 David
Irving
Year of birth : 1938 Residence: London Publications: Irving is the author of
numerous books and articles about World War II. He
also posts a monthly "Action
Report" on his Web site. Ideology: Holocaust denial Organizations: Irving founded his own
publishing house, Focal
Point Publications, which he uses to distribute
his works. He also lectures
internationally and has appeared at conferences
held by the Institute
for Historical Review (the most active
Holocaust- denial organization in the United
States) and the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Associations : Institute for Historical
Review, National Alliance, several European
far-right groups and Holocaust deniers Legal issues : The governments of Canada,
Austria, Germany and Australia have barred Irving
from entering their countries. He has been
convicted
of defaming the memory of the dead in Germany and
has lost civil
suits in England and the United States. His
most significant legal
battle ended unsuccessfully in April 2000 when
a British court ruled
that American historian Deborah Lipstadt had
not libeled Irving when she called him a Holocaust
denier. In July 2001, an appeals court denied
his request for another trial. David Irving is unique among modern Holocaust
deniers for having first established a reputation
as a popular, if controversial, chronicler of World
War II. This reputation, combined with his flair
for self-promotion and involvement in high-profile
lawsuits, made him one of the best-known Holocaust
deniers in the world. He suffered a major blow in
April 2000, however, when he lost an internationally
publicized legal battle with Professor Deborah
Lipstadt, whom he had accused of libel, before a
London court. (In July 2001, his request for a new
trial was turned down by an appeals court.) Labeled
a Holocaust denier and anti-Semite by Justice
Charles Gray, and increasingly shunned by
mainstream publishing houses, it is unlikely that
Irving will ever regain the mainstream scholarly
cachet he once enjoyed. Nonetheless, he continues
to tour and raise money, and he remains one of the
world's most effective purveyors of Holocaust
denial. Early Life and Writings David John Cawdell Irving was born in 1938. He
was considered a gifted student in grammar school,
and in 1957 he entered the physics program at
Imperial College in London. He dropped out in 1959
due to a lack of funds, but not before achieving
notoriety for his rightist writings, which appeared
in the student newspaper Phoenix, and for
his editorship of the London University Carnival
Committee's journal, Carnival Times. In the
latter case, Irving published a special supplement
to the paper that included racist cartoons, a
"spirited defense" of South African apartheid, an
appreciative article about Nazi Germany and the
allegation that "the national press is owned by
Jews." In the ensuing uproar, Irving was removed
from his position as editor. In an interview with
The Daily Mail printed at the time, Irving
was quoted as saying: "I belong to no political
party. But you can call me a mild
fascist if you like. I have just come back from
Madrid.…I returned through Germany and visited
Hitler's eyrie at Berchtesgaden. I regard it as a
shrine." In a 1981 interview,
Irving denied having made these statements. Following his departure from the college, Irving
worked as a steelworker in the Ruhr Valley in
Germany. After a year, having become fluent in
German, he returned to University College in London
to complete his degree, which he thought would be
necessary to attain "higher executive jobs." To
support himself while enrolled, he worked as a
night watchman and wrote articles for local
newspapers about his experiences in Germany. Also
at this time he began researching and writing what
would become his first book, The
Destruction of Dresden. By 1962, according
to his own account, he contracted with a magazine
to write a series of articles on air warfare.
Supporting himself with his writing, Irving decided
that he had no further need for college. He would
later say, "After two years at University College,
I decided to devote myself entirely to a career of
professional writing about history, and left
without taking the
degree."[1] In 1963, Irving, only 25, published The
Destruction of Dresden. The book addressed the
February 1945 Allied
bombardment of that city, in which tens of
thousands of German civilians died and which left
the city nearly razed. Because casualties were so
high, historians since the war have debated the
morality of the bombing, and there has been some
debate as to how many Germans were
killed.
Irving's book, however, seemed designed rather to
sensationalize the tragedy than to weigh the
historical evidence. As historian Richard
Evans (right) recently demonstrated while
testifying as an expert
witness for the defense in the Irving v.
Lipstadt trial, Irving reported the death toll
at 10 times the most reliable estimate. The book
became an immediate bestseller nonetheless and may
still be the most widely read of Irving's
works. In retrospect, the inaccuracies, omissions and
distortions that Irving used in order to arrive at
his figures in The Destruction of Dresden
come as no surprise. Throughout his career he has
sought to rehabilitate the image of the Nazi
regime, and this inclination led him ultimately to
deny the existence of gas chambers in Nazi
concentration camps and the genocide of the Jews.
In a similar but less spectacular way, by
manipulating and misrepresenting historical data in
The Destruction of Dresden, Irving was able
to exaggerate the already horrifying Allied actions
in Dresden by an order of magnitude, thereby
suggesting a moral equivalency between the Nazi
regime and the Allied governments (or even that the
Allies were "worse"). Indeed, since the book's
initial publication in 1963, Irving has lectured
extensively on the subject of "Allied war crimes"
in Dresden while minimizing or denying Nazi war
crimes. In 1995, Irving reprinted the book himself,
adding the phrase Apocalypse 1945 to the
title. Irving produced several other works following
The Destruction of Dresden. In 1963, he
published The
Mare's Nest, a study of Germany's
development of secret weapons during World War II;
in 1964, The
Virus House, on the German effort to develop an
atomic bomb. A few years later, in 1967, The
Destruction of Convoy PQ17 described a failed
arctic expedition, and Accident
- The Death of General Sikorski suggested that
Sikorski, the Polish leader in exile during
World War II, had been assassinated by order of
Winston Churchill. Hitler's War Irving gained wider notoriety 10 years later
with the 1977 publication of Hitler's
War, a 900-page World War II narrative told
"from behind the Fuhrer's desk," "through Hitler's
eyes." Irving later explained that he intended
Hitler's War to clean Hitler's historical
record of the "grime and discoloration" that had
accumulated since World War II. He concluded that
although Hitler was a "powerful and relentless
military commander," he was also a "lax and
indecisive political leader" who ignored internal
German affairs of state. Completely focused on the
military aspects of the war, "[Hitler's]
grip on his subordinates weakened with each passing
year." In fact, Irving argued, as a result of
Hitler's weak leadership, domestic policy was
controlled by whoever was most powerful in each
sector - by Hermann Göring as head of
the powerful economic agency, the Four-Year Plan;
by Hans Lammers as chief of the Reich
Chancellery; or by Martin Borman, the Nazi
party boss; or by Heinrich Himmler, minister
of the interior and Reichfuhrer of the evil-famed
SS. The depiction of Hitler as politically limited
led to Irving's most startling claim: that Hitler
had little knowledge of, and no part in, the Jewish
genocide. Irving acknowledged that as a young
politician Hitler realized that anti-Semitism was
"a powerful vote-catching force," but he insisted
that once the Austrian had attained power, he "paid
only lip service to that part of his Party creed."
In Irving's view, the planning, implementation and
responsibility for the systematic murder of the
Jews rested with those under Hitler - subordinate
"Nazi gangsters," Irving called them - most
importantly Heinrich Himmler. As late as 1943,
Irving argued, Hitler knew nothing of the death
camps operating in occupied German territory. From the outset, Irving's conclusions and
methods in Hitler's War elicited widespread
criticism from historians. Walter Laqueur of
Georgetown University, writing in The New York
Times Book Review of April 3, 1977, stated that
Hitler's War reads like the plea of an advocate who
knows from the very beginning what he intends to
prove and who marshals his evidence to his end
relentlessly and with an enthusiasm worthy of a
better cause. The result is a book of value to a
few dozen military historians capable of
separating new facts from old fiction, of
differentiating between fresh, documentary
material and unsupported claims, distortions,
and sheer fantasies. British historian Alan Bullock, in The
New York Review of Books (May 26, 1977), said
of Irving's portrayal of Hitler as a "weak" leader
that "there is so great a volume of evidence
against such a view that it is astonishing anyone
can seriously suggest it." John
Lukács, in the National
Review (August 19, 1977), called the book
"appalling," containing "hundreds of errors: wrong
names, wrong dates and, what is worse, statements
about events, including battles, that did not
really take place." Lukacs concluded that these
flaws did not merely reflect "inadequate
research…technical mistakes or oversights.
They are the result of the dominant tendency of the
author's mind." Reviewers had further opportunity to explore
Irving's "dominant tendency" when he released
The
Trail of the Fox, a biography of Nazi
general Erwin Rommel, shortly after the
publication of Hitler's War. David
Pryce-Jones wrote in The New York Times
Book Review (November 12, 1977): Like all Irving's work, this goes
beyond revisionism: Hitler, his lieutenants and
his creed are to be pure and shining, cleansed
of the crimes committed in their name by tainted
degenerates whom Irving keeps in the shadows out
of sight. Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda might
have hoped for a postwar line like this. The release of Hitler's War also led
reviewers to revisit some of Irving's earlier
works, where they encountered the same patterns of
distortion. In Accident: The Death of General
Sikorski (1967), Irving attempted to defame
Winston Churchill, claiming that he ordered the
assassination of Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Polish
Prime Minister-in-exile. In response, British
historian Hugh Trevor-Roper observed (London
Sunday Times Weekly Review, June 12, 1977): It is well known that some years ago
Mr. Irving convinced himself that General
Sikorski, who died in an air crash at Gibraltar,
was "assassinated" by Winston Churchill, to whom
in fact his death was a political calamity. Not
a shred of evidence or probability has ever been
produced in support of this theory and when it
was tested in the courts, Mr. Irving's only
"evidence" was shown to be a clumsy misreading
of a manuscript diary (I have myself seen the
diary and feel justified in using the work
"clumsy"). Toward the Radical Right and Holocaust Denial
By 1978, therefore,
scholars largely
dismissed Irving's methods and conclusions, though
many acknowledged his skill at unearthing
previously unknown archival material. Publishers in
England and the United States continued to print
his books, which sold well in the popular market.
In ensuing years, however, Irving's views veered
still further right. He developed connections with
extremist organizations in Germany and the United
States and articulated theories that were
increasingly critical of what he came to call the
"Holocaust legend."[2] Irving and the Deutsche Volksunion Irving began speaking to meetings of the German
political party Deutsche Volksunion (DVU) in 1982.
Though not banned or illegal, the DVU had been
categorized as "Right Wing Extremist" since the
early 1970s by West Germany's Office for the
Protection of the Constitution (the government body
responsible for safeguarding democratic
institutions, as mandated by the Basic Laws of
1949). In a 1985 report, the OPC described the
DVU's platform as including "hatred against
foreigners, anti-Semitism, playing down [the
crimes] of the National Socialist terror regime
and disparagement of democratic institutions."
(Irving demonstrated his usual disingenuousness
when he recently referred to the DVU as a
"longstanding democratic party" - a true statement
only if one defines "democratic party" as a party
that has not been banned by a democratic
government.) As early as 1977 the DVU had given an
award to pioneering American Holocaust denier
Arthur Butz, author of The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century. Irving's signature themes - the rehabilitation
of Hitler, downplaying the Holocaust and condemning
Allied actions - fit well with the DVU program; the
subject of his first speeches for the party -
during a tour of ten German cities - was "The
Unatoned Holocaust - The Expulsion of the Germans."
For the next 12 years he continued to stump for the
DVU, but following his conversion to hard-core
Holocaust denial in 1988 (see below), party leaders
began to consider him a liability: his
outspokenness threatened to entangle the party in
legal action brought by the German government. His
relationship with the party apparently ended in
1993. Irving and the Institute for Historical
Review Since its founding in 1979, the California-based
Institute for Historical Review has been the
foremost Holocaust-denial organization in the
United States. Its two main projects have been
publishing the bimonthly Journal of Historical
Review, which contains
ersatz scholarly
articles "disproving" various aspects of the
Holocaust, and its occasional Holocaust-denial
conferences, which attract an international coterie
of "revisionists." Irving's relationship with the IHR began in
September 1983 when he appeared before the Fifth
International Revisionist Conference in Los
Angeles. In the course of a speech on "Contemporary
History and Historiography," he restated his
Hitler's War thesis, to wit: "There is a
whole chain of evidence from 1938 right through to
October 1943, possibly even later, indicating that
Hitler was completely in the dark about anything
that may have been going on" in Nazi-controlled
territories. For good measure, he added that the
German leader was "probably the biggest friend the
Jews had in the Third Reich, certainly when the war
broke out….He was the one who was doing
everything he could to prevent things nasty
happening to them (sic)." As radical as these
statements were, Irving realized that, for the
dedicated deniers of the IHR, they didn't go far
enough. Reflecting on his own observation that
Hitler was unaware of "anything that may have been
going on," Irving explained: I use these words very closely. I am
sure you realize that I take a slightly
different line from several people here. I would
specify as follows: I would say I am satisfied
in my own mind that in various locations Nazi
criminals, acting probably without direct orders
from above, did carry out liquidations of groups
of people including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals,
mentally incurable people and the rest. I am
quite plain about that in my own mind. I can't
prove it, I haven't gone into that, I haven't
investigated that particular aspect of history
but from the documents I have seen, I've got the
kind of gut feeling which suggests to me that
that is probably accurate. Several months after the conference, Robert
Faurisson, a French Holocaust denier and
member of the Journal of Historical Review's
Editorial Advisory Committee, published "A
Challenge to David Irving" in the Journal. He
derided Irving's "gut feeling" about the Holocaust
as unworthy of a serious historian, who should only
rely on duly substantiated evidence. Faurisson
concluded that Irving's belief that Hitler knew
nothing about any mass killings was only true
because no mass killings took place. There is no
record of any direct response from Irving to
Faurisson. In the mid-1980s, Irving worked on
Churchill's War, whose conceit was to tell
the story of World War II from,
supposedly,
Churchill's point of view. Not surprisingly, Irving
portrayed Churchill as a warmonger whose reckless
policies forced the start of the war. Even here,
however, Irving did not deny the existence of gas
chambers or the extermination of Jews under the
Nazi regime. Nevertheless, there are indications that by the
mid-1980's Irving was gradually moving toward
denial of the basic facts of the Holocaust. This
evolution is most evident in his estimates of the
number of Jewish victims of the Nazis. In a 1986
interview in Australia, Irving referred to the
Jewish victims as "millions of Jews,
or…hundreds of thousands of Jews - I'm not
going to name a figure." In 1988, he testified
on behalf of Ernst
Zündel, a Canadian resident being
prosecuted by the government there for
disseminating neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denial
materials. Irving said: I am not familiar with any documentary
evidence of any such figure as six
million…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
six million…. Irving the Denier By all accounts, including his own, Irving's
"conversion" to hard-core Holocaust denial took
place sometime around the Zundel trial in 1988.
Zundel's defense team had commissioned Fred
A. Leuchter Jr., a
self-described
engineer from Massachusetts who specialized in
designing execution apparatus, to investigate
whether the Nazis had used gas chambers to kill
Jews. In his findings, Leuchter claimed that
samples he (illegally)
chipped off the walls of the gas chamber at
Auschwitz did not contain residue of the cyanide
gas recorded as having been used there. When Irving
read The Leuchter Report, he called it
"shattering in the significance of its discovery."
He elaborated: If a future historian was to be writing
the history of the Holocaust controversy, then
undoubtedly they can no longer ignore a document
of this validity (sic)….It is clearly a
document written by somebody in the position to
know what he is writing about….I'm very
impressed…by the scientific manner of
presentation, by the expertise that's been shown
by it and by the very novel conclusion that
[Leuchter] has arrived at….I must
say that as a historian I'm rather ashamed it
never occurred to me to make this kind of
investigation on this particular controversy. In fact, The Leuchter Report was
discredited within days of its introduction to the
court. Leuchter identified himself as the Chief
Engineer of Fred Leuchter Associates in Boston, but
the prosecution established that he had no
engineering education or training (his degree from
Boston University was in history). Under court
questioning, he also demonstrated that he was
unfamiliar with basic facts and documents about the
gas chambers. The court ruled that Leuchter did not
possess the qualifications or knowledge to serve as
an expert
witness for the defense. The New Disciple Irving remained committed to The Leuchter
Report. In 1989 his own publishing house issued
the study in a book version with an introduction
by Irving himself. This short essay may include his
first explicit public denial of the Holocaust: he
calls Nazi executions of millions of Jews a
"well-financed and brilliantly successful postwar
publicity campaign," modeled on "the original
ingenious plan of the British Psychological Warfare
Executive" in 1942 to disseminate a similar
"propaganda story" against Germany. He also
described the "Auschwitz concentration camp and its
'gas chambers'" as the "holiest shrines" of a "new
twentieth century religion." At the end of the
essay Irving challenged the "incorrigible
historians, statesmen and publicists" who persist
in their belief in the Nazi genocide of the Jews to
"explain to me as an intelligent and critical
student of modern history why there is no
significant trace of any cyanide compound in the
building
which they have always identified as the former gas
chambers." Irving appeared again at the Institute for
Historical Review's convention in 1989, the year
following the Zundel trial, and has since been a
frequent participant
in the organization's functions. His books are sold
through the IHR's Journal of Historical
Review, and the IHR has even organized
mini-conventions for local supporters when Irving
passes through the United States. Despite his
consistent claims to the contrary, he also began
associating with the neo-Nazi National Alliance
during the 1990s. Between 1995 and 1998, Irving
addressed National Alliance events at least seven
times. Hardcore As his appearances among bigots and neo-Nazis
suggest, Irving has become increasingly emphatic
and sweeping in his denial of the Holocaust.
Although The Leuchter Report denied the
existence of gas chambers only at Auschwitz,
Birkenau and Majdanek, Irving extended Leuchter's
claims in a 1990 speech to include Treblinka
and "other so-called extermination camps in the
East." In his 1991 edition of Hitler's War,
he deleted all references to the extermination of
the Jews "because it never occurred." He was
forced, therefore, to explain away thousands of
pages of testimony at Nuremberg. Like many other
deniers, he claimed, in Nuremberg:
The Last Battle (1996), that the
proceedings against Nazi war criminals were mere
"show-trials" staged by the victorious Americans
and British - themselves guilty of crimes against
humanity. Using a method to which he resorts when
treating evidence that disproves his conclusions,
he claimed that Nuremberg prosecutors forged or
tampered with incriminating documents used in the
trials. Another challenge for Irving has been the
survivors of the Holocaust, who experienced
firsthand the horrors of Nazi policies. Irving told
a Canadian audience in 1990 that people claimed to
be survivors because "there's money involved and
they can get a good compensation cash payment out
of it." He has also suggested that many of the
survivors are mentally unstable; he told the
magazine CODE in 1990 that
"the psychiatrists should concern themselves with
this matter some time. There are many cases of mass
hysteria." In a 1991 speech in Ontario, Irving
coarsely expressed his disdain: Ridicule alone isn't enough, you've got
to be tasteless about it. You've got to say
things like "More women died on the back seat of
Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick
than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz."
[Applause] Now you think that's
tasteless, what about this? I'm forming an
association especially dedicated to all these
liars, the ones
[Website note:
like
Wilkormiski] who try and kid people that
they were in these concentration camps, it's
called the Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the
Holocaust and other liars, A-S-S-H-O-L-E-S.
Can't get more tasteless than that, but you've
got to be tasteless because these people deserve
our contempt. Irving has also become less discreet in using
anti-Jewish language. He has referred to Jews as
"Shylocks" and "our traditional
enemy" and has dwelled on the "international
Jewish conspiracy" against him; he says the "big
lie" of the Holocaust is "designed to distract
attention from even bigger crimes than what the
Nazis did…designed to justify, both in arrears
and in advance, the bigger crimes in the financial
world and elsewhere that are being committed by the
survivors of the Holocaust." Baby Aryan Irving has made some notably racist remarks as
well. In a 1994 diary entry (revealed in his court
proceedings against Deborah Lipstadt in 1999),
Irving memorialized a poem he composed for his
young daughter (which is, according to 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.
More prosaically, in 1992 Irving maintained: 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. [cheers and
laughter] 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.[4] Fallout Because many Western democracies have passed
laws against Holocaust denial, racial incitement
and defaming the memory of the dead, Irving has
frequently come into conflict with the governments
of countries he has sought to enter. In early 1992,
German
authorities fined him 10,000 marks (about $6,000)
after he violated a federal law against public
expression of the "Auschwitz Lie." Appealing the
fine, an unrepentant Irving declared, "there were
no gas chambers at Auschwitz, I will not change my
opinion." (His fine was subsequently tripled.) In
1993, he was banned
from the country. His criminal convictions in
Germany led Canadian
authorities to deny him entrance as well; he was
deported
from Canada in 1992 after he admitted having lied
to a Canadian customs official. Also in 1993 Irving
was barred from visiting Australia
on the grounds that he was "likely to become
involved in activities disruptive to, or violence
threatening harm to, the Australian community."
Irving fought the ruling for several years, even
threatening defamation
proceedings against Australian Prime Minister
John Howard. He failed to win entry to the
country, however, which stated in 1996 that
"applicants with comparable criminal records are
routinely refused [entry]" by the
Australian Department of Immigration. Along with legal difficulties, Irving has had
trouble with publishers, who have rejected his
manuscripts in recent years. In 1991, Macmillan
UK Ltd chose to stop accepting his new works
and allowed already published books to lapse out of
print. In 1996, St.
Martin's Press, a New York publishing house,
canceled its plan to publish Irving's biography of
Joseph
Goebbels after receiving complaints
from Jewish organizations. St. Martin's called
the work "effectively anti- Semitic." Irving
currently self-publishes through his London-based
Focal Point Publications. In 1999, he urged his
supporters to invest in Focal Point, promising a 10
percent return. Whatever the success of the scheme,
he has been able to reissue several of his
out-of-print works, including Hitler's War. The Penguin-Lipstadt Trial His financial needs may
have been part of the motivation for filing
suit in a British court against American
Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University and
her British publisher, Penguin Books, Ltd. in 1996.
Irving charged that Lipstadt committed libel when
she characterized him as a Holocaust denier who
tended to "misstate, misquote, falsify statistics
and falsely attribute conclusions to reliable
sources" in her book, Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Although
Lipstadt's book was published in the United States
in 1993, Irving waited to sue until it was printed
by a British publisher. American law places the
burden of proof on the accuser; to win, Irving
would have had to prove that Lipstadt had lied
about him in her book. In addition, under the
provisions of American libel law, Irving would
undoubtedly be considered a "public figure," and
thereby would also need to prove that Lipstadt
wrote about him with malice. The libel laws in
England, by contrast, place the burden of proof on
the defendant. By suing Lipstadt in his own
country, Irving forced her to prove that her
statements about him were truthful. David
Irving in the USA Lipstadt and Penguin mounted a vigorous defense.
They commissioned
several expert
witnesses who testified with detailed written
reports that Irving systematically misused evidence
to falsify
the history of the Holocaust. Richard Evans,
right, Professor of Modern History at the
University of Cambridge, who submitted a 700-page
analysis of Irving's work on issues relevant to the
case, testified that he was not prepared for "the
sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in
Irving's treatment of the historical sources, nor
for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his
entire written and spoken output." In the first
chapter of the report, Evans wrote: Penetrating beneath the confident
surface of [Irving's] prose quickly
revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation
in every issue we tackled that was so tangled
that detailing it sometimes took up many more
words than had been devoted to it in Irving's
original account. Unpicking the eleven-page
narrative of the anti-Jewish pogrom of the
so-called Reichskristallnacht in Irving's book
Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich
and tracing back every part of it to the
documentation on which it purports to rest takes
up over seventy pages of the present Report. A
similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions
and manipulations became evident in every single
instance which we examined. We have not
suppressed any occasion on which Irving has used
accepted and legitimate methods of historical
research, exposition and interpretation: there
were none. Evans concurred with what some reviewers had
said about Irving as early as 1977: It is clear from all the investigations
which I and my research assistants have
undertaken that Irving's claim to have a very
good and thorough knowledge of the evidence on
the basis of which the history of Nazi Germany
has to be written is completely justified. His
numerous mistakes and egregious errors are not,
therefore, due to mere ignorance or sloppiness;
on the contrary, it is obvious that they are
calculated and deliberate. That is precisely why
they are so shocking. Irving has relied in the
past, and continues to rely in the present, on
the fact that his readers and listeners,
reviewers and interviewers lack either the time,
or the expertise, to probe deeply enough into
the sources he uses for his work to uncover the
distortions, suppressions and manipulations to
which he has subjected them. Verdict The trial, in which Irving represented himself,
ran from January 11 through March 15, 2000.
Justice Charles Gray presided; due to the
complexity of the evidence, both sides agreed to
dispense with a jury. Comically compromising his
attempt to dismiss Lipstadt's claims that he
admired Hitler, Irving, in a moment of weariness
during his closing
statement, addressed the justice as "Mein
Führer." The mistake presaged Justice Gray's verdict.
Ruling for Lipstadt and her publishers, the justice
argued that it was "incontrovertible that Irving
qualifies as a Holocaust denier." He described
Irving as an "anti-Semite," explaining that
"[Irving's] words are directed against
Jews, either individually or collectively, in the
sense that they are by turns hostile, critical,
offensive and derisory in their references to
Semitic people, their characteristics and
appearances." He also noted that Irving had
associated with the extreme right-wing National
Alliance, saying, "In my view Irving cannot fail to
have become aware that the National Alliance is a
neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic organization. The
regularity of Irving's contacts with the National
Alliance and its officers confirms Irving's
sympathetic attitude towards an organization whose
tenets would be abhorrent to most people." Finally
and most importantly, Justice Gray ruled
conclusively on Irving's historical methods,
stating: I have found that in numerous respects,
Irving has misstated historical evidence;
adopted positions which run counter to the
weight of the evidence; given credence to
unreliable evidence and disregarded or dismissed
credible evidence.…In my opinion there is a
force in the opinion expressed by Evans that all
Irving's historiographical "errors" converge, in
the sense that they all tend to exonerate Hitler
or to reflect Irving's partisanship for the Nazi
leaders. If indeed they were genuine errors or
mistakes, one would not expect to find this
consistency….Mistakes and misconceptions
such as these appear to be by their nature
unlikely to have been innocent. They are more
consistent with a willingness on Irving's part
to knowingly misrepresent or manipulate or put a
"spin" on the evidence so as to make it conform
with his own preconceptions. Consistent with British libel law, Irving was
ordered to pay the legal
fees incurred by the defense, which amounted to
nearly 2 million pounds. An initial payment
equivalent of $250,000 was ordered following
Irving's protests that he faced bankruptcy and that
he planned to appeal. On July 20, 2001, an appeals
court denied
his request
for a new trial. Irving's Future The Lipstadt trial exposed Irving's pervasive
dishonesty and recklessness as a historian, as well
as his bigotry, to an international audience. It is
highly unlikely that he will ever regain credibility
among legitimate scholars. He remains a celebrity
among Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, however,
who view him as a martyr to free speech and
political dissent. He continues to tour and raise
money, his vigor apparently undiminished. He
remains probably the most lucid expositor of a
history in which Hitler was benevolent, the Allies
despotic and Jews the perpetrators of their own
phony genocide.
- UPDATE
- Posted: August 6, 2002
- It is difficult to see what David Irving has
gained from the failed lawsuit he brought
against Deborah Lipstadt. Whatever positive
reputation he retained in academia and with
mainstream publishing houses was ruined,
lecture halls are now largely closed to him, and
he has been harassed at local venues.
[More]
1 See "David Irving: Information
for Counsel on my Background (1970)," on
Irving's Web site-
2 Irving used the phrase, for example, in a
videotaped speech he made at a 1993 "Real
History" convention in Australia
-
4 See "David
Irving's Talk to the Clarendon Club" is on
Irving's Web site
-
- UPDATE
-
Failed
Libel Lawsuit Ruins Irving's Reputation in
Academia, Publishing.
-
|
