David Irving

David John Cawdell Irving was born on 24 March 1938 in Hutton, Essex, alongside his twin brother Nicholas. Their father, a Royal Navy commander, survived the sinking of his ship during the war but afterwards cut off contact with his family. Irving later claimed his childhood was marked by deprivation and that he had held Holocaust-denial views from a young age, citing objections to wartime caricatures of Nazi leaders. After leaving a physics degree at Imperial College London twice due to money problems, he edited a student magazine called *Carnival Times*. In 1959, he added a secret supplement that called Hitler “the greatest unifying force Europe has known since Charlemagne,” included a cartoon critics called racist, and claimed the British press was Jewish-owned. Irving dismissed it as satire but later admitted the criticism was “probably justifiable.”

Irving wrote books on Second World War military and political history, including *The Destruction of Dresden* (1963), *Hitler’s War* (1977), *Churchill’s War* (1987), and *Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich* (1996). In these works, he falsely claimed Hitler either knew nothing about the extermination of Jews or opposed it. Historians condemned his denial of German war crimes and Hitler’s responsibility. His 1964 book *The Mare’s Nest* was praised for research but criticised for downplaying Nazi slave labour. By the late 1980s, Irving had moved to the fringes of historical study, influenced by the 1988 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel and the pseudoscientific Leuchter report. He then openly denied that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.

In 2000, Irving sued historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel and lost. High Court Judge Charles Gray ruled that Irving wilfully misrepresented evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash Nazis, calling him an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist who “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” for ideological reasons. The court found his books distorted Hitler’s role in the Holocaust to paint Hitler favourably. Irving has used forged documents, been forced to retract false accusations, paid fines and court costs for libel, been denied entry to or expelled from several countries, and served three years in an Austrian prison under laws against Nazi activities.