David Irving is the subject of a great Wikipedia profile. He lost a libel lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt. Here is David’s side.
Jack the Jew* emails: David Duke of course came to his views on race through the KKK. It is easy to think of David Duke as a clown, but his views on Jews largely parallel Kevin MacDonald’s.
David Irving is a different case. He was a respected amateur historian and popular author about military matters. He is educated guy and a really talented writer. Because he speaks and reads German fluently, he has used original source material for his works. He is more responsible than anyone, other than Kurt Vonnegut, for publicizing British firebomb raid on Dresden (for fans of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, it plays a significant part in that book as well). What happened with Irving is that in all of his original research, he was unable to come up with anything linking Hitler with direct orders to exterminate the Jews. He also minimized the number of Jews who were deliberately killed. (The numbers, even from established historians of the Holocaust, are all over the map. Arno Mayer, who wrote, Why did the Heavens not darken, in that book said that more Jews died of disease and other causes than were put to death in gas chambers in Auschwitz.)
Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book in which she called Irving a Holocaust Denier, lumping him with people who were explicit Holocaust deniers. Irving sued her in England for libel and lost. In the process Irving’s historical research was shredded by Richard Evans, another British historian of WWII and the Nazis, because Evans said that Irving had deliberately shaped his books and opinions by ignoring some facts and stressing others to reach a desired result.
This result of the trial pretty much ruined Irving’s reputation among serious historians. However, there are a number of points that really have to be made in Irving’s defense: Irving foolishly represented himself at trial whereas Libstadt’s team consisted of the best barristers in England paid millions of pounds by wealthy Jews including Spielberg. Evans was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to testify as an expert witness, and in subsequent events, has been criticized by neutral sources as someone who has made serious errors in his own works. Irving made all of his source materials available to the defense and Lipstadt refused to turn over much of what she had that she based her claim in the book on.
Irving is probably the English speaking historian who knows the most about the Nazi leadership having read and translated Goebbels diaries, written a book on Goebels and on Himmler as well as on other aspects. Irving has also changed his views on the extent of the Holocaust. He still doesn’t think it can be attributed to Hitler, but does think that others in the leadership were involved, and he now concedes that there were extermination camps and that at least hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed.
Christopher Hitchens strongly supported Irving’s right to his opinions and his books. The question is always one of whether histories should be refuted by calling its author a racist or an anti-Semite or refuted with facts. Irving was not some crank pounding out tracts. He may have had an agenda as Evans testified, but if that is the case, identify the agenda as Evans did and show how Irving distorted the facts. However, that may be true for some of the parts of Irving’s works, its certainly not true for most of them.
