Editing David Irving (section)

===Increasingly public Holocaust denial===

From 1988, Irving started to espouse [[Holocaust denial]] openly: he had previously not denied the Holocaust outright, and for this reason many Holocaust deniers were ambivalent about him.<ref name="Pelt 21">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=21}}.</ref> They admired Irving for the pro-Nazi slant in his work and the fact that he possessed a degree of mainstream credibility that they lacked, but were annoyed that he did not openly deny the Holocaust.<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|pp=153–154}}</ref> In 1980, [[Lucy Dawidowicz]] noted that, although ''Hitler's War'' was strongly sympathetic to the Third Reich, because Irving argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust as opposed to denying the Holocaust happened at all, his book was not part of the "anti-Semitic canon".<ref>{{Harvnb|Dawidowicz|1980|p=35}}</ref> In 1980, Irving received an invitation to speak at a Holocaust-denial conference, which he refused on the grounds that his appearance there would damage his reputation.<ref name="Pelt 21" /> In a letter, Irving stated his reasons for his refusal as: "This is pure ''[[Realpolitik]]'' on my part. I am already dangerously exposed, and I cannot take the chance of being caught in flak meant for others!"<ref name="Pelt 21" /> Though Irving refused at this time to appear at conferences sponsored by the Holocaust-denying [[Institute for Historical Review]] (IHR), he did grant the institute the right to distribute his books in the United States.<ref name="Pelt 21" /> [[Robert Jan van Pelt]] suggests that the major reason for Irving wishing to keep his distance from Holocaust deniers in the early 1980s was his desire to found his own political party called Focus.<ref name="Pelt 21" />

In a footnote in the first edition of ''Hitler's War'', Irving writes, "I cannot accept the view ... [that] there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or [[Reinhard Heydrich|Heydrich]] speaking of the extermination of the Jews".<ref>{{cite web|title=David Irving: a study in incompetency and dishonesty|url=https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/irving-david/irving-incompetent.shtml|website=The Holocaust History Project|author=Eugene Holman|date=7 January 2007|access-date=30 November 2020|archive-date=23 September 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200923124524/https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/irving-david/irving-incompetent.shtml|url-status=live}}</ref> In 1982, Irving temporarily stopped writing and made an attempt to unify all of the various far-right splinter groups in Britain into one party called Focus, in which he would play a leading role.<ref name="Evans 1989 166" /> Irving described himself as a "moderate fascist" and spoke of plans to become [[Prime Minister of the United Kingdom]],<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 161">{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|p=161}}.</ref> but his efforts to move into politics, which he regarded at the time as very important, failed due to fiscal problems.<ref name="Evans 1989 166" /> Irving told the ''[[Oxford Mail]]'' of having "links at a low level" with the [[National Front (UK)|National Front]] (NF).<ref name="Evans 1989 166" /> Irving described ''[[The Spotlight]]'', the main journal of the [[Liberty Lobby]], as "an excellent fortnightly paper".<ref name="Evans 1989 166" /> At the same time, Irving put a copy of Hitler's "[[Prophecy Speech]]" of 30 January 1939, promising the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" if "Jewish financiers" started another world war, onto his wall.<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|1989|p=167}}.</ref>

Following the failure of Focus, in September 1983, Irving for the first time attended a conference of the IHR.<ref name="Pelt 21" /> Van Pelt has argued that, with the failure of Irving's political career, he felt freer to associate with Holocaust deniers.<ref name="Pelt 21" /> At the conference, Irving did not deny the Holocaust, but did appear happy to share the stage with [[Robert Faurisson]] and Judge [[Wilhelm Stäglich]], and claimed to be impressed with the pseudoscientific allegations of the neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Friedrich "Fritz" Berg that [[mass murder]] using [[Diesel fuel|diesel gas fumes]] at the [[Operation Reinhard]] death camps was impossible.<ref>{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|pp=22–23}}.</ref> At that conference, Irving repeated his claims that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust because he was "so busy being a soldier".<ref name="Pelt 23">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=23}}.</ref> In a speech at that conference, Irving stated: "Isn't it right for [[Israel|Tel Aviv]] to claim now that David Irving is talking nonsense and ''of course'' Adolf Hitler must have known about what was going in Auschwitz and Treblinka, and then in the same breath to claim that, ''of course'' our beloved [[Menachem Begin|Mr. Begin]] didn't know what was going on in [[Sabra and Shatila massacre|Sabra and Chatilla]]".<ref name="Pelt 23" /> During the same speech, Irving proclaimed Hitler to be the "biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 162">{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|p=162}}.</ref> In the same speech, Irving stated that he operated in such a way as to bring himself maximum publicity. Irving stated that: "I have at home... a filing cabinet full of documents which I don't issue all at once. I keep them: I issue them a bit at a time. When I think my name hasn't been in the newspapers for several weeks, well, then I ring them up and I phone them and I say: 'What about this one, then?{{'"}}<ref name="Pelt 23" />

A major theme of Irving's writings from the 1980s was his belief that it had been a great blunder on the part of Britain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that ever since then and as a result of that decision, Britain had slipped into an unstoppable decline.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 161" /> Irving also took the view that Hitler often tried to help the Jews of Europe.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 161" /> In a June 1992 interview with ''[[The Daily Telegraph]]'', Irving claimed to have heard from Hitler's naval adjutant that the ''Führer'' had told him that he could not marry because Germany was "his bride".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 161" /> Irving then claimed to have asked the naval adjutant when Hitler made that remark, and upon hearing that the date was 24 March 1938, Irving stated in response "Herr Admiral, at that moment I was being born". Irving used this alleged incident to argue that there was some sort of mystical connection between himself and Hitler.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 161-162">{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|pp=161–162}}.</ref>

In a 1986 speech in Australia, Irving argued that photographs of Holocaust survivors and dead taken in early 1945 by Allied soldiers were proof that the Allies were responsible for the Holocaust, not the Germans.<ref name="Pelt 40">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=40}}.</ref> Irving claimed that the Holocaust was not the work of Nazi leaders, but rather of "nameless criminals",<ref name="Pelt 40" /> and claimed that "these men [who killed the Jews] acted on their own impulse, their own initiative, within the general atmosphere of brutality created by the Second World War, in which of course Allied bombings played a part."<ref name="Pelt 40" /> In another 1986 speech, this time in [[Atlanta]], Irving claimed that "historians have a blindness when it comes to the Holocaust because like [[Tay–Sachs disease]] it is a Jewish disease which causes blindness".<ref name=s32>{{Harvnb|Stern|1993 |p=32}}</ref>

By the mid-1980s, Irving associated himself with the IHR, began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German [[Deutsche Volksunion]] (DVU), and publicly denied that the Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 8">{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|p=8}}.</ref> Irving in his revised edition of ''Hitler's War'' in 1991 removed all mentions of "gas chambers" and the word "Holocaust". He defended the revisions by stating, "You won't find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even in a footnote, why should [you]. If something didn't happen, then you don't even dignify it with a footnote."<ref>{{cite web|title=Gas chamber claims impossible, says Irving |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jan/13/uk.irving |newspaper=The Guardian |date=13 January 2000 |first=Vikram |last=Dodd}}</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Guttenplan|2001|p=54}}</ref>

Irving was present at a memorial service for [[Hans-Ulrich Rudel]] in January 1983 after the latter's death, organised by the DVU and its leader [[Gerhard Frey (politician)|Gerhard Frey]], delivering a speech,<ref>{{cite news|date=9 January 1983|title=Big crowd commemorates death of Nazi pilot|url=https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/01/09/Big-crowd-commemorates-death-of-Nazi-pilot/7256410936400/|work=[[United Press International]]|access-date=27 November 2018|archive-date=27 November 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181127151958/https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/01/09/Big-crowd-commemorates-death-of-Nazi-pilot/7256410936400/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=Gedenkveranstaltung für Hans Ulrich Rudel, 1983|trans-title=Memorial service for Hans Ulrich Rudel, 1983|url=https://www.sz-photo.de/?16607724099100603390&EVENT=POPUP&WINDOW=WGWINe4704873e01b6fac8cb1c19fdf7143a9&AJXUID=0.7987179042092476&MEDIANUMBER=00325558&MEDIAITEMS=667e82876af943c49f10de114a6d270cc7811f83&OMG=fde34952c756&PAGING_SCOPE_4=29&MEDIAGROUP_SCOPE=1|language=de|work=[[Sueddeutsche Zeitung]]|access-date=28 November 2018|archive-date=28 November 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181128122843/https://www.sz-photo.de/?16607724099100603390&EVENT=POPUP&WINDOW=WGWINe4704873e01b6fac8cb1c19fdf7143a9&AJXUID=0.7987179042092476&MEDIANUMBER=00325558&MEDIAITEMS=667e82876af943c49f10de114a6d270cc7811f83&OMG=fde34952c756&PAGING_SCOPE_4=29&MEDIAGROUP_SCOPE=1|url-status=live}}</ref> and was given the Hans-Ulrich-Rudel-Award by Frey in June 1985.<ref>{{cite web|title=Funke: David Irving, Holocaust denial, and his connections to right wing extremists and neo-national socialism (neo-nazism) in Germany|url=https://www.hdot.org/funke/|work=[[Emory University]]|access-date=27 November 2018|archive-date=14 October 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181014191011/https://www.hdot.org/funke/|url-status=live}}</ref> Irving was a frequent speaker for the DVU in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but the relationship ended in 1993 apparently because of concerns by the DVU that Irving's espousal of Holocaust denial might lead to the DVU being banned.<ref name="adl profile"/>

In 1986, Irving visited Toronto, where he was met at an airport by Holocaust denier [[Ernst Zündel]].<ref name="Pelt 41">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=41}}.</ref> According to Zündel, Irving "thought I was 'Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!{{'"}}, and asked Zündel to stay away from him.<ref name="Pelt 41" /> Zündel and his supporters obliged Irving by staying away from his lecture tour, which consequently attracted little media attention, and was considered by Irving to be a failure.<ref name="Pelt 41" /> Afterwards, Zündel sent Irving a long letter in which he offered to draw publicity to Irving, and so ensure that his future speaking tours would be a success.<ref name="Pelt 41"/> As a result, Irving and Zündel became friends, and Irving agreed in late 1987 to testify for Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust.<ref>{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=42}}.</ref> In addition, the publication in 1987 of the book ''Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945'' by [[Ernst Nolte]], in which Nolte flirted with Holocaust denial as a serious argument, encouraged Irving to become more open in associating with Zündel.<ref name="Pelt 41" />
[[File:David Irving appearing on "After Dark", 28 May 1988.jpg|right|thumb|David Irving appearing on the TV show ''[[After Dark (TV series)|After Dark]]'' in 1988, [[After Dark (TV programme)#"Winston Churchill"|discussing Winston Churchill]].]]
In 1988, Irving argued that the Nazi state was not responsible for the extermination of the Jews in places like Minsk, Kiev and Riga because according to him they were carried out for the most part by "individual gangsters and criminals".<ref name="Evans 2002 134">{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|p=134}}</ref>

In 1989, Irving during a speech told an audience that "there is not one shower bath in any of the concentration or slave labour camps that turns out to have been some kind of gas chamber."<ref name="Evans 2002 133">{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|p=133}}</ref> He described Jewish Holocaust survivors as "liars, psychiatric cases and extortionists."<ref>{{Harvnb|Schweitzer|Perry|2005|p=185}}</ref> In 1990, Irving said on 5 March that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that "30,000 people at the most were murdered in Auschwitz ... that's about as many as we Englishmen killed in a single night in Hamburg." He reiterated his claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz on 5 March 1990 to an audience in Germany:
{{blockquote|There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, there were only dummies which were built by the Poles in the postwar years, just as the Americans build the dummies in Dachau ... these things in Auschwitz, and probably also in Majdanek, Treblinka, and in other so-called extermination camps in the East are all just dummies.<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|pp=133–134}}</ref>}}
During the same speech, he said, "I and, increasingly, other historians ... are saying, the Holocaust, the gas chamber establishments in Auschwitz did not exist."<ref name="Evans 2002 134"/> Later on in the same year, Irving told an audience in Toronto, "The gas chambers that are shown to the tourists in Auschwitz are fakes."<ref name="Evans 2002 134"/>

Irving denied that the Nazis gassed any Jews or other people, with the exception of admitting that a small number of people were gassed during experiments.<ref name="Evans 2002 133"/>