At 1.30 P.M. Himmler was obliged to telephone from Hitler's bunker to Heydrich the explicit order that Jews were not to be liquidated: and the next day Himmler telephoned SS General Oswald Pohl, overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the order. "Jews are to stay where they are." [780]

At the Zündel trial of 1988 Irving noted, regarding this tête-à-tête between Hitler and Himmler, that "you don't see this kind of thing referred to in the history books because they [establishment historians] can't make it fit. They pretend these documents don't exist." [781] Although no further commentary was provided in Hitler's War, Irving readily conceded at the trial, as he had many times in the previous years, that Hugh Trevor-Roper had rightly complained in the Sunday Times Weekly Review of June 12, 1977 that he (Irving) had misrepresented Hitler's order to Himmler. It was not a general order to spare all  

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776 / Quoted in "Torpedo Running!", p. 7.
777 / SZTR, 34-9459, 9540, 9813, 9814.
778 / Irving, Hitler's War, p. xiii. Cf. also pp. 503-5, 529, 631-2, et al.
779 / Ibid., p. xiv.
780 / Irving, Hitler's War, p. 332. Italics in original. Himmler's original, handwritten notes on his telephone conversations of November 30, 1941 – containing the line "Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine Liquidierung" – appear as a fascimile illustration on page 505.
781 / SZTR, 34-9476, 9477.
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Jews, as Irving thought, but an order to spare one specific transport of Jews bound for Riga. [782] Second, on page 331(n) Irving cited a little-known memo dictated in March 1942 by Staatsekretär Franz Schlegelberg[er] of the Reichsjustizministerium: 

Reich Minister Lammers [Chef der Reichskanzlei from 1933 to 1945] informed me that the Führer has repeatedly pronounced that he wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed until after the war is over. [783]

This document – evidence that early in 1942 Hitler "repeatedly" stated to at least some of his subordinates that he wanted to postpone the solution of the Jewish problem until after the war finished – is at variance with accepted historical opinion, which is, as Hilberg put it, that "Shortly after the Einsatzgruppen crossed the June 22, 1941 line into the USSR, Hitler ordered the commencement of the 'final solution of the Jewish question' on the entire continent." [784]

Controversy and debate are integral elements of the historical profession. The expressing and testing of controversial views often advance historical knowledge and understanding. However unpalatable one may find Irving's thesis regarding Hitler's involvement in the 'Final Solution', it is best seen in this light. It resulted from a genuine and thoughtful attempt to make sense of little-known and seldom-quoted primary sources and the lack of reliable evidence to the contrary. There is no evidence of deliberate falsification of fact.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Although George Orwell, the misanthropic author of Animal Farm and the quasi-prophetic 1984, penned these famous words a generation before Irving's Hitler biography was published, they arguably describe the event and the ensuing furor almost perfectly. When copies of Hitler's War first reached the bookstores – where they sold at an impressive pace, achieved usually by successful novels and popular fiction but rarely by historical works – the burly British historian suddenly found himself almost as reviled as the man whose career he had chosen to chronicle.

The prevailing orthodoxy (to use Orwell's terms) of the 1970s – and the preceding three decades – was that Hitler, a malevolent tyrant with no redeeming qualities, was driven by three principal ambitions: to attain and hold absolute power in Germany; to lead Germany in a crusade for European domination; and to destroy the Jewish people and rule over the other inferior European races. This 'orthodox' view was eloquently expressed in 1952 by Allan Bullock, who wrote that Hitler possessed: 

an ugly and strident egotism, a moral and intellectual cretinism. The passions which ruled Hitler's mind were ignoble: hatred, resentment, the lust to dominate, and, where he could not dominate, to destroy. His career did not exalt but debased the human condition.... Hitler constantly exalted force over the power of ideas and delighted to prove that men were governed by cupidity, fear and their baser passions. The sole theme of the Nazi revolution was domination, dressed up as the doctrine of race, and, failing that, a vindictive destructiveness.... It is this emptiness, this lack of anything to justify the suffering he caused rather than his own monstrous and ungovernable will which
makes Hitler both so repellent and so barren a figure. Hitler will have his place in history, but it will be alongside Attila the Hun ...[785]

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782 / Cf. SZTR, 34-9475, 9476. Even so, this document, Schlegelberg[er]'s memo and the numerous other documents cited by Irving suggest that the accepted historical view of Hitler – as a devilish figure bent on destroying all Jews – needs at least a little revision.
783 / "Herr Reichsminister Lammers teilte mir mit, der Führer habe ihm gegenüber wiederholt erklärt, daß er die Lösung der Judenfrage bis nach dem Kriege zurückgestellt wissen wolle. Demgemäß haben die gegenwärtigen Erörterungen nach Meinung von Herrn Reichsminister Lammers lediglich theoretischen Wert ..." (The document's German original – not quoted by Irving, who provided only an English translation – is in Justice ministry file R22/52 in the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz).
784 / Hilberg, Destruction, p. 257. For Hitler giving such an order in or around the Spring of 1941 (corresponding approximately with the formation of the Einsatzgruppen and the invasion of the USSR), see also H. Krausnick and H-H. Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938-1942; A. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegsführung 1940-41 (Frankfurt: 1965); Poliakov, Harvest of Hate; et al. It should be noted, however, that there is no agreement amongst scholars as to exactly when in 1941 Hitler gave the order or what form it took.
785 / A. Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny Revised Edition (London: Pelican Books, 1962. First published 1952), pp. 804-5. Despite writing that the "distorted picture of Hitler as a mere madman ["Das Zerrbild vom bloß verrückten Hitler"], which Irving pretends to destroy, has long ceased to exist for serious contemporary historical research", Martin Broszat, Director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, stated that historians could not ignore in Hitler "the disgusting monstrosity of the mental and spiritual makeup of this 'non-person' ["Unperson"] his totally irresponsible, self-deceiving, destructive and evilly misanthropic egocentricity ["heillos menschenfeindlichen Egozentrik"] and his lunatic fanaticism". (M. Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der "Endlösung": Aus Anlaß der Thesen von David Irving", Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 25 (1977), p. 745). Cf. also the comments of Yehuda Bauer: "The
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Bullock's treatment of Hitler, emulated by almost all other Hitler biographers and historians of the period, [786] puts one in mind of the painting of an Impressionist, who zealously applies a limited range of pigments – all harsh, in Bullock's case – to the canvas in thick dabs with a palette knife. Conveying an impression, rather than reproducing reality, is the artist's intention. Irving's 'canvas', however, is noticeably different from Bullock's and most of his other predecessors'. His treatment of Hitler resembles a Realist painter's detailed, unembellished depletion of his subject – painted in a wide range of pigments – in which all observed defects and finer qualities are accurately reproduced. Nonetheless, Irving's portrait of Hitler, which certainly challenged the 'prevailing orthodoxy', was unacceptable to reviewers of Hitler's War, the majority of whom dismissed it as the product of a neo-Nazi mentality. Leonard Bushkoffs review in Commentary, published by the America Jewish Committee (New York), typifies this attitude:

[In Hitler's War] all restraint is abandoned and Hitler is virtually canonized. It is no longer a matter of benevolence or generosity, or of regrets that Hitler's greatness as an anti-Communist crusader was undercut by such excesses as the Holocaust, Irving writes as a Zealot, a true believer, and the spirit of his work is closer to theology (or mythology) than to history." [787]

Despite lauding Irving for his ceaseless scholarly industry, [788] Professor Walter Laqueur of Georgetown University wrote in his review of Hitler's War that Irving had long been an admirer of the Third Reich, had political views which "gravitate toward the right" and was, like other revisionists, engaged in "de-demonizing or, to put it less elegantly, in whitewashing [Hitler and his Reich]." [789] The imputation that in Hitler's War Irving had "whitewashed" the German leader appeared in almost all reviews of the book and has been reiterated to the present day by countless authors, journalists, media pundits and anti-fascist propagandists. [790] Nonetheless, a more impartial reading of Hitler's War reveals that the charge of whitewashing is inappropriate and unsustainable. Whilst Irving did deny, for the reasons already outlined, that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews, he indicted Hitler for every crime of which reliable evidence exists. Thus, in Hitler's War one can see the Führer cruelly ordering the commencement of the euthanasia programme; ordering that Jews should be rounded up and expelled to "The East"; ordering the extermination of Red Army commissars; ordering the "disposal" of the entire male population of Leningrad and Stalingrad should the Germans occupy them; dictating the liquidation of Italian Army officers who resisted their 'Axis' partners in 1943; insisting on the massacre of hostages on a one hundred to one basis; and ordering the murder of captured enemy commandos and of downed Allied aircrews. Clearly Irving had not whitewashed Hitler. 

The First substantial attempt at refuting Irving's controversial thesis on Hitler and the Jews was "Hitler und die Genesis der "Endlösung": Aus Anlaß der Thesen von David Irving" by Professor Martin Broszat, Director of the Munich Institut für 

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problem with this [Irving's presentation of Hitler] is that one cannot get away from the demonic, or totally evil, qualities of the Nazi regime. One cannot de-demonize Hitler, because Hitler was a totally evil personality operating within a framework that only very evil personalities could exist in." Y. Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (London: Sheldon Press, 1978), p. 41.
786 / Bullock's Hitler biography, although written in 1952, is "still often referred to as the standard work.... [It] has exerted a powerful spell on a whole generation of historians in Europe and America". J. Hiden and J. Farquharson, Explaining Hitler's Germany: Historians and the Third Reich (London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd., 1983), p. 10.
787 / L. Bushkoff, "The Revised Hitler", Commentary, September 1977, p. 76. Religious phraseology such as that used here by Bushkoff, and by Bauer in the quote from footnote 23, was frequently but subjectively employed by reviewers to describe Irving's treatment of Hitler. Ragnar Kvam wrote that in Irving's Hitler biography "Hitler has sprouted full-fledged angels' wings". (R. Kvam, "Among Two Hundred Survivors from Auschwitz", Judaism: A Quarterly, Issue No. III, Summer 1979, p. 290); Cf. also the detailed discussions by Hugh Trevor Roper in the Sunday Times Weekly Review of June 12, 1977, of Alan Bullock in the New York Times Book Review of May 26, 1977 and of Eberhard Jäckel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of August 25, 1977. Although it is based on those of predecessors, the most detailed general review of Hitler's War, which reveals very many minor errors made by Irving, is Charles W. Sydnor's lengthy review article, "The Selling of Adolf Hitler: David Irving's Hitler's War", Central European History, Volume XII, Number 2, June 1979, pp. 169-199.
788 / "Hitler's War includes much new material, some of it of considerable interest and importance. Mr Irving is an indefatigable interviewer, a prodigy of enterprise and industry, a researcher who almost literally left no stone unturned and succeeded in digging up papers, letters and diaries which were believed to be lost or non-existent, or which escaped, for other reasons, earlier writers." New York Times, April 3, 1977, Section vii, p. 47.
789 / Ibid., p. 47. Additionally, Laqueur scathingly wrote that Hitler's War "reads like the plea of an advocate who knows from the very beginning what he intends to prove and who marshals his evidence to his end relentlessly and with an enthusiasm worthy of a better cause." (Ibid., p. 13). This serious charge was repeated by reviewers too numerous to name. To give one example, John Lukacs wrote in the August 19, 1977 National Revue that Hitler's War was "appalling", containing errors that "are not technical mistakes or oversights. They are the result of the dominant tendency of the author's mind."
790 / Cf. G. Sereny, "The Men Who Whitewash Hitler", New Statesman, November 2, 1979, p. 670.
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Zeitgeschichte. This 37-page article, published in the Institute's Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in October 1977, [791] was the German historian's attempt to integrate a critical analysis of Irving's arguments and texts with a documentation of the important sources which, although familiar to the author and copiously quoted by him in his work, are, even so, frequently obscured by him. [792]

In an apparent effort to destroy totally his credibility, Broszat wrote that Irving, an "enfant terrible", had "expounded a thesis which is embarrassing even to some of his friends and admirers" [793] and that Ullstein Verlag – the publisher of the "expurgated" German edition of Hitler's War – had demanded the omission of those theses of Irving's that were, in its judgement, untenable and irresponsible ["unhaltbaren und unverantwortlichen"]: diminishing Hitler's responsibility for the extermination of the Jews. The publication of the German edition led to a breach between the author and publisher. [794]

To support his claim that Hitler knew of the liquidation of the Jews, Broszat quoted excerpts from Hitler's Table Talk, transcripts of speeches by government officials, and entries in the diaries of several leading Nazis. He relied heavily on unpublished fragment of Goebblels's diaries from the second half of 1941. All these sources reveal, both individually and collectively, that Hitler was an incorrigible Jew-hater. Yet they do not appear to bear out claims that Hitler personally gave an order for the extermination of Europe's Jews. Indeed, none indicate to the present writer that the Führer wanted anything other than to drive ruthlessly the Jews out of Europe and was careless of any incidental deaths. The nature and scope of this summary prevent even a brief analysis of all these sources, but it might be appropriate to look at just one of these sources – the most explicit quoted by Broszat – in order to discover if it really is as incriminating as Broszat suggests. The source is Goebbels's diary entry of August 19, 1941:

The Führer is convinced that his prophecy in the Reichstag [of January 30, 1939] is becoming a fact: that if Jewry should succeed in provoking again a new war, it would finish with their annihilation ["Vernichtung"]. It is coming true in these weeks and months with a certainty that appears almost sinister. In the East the Jews are paying the price ("die Zeche bezahlen"), in Germany they have already paid in part and they will have to pay still more in the future. The last refuge is North America but even there they will have to pay sooner or later. ..[795]

First, if one examines the full text of Hitler's 1939 Reichstag speech (referred to by Goebbels), in which he threatened the "Vernichtung" of Europe's Jews as part of a "prophecy", one can see that his furious words were an emotional outburst against international Jewry as a political and economic force, which, in his Weltanschauung, exerted a disproportionate and insidious influence over the world. [796]

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791 / Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 25 (1977), pp. 739-775. English translation published in Yad Vashem Studies (1979), Volume 13, pp. 61-98 and in H. W. Koch (ed.), Aspects of the Third Reich (Macmillan, London, 1985), pp. 390-429. All quotes from Broszat's article which appear in this summary are from the present writer's own translation of the German text in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, which hereafter will be cited as 'Broszat, "David Irving"'.
792 / Broszat, "David Irving", pp. 739-740.
793 / Ibid., p. 739.
794 / Ibid., p. 739. Broszat's comments are a little misleading. In his introduction to the new and revised Focal Point edition of Hitler's War (London, 1991), Irving explained that the publisher's chief editor "found many of my arguments distasteful, even dangerous, and without informing me suppressed or even reversed them. In their printed text Hitler had not told Himmler (on November 30, 1941) that there was to be "no liquidation" of a consignment of Jews from Berlin; he had told him not to use the word "liquidate" publicly in connection with their extermination program. Thus history is falsified! I prohibited further printings of the book, two days after its appearance in Germany, and litigated for ten years to regain the right to publish it in its original form. To explain their actions, the Berlin publishers argued that my manuscript expressed some views that were "an affront to established historical opinion in their country." (pp. 11-12). Irving told the present writer, in a letter dated August 1, 1991, that the German publisher "had diligently refused to show me the translation or proofs before then [the publication date], and I had to buy a copy myself, in a bookshop in Munich's Neuhauser Straße, to see the monkey-work they had done to my text – changing opinions, distorting arguments, omitting sensitive passages". Cf. also D. Irving and K. Bird, "Reviewed vs. reviewer", New Statesman, May 8, 1981, esp. p. 24.
795 / Ibid., p. 750. Hitler had declared inter alia at the Reichstag on January 30, 1939: "Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in[nerhalb] und außerhalb Europas gelingen sollte, die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen, dann wird das Ergebnis nicht die Bolschewisierung der Erde und damit der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa." ("If international finance-Jewry, inside and outside Europe, should once again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and with that the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.") (Nuremberg Document 2663-PS, IMT, Vol. XXXI, p. 65).
796 / Immediately following the now-famous "prophetic" paroxysm, Hitler stated: "Denn die Zeit der propagandistischen Wehrlosigkeit der nichtjüdischen Völker ist zu Ende. Das national-sozialistische Deutschland und das faschistische Italien besitzen jene Einrichtungen, die es gestatten, wenn notwendig, die Welt über das Wesen einer Frage aufzuklären, die vielen Völkern instinktiv bewußt und nur wissenschaftlich unklar ist. Augenblicklich mag das Judentum in gewissen Staaten seine Hetze betreiben unter dem Schutz einer dort in seinen Händen befindlichen Presse, des Films, der Rundfunkpropaganda, der Theater, der Literatur usw. Wenn es diesem Volke aber noch einmal gelingen sollte, die Millionenmassen der Völker in einen für diese gänzlich sinnlosen und nur jüdischen Interessen dienenden Kampf zu hetzen, dann wird sich die Wirksamkeit einer Aufklärung äußern, der in Deutschland allein schon in wenigen Jahren das Judentum restlos erlegen ist", M. Domarus, Hitler und Proklamationen 1932-1945 (Verlagsdruckerei Schmidt, Neustadt a.d. Aisch, 1963), Vol. II, p. 1058 (For the non-Jewish peoples are no longer without the defence of propaganda.
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Taken in context, it is clear that Hitler's splenetic words were not a revelation to the German people of a monstrous National Socialist plan, even in its embryonic stage, to murder all European Jews. Rather, he was threatening to destroy brutally all Jewish influence and jüdischen Herrschaft in Europe. This view of Hitler's speech may be repellent to those 'intentionalist' historians who allege that Hitler had concrete plans to murder all Europe's Jews as early as 1919, [797] yet it is supported by a proper consideration of evidence. [271]

On numerous occasions Hitler had discussed, both privately and publicly, the "annihilation" (Vernichtung) or "eradication" (Ausrottung) of various nations and peoples. However, in almost all cases (the main exceptions are related to the destruction of armies and partisan groups) the context makes it clear that he was not envisaging the murder of entire populations, but rather the destruction of the military and/or political infrastructures of those nations or peoples. For example, in August 1936 he dictated a lengthy memorandum on the Four Year Plan which contained, worded similarly to his 1939 Reichstag "prophecy" about international finance-Jewry, the following passage:

[Germany must be] capable of waging a worthwhile war against the Soviet Union [...because...] a victory over Germany by Bolshevism would lead not to a new Versailles but to the final annihilation, indeed the extermination, of the German nation. [798]

Despite his explicit words, it is inconceivable that Hitler was seriously suggesting the Soviets would murder almost sixty-five million Germans if they militarily defeated Germany. Clearly he was referring to the Soviet destruction of Germany's military and political infrastructures; that is, the end of Germany as a European power, not the murder of the German people.

The same unequivocal phraseology was used by Hitler when Emil Hacha, the beleaguered Czech President, hurried to see him in Berlin on March 14, 1939. Before signing away Czechoslovakia to Germany, he was told by the disdainful Führer "If last autumn [at the September 1938 Munich Conference] Czechoslovakia had not given in, the Czech people would have been exterminated." [799] The notion that Hitler would have ordered the German forces to attempt the murder of the "tschechische Volk"– that is, over nine million people – is entirely nonsensical. It is apparent that Hitler was meaning that if Czechoslovakia had resisted ceding the Sudetenland to Germany, German troops would have invaded and destroyed the military, politic and possibly economical infrastructures of that country; it would have been the end of Czechoslovakia as a national entity, a political power.

It is possible to cite numerous other examples of Hitler threatening or referring to the annihilation or extermination of a people or nation where the context reveals he meant something totally different to, and much less heinous than, the genocide of that people. Nonetheless, it should be clear from those extracts quoted, and from the internal context of the speech itself, that his 1939 Reichstag "prophecy" against international finance-Jewry was almost certainly not referring to a proposed genocide of Europe's Jews. Rather, after putting the document in context, it appears that it referred to the total destruction of Jewish influence and domination in Europe, something Hitler felt he had already

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Both National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy have the necessary tools to enlighten the world about the nature of a problem that many nations instinctively recognize, though they may lack a scientific view of it. For the time being, the Jews may carry on their agitations in certain states under the cover of the press, cinema, radio, theatre, literature, etc., which are in their hands. But if the Jewish nation should once again succeed in goading millions of people from other nations into a totally senseless war, to serve only Jewish interests, the efficacy of the kind of enlightenment that in just a few years utterly defeated the Jews in Germany will become manifest.")
797 / See Tim Mason's "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism", in G. Hirschfeld and L. Kettenacker (eds.), Der "Führerstaat": Mythos und Realität. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches, Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 23-40. For the use of 2663-PS, cf. S. Gordon, Hitler: Germany and the "Jewish Question" (Princeton Uni. Press, 1984), pp. 130-1; E. Hoyt, Hitler's War (New York: Da Capo, 1988), p. 95; Broszat, et al., Anatomie des SS Staates, p. 340; W. Laqueur and R. Breitman, Breaking the Silence (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 59, 60; B. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 134; J. Toland, Adolf Hitler 1977 Edition (New York: Ballantyne Books, 1976), pp. 699, 700; W. Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: An Investigation into the Suppression of Information. Hitler's 'Final Solution' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 11; et al.
798 / This memorandum was used at the International Military Tribunal as Defence Exhibit-Schacht 48 and in Case 11 of the subsequent proceedings as Document NI-4955, Prosecution Exhibit 931. The English translation is from Document 490 of Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series C, Volume V, March 5, 1936 – October 31, 1936 (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1966),p. 855.
799 / "Wenn im Herbst vorigen Jahres die Tschechoslovakei nicht nachgegeben hätte, so wäre [das] tschechische Volk ausgerottet worden." Conference minutes taken by Legationsrat Hewel. (Document 2798-PS, IMT, Volume XXXI, p. 144).
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achieved in Germany through his brutal policies and legislation on the Jewish question and other issues of race. [800]

Thus, the Goebbels diary extract above – possibly the most explicit of Broszat's evidence – does not show that Hitler knew in, or by, August 1941 that the Jews as a race were being murdered. Indeed, the accepted historical opinion is that at that stage, only three weeks after the 'Göring Decree' [801] and a full five months before the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, no genocidal 'policy' as such existed for Europe's Jews. That allegedly evolved after Wannsee. What the diary extract does show is that Hitler correctly believed that because of his severe pre-war policies and legislation on the Jewish question – extended to cover territories by that point under German control – European Jewry as an economic and political influence was being destroyed, as he had 'prophesied' two years earlier.

Whilst Hitler's utter detestation of the Jews is evident in almost every other document quoted by Broszat they also provide insufficient evidence for one to conclude with certainty that Hitler ordered, or even knew about, the attempted destruction of Europe's Jewish population. Most of the documents (including other extracts from Goebbels's diaries), when referring to the Jewish problem up until early in the winter of 1941, mention or allude to the forced deportation of Jews to "the east" on Hitlers orders – a most terrible crime – or mention individual anti- Jewish atrocities or actions (which were certainly occurring), but do not mention an extermination order or policy.

Following Trevor-Roper's lead, Broszat argued persuasively and at length that in Himmler's telephone notes of November 30, 1941, the words "no liquidation" ("Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine Liquidierung") referred to a single transport of Jews from Berlin. They did not refer, as Irving had mistakenly believed, to a general order from Hitler prohibiting the liquidation of the Jewish people. [802]
However, Broszat wrongly perceived this to be Irving's "principal discovery" ("Hauptentdeckung" [803]) and therefore, acting as though it was his only "discovery", devoted excessive attention to it, ignoring much of the other documentary evidence employed by Irving to form his thesis. [804]

Broszat also accused Irving of ignoring or "treating with impatience" the post-war testimonies of "witnesses who were themselves involved in the killings or who had had access to secret information ["Geheiminformationen"]." [805] Some of those he ignored, according to Broszat, were Wilhelm Höttl, Rudolf Höss and Adolf Eichmann. Broszat was quite correct; Hitler's War was based largely on reliable primary sources from the war period, and contains few references to evidence gained from later war crimes trials. Nonetheless, there is a danger in accepting at face value much of the evidence arising from these trials. As numerous reputable historians have pointed out, this evidence "can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity". [806]

To counter Irving's assertion that Hitler was too preoccupied with the conduct of the war to concern himself with the Jewish problem, and therefore left his subordinates (in particular, Himmler and Heydrich) to attend to it, Broszat argued at length that there was:

a widely motivated and powerful link in Hitler's thinking and will between military operations, especially the war against the Soviet Union, and his ideological struggle ["Weltanschauungskampf"] against the Jews. [807]

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800 / See Hitler's words in his speech of January 31, 1939. Hitler claimed that the Jews had already been (by 1939) "utterly defeated" (" restlos erlegen"; lit. "completely routed"). This explains Goebbels's phrase "in Germany they [the Jews] had already paid in part and they will have to pay more in the future", which would make no sense if the diary entry was referring to the wholesale slaughter of the Jewish people. Although more than half of Germany's Jews fled the country in the 1930s – and the remainder were discriminated against, prohibited from numerous areas of employment and suffered such excesses as the Kristallnacht of November 9-10, 1938 – the genocide of the Jews of the Altreich had not been attempted prior to the date of the diary entry.
801 / The directive Reichsmarschall Göring issued on July 31, 1941 to SS-Gruppenführer Reinhart Heydrich, Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, instructing him to "solve the Jewish question by emigration and evacuation" ("die Judenfrage in Form der Auswanderung oder Evakuierung") (Nuremberg Doc. 710-PS, IMT, Volume XXVI, pp. 266-7. Facsimile of original in National Archives, T-120/R 780). See above, p. 125.
802 / Broszat, "David Irving", p. 760 ff.
803 / Ibid., p. 760.
804 / As noted above, Irving's evidence for his thesis on Hitler's involvement in the Jewish question comprised numerous documents from the war period, and also from as early as the Kristallnacht of November 1938, as can be seen in pp. 164-168 of The War Path: Hitler's Germany 1933-1939 (New York: Viking, 1978), the companion volume to Hitler's War.
805 / Broszat, "David Irving", p. 768.
806 / Mayor, Heavens, p. 363. Irving has himself published a book on the International Military Tribunal, which reveals many of the difficulties associated with using the evidence gained at such trials. D. Irving, Nürnberg: die letzte Schlacht (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne, 1979).
807 / Broszat, "David Irving", p. 769-770.
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To support this view he presented a lengthy, stereotypical and unpersuasive analysis of Hitler's antisemitic ideology. He also, however, presented weightier evidence in the form of passages from the Führer's April 1943 discussions with Marshal Antonescu, the Romanian head of state, and with Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian Regent. In these passages Hitler tried to persuade them to adopt a more brutal position regarding the Jews of their respective countries. Some of the language Hitler used in these discussions was particularly blunt. For example, Broszat quoted Hitler saying to Horthy on April 17, 1943, at the Klessheim conference:

They [the Jews] are just parasites. This state of affairs [alleged Jewish lawlessness] had not been tolerated in Poland; if the Jews there refused to work, they were shot. Those who could not work just wasted away. They had to be treated as tuberculosis bacilli which could infect a healthy organism. [808]

Broszat argued that this is very clear and irrefutable evidence that Hitler, even after Stalingrad, still took an active interest in the Jewish question and knew that the Jews of Poland were being subjected to a policy of extermination, Irving had himself quoted these passages in Hitler's War [809] but, according to Broszat, had done so only as part of a deliberately-misleading discussion of 

the revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto which had been suppressed not long before (and in the conference with Horthy that had not even been discussed); he thus makes it [Hitler's statement that "if the Jews there refused to work, they were shot ..."] falsely appear as only referring to an action limited in scope and executed for a specific reason ["eine engbegrenzte und besonders begründete Aktion erscheinen"]. [810]

It appears that Broszat made some major errors because of a misreading of Irving's text. First, Irving did not link Hitler's brutal comments at the Klessheim conference to the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, but to the alleged problems of Jewish lawlessness in Poland and the forced settlement in camps of the "Jews left working for armaments concerns in the Generalgouvernment". [811]

Second, the ghetto revolt had not been suppressed shortly before the date of Hitler's explicit statements to Horthy, as Broszat mistakenly asserted. The revolt did not even commence until two days after that date and was not "suppressed" until May 16, 1943, almost a full month later. Irving had correctly written that at the time of the Klessheim conference "the fifty thousand Jews surviving in the [Warsaw] ghetto were on the point of staging an armed uprising"; that is, it was just about to happen.

Third, Hitler's unambiguous description to Horthy of what the Jews in Poland were suffering – which even surprised Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who had never previously heard him utter such things about the murderous treatment of the Jews [812] – indicates that Hitler was aware of individual anti-Jewish atrocities. Yet it also indicates that forced labour, not total extermination, was the desired treatment of the Jewish question in Poland. Only the day before, on April 16, Horthy had protested to Hitler that he had done all he could against the Jews of Hungary, but that they could "hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated". Hitler had reassured the Regent: "There is no need for that." [813]

Broszat, who died on October 16, 1989, clearly had a deep knowledge of the period. His research in all potentially relevant primary sources enabled him to compile in his Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte article a body of sources 

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808 / "Sie seien eben reine Parasiten. Mit diesen Zuständen habe man in Polen gründlich aufgeräumt. Wenn die Juden dort nicht arbeiten wollten, wurden sie erschossen. Wenn sie nicht arbeiten könnten, mußten sie verkommen. Sie wären wie Tuberkelbazillen zu behandeln, an denen sich ein gesunder Körper anstecken könne" (Document 736- D, IMT, Vol. XXXV, p. 428) Broszat used as his source A. Hillgruber, Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler, Vol. II, 1942-1944 (Frankfurt: Bernard und Graete, 1970).
809 / Irving, Hitler's War, p. 509 and notes.
810 / Broszat, "David Irving", p. 774.
811 / Irving, Hitler's War, p. 509.
812 / Under cross-examination on April 2, 1946 at the International Military Tribune, Ribbentrop agreed that, whilst the conference summary was not compiled by Schmidt the interpreter until the day after the conference and, therefore, does not contain verbatim quotes, Hitler "did express himself in some such way at that time. That is true." (IMT, Vol. X, p. 412) However, Ribbentrop noted that this was the very first time Hitler had used such words in connection with the Jewish question and that he was very surprised and "grieved" by Hitler's outburst.
813 / Irving had quoted this fascinating exchange between Hitler and Horthy in Hitler's War (p. 509), causing Broszat strangely to accuse him of over-emphasizing "Hitler's evasive remark" ("ausweichenden Bemerkung") that there was no need to consider exterminating Hungary's Jews. (p. 774) First, Broszat did not explain why he considered Hitler's remark to be "evasive", and, indeed, the remark was not: Horthy had demanded to know what further action could be taken against Hungary's Jews, who were already subjected to severe policies and legislation, and had concluded exasperatingly that they could hardly be exterminated. Hitler replied quite openly that there was no need for that; Hungary could force all Jews into concentration camps, as had been done in Slovakia. Second, Irving could hardly have omitted these startling words of Hitler in his discussion of the Klessheim conference; they are as noteworthy, but for different reasons, as Hitler's brutal words (of the next day) to the effect that the Polish Jews who would not work were shot.
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which demonstrates that Hitler paid far more attention in the war years to the Jewish question than Irving had intimated. His article, to which Irving was unprofessionally denied the right of reply, [814] provides a reasonable degree of indirect evidence that tends to establish the conclusion by inference that Hitler was aware of and permitted the events in the east now described as the Holocaust. Yet it fails to demonstrate directly or conclusively that Hitler ordered, sanctioned or even knew about those events. 

In fact, despite Broszat having so vigorously attacked Irving's contention that Hitler may not have known of and endorsed the attempted destruction of Europe's Jews, he conceded that a specific Hitler order for the destruction of the Jews probably never existed. "David Irving", he wrote, "has correctly deduced that the annihilation of the Jews was partly a solution of expedition, 'the way out of an awkward dilemma.'" [815] According to one of Broszat's many passages which agree with Irving's claims:

It thus appears that the liquidation of the Jews began not purely as the result of a supposed will for extermination but also as a 'way out' of a blind alley ["als "Ausweg" aus einer Sackgasse"] into which the National Socialists had maneuvered themselves. The practice of liquidation, once initiated and established, gained predominance and finally evolved into a comprehensive 'programme'. This interpretation cannot be verified with complete certainty but in the light of circumstances, which cannot be elaborated on herein, it seems more plausible than the assumption that there was a comprehensive secret order ["umfassenden Geheimbefehls"] for the extermination of Jews in the summer of 1941. [816]

Dr John Foster of the University of Melbourne, who specializes in modern German-Jewish history, stated in 1984 at a conference organized jointly by the history department of that university and the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs, that the "academic impact" of Irving's controversial thesis had been "considerable". [817] Foster particularly noted the fact that Broszat had, in his "comprehensive rebuttal of Irving", made such large concessions to Irving's thesis: "Irving was wrong, so Broszat contends, to suggest that the destruction of the Jews was carried out against Hitler's will; but he was right to suggest
that it was an improvised solution." [818]

After describing Broszat's argument in more detail, Foster pointed out that other German historians have come even closer than Broszat to accepting the essential elements of Irving's thesis (which he described as a "frivolous attempt to rehabilitate Hitler" [819]):

Hans Mommsen [of the University of Bochum] has recently taken Broszat's argument a step further. While Broszat is still willing to postulate an oral authorisation for the killing from Hitler, Mommsen claims that even this is unlikely. If that had in fact been the case, why should it have been so generally denied in Nazi confessions after the war. [820]

Indeed, summarizing his view of the origin of the genocide of the Jews, Mommsen – a controversial figure himself – has stated that "I am convinced that the final solution policy was only possible [277] because behind it there lay no long-term planning with liquidation as its aim." [821] 

Whilst Broszat's article was based on extensive research in primary source material, and contains sophisticated (if not entirely persuasive) scholarly analysis, it is a very slender piece of work. The only comprehensive monograph

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814 / Irving wrote in the introduction to the new Focal Point edition of Hitler's War that "Professor Martin Broszat ... crudely assailed my biography in a 37-page review in the institute's journal, then refused space for a reply." (p. 20).
815 / Broszat, "David Irving", p. 759.
816 / Ibid., p. 753.
817 / J. Foster, "Fabricating History", Anti-Semitism and Human Rights, Proceedings of a Seminar held at the Southern Cross Hotel, Melbourne, on 10-11 June, 1984 (Melbourne: Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1985), p. 30.
818 / Ibid., p. 30. Although Foster did not mention it, Broszat's functionalist position on the genesis of the Holocaust itself prompted a strong response from historians. Cf. C. R. Browning: "Zur Genesis der Endlösung": Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat", Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 29, (1981), pp. 97-109; K. Pätzold, "Von der Vertreibung zum Genozid: Zu den Ursachen, Triebkräften und Bedingungen der antijüdischen Politik des faschistischen deutschen Imperialismus", Faschismusforschung: Positionen, Probleme, Polemik (Köln, 1980), pp. 180-208; et al.
819 / Foster, "Fabricating History", p. 30.
820 / Ibid., p. 30. Foster was referring to Mommsen's "Die Realisierung des Utopischen: Die "Endlösung der Judenfrage" im Dritten Reich", Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9, no. 3 (1983), pp. 381-420. Mommsen has also argued that Hitler's seemingly incriminating statements to Horthy and Antonescu have to be considered as nothing more than "typical metaphors of Hitler's propaganda". Cf. S. Friedländer's introduction (p. xvii) to G. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984).
821 / Quoted by Walther Hofer in "Fifty Years On: Historians and the Third Reich", Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 21 (1986), p. 223 and note. Whilst he pointed out that to date "no-one has gone so far as to accept Irving's extreme thesis", Hofer outlined the considerable Historikerstreit caused by it.
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wasn't able to prove me wrong then. He's ever since felt mortally wounded by the fact that he wasn't able to prove me wrong in front of 16 million English television viewers, and he's the gentleman who's been to [the archives in]

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822 / Munich and Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1982.
823 / Ibid., p. 5.
824 / Cf. Christoph M. Kimmich's review in the New York Times, January 6, 1985, Section VII, p. 10; D. J. R. Bruckner's review in the New York Times, December 28, 1984, Section III, p. 32; Tom Bower's review in The Guardian, January 31, 1985: Gordon Craig's review in the New York Review of Books, July 21, 1983, p. 6; J. P. Stem's review in the Sunday Times, January 20, 1985; et al.
825 / Fleming, Hitler und die Endlösung, pp. 37 n. 56, 66, 67 and notes 118-120.
826 / Ibid., p. 37.
827 / Craig, in New York Review of Books. Nonetheless, Craig conceded – as did most other reviewers – that, whilst Fleming had assembled an impressive and persuasive case incriminating Hitler, based on inferential evidence, he had failed to produce conclusive documentary evidence which would prove Irving wrong. Tom Bower wrote in The Guardian that Fleming's book "reaffirms what we already knew, but leaves the heretic Irving chuckling."
828 / For example, after one such tempestuous confrontation (June 7, 1977), in which Frost and invited experts attempted to demolish the 'Irving thesis', the newspapers of that week described Irving as the obvious winner. Cf. The Bookseller, June 18, 1977: "Quite why Golden Boy Frost, having lost one bout on points some years ago against 'Battler Irving' should have sought a re-match, I do not know.... Anyway, television's aging boy wonder looked shockingly out of condition when he appeared in the ring, and Battler was clearly fighting fit. The first round was Battler's since he dodged Frosty's leads and replied with a flurry of punches which certainly had him hanging on the ropes.... Then Frosty called time – at least it saved him having to throw in the towel." On this clash, see also Peter Lewis in The Daily Mail, June 11, 1977; Janet Watts, "The Wednesday Page", The Guardian, June 8, 1977.
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Riga and all those other places – he's actually talked to Gauleiter Koch and all those other Nazi dignitaries and notables – and he's tried very hard to obtain the evidence that I'm wrong" [829]

In a 1983 exchange of letters in the Jewish Chronicle, Fleming, who is himself Jewish, and Irving debated a particular historical issue. Because this exchange may reveal to readers the different approach each historian has to historical evidence, it is worth including at this point a brief discussion of the exchange. In the November 25, 1983 issue of the Chronicle Fleming had asserted that Irving's thesis on Hitler's involvement in the Final Solution' was "rubbish", he argued that a January 26, 1944 speech by Himmler was concrete proof that Hitler not only knew about, but ordered, the annihilation of the Jews. In Himmler's speech (as quoted by Freiherr von Gersdorff, who was present) appeared the lines "When the Führer gave me the order to carry out the total solution to the Jewish question ... it was after all a Führer order and there could be no questioning it." Irving replied in the December 23 issue that Fleming's evidence did not come from a contemporary document, but rather from an uncorroborated 1977 declaration by von Gersdorff – an avowed anti-Nazi – based solely on his memory. Such evidence, Irving inferred, was not worthy of the historian's serious consideration. He further stated that he had examined Himmler's own detailed, handwritten notes for the speech and they contained absolutely no reference to a
'Führer order'. Fleming appears willing to believe that von Gersdorff's recital of a statement allegedly made thirty-three years earlier during a speech by Himmler is trustworthy and correct, despite the fact that the various psychological factors involved in the formation of such a source tend to work against accuracy.

This is not to suggest, as Irving does, that such evidence is unworthy of the historian's consideration. Yet Fleming should not have simply accepted von Gersdorff's account at face value, without analyzing it according to the basic elementary principles of source criticism. Irving, on the other hand, appears to believe that contemporary documentation (in this case, Himmler's handwritten notes) is necessarily more accurate and bias-free than memory-based sources. He ignored the fact that all sources, produced by fallible human beings, contain biases, errors and omissions. It was highly probable, for example, that Irving would find no evidence of a Führer order in Himmler's handwritten notes, even if Himmler did utter the words von Gersdorff attributed to him. If the notes were made before the speech, they would invariably be departed from occasionally during the speech's delivery. If the notes were made after the speech they would not be a verbatim and inclusive record of what he said, but a summary.

Also in 1983, Irving made his first formal speaking engagement in the United States, after many years of addressing 'sell-out' crowds in Britain and Europe. On September 4, 1983 he presented a lecture to the Fifth International Revisionist Conference, held at the Grand Hotel in Anaheim, California. In his well-received speech he discussed recent historiographical trends and his own writing career. He also talked about the 1956 Hungarian uprising – the subject of his most recent book – and his efforts to research it, and elaborated on his claims regarding Hitler's involvement in the 'Final Solution'.

Irving was well aware that most people present were Holocaust Revisionists (which, at that stage, he was not), who rejected the opinion that the Nazis planned and attempted – as a central act of state – the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews, and that they constructed special apparatus (gas chambers and vans) to implement the exterminations. Accordingly, Irving introduced his section on the link between Hitler and the 'Final Solution' with these explicit words:

I am sure you realize that I take a slightly different line from several people here. I would specify as follows: I would say I am satisfied in my own mind that in various locations Nazi criminals, acting probably without direct orders from above, did carry out liquidations of groups of peoples including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally incurable people and the rest. I am quite plain about that in my own mind. I can't prove it, I haven't got into that, I haven't investigated that particular aspect of history but from the documents I've seen, I've got the kind of gut feeling which suggests to me that that is probably accurate. [830]

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829 / D. Irving, "On Contemporary History and Historiography" (transcript of a speech delivered at the Fifth International Revisionist Conference, 1983), The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Five, Numbers 2, 3, 4, Winter 1984, p. 288. Regarding Fleming's book, Irving declared during the same speech that the reviewers admit, in reviewing his book, that he has not found the evidence that I'm wrong, that he hasn't found documentary proof. His book, in fact, is a lie, because the book's title [translated from the German] is Hitler and the Final Solution, and then underneath is a subtitle, in quotes: "It is the Fuehrer's Wish ..." dot-dot-dot, as though this was from some document! In fact, it isn't: this is just what some Nazi bigwig said after the war, sweating and pleading for his life in the dock in Nuremberg or somewhere else, tried to claim – that it was the Fuehrer's wish that this should be done. This is precisely the kind of evidence which I'm not prepared to accept. It's a well-written book, he's done a lot of research, but he mixes first-, second-, and third order evidence in a completely reprehensible way." (Ibid).
830 / Irving, "On Contemporary History", p. 274.
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Several persons present were unhappy with the section of Irving's speech that dealt with the Holocaust. Robert Faurisson, considered the doyen of Holocaust Revisionists, seemed mildly disappointed that whilst Irving appeared to have adopted a semi-Revisionist position on the genesis of the alleged genocide, [831] he had not examined critically its nature and dimensions or even questioned the evidence for its occurrence. At the conclusion of Irving's speech Faurisson asked him one or two questions regarding Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust. The next day – September 5, 1983 – before commencing his own lecture, Faurisson shared with the one hundred and twenty assembled Revisionists some of the questions and remarks he would have also directed at Irving had time permitted.

A few months later, he expanded his thoughts on Irving's 'semi-Revisionist' position into a seventeen-page article entitled "A Challenge to David Irving", which was published in the Winter 1984 issue of The Journal of Historical Review. [832] This article is essentially a series of clumsily-worded (English being Faurisson's second language) but well-reasoned questions based on statements Irving had made in Hitler's War and in his speech to the Revisionist conference. For example, regarding the Irving lecture passage quoted above ("I am sure you realize ..."), Faurisson wrote:

We would love to learn from Irving the facts about precisely how many such "locations" there were and at what geographical points? How many "Nazi criminals" in this matter were there, and what were the specific responsibilities of each? If they acted "probably without direct orders from above", does that mean that they perhaps acted with indirect orders or perhaps even without orders at all? What does "from above" mean? About which level(s) of the hierarchy is Irving thinking here, if he is not alluding to Adolf Hitler alone? What were the processes of physical liquidation that were used? How large were those groups of victims? If, on the one hand, Irving has the honesty – rare among historians – to tell us: 
"I can't prove it, I haven't got into that, I haven't investigated that particular aspect of history" and if, on the other hand, he mentions "the documents I have seen", I can allow myself to deduce the following: David Irving has studied some documents which are not the ones that he would have studied if his research had dealt with the exterminations. In that case, not having carried out research on that aspect, he is not able to say very much about it. He can simply express his "feelings". [833]

Faurisson clearly hoped that his questions would prompt Irving into investigating more thoroughly the evidence both for and against the alleged genocide. He richly embroidered his article with laudatory (but sincerely meant) comments about Irving's impartiality and abilities as an historian. Irving is, insisted Faurisson, a "major historian" who had taken a "courageous position" on the Holocaust. He is a "master historian of World War II" with a "generally superb command of its sources", and is an "historian of importance" who is an "excellent investigator". Nonetheless, Faurisson also rebuked Irving in several passages for relying on suppositions and his "gut feelings", and challenged him to back up
those feelings with documentary evidence. As part of his conclusion, he encouraged Irving to invite other major historians – particularly those opposed to open debate on all aspects of the Holocaust – to provide evidence that accepted historical opinion is sustainable in the face of rigorous scholarly criticism:

I have some other things to say to David Irving: I congratulate you for the vigorous terms that you have used in opposing those who persecute free research. In this area [persecution] I have, unfortunately, a certain advantage over you. If there is one lesson that I have drawn from my experiences in the struggle against that intolerance, it is that one must be inflexible. One must never fear to stand up for what he believes to be true, for the results to which his researches have inexorably pointed, in the face of such an enemy. One must provoke him, flush him out of hiding, and force him into battle. You already have easily provoked him by saying in public that you were ready to offer $1,000 if someone could bring you wartime documentary proof, for example, that Hitler knew something about a program for the extermination of the Jews. I say this to you: EXPAND YOUR $1,000 OFFER. Expand it beyond Hitler. Expand it to cover the other members of the Nazi hierarchy and administration, as high or as low as you want to go; Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Bormann, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Frank, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, Heinrich Mueller, Richard Gluecks, and so on. Do this, and do not fear: you will not lose your $1,000. [834]

The monetary offer referred to, first made by a smug Irving in major television and newspaper interviews in 1977, was that he would give £1,000 (or, to American audiences, $1,000) to anyone who could produce even a single genuine wartime document showing that Hitler ordered, sanctioned or actually knew about the genocide of the Jews. Before a panel of distinguished historians and a large audience at the Aschaffenburg Hitler Conference held on July 1-2, 1978, Irving made the same gimmicky offer, and has repeated it on many occasion in the years since. [835] However, to date no-one has managed – or perhaps even bothered – to provide the evidence necessary to silence the self-satisfied historian and gain the £1,000 'reward'.

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831 / Half a decade later, Faurisson still referred to Irving as being "between Ersatzrevisionismus and real Revisionism ... crouching, awaiting better days". R. Faurisson, "My Life as a Revisionist (September 1983 to September 1987)", The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Nine, Number 1, Spring 1989, p. 58.
832 / Volume Five, Numbers 2, 3, 4, Winter 1984, pp. 289-305.
833 / Ibid., p. 293.
834 / Ibid., p. 303. Italics and added emphasis in original.
835 / G. Knopp (ed.), Hitler Heute: Gespräche über ein deutsches Trauma (Aschaffenburg: Paul Pattloch Verlag, 1979), pp. 101 ff.
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It would appear that Faurisson's article did not prompt Irving to undertake any new study of the evidence for and against accepted historical opinion on the Holocaust, and he certainly did not extend his £1,000 offer to cover more than it had previously. It was not until six years later, in 1988, that Irving revised his views on that event, and at no time until then did he publicly express views on its nature and dimensions that were in accord with Holocaust Revisionism.


Irving's War

Irving first became a victim of Jewish harassment in 1963, when the publication of The Destruction of Dresden resulted in him being incorrectly branded by some a Nazi-apologist. In November of that year three young Jews – Gerald Gable, a former communist election candidate in Stoke Newington, and two accomplices, Manny Carpel and David Friedman – disguised themselves as GPO technicians, complete with repair tools and stolen GPO identification cards, and illegally entered Irving's home in order to steal his research files to prevent work on his next book. Irving, however, subsequently recognized Gable, and the trio were arrested and later fined £30 each for their law-breaking. [836] Irving told
the present writer that Gable was part of a Jewish "underground organization" which ordered them to steal his papers, [837] something strenuously denied by Tony Robson, Gable's assistant. [838]

In the mid-1970s Gable began publishing Searchlight, a London-based monthly publication. Through this anti-fascist magazine he has repeatedly denounced Irving as a Nazi. Irving told the present writer that Gable "has never stopped libeling me as revenge [for his criminal prosecution]". [839] This statement may not be as exaggerated as it first appears: in a recorded telephone interview of September 19, 1991, Robson – Searchlight's researcher and a close confidant of Gable – told this writer that Gable was "morally correct" in illegally entering Irving's home and that "Yeah, we're out to hassle Irving. He's a Nazi. We're anti-Nazis." [840]

Searchlight articles on Irving, of which there have been literally dozens, became venomous in the years following the publication of Hitler's War. In the April 1977 issue he was portrayed in a poorly researched and weakly-argued article as a fascist and a racist who had not only twisted history in Hitler's War, but had attacked "both Jews and Black people." [841] As evidence of Irving's racism, the magazine quoted from articles he had penned almost two decades earlier when he was the twenty-year old editor of Carnival Times, a satirical campus newspaper. In these articles (reproduced in the Searchlight exposé) the
impassioned young student had made one or two insensitive remarks about Jewish control of the British press, had offered qualified support for apartheid in South Africa, and had praised the German military machine "under Herr Hitler" for almost subjugating the "combined might of the Bolshevik Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." [842] Nonetheless, the publicizing of these inconsequential revelations about Irving's student days of two decades earlier, and the total lack of evidence to support the far more serious allegation that in "Hitler's War and many of his earlier works" he had twisted and rewritten history "to suit his own political ideas", suggests that Irving was indeed the victim of a malicious smear campaign. [843]

In Searchlight's review of Irving's well-received book, The War Path: Hitler's Germany 1933-39, all editorial restraint was abandoned. This companion volume to Hitler's War – in which he provided additional documentary evidence to support his thesis about Hitler and the Jews – was described as "nothing less than a celebration of the Führer", who was Irving's "hero". [844] The anonymous author grudgingly conceded that "Over the years David Irving has consistently unearthed Nazi documentation which has eluded other historians". [845] Yet he 

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836 / Cf. The Evening Standard, November 28, 1963, p. 1; Torpedo Running, p. 4. For Gable's explanations of the event, which actually contradict each other, cf. Searchlight, Issue 26, April 1977, p. 3, and Issue 176, February 1990, p. 4.
837 / Letter from Irving to the present writer, October 11, 1991, p. 2.
838 / Recorded telephone interview with Robson, September 19, 1991.
839 / Letter from Irving to the present writer, August 1, 1991, p. 3.
840 / When pressed further about this comment, Robson stated that Searchlight, which "work[s] in very closely with the Board of Deputies for British Jews", does not advocate physical violence or criminal activities, but is prepared to "work with the Revolutionary Left" which does.
841 / "David Irving – The Man and His Motives", Searchlight, Issue 26, April 1977, pp. 3-5.
842 / Carnival Times (Imperial College, London), May 1959, pp. 14, 17.
843 / "David Irving – The Man and His Motives", p. 3.
844 / "David Irving – Past and Present", Searchlight, Issue 39, September 1978, p. 15.
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incorrectly stated that Irving had achieved this only because of his own Nazi views and close links with racist and Nazi groups in West Germany: 

As Irving himself says in his preface: "No former Hitler employee whom I approached declined to grant me an interview". And no wonder, if he can persuade them that they can still perform services to the glory of the Führer. Moreover, Irving has impeccable credentials: As a student at London University, he edited an openly racist and pro-Nazi edition of the magazine Carnival Times... Since then Irving has maintained contacts with Nazigroups. [846]

The only "Nazi" group named as evidence to support this statement was the Gesellschaft für Freie Publizistik (Society for Publishing Freedom, or GFP), a German society formed in 1960 to promote free inquiry, impartial reporting on the Second World War and the publication of German war memoirs. The latter activity is condemned in Germany, where war veterans – especially former SS personnel – are still prohibited from forming societies comparable with the Returned Services Association. Whilst the GFP is right-wing and nationalistic, and numerous war veterans and historians have addressed its meetings and spoken nostalgically or eulogistically on aspects of the Third Reich, it need not be considered a 'Nazi' organization. It is worth noting that a large percentage of British exservicemen are politically conservative, but are still considered to be 'patriotic', whereas politically conservative German ex-serviceman – who might wish to meet with their old comrades from time to time – tend to be labeled 'Nazis'.

The March 1982 issue of Searchlight devoted five full pages to a well-researched but highly partisan article, entitled 'David Irving: "A Man Meets His Destiny?"'. The article contains two allegations about Irving: a) that he had strong political ambitions and was in the process of launching himself into British politics; and b) that he was a dangerous neo-Nazi with close ties to German Nazi groups which deny the verity of the Holocaust, an activity Irving must really endorse. A sufficient degree of reliable evidence was presented to support the former allegation. Only a year earlier, it was pointed out, Irving had established an ultra-conservative political think-tank, Focus Policy Group. It was formed, as Irving himself had written, to "bring together the more intelligent right-wing people in this country, as a movement similar in style to the New Right in the United States and France." [847] The article also described how Irving sought support for Focus Policy Group from members of Britain's right-wing intelligentsia. These included Tim Beardson and Tony Webber, former National Front election candidates, and Henry Jones Davies, prominent in the extremely nationalistic League of St. George. Additionally, Irving's think-tank began publishing a journal, Focal Point, which contained ultra-conservative editorials and articles, many being on the Second World War and of a distinctly Revisionist (but not Holocaust Revisionist) nature.

To support the latter allegation, that Irving was in league with Holocaust-denying Nazi groups in Germany, the anonymous author of the Searchlight article weakly employed – as had the author of the September 1978 article – a 'guilt by association' argument: Irving regularly ad-dressed meetings of the GFP and the Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), therefore he must be in agreement with all their beliefs, including their 'Nazism' and Holocaust Revisionism. The DVU is certainly a right-wing, 'völkisch' organization. It also has many ex-servicemen, including former SS personnel, amongst its ten thousand members. The DVU's newspaper, National-Zeitung (circulation 110,000), features ultra-conservative editorials and articles praising German culture, attacking some of the non- German elements in the nation and condemning what is seen as the propagandist and frequently anti-German view of the Second World War presented by historians since 1945. Additionally, the DVU has regularly advertised for sale Holocaust Revisionist books and in 1977 even serialized Arthur Butz's lengthy tome, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

However, the fact that Irving has frequently addressed meetings of the DVU, and even proudly received in 1982 its 'European Freedom Prize', worth 10,000 Deutschmarks, does not mean that he agrees with everything the DVU does, expounds or stands for. [848] It has been shown that Irving spoke at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference and yet unashamedly declared there that he held a position on the Holocaust totally contrary to that held by almost all attendees. So too with the DVU: his willingness, to address its meetings does 

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845 / Ibid., p. 15.
846 / Ibid., p. 16.
847 / Quoted in "David Irving: A Man Meets His Destiny?", Searchlight 81, March 1982, p. 9.
848 / Another award bestowed on Irving for his historical writing is the Hungarian Freedom Fighters' Pro Libertate Hungariae. In 1981 it was given in recognition of his ground-breaking but controversial book on the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
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not necessarily show, as the Searchlight article insisted, that he entirely agrees with its political ideology or views on all aspects of history, including the Holocaust.

In 1984 Irving and his controversial thesis on Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust featured prominently in another of Gerald Gable's endeavors, The Other Face of Terror. This is a Jewish, antifascist video-documentary produced by Belboa Film Productions in association with Gable's Searchlight magazine. Gable is even listed in the film's credits as one of the three "researchers". This video-film claims to survey the resurgence in the late-1970s and early-1980s of European neo-Nazism, fascism and militant extreme-right political groups. As part of a lengthy, rather partisan expose of "anti-Semitic" Holocaust Revisionism, which focused on the 1983 International Revisionist Conference ("this gathering of Revisionists, racists and anti-Semites"), Irving was introduced to viewers with these words:

Only the perverse and politically interested need to deny [historical] facts. All the more worrying to find here [at the conference] a well-known author, whose books sell by the millions: David Irving, British historian and star speaker at the conference. 

Whilst Irving's speech at the conference was not shown or discussed in The Other Face of Terror, he was interviewed at length by Annette Lévy Willard, the documentary's French reporter. Carefully-edited excerpts of this interview were featured in the video-film. It appears that the intention of the producers was, through highly selective editing, to present Irving as a bombastic buffoon who had proffered a racist and entirely untenable thesis. In this they were rather successful. For example, in one scene he is made to look extremely pompous when he stares into the camera and states, in an affluent accent which only the British upper class seems to have perfected, "Yes, I think I do probably know more about the Third Reich than very many other historians, probably more than any other historian of the Second World War period." Viewers are not able to see this bold statement in any context. That is, one is unable to tell what the general discussion was about, or what specific question Irving was answering when he made such a statement. Following this, the scene immediately changes to show a large and angry crowd of young, chafing anti-fascists, protesting outside a Hamburg gathering of the DVU. Irving, who was to be the guest speaker, is shown arguing in fluent German against the placard-carrying protesters. The voice-over informs viewers that Irving has been a regular speaker at these "Nazi rallies" and that he shares their racist views. Only after having destroyed Irving's credibility in this fashion do the film-makers allow Irving's contentious thesis to be mentioned. "It is Irving's thesis about the Third Reich that makes him so popular with the extreme-right" declares the voice-over which precedes the scene in which Irving is shown briefly explaining:

Hitler may not have known about Auschwitz, to put it in simple terms. To put it the other way round, so far nobody has proved that Adolf Hitler did know about Auschwitz. Nobody has proved with war-time documents that Hitler knew that the Jews of France, of Holland, of Czechoslovakia were being 'liquidated', murdered systematically. He knew about their transportation; he didn't know about their murder.

Instantly, to reinforce the subliming message that this thesis is fascistic in origin, the scene changes to one of helmet-wearing West German riot police outside a "Nazi" gathering, and, in a further effort to link Irving's thesis to Holocaust Revisionism and – something far more heinous – neo-Nazism, the voice-over declares: 

Hitler is clean! Irving's theory is more sophisticated than a straight-forward denial of the Holocaust, but the result is similar, admirers of Hitler need not feel guilt today. An Englishman, a non-German, a respectable historian says so.

This statement is clearly misleading: Irving did not form his thesis to absolve the guilt of "admirers of Hitler", and, as noted above, his thesis does not remove from Hitler the guilt of his other crimes. Irving's Hitler is not clean, but is stained with the blood of countless innocents, as are the other wartime leaders in his writings.

The Other Face of Terror was shown on television in England, France, parts of West Germany and parts of North America. It thus brought Irving's thesis to the attention of millions of people who may have otherwise remained unknowing, Irving was presented by the producers and researchers – one of whom had conducted a campaign against him for some years – as a Nazi. His thesis was presented not only as untenable, but as an attempt to rehabilitate the Third Reich.

This campaign against Irving is certainly something other than the legitimate exercising of his opponents' right to free speech. On numerous occasions since he published his views on the genesis of the Holocaust he has been threatened with physical violence. In 1984 his home was again violated by several of his adversaries, although this time they used considerably less cunning and deceit than the ones who illegally entered his previous home almost twenty years earlier.

Instead, brute force was chosen as the method of entry, as the historian recalled two years later. 

A few years ago they came back again, this time with sledgehammers ... smashed my door down, came right in, middle of the day. They'd tried my doorbell which does not work and they assumed I was out. I can only speculate what they intended to do with those sledgehammers.... They saw me standing there in my running gear and they turned and fled. [849]

Less than six months after replacing his mangled door, arsonists fire-bombed the Wilson Printing Press, gutting it and rendering it totally inoperative. This press printed his Focal Point magazines and one or two of his other minor publications. It is noteworthy that one of the arsonists was Manny Carpel, who had broken into Irving's home with Gerry Gable two decades earlier. For this latest criminal act Carpel was convicted and sentenced to a period of imprisonment. [850]

Thus, by publishing his unconventional and much-criticized thesis on Hitler's lack of involvement in the Holocaust, Irving has attracted the wrath of a number of Jews who feel that he is attempting to rehabilitate the murderer of their deceased relatives. That he is also unashamedly right-wing gives them further cause for alarm, as many of them – the evidence suggests – automatically associate such political views with fascism or Nazism, ideologies they naturally abhor. Thus, they reason that a right-wing author of a book challenging accepted historical opinion on Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust must be an Nazi, and should be exposed as such. "The Jewish people", wrote Chaim Bermant, a Jewish journalist, have a "subconscious search for new enemies." They look for new Hamans, Torquemadas and Hitlers, "and in the absence of anyone more formidable some Jews will alight on pathetic non-entities like historian David Irving, a Hitler apologist." [851] It would appear that this attitude is the driving force behind the often vicious response of some Jews to Irving's thesis; a response that has unfortunately manifested itself in various forms, including defamation, threats of violence, invasions of privacy, destruction of personal property, and arson. It will be argued that this mainly-Jewish campaign against him did not diminish, but gained new intensity after his 1988 conversion to Holocaust Revisionism.


Conversion to Holocaust Revisionism

In April 1988 Irving, who was holidaying in Florida, received a telephone call from Ernst Zündel in Toronto, who excitedly told him about Fred Leuchter's recently-completed forensic examination of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. Zündel, then in the midst of his second trial, asked Irving if he would be prepared to testify on his behalf as an expert witness on the Second World War. Irving agreed to fly to Toronto to discuss the matter further, and arrived there on April 21, at which point he was first given a copy of The Leuchter Report to scrutinize.

Robert Faurisson, who had years before encouraged Irving to investigate the evidence both for and against accepted historical opinion on the Holocaust, later described – with obvious delight – Irving's arrival in Toronto and his subsequent role in the Zündel trial:

In 1988 Zündel became convinced that the British historic was only waiting for a decisive event to take a final step in our direction. After arriving in Toronto, David Irving discovered in rapid succession the Leuchter Report and an impressive number of documents that Zündel, his friends and I had accumulated over the course of several years. The last reservations or the last misunderstandings melted away in the course of a meeting. He agreed to testify on the stand. In the opinion of those who were present at the two [Zündel] trials (1985 and 1988) no single testimony, except that of Fred Leuchter, caused such a sensation. For more than three days [April 21, 25 and 26, David Irving, 

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849 / From the audio-tape of his speech at the 1986 Shepparton (Australia) book launch of the Veritas edition of his Uprising: One Nation's Nightmare: Hungary 1956 (First published by Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1981). Audio-cassette sold by the New Zealand League of Rights under the title "Falsification of History".
850 / Tony Robson of Searchlight magazine, a friend of Carpel, told the present writer (above cited interview) that the Wilson Press also printed literature for most "extreme-right and Nazi groups" in Britain. Additionally, said Robson, whilst Carpel's arson attack was primarily an act against Irving, it was also to hurt the "Nazi movement" as a whole. Whilst Robson expressed the opinion that the arson attack was morally correct, he did stress that Searchlight magazine was not involved in it.
851 / C. Bermant, "Rabin sets out to unwrite 2000 years of history", The Press, August 17, 1992.
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engaging in a sort of public confession, took back all that he had said about the extermination of the Jews and without reservation adopted the Revisionist position. With courage and honesty, he showed how an historian can be brought to revise profoundly his views on the history of the Second World War. [852]

Indeed, on April 21, 1988 the first day Irving took the stand at the Ontario District Court, he stunned almost everyone present – including Crown Attorney John Pearson, who had approvingly mentioned him on several occasions earlier in the trial – by enouncing that he had rejected much of accepted historical opinion on the Holocaust. That is, he could no longer believe that around six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Germans during the Second World War, the majority of them in gas chambers constructed especially for the task.

Irving has maintained in the years since the trial that he felt 'compelled' to revise his views after reading The Leuchter Report in Toronto. An analysis of the trial transcripts reveals that the report certainly had made an immediate and considerable impression on him. On April 21, less than a day after first reading it, he stated in the witness box that he was "very impressed by the scientific manner of [the reports] presentation" and lamented that "as a historian I'm rather ashamed it never occurred to me to make this kind of investigation." "The Leuchter Report", he added some minutes later, "is shattering in the significance of its discovery" and was "a stroke of genius on the part of the defense". [853] On the last day of his testimony he referred to the part the report played in changing his opinion on the Holocaust, describing it as the "the most significant piece of evidence" as to whether "a mass extermination occurred in Auschwitz itself". [854]

Jewish commentators, realizing that Irving's change of opinion on the Holocaust gave Revisionism a considerable boost, were quick to express their disgust and outrage. For example, in Canadian Jewry Today: Who's Who in Canadian Jewry, Manuel Prutschi – the National Director of Community Relations for the Canadian Jewish Congress – wrote that:

Irving, at long last, chose to come out of the Holocaust denial closet at the second Zundel [sic] trial. In the closing moments of the case for the defence he was brought out as a "surprise" witness and he openly declared himself for the Holocaust denier that he really is.

Under vigorous cross-examination Irving was confronted with what he had himself written ten years earlier in his book, Hitler's War. In that work Irving did not deny the Holocaust – far from it. In fact he outlined in detail its extent and its horrors, ascribing it to Heinrich Himmler [sic] and his subordinates but insisting that Hitler was ignorant of it. Repeatedly, when faced by the Crown with passages from that book which asserted the reality of the Holocaust, Irving monotonously countered that "He believed then but he no longer believed now." When he was asked whether he had done any research in the last ten years which led him to change his mind, he candidly admitted he had not. When pressed further, as evidence for his turnaround, he cited the Leuchter "report". ... Irving would have seen this worthless "report" no earlier than forty-eight to twenty-four hours before he took the stand. Yet he pointed to it as a significant influence in changing his mind away from what he had written about the Holocaust ten years earlier, in Hitler's War. If Irving had any credibility as a historian, the a-historical and indeed anti-historical way in which he dealt with the facts of the Holocaust while testifying, under oath, in the Zundel trial reduced his credibility to zero. [855]

As Prutschi's discourse is particularly representative of the literally dozens of Jewish articles on Irving's conversion to Holocaust Revisionism, it might be useful to describe and analyze Prutschi's principal arguments in some detail. First, his claim that Irving only had one or two days to read The Leuchter Report before he announced that it had radically altered his view of what happened to the Jews during the Second World War is quite correct. In fact, Irving first set eyes on the report less than twenty-four hours before he testified as to its importance, which is very surprising in the light of the fact that he claims to be a judicious and prudent scholar who deals cautiously and responsibly with evidence.

It is unclear whether Irving was given the full 196-page report to read, or a condensed version. If it was the former, one would be justified in doubting that Irving could have, in less than one day, familiarized himself with the wealth of new information contained within the lengthy report and its many appendices to a degree sufficient to make a sound judgement of it. Certainly he did not, before testifying at the trial, consult independent engineers, physicists, crematory

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852 / R. Faurisson, "The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988)", The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Eight, Number Four, Winter 1988/1989, p. 430.
853 / SZTR, 33-9414, 9423, 9424.
854 / Ibid., 34-9814, 9815.
855 / M. Prutschi, "Holocaust Denial Today", in E. Y. Lipsitz (ed.), Canadian Jewry Today: Who's Who in Canadian Jewry (Downsview, Ontario: J. E. S. L. Education Products, 1989), p. 34. Cf. also Holocaust "Revisionism": Reinventing the Big Lie; The 1989 IHR Conference: White-Washing Genocide "Scientifically". In the latter publication's treatment of Irving's new views, it is noted that "David Irving's accession to their ranks does constitute a gain for the revisionists".
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technicians or execution specialists to verify that the author's methods and conclusions were sound. Although he had himself studied physics (undergraduate level only) at university, that was almost twenty years earlier and he had not been involved in that field of study in the intervening years. His almost-immediate acceptance of the report's conclusions and his willingness to state publicly that it had changed his opinion on the Holocaust – less than a day after first reading it and before having it analyzed by exports – is very damaging to the reputation he struggled to cam over the previous two decades, of being a scholar of considerable circumspection.

Second, Prutschi's claim that for some years Irving had been a 'closet' Holocaust Revisionist, waiting for the right moment to reveal his true beliefs, is entirely groundless, there were many excellent occasions in the previous decade when he could have 'come out of the closet' and argued against received opinion on the Holocaust, such as in 1983 when his reputation was at its highest point after exposing the notorious Hitler Diaries, or at the 1983 Revisionist conference when he would have been (if he was a Holocaust Revisionist) addressing a crowd of like-minded people. Further, that he had on numerous occasions in the previous decade publicly stated the contrary – that is, that he believed millions of Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime – should help to dispel the 'closet Holocaust Revisionist' theory now advanced by his opponents.

Third, when confronted in the trial with what he had written on the Holocaust ten years earlier in Hitler's War, Irving did, as Prutschi claimed, repeatedly retract his previous statements, arguing that he no longer believed what he had then written. This, however, is the prerogative of any historic, author or public figure. Indeed, all responsible scholars will revise their own views in light of flush evidence that exposes inaccuracies or misinterpretations in their arguments or conclusions. The unusual thing about Irving's radical change of mind on the Holocaust is that it was not based on any in-depth research he or other scholars had done in the intervening years. Rather, it was – as he acknowledged during cross-examination – based almost entirely on the evidence provided in The Leuchter Report, a document he had first set eyes on less than a day earlier. [856]

Despite the strange way in which Irving came to agree with the fundamental Revisionist theses on the Holocaust, when he began his "public confession" – to quote Faurisson once more – his almost unparalleled knowledge of the original German primary sources relating to the Second World War enabled him to defend his new position with a confidence that even Judge Thomas commented on later. [857] For example, Irving was asked about the infamous speech that Heinrich Himmler delivered on October 4, 1943 to a gathering of SS-Gruppenführer at Posen. [858] He replied that he found it "very strange" that the only two pages of transcript in which Himmler made brutal remarks about the extermination of the Jewish people had been retyped "by a different secretary on a different typewriter using different carbon paper" and "repaginated in pencil". "I hold that document to be suspicious" for those reasons, he explained. Later in the trial he stated that he was "unhappy about the integrity" of that document, 

"because of the remarkable fact that at precisely at this point [Himmler's incriminating statements] the type script changes, a page appears to have been inserted by a different typist, the numeration of the pages changes from a typewritten page number at the top to a pencilled page number at the top, and there are various other indications about that speech that makes me queasy." [859]

Arguing that the transcript had obviously been "tampered with", Irving said that historians must submit all such documents to a "very detailed forensic examination". Historians who cite or quote important documents without actually having seen the originals, which often differ considerably from their published 

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856 / SZTR, 34-9473, 9474.
857 / Thomas stated after the trial that probably Irving possessed more self-confidence than any witness he had ever seen. Cf. R. Lenski, The Holocaust on Trial: The Case of Ernst Zündel, p. 504.
858 / Nuremberg Document 1919-PS, which quotes Himmler as having stated, inter alia: "Ich will hier Ihnen in aller Offenheit auch ein ganz schweres Kapitel erwähnen. Unter uns soll es einmal ganz offen ausgesprochen sein, und trotzdem werden wir in der Öffentlichkeit nie darüber reden... Ich meine jetzt die Judenevakuierung, die Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes. Es gehört zu den Dingen, die man leicht ausspricht – "Das jüdische Volk wird ausgerottet", sagt ein jeder Parteigenosse, "ganz klar, steht in unserem Programm, Ausschaltung der Juden, Ausrottung, machen wir. "Die Judenevakuierung" – IMT, Volume XXIX, p. 145.) (I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly.... I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about –"The Jewish race is being exterminated," says one party member, "that's quite clear, it's in our program – elimination of the Jews, and we're doing it, exterminating them.")
859 / SZTR, 33-9368, 9369, 34-9645.
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versions, are entirely failing in their professional duty. "I'm the only person to have taken [the] trouble to look at the original typed script" of the Posen speech, he asserted. [860]

Irving is probably not, as he claimed, the only historian to have studied the original typewritten transcript of Himmler's Posen speech. Yet his familiarity with the original text and his unwillingness to trust the authenticity of a document showing so many signs of having been altered after its original composition are commendable. During his testimony Irving was able to identify several other key Nazi documents on the 'Jewish question' that show signs of having been tampered with in a similar way to the Posen speech transcript. Irving cautiously refrained from stating who he thought had altered these sources, or why, and he certainly did not intimate that Jews were responsible. 

Irving agreed during his testimony that many individual anti-Jewish atrocities were committed during the war by the Nazis and collaborators in other countries. During some of these atrocities, he said, "thousands of civilians [were] ... lined up on the sides of pits and ... machine-gunned into the pits after being robbed of their personal possessions." [861] For these awful and inexcusable crimes, he added, a great deal of reliable and irrefutable documentary evidence exists. On the other hand, Irving stressed that there is absolutely no such evidence that the systematic ex-termination of the Jewish race in Europe was planned or attempted. For example

— Q. "Were six million Jews exterminated as a result of an official German policy?
— A. "We [historians] are not familiar ... with the slightest documentary evidence that there was any such German policy. And I should be familiar with it, having spent 10 years wading around in the archives of the German high command and speaking with Hitler's private staff. It isn't there." [862] 

That hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe were forcedly and ruthlessly removed from their homes and shunted to 'the east' as a result of National Socialist policy is accepted by all historians, including Holocaust Revisionists. It is also acknowledged by Revisionists that many Jews suffered terribly or died during deportation. Irving claimed that whilst no reliable evidence exists for the planned
extermination of European Jewry, there is an abundance of evidence in the German documents for the planning and carrying out of the mass deportations. The sources, Irving pointed out on several occasions, also reveal that Hitler was directly responsible for those heartless and brutal deportations. For example:

— Q. "Is there any documentary evidence to support the policy of deportation?"
— A. "Quite definitely. The documents exist and its clearly referred to as Hitler's order." [863]

He was asked how likely it was that an enterprise of the magnitude of the extermination of Europe's Jews could be attempted or accomplished without the existence of detailed planning and specific orders. He replied that it was extremely unlikely, and noted that not only do historians have no documentary evidence that any such plans or orders existed, but there is also a total lack of any written references in the German documents to the Jews being exterminated:

I have to say that the German wartime civil servant was basically a cowardly animal and he would not do something that he considered to be criminal without getting a document clearing himself. [That is why, he continued,] .. there are letters showing Himmler saying on the Fuehrer's orders we are deporting the Jews. Which was the extent, to my mind, of the Final Solution... Hitler's other crimes, the documents are there. The euthanasia order, the order to kill British commandos, the order for the killing of the male population of Stalingrad if ever they occupied it. Hitler's other crimes, simple crimes, the documents are there where you would expect to find them. And yet this biggest crime of all, there is no document. [864]

Thus, Irving had come to believe that the 'Final Solution' (die Endlösung) – the seemingly incriminating phrase found in several wartime German documents on the Jewish question – meant the programme of forced deportation, not a programme of extermination. Further, he said, if orders for an extermination programme were given 

these orders would have been referred to in countless files of different ministerial bodies. So, it would have been impossible for these documents to have been destroyed at the end of the war. There would always be carbon copies somewhere. [865]

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860 / SZTR, 33-9368, 9369, 34-9651, 9660 cf. also P. Bilodeau, "Author of Hitler Biography testifies he's changed his views of Holocaust, Toronto Star, April 26, 1988.
861 / SZTR, 31-9172.
862 / Ibid., 33-9349, 9350.
863 / Ibid., 33-9351, 9352.
864 / Ibid., 33-9375, 9376. Italics added for emphasis.
865 / Ibid., 33-9376.
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Pointing out that much of the key evidence for the Holocaust came from war crimes trials, Irving argued that the reliability of evidence gained at such trials is highly questionable. He discussed at length the maltreatment of defendants at the International Military Tribune, such as SS generals Ohlendorf and Pohl and Luftwaffe Marshal Erhard Milch. The latter was threatened, he explained, with very severe punishments unless he perjured himself by testifying against his previous superior, Hermann Göring. Milch refused and testified on behalf of Göring. As a result he was thrown into the punishment bunker at the Dachau concentration camp, which was designed by the SS to hold one prisoner but was used by the Americans to hold six, all Field-Marshals. Milch was then subjected to a war crimes trial and given a life sentence. [866]

"There's a whole string of examples of the coercion of prisoners at Nuremberg" said Irving. He explained how, in the early 1960s he had gained from the National Archives in Washington "a complete photocopy of the Simpson [-Van Roden] Commission of Inquiries which the American Justice Department, to its credit, sent to Europe to investigate the allegations that American officers were torturing German defense witnesses." [867] When asked what opinion he formed as a result of studying the document, Irving stated that "in the future, one would have to be very, very cautious before accepting without reservation the evidence sworn by defense or prosecution witnesses in the Nuremberg trials." [868]

He called attention to the fact that most of the prosecution witnesses at the main Nuremberg trial were lavishly fed, housed in luxury hotels, paid well and promised good jobs, whilst the defence witnesses were usually treated very badly. They were housed in cold, windowless cells in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, poorly fed, and subjected to mental and physical coercion. Even Robert Jackson, the American Chief Prosecutor at Nürnberg, was ashamed of the proceedings, claimed Irving. This he discovered when he gained privileged access to Jackson's private diary.

Irving's new position on the Holocaust meant, of course, that he had to revise slightly his previous views on Hitler's involvement in the Jewish question. Whereas previously he had argued that the extermination of millions of Jews in concentration camps did occur, but behind the uninformed Führer's back, during his testimony in Toronto he insisted that Hitler couldn't have known about those exterminations – not because Himmler and his other subordinates kept it from him, as he previously believed, but because the systematic exterminations did not happen.

The rest of Irving's testimony at the trial – which covered in detail such topics as the Wannsee Conference, the Korherr Report, the investigations of concentration camps by Dr Konrad Morgan and the Eichmann Trial – followed the same pattern as his above-mentioned testimony: his outstanding familiarity with the primary sources quoted by Crown Attorney Pearson to argue for accepted opinion on the Holocaust allowed him to totally demolish Pearson's arguments, revise his own previous arguments (as expounded in Hitler's War) and advance Revisionist theses. Accordingly, Pearson was forced to conclude his cross-examination of Irving with an attempt at discrediting him in much the same way as the editors of Searchlight magazine had done over the years. Pearson even confronted him with a copy of his Carnival Times article, written twenty-nine years earlier, an act which prompted the amused historian to state that the publication was a satirical campus magazine, as its title indicates:

[so] I hope you won't also read from the next article, called "Christopher Robin and the Facts".... If you have nothing more recent than 30 years ago with which to smear me, I think this in itself is a statement of the case." [869]

Based on a reading of the daily Toronto newspapers of April 1988, it would appear that journalists covering the trial were of the opinion that Irving was a successful and important historian who had not challenged historical orthodoxy regarding the magnitude or nature of the Holocaust until the trial. "Previous defence evidence presented at the trial", they reported, convinced him that accepted historical opinion on several aspects of the Holocaust was unsupported by evidence and open to challenge. Whilst the 'closet' Holocaust Revisionist 

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866 / Irving is considered an authority on Milch, having published in 1974 The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Luftwaffe Marshal Erhard Milch (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited), a well-received and still widely-cited work.
867 / SZTR, 33-9387. For the Simpson Commission, see above, p. 91ff. Irving also stated that he had read Reginald Pagets's Manstein: His Campaigns and His Trial when he was a young man, and was disturbed to read of the methods that had been used at Nuremberg "to obtain testimony from prisoners, including the severe maltreatment and brutalization of a number of witnesses." (SZTR, 33-9387). This prompted him to undertake further study of the matter.
868 / Ibid.
869 / Quoted in ibid., 34-9770.
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claim did not appear in the many newspaper articles covering his testimony, the fact that he had "been associated with the Institute for Historical Review, a Californiabased group that publishes anti-Holocaust material" featured prominently in most articles. [870]

Thus, it is clear that Irving's decision to testify in the second Zündel trial was the major turning point for his views on the Holocaust. Before the trial he held orthodox views on the Holocaust's nature and dimensions, except that he had advanced a controversial, "semi-Revisionist" thesis (to quote Faurisson) on its genesis and implementation. During the trial he rejected that orthodoxy and adopted the Revisionist position, which he has maintained in subsequent years. His 'conversion' was incorrectly seen by Jewish commentators and other anti-Revisionists as proof that Irving had always been a Revisionist, merely awaiting an opportunity to come out of the closet. On the other hand, his testimony was seen by Revisionists as an important victory. It was, they said, proof that even leading historians will reject accepted opinion on the Holocaust when confronted with the weight of evidence and the soundness of the arguments they advance. Revisionists were certainly proud to claim him as one of their own, and – as will be argued – he has given them every reason to feel satisfied, having become the English speaking world's most influential Holocaust Revisionist.


Irving and the Leuchter Report

After he had returned to England, Irving decided that Leuchter's report deserved to be published on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than just in North America, he therefore volunteered the services of his own publishing company, Focal Point, to put out a British edition. This glossy and attractive edition was scheduled for a June 23, 1989 publication release, and Irving arranged a press conference at London's New World Trade Centre to mark the event. National and regional press representatives were invited to attend the conference and receive complimentary copies of the report. However, less than a day before the conference was set to take place, management at the World Trade Centre bowed to pressure put on them by angry Jewish organizations and broke their contract with Irving. [871] Irving promptly changed the venue to Focal Point's own premises in Mayfair, and notified the press accordingly.

The Jewish Chronicle of June 23, perhaps in an effort to rouse opposition to Irving, provided details (in advance) of the conference and stated that "Members of the Union of Jewish Students and antifascist groups are to demonstrate outside Focal Point's West End headquarters when the book is launched today." [872] Indeed, a large number of angry Jewish people did turn up to protest against the report's launch and to prevent any journalists entering the building. Irving, who described their actions as "intimidating", later wrote:

As the world knows, British newspapermen are not easily intimidated however. Ten of them struggled through to reach the F.P. [Focal Point] doorbell – which they were allowed to push only after identifying themselves and their newspapers to the mob's ringleaders. It is understood that even before these reporters had filed their stories, pressure had been applied to their editors not to allow the extraordinary Leuchter Report an inch of space.... At one stage the mob barring the entrance to Focal Point's base became violent, and burst in through the doors. Mr. Irving, a burly six-footer, evicted them. [873] 

Several of the journalists present filed reports on The Leuchter Report and the press conference, as did the Jewish Chronicle. However, the latter's article, entitled "Irving publishers Won't Drop Him" [874], unfortunately reveals that it was not content simply to publish an article disparaging to Irving. Representatives of that old and reputable Jewish newspaper contacted Macmillan London Ltd., Irving's main publisher, and demanded that they drop him as an author. The publisher refused, pointing out that the Irving books they published, which included the generally well-received Hess: the Missing Years 1941-1945 and Göring: A Biography, were solid works of history and were not at all anti-Semitic. They were also under contract to publish further works by Irving. The Jewish Chronicle displaying what one can only describe as an unprofessional desire for academic censorship, headlined Macmillan's refusal to drop Irving as an author, [and] argued that the publisher was wrong not to have done so in view of Irving's new and perverse views on the Holocaust.

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870 / P. Bilodeau, "Author..."; P. Bilodeau, "Accused publisher decides not to testify in his own defence", Toronto Star, April 27, 1988; "Writer Irving defends Zundel as trial goes on" (CP Newsfile), Montreal Gazette, April 24, 1988; et al.
871 / Page B2 of a draft copy of Irving's introduction to the new Focal Point edition of The Leuchter Report. Sent to the present writer by Irving with a letter dated August 1, 1991.
872 / B. Josephs, "Storm over 'evil' book", Jewish Chronicle, June 23, 1989.
873 / Draft introduction, pp. B2-B3; see also IHR Newsletter 68, October 1989, pp. 2, 3.
874 / "Irving Publishers Won't Drop Him", Jewish Chronicle, June 30, 1989.
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Irving strongly protested about the Jewish Chronicle's conduct and tactics in a letter to the editor (dated July 12, 1989), which he refused to publish despite Irving's warning that he considered calling in the Press Council to adjudicate. [875] In his letter Irving accused the Jewish Chronicle of being responsible for the cancellation of his World Trade Centre contract and the protest outside the new venue, of demanding that journalists at the conference give their names so that representations to their editors could be made, and of putting undue "pressure" on Macmillan London Ltd.

In a responding letter sent to Irving by David Nathan, the newspaper's acting editor, it was denied that the newspaper was guilty of those charges, although it agreed that it did ask the publishers to drop Irving: "We did not 'pressure' your publisher, we asked a perfectly legitimate 'question' and published the answer". [876] Further, Nathan explained to Irving that his claim regarding the Leuchter Report and the properties of Zyklon-B

contradicts the testimony of tens of thousands of survivors, observers, investigators, jurists and even Nazis. It seems to me that they have more of a case against you than you have against them or us. In these circumstances I see no reason to give you the opportunity of repeating your views in the "Jewish Chronicle". I am therefore not prepared to publish your letter of July 1 and you may take any action you wish. [877]

Irving chose not take the matter further, despite his continued belief that the Jewish Chronicle was behind all the problems mentioned above. Nathan told the present writer that Irving "did go to the Press Council, something you may find significant in view of Mr Irving's well-known tendency not to go the whole hog". [878] This is clearly a reference to the fact that Irving on several occasions commenced litigation proceedings against individuals only to cancel them on the eve of the court hearings. 

In 1990 Macmillan's previous Managing Director was replaced by Felicity Rubenstein, who is Jewish. Consequently, stated Irving in August 1991, "her editors have just cancelled my long-standing contract to write a Roosevelt biography (although in fairness, they are still contracted to bring out my forthcoming biography of Dr. Goebbels)." [879] It would appear that Rubinstein and her editors took this action without further pressure from the Jewish newspaper, who have not published Macmillan's decision and, in fact, may not know of it.

The 67-page Focal Point edition of The Leuchter Report, printed on glossy stock with an attractive cover, is a condensed version of the original report, with several additional graphs and illustrations. It is considerably easier for those lacking scientific knowledge to read and understand. Irving's foreword to this edition, which has been very widely distributed in Europe and elsewhere, [880] expresses the author's total rejection of accepted opinion on the Holocaust. It also expresses his new belief that the 'legend' of a Nazi plan to murder all Europe's Jews, most of them in gas chambers, began as nothing more than wartime atrocity propaganda devised by the British to stir up anti-German feelings. The Leuchter Report's endorsement by Irving, amongst the most widely-read historians writing in the English language, gives the report a degree of respectability denied to other Revisionist publications on the Holocaust. Irving, probably aware of this – and perhaps seeing an opportunity for self-publicity –wrote his foreword in such a manner that he is almost as much the subject of it as the import's contents:

UNLIKE THE WRITING OF HISTORY [sic], chemistry is an exact science. Old fashioned historians have always conducted endless learned debates about meanings and interpretations, and the more indolent among them have developed a subsidiary Black Art of "reading between the lines", as a substitute for wading into the archives of World War II documents which are now available in embarrassing abundance. 

Recently, however, the more daring modern historians have begun using the tools of forensic science – carbon-dating, gas chromatography, and simple ink-aging tests – to examine, and not infrequently dispel, some of the more tenaciously held myths of the twentieth century.

Sometimes the public is receptive to the results, sometimes not. The negative result of the laboratory analysis of the ancient Shroud of Turin is one example: it is not a deliberate fake, perhaps, but nor was it nearly as old as the priests would have had centuries of gullible tourists believe.

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875 / Page three of a letter from Irving to the present writer, dated August 1, 1991.
876 / Letter from David Nathan to David Irving, July 25, 1989. (Copy given by Nathan to the present writer upon the latter's request).
877 / Ibid.
878 / Letter from Nathan to the present writer, dated October 18, 1991.
879 / Page three of a letter from Irving to the present writer, dated August 1, 1991.
880 / According to Irving, "Several times Focal Point's stocks ran out, and reprints had to be ordered. Bulk shipments of several thousand were shipped to North America." (Draft introduction, p. C5).
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It is unlikely that the world's public would be as receptive, yet, to the results of the professional and dispassionate chemical examination of the remains of the wartime Auschwitz concentration camp which is at the centre of this report. 

Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved. (Since 1949 the State of Israel has received over 90 billion Deutschmarks in voluntary reparations from West Germany, essentially in atonement for the "gas chambers of Auschwitz".) And this myth will not die easily: Too many hundreds of millions of honest, intelligent people have been duped by the well-financed and brilliantly successful postwar publicity campaign which followed on from the original ingenious plan of the British Psychological Warfare Executive (PWE) in 1942 to spread to the world the propaganda story that the Germans were using "gas chambers" to kill millions of Jews and other "undesirables".

As late as August 1943 the head of the PWE minuted the Cabinet secretly that despite the stories they were putting out, there was not the slightest evidence that such contraptions existed, and he continued with a warning that stories from Jewish sources in this connection were particularly suspect. 

As a historian I have, on occasion, had recourse to fraud laboratories to test controversial documents for their authenticity. In the late 1960's I discarded certain diaries of Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, offered to myself and the publishers William Collins Ltd, since Messrs. Hehner & Cox Ltd. of the City of London advised me that the ink used for one signature did not exist during the war years. It was I who exposed the "Hitler Diaries" as fakes, at Der Stern's famous international press conference in Hamburg in April 1983.

And yet I have to admit that it would never have occurred to me to subject the actual fabric of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its "gas chambers" – the holiest shrines of this new Twentieth Century religion – to chemical tests to see if there was any trace of cyanide compounds in the walls.

The truly astounding results are as set out in this report: while significant quantities of cyanide compounds were found in the small de-lousing facilities of the camp where the proprietary (and lethal) Zyklon B compound was used, as all are agreed, to disinfect the plague-ridden clothing of all persons entering those brutal slave-labour camps, no significant trace whatsoever was found in the buildings which international opinion – for it is not more than that – has always labeled as the camp's infamous gas chambers. Nor, as the report's gruesomely expert author makes plain, could the design and construction of those buildings have made their use as mass gas-chambers feasible under any circumstances.

For myself, shown this evidence for the first time when called as an expert witness at the Zündel trial in Toronto in April 1988, the laboratory reports were shattering. There could be no doubt as to their integrity. I myself would, admittedly, have preferred to see more rigorous methods used in identifying and certifying the samples taken for analysis, but I accept without reservation the difficulties that the examining team faced on location in what is now Poland: chiseling out the samples from the hallowed site under the very noses of the new camp guards. The videotapes made simultaneously by the team – which I have studied – provide compelling visual evidence of the scrupulous methods that they used.

Until the end of this tragic century there will always be incorrigible historians, statesmen, and publicists who are content to believe, or have no economically viable alternative but to believe, that the Nazis used "gas chambers" at Auschwitz to kill human beings. It is now up to them to explain to me as an intelligent and critical student of modern history why there is no significant trace of any cyanide compound in the building which they have always identified as the former gas chambers. Forensic chemistry is, I repeat, an exact science. 
The ball is in their court.

When Irving chose to champion The Leuchter Report in Britain, he could hardly have foreseen that his doing so would create a furor which would even involve British Members of Parliament. Yet on June 20, 1989 over one hundred MP's, from all parties and sides of the Commons, made their feelings known in a House of Commons Early Day Motion (number 999) which stated in full:

Notices of Motions: 20th June 1989-999

DAVID IRVING AND HOLOCAUST DENIAL 20:6:89

– Mr Hugh Dykes – Mr Grenville Janner – Mr [Winston] Churchill – Mr David Alton – Mr Ivan Lawrence – Mr Peter Shore –

That this House, on the occasion of the reunion in London of 1,000 refugees from the holocaust, most of whose families were killed in gas chambers or otherwise by Nazi murderers, is appalled by the allegation by Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving that the infamous gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek did not exist ever, except perhaps, as the brainchild of Britain's brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare Executive, draws attention to a new fascist publication. The Leuchter Report, in which this evil calumny appears, and condemns without qualification such pernicious works of Hitler's heirs.

It is clear, however, from the wording of this motion – passed three days before the official British launch of Leuchter's report – that the MP's who signed it were largely unaware of the report's contents, and based their opposition to it on hearsay. First, Treblinka is not mentioned in the report at all, as the motion states, nor is it mentioned in Irving's foreword. Second and more importantly, Leuchter's report contains not one statement that is fascist in origin or indicative of a fascist ideology. It is a straightforward engineering report – written largely in scientific language – which deals exclusively with the physical condition and capabilities of the alleged gas chambers and crematoria. It contains no
references to fascism – historical or contemporary – and only mentions National Socialism in passing (and those references are not laudatory).

An investigation of the Official Reports of the House of Commons reveals that Irving appears to be the first British historian in recent times to be the subject of a motion of condemnation. One of the principal sponsors of the motion was Winston Churchill, the grandson of the wartime leader of the same name. Irving had horrified and angered the Churchill family with his scaring 1987 biography, Churchill's War which exposed the late Prime Minister's vices, weaknesses and hidden agendas, something many people felt should have been overlooked. Thus, it is possible (although extremely difficult to prove) that a motivating factor in Churchill's decision to sponsor the anti-Irving House of Commons motion may have been retribution. Irving was disappointed and dismayed by the motion. In an angry letter to Hugh Dykes, the Member of Parliament who introduced the motion, Irving challenged his motives for doing so:

Dear Dykes:

Come clean. Who put you up to it? Is this the best that the gallant but dwindling band of gullible believers in the "gas chambers" can do? Unwilling to debate them in public, they resort to the sledgehammer (literally), fire bomb, and "Nazi" smear to protect their moral investment. [881]

It is interesting that Irving, who had only recently come to doubt the existence of Nazi gas chambers, would accuse those who still believe in their existence of being "gullible". One can only infer from this that he considered himself to have been "gullible" for several decades.

In December 1989 Irving decided to express publicly his opposition to the proposed War Crimes Bill which, if enacted, would provide for the prosecution of naturalized British subjects for war crimes allegedly perpetrated in the Soviet Union whilst they were citizens of Baltic states. To every British Member of Parliament he sent a lengthy letter of petition, in which he argued that the proposed law "advocates the violation of fundamental principles of British justice." He also sent each of the Members of Parliament, at great personal expense, a complimentary copy of The Leuchter Report. In his covering letter, dated December 8, Irving made a number of claims about the Holocaust which he has yet to support with evidence. For example, he repeated his claim that the Political Warfare Executive (not the "Psychological Warfare Executive", as he had mistakenly written in the introduction to the Leuchter report) had invented the stories of Nazi gassings as anti-German propaganda. His covering letter is worth quoting in full:

You probably heard of me even before the rather odd House of Commons Motion that Hugh Dykes tabled in June. My books are published by the world's most respected publishers, including Macmillan in this country and New York. Please read my short Introduction to the attached technical report.

My advice – now that the obviously one-sided and unedifying legislation on war criminals is about to come before you all – is not to accept any wartime atrocity stories at face value, but to scrutinize each one closely on its merits, mindful always of the traditional British standards of justice. Even the notorious "gas chambers" are turning out to have been a fiction, a "grotesque lie" (their phrase) perpetuated by Britain's Political Warfare Executive in 1942. The US Army have long ago discreetly dismantled the one they themselves (!) fabricated at Dachau, while American laboratory tests as detailed in the enclosed technical report and the tell-tale signs of site-falsification reveal the fraud at Auschwitz. Even the Russians have now announced (in a little-noticed TASS communiqué dated
September 21, which I can let you have), that the Nazis' own meticulous camp records, found recently in Moscow archives, reveal that a total of 74,000 people perished at Auschwitz, not "two million". Of these, over half died of natural causes, principally typhus.

So it seems to me very necessary to cast a jaundiced eye on the peripheral atrocity-claims now being noised around by the same gentlemen who have banqueted for so long on the grisly legend of "gas chambers" at Dachau and Auschwitz.

What do you think? I'd be glad to know. I am, incidentally, sending copies of this technical report to every senior school in Britain. – Yours sincerely, – David Irving

Interestingly, only four days before the report and this accompanying material was sent out, Lord Beloff, a Conservative member of the House of Lords and a professional historian himself, had remarked in the House about Irving's recent writings and his decision to champion Leuchter's report:

At one time, Mr. David Irving had some claim to be a serious military historian. He has produced views – unsustained – that the Holocaust was not an act of state and that Hitler himself was entirely innocent of the matter.

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881 / Quoted in the IHR Newsletter 68, October 1989, p. 3.
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That view is possible because it does not affect the way we think. However, he has recently written a preface to an American publication in which he asserts in so many words that the extermination camps ... Majdanek and Auschwitz ... did not exist. David Irving has said that these camps never existed and that they were thought up by the British propaganda services. That publication has been printed in this country. No doubt the impressionable young, and those for whom these events are as far off as the wars of Julius Caesar, may be disposed to believe it. [882]

Beloff's comments are misleading: Irving did not (and does not now) deny the existence of Auschwitz, Majdanek or any other such camp. They certainly existed, according to Irving, and were appalling and brutal camps in which many tens of thousands of Jews and others perished. That can never be denied. What he did deny was that the camps were used by the Nazis to exterminate systematically Jews and others in gas chambers.

Some months after the British MPs received their complimentary copies of the report from Irving, Sir Bernard Braine, Father of the House (of Commons) and one of Britain's longest serving MPs, addressed an annual meeting in commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters. He informed his mainly Jewish audience that:

Both 'The Leuchter Report' and its preface were sent to Members of Parliament, professional bodies, and local libraries. Perhaps most chilling of all – the publisher of the report announced his intention to send copies to every secondary school in Britain. [883]

Things got even worse for Irving on May 14, 1990, when The Times published a large feature article on him, entitled "So that's what became of Europe's missing Jews". It was written by Bernard Levin, one of Britain's most popular and influential columnists – himself of Jewish ethnicity. This scathing article, syndicated in dozens of newspapers around the world, sharply condemned him for his new Revisionist views on the Holocaust. [884] Levin called these views "lunacies", and argued that Irving was motivated by nothing more than a desire to rehabilitate Hitler and his regime. Levin's own partisanship is obvious:

From then [the publication of Hitler's War] on, Irving's admiration for Hitler has steadily grown, along with his denigration of Churchill, Hitler's most obvious opponent; at one point, he came up with the charge that Churchill had fiddled his income tax, and at another he asserted that he was an alcoholic and, for good measure, a coward. After that, Irving gradually began to slither away from his earlier criticisms of Hitler.

After a time, however, he realized – he is, after all, quite an intelligent man – that there was an insuperable obstacle in the way of his campaign to install Hitler on a marble column, flanked not by a mere Three Graces but a dozen or more. If Hitler did not order the Holocaust, and found out about it only much later, why did he do nothing to stop the exterminations – as Irving says he did in the case of the handicapped? The answer, in Irving's logic, is that there could never have been any exterminations... Although he insists that the gas chambers were imaginary, he agrees, the open-minded fellow, that Jews did die in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis – a total of 74,000, though even of this somewhat reduced number hall died of natural causes. Nor has he gone back on his admission that Jews were done away with in other ways. But gas chambers? You must be – er – joking.

Irving is nothing if not consistent. He knew, of course, that Hitler had no hand in the Holocaust, and he had said so. Now that he knows there was no Holocaust anyway, he must go further: full rehabilitation is essential, and he tells us that he has "deleted every reference to 'factories of death' from the revised edition of my Hitler biography".

Levin's stinging article won praise from many Jewish organizations, including Searchlight magazine, which had stepped up its own campaign against Irving since his rejection of orthodox opinion on the Holocaust in 1988. In almost every issue since then he has been featured and described in substantial but biased articles as a fascist, a neo-Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. [885] The content of these articles is noticeably more defamatory than those from the late 1970s and early 1980s, perhaps resulting from Gerald Gable taking over as editor.

Despite many errors, omissions and distortions, Levin's article draws attention to several recent developments relevant to this study. These include Irving's decision to delete all references to gassings and

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882 / "Debate on the War Crimes Inquiry Report, 4 December 1989", The Parliamentary Debates: House of Lords Official Reports (Hansard), Volume 513 (8), column 640. To his credit, Lord Beloff acknowledged his own proneness to bias against Irving and Revisionism, and stated: "My Lords, I believe that everyone who speaks in this debate should declare an interest because all of us are moved one way or another by the interests we have. I begin by declaring a double interest: I am a member of the Jewish community". (Ibid., column 639).
883 / Quoted in Shapiro (ed.), Truth Prevails, p. 90.
884 / For example, in Australia it appeared as "The evil behind a pogrom of truth", published in The Australian (city edition), May 15, 1990.
885 / Cf. "Irving heads phoney scientist's fan club", Searchlight, Issue 176, February 1990, pp. 4-5; "Nazis campaign openly"; Searchlight, Issue 177, March 1990, p. 8; "Irving – the mask drops". Searchlight, Issue 180, June 1990, p. 12; "David Irving: Back – or beyond?", Searchlight, Issue 182, August 1990, pp. 10-11; et al.
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systematic extermination from his new, condensed American edition of Hitler's War, published in paperback by Avon Books. [886] Irving not only deleted these references from that new edition, but also from the new Focal Point edition (1991) and from the German edition of his combined Irving biographies (The War Path and Hitler's War), published in Germany as Führer und Reichskanzler: Adolf Hitler 1933-1945. In the October 6, 1989 edition of the widely-read West German newspaper Die Zeit, Rainer Zitelmann reviewed the new edition. Zitelmann noted that the book lacked previous references to "liquidations" at Auschwitz, Treblinka and other concentration camps, which were no longer referred to as
"extermination camps". He also discussed the roles the Zündel trial and The Leuchter Report played in Irving's rejection of accepted opinion on the Holocaust, and stated that in view of Irving's exceptional knowledge of the German sources relating to the period, expressing outrage at the denial of the exterminations is no longer enough. Scholarly refutations, based on proper considerations of the evidence,are necessary.

In 1989 and 1990 Irving was actually the focus of considerable media attention in West Germany, a nation that prohibits and punishes Holocaust Revisionism. On October 3, 1989 he was supposed to appear on a television programme called Berliner Salon, produced by Sender Freies Berlin, the largest government television station in Berlin. The format was going to be a round table discussion with several leading historians of the Second World War and the Holocaust, including Eberhard Jäckel and Arno Mayer. These scholars were going to discuss Revisionist claims about the Holocaust and the significance of Leuchter's report. [887] However, less than a week before the show was to be filmed the producers cancelled Irving's appearance. They informed him that the other historics, disgusted by his revised views on the Holocaust, had "refused to sit down at the same table" with him and debate the issues. [888]

Unhappy at what he later described as the other historians' cowardly and unprofessional behavior in not wishing to defend accepted opinion on the Holocaust, Irving organized a press conference at Berlin's Hotel Kempinsky. This was attended by numerous journalists and other media representatives, and was followed by a demonstration – at which young Berliners chanted "Wir wollen Irving! Wir wollen Irving!" – in the Masurenallee outside the television station's headquarters. Irving later stated that "we were carrying banners and placards which read, in English and in German: "German Historians – Liars and Cowards!" [889]

In Austria he was more successful, and addressed audiences in six cities with a speech that included a discussion on Leuchter's findings and recent developments regarding the Holocaust. Additionally, after the November 1989 dismantling of the Berlin War a legal limbo in the former Soviet zone of Germany existed until reunification was declared eleven months later. Realizing that West German laws against Holocaust Revisionism were no longer valid in that area of Germany, Irving took the opportunity on February 13, 1990 to address a huge East German audience in Dresden, and in June of that year addressed audiences in Gera, Leipzig and Dresden. Irving's February speech in Dresden was essentially on the devastation of that city – previously known as 'Florence on the Elbe' for its unique and beautiful Baroque and Rococo architecture – by American and British bombers forty-five years earlier to the day. This had been the subject of his first major work. He was invited to speak by Dresden's Director of Culture, welcomed enthusiastically by several dignitaries, and presented with flowers. His speech at the Kulturpalast, which was met with tumultuous applause from the thousand-strong audience, was an impassioned but well-argued attack on Winston Churchill. According to Irving, Churchill was the individual primarily responsible for the murderous Allied bombing of the city. Then, in a lengthy outpouring against those who still attempt to minimize the Dresden death toll, he uttered these provocative words:

My dear ladies and gentlemen, survivors and children of those who survived Dresden, the holocaust of the Germans of Dresden was real. The holocaust of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is a fabrication. [890]

After the speech he told the audience and assembled journalists, including several from East German state television, how he had come to reject accepted opinion on the Holocaust after being confronted with the wealth of contrary

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886 / Cf. D. Irving, "Hitler's War: An Introduction to the New Edition", The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Ten, Number Four, Winter 1990-91, pp. 389-416.
887 / "Irving in Berlin", IHR Newsletter 69, November 1989, p. 3.
888 / Irving, "Battleship Auschwitz", p. 496.
889 / Ibid., p. 496.
890 / Translated from the following audio-tape: Dresden 1945: Churchills Schuld am Bombenterror, Offizielle Ansprache des englischen Historikers David Irving anläßlich des 45. Jahrestages des anglo-amerikanischen Bombenangriffs auf Dresden (Essen: Heitz & Höffkes, 1990).
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evidence by Ernst Zündel, Robert Faurisson and Fred Leuchter. He also insisted, as he had done in his foreword to Leuchter's report, that stories of Nazi gas chambers were initiated by Britain's war propaganda ministry.

The German historical profession was slow to respond to these events, but in April 1990 Professor Hellmuth Auerbach of the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte issued a detailed communiqué on The Leuchter Report. [891] The report was, he insisted, "nothing less than a pseudo-scientific and rather clumsily-concocted piece of propaganda and apologia for National Socialism." His arguments appear to have been based on those of Jean-Claude Pressac, whom he described as a French "pharmacologist and toxicologist " (Pressac is certainly not the latter) who has conducted the most exhaustive study of the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Like Pressac, Auerbach weakly argued that a greater concentration of hydrogen cyanide gas per cubic metre was needed to kill lice than humans, which is why the physical sample removed by Leuchter from the delousing facilities contained more cyanide compounds than the samples removed from the gas chambers. He accepted Pressac's incorrect thesis that exposure to wind and rain for more than forty years would have removed all traces of cyanide from the remains of the gas chambers. He claimed that in Krema I, which had not been exposed to the elements, Leuchter took his samples from the floor. 

This, he said, had been washed frequently with copious amounts of water by the Auschwitz museum staff, which accounts for its low cyanide concentration. [892] Auerbach also pointed out that the Forensic Institute in Krakow had in 1945 conducted similar chemical tests on the buildings, on quantities of human hair and on several metal objects, all of which showed very clear and incriminating traces of cyanide residue.

Irving was invited to respond to Auerbach's denunciation of Leuchter's report, and his reply was also published in the April 1990 Junge Freiheit. He argued that despite some short-comings in Leuchter's methods in identifying and certifying the samples, the laboratory results demonstrated conclusively that the alleged gas chambers were exposed to very little Zyklon-B. This, he wrote, could not be argued away by saying the figures reflect the fact that it took a third more cyanide to kill lice than humans. The cyanide levels detected in the delousing facilities were extremely high ("1050 mg/kg") in comparison with those from the alleged gas chambers ("no significant residue"). 

Irving was able to refute the results of the 1945 chemical examination of some zinc ventilation grates from the alleged gas chamber in Krema II and of some human hair, used by Auerbach as evidence that Zyklon-B was used to kill people in the chambers. Pointing out that the laboratory claimed to have examined twenty-five kilograms of hair "in a paper bag", Irving wrote:

"True, I am no expert on the density of human hair, but I believe that twenty-five kilos of hair would have about the same volume as a baby elephant, which would be difficult to stuff, even dead, into a "paper bag"."

The volume was irrelevant in any case, he continued, as the Polish laboratory had only detected very minute – in fact, barely determinable – traces of cyanide in the various samples, which is to be expected as Zyklon-B was used for delousing operations in almost all buildings in all concentration camps.

Irving asked what he considered to be an obvious question: why are the still-existent delousing facilities in Auschwitz, where Zyklon-B was safely used every day to kill lice, not shown to tourists? Answering his own question, he wrote that perhaps it was because their construction, including many safety features and specialised devices for safe and effective gas handling, would cause tourists to wonder why the gas chambers in which millions of persons were allegedly murdered entirely lacked these safety features and specialised devices.

In any event, he said, the alleged gas chambers had been adapted in the post-war years to match the buildings described in various 'eye-witness' accounts. Evidence of these alterations can be found in the detailed photographs of Auschwitz released by the Central Intelligence Bureau in the 1970s. This argument is the weakest part of Irving's response to Auerbach, and contains an obvious flaw: whilst the above-mentioned photographs expose

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891 / Published in Junge Freiheit, April 1990.
892 / As noted above, these cyanide compounds are extremely stable, and could not be washed out simply with water. In fact, these same cyanide compounds were manufactured earlier in the century to dye textiles a particular shade of blue ("Prussian blue"), specifically because of its permanence and resistance to fading and weathering. It was particularly used to dye Prussian army uniforms, hence the name of the shade produced.
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several distortions and inaccuracies in accounts of what transpired in Auschwitz during the war, they do not show the buildings in sufficient detail for one to conclude with certainty that they have been changed after the war, even if those changes were made. In any event, the structural changes would have been internal.

On October 14, 1990, Irving addressed the Tenth International Revisionist Conference in Washington, D.C., and delivered a lengthy speech to the nearly two hundred gathered Revisionists. The first part of his speech was a particularly candid discussion of his new Revisionist views on the Holocaust, and was markedly different in tone and content from his first speech to a Revisionist conference, back in 1983 when he openly declared that he did not share the views of most attendees on that subject. The second part, delivered entirely without notes, was a detailed reconstruction of Erwin Rommel's final days and his innocence of involvement in the July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler's life.

Irving began his speech with the following presage: "Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure that in the first pan of my talk this evening, nobody is going to accuse me of having any respect for taste!".[893] Indeed, he treated the subject of the Holocaust with a mordaciousness that far exceeded that of any previous public treatment of the subject by him. Because the text of this speech constitutes one of the lengthiest written records of his revised views on the Holocaust, an important section of it will be quoted at length:

This is how it was when I was in Toronto a couple of years ago. I was called as an expert witness as a historian to give evidence at the Ernst Zündel case, while Zündel's researchers showed me the Leuchter Report, the laboratory tests on the crematoria and the gas chambers. As a person who, at University in London, studied chemistry and physics and the exact sciences, I knew that this was an exact result. There was no way around it. And suddenly all that I'd read in the archives clicked into place. You have to accept that, if there is no evidence anywhere in the archives that there were any gassings going on; that if there's not one single German document that refers to the gassings of human beings – not one wartime German document; and if there is no reference anywhere in the German archives to anybody giving orders for the gassings of people, and if, on the other hand, the forensic tests of the laboratories, of the crematoria, and the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and so on, show that there is no trace, no significant residue whatsoever of a cyanide compound, then this can all only mean one thing.

So how do we explain the fact that for forty-five years since the end of World War Two, we have all internationally, globally, been beset by a common guilt: the idea that the human race was responsible for liquidating six million human beings in gas chambers?

Well, the answer is: we have been subjected to the biggest propaganda offensive that the human race has ever known. It's been conducted with such finesse, with such refinement, with such financial clout, that we have not been able to recognize it as a propaganda offensive – from start to finish. And yet there are these weapons cruising past us on the horizon – in all their ugliness – and the biggest weapon, of course, of all in this propaganda campaign against the truth since 1945 has been the great battleship Auschwitz!  And we have now, at last, the historical profession – above all, the Revisionist historical profession – have found as our own task, the major task: "Sink the Auschwitz!"

I warned you I was going to show no respect for taste in the first part of this talk. Sink the Auschwitz! But we haven't had to sink the Auschwitz, because the crew of the Auschwitz, Beate Klarsfeld, the Wiesenthals, Elie Wiesel and the rest of them, have been struggling on the bridge and battling with each other – boxing and engaging in fisticuffs – and the Auschwitz has been steering amongst the icebergs, and finally it has begun to scuttle itself. They've begun to haul down the flag of the battleship Auschwitz. They've taken down the placard, they've taken down the memorial to the four million and they've replaced it with a rather smaller memorial to one million. 

Of course that's not the end of the story. I'm convinced that its just the "interim memorial". I think its on cardboard, if you have a close look because why waste money on [an] expensive memorial when you're only going to have to change it again in a few months time! They're going to have to change it because it's quite obvious. I'm not going to say only a million – I'm not going to say only any figure died in Auschwitz. We don't know the exact figures of how many people died in Auschwitz.

The Russians have helped us: the Russians released in September last year, September 21, the Auschwitz death books. That was an ugly blow for the battleship Auschwitz and its crew. Because the Russians, by releasing the forty-six death books of Auschwitz – which cover the year 1942 completely, 1943 almost completely, and 1944 incompletely – the Russians have revealed that the set of Auschwitz death books, which they have released (after forty-four years), now shows a total of 74,000 deaths. 74,000 deaths by all causes. Now the Jewish professor, Arno Mayor, whom I greatly respect... tells us in his book Why did the Heavens Not Darken? that of those who died in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, probably far more than half died of natural causes – whatever you can call natural causes in wartime. Of course the very phrase is suspect. But that means – whatever it does mean – that less than half were killed. Which means less than half of 74,000 people were killed in Auschwitz. Let's be generous and say 40,000 may have been killed in Auschwitz. over the three years – that's a bad figure! That's a grave crime, it's almost as many people as we British killed in Hamburg in one night. [894]

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893 / Transcript of speech (published as "Battleship Auschwitz") in The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Ten, Number Four, Winter 1990-91, p. 495.
894 / "Battleship Auschwitz", pp. 498-500.
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Irving continued his speech by pointing out that British codebreakers were breaking and reading SS wireless telegraphic codes. These included the daily reports between the commandants of Auschwitz and other concentration and labour camps and the Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) in Berlin. Branch D of the WVHA was the office in charge of the concentration camps. The German texts of those decrypted messages, he said, are currently in the archives of the British secret service. Every day the commandants' offices reported back to Berlin the number of prisoners who had arrived the previous morning, the number of prisoners who left the camp that day and the number of prisoners left in the camps at the end of that day. Additionally, there was a fourth category: "Abgänge aller Art" or "other losses". To explain the significance of these decrypted reports and the meaning of the phrase "other losses" contained in them, Irving quoted (but not accurately, although the errors do not change the meaning) what he considered to be a significant statement by Professor F. H. Hinsley of the University of Cambridge. Hinsley was employed during the war at Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. He had written the following passage about the decoded Auschwitz reports, in volume two (page 673) of the official British Intelligence in the Second World War:

In the case of Auschwitz, most of these other losses turned out to have been due to illness. The remainder were partly accounted for by executions, which are described as having been executions by hangings and executions by shooting. There are no references to any gassings in Auschwitz.

Irving is correct in considering this to be significant evidence. If systematic extermination by gassing was conducted at Auschwitz, one would expect to see it mentioned – either openly or euphemistically – in the daily messages sent from the camp to the WVHA. After all, these messages were in the form of secret communications of great coding complexity.

The gas chamber at Auschwitz shown to tourists today is a post-war fabrication, Irving argued, as Professor Berndt Martin, head of the history department at the University of Freiburg, had informed him on a recent visit to Germany. One must concede that Irving's information is correct. As noted above, authorities at the Auschwitz State Museum (PMO) informed the present writer in a letter dated May 7, 1991 that the gas chamber at Krema I, Auschwitz was a "reconstruction". It was a crematory building redesigned after the war to look like a homicidal gas chamber. Walls were changed, a chimney was constructed, two ovens were installed, and openings for letting in gas were cut in the ceiling. [895] In
September 1992 David Cole, a 23-year-old American, conducted an interview with Dr. Franciszek Piper, the Senior Curator and Archives Director of the PMO. Cole obtained this interview by deceitfully masquerading as a religious Jew (complete with skull-cap and prayer book) who wanted "to get the real facts to answer those back home who say there were no gas chambers." [896] Cole is not a religious Jewish anti-Revisionist, as he pretended. He is of Jewish ethnicity, but is entirely atheistic. He is also a Revisionist activist associated with Bradley Smith's CODOH. Piper would never have given an interview to Cole had he known these facts. Cole's deception deserves strong condemnation, and casts doubt upon his and CODOH's claims to being interested in truth. Nonetheless, an interview with Piper was conducted, and during this videotaped interview Piper conceded that Krema I had indeed been reconstructed after the war to look like a gas chamber. The changes he outlined to Cole match those listed in the museum's letter to the present writer. It is apparent that Irving was right: the building at Auschwitz presented by museum guides to tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists every year as a genuine Nazi gas chamber is a post-war fabrication.

It may be – as the PMO's letter to the present writer intimates – that the building was only reconstructed to return it to the appearance it had in 1941 and 1942 when it was used as a homicidal gassing facility. The building, according to the PMO, was used during the remainder of the war as a warehouse and bomb shelter, and was remodeled several times for those purposes. If this is the case, then the scholars and guides at the PMO should not have dishonestly passed it off to historians and the public alike (as they have for well over thirty years) as an extant Nazi gas chamber. As Irving stated in his speech, the PMO's fabrication of "proof" of homicidal gassings casts doubt upon its claims that gassings
occurred at all in the Auschwitz complex.

At the end of the section of his speech dealing with the Holocaust, Irving made the following vulgar witticism (which was greeted by considerable laughter and applause):

What can one say about all the people who still go around believing in the Auschwitz lie? Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to found a specific association for these, people. Its going to be an association called the

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895 / See above, p. 210 n. 20, and Appendix V below.
896 / "A Personal Note from David Cole" (CODOH info. sheet).
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Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars Education System, or A.S.S.H.O.L.E.S. for short. I warned you not to expect much taste from me here this evening. [897]

As Irving had himself believed in the "Auschwitz lie" until only eighteen months earlier, and had not questioned it in the more than twenty books he had written on the Second World War, it would not be unreasonable to wonder whether he now considered himself to have been, until the time he revised his views on the subject, an "asshole". His speech shows that not only had he totally rejected accepted historical opinion on the Holocaust, he was willing to sharply condemn and unprofessionally abuse those who still accepted it.

It is apparent, nonetheless, that Irving's speech contains a reasonable degree of factual information, which cannot be disregarded simply on the basis of his extremely vulgar presentation. First, he was correct in stating that the 'official' figure for the number of persons who died at Auschwitz, long claimed to be four million, had been drastically reduced to a figure of somewhere just over one million. In September 1989 Yehuda Bauer – the Jona M. Machover Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – published an article in the English language Jerusalem Post in which he declared that the total number of deaths in Auschwitz was "in the neighbourhood of 1.6 million" and that 1,323,000 of those victims were Jewish. [898] He partly based these figures on George Weller's "Essai de détermination du nombre de morts au camp d'Auschwitz" (Le Monde Juif, Fall 1983), which he called "a basis for understanding the horror statistics of Auschwitz". Bauer, recognized as one of the world's foremost scholars of the Holocaust, argued that the figure of four million, then graved in stone memorial tablets at Auschwitz and accepted by a majority of specialists in the Field, was a deliberate "historical falsification". It was the result of a Polish desire to have the Holocaust include a larger percentage of Polish victims, thereby making themselves "the crucified nation". Poles, he claimed, intentionally "disseminate the wrong figures". 

Bauer's explanation of the origin of the 'four million' figure is inaccurate. That figure was first asserted in a May 1945 report by the propagandist Soviet War Crimes Commission. [899] It was accepted as the "official" death total by the governments of the U.S.S.R., Great Britain, France and the United States at the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg. It has also been repeated thousands of times from then until the present day in the world's mass-media. [900] Perhaps more importantly, from 1945 to 1989 the figure of four million was reiterated by many reputable historians, [901] and was not seriously challenged by those scholars who accepted a lower figure. Bauer himself had previously accepted the far higher figure, although he made no mention of this fact in his Jerusalem Post article. In his foreword to Filip Muller's 1979 Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers Bauer had written that the figure for people "murdered in the Auschwitz gas chambers" (excluding those who died of all other causes) was believed to be "around three and a half million." Thus, it is clear even from this brief summary that the figure of four million was not a Polish invention, nor were the Polish people its only – or even principal – proponents, as Bauer would have his readers believe.

Bauer's article in the Jerusalem Post, which prompted a strong reaction, around the world, was influential in shaping academic opinion on the matter. For example, in July 1990 Franciszek Piper of the PMO declared that because of unspecified "recent Polish research" the PMO had come to reject the figure of four million. It was clear that about 1.1 million persons died in Auschwitz, 960,000 of them being Jews. Whilst those figures are minimum estimates, he said, the total is unlikely to exceed 1.5 million. [902] Like Bauer, Piper did not elaborate on how many of the 1.1 million were murdered and what method was used to kill them, or how many died of "natural causes".

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897 / This section of Irving's speech was edited from the text published in the Journal of Historical Review, but can be heard on the audiotape (IHR Audio-tape 101).
898 / Y. Bauer, "Auschwitz, The Danger of Distortion", Jerusalem Post, International Edition Week Ending September 30, 1989, p. 7. Cf. also P. Steinfels, "Auschwitz Revisionism: An Israeli Scholar's Case", New York Times, November 12, 1989.
899 / Report of the Soviet War Crimes Commission, May 6, 1945 (Nuremberg document 008-USSR, IMT, Volume XXXIX, pp. 241-261). In particular, cf. pp. 260-1: " "Ueber 4.000.000 gemordet." Im Laufe des Bestehens des Lagers Auschwitz haben die deutschen Henker dort nicht weniger als 4.000.000 Staatsangehoerige der USSR, Polen, Frankreich, Jugoslawien, Tschechoslowakei, Rumaenien, Ungarn, Bulgarien, Holland, Belgien und anderer Laender umgebracht...."
900 / For an early example, cf. C. L. Sulzberger, "Oswiecim Killings Placed at 4,000,000", New York Times, May 8, 1945, which begins: "More than 4,000,000 persons were systematically slaughtered in a single German concentration camp – that at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] in Poland, near Cracow – from 1939 to 1944." For a recent example cf. "Auschwitz saint provided hope", The Press, October 5, 1991, p. 25.
901 / Cf. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 337.
902 / Cf. E. Silvci [Silver?], "Auschwitz death figures revised", The Press, September 5, 1990, p. 21.
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Additionally, both Bauer and Piper illogically insisted that the overall figure for Jewish deaths in the Second World War period (believed by both to be around 5.8 million) need not be revised despite the death total for Auschwitz being drastically reduced. [903]

Bauer's and Piper's reduced totals, now accepted by almost all historians of the Holocaust, contradict the post-war testimony of Rudolf Höß, the commandant of Auschwitz from May 1940 to December 1943, who claimed – after rigorous interrogations by his British captors – that in those fortythree months alone:

at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. [904]

The various affidavits and memoirs of Höß, however, have been accepted since their time of writing as particularly reliable by all non-Revisionist scholars of the Holocaust (who quote them repeatedly in their books). They constitute some of the weightiest evidence in favor of accepted historical opinion on the Holocaust. These scholars now insist that on this point Höß may have been mistaken, and was, in any event, probably not in a position to know exact fatality numbers. The rest of his evidence, especially regarding the gas chambers, is still to be considered reliable.

Revisionist historians, on the other hand, see the obvious contradiction between recently accepted fatality totals and those asserted in 1946 by Höß, who certainly would have known the number of fatalities and could not have erred on such a major point, as extra evidence that the Höss affidavits and memoirs were obtained by torture (which Revisionists have long believed and the British torturers themselves now admit) and bear little resemblance to reality. [905] These sources, argue Revisionists, should never have been considered worthy of the historian's serious attention.

Irving's statements about the Auschwitz memorial plaque to the "four million" being taken down and a new one being temporarily erected in its place but with a greatly reduced figure, also contain a degree of truth. The Washington Times of July 17, 1990 noted that after Piper announced his revised figures for the claimed Auschwitz death toll, the PMO took the remarkable step of removing the official memorial plaques to the "four million victims" and replacing them with new plaques containing no figures or, in some cases, figures more in line with the new estimates. The changes mentioned in the Washington Times were made without much publicity or controversy, although Revisionists – who had long insisted that nowhere near four million persons had been interned in Auschwitz, let alone died there – saw it as a significant concession to their theses (as they also saw Bauer's figure reductions [906]). Ernst Zündel, by way of illustration, proudly wrote in his August 23, 1991 newsletter about his recent trip to Auschwitz:

I wanted to have my picture taken at the site of my triumph – where the Auschwitz authorities had the 4 million victims number chiseled out of the 19 tablets, in [...] languages after my last trial. Finally, on a bright and sunny morning on August 15, 1991, I stood, where on June 7, 1979, the pope had stood and blessed the 4 million victims – and when I stood there, there was nothing on those tablets except emptiness! Nothing! [907]

Indeed, the photographs in Zündel's newsletter show two very different scenes: one of Pope John Paul II standing at Auschwitz with his head bowed before the nineteen large tablets inscribed to the memory of the four million persons who died there; the other of Zündel at the identical spot two years later, pointing to the same nineteen tablets which were by then blank, totally devoid of inscriptions.

Irving was also correct in pointing out in his speech that the Auschwitz camp Totenbücher (death registers) were handed over by the Soviet Union in 1989, and that their contents do not support accepted historical opinion as to what transpired in the camp. On September 22, 1989 the Associated Press reported that the Soviet Red Cross had turned over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) the forty-six large volumes which the Soviets had kept in Moscow since 1945. They contain the complete Auschwitz registration of deaths in 1942, the almost-complete registration of deaths in 1943, and only a portion of the registration of deaths in 1944. As a TASS (Soviet news agency) communiqué of the day earlier reported, the administrators of all concentration camps were required to keep daily registers of fatalities, and in the Auschwitz registers "the deaths of over 74,000 people were neatly recorded, day

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903 / Cf. K. Lenski and G. Ohad, "Poland reduces Auschwitz death toll estimate to 1 million", The Washington Times, July 17, 1990.
904 / Affidavit of Höß, April 5, 1946 (Nuremberg Document 3868-PS, IMT, Vol. XXXIII, p. 276).
905 / For example, see M. Weber, "Reviewing a Year of Progress", Journal of Historical Review, Volume Ten, Number Four, Winter 1990-91, p. 446. For evidence of the British torture of Höß, see above, pp. 96, 97.
906 / Cf. "Auschwitz Revisionism?", IHR Newsletter 70, January 1990, pp. 2-3.
907 / Power Special Report, August 23, 1991, p. 2.
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after day, hour after hour, in 46 huge volumes. Their names, their birthdates, and the names of parents were written down."

It is clear that the total number of deaths recorded in the meticulous death registers do not even remotely match the popular figure of four million or the much reduced figure advanced by Bauer and Piper and now accepted by most scholars. [908] Even if the recently recovered records were complete for the three years they cover, 1942 to 1944, it is very unlikely, based on the death rate evident in the registers, that the total figure would reach 130,000. This is a small fraction – approximately ten percent – of the presently accepted death total for that infamous camp.

This obvious discrepancy has prompted several scholars upholding received opinion on the Holocaust to argue that the death registers "represent deaths from 'natural causes' only, as opposed to those who perished in the gas chambers". The latter group of internees, it is claimed, were not tattooed and registered in the Auschwitz records. [909] This argument is consistent with many accounts attesting to Jews being unloaded from trains and dispatched almost straight away to another location in the camp (presumably the gas chambers), never to be seen again.

Revisionists argue that they have demonstrated conclusively that no homicidal gassings occurred in Auschwitz (or any other camp). Therefore, they say, if there were no gassings, there were certainly no internees excluded from the tattooing and registration process, except perhaps those who entered Auschwitz temporarily before being moved to another camp or to the massive I.G. Farben complex. The death books are accurate records of all deaths in the camp. To support this argument Revisionists claim that the 'eyewitness' accounts are too prone to lapses, errors, fabrications and distortions to be valuable historical evidence. And even if the sources are reliable, they say, and Jews and others were unloaded from trains and dispatched almost straight away to another location in the camp, never to be seen again, there is no reliable evidence that they were executed in gas chambers. The Revisionist thesis can be considered plausible only if one is satisfied with the case they have made against the existence of gas chambers.

Determining which of these competing hypotheses is correct is no easy task. That of scholars upholding received opinion on the Holocaust appears at first sight to be more plausible.  Yet the registers themselves – in which the causes of deaths are not listed – contain no evidence to support the argument of scholar upholding received opinion that over a million additional unlisted Jews perished in Auschwitz, nor is there any other corroborating documentary evidence to support it. Indeed, this argument is based not only on the accounts of former internees but on the assumption that if just over one million persons (the presently-accepted estimate) died in Auschwitz during the Second World War – whilst the death registers indicate only around 150,000 deaths for the same period – then the other one million or so must have been gassed. This argument, which may be 'damage control', fails to take into consideration contradictory evidence. For example, on November 21, 1942, SS-Brigadeführer Richard Glücks, head of Branch D of the WVHA, issued an order to all concentration camp commandants. [910] He instructed them to record "the decrease of Jews and Jewesses" ("Todesfälle von Juden und Jüdinnen") in a joint list ("Sammelliste"), which had to include such details as the Jews' registration numbers, names, birthdates, nationalities and dates of deaths. These chronically-arranged lists were to be submitted on the third day of each month.
This document clearly lends itself to the thesis that all Jewish deaths were to be registered, not just those from 'natural causes'. Certainly the document does not state or suggest – even euphemistically – that only the deaths of Jews used for labour were to be re-corded, whilst the rest were not to be. Moreover, it was a specific order to camp commandants from their superior officer, and was to be obeyed. 

Until the death registers are opened up to scholarly investigation, the importance of the evidence contained within cannot be ascertained fully, despite the fact that at present the evidence appears to support the Revisionist claim that the total death toll at Auschwitz was nowhere near even the reduced figures 

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908 / For example, in Yad Vashem's recent multi-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1990) – which contains the most up to date and authoritative non-Revisionist scholarship on the Holocaust – the fatality total for Auschwitz is stated as being less than 1.5 million persons.
909 / M. Weiner, "Documents released from Soviet archives", The New Zealand Jewish Chronicle, November 1991, p. Weiner is recognized as an expert in tracing victims of the Holocaust, and has worked in the massive ITS archives on several occasions. Additionally, along with Arthur Kurzeweil, she is co-authoring a five-volume Encyclopedia of Jewish Genealogy.
910 / Document NO-1543. Original is in the Yivo Jewish Research archives, New York, file G-207.
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advanced by Bauer and Piper. However, it looks increasingly likely that the International Tracing Service (ITS) of Arolsen, Germany – which now has the forty-six registers in its possession – will prohibit all access to them. This organization, which is under the management and administration of the ICRC in Geneva, had previously been given by the Auschwitz State Museum facsimiles of only three of the registers, and these have never been available to historians – who still do not know with certainty the fatality totals contained therein. The Bonn Agreement of 1955 prohibits any access to the ITS's enormous wealth of documents (which includes similar death registers from several other camps), except for accredited representatives of the ten signatory governments, which include Germany, the United States and Israel. Whilst one of these governments may apply for access to the ITS' s archives, and may be granted it if a conscious agreement is reached, all applications by individual historians or historical institutes – even within those ten nations – are automatically rejected. [911]

Thus, Irving's speech to the Tenth International Revisionist Conference contained a number of statements that would be offensive to Jews and others who see no reason to doubt or question accepted opinion on the Holocaust. Considering that Irving had only recently rejected this orthodoxy himself, his offensive comments seem unreasonable and ill-considered. However, his speech shows that he had done a lot of study on the subject in the two years since he was so easily persuaded by the arguments and conclusions of The Leuchter Report. It also reveals the commitment he now feels to exposing what he considers to be an historical fraud.

When Irving left Washington, D.C. he traveled to Canada to address several groups, and included plenty of Holocaust Revisionism in his cross-Canadian speaking tour. In Regina he told an audience, which responded with applause, that "the Holocaust is a major fraud." "There were no gas chambers", he said, "They were fakes and frauds." One attendee, who was especially unimpressed, was Norman Bercovich, vice-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Bercovich, visibly shaken at the time, was later quoted in the local newspaper as warning ominously that people should consider the fate of James Keegstra and Ernst Zündel – both dragged through the courts for several years – before saying such things. [912]

This speaking tour actually marked the beginning of a new period of bitter Jewish opposition to Irving and his Revisionist views on the Holocaust. The November 1, 1990 issue of the Canadian Jewish News reported that the Canadian Jewish Congress, in what can only be considered an effort to stifle scholarly debate on the Holocaust, wrote to "a local television station asking it to cancel a scheduled interview with Irving. According to CJC Pacific Region director Erwin Nest, the station (CKVU) complied." Irving also found that certain Jewish groups had pressured hotel managers right across Canada to cancel his speaking venue bookings, sometimes only minutes before he was due to speak. However, in Ottawa the (Ottawa) Congress Centre refused to bow to the pressure, believing that Irving's freedom of speech was being denied. It was reported in the same issue of the Canadian Jewish News that Gordon Henderson, the chairman of that facility's management board, stated: "The right to freedom of expression is a value that the board must and does recognize even though [it] disagrees with the message Mr Irving has enounced as his theme." The board was approached by a delegation from B'nai B'rith Canada and the National Capital Alliance on Race Relations, but the Congress Centre still refused to deny Irving the right to speak. Approximately six hundred people attended the meeting, despite the presence of a number of protestors. The protestors included, according to one commentator, "100 homosexuals, anarchists, Trotskyites and assorted minorities who loudly demonstrated outside the hall." [913]

The Toronto Sun of October 28, 1990 pointed out that several MPs, led by Multiculturalism Minister Jerry Weiner, became involved in the campaign to stop Irving publicly discussing in Canada the Holocaust. The Sun also reported that Weiner: 

wired across Canada a statement expressing 'extreme disquiet' at Irving's speaking tour. "Mr Irving's sympathies and intentions have no place in our society", said Weiner, the first Jew in Tory history to be a full cabinet minister. "They are abhorrent to Canadian values and ideals and are an incitement to racism if not a direct promotion of racist attitudes."

On October 30 Margaret Mitchell, the Member of Parliament for Vancouver East, wrote to the

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911 / The ITS does not, of course, prohibit the tracing of missing individuals and in fact it does give assistance to almost anyone trying to discover the fate or location of their relatives.
912 / IHR Newsletter 77, January 1991, pp. 3-4.
913 / B'nai B'rith Harasses Irving Tour", Free Speech Monitor (Rexdale, Ontario: published by the Canadian Association for Free Expression Inc.), January/February 1991, p. 1.
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Council on Public Affairs, which sponsored the Irving tour, insisting that they cancel his speaking engagements, because "His kind of racism should not be imported to Canada." The Sun noted that Mitchell had also send copies of her letter to Jewish organizations across the country. The actions of Weiner and Mitchell, both Members of Parliament, caused a disgusted Irving to comment:

This is quite extraordinary, It's almost an incitement to violence. This is the Canadian government using its paramount position of power to smear an individual who does not have the taxpayers' money with which to mount a defence. [914]

In Britain Irving became the victim of a similar campaign after he announced that he was arranging a November 15, 1991 "Leuchter Congress" in London, where Fred Leuchter could meet historians and others who might wish to discuss his report. [915] Irving almost immediately started receiving phone calls threatening him with violence, [916] and, according to Searchlight, the Home Secretary was "bombarded by protests from leaders of survivors' groups, Members of Parliament and Jewish community leaders... calling for a ban on this liar [Leuchter]". Searchlight urged all readers to write a letter of protest to the Home Secretary, telling him not to let Leuchter into the country. If he arrived, Searchlight threatened, "violence may follow." [917] A similar threat of violence was made by Ben Helfgott, the chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews' Yad Vashem Committee. [918] The Board also sent a protest to the Home Secretary, as Mike Whine, a spokesman for the Board, stated:

The only reason that Irving is hosting his visit is to spread lies about the Holocaust and to provoke the Jewish community. We have written to the Home Office and we hope that Leuchter will not be admitted into the country. If he comes there will be protests. [919]

These protests and threats of violence had the desired effect. In a letter dated October 1, 1991 Kenneth Baker, the British Home Secretary, informed Leuchter that because of his "deeply repugnant" views he would not be permitted to enter the United Kingdom. "Your presence here", he wrote, "would not be conducive to the public good." The Jewish Chronicle of October 4 carried a front page article praising Baker for his ban, against which Leuchter could not appeal. 

In the light of the fact that Leuchter is not a criminal and is not involved in any form of radical or militant politics, one can only consider Baker's action to be out of keeping with the spirit of our age. Regardless of how unpalatable a person's views are deemed to be, he or she must never be denied the opportunity to express them in a peaceful and lawful manner.

Leuchter flew to Europe in November 1991. In Germany he addressed four private meetings ranging in size from 40 to around 200. In Munich he was to appear at a court hearing as a defence witness for Ernst Zündel, but was not permitted to testify. On November 11 Leuchter and his wife crossed the channel from Calais, France and entered England – in spite of the ban – at Dover. The November 17 issue of the Mail, a popular London newspaper, wrongly claimed that Irving had "smuggled" Leuchter into the country. Leuchter actually entered England in the usual manner, by presenting his passport to officials of British Customs, who dutifully stamped it for entry.

Irving's Revisionist conference – the first such conference in the United Kingdom – was held in London's Old Chelsea Town Hall on November 15, 1991. After Irving and Robert Faurisson had addressed the crowd of around 350, Leuchter attempted to give his speech. At that point police interrupted the meeting and escorted Leuchter out of the building. The crowd were obviously displeased and began to chant "Freedom of Speech! Freedom of Speech!" [920] Leuchter was formally arrested, but never charged. He was detained for fourteen hours in a cold police cell, and then placed with his wife in a flight to New York.

In January 1992 Irving made international news when he declared that he had been given what he believed to be the authentic memoirs of Adolf Eichmann, who worked during the war at the RSHA as head of Section IV-D-4 (IV-B-4, after 

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914 / Quoted in Toronto Sun, October 28, 1990. Irving told the present writer that "the Hon. Gerald Weiner issued a nationwide statement smearing me with so many lies that he is now at the receiving end of a libel writ which I have served on him in British Columbia", (letter dated August 1, 1991, p. 3).
915 / A Leuchter Kongress was held in Munich on March 23, 1991, with Revisionists – including several 'heavy-weights' such as Weber, Faurisson and Irving – attending from around the world.
916 / Letter dated August 1, 1991, p. 3.
917 / "Irving invites liar Leuchter to Britain", Searchlight magazine, August 1991, p. 12.
918 / Jewish Chronicle, July 12, 1991.
919 / Quoted in A. Martin, "Bunker Mentality", Time Out, July 31, 1991, p. 1££.
920 / "Leuchter Arrested in London", IHR Newsletter 85, February 1992, p. 4.
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1941) for Jewish and Evacuation Affairs. He was responsible from 1941 onward for the transportation of Jews to the concentration camps. Irving had been on a speaking tour of Argentina, which drew sharp criticism from that country's Jewish community. On October 18 La Nación, the largest national newspaper, published a scathing report from an influential Jewish organisation known as DAJA. It denounced Irving as an "agitator internacional". The following day the same item was published in numerous other newspapers, which resulted in the cancellation of all further press and television interviews and the cancellation of several university lecture theatres in which he was booked to speak. However, at the next meeting Irving was given two large paper bags by an elderly Buenos Aires man who had been attracted by the press attention. They contained 1,000 pages of the memoirs of Adolf Eichmann. [921] The memoirs were allegedly found by Eichmann's family after his kidnapping by Israeli agents in 1960 and then passed to one of their friends. That person handed them to Irving's contact. Irving "followed all the correct historical procedures and made him sign an authentication statement". [922] He then spent Christmas Day photocopying them in order to have them examined for their authenticity by the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Germany. Irving, who was one of the few historians to identify the Hitler Diaries as fakes (although he later changed his mind), said "I'm 95 percent certain they [the Eichmann memoirs] are original. I'm more satisfied that they are genuine than I was convinced that the Hitler Diaries were not." [923]

It was reported in countless newspapers around the world that the Eichmann memoirs, written in the 1950s, were forcing Irving to abandon his Revisionist views on the Holocaust. "Historian Recants on the Holocaust", by way of illustration, was a large headline in the Sunday Telegraph of January 12. Irving was apparently bothered that Eichmann had written: "Heydrich said to me [in 1941]: I have come from the Reichsführer. Now the Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews." Moreover, Eichmann had described mass executions he had witnessed on the Eastern front. "Quite clearly", Irving is quoted as saying, "this has given me a certain amount of food for thought and I will spend much of the year thinking about it". [924] Whilst Irving pointed out that Eichmann's statement about a Führer "order was really only "hearsay", he admitted it caused him "considerable anguish". [925]

Several other historians of the Holocaust were clearly displeased at the attention Irving was receiving; unfortunately displaying his Jewish elitism, Tuvia Friedman, an Israeli scholar, said: "We don't need a dubious British historian to tell us about the Holocaust." [926] Martin Gilbert, a well known British-Jewish historian, was decidedly unimpressed by Irving's "antics": "For many years Mr Irving has denied these facts about the Holocaust, and now he makes a virtue of finding them." David Cesarani, the deputy director of the Jewish Wiener Library in London, was more philosophical: "All he [Irving] is trying to do is ditch some of his more preposterous ideas." [927]

As it turned out, Irving had not "recanted". He agreed that many "My-Lai-type atrocities" were committed by the Nazis and their collaborators against the Jews, and that many Jews died in generally uncoordinated "mass exterminations". Yet he still firmly denied that Hitler had ordered the systematic and total extermination of Europe's Jews, that such a policy or programme ever existed, and that there were homicidal gas [chambers]. "The Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time", he told the Jewish Chronicle. He also predicted a new wave of anti-Semitism within eighteen months, because the Jews "have exploited people with the gas chamber legend." [928] 

Perhaps more importantly, the Eichmann manuscript turned out to be not as important as it at first appeared. Norbert Frei, an expert at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, claimed that the manuscript seemed to be based on previously published material. [929] Indeed, as most leading Revisionists were aware [930], the historically pertinent portions of the manuscript had already been

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921 / Fax from Irving's Focal Point, dated December 29, 1991.
922 / N. Watt, "Nazi papers were gift to historic", The Times, January 13, 1992.
923 / N. Farrell, "Historian recants on the Holocaust", Sunday Telegraph, January 12, 1992.
924 / Ibid.
925 / M. Bailey, "Historian 'discovers' Eichmann memoirs", The Observer, January 12, 1992.
926 / U. Dan, "Eichmann's 'Diary' Sparks Fury in Israel", New York Post, January 13, 1992.
927 / "Nazi's memoirs found – historian" (Reuter), The Press, January 14, 1992.
928 / J. Kossoff, "Hitler innocent, says Irving, despite 'discovery' of Eichmann documents", Jewish Chronicle, January 17, 1992.
929 / H. Rossier-Kreuzer, "Eichmann papers met with skepticism", Washington Times, January 14, 1992.
930 / Cf. IHR Newsletter 85, February 1992, p. 3; JHR, Vol. 5, 1984, p. 423.
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published in 1980 as Ich Adolf Eichmann – Ein historischer Zeugenbericht (I, Adolf Eichmann – An Historical Eyewitness Account) by a right-wing German publishing house, Druffel Verlag. [931] Rudolf Aschenauer, the volume's editor, was formerly a defence lawyer at the International Military Tribunal. He had obtained several hundred pages of rough manuscript from Eichmann's widow.

Irving was back in the headlines in July 1992. A bitter row broke out on July 2 when it was announced that he had "discovered" in Moscow's Central Government Archive the first complete set of Joseph Goebbels's diaries and that he had been commissioned by The Sunday Times to translate them for future serialization. Irving is one of only two or three scholars in the world who can decipher Goebbels's spidery handwriting, and his detractors claimed that he could not be trusted to translate accurately Goebbels's diaries, which run to some 50,000 pages.

There is no evidence to support claims that Irving would deliberately mistranslate passages in such a way as to support or defend any preconceived notions about the past. In the last thirty years he has translated hundreds of key documents from German and no evidence of deliberate falsification has ever been detected. Irving, of course, firmly denied that he would ever resort to the falsification of evidence, and called such accusations about him "grossly defamatory." [932] Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times, stated that Irving's views on the past are those of an "amateur Nazi". Yet he conceded that Irving had highly developed "technical skills", which the newspaper could not ignore. In any event, said Neil, Irving would be "kept on a short leash.... All editing will be done by reputable historians, including Professor Norman Stone of Oxford University, Irving's views on the Holocaust will not appear." [933]

The day after Irving's involvement in the affair was announced, several hundred Jewish protestors picketed Irving's Mayfair home. According to one publication, the demonstration was organised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. [934] Photographs of placard-waving youths from the Jewish Free School in Camden featured prominently in several of the next morning's newspapers. [935] A more militant protest was organised the following day by the radical left-wing Campaign Against Fascism in Europe, which pledged to continue its "intimidation of Irving." [936] Five people were arrested during scuffles between police and the crowd of more than one hundred protestors outside the meeting of Campaign for Real History, a group of Irving's supporters.

Irving flew back to Britain from Moscow on the same day as the Revisionist meeting. Uniformed police and plain-clothed Special Branch officers met him at Heathrow Airport and escorted him out by a side door. [937] After attending the Revisionist meeting he was again escorted from the building by police. The crowd was at times hysterical. "My mother's family ended in the gas chambers which that man says did not exist", exclaimed a furious Miriam Karlin of the Anti-Nazi League. "There is no way that I can allow this to go on happening, for people like this to be spewing the filth that they are spewing. Do I have to dig up the rotting bones of my mother's family to prove that this man is wrong?" [938] A week later Irving was sitting down at the Richoux restaurant in Mayfair when he was physically assaulted by several young Jews. They punched and kicked him as they shouted obscenities and taunted him to step outside so they could beat him up further. When police arrived about thirty protestors fled.[939] "The demonstration did Irving no harm and the demonstrators no good", Chaim Bermant (himself Jewish) lamented in The Observer of August 2, 1992. "It came near to making him a white Rushdie, especially after he was physically attacked."

It would not be unreasonable to conclude that the actions of these militant and immoderate Jews are in keeping with the spirit of an awful age that finished almost fifty years ago; an age – dominated by the swastika – in which people, especially Jews, were routinely denied their civil rights. It is perhaps a perverse

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931 / Leoni am Starnberger See, Druffel Verlag, 1980.
932 / Quoted in R. Simpson, "Fuehrer's PR man", International Express, July 9-15, 1992.
933 / G. Frankel, "The Furor over Goebbels's Diaries", Washington Post, July 11, 1992.
934 / B. Cohen, "David Irving and the Goebbels Diaries", The Jerusalem Report, p. 35.
935 / Cf. The Times, July 4, 1992, see accompanying article: I. Hidalgo, "Anti-nazi groups vow to disrupt Hitler apologist's meeting".
936 / Cohen, "David Irving and the Goebbels Diaries".
937 / Simpson, "Fuehrer's PR man".
938 / "Rage over rightist's translating Nazi diary" (Router), San Francisco Examiner, July 6, 1992.
939 / BBC report, TV3 News, July 14, 1992; "Stenographer hid diaries in forest" (Reuter), New Zealand Herald, July 14, 1992.
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twist of fate that Irving, supposedly a Nazi apologist, suffers intimidation and violence from certain Jews in much the same way as German Jews in the 1930s suffered intimidation and violence from Nazis.

The actions of these Jews, however, were apparently considered to be more newsworthy than the important historical issues involved. Very few newspapers (aside from The Sunday Times) or television news items discussed the true significance of the newly-discovered Goebbels's diaries or scholarly reaction to them. Therefore, it might be appropriate at this point to provide some brief background information.

Fragments of Goebbels's diaries have appeared at irregular intervals since 1945, but until the discovery of the complete set in 1992 many critical episodes – such as the 'Night of the Long Knives' in 1934 and the Munich conference and Kristallnacht in 1938 – were missing. Significant details about the genesis and execution of Hitler's war against the Jews were also missing. In early 1992 Dr. Elke Fröhlich of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich came across ninety-two small yellow boxes on the Goebbels shelf in the 'special state archive' of the Russia Federation in Moscow. Fröhlich recognized the handwriting of Richard Otte, Goebbels's stenographer from 1941 to 1945, on the dust-covered boxes. They turned out to contain thick (3mm) glass photographic plates carrying copies of what were believed to be (and since proven to be) a complete set of Goebbels's diaries, running to some 50,000 pages. [940]

Since the beginning of the war Goebbels had stopped writing his diaries himself. Instead he dictated them to Otte. Towards the end of the war Goebbels, perhaps worried that his diaries would not survive him, ordered them to be preserved through the experimental technique of microphotography. The diaries were copied onto small (approx. 75mm x 125mm) glass plates. 

Otte claimed in 1992 that when Russians advanced from the east in 1945 he and several colleagues left Berlin by car to bury the copies of the diaries in the woods near Potsdam. "There they were found. The Russians must have heard about it," said the 85-year-old Otte. [941]

The Institut für Zeitgeschichte, under Fröhlich's editorial direction, had already published the first scholarly edition of Goebbels's diaries. Four volumes, covering 1924 to 1941 incompletely, had been published before the 1992 discovery. [942] Another six volumes were planned, but the newly-discovered diaries – which close many significant gaps in the previously-known diaries – will almost certainly make necessary further volumes. The Munich institute, naturally delighted by the discovery, drew up a contract with the Russian State Archive Committee, the agency now in charge of former Soviet archives in Russia. The original draft contract gave the Munich institute exclusive rights to the material, but the Russians later amended the contract to allow other scholars access to the diaries before they were returned to Germany.

Irving had been after the diaries for almost twenty years, and at one point in the 1970s had even spent several weeks searching with a proton magnetometer – a kind of supersensitive mine detector – in the forest where he believed the diaries were buried. In May 1992 Irving, who is "well plugged into the German gossip circle", to quote one columnist, heard rumors of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte's great discovery. He immediately approached The Sunday Times, suggesting a formal approach be made to the Russian archive. With Irving acting as a sort of 'middle-man', the newspaper managed to negotiate a deal with Vladimir Tarasov, head of the State Archive Committee's international department. The Sunday Times would be given unrestricted access to study the diaries while they were still in Russia, although no more than 100 pages could be photocopied. The newspaper could then publish extracts as it saw fit. No financial transaction occurred, although Irving supplied the desperately-poor archive with a £2,500 microfiche reader paid for by The Sunday Times as a good-will gesture. When scholars from the Munich institute returned to Moscow – with an expensive photocopier, their own good-will offering – they found that Irving had had access to all the photographic plates and that he had beaten them in their race to publish the most important sections of the diaries. Irving is quoted as saying before the Munich institute's return: "They will find the diaries gutted and filleted by the time they arrive." [943]

The nature and scope of this summary prevent even a brief analysis of the diary extracts published by The Sunday Times, although a brief description of their contents may be germane. They include

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940 / P. Millar, "The Reich Revealed", The Sunday Times, July 5, 1992.
941 / "Stenographer hid diaries in forest".
942 / Munich: K. G. Saur Verlag.
943 / G. Smith, "Goebbels and the Moscow connection", Evening Standard, July 3, 1992.
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Goebbels's accounts of the Night of the Long Knives, the Sudeten crisis leading up to the Munich meeting with Chamberlain and Daladier, the division of Czechoslovakia, the Polish crisis and the outbreak of war, Hitler's reaction to the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, and the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944. It is generally agreed by historians of the Third Reich that the discovered diaries are, as Professor Norman Stone wrote, "the last seriously important documents to come out of the Third Reich." After studying some of the diaries relating to the outbreak of war in September 1939, Stone, who is editing the passages for The Sunday Times concluded that Hitler was a total gambler who ended up fighting a world war by accident:

If accurately transcribed, the diaries show that the Nazis believed the British would not go to war over Poland and that Hitler was thinking of a kind of grand bargain: Hitler takes very little from Poland ("a corridor within a corridor") and even allows an internationally supervised plebiscite in the ethnically disputed regions. For a long time that was thought just to be a propaganda maneuver.... Goebbels's account bears out quite well what A. J. P. Taylor was vilified for suggesting 30 years ago – that Hitler was gambling in the crisis of August-September 1939. [944]

Not all scholars were in agreement with Stone, and several – including Douglas Cameron Watt of the London School of Economics – argued that the diaries actually tend to disprove Taylor's theory that Hitler had a reasonable game plan for European expansion that could be achieved without a war. [945]

Irving was able to gain little comfort from the contents of the diaries. He conceded that Goebbels's 1938 diaries will force him to reappraise his belief that the November 9-10, 1938 attacks on Jews were conducted without Hitler's prior knowledge. "I didn't believe that Hitler was personally involved," he said. "I'm going to have to revise that opinion in the light of what I have read on those glass plates." [946] Indeed, part of the diary entry for November 9, 1938 reads: 

The situation of the diplomat Ernst von Rath, shot at by a Jew in Paris, continues to be critical. The German press is getting very worked up.... Big demonstrations against the Jews in Kassel and Dessau. Synagogues set on fire and shops demolished. During the afternoon the death of the German diploma von Rath is reported. That is good news. I go to the party reception in the old town hall. The place is jammed. I report the situation to the Führer. He decides: let the demonstrations keep going. Pull back the police. The Jews should be made to feel the wrath of the people. That is right. I give the relevant instructions to the police and party. ... As I head for the hotel, I see the sky is blood-red. The synagogue is burning.... Reports are pouring in now from all over the Reich: 50, then 75 synagogues are burning. The Führer has ordered 20,000-30,000 Jews to be arrested immediately. That will cause a stir.... As I drive back to the hotel, I hear the shop window glass smashing. Bravo! Bravo! The synagogues burn like old shacks. [947]

Goebbels's entry for the following day also clearly reveals Hitler's involvement in the pogrom:

I reported to the Führer in the Osteria [restaurant]. He is in accord with everything. His views are very radical and aggressive. The action itself has gone off perfectly. 100 dead. But no German property harmed. Apart from a few small alterations, the Führer gives the go-ahead to my order to halt the actions. I issue it immediately via the Press. The Führer wants to go ahead with very severe steps against the Jews. They must fix up their shops themselves. The insurance companies will pay them nothing. Then the Führer wants to dispossess the Jews entirely... [ 948]

Despite conceding that Hitler was personally involved in the Kristallnacht, Irving found little else in the diaries to make him reshape his views on the Holocaust. He found many references to Jews being murdered in the east, but none to an extermination policy as such, and certainly none to systematic exterminations by gassing. "I would say that clearly more than 100,000 Jews were murdered," he said in late July, 

[but] probably less than 2,000,000. I do accept that the Nazis did machine-gun Jews, 10,000 at a time, into pits in Russia, this kind of thing, the things we've seen the films of.

I accept that. There's overwhelming evidence of that. But I don't buy the whole package. The Holocaust now is marketed with a capital 'H' like Aspirin or Araldite or any other trade name. I don't buy that. I don't buy gas chambers. Anybody who questions it blasphemes. But people who say that I deny the Holocaust are, in fact, being grossly unfair to me, although I understand their motives. It's to make my position look completely untenable. [949]

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944 / P. Millar, "Goebbels's diaries give new insight into Nazi tyranny", The Sunday Times, July 5, 1992.
945 / P. Millar, "Revealed: How Hitler was ready to start war in 1938", The Sunday Times, July 12, 1992.
946 / "Anger at Goebbels diary contract for historian" (Reuter), The Press, July 6, 1992.
947 / The Sunday Times, July 12, 1992.
948 / Ibid.
949 / Quoted in The Herald (Glasgow), July 28, 1992.
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A German court, two months earlier, certainly found Irving's views on the Holocaust to be untenable. On May 4, 1992 a Munich court rejected his appeal against a DM 7,000 (£2,400) fine imposed for "disparaging the memory of the dead" ("Beleidigung der Toten"), and increased it to DM 10,000. [950] Irving had claimed at a Munich meeting in April 1990 that the gas chamber shown to tourists at Auschwitz is a "dummy" ("Attrappe"), like the one at Dachau. As noted above, even the Auschwitz State Museum now agrees that the building is not in its original state but has been reconstructed to look like a gas chamber. Nonetheless, Judge Thomas Stelzner increased Irving's fine because of what he saw as the latter's defiant "lack of understanding" and because he had earned money from the sale of his Focal Point edition of Leuchter's report, Irving told the judge: "We both have our duties. My duty as historian is to establish the truth. Your duty is also to establish the truth, but you have a problem here in Germany."

In October, as the furor over the Goebbels diaries was beginning to die away, Irving's 'criminal' conviction in Germany was used as the basis for a Canadian Immigration Department ban on Irving entering Canada. [951] He was scheduled to give a ten-day speaking tour across the country but was served on October 9 with a legal notice in Los Angeles – where he had addressed the Eleventh International Revisionist Conference – stating that he could not enter Canada. His criminal conviction was cited in the notice, which was from the Canadian Consulate General in Los Angeles. The notice also asserted that "there are reasonable grounds to believe [Irving] will commit one or more offenses" in Canada. [952]

Irving chose to ignore the ban, believing that his German conviction would not be legal in Canada and that the penalty he received was nowhere near that required by the statute of exclusion from entry. [953] He crossed the border into Canada, presented his passport to immigration officials and was admitted. He arrived in Victoria on October 27 and spoke later that day at the Eighth Annual George Orwell Awards Dinner, held at the Jade Palace Restaurant. The meeting, attended by about a hundred people, was organised by the Canadian Free Speech League. After speaking on his experiences with censorship, Irving was approached by a group of police officers, who handcuffed him and led him away. Rather than being accused of illegally entering Canada, Irving was accused of having misrepresented the purpose and duration of his stay" by not mentioning his cross-Canada speaking tour. Irving agreed that he would leave Canada voluntarily within forty-eight hours, and signed an agreement to that effect. This essentially meant that he was not formally deported and could reenter Canada legally at another time. Nonetheless, he was furious at his arrest and treatment. "I've had two days in five different prisons, solitary confinement here in British Columbia, because of opinions which I sincerely hold," he stated to the media.[954]

He then made a bizarre and ill-judged move. He left Canada and entered the United States, but stayed there for less than two hours before re-entering Canada. He believed he had thus kept the 'letter of the law'. He gave a public meeting to a large crowd on November 1 at the Primrose Hotel in Toronto. On the same day he attempted to cross the border into the United States, but was refused entry by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization service. When Irving was forced to reenter Canada he was promptly arrested because he was still in Canada after forty-eight hours, which violated the voluntary departurenotice he had signed. On November 13 he was taken in handcuffs to Pearson International Airport and deported at Canadian taxpayers' expense to England. [955]

Irving's arrest and subsequent deportation would not have occurred if he had chosen to obey the ban on entering Canada (which he could, in any event, have appealed through the proper legal channels). By ignoring the ban, it could be argued, he invited the trouble he found himself in. His actions were illconsidered and unreasonable. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that the ban on Irving entering Canada was designed solely to prevent him expressing his views on the past whilst in that country. The decisionwas not based on a fair consideration of his 'criminal' record. 

His only conviction was for expressing unorthodox views on the past whilst in Germany, a country with a poor civil liberties record. The Canadian Government's action is, therefore, worthy of condemnation. One of the most thoughtful and balanced commentaries on the affair was contained in a media release by the Canadian Centre of International PEN, an association of poets, playwrights, essayists, novelists, publishers and editors. The media release, dated November 5, stated:

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950 / Daily Telegraph, May 5, 1992.
951 / Canadian Jewish News, October 22, 1992.
952 / Ibid.
953 / The Balance, Volume 3, No. 3 (November 1992).
954 / The Spectator, October 31, 1992.
955 / Monday Magazine, November 19-20, 1992.
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The Canadian Centre of International PEN is deeply concerned about the detention of David Irving. Canada has often been in the forefront of human rights and civil liberties issues abroad, but Mr. Irving's detention raised extremely serious questions about our commitment to freedom of speech at home. While Mr. Irving's present position in Canada appears to involve specific breaches of Canadian immigration law, the issue as a whole raised the larger questions of freedom of expression. As it underscores the urgent need for reappraisal of our immigration laws, which in their present form, allow such a curtailment of the rights of freedom of expression, PEN Canada unequivocally maintains that freedom of expression, in all its variety, is fundamental to a democratic society and must therefore be supported in full and without any form of censorship. The greatest obligation of a democratic government is to its citizens, and that obligation includes ensuring freedom of access to information and opinion. We maintain that Canadians do not need to be "protected" against the free flow of ideas, and are capable of determining for themselves what is valid and what is nonsensical. If Canadians want to hear foreign speakers, it is their right to do so; equally, all writers in this country – residents or visitors to Canada – should have the right to express their views lawfully and peaceably without fear of being thrown into prison or expelled.

Censorship has never been an appropriate way of dealing with the problem of conflicting, insensitive, evil or fallacious opinion. The most effective antidote is free discussion and free debate, based on a commitment to tolerance, understanding and truth. Anything else is inconceivable in a democracy in times of peace. [956]

These are appropriate words with which to conclude this description and analysis of Irving's involvement in the controversy over the Holocaust. Yet this study, with its necessarily narrow focus on Holocaust-related matters, may have inadvertently obscured two points which need brief clarification. First, whilst Irving did cross the battlefield of historical debate to join the besieged camp of the Holocaust Revisionists and has become their champion, repelling several savage offensives, he has not become totally consumed by the subject of the Holocaust. Indeed, in recent years his speeches and writings on other historical events and epochs have far outnumbered those on the Holocaust. Second, and perhaps more importantly, his standard of scholarship has apparently not suffered or decreased in impartiality as a result of his new position. For example, in late 1989 – more than a year after abandoning accepted opinion on the Holocaust – his Göring: A Biography was published, receiving generally good reviews. Like most of his other works, it was largely based on previously unknown diaries and private and official documents. "Irving has an extraordinary talent for digging up otherwise obscure Nazi sources", wrote Norman Stone in his enthusiastic review of the book. [957] Irving's analysis of this material was prudent and judicious and his conclusions were well-argued and sensible. There is no evidence that Irving had preconceived notions in favor of Göring or that any preconceptions led to an improper or defective consideration of sources. There is also no evidence in the lengthy book of his alleged anti-Semitism, despite Jews being discussed in numerous places. Nor did he try to insert subtly a Revisionist discussion of the Holocaust, despite there being opportunities to do so. Regardless of his attention-seeking antics and his contentious new views on the Nazi treatment of Jews, Irving remains a researcher, biographer and military historian of outstanding aptitude.

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956 / Reproduced in Friends of Freedom (newsletter), October/November 1992.
957 / N. Stone, "Hitler's right-hand man", New Statesman and Society, August 18, 1989, p. 28.
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