David Irving

David Irving was once a respected writer. He is now remembered as a discredited figure associated with Holocaust denial and historical revisionism.

The early career

Irving made his early reputation as a writer of English-language histories of the Third Reich. His first book, The Destruction of Dresden (1963), used recently declassified material to argue for a death toll from the February 1945 firebombing of around 135,000. The official German figure (Tagesbefehl 47 of 22 March 1945) was around 25,000. Irving’s figure was an order of magnitude too high.

The book sold well. The figure entered popular Anglophone usage. Kurt Vonnegut cited it in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). In later statements during the 1990s Irving raised the figure further, to as much as 250,000. The actual Dresden death toll, reassessed by the Dresden Historians’ Commission in 2010, was approximately 25,000. Irving had been wrong from the start, and wrong by a factor of five to ten.

He went on to publish The Mare’s Nest (1964) on the V-weapon programme, The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17 (1968), Hitler’s War (1977), The Trail of the Fox (1977) on Erwin Rommel, and several others. The output was prolific. Reviews were mixed. A. J. P. Taylor gave Hitler’s War a positive notice in the Sunday Express. Hugh Trevor-Roper dismantled it in the Sunday Times. The German academic reception was hostile.

The book’s central thesis was that Hitler had not known about the killing of the Jews. The Final Solution had been carried out behind his back, Irving argued, by Himmler and Heydrich. The thesis collapsed under sustained scholarly attack during the 1980s, particularly the work of Martin Broszat, Eberhard Jäckel and Christopher Browning. Irving retained the thesis through every subsequent edition.

The slide into denial

The transition from Hitler apologist to open denier of the Holocaust can be dated to 1988. Irving had encountered the work of the American execution-equipment designer Fred Leuchter. Leuchter’s report, based on chemical sampling at Auschwitz, claimed that the gas chambers had not been used for homicidal gassing. Irving wrote the foreword to the British edition.

In a 1989 speech at the Institute for Historical Review’s denial conference in California, Irving made the position that defined the rest of his career:

I do not see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It’s baloney, it’s a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney? I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.

This was Irving’s voice at full extension. He repeated variations on the Chappaquiddick line for the next decade. He referred to Auschwitz survivors as “the Auschwitz survivors’ association of liars”. He called Anne Frank’s diary a forgery. He called the gas chambers “Disneyland”. The recordings are extant. Many were played back to the High Court at length during the libel trial.

The 1996 libel writ

Deborah Lipstadt published Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory in 1993, and in it she described Irving as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial”. Irving sued Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in the High Court in September 1996.

He chose the British jurisdiction deliberately. English libel law as it then stood placed the burden of proof on the defendant. Lipstadt and Penguin would have to prove that what Lipstadt had written about Irving was substantially true. Irving did not have to prove it was false. The case took three and a half years to reach trial.

The defence was led by Anthony Julius (the solicitor) and Richard Rampton QC (lead counsel), with Heather Rogers as junior counsel. The principal expert witnesses on the historical questions were the Dutch architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt and the Cambridge historian Richard Evans, supported by Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich, and the German historian of antisemitism Hajo Funke.

The defence strategy was settled early. They would not litigate whether the Holocaust had happened (Lipstadt’s book had assumed that as established fact). They would litigate whether Irving’s specific historical claims, in his books and his speeches, were the work of an honest historian or a deliberate falsifier. The strategy required the defence to take Irving’s books apart paragraph by paragraph, source by source, against the original German archives.

The trial

The trial ran from 11 January to 11 March 2000 in Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. Irving represented himself. He had had no choice; no specialist libel chambers had been willing to take his case. Both sides agreed to dispense with a jury. The documentary material was too voluminous and technical for jury assessment. Justice Gray sat alone.

The defence presented its evidence through detailed comparison of Irving’s published claims with the original German sources. The Evans expert report, later published as Lying About Hitler (2001), documents the analysis. Irving had consistently mistranslated German documents in directions favourable to his thesis. He had selectively quoted SS and Wehrmacht material to remove the implications of complicity in killing. He had misrepresented the dating of documents. He had presented invented or grossly distorted accounts of specific events, notably the Reichstag session of 30 January 1939, in which Hitler had publicly threatened the destruction of European Jewry.

The van Pelt report, later published as The Case for Auschwitz (2002), documented Irving’s claims about the Auschwitz gas chambers against the surviving Topf and Sons construction-office archive and the physical remains of the buildings. The combined evidence ran to thousands of pages.

The judgment

Justice Gray handed down judgment on 11 April 2000. It ran to 333 pages. Its central findings were unambiguous:

I have found that it is incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier. He is anti-Semitic and racist, and he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism. For the reasons I have given, I have concluded that the Defendants’ plea of justification succeeds.

The judgment found that the Holocaust had happened. It found that the gas chambers at Auschwitz had been used for the homicidal gassing of approximately one million people (the figure van Pelt had given in evidence). It found that Irving had deliberately falsified the historical record in pursuit of his political ends. The detailed findings on Irving’s historiography ran to nearly 200 pages.

Irving was ordered to pay the defendants’ costs, estimated at approximately £2 million. He declared himself bankrupt in 2002. His personal library was auctioned to defray the costs.

Austria 2005 and the prison sentence

Irving entered Austria on 11 November 2005 to address a far-right student fraternity. He was arrested at Hartberg in Styria on a warrant issued in 1989. The offence was denying, grossly minimising or approving of the Holocaust, contrary to section 3h of the Austrian Verbotsgesetz (the Prohibition Statute, the founding criminal-law instrument of post-war Austrian de-Nazification). The warrant arose from two speeches Irving had given in Austria in 1989, one in Vienna and one in Leoben.

He was tried in Vienna in February 2006 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. He served thirteen months in Josefstadt prison and was deported in December 2006.

The Austrian conviction is sometimes presented in the denier literature as evidence of state suppression of historical inquiry. It is more accurately described as the application of a 1947 statute, of which Irving had been long aware, to a man who had publicly violated it on Austrian soil. The Verbotsgesetz exists because Austria has chosen to make the public denial of the Nazi crimes a criminal offence in the country where those crimes were planned and partly executed. The choice is a matter of Austrian sovereign legal judgement. It is not a question of historical method.

Afterwards

Irving has continued to publish through his own imprint, Focal Point Publications, and to give paid speaking tours, principally in the United States. He has not published with a mainstream press since the 1996 libel writ. He has been refused entry to Germany, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Italy and South Africa at various dates since 1990. He retains a small online following.

His stated career ambition, in interviews from the 1970s and 1980s, had been to be remembered as the leading English-language historian of the Third Reich. He is now remembered as a discredited figure associated with Holocaust denial and historical revisionism.

See also

Sources

  • Justice Charles Gray, Judgment in Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, [2000] EWHC QB 115
  • Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993
  • Deborah Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, Ecco, 2005
  • Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001 (the Evans expert report for the trial)
  • Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002 (the van Pelt expert report for the trial)
  • D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial, W. W. Norton, 2001
  • Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Oxford University Press, 2010, ch. 6
  • David Irving, Hitler’s War, Hodder and Stoughton, 1977; revised editions 1991 and 2002 (cited for documentary purposes; the trial findings establish its falsifications)
  • Dresden Historians’ Commission, Erklärung der Historikerkommission zu den Luftangriffen auf Dresden zwischen dem 13. und 15. Februar 1945, City of Dresden, 2010, the definitive reassessment of the Dresden death toll
  • Austrian Verbotsgesetz 1947, section 3h, the statutory basis of the 2006 Austrian conviction
  • USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Combating Holocaust Denial: Evidence of the Holocaust Presented at Nuremberg”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org