Editing David Irving (section)

===Movement towards Holocaust denial===
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R99621, Heinrich Himmler.jpg|thumb|200px|A note in ''Reichsführer-SS'' [[Heinrich Himmler]]'s telephone log on 30 November 1941 stating "no liquidation" was later used by Irving as his central argument in trying to prove that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust.]]

Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust has changed. Since the late 1970s, he has either questioned or denied Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust and whether or not the Nazis had a plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.<ref name="BBC Profile" /><ref name="Southern Poverty Law Center" />

Irving always denied Hitler was antisemitic, even before he openly denied the Holocaust.<ref name="Evans 2002 50">{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|p=50}}</ref> Irving claimed Hitler only used antisemitism as a political platform, and that after he came to power in 1933 he lost interest in it, while Joseph Goebbels and other Nazis continued to espouse antisemitism.<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|pp=50–51}}</ref> In 1977 on a BBC1 television programme, he said that Hitler "became a statesman and then a soldier ... and the Jewish problem was a nuisance to him, an embarrassment."<ref name=Evans51>{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|p=51}}</ref> In 1983, Irving summarised his views about Hitler and the Jews when he said that "probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich, certainly when the war broke out, was Adolf Hitler. He was the one who was doing everything he could to prevent things nasty happening to them."<ref name=Evans51 /> In the same year, he further declared about Hitler and the mass killing of Jews, "There is a whole chain of evidence from 1938 right through to October 1943, possibly even later, indicating that Hitler was completely in the dark about anything that may have been going on."<ref name=Evans51 /> Irving boasted that he had not been disproved.<ref name=Evans51 />

In his first edition of ''Hitler's War'' in 1977, Irving argued that Hitler was against the killings of the Jews in the East. He claimed that Hitler even ordered a stop to the extermination of Jews in November 1941; British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that this admission blatantly contradicted Irving's claim that Hitler was ignorant about what was happening to Jews in Eastern Europe.<ref name=trial1>{{cite web|title=Evans: David Irving, Hitler and Holocaust Denial|url=https://www.hdot.org/evans/|website=Holocaust Denial on Trial|access-date=28 October 2020|archive-date=22 December 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221222031824/https://www.hdot.org/evans/|url-status=live}}</ref> On 30 November 1941, Heinrich Himmler went to the [[Wolf's Lair]] for a private conference with Hitler and during it the fate of some Berlin Jews was mentioned. At 1.30 pm, Himmler was instructed to tell [[Reinhard Heydrich]] that the Jews were not to be liquidated. Irving falsely claimed that Himmler telephoned SS General [[Oswald Pohl]], the overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the order: "Jews are to stay where they are" (Himmler actually referred to "administrative leaders of the SS" needing to stay where they were).<ref name=trial1 /> Irving argued that "No liquidation" (''Keine Liquidierung'') was "incontrovertible evidence" that Hitler ordered that no Jews were to be killed.<ref name=trial1 /> However, although the telephone log is genuine, it provides no evidence that Hitler was involved at all, only that Himmler contacted Heydrich and there is no evidence that Hitler and Himmler were in contact before the phone call.<ref name=trial1 /> This is an example of Irving's manipulation of documents since there was no general order to stop the killing of Jews.<ref name=trial1 /> Historian [[Eberhard Jäckel]] wrote that Irving "only ever sees and collects what fits his story, and even now he will not let himself be dissuaded from understanding what he wants to by the phrase 'postponement of the Jewish question'."<ref name=trial1 />

In June 1977 the British television host [[David Frost]] aired a debate. During the debate, Irving argued that there was no evidence Hitler even knew about the Holocaust. Frost asked Irving whether or not he thought Hitler was evil, he replied, "He was as evil as [[Winston Churchill|Churchill]], as evil as [[Franklin D. Roosevelt|Roosevelt]], as evil as [[Harry S. Truman|Truman]]".<ref name="Evans 2002 50"/>