David Irving

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 also told Rosenbaum that he had held Holocaust-denialist views since childhood because of his objections to cartoon caricatures of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders published in the British wartime press. ==Student years==

After completing his A levels at Brentwood School, Irving studied for a physics degree at Imperial College London, leaving after the first year. He did not complete the course because of financial constraints. Irving later resumed his studies but had to drop out again for the same reason. Carnival Times article 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." (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'' (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 '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: In 1991 Irving espoused an antisemitic conspiracy theory when he stated that the Jews "dragged us into two world wars and now, for equally mysterious reasons, they're trying to drag us into the Balkans." In 1995, when Irving was confronted with a Holocaust survivor, he repeated the same claim and asked, "How much money have you made from that piece of ink on your arm, which may indeed be real tattooed ink? Yes. Half a million dollars, three-quarters of a million for you alone?" Ernst Zündel trial In January 1988 Irving travelled to Toronto, Ontario, to assist Douglas Christie, the defence lawyer for Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust. Subsequently, Irving claimed to the American journalist D. D. Guttenplan in a 1999 interview that Zündel had convinced him that the Holocaust had not occurred. Between 22 and 26 April 1988 Irving testified for Zündel, endorsing Richard Harwood's book Did Six Million Really Die? as "over ninety percent ... factually accurate". As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited The Leuchter report by Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving said in a 1999 documentary about Leuchter: "The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of cyanide in the brickwork. That's what converted me. When I read that in the report in the courtroom in Toronto, I became a hard-core disbeliever". In addition, Irving was influenced to embrace Holocaust denial by the American historian Arno J. Mayer's 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which did not deny the Holocaust, but claimed that most of those who died at Auschwitz were killed by disease: Irving saw in Mayer's book an apparent confirmation of Leuchter's and Zündel's theories about no mass murder at Auschwitz. After the trial Irving published Leuchter's report as Auschwitz, The End of the Line: The Leuchter Report in the United Kingdom in 1989 and wrote its foreword. In his foreword to the British edition of Leuchter's book, Irving wrote that "Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved". The motion went on to describe Irving as a "Nazi propagandist and longtime Hitler apologist" and Auschwitz The End of the Line as a "fascist publication". In a pamphlet Irving published in London on 23 June 1989, he made the "epochal announcement" that there was no mass murder in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp. Irving labelled the gas chambers at Auschwitz a "hoax", and writing in the third person declared that he "has placed himself [Irving] at the head of a growing band of historians, worldwide, who are now sceptical of the claim that at Auschwitz and other camps were 'factories of death', in which millions of innocent people were systematically gassed to death". German nationalists found Irving, as a non-German Holocaust denier, to be particularly credible. Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at the death camp, stating that the existing remains were "mock-ups built by the Poles". Following his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving was banned from visiting Germany. Expanding upon his thesis in ''Hitler's War about the lack of a written order by the Führer'' for the Holocaust, Irving argued in the 1990s that the absence of such an order meant that there was no Holocaust at all. In a speech delivered in Toronto in November 1990, Irving claimed that Holocaust survivors had manufactured memories of their suffering because "there's money involved and they can get a good compensation cash payment out of it". Irving went on to say that he believed anti-semitism will increase all over the world because "the Jews have exploited people with the gas chamber legend" and that "In ten years, Israel will cease to exist and the Jews will have to return to Europe". Two days later, Irving repeated the same speech in Halle, in West Germany. In November 1992 Irving was to be a featured speaker at a world anti-Zionist congress in Stockholm that was cancelled by the Swedish government. Irving went on to claim that most of the Jewish deaths during World War II had been caused by Allied bombing. In a 1995 speech, Irving claimed that the Holocaust was a myth invented by a "world-wide Jewish cabal" to serve their own ends. Irving also spoke on other topics at the IHR gatherings. A frequent theme was the claim that Churchill had advance knowledge of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor, and refused to warn the Americans, in order to bring the United States into the war. In 1995 he stated that, "We revisionists, say that gas chambers didn't exist and that the 'factories of death' didn't exist." In 1999 Irving said during a television interview, "I'm a gas chamber denier. I'm a denier that they killed hundreds of thousands of people in gas chambers, yes." At the same time, Irving maintained an ambivalent attitude to Holocaust denial depending on his audience. In a 1993 letter, Irving lashed out against his former friend Zündel, writing that: "In April 1988 I unhesitatingly agreed to aid your defence as a witness in Toronto. I would not make the same mistake again. As a penalty for having defended you then, and for having continued to aid you since, my life has come under a gradually mounting attack: I find myself the worldwide victim of mass demonstrations, violence, vituperation and persecution" (emphasis in the original). Irving went on to claim his life had been wonderful until Zündel had got him involved in the Holocaust denial movement: van Pelt argues that Irving was just trying to shift responsibility for his actions in his letter. In an interview with Australian radio in July 1995, Irving claimed that at least four million Jews died in World War II, though he argued that this was due to terrible sanitary conditions inside the concentration camps as opposed to a deliberate policy of genocide in the death camps. Irving's statement led to a very public spat with his former ally Faurisson, who insisted that no Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Depending on his audience, during the 1990s Irving either used the absence of a written (Führer order) for the "Final Solution" to argue that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust, or claimed that the absence of a written order meant there was no Holocaust at all. ==Racism and antisemitism==

Although Irving denies being a racist, he has expressed racist and antisemitic sentiments, both publicly and privately. Irving has often expressed his belief in the conspiracy theory of Jews secretly ruling the world, and that the belief in the reality of the Holocaust was manufactured as part of the same alleged conspiracy. Irving used the label "traditional enemies of the truth" to describe Jews, and in a 1963 article about a speech by Sir Oswald Mosley wrote that the "Yellow Star did not make a showing". In 1992, Irving stated that "the Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time" and claimed he "foresees a new wave of antisemitism" the world over due to Jewish "exploitation of the Holocaust myth". In one interview cited in the libel lawsuit, Irving also stated that he would be "willing to put [his] signature" to the "fact" that "a great deal of control over the world is exercised by Jews". After Irving was sacked by The Sunday Times to help them with their serialisation of the Goebbels diaries, he described a group of protesters outside his flat as, "All the scum of humanity stand outside. The homosexuals, the gypsies, the lesbians, the Jews, the criminals, the Communists..." Several of these statements were cited by the judge's decision in Irving's lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, One example brought was his diary entry for 17 September 1994, in which Irving wrote about a ditty he composed for his young daughter "when half-breed children are wheeled past": Christopher Hitchens wrote that Irving sang the rhyme to Hitchens's wife, Carol Blue, and daughter, Antonia, in a lift following drinks in the family's flat in Washington, D.C. ==Persona non grata==

After Irving denied the Holocaust in two speeches given in Austria in 1989, the Austrian government issued an arrest warrant for him and barred him from entering the country. In early 1992, a German court found him guilty of Holocaust denial under the Auschwitzlüge section of the law against Volksverhetzung (a failed appeal by Irving would see the fine rise from 10,000 DM to 30,000 DM), and he was subsequently barred from entering Germany. where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported to the United Kingdom. In 1992 Irving signed a contract with Macmillan Publishers for his biography of Goebbels titled Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Following charges that Irving had selectively "edited" a recently discovered complete edition of Goebbels's diaries in Moscow, Macmillan cancelled the book deal. The decision by The Sunday Times (who had bought the rights to serialised extracts from the diaries before Macmillan published them) in July 1992 to hire Irving as a translator of Goebbels's diary was criticised by the British historian Peter G. J. Pulzer, who argued that Irving, because of his views about the Third Reich, was not the best person for the job. Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times, called Irving "reprehensible", but defended hiring him because he was only a "transcribing technician", which others criticised as a poor description of translation work. In 1995 St. Martin's Press of New York City agreed to publish the Goebbels biography. After protests, they cancelled the contract, leaving Irving in a situation in which, according to D. D. Guttenplan, he was desperate for financial help, publicity, and the need to restore his reputation. The book was eventually self-published. Libel suit On 5 September 1996 Irving filed a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin Books for publishing the British edition of Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, which had first been published in the United States in 1993. In the book, Lipstadt called Irving a Holocaust denier, falsifier and bigot, and said that he manipulated and distorted real documents. During the trial, Irving claimed that Hitler had not ordered the extermination of the Jews of Europe, was ignorant of the Holocaust and was a friend of the Jews. Lipstadt hired the British solicitor Anthony Julius to present her case, while Penguin Books hired Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman, libel specialist from media firm Davenport Lyons. They briefed the libel barrister Richard Rampton QC and Penguin also briefed junior barrister Heather Rogers. The defendants (with Penguin's insurers paying the fee) also retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Also working as expert witnesses were the American Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, the German historian Peter Longerich, and the Dutch architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt. The last wrote a report attesting to the fact that the death camps were designed, built and used for the purpose of mass murder, while Browning testified for the reality of the Holocaust. Evans' report was the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of Irving's work: The BBC quoted Evans further: Not only did Irving lose the case, but in light of the evidence presented at the trial a number of his works that had previously escaped serious scrutiny were brought to public attention. He was also ordered to pay all of Penguin's trial costs, estimated to be as much as £2 million (US$3.2 million), though it is uncertain how much of these costs he would ultimately pay. When he did not meet these, Davenport Lyons moved to make him bankrupt on behalf of their client. He was declared bankrupt in 2002, and lost his home, though he has been able to travel around the world despite his financial problems. Irving subsequently appealed to the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal. On 20 July 2001 his application for appeal was denied by Lords Justices Malcolm Pill, Charles Mantell and Richard Buxton. The libel suit was depicted in the 2016 film Denial. Life after the libel suit , 2003 In July 2004 the New Zealand government decided not to allow Irving to enter the country unless he applied for and was granted special permission. This decision was made on the grounds that he had previously been deported from a different country. Members of the Jewish community had requested that he not be permitted to visit, with the New Zealand Jewish Council's president stating that Irving was "well known for his anti-Jewish writings and activities, and was found by the High Court in London in 2002 to be racist, [and] an active Holocaust denier". Irving attempted to travel to New Zealand in September 2004, but was refused permission to board a flight from Los Angeles on the grounds that he did not have permission to enter the country. On 11 November 2005 the Austrian police in the southern state of Styria, acting under the 1989 warrant, arrested Irving. Irving pleaded guilty to the charge of "trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust". Irving stated in his plea that he had changed his opinions on the Holocaust, "I said that then based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now. The Nazis did murder millions of Jews." Irving had obtained the papers from Hugo Byttebier, a Belgian who had served in the SS during the war and had escaped to Argentina. Irving was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in accordance with the law prohibiting Nazi activities (, "Prohibition Law"). Irving sat motionless as judge Peter Liebetreu asked him if he had understood the sentence, to which he replied "I'm not sure I do" before being escorted out of the court by Austrian police. Later, Irving said that he was shocked by the severity of the sentence. He had reportedly already purchased a plane ticket home to London. In December 2006 Irving was released from prison and banned from ever returning to Austria. Upon Irving's arrival in the UK he reaffirmed his position, stating that he felt "no need any longer to show remorse" for his views on the Holocaust. On 18 May 2007, he was expelled from the 52nd Warsaw International Book Fair in Poland because the books he took there were deemed by the organisers as promoting Nazism and antisemitism, which is in violation of Polish law. Since then, Irving has continued to work as a freelance writer, despite his troubled public image. He was drawn into the controversy surrounding Bishop Richard Williamson, who in a televised interview recorded in Germany in November 2008 denied the Holocaust took place, only to see Williamson convicted for incitement in April 2010 after refusing to pay a fine of €12,000. Irving subsequently found himself beset by protesters on a book tour of the United States. He has also given lectures and tours in the UK and Europe; one tour to Poland in September 2010 which led to particular criticism included the Treblinka death camp as an itinerary stop. Irving and Nick Griffin (then the British National Party leader) were invited to speak at a forum on free speech at the Oxford Union on 26 November 2007, along with Anne Atkins and Evan Harris. The debate took place after Oxford Union members voted in favour of it, but was disrupted by protesters. Irving was lecturing to small audiences at venues disclosed to carefully vetted ticket-holders a day or two before the event on topics, including antisemitic conspiracy theories, and at one such event, claiming to write the truth unlike "conformist historians" while asserting fabrications about leading Nazis, the life and death of Himmler and the saturation bombings during the war. Irving established a website selling Nazi memorabilia in 2009. The items are offered by other people, with Irving receiving a commission from each sale for authenticating them. Irving stated in 2009 that the website was the only way he could make money after being bankrupted in 2002. Items sold through the website include Hitler's walking stick and a lock of Hitler's hair. Irving has also investigated the authenticity of bones purported to be from Hitler and Eva Braun. During an interview with Johann Hari, Irving said that in the 1970s Erwin Giesing, one of Hitler's doctors, had quoted Hitler to him thus: "One day, an Englishman will come along and write my biography. But it cannot be an English man of the present generation. They won't to be objective. It will have to be an Englishman of the next generation, and one who is totally familiar with all the German archives." Irving said that Giesing had identified him as the objective Englishman that Hitler had spoken of. During the same interview, Irving claimed that various Nazis hid what was happening to the Jews from Hitler because he was "the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich". Also, the Norwegian free-speech organisation Fritt Ord was critical of letting Irving speak at the festival and had requested that its logo be removed. In addition, Edvard Hoem announced that he would not attend the 2009 festival with Irving taking part. Per Edgar Kokkvold, leader of the Norwegian Press Confederation, advocated cancelling Irving's invitation. Days after the controversy had started, the invitation was rescinded. This led to the resignation of Stig Sæterbakken from his position as content director as he was the person who had invited Irving to the event. The head of the Norwegian Festival of Literature, Randi Skeie, deplored what had taken place: "Everything is fine as long as everyone agrees, but things get more difficult when one doesn't like the views being put forward." According to editor-in-chief Sven Egil Omdal of , the opposition to Irving's participation at the festival appeared as a concerted effort. He suggested that campaign journalism from two of Norway's largest newspapers, Dagbladet and Aftenposten, and Norway's public service broadcaster NRK was behind the controversy. David Irving commented that he had not been told that the festival was going to present him as a liar, Only days after the cancellation Irving announced that he would go to Lillehammer during the literature festival and deliver his two-hour lecture from a hotel room. ==Reception by historians==

Irving, once held in regard for his expert knowledge of German military archives, was a controversial figure from the start. His interpretations of the war were widely regarded as unduly favourable to the German side. At first this was seen as personal opinion, unpopular but consistent with full respectability as a historian. By 1988, however, Irving had begun to reject the status of the Holocaust as a systematic and deliberate genocide. He soon became the main proponent of Holocaust denial. This, along with his association with far-right circles, dented his standing as a historian. A marked change in Irving's reputation can be seen in the surveys of the historiography of the Third Reich produced by Ian Kershaw. In the first edition of Kershaw's book The Nazi Dictatorship in 1985, Irving was called a "maverick" historian working outside the mainstream of the historical profession. By the time of the fourth edition of The Nazi Dictatorship in 2000, Irving was described only as a historical writer who had in the 1970s engaged in "provocations" intended to provide an "exculpation of Hitler's role in the Final Solution". The description of Irving as a historian, rather than an author writing about history, is controversial, with some publications since the libel trial continuing to refer to him as a "historian" or "disgraced historian", while others insist he is not a historian, and have adopted alternatives such as "author" or "historical writer". The military historian John Keegan praised Irving for his "extraordinary ability to describe and analyse Hitler's conduct of military operations, which was his main occupation during the Second World War". Donald Cameron Watt, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the London School of Economics, wrote that he admires some of Irving's work as a historian, though he rejects his conclusions about the Holocaust. At the libel proceedings against Irving, Watt declined Irving's request to testify, appearing only after a subpoena was ordered. He testified that Irving had written a "very, very effective piece of historical scholarship" in the 1960s, which was unrelated to his controversial work. He also said that Irving was "not in the top class" of military historians. ==Personal life==

In 1961, while living in Spain, Irving met and married a Spaniard, María del Pilar Stuyck. They have four children. Irving's daughter Josephine suffered from schizophrenia. She was involved in a car crash in 1996 which resulted in her having to have both of her legs amputated. In September 1999, at the age of 32, she died by suicide by throwing herself out of a window of her flat in Central London. One of the wreaths sent to her funeral contained a card which stated in German, "Truly a merciful death, Philipp Bouhler and friends". ==In popular culture==

• In 1982 Irving appeared on In Search of... Season 6, Episode 20, Eva Braun, offering his commentary on the episode's exploration of whether or not she died in the Bunker with Hitler. Irving explained the testimony by Otto Gunsche Hitler's Adjutant, whom Irving had interviewed in his research. • In 1988 Irving made an extended appearance on the Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark. • Irving was portrayed by Roger Lloyd-Pack in the 1991 ITV series Selling Hitler. • Irving was portrayed by John Castle in courtroom dramatisations of the Lipstadt case for the PBS Nova episode "Holocaust on Trial" (2000). • Irving is portrayed by Timothy Spall in the 2016 film Denial, based on Lipstadt's 2005 book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. ==Works==

Books • The Destruction of Dresden (1963) , updated and revised 1995 as Apocalypse 1945, The Destruction of Dresden, further revised for 2007 • ''The Mare's Nest'' (1964) • The Virus House (1967) • The Destruction of Convoy PQ17 (1968), reprinted (1980) , updated in 2009. • Accident – The Death of General Sikorski (1967) • Breach of Security (1968) • The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe (1973), a biography of Erhard Milch • The Night the Dams Burst (1973): (in 3 parts). • ''Hitler's War'' (1977), updated in 2000 as a millennium edition • The Trail of the Fox (1977), a biography of Erwin Rommel , reissued 1999 in Wordsworth Military Library, • The War Path (1978) • The War Between the Generals (1981) • Uprising! (1981), • ''The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor'' (1983) • The German Atomic Bomb: The History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany (1968) • Der Morgenthau Plan 1944–45 (in German only) (1986) • War between the Generals (1986) , updated in 2010. • Hess, the Missing Years (1987) Macmillan, • ''Churchill's War'' (1987) : (in 4 parts). • Göring (1989) , updated in 2010. • Das Reich hört mit (in German only) (1989) • ''Hitler's War (1991), revised edition, incorporating The War Path'' • Der unbekannte Dr. Goebbels: Die geheimen Tagebücher 1938 (in German only) (1995) • Goebbels – Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996) , cleaned-up and corrected in 2014 • Nuremberg: The Last Battle (1996) • ''Churchill's War Volume II: Triumph in Adversity'' (1997) : (in 3 parts) • ''Hitler's War and the War Path'' (2002) • True Himmler (2020) Translations • The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel (1965) • The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (1972) Monographs • The Night the Dams Burst (1973) • Von Guernica bis Vietnam (in German only) (1982) • Die deutsche Ostgrenze (in German only) (1990) • Banged Up: Survival as a Political Prisoner in 21st Century Europe (2008) ==See also==