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.

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 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.

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 G�ring 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 Lukacs, 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”).

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.

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 Zundel, 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….

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.

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.

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 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.”

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:

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.

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.

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, 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.

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 F�hrer.”

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.

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.

¹See “David Irving: Information for Counsel on my Background," on Irving's Web site

²Irving used the phrase, for example, in a videotaped speech he made at a 1993 “Real History” convention in Australia

⁴See "David Irving's Talk to the Clarendon Club" is on Irving's Web site

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