David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author who has written on the military and political history of the Second World War, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a British court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Irving's works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it. Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were denounced by historians.
Irving was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents, which he held closely but stated were fully supportive of his conclusions. His 1964 book The Mare's Nest about Germany's V-weapons campaign of 1944–45 was praised for its deep research but criticised for minimising Nazi slave-labour programmes.
By the late 1980s Irving had placed himself in the fringes of the study of history, and had begun to turn to further extremes, possibly influenced by the 1988 trial of the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, led him openly to espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at Auschwitz concentration camp.
Irving's reputation as a historical author was further discredited in 2000, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray determined in his ruling that Irving wilfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians. The court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". In addition the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light. He has been proven to make falsified claims using forged documents, has been forced to retract false accusations against individuals, has been fined for libellous claims and has had to pay court costs after failing to prove that others have made libellous claims against him. He has been denied entry to various countries, expelled from others, and was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in Austria in accordance with the law prohibiting Nazi activities.
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