David Irving

David Irving, 2003
David John Cawdell Irving (born March 24, 1938) is a controversial British World War II historical researcher and author, whose numerous books are widely considered influential, discredited, or both. He has been accused of revisionism by denying the Holocaust.
From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, Irving's prominence arose from his writings such as Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden and Hitler's War. When Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt counted Irving among those who deny the Holocaust, Irving sued Lipstadt for libel. Irving lost the highly publicised trial. [1] The judge upheld Lipstadt's claims about Irving "that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist".
Irving's continued disagreement with mainstream historical accounts of the Second World War, of Adolf Hitler, and of the Holocaust has earned him iconic status among neo-Nazis and other Holocaust deniers. His books and speeches have led to his being barred from entering Germany and Austria, where it is a crime to claim publicly that the Holocaust, or aspects of it, never occurred. Relatedly, he has also been barred from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. As a result of his stance on the Holocaust and from the outcome of his libel case, Irving has lost much, if not all, credibility as a historian. [2] [3]
On 20 February 2006, Irving was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in Austria for re-entering the country after being banned for denying the Holocaust.
arly life
Irving was born in Essex, England. His father John James Cawdell Irving was a commander in the Royal Navy, his mother Beryl an illustrator. During the Second World War, his father was an officer aboard the light cruiser HMS Edinburgh. On 2 May 1942, while escorting Convoy QP-11 in the Barents Sea, the ship was sunk by the German U-456. Irving's father survived, but after the incident cut off all ties with his wife and their children.
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Student years
Irving first gained notoriety as a student at Imperial College London, where he attempted to study physics. He wrote for the student newspaper Phoenix and in 1959 served as editor of the London University Carnival Committee's journal, Carnival Times. His editorialship here stirred criticism, though Irving deflects such criticism by characterizing the Carnival Times as "satirical". In one editorial, he suggested the Jewish-owned media were against the formation of the European Union, and referred to Adolf Hitler as "Herr Hitler". According to the Anti-Defamation League, Irving also supported apartheid in South Africa, racist cartoons, and gave an appreciative view of Nazi Germany [4]. Covering the controversy, the 1 May 1959 edition of the Daily Mail, quoted Irving as saying, "You can call me a mild fascist if you like". Though Irving admits having had at the time membership in a conservative student group, he has denounced that article as libellous and "handiwork of an imaginative Daily Mail journalist". [5]
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The Destruction of Dresden
Irving's scholastic and financial difficulties led him to Germany, where he worked as a steelworker in a Thyssen steel works in the Ruhr area and first learned German. He then moved to Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an airbase. In 1962, he wrote a series of thirty-seven articles on the Allied bombing campaign, Wie Deutschlands Städte starben (How Germany's Cities Died), for the right-wing German journal Neue Illustrierte. These served as the basis of his first book The Destruction of Dresden, published in 1963. In it, Irving examined the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. By the 1960s, a debate about the morality of the carpet bombing of German cities and civilian population had already begun, especially in the United Kingdom. There was consequently considerable interest in Irving's book, which was illustrated with graphic pictures. The book subsequently became an international bestseller.
In the first edition of the book, Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 - nearly an order of magnitude higher than previous numbers. These figures became authoritative and widely accepted in many standard references and encyclopedias. Over the next three decades, later editions of the book gradually modified that figure downwards to a range of 50,000 to 100,000. Forty years later, during the hearing of Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, these figures were publicly discredited. Today, the Dresden bombing casualty figures are estimated as most likely in the range of 25,000 to 35,000 dead, and probably toward the lower end of that range.
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Historian
After the success of the Dresden book, Irving continued writing, including some works of revisionist history. In 1964, he wrote The Mare's Nest, an account of the German secret weapons projects and the Allied intelligence countermeasures against it, translated the Memoirs of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in 1965, and in 1967 published Accident: The Death of General Sikorski, in which he suggests Churchill had a hand in the death of Polish government in exile leader Władysław Sikorski. Also in 1967, he published two more works: The Virus House, an account of the German nuclear energy project, and The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, in which he blamed the British convoy commander Captain Jack Broome for the catastrophic losses of the Convoy PQ-17. Amid much publicity, Broome sued Irving for libel in October 1968, and in February 1970, after seventeen days of deliberation before London's High Court, Broome won. Irving was forced to pay £40,000 in damages, and the book was withdrawn from circulation.


Irving with Hitler's armaments minister Albert Speer in the late 1970s
After PQ-17, Irving shifted to writing biographies. As a result of Irving's success with Dresden, but prior to the conclusion of the Broome trial, members of Germany's extreme right wing assisted him in contacting surviving members of Hitler's inner circle. Many aging former mid- and high-ranked Nazis saw a potential friend in Irving and donated diaries and other material. In 1972, he translated the memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, and in 1973 published The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, a biography of Air Marshall Erhard Milch. He spent the remainder of the 1970s working on Hitler's War and the War Path, his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler, The Trail of the Fox, a biography of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, and a series in the Sunday Express describing the Royal Air Force's famous Dam Busters raid.
Although Irving's works were generally ignored by academics, and often criticised as inaccurate when reviewed by specialists, his command of language and a wealth of entertaining anecdotes led generalists to write favourable reviews in the popular press, and many of his works sold well. He was particularly noted for his mastery of the voluminous and scattered German war records. The raw biographical material he received from Hitler's inner circle bolstered Irving's claim as an authentic historian. As a result, throughout the 1970s, the popular perception of Irving as a mainstream British historian went unchallenged.