David Irving
David Irving | |
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Irving in 2012 | |
| Born | 24 March 1938 Hutton, Essex, England |
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| Education | Brentwood School, Essex |
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| Years active | 1962–present |
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| Spouse |
María del Pilar Stuyck
(m. 1961; div. 1981) |
| Partner | Bente Hogh (since 1992) |
| Children | 5 |
| Part of a series on |
| Far-right politics in the United Kingdom |
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David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author who has written on the military and political history of the Second World War, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a British court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.[1]
Irving's works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it.[2] Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes in the Second World War (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were denounced by historians.
He was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents, which he held closely but stated were fully supportive of his conclusions.[3] His 1964 book The Mare's Nest about Germany's V-weapons campaign of 1944–45 was praised for its deep research but criticised for minimising Nazi slave-labour programmes.[4]
By the late 1980s Irving had placed himself in the fringes of the study of history, and had begun to turn to further extremes, possibly influenced by the 1988 trial of the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel.[5] That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific[Note 1] Leuchter report, led him openly to espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at Auschwitz concentration camp.[6][7]
Irving's reputation as a historical author was further discredited[Note 2] in 2000, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray determined in his ruling that Irving wilfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians.[Note 3] The court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist,[8] who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".[8][9] In addition the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.
- ^ Hare, Ivan & Weinstein, James (2010). Extreme Speech and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 553. ISBN 978-0199601790.
- ^ Evans 2001, p. 101.
- ^ Guttenplan 2001, pp. 91, 277, 278
- ^ Neufeld, Michael J. (2009). "Creating a Memory of the German Rocket Program for the Cold War". In Dick, Steven J. (ed.). Remembering the Space Age. Government Printing Office. p. 81. ISBN 9780160867118.
- ^ Evans 2002, pp. 119–23
- ^ van Pelt 2002, p. 15
- ^ Evans 2001, p. 125.
- ^ a b "The ruling against David Irving". The Guardian. London. 11 April 2000. Archived from the original on 2 July 2015. Retrieved 27 March 2010.
- ^ "Hitler historian loses libel case". BBC News. 11 April 2000. Archived from the original on 28 February 2021. Retrieved 2 January 2010.
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