David Irving

David Irving is a well-known Holocaust denier whose work has questioned the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and the extent of Hitler’s atrocities during World War II, and who has ties to American neo-Nazi groups. In 1977, he published Hitler’s War, which he described as a book intended to provide a narrative of World War II through Hitler’s perspective to clear his record of “grime and discoloration.” He also had ties to the Institute of Historical Review, speaking at their conferences. In 1988, he testified at Ernst Zundel’s trial and asserted that many fewer than six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. He cites the Leuchter Report as the source of his “conversion” to Holocaust denial. Between 1995 and 1998, Irving spoke at the neo-Nazi group National Alliance events at least seven times.

Irving has had multiple legal battles in regard to his Holocaust denial. In 1989, Austrian authorities issued a warrant for his arrest for trivializing the Holocaust, and he was ultimately arrested there in 2005. In 2006 he was convicted and spent 13 months in jail. In 1992, Germany fined him and barred him from entering the country for a year for denying the Holocaust. Most famously, in 1994, he engaged in a lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt after she portrayed him as a Holocaust denier in one of her books, but lost the suit. He has publicly defended Hitler and Nazism, leading to his being barred from many countries. 

In his words:

• Richard Rampton QC: "Do you deny that the Nazis killed millions of Jews in gas chambers in purpose built establishments?" David Irving: "Yes... I deny that millions died in the gas chambers because of the logistical problems for a start."  - Quote during Irving’s 2000 trial, reprinted in The Guardian, January 13, 2000
• “The biggest lie of the lot, the blood libel on the German people, is the lie that the Germans had factories of death in which they liquidated millions of their opponents.”  - 1991 press conference transcript, reprinted in The Guardian, January 13, 2000
• “It is going to be a hot twelve months. . . but at the end of it, the gas chamber legend will have vanished once and for all. . . [T]his myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka, etc., etc., which in fact never took place. . . this horrific ghost of guilt from which the German people have suffered for the last 45 years, will be laid to rest.”  - IHR Newsletter, July/August 1992
• “If you go to a grocer’s shop…[and] you buy six liters of milk and you find that the jug’s only got 2 liters in it and the milkman says: ‘I’m sorry, madam, you’re still going to have to pay for the six, and that’s the way it is.’  That, too, is a swindle. That’s what’s happening in Germany now. They’re still sticking to the six million figure.” – David Irving, Tenth IHR Conference, Journal of Historical Review (vol. 10 no. 4), 1990