David Irving

David John Cawdell Irving (born March 24, 1938) is the British authorRichard Ingram Irving was the author of his own downfall in The Independent 25 February 2006: In 1969, after David Irving's support for Rolf Hochhuth, the German playwright who accused Winston Churchill of murdering the Polish wartime leader General Sikorski, The Daily Telegraph issued a memo to all its correspondents. "It is incorrect," it said, "to describe David Irving as a historian. In future we should describe him as an author." of several best-selling books about the military history of World War II. He is widely regarded as a Holocaust denier, although he has at times appeared to change his position, saying that "the Nazis did murder millions of Jews". ^*

In 1998, he launched an unsuccessful libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher in which the judge ruled that characterizations "that is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism" and "that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" were "substantially true". ^*

As a result of previous statements about the Holocaust, Irving has been barred from entering Germany, Austria, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. On 20 February 2006, he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in Austria for denying the Holocaust, when he re-entered Austria following his earlier ban.

Early life

Irving was born in Hutton, near Brentwood, 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 tragedy severed all links with his wife and their children.

Student years

After completing A-levels at Brentwood School, Irving briefly studied physics (though never graduated) at Imperial College London. He gained notoriety by writing for the student newspaper Phoenix and in 1959 served as editor of the London University Carnival Committee's journal, Carnival Times. His time as editor was controversial, though Irving deflected criticism by characterizing the Carnival Times as "satirical". In one editorial, he suggested the media were owned by Jews and were against the formation of what is now 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 wrote appreciatively of Nazi Germany. 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 being a member of a Conservative student group at the time, he has denounced that article as libellous and the "handiwork of an imaginative Daily Mail journalist." [http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/PQ17Libel/Parker240269.html

The Destruction of Dresden

Irving next left for 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. 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. 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. Today, casualties at Dresden are estimated as most likely 25,000-35,000 dead, and probably towards the lower end of that range.

Early attacks on Irving - Gerry Gable and Searchlight

In November 1963 Irving called the police because he suspected that three men who had gained access to his Mayfair apartment by claiming to be GPO engineers were not genuine. Gerry Gable was arrested and held at Hornsey police station, and on 14 January 1964, along with Manny Carpel and another, Gable admitted breaking in with intent to steal private papers, and was convicted. 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, January 17 1964 and other newspapersIrving considered this incident important, and in his video 'Ich komme wieder' London Weekend Television in May 1977, he would later boast of "my top level security service sources."[http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/people/Gable/OxfordStudent0500.html" target="_blank" >^*

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 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 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. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Irving called the surviving members of Hitler's circle as "the Magic Circle" and stated it was his intense desire in the 1960s to be a member of "the Magic 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 sometimes criticised as inaccurate when reviewed by specialists, his command of language and a wealth of 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.

Revisionism

In 1977, Irving published Hitler's War, the first of his two-part biography on Adolf Hitler. In it, 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 "preventative war" forced on Hitler to avert an impending Soviet attack (supported by some, notably Soviet GRU defector Victor Suvorov, and others, see Icebreaker). 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.

Reaction to Hitler’s War was highly mixed. 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, other historians were more hostile. John Lukacs in a very unfavourable book review called Hitler’s War a worthless book while various historians such as Gitta Sereny, Martin Broszat, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Eberhard Jäckel wrote either articles or books rebutting what they considered to be erroneous information in Hitler’s War.

Just 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 wrote of Rommel's view that the members of the July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler, were traitors, cowards, and manipulators. Irving challenged the unfounded notion that Rommel was one of the leaders of the rebellion, as was suspected by the SS: Rommel stayed loyal to Hitler until the end, Irving wrote, and the real blame for his forced suicide lay with senior officers in his staff and members of the German High Command, who had been critical of his tactics (and, according to Irving, envious of his medals) throughout the war. Irving laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of one man, General Hans Speidel, who Irving claims was the real mastermind of the plot. Speidel survived the witch-hunt, going on to become a top General in N.A.T.O. after the war. For his part, Speidel denies any involvement in the attempted coup.

In 1978, Irving released The War Path, the companion volume to Hitler's War which covered events leading up to the war and is written from a similar point of view. Again, professional historians noted numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Despite the criticism, the book sold well, as did all of Irving's books to that date.

In the 1980s, Irving started researching and writing about topics other than Nazi Germany, but with far less success. He began his research on his three-part biography of Churchill. In 1981, he released two books. The first was The War Between the Generals, in which Irving offered a tabloid-esque account of the Allied High Command, 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.

In 1983, Irving played a major role in the Hitler Diaries controversy. Irving was an early proponent of the argument that the diaries were a forgery, and went as far to crash the press conference held by Hugh Trevor-Roper at the Hamburg offices of Der Stern magazine on April 25, 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, thereby making Irving's attack on Trevor-Roper somewhat unnecessary in the opinion of many). However, a week later on May 2, 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 Morrell. Robert Harris in his book Selling Hitler suggested that an additional reason for Irving's change of mind over the authenticity over the alleged Hitler diaries was motivated by the fact that the allged diaries contain no reference to the Holocaust, thereby buttressing Irving's claim in Hitler's War that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust. 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 an forgery, to which a reporter replied that that he was also the last to call the diaries genuine. In his later accounts of his role in the Hitler Diaries matter, Irving has always mentioned his role as proponent of the theory that that the diaries were fake while ignoring his change of opinion about the authenticity of the Hitler Diaries. Many historians have criticized Irving as a crass, self-promoting individual who merely used the Hitler Diaries controversy as a chance to enhance his profile with the public.

By the mid-1980s, Irving had not had a successful book in years, and was behind schedule in writing his upcoming first volume of his Churchill series, the research for which had strained his finances. By the time he finished the manuscript in 1985, his reputation was greatly diminished, so it wasn't 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". Irving also accused Churchill of "selling out the British Empire" and "turning Britain against its natural ally, Germany."

In 1989, Irving published his biography of Hermann Göring, in which he highlighted, though did not endorse, the more "positive" features of the Nazi Reichsmarschall. Irving avoided discussion of 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.

Accusations of Holocaust denial

Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust has changed significantly. In the first edition of Hitler's War, Irving footnotes, "I cannot accept the view... ^* there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich speaking of the extermination of the Jews." By the mid-1980s, however, 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. He also alleged that parts of The Diary of Anne Frank might have been forged by her surviving father, and in 1988 testified for the defence at Canadian-based Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel's trial.

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.

I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was.^*

As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited a 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. After the trial, Irving published Leuchter's report in the United Kingdom and wrote its foreword. In Errol Morris' 1999 documentary about Leuchter, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., Irving said, "The big point 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 his 1991 revised edition of Hitler's War, he had removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust.

Many have considered Irving’s historical arguments to be very convoluted. An example occurred in the above-mentioned interview with Ron Rosenbaum, when Rosenbaum questioned Irving about a memoir that had come into Irving’s possession that was alleged to have written by Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s (The precise authenticity of the Eichmann Memoirs is in doubt, but parts of the book, according to the German Federal Archives, appeared to be genuine). Irving had received the alleged memoir during a visit to Argentina in 1991 and was quite proud of his find. In The Eichmann Memoirs, Eichmann claimed to have heard from Himmler that Hitler given a verbal order authorizing the Holocaust, thereby contradicting Irving’s claim in Hitler’s War that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. Irving’s response to the claim that Hitler ordered the Holocaust in The Eichmann Memoirs was to claim that Eichmann wrote his memoirs in 1956 at the time of the Suez War, and was fearful that Cairo, Egypt might fall to Israel. Irving’s reasoning is that if Cairo was taken by the Israeli Defence Forces, then the Israelis might discover the “rat-line” as undercover smuggling networks for Nazis were known that had allowed Eichmann to escape to Argentina, and that therefore Eichmann had written his memoirs as a potential defense in the event of being captured by the Israelis. In this way, Irving argued that The Eichmann Memoirs were genuine, but the claim that Hitler ordered the Holocaust was false — only made to reduce Eichmann’s responsibility for the Holocaust. Also in the same interview, Irving claimed to want to be accepted as a scholar by other historians, and bemoaned having to associate with what Irving called the lunatic anti-Semitic fringe groups, who Irving claimed he would disassociate himself from as soon as he was accepted by the historians’ community.

Racism

Irving has expressed, both publicly and privately, racist sentiments. Several of these were cited by the judge's decision in Irving's lawsuit against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt ^*. For instance, in a 1994 diary entry, Irving wrote about a ditty he composed for his young daughter "when halfbreed children are wheeled past":

I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.

And from a speech in 1992 (note that Sir Trevor McDonald, referenced in the quote, was the first black newsreader in the United Kingdom, with ITN):

I am not anti-coloured, take it from me; nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at an airport, or a station, or a seaport, and I see a coloured family there — the black father, the black wife and the black children… When I see these families arriving at the airport I am happy, and when I see them leaving at London airport I am happy.

But if there is one thing that gets up my nose, I must admit, it is this — the way… the thing is when I am down in Torquay and I switch on my television and I see one of them reading our news to us. It is our news and they’re reading it to me. If I was a chauvinist I would say I object even to seeing women reading our news to us.

…But now we have women reading out news to us. If they could perhaps have their own news which they were reading to us, I suppose ^*, it would be very interesting.

For the time being, for a transitional period I'd be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, following by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts…"

Libel suit

In 1998, Irving filed a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books. In her book, Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt called him a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot, and said that he manipulated and distorted real documents. Though the author was American, Irving filed his suit in the English High Court, where the burden of proof in libel cases is on the defendant, unlike the U.S. where the burden is on the plaintiff. As explained by the trial judge, Sir Charles Gray:

''4.7 ... the burden of proving the defence of justification rests upon the publishers. Defamatory words are presumed under English law to be untrue. It is not incumbent on defendants to prove the truth of every detail of the defamatory words published: what has to be proved is the substantial truth of the defamatory imputations published about the claimant. As it is sometimes expressed, what must be proved is the truth of the sting of the defamatory charges made.

Defence

Lipstadt and Penguin hired the British solicitor Anthony Julius to present her case and he in turn briefed the libel barrister, Richard Rampton QC. They also retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Also working as an assistant expert witness was the American Holocaust historian Christopher Browning. Evans and his two assistants spent more than two years examining Irving's work, while gathering evidence to support the claim that Irving had misrepresentated evidence to support his prejudice. Evans suggested that in his view, Irving had knowingly used forged documents as sources. Evans' report was the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of Irving's work:Not one of books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian. [http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/evidence/evans006.asp

Plaintiff

In the trial, Irving represented himself. He called the American Kevin B. MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist, to testify on his behalf. Rather than focus on the defence's evidence against him, or on whether or not Lipstadt had defamed him, Irving seemed to focus mainly on his "right to free speech." In his closing statement, Irving claimed to have been a victim of an international, mostly Jewish, conspiracy for more than three decades. At one point on 15 March 2000, during the course of Irving's closing argument, he appeared to refer to the Judge as 'Mein Führer' (page 193 of the transcript).

Ruling

Mr Justice Gray praised Irving's "thorough and painstaking research into the archives" and commended his discovery and disclosure of many historical documents. He also noted Irving's intelligence and thorough knowledge of World War II history. However, as stated at David Irving vs Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, he found the following claims against Irving to be 'substantially true':

Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.

Irving lost subsequent attempts at appeal, the appeal finally being rejected by Lord Justice Sedley.

A 2001 episode of PBS' NOVA (titled "Holocaust on Trial") focused on the case, and showed re-enactments of events in the courtroom. Irving was played by British actor John Castle.

Aftermath

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 liable to pay the substantial costs of the trial, which ruined him financially and subsequently forced him into bankruptcy.

Criticism by historians

In a review of Irving's 1988 book Churchill's War, David Cannadine, the director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, criticised Irving's "double standard on evidence", accusing Irving of "demanding absolute documentary proof to convict the Germans (as when he sought to show that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust), while relying on circumstantial evidence to condemn the British (as in his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden)."^*

Prominent British historian Sir John Keegan wrote in 1996 in his book The Battle for History, "Some controversies are entirely bogus, like David Irving's contention that Hitler's subordinates kept from him the facts of the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews…" During the libel trial, Keegan - who had been subpoenaed by Irving to appear as a witness - lambasted Irving by saying: "I continue to think it perverse of you to propose that Hitler could not have known until as late as October 1943 what was going on with the Jewish people" and, when asked if it was perverse to say that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution, answered "that it defies common sense".^*

In an April 20 1996 review in The Daily Telegraph of Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, Keegan wrote that Irving "knows more than anyone alive about the German side of the Second World War", and claimed that Hitler's War was "indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round."In an article in The Daily Telegraph of 12 April 2000, Keegan spoke of his experience of the trial, writing that Irving had an "all-consuming knowledge of a vast body of material" and exhibited "many of the qualities of the most creative historians," that his skill as an archivist could not be contested, and that he was "certainly never dull." However, according to Keegan "Like many who seek to shock, he may not really believe what he says and probably feels astounded when taken seriously."[http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/2000/04/12/nirv512.html.

In 1977, the prominent German historian Hans Mommsen wrote Irving a letter praising his skill as a researcher. In the 1990s, Irving featured a translation of Mommsen’s letter on his web-site. Mommsen attempted to have the letter removed, but was unsuccessful. However, Mommsen did succeed in forcing Irving to feature a second letter from Mommsen written in 1998 in which Mommsen completely disallowed his first letter of 1977.

In a six-page essay in The New York Review of Books, Gordon A. Craig, a leading scholar of German history at Stanford University, noted Irving's claims that the Holocaust never took place and that Auschwitz was merely "a labor camp with an unfortunately high death rate." Though "such obtuse and quickly discredited views" may be "offensive to large numbers of people", Craig argued that Irving's work is ";the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War" and that "we dare not" disregard his views.

Persona non grata

By the late 1980s, Irving was barred from entering Austria. In the early 1990s, a German court found him guilty of Holocaust denial, and he was subsequently fined and barred from entering Germany. Other governments followed suit. In 1992, he was barred from South Africa and Canada, where he was arrested in November 1992 and deported back to the United Kingdom. In an administrative hearing surrounding those events he was found by the hearing office to have engaged in a "total fabrication" in telling a story of an exit from and return to Canada which would have, for technical reasons, made the original deportation order invalid. He was also barred from entering Australia in 1992, a ban he made four unsuccessful legal attempts to overturn.

Early in September 2004, Michael Cullen, the deputy prime minister of New Zealand, announced that Irving would not be permitted to visit the country, where he had been invited by the National Press Club to give a series of lectures under the heading "The Problems of Writing about World War II in a Free Society". The National Press Club defended its invitation of Irving, saying that it amounted not to an endorsement of his views, but rather an opportunity to question him. The intended visit provoked an outcry among Jewish groups, who were not appeased by Irving's promise not to speak about the Holocaust.

Irving had visited New Zealand twice before in the 1980s. His intended 2004 visit was refused on the grounds that he had been convicted of offences by a German court, and that at various times had been deported from, and/or refused entry to, Canada, the United States, Italy, and South Africa. "Mr. Irving is not permitted to enter New Zealand under the Immigration Act because people who have been deported from another country are refused entry," government spokeswoman Katherine O'Sullivan had told The Press earlier. Irving rejected the ban and attempted to board a Qantas flight for New Zealand from Los Angeles on 17 September 2004. He was not allowed on board. "As far as I'm concerned, the legal battle now begins," he was quoted as saying. His New Zealand based lawyer is still waiting on instructions on how to proceed.

Arrest and trial in Austria

Irving was arrested by the Austrian police in the southern state of Styria on 11 November 2005, under a warrant issued in 1989. Irving knew that he was banned from Austria, in the words of his partner, Bente Hogh: "He was not jailed just for his views but because he's banned from Austria and still went. David doesn't take advice from anyone. He thought it was a bit of fun, to provoke a little bit."^*

Within two weeks of his arrest, Irving asserted through his lawyer that he acknowledged the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers. On 20 February 2006 ^* he pleaded guilty to the charge of denying the Holocaust from two speeches in 1989. He said this was what he believed, until he later saw the personal files of Adolf Eichmann, the chief organiser of 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," Irving told the court. "The Nazis did murder millions of Jews", "I am absolutely without doubt that the Holocaust took place."

He was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in accordance with the Austrian Federal Law on the prohibition of National Socialist activities (officially termed Verbotsgesetz, "Prohibition Statute") for having denied the existence of gas chambers in National Socialist concentration camps in several lectures held in Austria in 1989. (Under the State Treaty of 1955 for the Re-establishment of an Independent and Democratic Austria, which Austria concluded with France, the United Kingdom, the USA and the USSR, Austria undertakes to prevent all Nazi propaganda. The Prohibition Statute forms part of the Austrian Constitution.)

Irving declared himself shocked by the severity of the sentence. He reportedly had already purchased a plane ticket home to London, believing the court would "not be stupid enough" to lock him up. ^*

On February 28, Irving once again questioned the Holocaust, asking "Given the ruthless efficiency of the Germans, if there was an extermination programme to kill all the Jews, how come so many survived?" He claimed that the number of people gassed in Auschwitz was relatively small, and that his earlier claims that there had been no gassing at all had been a "methodological error." According to Irving "You could say that millions died, but not at Auschwitz."^*

Many feared that Irving could become a martyr for far-right activists and the issue also raised a debate on what grounds freedom of speech could be denied in democratic countries.

The Austrian Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs insists that the country's 'Prohibition Statute' does conform with international law and international human rights standards, and is not contrary to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights 1950, being "...necessary in a democratic society (inter alia) ...for the prevention of disorder or crime,...^* ...for the protection of the rights of others" (the quoted words being from Article 10). It would require an appeal by Mr Irving to the European Court of Human Rights, should he wish to have it determined whether the Austrian authorities are correct on this point or their statute is an excessive and illegal intrusion on the right of freedom of expression.

As of February 2006, Irving is in the Josefstadt Prison in central Vienna, awaiting appeal. He has stated that he will use time spent in prison to write his memoirs, entitled "Irving's War". Irving's appeal will be heard by the Austrian Supreme Court in September 2006. Both parties - Irving and the Austrian prosecutor calling for a longer sentence - served their appeals on April 22, 2006.

Upon hearing of Irving's sentence to three years' imprisonment, noted Irving critic Deborah Lipstadt said, "I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship… The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth." ^*.

Bibliography

The Destruction of Dresden (1963) ISBN 0705700305
The Mare's Nest (1964)
The Virus House (1967)
The Destruction of Convoy PQ17 (1967)
Accident — The Death of General Sikorski (1967) ISBN 0718304209
Breach of Security (1968) ISBN 0718301013
The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe (1973), a biography of Erhard Milch ISBN 0316432385
Hitler's War (1977), Hitler in wartime
The Trail of the Fox (1977), a biography of Erwin Rommel ISBN 0525222006
The War Path (1978) ISBN 0670749710
The War Between the Generals (1981)
Uprising! (1981), ISBN 0949667919
The Secret Diaries of Hitler’s Doctor (1983) ISBN 002558250X
The German Atomic Bomb: The History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany (1983) ISBN 0306801981
War Between the Generals (1986) ISBN 0865530696
Churchill's War (1987), Churchill in wartime ISBN 0947117563
Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (1968), reprint (1989) ISBN 0312911521
Göring (1989), biography of Hermann Göring ISBN 0688066062
Goebbels — Mastermind of the "Third Reich" (1996) ISBN 1872197132
Hitler's War (1991), revised edition, incorporating The War Path
Nuremberg: The Last Battle (1996) ISBN 1872197167
Churchill's War Volume II: Triumph in Adversity (1997) ISBN 1872197159
Rommel: The Trail of the Fox, Wordsworth Military Library; Limited edition (1999) ISBN 1840222050
Hitler's War and the War Path (2002) ISBN 1872197108
Hess, the Missing Years (1987) Macmillan, ISBN 0333451791

Note: Most of Irving's books are available in PDF as free downloads at his web site.

References

Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah E. Lipstadt, New York : Free Press ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York ; Oxford : Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993, ISBN 0029192358.
Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial by Richard J. Evans, New York : Basic Books, 2001, ISBN 0465021522: The author was a major expert witness at the trial, and this book presents both his view of the trial, and much of his expert witness report, including his research on the Dresden death count.
The Holocaust on Trial by D. D. Guttenplan, New York: Norton, 2001, ISBN 0393020444.
David Irving's Hitler : a faulty history dissected, two essays by Eberhard Jäckel; translation and comments by H. David Kirk ; with a forward by Robert Fulford, Port Angeles, Wash. : Ben-Simon Publications, 1993. ISBN 0914539086
The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial by Robert Jan Van Pelt, Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 2002, ISBN 0253340160: Van Pelt was another expert witness at the trial, focussing on Auschwitz.
Selling Hitler : The Story Of The Hitler Diaries by Robert Harris, London : Faber and Faber, 1986 ISBN 0571147267.
Denying History: Who Says Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It by Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman ; foreward by Arthur Hertzberg, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0520216121.
Ann Tusa review, Guilty of Falsifying History, of Irving's Nurenburg: The last Battle"
The Hitler of History by John Lukacs, New York : A. A. Knopf, 1997, ISBN 0679446494.
History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving by Deborah E. Lipstadt, New York : Ecco, 2005, ISBN 0060593768.
"David Irving: The Big Oops" pages 221-236 from Explaining Hitler : the search for the origins of his evil by Ron Rosenbaum New York : Random House, 1998. ISBN 0679431519
"Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses" pages 73-125 from Yad Vashem Studies by Martin Broszat, Volume 13, 1979, originally published as "Hitler und die Genesis der "Endlösung". Aus Anlaß der Thesen von David Irving", pages 739-775 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 25, 1977.
"The Selling of Adolf Hitler: David Irving's Hitler's War" pages 169-99 from Central European History by Charles W. Sydnor, Jr, Issue # 2, Volume 12, June 1979.
Felix Müller - Das Verbotsgesetz im Spannungsverhältnis zur Meinungsfreiheit. Eine verfassungsrechtliche Untersuchung; Verlag Österreich, 2005, 238 Seiten, br., ISBN 3-7046-4685
Schiedel, Heribert. Irving sitzt in Österreich in Jungle World, 23 November 2005. ISSN 1613-0766
David Irving vs Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt

Footnotes

Early life

Student years

The Destruction of Dresden

Early attacks on Irving - Gerry Gable and Searchlight

Historian

Revisionism

Accusations of Holocaust denial

Racism

Libel suit

Defence

Plaintiff

Ruling

Aftermath

Criticism by historians

Persona non grata

Arrest and trial in Austria

See also

Bibliography

References

Further reading

Irving v. Penguin Books Limited and Deborah E. Lipstadt trial

Footnotes

Gourt Home::Gourt :: David Irving

Early life

Student years

The Destruction of Dresden

Early attacks on Irving - Gerry Gable and Searchlight

Historian

Revisionism

Accusations of Holocaust denial

Racism

Libel suit

Defence

Plaintiff

Ruling

Aftermath

Criticism by historians

Persona non grata

Arrest and trial in Austria

See also

Bibliography

References

Further reading

Irving v. Penguin Books Limited and Deborah E. Lipstadt trial

Footnotes