David Irving

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is a British writer and Holocaust denier who specialises in the military history of World War II. He is the author of numerous books, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels — Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).

David Irving in 2003

Quotes

• I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was.
  • In 1988, as cited in "David Irving", Southern Poverty Law Center (undated)

• 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. But 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.
  • In 1989, as cited in "David Irving", Southern Poverty Law Center (undated)
  • By the end of the 1980s, Irving had endorsed the pseudo-scientific Leuchter report.

• When I get to Australia in January I know what is going to happen. They are going to wheel out all the so-called eyewitnesses. One in particular, Mrs. Altman, I've clashed with once or twice. She is very convincing. They can be very convincing. Because they have to do it so often over the years. They've had a free run. We're going to meet because she has that tattoo. I am going to say, "You have that tattoo, we all have the utmost sympathy for you. But how much money have you made on it! In the last 45 years! Can I estimate! Quarter of a million! Half million! Certainly not less. That's how much you've made from the German taxpayers and the American taxpayers." Ladies and gentlemen, you're paying $3 billion a year to the State of Israel. Compensation to people like Mrs. Altman. She'll say, "Why not, I suffered." I'll say you didn't. You survived. By definition you didn't suffer. Not half as much as those who died.... They suffered. You didn't. You're the one making the money. Explain to me this. Why have you people made all the money, but Australian soldiers who suffered for five years in Japanese prison camps haven't got a bent nickel out of it!
  • Speech in Portland, OR. September 18, 1996

• I deny that millions died in the gas chambers because of the logistical problems for a start.
• The defendants will find it very hard to prove it was a Third Reich decision and an Adolf Hitler decision. There were multiple shootings but it was not pursuant to any programme.
  • "Gas chamber claims impossible, says Irving", The Guardian (13 January 2000).
  • Statements during the David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt libel trial, which Irving lost.

• What you're saying is 'Has a historian the right to offend?' and the answer is very definitely, yes.
• The Nazis quite clearly killed millions of Jews...
• The interesting questions are what did Hitler know, did Himmler conceal it, did he keep it from Hitler, where was the killing done, was it Auschwitz, was it the Reinhard camps and that's what people are frightened to research, because they go to prison for it.
  • Interview with John Humphrys on the Today programme (23 December 2006)

• I am not anti-coloured, take it from me; nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at an airport, or a station, or a seaport, and I see a coloured family there — the black father, the black wife and the black children… When I see these families arriving at the airport I am happy, and when I see them leaving at London airport I am happy.
  But if there is one thing that gets up my nose, I must admit, it is this — the way… the thing is when I am down in Torquay and I switch on my television and I see one of them reading our news to us. It is our news and they’re reading it to me. If I was a chauvinist I would say I object even to seeing women reading our news to us.
  But now we have women reading our news to us. If they could perhaps have their own news which they were reading to us, I suppose [laughter], it would be very interesting.
  For the time being, for a transitional period I'd be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, following by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts…
  • David Irving's Talk to the Clarendon Club

• I am a Baby Aryan,
  Not Jewish or Sectarian.
  I have no plans to marry-an
  Ape or Rastafarian.
  • Poem quoted by the counsel for the defendants in the libel trial, as cited in "Irving taught his nine-month-old daughter racist ditty, libel trial told". The Guardian (3 February 2000).
  • The quote originates from Irving's diaries (1994) and was apparently sung to his infant daughter

Quotes about Irving

• A man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost everything of an innocent, and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception.
  • The Times on David Irving, quoted in Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993), p. 180.

• Mr. Irving's constant references to archives, diaries and letters, and the overwhelming amount of detail in his work, suggest objectivity. In fact they put a screen behind which a very different agenda is transacted… Mr. Irving is a great obfuscator ... Distortions affect every important aspect of this book to the point of obfuscation… It is unfortunate that Mr Irving wastes his extraordinary talents as a researcher and writer on trivializing the greatest crimes in German history, on manipulating historical sources and on highlighting the theatrics of the Nazi era.
  • Peter Hoffmann, quoted in Richard J. Evans, Telling Lies about Hitler, London: Verso (2002), p. 17.

• Irving does have a rounded and developed theory of Fascism, which is to say that he has studied it a lot and thinks it’s had a bum rap. He’s even been quoted as calling himself a “mild Fascist” or “a moderate Fascist”—oxymoronic if true.
• David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.
  • Christopher Hitchens, "Hitler’s Ghost", Vanity Fair (2 June 1996), Online