I.'s father was a commander in the Royal Navy, his mother Beryl an
illustrator. After completing A-levels at Brentwood School, I. studied physics
in London. In 1959, he left for West Germany, where he worked as a steelworker
and learned German. He then moved to Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an
airbase and married his first wife, a Spanish woman with whom he had five children.
In 1962, he wrote a series of articles on the Allied bombing campaign, 'Wie Deutschlands Städte starben' (How Germany's Cities Died),
which were the basis of his book, 'The Destruction of Dresden' (1963). I.'s estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000.
After the Dresden book, he continued writing history books. In 1977 I. published
'Hitler's War', in which he argued that Britain was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in
1939, and portrayed Hitler as a rational, intelligent politician, whose only goal was to increase Germany's prosperity and influence on the
continent, and who had no knowledge of the Holocaust. In 1987 I. published 'Churchill's
War', a revisionist portrayal of Churchill as a debauched alcoholic, coward,
racist, and corrupt warmonger servile to the interests of international
Jewry.
In the 1988 Ernst Zündel trial in Canada, I. expressed his evolving belief that the
'Final Solution' involved atrocities, but not systematic murder. "If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of
survivors". In his 1991 revised edition of 'Hitler's War', I. removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust.
After I. presented his views 1989 in two speeches in Austria, the Austrian government issued an arrest warrant against him and barred him from entering the
country. In 1992 a German court barred him from entering Germany. Other governments followed, including
Italy and Canada, where he was arrested deported back to the United Kingdom.
In 1993 Irving was ordered to attend court relating to the 'Loi Gayssot' in
France, and refused to travel there. In 2004, New Zealand announced that I. would not be permitted to visit the country, where he had been invited by the National Press Club to give a series of lectures.
In 2005, the Austrian police arrested I. He remained in jail awaiting
trial and was pleaded guilty of trivialising the Holocaust and sentenced to three
years' imprisonment. On 21 December 2006, he was expelled from Austria and banned from ever.
On 18 May 2007, I. was expelled from the 52nd Warsaw International Book Fair in Poland.
Anschrift
von / Address of I.:
Werke von / Works of I.: Der
Morgenthau-Plan 1944/45
