Profile: David Irving

By Andrew Walker BBC News

David Irving: No stranger to controversy

David Irving has been jailed by an Austrian court after pleading guilty to denying that the Holocaust took place.

His arrest in November and subsequent trial is the latest twist in a highly controversial career as an historian.

He was once seen as the brightest new star in the historical firmament - an extraordinarily competent researcher, a brilliant linguist and a first-class writer.

Ahead of the trial, he told UK news channel More4 News that he would be pleading guilty, as "under the law, I've got no alternative".

But he insisted: "I deny that I'm a Holocaust denier. This is a filthy smear."

Libel action

David John Caldwell Irving was born in 1938, the son of a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy who had seen service in the Battle of Jutland.

Although he entered Imperial College, London, to study physics, he failed to graduate.

He was rejected by the Royal Air Force as being medically unfit and decided, as an alternative to national service, to move to Germany. There he found a job as a steelworker in the Ruhr.

Returning to Britain, he wrote a controversial first book, The Destruction of Dresden, which described the 1945 air raid on the city as "the worst single massacre in European history".

AJP Taylor praised Irving's work

The book was, nevertheless, popular and he followed it with a series of bestsellers, including The Mare's Nest and The Virus House, about the Nazis' atomic research programme.

In 1968, he found himself in court following the publication of The Destruction of Convoy PQ17. Captain J E Broome, who commanded the doomed convoy's escort, sued for libel and won.

But Irving bounced back and, in 1977, produced the work for which he is probably best known - Hitler's War. The book looked at the conduct of World War II from Hitler's perspective, "from behind the Fuehrer's desk", as the author put it.

He accused fellow historians of idle research, as he had unearthed a vast collection of previously unexploited Nazi documents and had conducted many interviews with members of Hitler's personal staff while writing the book.

Banned

The vast work, which took 13 years to produce, contained the astounding thesis that, until late 1943, Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust and that he never gave the order for the annihilation of Europe's Jews.

He offered £1,000 to anyone who could produce a written document showing that Hitler had given such an order.

Indeed in the following years, Irving went even further, stating that the Nazi gas chambers did not exist and that six million Jews did not die.

Irving claims Hitler did not order the Holocaust

At the time, he drew plaudits from some distinguished historians.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler, and the man who erroneously authenticated the bogus "Hitler diaries" wrote: "No praise can be too high for his indefatigable scholarly industry". AJP Taylor commended his "good scholarship".

Most, though, were outraged by what they saw as his unacceptable views. He underwent verbal attacks, the door of his house was smashed with a sledgehammer and he was banned from Germany, Australia and Canada.

Bankrupted

Matters came to a head in 2000, when he took the American academic, Deborah Lipstadt, to court for libel after she branded him a "Holocaust denier" in her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

A key element in the Lipstadt case was a report compiled for the defence by Richard Evans, professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His conclusion was damning.

Irving, surmised Professor Evans, had deliberately distorted and wilfully mistranslated documents, consciously used discredited testimony and falsified historical statistics.

The Deborah Lipstadt libel case bankrupted Irving

And he concluded: "Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all."

And, if the judge's comments, branding David Irving "a racist, an anti-Semite and an active Holocaust denier" were not enough in themselves, the financial cost, an estimated £3m, bankrupted him.

Irving had recently moved out of his former Mayfair home into rented accommodation.

Today, he views himself as a champion of what he calls "Real History". He blames a vast, largely Jewish, conspiracy of "the traditional enemies of free speech" for losing book contracts and income and now sees his works published free online on his own website.

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