Real History and David Irving

Focal Point Publications (FPP) began its operations in 1980, created by David Irving's Focus Group, a small, ad hoc society of Londoners interested in preserving the British way of life. For a while it issued an irregular newsletter, Focal Point, to a mailing list of about five hundred. The group spawned an informal private dining society, The Clarendon Club, which met irregularly until the activities of the traditional enemies of Free Speech made further meetings virtually impossible.

As these pressures began, roughly in 1982, FPP began to take action to preserve what Mr Irving calls Real History. He founded an International Campaign for Real History, conducting a campaign of historical lectures at universities and to public societies, which took him around the world several times. In 1987 an associated publisher in Australia issued the first volume of Mr Irving's biography of Winston Churchill.

Dr Goebbels In June 1989 FPP issued The Leuchter Report, a controversial, perhaps even flawed, first forensic investigation of the WW2 Nazi concentration camp site at Auschwitz. In 1991 FPP republished Hitler's War. The lavish quality of its output has attracted envy. Attempts to silence him redoubled. American publishers came under pressure not to publish US editions of FPP titles.

Ugly pressures are already beginning on the British trade press in an attempt to force FPP out of business. Mr Irving's flagship biography of the Nazi leader, followed in short order by a scientific edition of his transcript of the unpublished 1938 diaries of Dr Joseph Goebbels (right), then a biography of the Nazi propaganda minister and in 1997 by his history of the post-war Nuremberg trials. The year 2001 sees the publication of Churchill's War, vol. ii, a book on Heinrich Himmler's mysterious suicide, and a book by Mark Deavin on Harold Macmillan; future publications include a work on the Allied liberation of Dachau concentration camp.

Despite the continuing pressures to silence him, Mr Irving persists, with FPP, in what he describes as ploughing a straight furrow.

DAVID IRVING runs FPP as an equal-opportunity employer, allowing no discrimination on grounds of race, creed, or sex. His permanent salaried staff has included Barbadian, Sri Lankan, Jewish, and Punjabi staff. He will not publish manuscripts which do not meet his own criteria; he will not lend his name or authority to gratuitously offensive tracts, ad hominem attacks, or concealed or overt anti-Semitic, anti-German, or anti-anything-else propaganda. He accepts full personal responsibility for all the words published on this Website (but not for those to which, in the spirit of the Web, it offers links).