David Irving - WikiHQ

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author who has written on the military and political history of the Second World War, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a British court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.

Irving's works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it. Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were denounced by historians.

Irving was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents, which he held closely but stated were fully supportive of his conclusions. His 1964 book The Mare's Nest about Germany's V-weapons campaign of 1944–45 was praised for its deep research but criticised for minimising Nazi slave-labour programmes.

By the late 1980s Irving had placed himself in the fringes of the study of history, and had begun to turn to further extremes, possibly influenced by the 1988 trial of the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, led him openly to espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Irving's reputation as a historical author was further discredited in 2000, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray determined in his ruling that Irving wilfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians. The court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". The court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light. He has been proven to make falsified claims using forged documents, has been forced to retract false accusations against individuals, has been fined for libellous claims and has had to pay court costs after failing to prove that others have made libellous claims against him. He has been denied entry to various countries, expelled from others, and was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in Austria in accordance with the law prohibiting Nazi activities.

Early life

David John Cawdell Irving and his twin brother, Nicholas, were born in Hutton, Essex, on 24 March 1938, six months before the start of the undeclared German–Czechoslovak War, as Nazi Germany moved towards initiating the Second World War. The family lived in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex. Irving had another brother, John, and a sister, Jennifer. His father, John James Cawdell Irving (1898–1967), was a career naval officer and a commander in the Royal Navy. His mother, Beryl Irving (née Newington), was an illustrator and a writer of children's books.

During the Second World War Irving's father was an officer aboard the light cruiser HMS Edinburgh. On 30 April 1942, while escorting Convoy QP 11 in the Barents Sea, the ship was badly damaged by the German submarine U-456. Two days later, the ship was attacked by the German destroyers , and , and now beyond recovery, was abandoned then scuttled by a torpedo from HMS Foresight. Irving's father survived but severed all links with his wife and children after the incident.

Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum: "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". According to his twin brother, Nicholas, David was a provocateur and prankster since his youth. He said that "David used to run toward bombed out houses shouting 'Heil Hitler!, a statement which Irving denied. Irving later resumed his studies but had to drop out again for the same reason.

thumb|Irving speaking as the Labour Party candidate during a mock election at Brentwood School, May 1955

Carnival Times article

thumb|Irving with [[Arthur Harris|Arthur "Bomber" Harris in 1962]]

Irving's time as an editor of the Carnival Times, a student rag mag of the University of London Carnival Committee, became controversial in 1959 when he added a "secret supplement" to the magazine. This supplement contained an article in which he called Hitler the "greatest unifying force Europe has known since Charlemagne". Although Irving deflected criticism by characterising the Carnival Times as "satirical", he also stated that "the formation of a European Union is interpreted as building a group of superior peoples, and the Jews have always viewed with suspicion the emergence of any 'master-race' (other than their own, of course)". Opponents also viewed a cartoon included in the supplement as racist and criticised another article in which Irving wrote that the British press was owned by Jews. Volunteers were later recruited to remove and destroy the supplements before the magazine's distribution.

The Destruction of Dresden

Irving tried to join the Royal Air Force (RAF), but was deemed to be medically unfit.

After serving in 1959 as editor of the University of London Carnival Committee's journal, instead of doing national service, Irving left for West Germany, where he worked as a steelworker in a Thyssen AG steel works in the Ruhr area and learned the German language. He then moved to Francoist Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an air base.

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 widely accepted in many standard reference works. In later editions of the book over the next three decades, he gradually adjusted the figure downwards to 50,000–100,000. According to the historian Richard J. Evans, at the 2000 libel trial that Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt, Irving based his estimates of the dead of Dresden on the word of one individual who provided no supporting documentation, used a document forged by the Nazis, and described one witness who was a urologist as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. The doctor later complained about being misidentified by Irving, and further, that he, the doctor, was only repeating rumours about the death toll. According to an investigation by Dresden City Council in 2008, casualties at Dresden were estimated as 22,700–25,000 dead.

Irving had based his numbers on what purported to be Tagesbefehl 47 ("Daily Order 47", TB 47), a document promulgated by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and on claims made after the war by a former Dresden Nazi functionary, Hans Voigt, without verifying them against official sources available in Dresden. Irving's estimates and sources were first disputed by Walter Weidauer, Mayor of Dresden 1946–1958, in his own account of the Dresden bombing. When it was later confirmed that the TB 47 used was a forgery, Irving published a letter to the editor in The Times on 7 July 1966 retracting his estimates, writing that he had "no interest in promoting or perpetuating false legends". In 1977 the real document TB 47 was located in Dresden by Götz Bergander.

Despite acknowledging that the copy of "TB 47" he had used was inaccurate, Irving argued during the late 1980s and 1990s that the death toll at Dresden was much higher than the accepted estimates: in several speeches during this period, he said that 100,000 or more people had been killed in the bombing of Dresden. In some of the speeches Irving also argued or implied that the raid was comparable to the Nazis' killing of Jews.

1963 burglary of Irving's flat

In November 1963 Irving called the Metropolitan Police with suspicions he had been the victim of a burglary by three men who had gained access to his flat in Hornsey, London, by claiming to be engineers from the General Post Office. The anti-fascist activist Gerry Gable was convicted in January 1964, along with Manny Carpel. They were fined £20 each.

Subsequent works

After the success of the Dresden book, Irving continued writing, including some works of negationist history, although his 1964 work The Mare's Nest – an account of the German V-weapons programme and the Allied intelligence countermeasures against it – was widely praised when published and continues to be well regarded. Michael J. Neufeld of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has described The Mare's Nest as "the most complete account on both Allied and German sides of the V-weapons campaign in the last two years of the war."

right|upright|thumb|Irving once said he works to remove the "slime" applied to the reputation of [[Adolf Hitler (pictured).]]

Irving translated the Memoirs of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in 1965 (edited by Walter Görlitz). In 1967 he published Accident: The Death of General Sikorski. In this 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. This view was criticised by Colin Smyth in his 1969 book The Assassination of Winston Churchill. Irving sued Smyth for libel but was unsuccessful and ordered to pay costs.

Also in 1967, Irving published two more works: The Virus House, an account of the German nuclear program during World War II, for which Irving conducted many interviews, and The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17. In the latter book he accused the British escort group commander Commander Jack Broome of cowardice in relation to the destruction of Convoy PQ 17. Broome sued Irving for libel in 1968. The High Court found in Broome's favour in 1970, with this ruling later being upheld by the House of Lords. Irving was forced to pay £40,000 in damages; this included £25,000 of exemplary damages which are only awarded when it is proven that the defendant deliberately committed a tort with the aim of making money.

After PQ-17 Irving largely shifted to writing biographies. In 1968 he 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 Donald Cameron Watt. As a result of Irving's success with Dresden, members of Germany's extreme right wing assisted him in contacting surviving members of Hitler's inner circle. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Irving claimed to have developed sympathies towards them. Many ageing former mid- and high-ranked Nazis saw a potential friend in Irving and donated diaries and other material. Irving described his historical work to Rosenbaum as an act of "stone-cleaning" of Hitler, in which he cleared off the "slime" that he felt had been unjustly applied to Hitler's reputation. Irving asked Kempner whether the "official record of the Nuremberg Trials was falsified", and told him that he was planning to go to Washington, D.C., to compare the sound recordings of Luftwaffe Field-Marshal Erhard Milch's March 1946 evidence with the subsequently published texts to find proof that evidence given at Nuremberg was "tampered with and manipulated". Upon his return to the United States, Kempner wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that Irving expressed many "anti-American and anti-Jewish statements". The publisher of Hitler und seine Feldherren was later required to pay damages in relation to this claim.

Revisionism and denialism

Hitler's War

thumb|In Hitler's War, Irving used an undated memo written by [[Hans Lammers (pictured), the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, to the Justice Minister, saying: "The Führer has repeatedly pronounced that he wants the solution of the Jewish Question put off until after the war is over."]]

In 1977 Irving published Hitler's War, the first of his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler. Irving's intention in Hitler's War was 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 argued had been slandered by historians. In Hitler's War, Irving tried to "view the situation as far as possible through Hitler's eyes, from behind his desk". Irving also argued that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust: while not denying its occurrence, he argued that Heinrich Himmler, the of the (SS), and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich were its originators and architects. Irving made much of the lack of any known written order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust; he offered to pay £1,000 to anyone who could find such an order.

Reception

Critical reaction to Hitler's War was generally negative. Reviewers took issue with Irving's factual claims as well as his conclusions.

In Hitler's War, Irving quoted an undated memorandum by Hans Lammers, the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, to the Reich Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger, saying: "the Führer has repeatedly pronounced that he wants the solution of the Jewish question put off until after the war is over". Irving took this as proof that Hitler ordered not to exterminate the Jews. Later, Irving falsely claimed that "no other historians have quoted this document, possibly finding its content hard to reconcile with their obsessively held views" about Hitler's responsibility for the Holocaust. The memorandum has no date and no signature, although historians estimate that it was issued at some point between 1941 and 1942 by looking at the other documents where the memorandum is located. They have concluded that the memorandum was more than likely from late 1941 when Hitler was still advocating the expulsion of the Jews, rather than later when he advocated their extermination. Sydnor also pointed out that Hitler had received an SS report in November 1942 which contained a mention of 363,211 Russian Jews executed by the between August and November 1942. Sydnor remarked that Irving's statement that the were in charge in the death camps seemed to indicate that Irving was not even familiar with the history of the Holocaust, as the were in fact mobile death squads who had nothing to do with the death camps.

Martin Broszat wrote that: "He [Irving] is too eager to accept authenticity for objectivity, is overly hasty in interpreting superficial diagnoses and often seems insufficiently interested in complex historical interconnections and in structural problems that transcend the mere recording of historical facts, but are essential for their evaluation". Broszat argued that in Hitler's War, Irving was too concerned with the "antechamber aspects" of Hitler's headquarters, and had distorted historical facts in Hitler's favor. In addition, Irving, despite being married, became increasingly open about his affairs with other women, all of which were detailed in his self-published diary. . Irving's first marriage ended in divorce in 1981.

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):

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 characterised 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. 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. 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".

Hitler Diaries

In 1983 , a weekly German news magazine, purchased 61 volumes of Hitler's supposed diaries for DM 9 million and published excerpts from them. Irving played a major role in exposing the Hitler Diaries as a hoax. In October 1982 Irving had purchased, from the same source as Stern 1983 purchase, 800 pages of documents relating to Hitler, only to conclude that many of the documents were forgeries. Irving was amongst the first to identify the diaries as forgeries, and to draw media attention. He went so far as to crash the press conference held by Hugh Trevor-Roper at the magazine's offices in Hamburg on 25 April 1983 to denounce the diaries as a forgery and Trevor-Roper for endorsing the diaries as genuine. Irving's performance at the 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 the Today television show as a featured guest. 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. 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.

A week later, on 2 May, Irving asserted that many of the diary documents appeared to be genuine: at the same press conference, Irving took the opportunity to promote his translation of the memoirs of Hitler's physician Theodor Morell. Subsequently, Irving conformed when the diaries were declared a forgery by consensus. 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. The book was published in 1987 as Churchill's War, The Struggle for Power.

In 1989 Irving published his biography of Hermann Göring.

Holocaust denial

Movement towards Holocaust denial

thumb|200px|A note in Reichsführer-SS [[Heinrich Himmler's telephone log on 30 November 1941 stating "no liquidation" was later used by Irving as his central argument in trying to prove that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust.]]

Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust changed. Since the late 1970s, he has either questioned or denied Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust and whether or not the Nazis had a plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Irving claimed Hitler only used antisemitism as a political platform, and that after he came to power in 1933 he lost interest in it, while Joseph Goebbels and other Nazis continued to espouse antisemitism. In 1977 on a BBC1 television programme, he said that Hitler "became a statesman and then a soldier ... and the Jewish problem was a nuisance to him, an embarrassment." In 1983, Irving summarised his views about Hitler and the Jews when he said that "probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich, certainly when the war broke out, was Adolf Hitler. He was the one who was doing everything he could to prevent things nasty happening to them." On 30 November 1941 Heinrich Himmler went to the Wolf's Lair for a private conference with Hitler and during it the fate of some Berlin Jews was mentioned. At 1.30 pm Himmler was instructed to tell Reinhard Heydrich that the Jews were not to be liquidated. Irving falsely claimed that Himmler telephoned SS General Oswald Pohl, the overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the order: "Jews are to stay where they are" (Himmler actually referred to "administrative leaders of the SS" needing to stay where they were). 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 happened at all, his book was not part of the "anti-Semitic canon". In 1980 Irving received an invitation to speak at a Holocaust-denial conference, which he refused on the grounds that his appearance there would damage his reputation. In 1982 Irving temporarily stopped writing and made an attempt to unify all of the various far-right splinter groups in Britain into one party called Focus, in which he would play a leading role. but his efforts to move into politics, which he regarded at the time as very important, failed due to fiscal problems.

Following the failure of Focus, in September 1983, Irving for the first time attended a conference of the IHR. At that conference, Irving repeated his claims that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust because he was "so busy being a soldier". In a speech at that conference, Irving stated: "Isn't it right for Tel Aviv to claim now that David Irving is talking nonsense and of course Adolf Hitler must have known about what was going in Auschwitz and Treblinka, and then in the same breath to claim that, of course our beloved Mr. Begin didn't know what was going on in Sabra and Chatilla". In the same speech, Irving stated that he operated in such a way as to bring himself maximum publicity. Irving stated that: "I have at home... a filing cabinet full of documents which I don't issue all at once. I keep them: I issue them a bit at a time. When I think my name hasn't been in the newspapers for several weeks, well, then I ring them up and I phone them and I say: 'What about this one, then?

In a 1986 speech in Australia, Irving argued that photographs of Holocaust survivors and dead taken in early 1945 by Allied soldiers were proof that the Allies were responsible for the Holocaust, not the Germans. Irving claimed that the Holocaust was not the work of Nazi leaders, but rather of "nameless criminals",

By the mid-1980s Irving associated himself with the IHR, began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), and publicly denied that the Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II. Irving in his revised edition of Hitler's War in 1991 removed all mentions of "gas chambers" and the word "Holocaust". He defended the revisions by stating, "You won't find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even in a footnote, why should [you]. If something didn't happen, then you don't even dignify it with a footnote."

Irving was present at a memorial service for Hans-Ulrich Rudel in January 1983 after the latter's death, organised by the DVU and its leader Gerhard Frey, delivering a speech, and was given the Hans-Ulrich-Rudel-Award by Frey in June 1985. Irving was a frequent speaker for the DVU in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but the relationship ended in 1993 apparently because of concerns by the DVU that Irving's espousal of Holocaust denial might lead to the DVU being banned. According to Zündel, Irving "thought I was 'Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!, and asked Zündel to stay away from him. In addition, the publication in 1987 of the book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945 by Ernst Nolte, in which Nolte flirted with Holocaust denial as a serious argument, encouraged Irving to become more open in associating with Zündel.

In 1989 Irving during a speech told an audience that "there is not one shower bath in any of the concentration or slave labour camps that turns out to have been some kind of gas chamber." He described Jewish Holocaust survivors as "liars, psychiatric cases and extortionists." In 1990, Irving said on 5 March that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that "30,000 people at the most were murdered in Auschwitz ... that's about as many as we Englishmen killed in a single night in Hamburg." He reiterated his claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz on 5 March 1990 to an audience in Germany:

During the same speech, he said, "I and, increasingly, other historians ... are saying, the Holocaust, the gas chamber establishments in Auschwitz did not exist." He continued: