From Brentwood to Berchtesgaden:
Rosie Waterhouse traces the disturbing story of the 'revisionist' David Irving.http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 32491.htmlROSIE WATERHOUSE Saturday 11 July 1992ANDREW NEIL called him an amateur Nazi. Neo-Nazis, who sport swastikas and give Sieg Heil salutes, treat him as the Fuhrer. David Irving describes himself as a revisionist historian.
His thesis about Hitler and the Holocaust has developed significantly over the years. In Hitler's War, first published in Britain in 1977, it was that the Holocaust happened but that Hitler was ignorant of it and that it was in fact carried out against his express orders.
His latest position is that 'important elements of the Holocaust legends are a hoax'. The gas chambers were a tourist attraction built by the Poles after the war, a delousing service for the work camps or a 'figment of British propaganda'. He concedes that 'probably a few hundred thousand' Jews were massacred and that atrocities were committed.
Born in March 1938, the son of a naval officer, Irving apparently became politicised at Imperial College, London, where he read physics. He had left Brentwood Boys' school in Essex with seven O- levels (he failed history) and three A-levels. He says he later got 17 O-levels and 13 A-levels, but he has no degree.
By 1959 he had became known as an extreme right-winger. His parting shot as a student was to produce a secret supplement to the students' rag magazine, Carnival Times. Irving says it was satirical. Critics interpreted it as containing a racist cartoon, a tribute to Hitler's Germany and the assertion that the national press is owned by Jews. By then he had developed an unusual fixation with Hitler. After a trip to Spain in 1959 he was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying: 'I returned through Germany and visited Hitler's eyrie at Berchtesgaden. I regard it as a shrine.'
After university, Irving was called up for two years' National Service. Irving says he volunteered for three years in the RAF but failed his medical, he says, because he had a spotty face, and he went to Germany to work in a steelworks instead.
In 1963 he published Destruction of Dresden, in which he claimed that 250,000 German lives were lost. Documentary evidence later forced him to admit that the death toll was 25,000. Since then he has made several costly mistakes. In March 1971 the Court of Appeal upheld the award of pounds 40,000 damages to a Royal Navy captain, John Broome, who was commanding an escort to a convoy of merchant ships taking supplies to Russia in 1942 when he received an order from the Admiralty to 'scatter'. German aircraft and U-boats sank 24 of the convoy's 38 ships.
In his book The Destruction of Convoy PQ17, Irving alleged that Broome had deliberately abandoned the convoy, disobeyed routing orders and withdrawn the destroyers' protection on his own initiative. The Admiralty did not hold Broome responsible for the heavy losses but Irving was said in court to have set himself up as a 'hanging judge'. The libel damages were then the highest awarded by an English court.
The introduction to the West German edition of Hitler's War contained the statement: 'Many forgeries are among records, including the diary of Anne Frank'. The reference was later removed by the publishers Ullstein, which paid compensation to Anne Frank's family. Although he is regarded, even by his critics, as a gifted researcher and finder of historical treasures, Irving's interpretation and selective use of archive material has brought him into disrepute among respected students of the period.
After the publication of Hitler's War in Britain, the Sunday Times conducted an investigation into Irving's use of archive material to substantiate his claims. The report showed he had omitted inconvenient passages, misconstrued evidence and selectively quoted experts who later denounced his conclusions. In publicising his revised edition, which he published himself last year, he told an audience at the time: 'Why dignify something with even a footnote that has not happened?'
Irving's public speaking, from which he earns about pounds 100,000 a year, took off after Hitler's War. Groups he has addressed regularly include: in Germany, the Gesellschaft fur Frei Publizistik (the Society for the Freedom of Publication), and the Deutsche Volksunion, Germany's biggest extreme right-wing group, including a memorial service for Nazi Germany's most decorated pilot, Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel; in the US he has addressed the Institute for Historical Review, audiences of hundreds of neo-Nazis and fellow 'revisionists'; in Britain he has most recently addressed meetings of the British National Party, although he denies any formal association with it.
Irving no longer visits Austria, where he is wanted for questioning since a warrant for his arrest was issued in November 1989 by the criminal court in Vienna. He defied a police order banning him from speaking on 'how the story of the gas chambers . . . derived from an English propaganda warfare story in 1942'.
In April 1990 he was arrested in Munich after joining a neo-Nazi march that followed his address to a mob of 500 in a beer cellar. Since then he has been banned from Germany. However, he regularly sneaks into the country, and the authorities take no action. Following his claim that there were no Nazi gas chambers - denying their existence is illegal in Germany - he was charged by the state prosecutor. In May the case came to court and he was fined 10,000 marks ( pounds 3,500). The court ruled that his remarks libelled the memory of the dead. Irving is appealing against the verdict.
by solace » Wed Jan 22, 2014 9:56 pm 