Hitler Did Not Know About the Holocaust

This is the David Irving thesis, set out at length in his 1977 book Hitler’s War and demolished in detail in the 2000 libel trial of Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt. The thesis was rejected by the High Court in London on the basis of the documentary evidence presented at trial, which established that Hitler was the source of the policy, was kept fully informed of its execution, and discussed it openly with his closest associates from at least 1941 onwards. The thesis is the position of the deniers’ most prominent recent advocate, and it has been examined and rejected by the most extensive judicial proceeding ever conducted on the question.

The Irving thesis and its judicial rejection

David Irving in Hitler’s War (1977 edition) argued that Hitler had not personally ordered the killing of European Jewry, that he had not been informed of the killing as it was happening, and that the operation was the work of Himmler, Heydrich and other senior SS officers acting independently of Hitler. Irving’s evidential basis was his selective reading of the surviving German documents and his arguments that the silence of certain documents (the missing Hitler-signature kill-order memo, the absence of explicit Hitler statements in some recorded conversations) demonstrated absence of involvement. Irving sued the historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 1996 for libel after Lipstadt had described him as a Holocaust denier in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust.

The trial took place in the High Court in London from January to April 2000, with Irving acting as his own counsel. The defence assembled a team of expert historians including Richard Evans, Christopher Browning, Robert Jan van Pelt and Peter Longerich, who produced extensive expert reports analysing Irving’s documentary methods and his treatment of the Hitler-knowledge question. Mr Justice Charles Gray delivered judgment on 11 April 2000, finding for the defendants on the substantive issues. The judgment, running to over 350 pages, includes detailed findings on Irving’s “Hitler did not know” thesis. Gray found that Irving had “deliberately and persistently misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” in service of the thesis, that the documentary record established Hitler’s knowledge and involvement beyond any reasonable doubt, and that Irving’s denial of these facts was “a falsification of the historical record”.

The documentary record on Hitler’s knowledge

The documentary record establishing Hitler’s knowledge was set out in the trial expert reports and in the resulting scholarly publications, particularly Peter Longerich’s The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution (2001). The record includes the Himmler appointment diary entries recording meetings with Hitler at which the killing was the subject (the 18 December 1941 meeting on “Judenfrage / als Partisanen auszurotten” being among the most explicit). It includes the Goebbels diary entries recording Hitler’s comments on the operation in conversations across 1942, 1943 and 1944. It includes Hitler’s own public speeches, in which he repeatedly invoked the prophecy of his 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech and stated that he was bringing it into effect. It includes the Posen recording of Himmler’s October 1943 speech, in which Himmler referred to the operation as the “fulfilment of a duty given to us by the Führer”. It includes the Höss testimony, the Eichmann testimony, and the testimony of every senior officer of the operation who survived to testify. The record is unanimous and unambiguous.

The “Himmler shielded Hitler” sub-thesis

Irving’s specific sub-thesis was that Himmler had deliberately concealed the killing from Hitler. The Himmler appointment diary refutes this directly. Himmler met Hitler approximately twice a week for the entire war period; the meetings are recorded by date, attendees and agenda items. The agenda items repeatedly include the Jewish question. The meetings record the killing operation being discussed. Himmler was not concealing the operation from Hitler; he was reporting it to him in regular meetings.

The Goebbels diary, written from Goebbels’s own detailed daily conversations with Hitler, records Hitler making explicit statements about the operation in Goebbels’s presence. The entries of 14 February 1942, 27 March 1942, 30 March 1942, 26 April 1942, 28 April 1942, 22 December 1942, 25 January 1943 and many others record Hitler discussing the killing in plain terms. None of this is consistent with a Hitler being kept in the dark by Himmler. Hitler was the source of the policy and was kept informed at the highest level.

The Hitler conversations recorded by participants

Numerous senior officials wrote down their conversations with Hitler at the time or soon after. Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, written in Spandau Prison in the 1950s and 1960s and published in 1969, records Hitler’s open discussion of the Jewish question with him, although Speer’s specific claims to have been ignorant of the killing have been challenged by subsequent research (Magnus Brechtken, Albert Speer: Eine deutsche Karriere, 2017, demonstrated that Speer knew more than he later admitted). Hans Frank, the General Governor of occupied Poland, kept a detailed diary that records his many conversations with Hitler about the Jewish operations in the General Government, including Hitler’s instructions on the pace and intensity of the killing. Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, wrote his post-war memoir based on his presence at almost all of Hitler’s meetings; he recorded Hitler discussing the operation openly. The convergence of independent contemporary witnesses is unanimous on Hitler’s knowledge.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that Hitler did not know is harmful because it has been the most extensively litigated of the denier claims and has been the most decisively rejected. The Irving v. Lipstadt judgment is one of the most thorough judicial examinations of a historical question ever conducted. The thesis was tested in court by a hostile claimant (Irving himself) against expert defence and was found to be a falsification of the record. The Goebbels diary, the Himmler diary, the Hitler speeches, the Posen recording, the perpetrator testimony and the conversations recorded by senior witnesses all establish Hitler’s knowledge. To accept the denial is to accept that all of this evidence is misread and that the High Court’s findings are wrong, with no specific evidence offered for the alternative.

What did Mr Justice Gray’s judgment find? What does the Himmler appointment diary record? What did Goebbels write down about his conversations with Hitler?

See also

• Adolf Hitler
• David Irving
• Heinrich Himmler
• Deborah Lipstadt
• Albert Speer
• Hans Frank

---

Sources

• Mr Justice Charles Gray, judgment in David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, full text at https://www.hdot.org and https://www.bailii.org
• Richard J. Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001, the lead defence expert’s account
• Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002
• Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution, Tempus, 2001
• Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 to March 1942, University of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem, 2004
• D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial, W. W. Norton, 2001, on the Irving trial
• Heinrich Himmler, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, edited by Peter Witte and others, Hamburger Edition, 1999
• Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, edited by Elke Fröhlich, K. G. Saur, 1993 to 2008
• Heinrich Himmler, Posen speech to SS officers, 4 October 1943, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz; Nuremberg Document PS-1919
• Hans Frank, Das Dienstagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939 bis 1945, edited by Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975
• Magnus Brechtken, Albert Speer: Eine deutsche Karriere, Siedler, 2017
• Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, W. W. Norton, 2000
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Hitler’s Role in the Holocaust” and “David Irving and Holocaust Denial”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org