devastating for both Pressac and van Pelt, as it reveals that their studies of Auschwitz ignore crucial counter-arguments, fail to approach pivotal technical issues with technical means, are highly inconsistent, use deceptive methods, present conflicting sources without due source criticism, deform all sources to serve the author’s perspective, and reveal a shockingly threadbare knowledge of the history of the Auschwitz camps. Mattogno therefore concludes “The Case for Auschwitz is neither a scholarly nor a historical work; it is only a biased journalistic assemblage of poorly understood and poorly interpreted historical sources.""

Fail: "Denying the Holocaust"

Germar Rudolf in 2016 published a book titled Fail: "Denying the Holocaust" which criticized Lipstadt's book. Arguments included that it "misquotes, mistranslates, misrepresents, misinterprets, and makes a plethora of wild claims without backing them up with anything", "utterly fails to use generally recognized standards of evidence", and "Rather than dealing thoroughly with factual arguments, Lipstadt’s book is full of ad hominem attacks on her opponents."

Absence of material and documentary evidence, reliance on witnesses and circumstantial evidence

The judgment stated that "What is the evidence for mass extermination of Jews at those camps? The consequence of the absence of any overt documentary evidence of gas chambers at these camps, coupled with the lack of archeological evidence, means that reliance has to be placed on eye witness and circumstantial evidence".

Despite the great reliance placed on "eye witnesses", the judgment stated that "Irving had some valid comments to make about the various accounts given by survivors of the camp and by camp officials. Some of those accounts were given in evidence at the post-war trials. The possibility exists that some of these witnesses invented some or even all of the experiences which they describe. Irving suggested the possibility of cross-pollination, by which he meant the possibility that witnesses may have repeated and even embellished the (invented) accounts of other witnesses with the consequence that a corpus of false testimony is built up. Irving pointed out that parts of some of the accounts of some of the witnesses are obviously wrong or (like some of Olère’s drawings) clearly exaggerated. He suggested various motives why witnesses might have given false accounts, such as greed and resentment (in the case of survivors) and fear and the wish to ingratiate themselves with their captors (in the case of camp officials). Van Pelt accepted that these possibilities exist. I agree."

Claimed reliable witnesses and confessors by the judgment

The judgment gave special importance to the account of Henryk Tauber and stated that it "is so clear and detailed that, in my judgment, no objective historian would dismiss it as invention unless there were powerful reasons for doing so." See article on Henryk Tauber regarding revisionist criticisms.

The judgment also stated that "The evidence of other eye-witnesses, such as Höss and Broad, would in my view appear credible to a dispassionate student of Auschwitz." The British judge did not state a word on the evidence supporting that Höss was tortured while in British captivity. See the articles on Rudolf Höss and Pery Broad.

The judgment on Hans Aumeier (Kurt Aumeier): “Whilst there are clearly errors in his account, for the most part his recollections are convincing. It was of course legitimate for Irving to suggest that his account was the result of brutal pressure being brought to bear by his British captors, if he had evidence for such a suggestion. But it was not clear to me what evidence Irving was relying on." See the article on Hans Aumeier and Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre. Much of the evidence for torture at the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centres have appeared only after the Irving-Lipstadt trial.

The judgment on Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier: “vivid, detailed and credible evidence". See the article on Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier.

Speeches and statements by Himmler

The judgment stated that Irving at the trial (unlike most other Holocaust revisionists) stated that Himmler in the Posen speeches and other statements confessed the Holocaust. The trial debate in relation to the speeches involved alleged concealment by underlings and Hitler's alleged knowledge and complicity. Irving had criticized the authenticity of some of the records of the speeches, but argued that "retyping" was due to concealing information from Hitler by underlings, and not due to secretarial "retyping" of minor errors or postwar propaganda "retyping". The judgment rejected Irving's theory (but not that "retyping" had occurred) and stated that "in these three speeches Himmler was speaking, with remarkable frankness, about the murder of the Jews [...] the speeches provide powerful evidence that Hitler ordered that the extermination of the Jews should take place." See the articles on the Posen speeches (in particular the section "Critical parts retyped") and Heinrich Himmler.

"Convergence of evidence"

An important claim was that there was a "convergence of evidence" from different sources, which allegedly similarly supporting the politically correct version. See the article Holocaust convergence of evidence.

Leuchter Report

A significant part of the trial was spent discussing the 1988 Leuchter Report. Revisionists have argued that the judge ignored the later Rudolf Report as well as other investigations and accepted as valid claims that are demonstrably incorrect, such as a defense claim that blue wall staining from Zyklon B usage "could not have penetrated the brickwork more than the depth of a human hair. This contention is demonstrably incorrect. As several independent specialists have affirmed, similar blue “staining” visibly penetrated through the entire depth of brick walls of Auschwitz-Birkenau delousing (non-homicidal) gas chambers." See also Missing Zyklon B derivatives in claimed homicidal gas chamber walls argument and Holocaust material evidence.

Other less often mentioned aspects of the trial

A 2015 revisionist article in Smith's Report wrote that Irving stated at the opening of the trial that "I have never held myself out to be a Holocaust expert, nor have I written books about what is now called the Holocaust" and the judge stated specifically that "It is no part of my function to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime." However, the "Defendants’ legal team realized that Irving’s weaknesses lay with his various flamboyant statements about the Holocaust and made them the main issue of the trial."

The judgment stated that Irving had in some cases been falsely defamed."The Defendants made no attempt to prove the truth of Lipstadt’s claim that Irving was scheduled to speak at an anti-Zionist conference in Switzerland in 1992, which was also to be attended by various representatives of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Nor did they seek to justify Lipstadt’s claim that Irving has a self-portrait by Hitler hanging over his desk. Furthermore the Defendants have, as I have held, failed in their attempt to justify the defamatory imputations made against Irving in relation to the Goebbels diaries in the Moscow archive." It has been argued that "If Irving had stuck to these clear defamations and not gone off on his classification as a ‘Denier,’ he PROBABLY would have won his case."

The judgment also stated that "My assessment is that, as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military history Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the archives. He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years. It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating cross-examination that his knowledge of World War Two is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent. He was invariably quick to spot the significance of documents which he had not previously seen. Moreover he writes his military history in a clear and vivid style. I accept the favourable assessment by Professor Watt and Sir John Keegan of the calibre of Irving’s military history and reject as too sweeping the negative assessment of Evans".

Another seldom mentioned aspect is that "At the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial it was conceded by Lipstadt’s team of anti-revisionist Holocaust experts that prior to 1941 there was no Nazi policy to exterminate Jewry. Justice Gray noted: “It is common ground between the parties [Irving and Lipstadt’s team of Holocaust experts] that, until the latter part of 1941, the solution to the Jewish question which Hitler preferred was their mass deportation.” The anti-revisionist experts at the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial further admitted: “…that in the 1930s Hitler should not be understood to have been speaking in a genocidal terms."

The judge in the verdict wrote that "I did not derive much assistance from the debate as to how words such as ausrotten, vernichten, abschaffen, umsiedeln and abtransportieren are to be translated [...] depends on the context." Thus, the judge implied that these words must not necessarily mean "exterminate", as often claimed in politically correct interpretations and translations. See Meanings and translations of German words and Holocaust revisionism.

Disparity in economic resources

"A striking fact about Irving v. Penguin, et al. was the vast disparity in economic resources between the parties. The trial was not a “titanic struggle” but a David vs. Goliath affair, with David Irving in the role of David and Penguin Books as Goliath. The disparity showed itself in the legal team each side marshaled. Lipstadt hired British lawyer Anthony Julius, while Penguin hired libel experts Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman of media law firm Davenport Lyons. Together they briefed the barrister, Richard Rampton. Penguin also retained Heather Rogers as junior barrister. Lipstadt also engaged the firm of Mishcon de Rey. A veritable phalanx of solicitors, legal talent, staff and barristers represented the defendants. Irving, on the other hand, was unable to retain either counsel or barrister. He would show up at court alone and with his papers carried in a plastic shopping bag...

'...As the case expanded into a wide-ranging questioning of Irving’s competence as a historian, the power of a large purse was shown in the purchase of expert testimony. The defense spared no expense. Richard J. Evans was hired to justify, ex post facto, Lipstadt’s comment that Irving “falsified history.” Evans and his team spent two years examining Irving’s lifework in painful detail, and presented a 740-page report for the defense. He came up with 19 possible errors, as discussed below. An additional sum of over £400,000 was paid to 13 other witnesses who were brought into court, one after the other, to joust with Irving. The expense was so large that The London Times took note and printed an article entitled “Specialist witnesses do not come cheap,” mentioning the huge costs of “expert witnesses” in the case."

"Irving’s adversaries were also fabulously better funded. According to British press reports, generous financial aid for the Lipstadt-Penguin defense came from the American Jewish Committee, Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (co-chairman of the giant Seagram’s company, and president of the World Jewish Congress), and Steven Spielberg (filmmaker and Jewish activist)."

Alleged organized suppression campaign

Irving alleged that he had documented how various influential Jewish activist organizations had operated and collaborated to smear his reputation and destroy his career. These organizations included Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Israel’s Yad Vashem center, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and even the US taxpayer-funded United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Kevin MacDonald testified on Irving's behalf during the trial on Jewish activism in support of Jewish interests (including by using the Holocaust for such purposes) as well as on Lipstadt as a Jewish activist.

Drama film - "Denial"

The trial is depicted in a 2016 drama film with the title Denial. See the article on this topic for more details, including Holocaust revisionist criticisms of the depiction.

2006 Austrian sentencing and other Holocaust statements

A 2013 article stated that in 2006 he was "sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison for “trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust”. He was released after 13 months and banned from returning to the country. He has also been banned from Canada, Italy and Germany. [...] Since his conviction the historian has denied denying the Holocaust, conceding that millions of Jews did die in gas chambers. But in Peterborough he says: “If you read the memoirs of Churchill or Eisenhower or de Gaulle, they don’t mention it at all. It never happened as far as they were concerned.” In around 1970, he adds, the Jews were “advised by a PR firm to give it one name, stick to that name, and stick to those figures and gradually you’ll make billions out of this. That’s what happened.” Irving claims that Hitler was unaware of the atrocities being committed in his name, that Himmler’s fearsome Waffen-SS Nazi fighting force “had a completely clean reputation” and that Auschwitz is “hugely inflated and hyped up. It’s like Disney. I don’t go there. It has no part in history."

According to a 2017 article: "Now he believes at least 4m and possibly 6m Jewish people died, many of disease, though unquestionably most were murdered. He does not believe many died at Auschwitz, however. [...] the full extent of the Holocaust was kept from Himmler by Reinhard Heydrich, who everybody agrees was the prime architect of the programme. [...] Hitler knew nothing of the Final Solution because Heydrich also kept it from him."

Free to read books

Several of Irving's book are free to read by downloading from Irving's website. See the "External links" section. In some cases, newer editions of a book may have significant differences with older editions of the same book. See also: David Irving's famous biography Hess: The Missing Years (Archive).

See also

• Holocaust revisionism lite

External links

• Official site at FPP.co.uk
  • Free to read books
  • Bookstore
  • Irving Books at X
• The 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel -- 1988: David Irving

2000 libel case

• The Real Case for Auschwitz—Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed - Holocaust Handbooks
• Critique of the "Findings on Justification" by Judge Gray
• Critique of Claims Made by Robert Jan Van Pelt

Denial film

See the article Denial (2016 film)‎ and the external links there.

Codoh categories

• Category: Irving, David
• Category: Authors: David Irving
• Category: Lipstadt, Deborah
• Category: van Pelt, Robert J.
• Category: Browning, Christopher