David Irving paid heavy price for denying Holocaust
By Duncan Campbell
LODON: David Irving’s court appearance in Vienna is the latest in a long line of legal battles in which the far-right historian has been involved stretching back almost 40 years. Throughout this time, he has portrayed himself as a victim of smear tactics who is seeking to bring to light historical truths, while his opponents and critics see him as a would-be martyr cynically using the arguments of free speech to “peddle myths to appreciative extremist audiences.”
Born in Essex in March 1928, the son of a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, Irving went to Brentwood School before studying physics at Imperial College, London. Medically unfit to serve in the RAF for his national service, he worked briefly in German steelworks in the 50s. Returning to Britain in 1963, he published what was to be the first of a series of increasingly ‘controversial books’ about the Second World War, entitled The Destruction of Dresden. It highlighted the German death toll in the city and sold well internationally.
Other books followed, from Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich to Nuremberg: the Last Battle. But it was Hitler’s War, published in 1977, that was to make him a social outcast in which he challenged the “accepted historical version” of the Holocaust. The book, on which he had worked for 13 years, suggested Hitler had been unaware of the Holocaust until it was well under way.
In 1983, he was one of many whose reputation was damaged by the fake Hitler diaries, which he initially denounced as bogus before changing his mind two weeks later. He dimisses this U-turn now as “a joke ... entertainment”. The following year, he was invited to speak in Austria but arrested and thrown out of the country as he tried to give a press conference in Vienna. He eventually successfully appealed against the deportation and returned in 1989 although many of his planned speeches were cancelled after “public protests.”
The suggestion that Irving was a Holocaust denier, made forcefully by the American writer Deborah Lipstadt in her book Denying the Holocaust, finally brought his beliefs to international attention. Irving sued, launching his action in 1998 and representing himself in court against Ms Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin. Ms Lipstadt suggested he had persistently and deliberately misinterpreted and twisted “historical evidence” to minimise Hitler’s culpability for the Holocaust. In May 2000, he was ordered to pay an interim amount of £150,000 but failed to come up with the money. A bankruptcy order was granted against him and he had to sell his Mayfair home.
During the 90s, as his social boycott grew, he was banned from Germany, South Africa, Australia and Canada. New Zealand denied him entry in 2004. He was arrested in the latest case last November and has been in jail ever since. Asked by the Observer last month why he appeared deliberately to court trouble in Austria by returning when he knew he could be arrested and prosecuted, he replied: “I’m from a family of officers and I’m an Englishman. We march towards the gunfire.” He was pleased to have found a copy of his Hitler biography in the Austrian prison library.
On his website he portrays himself as a victim of a worldwide conspiracy which he describes as a global vendetta. He says the source of his current reputation is a damning biography produced by the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith in New York in 2004 which he says is full of inaccuracies.
Married in 1961 to Pilar Stuyk and divorced 20 years later, his partner for the last 15 years has been Bente, a Dane. They have a 12-year-old daughter. As the ADL biography records, Irving composed a poem for her, which ran: “I am a baby Aryan/Not Jewish or sectarian/I have no plans to marry an/Ape or Rastafarian.”
Since he was declared bankrupt in 2002, after an unsuccessful libel action over claims he was a Holocaust denier, David Irving has been forced to move from his home in Mayfair in central London to rented accommodation.
He has toured the revisionist history speaking circuit in the US and his earlier books remain popular in parts of eastern Europe. An Observer investigation in 2002 found that Irving was backed by an international network of supporters, including a Saudi prince and a former Nazi U-boat commander.
Irving says he is the champion of real history blaming the traditional enemies of free speech for lost book contracts and income. He now publishes much of his work free on his own websites, where he asks for donations. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
