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David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is a British writer[1] specializing in the military history of World War II. His interpretations of the Third Reich have proved highly controversial due to allegations of undue sympathy for the Third Reich and antisemitism, and because of his involvement in the Holocaust denial movement. He is the author of 30 books, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels — Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). Irving's reputation as a historian was widely discredited[2] after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 1996. During the trial, an English court found that Irving was an "active Holocaust denier," as well as an antisemite and racist, and that he "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."[3] The judge also ruled that Irving had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."[3][4] On a visit to Austria, Irving was apprehended, tried and convicted of "glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party", which is a crime in Austria under the Verbotsgesetz law. He served a prison sentence from February to December 2006 on the charges. [edit] Early lifeIrving, along with his twin brother,[5] was born in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex, England. His father, John James Cawdell Irving, was a commander in the Royal Navy, and his mother, Beryl, an illustrator (Beryl Irene Newington was born at St. Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, on 24 October 1896, the daughter of Captain Charles Newington, formerly of the Indian Army, and his wife Frances (née Dolman)). During the Second World War, Irving's 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-boat U-456. Irving's father survived, but severed all links with his wife and their children after the incident.[6] Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum as: "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".[7] Irving went on to claim to Rosenbaum that his negationist views about World War II dated to his childhood, particularly due to his objections to the way Adolf Hitler was portrayed in the British media during the war.[7] Irving asserted that his "skeptical" views about the Third Reich were due to his doubts to the cartoonist caricature of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders that appeared in the British press during the war.[7] [edit] Student yearsAfter completing A-levels at Brentwood School, Irving briefly studied physics (though never graduated, due to financial reasons[8]) at Imperial College London. He gained notoriety by writing for the student newspaper Phoenix and in 1959 served as editor of the University of London Carnival Committee's journal, Carnival Times. His time as editor was controversial because Irving wrote an article calling Hitler the “greatest unifying force Europe has known since Charlemagne” , though Irving deflected criticism by characterizing the Carnival Times as "satirical"[9]. Covering the controversy regarding his editorship of The Carnival Times, Irving was asked by a Daily Mail reporter about his political views. In the 1 May 1959 edition of the Daily Mail, Irving is quoted as having replied: "You can call me a mild fascist if you like. I have just come back from [Francisco Franco's] Madrid...I returned through Germany and visited Hitler's eyrie at Berchtesgaden. I regard it as a shrine."[10] Irving has denounced that article as libellous and the "handiwork of an imaginative Daily Mail journalist".[11] He also stated he was against the formation of what is now the European Union. He later studied for a degree in Political Economy at University College London,[12] which he dropped out of after two years. During his time at university, he seconded British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley in a debate on Commonwealth immigration. He was heckled.[13] According to the Anti-Defamation League, Irving also supported apartheid in South Africa, racist cartoons, and wrote appreciatively of Nazi Germany.[14] [edit] The Destruction of DresdenSometime after serving in 1959 as editor of the University of London Carnival Committee's journal, Irving left for West Germany, where he worked as a steelworker in a Thyssen steel works in the Ruhr area and learned German. He then moved to Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an airbase. During his time in Spain, Irving married his first wife, a Spanish woman with whom he had five children. In 1962, he wrote a series of 37 articles on the Allied bombing campaign, Wie Deutschlands Städte starben (How Germany's Cities Died), for the right-wing German journal Neue Illustrierte. These were the basis of his first book, The Destruction of Dresden (1963), in which he 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, and it became an international bestseller. 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.[15] These figures became authoritative and 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.[16] According to the evidence introduced by Richard J. Evans at the libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, Irving based his estimates of the dead of Dresden on the word of one individual who provided no supporting documentation, used forged documents, and described one witness who was a urologist as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. The doctor has since complained about being misidentified by Irving, and further, was only reporting rumours about the death toll.[17] Today, casualties at Dresden are estimated as most likely 25,000-35,000 dead, and probably towards the lower end of that range.[18] [edit] 1963 burglary of Irving's apartmentBy November 1963, Irving was in England when he called the London Metropolitan Police with suspicions he had been the victim of a burglary, perpetrated by three men who had gained access to his Mayfair apartment claiming to be General Post Office (GPO) engineers. Gerry Gable was subsequently arrested and held at Hornsey police station, where on 14 January 1964, along with Manny Carpel and another, Gable admitted breaking in with intent to steal private papers. At the trial, counsel for the defence claimed that this was no ordinary crime, telling the court, "they hoped to find material they could take to Special Branch". The case was reported in the Daily Telegraph, 17 January 1964 and other newspapers.[19] Irving considered this incident important, and in his video 'Ich komme wieder' he describes this as the first indication he had that he was under attack for some reason.[20] Gable was a former member of the British Communist Party, and would later run Searchlight a magazine devoted to anti-fascist activities. In a letter from Gable to London Weekend Television in May 1977, he would later boast of his "top level security service sources".[21] [edit] 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 (edited by Walter Görlitz); and in 1967 published Accident: The Death of General Sikorski. In the latter 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, so as to enable Churchill to "betray" Poland to the Soviet Union. Irving's book inspired the highly controversial 1967 play Soldiers by his friend, the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, where Hochuth depicts Churchill ordering the “assassination” of General 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 escort group commander, Commander 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 17 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. After PQ-17, Irving largely shifted to writing biographies. In 1968, Irving 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 D.C. Watt. 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. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Irving claimed to have developed sympathies towards them (referring to them as "the Magic Circle").[22] Many aging 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.[23] In 1971, he translated the memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, and in 1973 published The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, a biography of Luftwaffe Marshal 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 Marshal Erwin Rommel; and a series in the Sunday Express describing the Royal Air Force's famous Dam Busters raid. In 1975, in his introduction to Hitler und seine Feldherren, the German edition of Hitler's War, Irving attacked the diary of Anne Frank as a forgery, claiming falsely that a New York court had ruled that the diary was really the work of an American scriptwriter Meyer Levin "in collaboration with the girl's father".[24] In fact, Levin had been commissioned by Otto Frank to serve as his American literary agent in 1952, whom Frank had then fired and turned over the literary rights to The Diary of Anne Frank to Kermit Bloomgarden[25]. Bloomgraden produced a successful play version of the diary in 1955, leading Levin to sue over alleged plagiarism of his unproduced theatrical version of The Diary of Anne Frank[26] In 1959, a court ruled against Levin, leading him to appeal; the case was settled out of court in 1963[27] Lipstadt argued in 1993 book Denying the Holocaust that those like Irving who claim that Levin was the real author of The Diary of Anne Frank are engaging in a wilful misrepresentation of the facts[28]. Description of Irving as a historian, rather than a historical author, is controversial, with some publications continuing to refer to him as a "historian"[29] or "disgraced historian,"[30] while others insist he is not a historian, and have adopted alternatives such as "author" or "historic writer."[1] The military historian John Keegan has 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."[31] 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.[32] At the libel proceedings against Irving, Watt declined Irving's request to testify, appearing only after a subpoena was ordered.[33] 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 suggested that Irving was "not in the top class" of military historians.[33] [edit] Revisionism[edit] Hitler's War
In 1977 Irving published Hitler's War, the first of his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s War had been first published in German as Hitler und seine Feldherren (Hitler and his Field Command) in 1975[34] In Hitler's War, Irving tried to describe the war from "Hitler's point of view". He portrayed Hitler as a rational, intelligent politician, whose only goal was to increase Germany's prosperity and influence on the continent. For instance, Irving's book faulted the Allied leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, for the eventual escalation of war, and claimed that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler to avert an alleged impending Soviet attack (supported by some, notably Soviet GRU defector Victor Suvorov, and others; see Icebreaker). Irving commented that in light of the "preventive war" that he felt Hitler was forced to wage, the Kommissarbefehl was merely something that Stalin forced on Hitler.[35] He also claimed that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust; while not denying its occurrence, Irving claimed that Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich were its originators and architects. Irving made much of the lack of any written order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust, and for decades afterward offered to pay £1000 to anyone who could find such an order. In addition, citing the work of such historians as Harry Elmer Barnes, David Hoggan, and Frederick J.P. Veale, Irving argued that Britain was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1939.[36] In a footnote in Hitler’s War, Irving first introduced the thesis later popularized in the 1980s by Ernst Nolte that because Chaim Weizmann wrote a letter to Neville Chamberlain on September 3, 1939 pledging the support of the Jewish Agency to the Allied war effort, that this constituted a “Jewish declaration of war” against Germany, thus justifying German “interment” of European Jews[37]. A major law-suit that arose in 1975 from the German edition of Hitler's War when the firm of Ulstein-Verlag removed the passages from Hitler und seine Feldherren claiming Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust without Irving's permission, leading him to sue Ulstein-Verlag over abridging his book[34]. Reaction to Hitler’s War was polarized. While some historians like John Keegan and Hugh Trevor-Roper—though disputing Irving’s claim that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust—praised the book as well-written and well-researched[38], other historians were more hostile (though Trevor-Roper was strongly critical of Irving's repeating the "stale and exploded libel" about Churchill ordering the "assassination" of General Sikorski[39]). Keegan wrote that Hitler's War was "Irving's greatest achievement...indispensable to anyone seeking to the understand the war in the round"[38]. Trevor-Roper's praise was more much circumspect. Trevor-Roper commended Irving's "indefatigable, scholarly industry" and that "I have enjoyed reading his long work from beginning to end", but went to note that the many of the conclusions Irving drew were not supported by the evidence[40]. Trevor-Roper objected to Irving's argument that because one entry from Heinrich Himmler's phone log from the 30th of November 1941 ordering Heydrich to ensure that one train transport of German Jews to Latvia not to be executed on arrival proved that Hitler was opposed to genocide[41]. Trevor-Roper argued that the message concerned only the people abroad about that particular train and was not about all the Jews in Europe[41]. Trevor-Roper noted the contradiction in Irving's argument, based on the assumption that it was Hitler who ordered Himmler to spare the people abroad that train and the claim that Hitler was unaware in the fall of 1941 that the SS were rounding up German and Czech Jews to be sent to be shot in Eastern Europe (the first gassings via gas vans started on December 8th, 1941)[41] Trevor-Roper commented about Irving's claim that Hitler was unaware of the mass murders of Jews carried out by the SS while at the same time intervening to save Jewish lives that: "One does not veto an action unless one thinks that it is otherwise likely to occur"[41]. Finally, Trevor-Roper complained about Irving's "consistent bias" for Hitler and that "Mr. Irving's sympathies can hardly be doubted"[42]. The British historian Alan Bullock writing the in The New York Review of Books on May 26th , 1977 dismissed Irving’s depiction of Hitler as a leader too busy with the war to notice the Holocaust as contrary to all of the historical evidence.[43] John Lukacs in a very unfavourable book review in the 19 August 1977 edition of National Review called Hitler’s War a worthless book while Walter Laqueur when reviewing Hitler’s War in the The New York Times Book Review of 3 April 1977 accused Irving of selective use of the historical record in Hitler's favour.[43]. Laqueur argued that Hitler's War read more like a legal brief written by a defense lawyer who was attempting to exonerate Hitler before the judgement of history then a historical work.[43]. Lukacs called Irving an "amateur historian" whose determination to defend Hitler had resulted in an "appalling" book.[44] Lukacs complimented Irving's industry in tracking down hundreds of people who knew Hitler, but went on to note personal recollections are not always the best historical source, and that Irving manufactured battles; for instance, crediting Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner with a victory in April 1945 against the Red Army for the control of Ostrava, a battle which did not, in fact, take place.[45] Lukacs took issue with Irving's language, which he described as conveying moral judgements that were not supported by the facts.[45] Lukacs was very critical of Irving's claims that Poland had planned to invade Germany in 1939 and likewise, that the Soviet Union was on the verge of attacking the Reich in 1941, in both cases justifying German "preventative wars" against those states.[45] In a review published in the German Studies Review, the American historian Bradley Smith noted that Irving had uncovered some new documents and was correct in arguing against those Germans who sought to place all of the blame for the Shoah onto Hitler, but went on to note that Irving’s determination to tell World War II from Hitler’s point of view had apparently led him to totally identify himself with Hitler.[46] Smith noted it was often impossible to tell where Hitler’s views ended and where Irving's began.[46] Various historians such as Gitta Sereny, Martin Broszat, Lucy Dawidowicz, Gerard Fleming, Charles W. Sydnor and Eberhard Jäckel wrote either articles or books rebutting what they considered to be erroneous information in Hitler’s War. Sereny writing in the Sunday Times called Irving's work as "closer to theology or mythology" than history while Broszat labeled Irving a "Hitler partisan wearing blinkers"[47]. In an article published in the Sunday Times under the title “The £1, 000 Question” on July 10, 1977, Sereny and the journalist Lewis Chester examined Irving’s sources and found significant differences from what Irving published in Hitler’s War[48]. In particular, while interviewing one of Irving’s primary informants, Otto Günsche, the latter stated that “one must assume that he [Hitler] did know” about the Holocaust[48] In an article first published in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte journal in 1977, 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".[49] Broszat argued that in writing Hitler's War, Irving was too concerned with the "antechamber aspects" of Hitler's headquarters, and accused Irving of distorting historical facts in Hitler's favor.[50] Broszat complained that Irving was focused too much on military events at the expense of the broader political context of the war, and that he had offered false interpretations such as accepting at face value the Nazi claim that the Action T4 "euthanasia" program was launched in September 1939 to free up hospital spaces for wounded German soldiers, when in fact the program was launched in January 1939.[51] In particular, Broszat criticized Irving's claim that because of one telephone note written by Himmler stating "No liquidation" in regards to a train convey of German Jews passing through Berlin to Riga (whom the SS intended to have all shot upon arrival) on 30 November 1941 that this proved that Hitler did not want to see the Holocaust happen.[52] Broszat argued that this was not proof that Hitler had given any such order to Himmler to stop the killings of Jews, but rather that the comment "No liquidation" referred only to that particular train, and was mostly likely related to concerns about questions American reporters were asking about the fate of German Jews being sent to Eastern Europe.[53] Broszat questioned whatever Hitler had given Himmler any order about the train, given that the phone call Himmler made from the Wolfsschanze to Heydrich in Prague took place at about 11: 30 A.M., and the records show that Hitler did not get up until about 2: 00 P.M on November 30th, 1941[53]. Likewise, Broszat criticized Irving for accepting the "fantastic" claims of the SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff that he did not know about the Holocaust (Irving's argument was that if Wolff did not know about the Holocaust, how could Hitler have known), despite the fact that Wolff was convicted of war crimes in 1963 on the basis of documentary evidence implicating him in the Holocaust.[54] Broszat accused Irving of seeking to generate a highly misleading impression of a conference between Hitler and the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy in April 1943 by re-arranging the words to make Hitler appear less brutally anti-Semitic then what the original notes showed.[55] Along the same lines, Broszat maintained that the picture of World War Two drawn by Irving was done in a such way to engage in moral equivalence between the actions of the Axis and Allied states, leading to Hitler's "fanatical, destructive will to annihilate" being downgraded to being "...no longer an exceptional phenomenon".[56] The criticism by Broszat was considered to be especially damaging to Irving because Broszat had based his critique largely by examining the same primary sources Irving had used for Hitler's War. Another equally scathing review was published by the American historian Charles Sydnor who argued that Hitler's War was marred by Irving's efforts to present Hitler in the most favorable light possible.[57] Sydnor commented that Irving wrongly and bizarrely presented SS massacres in Poland in September 1939 as the legitimate response to the British rejection of Hitler's peace offer of October 1939 , and that Irving seemed to imply that Hitler's anti-Semitism was justified by the Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive against German cities.[58] Sydnor noted numerous errors in Hitler's War such as Irving's claim that Andreas Hofer was shot by the French in 1923 for opposing the French occupation of the Ruhr (Irving probably had Albert Leo Schlageter in mind), and that the 1945 film Kolberg, which dealt with the theme of a Prussian fortress besieged by the French in 1806 was set in the Seven Years' War.[59] Syndor was highly critical of Irving's unreferenced statement that the Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 were well supplied with weapons from Germany's allies.[60] In the same light, concerning Irving's claim that Hitler was ignorant of the Shoah prior to October 1943, Syndor commented that Hitler had received a SS report in November 1942 which contained a mention of 363,211 Russian Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen between August-November 1942.[61] Similarly, Syndor charged Irving with misquotation such as having Hitler say on 25 October 1941 "...with the Jews too I've found myself remaining inactive", thereby implying that Hitler wanted to be "inactive" against the Jews for the rest of the war, when the documents show Hitler's remarks to be "Even with regard to the Jews I've found myself remaining inactive", and that Hitler's remark was referring to the past when Hitler was criticizing himself for his past "inactivity" against the Jews.[62] Likewise, Sydnor argued that Irving's statement that all previous Hitler biographies were compromised by their hostility towards der Führer is not supported by an examination of said biographies.[63] Syndor remarked that Irving's statement that the Einsatzgruppen were in charge in the death camps seems to indicate that he was not familiar with the history of the Shoah as the Einsatzgruppen were in fact mobile death squads who had nothing to do with the death camps.[64] Moreover, Syndnor noted that Irving falsely claimed that the Einsatzgruppen operating in Poland in 1939 were under the authority of SS General Udo von Woyrsch, when in fact the Einsatzgruppen were divided into two groups, one of which reported to Heydrich and another to Theodor Eicke (General Woyrsch commanded a group reporting to Heydrich).[65] Continuing on the theme of the Einsatzgruppen, Syndor criticized Irving for his statement that the Babi Yar massacre of September 1941 was the first massacre carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in 1941, when in fact the Einsatzgruppen had been staging massacres of Soviet Jews since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.[66] Syndor charged Irving with offering a false interpretation of Hitler's reaction to Konrad Morgen's report of October 1944 about widespread corruption in the SS as marking Hitler's moral outrage to the Holocaust; Syndor asserted that Hitler's outrage had nothing to do with the murder of the Jews, and everything to do with the revelation of SS corruption.[67] Concerning Irving's claim that General Friedrich Olbricht was engaged in an orgy on the night of 20 July 1944 in reaction to the news of Hitler's apparent assassination, Syndor noted that Irving does not explain how General Olbricht could have been engaged in directing a putsch at the Bendlerblock on the night of 20 July while at the same time engaging in an orgy at his home.[68] Finally, Syndnor argued that Irving's account of the final days of Hitler appeared to comprise little more than a rehashing of Hugh Trevor-Roper's 1947 book, The Last Days of Hitler, only with Hitler as an object of sympathy, rather than scorn[69] Dawidowicz in her 1981 book The Holocaust and Historians called Irving an apologist for the Third Reich with minimal scholarly standards[70]. Dawidowicz wrote that she believed that the term revisionist was inappropriate for Irving because revisionism is a legitimate historical method whereas Irving was not entitled to call himself a historian, revisonist or otherwise, and only deserved the label apologist[70]. Dawidowicz maintained that the “No liquation” message in Himmler’s phone log refers not to the German Jews being deported to be shot in Riga, but rather to a Dr. Jekelius, whom Himmler believed to the son of Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, who was also travelling on that train, and whom Himmler wanted arrested, but not executed.[70] Because of the controversy Hitler’s War generated, it was a best-seller in 1977. [edit] Continuing negationist studies: Irving's work of the late 1970s-early 1980sJust months after the initial release of Hitler's War, Irving published The Trail of the Fox, a biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In it, Irving attacked the members of the July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler, branding them "traitors", "cowards", and "manipulators", and uncritically presented Hitler and his government's subsequent revenge against the plotters, of which Rommel was also a victim. Irving painted the men and women involved in the plot in the blackest of colours, and argued that their fate after 20 July was fully deserved. Irving challenged the popular notion that Rommel was one of the leaders of the rebellion: Rommel stayed loyal to Hitler until the end, Irving claimed, and the real blame for his forced suicide lay with his associates, who schemed against him so they could save their own lives and because they were jealous of Rommel's medals. In particular, Irving accused Rommel's friend and Chief of Staff General Hans Speidel of framing Rommel in the attempted coup. One reviewer of The Trail of the Fox noted that Irving celebrated German victories in North Africa with more gusto then one would expect from a British author, and that Irving had an evident dislike for the “criminals” Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, General Ludwig Beck and Carl Friedrich Goerdeler[71] The British historian David Pryce-Jones in a book review of The Trail of the Fox in the 12 November 1977 edition of The New York Times Book Review accused Irving of mindlessly taking everything Hitler had to say at face value.[43]. In 1978, Irving released The War Path, the companion volume to Hitler's War which covered events leading up to the war and which was written from a similar point of view. Again, professional historians such as D.C. Watt noted numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Despite the criticism, the book sold well, as did all of Irving's books to that date. The financial success of his books enabled Irving to buy a home in the prestigious Mayfair district of London, own a Rolls-Royce car, and to enjoy a very affluent lifestyle.[72] In addition, Irving, despite being married, became increasing open with his affairs with other women, all of which were detailed in his self-published diary.[73] Irving's affairs were to cause his first marriage to end in divorce in 1981. In 1982, Irving began a common-law relationship with a Danish model, Bente Hogh. 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. 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 characterized 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 anti-Semitism.[74] 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 anti-Semitic attitudes themselves.[75] [edit] Hitler DiariesIn 1983, Irving played a major role in the Hitler Diaries controversy. Irving had long been an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia, and in October 1982 purchased eight-hundred pages of documents relating to Hitler, only to discover that many of the documents were forgeries[76] Irving was an early proponent of the argument that the diaries were a forgery, and went so far as to crash the press conference held by Hugh Trevor-Roper at the Hamburg offices of Der Stern magazine on 25 April 1983 to denounce the diaries as a forgery and Trevor-Roper for endorsing the diaries as genuine (Trevor-Roper had called the press conference to announce his withdrawal of his endorsement, arguably rendering Irving's attack on Trevor-Roper irrelevant).[77] Irving's performance at the Der Stern press conference where he violently harangued Trevor-Roper until ejected by security led him to be featured prominently on the news and the next day Irving appeared on Today television show as a featured guest.[78] Irving had concluded that the alleged Hitler diaries were a forgery because the diaries come from the same dealer in Nazi memorabilia that Irving had purchased his collection from in 1982[76]. At the press conference in Hamburg, Irving announced "I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here"[79]. Irving was proud of the "trail of chaos" he had caused at the Hamburg press conference and the attendant publicity it had brought him, and in particular took a great deal of pride in his humiliation of Trevor-Roper, whom Irving strongly disliked for his criticism of Irving's methods and conclusions[80]. Irving also noted internal inconsistencies in the supposed Hitler diaries such as diary entry for July 20, 1944 which would have been unlikely given that Hitler’s right hand been badly burned by the bomb planted in his headquarters by Colonel Stauffenberg earlier that day[81]. However, a week later on 2 May, Irving reversed himself and claimed the diaries were genuine; at the same press conference, Irving took the opportunity to promote his translation of the memoirs of Hitler’s physician Dr. Theodor Morell[82]. Robert Harris in his book Selling Hitler suggested that an additional reason for Irving's change of mind over the authenticity of the alleged Hitler diaries was that the fake diaries contain no reference to the Holocaust, thereby buttressing Irving's claim in Hitler's War that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust.[83] Subsequently Irving reversed himself again when the diaries were revealed as a forgery. At a press conference held to withdraw his endorsement of the diaries, Irving proudly claimed that he was the first to call the diaries a forgery, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call the diaries genuine[82]. In his later accounts of his role in the Hitler Diaries matter, Irving has always mentioned his role as proponent of the theory that the diaries were fake, while ignoring his change of opinion about their authenticity. [edit] ChurchillBy the mid-1980s, Irving had not had a successful book in years, and was behind schedule in writing the first volume of his Churchill series, the research for which had strained his finances[84]. By the time he finished the manuscript in 1985, his reputation was greatly diminished,[citation needed] so it was not until 1987 that the book was published as Churchill's War, Volume I. In it, Irving writes a revisionist portrayal of Churchill—a debauched alcoholic, a coward, an unabashed racist, and a corrupt warmonger servile to the interests of "international Jewry".[citation needed] Irving also accused Churchill of "selling out the British Empire" and "turning Britain against its natural ally, Germany". [edit] Ernst NolteIn 1986, Irving was one of the few English language authors to endorse the controversial thesis of the German philosopher Ernst Nolte who, in a 1986 article named Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will ("The Past That Does Not Want To Go Away"), claimed that because the President of the World Zionist Organization Chaim Weizmann wrote a letter to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain pledging the full support of his organization to the British war effort on 3 September 1939, that this constituted a “Jewish declaration of war” against Germany, and thus the German government was fully justified in “interning” the Jews of Europe in concentration camps[37]. Nolte in his turn, had received his notion of Weizmann's letter to Chamberlain as a "Jewish declaration of war" from Irving, who had first introduced this theory in Hitler's War[85]. Nolte commented that since Irving had made that point in Hitler's War, he felt that proved that the point was historically valid[37]. Many other historians attacked Nolte’s argument (and those, like Irving, who supported Nolte’s views) as misleading, intentionally or not, and as coming very close to justifying the Holocaust. Nolte in his turn has been a great admirer of Irving and has often cited Irving’s work in his writings[86]. [edit] GöringIn 1989, Irving published his biography of Hermann Göring, in which he largely portrayed the Reichsmarschall as an overweight drug addict largely concerned with his own wealth and personal pleasures rather than his duties within the Third Reich. Irving downplayed Göring's role in the Holocaust, describing instead Göring's jovial personality and offering a wealth of lesser-known facts about his life. Irving also recounts various incidents and produces documents as evidence that Göring disapproved of the persecution of Jews and other Nazi crimes. [edit] GoebbelsIn 1992, Irving signed a contract with Macmillan for a biography of Joseph Goebbels entitled 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.[87] The decision by Sunday Times (who had brought the rights to serialized extracts from the diaries before Macmillan published them) in July 1992 to hire Irving as a translator of the Goebbels's diary was a controversial one with many historians such Peter Pulzer arguing that Irving because of his views about the Third Reich was not the best man to do that job[88]. Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times called Irving "reprehensible", but defended hiring Irving because he was only a "transcribing technician"[89]. Pulzer argued that it absurd to describe Irving as a "mere technician" translating the diaries from German into English, asserting that a translator working on a "set of documents others had not seen, you took on the whole man"[88]. During his time in Moscow, Irving was given access to two microfiche plates containing 90 pages of previously unknown pages of Goebbels diaries[88]. Through Irving was only supposed to translate the diaries, he stole the plates, smuggled them out of Russia, and copied them without permission[88]. Concern has been expressed by historians such Deborah Lipstadt that Irving may have destroyed or damaged the plates, thereby depriving of the world of knowledge of what was on those plates[89]. In 1995, the St. Martin's Press of New York City agreed to publish the Goebbels biography.[90] By this time, Irving's financial state was such that he very much needed this book deal to be completed in order to pay down the massive arrears on his mortgage.[90] In March 1996, following widespread protests over allegations of antisemitism in Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, St. Martin's cancelled the contract, and left Irving in a situation where he was desperate for both publicity and the need to re-establish his reputation as a historian.[91] [edit] Holocaust denial[edit] Drift towards Holocaust denialOver the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust has changed significantly. Until 1988, when he started to espouse Holocaust denial openly, Irving never sought to deny the reality of the Holocaust and for this reason many Holocaust deniers were ambivalent about him. 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 through Hitler's War was strongly sympathetic to the Third Reich, that because Irving argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust as opposed to the denying the Holocaust, that his book was not part of the "anti-Semitic canon"[92] Typical of the ambiguity felt by them was a letter written in 1984 by the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in the Journal of Historical Review, the official journal of the Institute for Historical Review (I.H.R). In an open letter entitled “A Challenge to David Irving”, Faurisson praised Irving as a historian but criticised him for maintaining that the Holocaust had taken place, and challenged him to take up the cause of Holocaust denial.[93] It has been alleged by the Anti-Defamation League that the original draft of Faurisson's open letter was more critical of Irving, but Willis Carto persuaded Faurisson to tone down the criticism, lest it alienate Irving (who had spoken at a conference sponsored by the I.H.R. in September 1983) from the I.H.R".[94]. It is not known what Irving’s response to Faurisson’s letter was".[95]. Until 1988, Irving seemed torn between a desire to be taken seriously as a historian and a desire to associate with those he seemed to share an ideological affinity with. In the first edition of Hitler's War, Irving footnotes, "I cannot accept the view… [that] there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich speaking of the extermination of the Jews." In 1982, Irving made an attempt to unify all of the various neo-Nazi groups in Britain into one party called Focus, in which he would play a leading role.[96] Irving described himself as a "moderate fascist" who through his leadership of Focus would become the future fascist Prime Minister of Britain.[97] The effort failed due to fiscal problems.[96] One of the main writers for Irving's magazine Focal Point in the 1980s was John Tyndall, the leader of the British National Party.[96] At the time, Irving told the Oxford Mail of having "links at a low level" with the National Front.[96] Irving described Spotlight, the main journal of the Liberty Lobby as "an excellent fortnightly paper."[96] At the same time, Irving put a copy of Hitler's "Prophecy Speech" of 30 January 1939, promising the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" if "Jewish financiers" started another world war, onto his wall.[98] A major theme of Irving's writings since the 1980s was his belief that it had been a great blunder on the part of Britain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that ever since then, Britain had in unstoppable decline as a result of that decision.[97] Irving also took the view that Rudolf Hess should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his flight to Britain in 1941, and that Hitler often tried to help the Jews of Europe.[97] At an IHR conference in September 1983, Irving proclaimed Hitler to be the "biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich".[99] In a June 1992 interview with the Daily Telegraph, Irving stated his belief that "Marriage is a detour" that prevents men from getting ahead in life, and praised Hitler for understanding this.[97] In the same interview, Irving claimed to have heard from Hitler's naval adjutant that the Führer had told him that he could not marry because Germany was "his pride".[97] Irving then claimed to have asked the naval adjutant when Hitler made that remark, and upon hearing that the date was March 24, 1938, Irving stated in response "Herr Admiral, at that moment I was being born".[100] Irving used this alleged incident to argue that there was some sort of mystical connection between him and Hitler.[100] By the mid-1980s, Irving associated himself with the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion, and publicly denied that the Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II.[101] 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.[93] He also alleged that parts of The Diary of Anne Frank might have been forged by her surviving father. [edit] The Zündel trialIn January 1988, Irving travelled to Toronto, Canada to assist Douglas Christie, the defence lawyer for Ernst Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust.[97] Working closely with Robert Faurisson, who was also assisting the defence, Irving contacted Warden Bill Armontrout of the Missouri State Penitentiary who recommended that Irving and Faurisson get into touch with Fred A. Leuchter, a self-proclaimed execution expert living in Boston.[99] Irving and Faurission then flew to Boston to meet with Leuchter, who agreed to lend his alleged technical expertise on the behalf of Zündel's defense.[97] Irving argued that an alleged expert on gassings like Leuchter could prove that the Holocaust was a “myth”[97] After work on the second Zündel trial, Irving declared based on his exposure to Zündel's and Leuchter’s theories that he was now conducting a “one-man intifada” against the idea that there had been a Holocaust.[102] 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.[103] In the 1988 Zündel trial, Irving repeated and defended his claim from Hitler's War that until October 1943 Hitler knew nothing about the actual implementation of the Final Solution. He also expressed his evolving belief that the Final Solution involved "atrocities", not systematic murder:
As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited the Leuchter report by self-styled execution expert Fred A. Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. In Errol Morris' 1999 documentary about Leuchter, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., Irving said, "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."[105] 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.[106] 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.[107] Leuchter's book had been first published in the United States in 1988 as The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdenek.[108] 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".[107] The alleged swindle was the reparations money totating 3 billion DM paid by the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel between 1952-1966 for the Shoah. Irving described the reparations as being "essentially in atonement for the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz", which Irving called a "myth" that would "not die easily".[107] In his foreword, Irving praised the “scrupulous methods” and “integrity” of Leuchter.[109] For writing the foreword to Auschwitz The End of the Line, on June 20, 1989 Irving together with Leuchter was condemned in a House of Commons motion as "Hitler's heirs".[110] 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".[111] In a pamphlet Irving published in London on June 23, 1989 Irving made the "epochal announcement" that there was no mass murder via gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp.[112] Irving labeled 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 no 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".[113] Boasting of his role in criticizing the Hitler diaries as a forgery in 1983, Irving wrote "now he [Irving] is saying the same thing about the infamous 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. They did not exist – ever – except perhaps as the brainchild of Britain's brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare Executive".[114] Finally, Irving claimed "the survivors of Auschwitz are themselves testimony to the absence of an extermination programme".[115] Echoing the criticism of the House of Commons, on May 14, 1990 a leader in The Times described Irving as a "man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost everything of an innocent and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception".[116] [edit] The Holocaust denial lecture circuitIn the early 1990s, Irving was a frequent visitor to Germany, where he spoke at neo-Nazi rallies.[117] The chief themes of Irving's German speeches were that the Allies and Axis states were equally culpable for war crimes, that the decision of Neville Chamberlain to declare war on Germany in 1939 had been a great mistake that set Britain on a path of decline, and the Holocaust was just a "propaganda exercise".[117] Irving's self-proclaimed mission was to guide "promising young men" in Germany in the "right direction" (Irving has often stated his belief that women exist for a "certain task", namely reproduction, and should be "subservient to men"; leading as Deborah Lipstadt noted to a lack of interest in guiding young German women in the "right direction").[117] As a foreigner, Irving was a popular figure with German neo-Nazis, who liked to hear praise and support from abroad.[117] In January 1990, Irving gave a speech in Moers where he asserted that only 30, 000 people died at Auschwitz between 1940-45, all of natural causes, which was equal – so Irving claimed – to the typical death toll from one Bomber Command raid on German cities.[118] Furthermore, Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at that death camp.[118] In that speech, Irving averred : "I say the following thing: there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. There have been only mock-ups built by the Poles in the years after the war".[118] On April 21, 1990 Irving repeated the same speech in Munich, which led to his conviction for Holocaust denial in Munich on July 11, 1991.[119] The court fined Irving DM 7,000.[118] Irving appealed the judgement, and received a fine of DM 10,000 for repeating the same remarks in the courtroom on May 5, 1992.[118] During his appeal in 1992, Irving called upon those present in the Munich courtroom to “fight a battle for the German people and put an end to the blood lie of the Holocaust which has been told against this country for fifty years”.[107] Irving went on to call the Auschwitz death camp a “tourist attraction” whose origins Irving claimed went back to an “ingenious plan” devised by the British Psychological Warfare Executive in 1942 to spread anti-German propaganda that it was the policy of the German state to be “using ‘gas chambers’ to kill millions of Jews and other undesirables”.[107] Following his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving was banned from visiting Germany.[120]. Expanding upon his thesis in Hitler's War about the lack of a written Führer order for the Shoah, Irving argued in the 1990s that the absence of such an order meant that there was no Holocaust.[121] 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.”[93] During the same 1990 speech in Toronto, Irving claimed that "more people died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's motor car in Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber of Auschwitz".[122] In that speech, Irving used the metaphor of a cruise ship named Holocaust, which Irving claimed had "...luxury wall to wall fitted carpets and a crew of thousands… marine terminals established in now virtually every capital in the world, disguised as Holocaust memorial museums".[122] Irving went on to assert that the "ship" was due for rough sailing because recently the Soviet government had allowed historians access to "the index cards of all the people who passed through the gates of Auschwitz", and claimed that this would lead to "a lot of people [who] are not claiming to be Auschwitz survivors anymore" (Irving's statement about the index cards was incorrect; what the Soviet government had made available in 1990 were the death books of Auschwitz, recording the weekly death toll).[122] Irving claimed on the basis of what he misleadingly called the index books that, "Because the experts can look at a tattoo and say 'Oh yes, 181, 219 that means you entered Auschwitz in March 1943" and he warned Auschwitz survivors "If you want to go and have a tattoo put on your arm, as a lot of them do, I am afraid to say, and claim subsequently that you were in Auschwitz, you have to make sure a) that it fits in with the month you said you went to Auschwitz and b) it is not a number which anyone used before".[122] In his 1991 revised edition of Hitler's War he had removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust. In a speech given in Hamburg in 1991, Irving stated that in two years time "...this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majanek and Treblinka...which in fact never took place" will be disproved (Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were all well known Vernichtungslager).[123] Two days later, Irving repeated the same speech in Halle before a group of neo-Nazis, and praised Rudolf Hess as "that great German martyr, Rudolf Hess."[123] At another 1991 speech, this time in Canada, Irving called the Shoah a "hoax", and again predicted that by 1993 the "hoax" would have been "exposed".[122] In that speech, Irving declared, "Gradually the word is getting around Germany. Two years from now too, the German historians will accept that we are right. They will accept that for fifty years they have believed a lie".[122] During that speech, Irving expressed his contempt and hatred for Holocaust survivors by proclaiming that:
In November 1992, Irving was to be a featured speaker at the world "anti-Zionist" congress in Stockholm that was cancelled shortly before beginning by the Swedish government.[117] Also scheduled to attend the "anti-Zionist" conference were Robert Faurisson, Louis Farrakhan, Fred A. Leuchter together with representatives of the anti-Semitic Sunni Islamic group Hamas, the anti-Semitic Shiite Islamic Hezbollah, and the Russian anti-Semitic group Pamyat.[117] In a 1994 speech, Irving lamented that his predictions of 1991 had failed to occur, and complained of the persistence of belief in the "rotting corpse" of the "profitable legend" of the Holocaust.[122] In October 2007 Irving threatened to sue The Jewish Chronicle for describing him as a "Holocaust denier". The Jewish Chronicle responded by printing their solicitor's name and address on its front page.[125] [edit] Racism and antisemitismIrving has expressed racist and antisemitic sentiments, both publicly and privately. Irving has often expressed his belief in the theory of a sinister Jewish conspiracy ruling the world, and that the belief in the reality of Shoah was manufactured as part of the same alleged conspiracy[126]. Irving uses the label "traditional enemies of the truth" to describe Jews, and in a 1963 article about a speech by Sir Oswald Mosley wrote that "Yellow Star did not make a showing"[126]. In 1992, Irving stated that "...the Jews are very foolish not 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"[88]. During an interview with the Amreican writer Ron Rosenbaum, Irving stated his belief that Jews were his "traditional enemy"[127] Several of these racist statements were cited by the judge's decision in Irving's lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt.[128] For instance, in his diary entry for 17 September 1994, Irving wrote about a ditty he composed for his young daughter "when halfbreed children are wheeled past":
Christopher Hitchens writes that after having dinner in his New York apartment, Irving sang the rhyme to his daughter once they were alone in the building's elevator.[129] In one interview cited in the 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".[128] And from a speech in 1992, given to the Clarendon Club:
In 2007, The Guardian reported that Irving said, "The Jews are the architects of their own misfortune, but that is the short version A–Z. Between A–Z there are then 24 other characters in intervening steps".[131] [edit] Libel suit Wikisource has original text related to this article:
In November 1994, Irving had his first encounter with Deborah Lipstadt at DeKalb College in Atlanta, where Lipstadt was lecturing on Holocaust denial.[132] Irving stormed into the lecture hall, did his best to disrupt Lipstadt's lecture by challenging her to a debate, waved about a large amount of money in his hands, and announced he had $1,000 to give right here and now to the first person who could find a written order from Hitler for the Holocaust.[132] Lipstadt proceeded to ignore Irving, despite his repeated attempts to draw her into a debate.[133] After Lipstadt's lecture had ended, Irving announced that Lipstadt's refusal to debate him or produce a written order from Hitler for the Holocaust despite his promise to pay $1,000 on the spot proved that her criticism of him in Denying the Holocaust was invalid, and he proceeded to hand out free copies of his Göring biography to Lipstadt's students.[133] On September 5, 1996, Irving filed a libel suit against Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin Books for publishing a British edition of Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, which had first been published in the United States in 1993[134]. At the same time, Irving also sued Gitta Sereny for libel for an article she had written about him entitled "Spin Time for Hitler" in The Observer newspaper on April 21, 1996[135]. As of 2008, the claim has yet to be heard in a court. In letters of October 25th and October 28th, 1997 Irving threatened to sue John Lukacs for libel if he published his book, The Hitler of History without removing certain passages highly critical of Irving's work[136]. The American edition of The Hitler of History was published in 1997 with the alleged libelous passages included, but because of Irving's legal threats, no British edition of The Hitler of History was published until 2001 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
