Editing David Irving (section)

==Holocaust denial==
===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"/>

===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"/>

===1990s===

In 1990, Irving told an audience in Canada that "particularly when there's money involved and they can get a good compensation cash payment out of it" there would be people claiming to be eyewitnesses to gas chambers or extermination camps.<ref name="Evans 2002 141">{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|p=141}}</ref> He continued:

{{blockquote|And the only way to overcome this appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere that surrounds the whole of this immense tragedy called World War II is to treat these little legends with the ridicule and bad taste that they deserve. Ridicule isn't enough, you've got to be tasteless about it. You've got to say things: "More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz." You think that's tasteless? What about this: I'm forming an association especially dedicated to all these liars, the ones who try to kid people that they were in these concentration camps. It's called "The Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Lies" – "A.S.S.H.O.L.E.S." Can't get more tasteless than that. But you've got to be tasteless because these people deserve all our contempt, and in fact they deserve the contempt of the real Jewish community and the people, whatever their class and colour, who did suffer.<ref name="Evans 2002 141"/>}}

In 1991, Irving espoused an antisemitic conspiracy theory when he stated that the Jews "dragged us into two world wars and now, for equally mysterious reasons, they're trying to drag us into the [[Yugoslav Wars|Balkans]]."<ref name="Evans 2002 147">{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|p=147}}</ref>

In 1995, when Irving was confronted with a Holocaust survivor, he repeated the same claim and asked, "How much money have you made from that piece of ink on your arm, which may indeed be real tattooed ink? Yes. Half a million dollars, three-quarters of a million for you alone?"<ref name="Evans 2002 141"/> On 6 October 1995, Irving told an audience in Tampa, Florida, that he agreed with the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels that the Jews "had it coming for them".<ref>{{Harvnb|Evans|2002|p=146}}</ref>

===Ernst Zündel trial===
[[File:Ernst Zundel.jpg|thumb|Ernst Zündel, whom Irving met in 1986 and became good friends with and collaborated with to distribute Holocaust denial]]
In January 1988, Irving travelled to Toronto, Ontario, to assist [[Doug Christie (lawyer)|Douglas Christie]], the defence lawyer for [[Ernst Zündel]] at his [[R v Zundel|second trial]] for denying the Holocaust.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 161" /> Working closely with [[Robert Faurisson]], who was also assisting the defence, Irving contacted Warden Bill Armontrout of the Missouri State Penitentiary who recommended that Irving and Faurisson get into touch with [[Fred A. Leuchter]], a self-described execution expert living in Boston.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 162" /> Irving and Faurisson then flew to Boston to meet with Leuchter, who agreed to lend his alleged technical expertise on the behalf of Zündel's defence.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 161" /> Irving argued that an alleged expert on gassings like Leuchter could prove that the Holocaust was a "myth".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 161" /> After work on the second Zündel trial, Irving declared that based on his exposure to Zündel's and Leuchter's theories that he was now conducting a "one-man ''[[wikt:intifada|intifada]]''" against the idea that there had been a Holocaust.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 179">{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|p=179}}.</ref> Subsequently, Irving claimed to the American journalist [[D. D. Guttenplan]] in a 1999 interview that Zündel had convinced him that the Holocaust had not occurred.<ref>{{Harvnb|Guttenplan|2001|p=54}}.</ref>

Between 22 and 26 April 1988, Irving testified for Zündel, endorsing [[Richard Verrall|Richard Harwood]]'s book ''[[Did Six Million Really Die?]]'' as "over ninety percent&nbsp;... factually accurate".<ref name="Pelt 44">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=44}}.</ref>

As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited ''The [[Leuchter report]]'' by Fred A. Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal [[gas chamber]]s at the [[Auschwitz concentration camp]]. Irving said in a 1999 documentary about Leuchter: "The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of [[cyanide]] in the brickwork. That's what converted me. When I read that in the report in the courtroom in Toronto, I became a hard-core disbeliever".<ref>''Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.''.</ref>{{full citation needed|date=December 2022}} In addition, Irving was influenced to embrace Holocaust denial by the American historian [[Arno J. Mayer]]'s 1988 book ''Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?'', which did not deny the Holocaust, but claimed that most of those who died at Auschwitz were killed by disease: Irving saw in Mayer's book an apparent confirmation of Leuchter's and Zündel's theories about no mass murder at Auschwitz.<ref>{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|pp=47–48}}.</ref>

After the trial, Irving published Leuchter's report as ''Auschwitz, The End of the Line: The Leuchter Report'' in the United Kingdom in 1989 and wrote its foreword.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 179" /> Leuchter's book had been first published in Canada by Zündel's [[Samisdat Publishers]] in 1988 as ''The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek''.<ref>{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|p=260}}.</ref> In his foreword to the British edition of Leuchter's book, Irving wrote that "Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 179" /> The alleged swindle was the [[Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany|reparations]] money totalling 3 billion DM paid by the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel between 1952 and 1966 for the Holocaust.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 179" /> In his foreword, Irving praised the "scrupulous methods" and "integrity" of Leuchter.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 179" />

For publishing and writing the foreword to ''Auschwitz The End of the Line'', on 20 June 1989, Irving together with Leuchter was condemned in an [[Early Day Motion]] of the [[House of Commons of the United Kingdom|House of Commons]] as "Hitler's heirs".<ref>{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|pp=179–180}}.</ref> The motion went on to describe Irving as a "Nazi propagandist and longtime Hitler apologist" and ''Auschwitz The End of the Line'' as a "fascist publication".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 180" /> In the Motion, the House stated that they were "appalled by [the Holocaust denial of] Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving".<ref name=s32/> In response to the House of Commons motion, Irving in a press statement challenged the MPs who voted to condemn him, writing that: "I will enter the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz and you and your friends may lob in [[Zyklon B]] in accordance with the well known procedures and conditions. I guarantee that you won't be satisfied with the results!"<ref name="Brinks, Jan Hermann page 107">Brinks, Jan Hermann. ''Children of a New Fatherland'', London: I.B. Tauris, 2000, p. 107.</ref>

In a pamphlet Irving published in London on 23 June 1989, he made the "epochal announcement" that there was no mass murder in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp.<ref name="Pelt 48">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=48}}.</ref> Irving labelled the gas chambers at Auschwitz a "hoax", and writing in the third person declared that he "has placed himself [Irving] at the head of a growing band of historians, worldwide, who are now sceptical of the claim that at Auschwitz and other camps were 'factories of death', in which millions of innocent people were systematically gassed to death".<ref name="Pelt 48" /> Boasting of his role in criticising the Hitler diaries as a forgery in 1983, Irving wrote "now he [Irving] is saying the same thing about the infamous 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. They did not exist – ever – except perhaps as the brainchild of Britain's brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare Executive".<ref name="Pelt 48" /> Finally, Irving claimed "the survivors of Auschwitz are themselves testimony to the absence of an extermination programme".<ref name="Pelt 48" /> Echoing the criticism of the House of Commons, a leader in ''[[The Times]]'' on 14 May 1990 described Irving as a "man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost everything of an innocent and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 180" />

===Holocaust denial lecture circuit===
[[File:Gas chamber at Auschwitz I (Oświęcim, Poland 2014) (14136015058).jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|Interior of the gas chamber of Auschwitz I camp. In a 1990 speech, Irving said, "There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. There have been only mock-ups built by the [[Poles (people)|Poles]] in the years after the war."<ref name="Pelt 55" />]]

In the early 1990s, Irving was a frequent visitor to Germany, where he spoke at neo-Nazi rallies.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 8" /> The chief themes of Irving's German speeches were that the Allies and Axis states were equally culpable for war crimes, that the decision of [[Neville Chamberlain]] to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that of [[Winston Churchill]] to continue the war in 1940, had been great mistakes that set Britain on a path of decline, and the Holocaust was just a "propaganda exercise".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 8" /> In June 1990, Irving visited [[East Germany]] on a well-publicised tour entitled "An Englishman Fights for the Honour of the Germans", on which he accused the Allies of having used "forged documents" to "humiliate" the German people.<ref name="Brinks, Jan Hermann page 107"/> Irving's self-proclaimed mission was to guide "promising young men" in Germany in the "right direction" (Irving has often stated his belief that women exist for a "certain task, which is producing us [men]", and should be "subservient to men": leading, in Lipstadt's view, to a lack of interest on Irving's part in guiding young German women in the "right direction").<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 16">{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|p=16}}.</ref> German nationalists found Irving, as a non-German Holocaust denier, to be particularly credible.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 16" />

In January 1990, Irving gave a speech in [[Moers]] where he asserted that only 30,000 people died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, all of natural causes, which was equal—so he claimed—to the typical death toll from one Bomber Command raid on German cities.<ref name="Pelt 55">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=55}}.</ref> Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at the death camp, stating that the existing remains were "mock-ups built by the [[Poles (people)|Poles]]".<ref name="Pelt 55" /> On 21 April 1990, Irving repeated the same speech in [[Munich]], which led to his conviction for Holocaust denial in Munich on 11 July 1991. The court fined Irving DM 7,000 (equivalent to €{{#expr:({{Inflation|DE|7000|1991|r=2}} / 1.95583) round 2}}<!--1.95583 is the precise DM/€ conversion factor fixed in 2001--> in {{Inflation/year|DE}}{{Inflation/fn|DE}}). Irving appealed against the judgement, and received a fine of DM 10,000 (€{{#expr:({{Inflation|DE|10000|1991|r=2}} / 1.95583) round 2}} in {{Inflation/year|DE}}) for repeating the same remarks in the courtroom on 5 May 1992.<ref name="Pelt 55" /> During his appeal in 1992, Irving called upon those present in the Munich courtroom to "fight a battle for the German people and put an end to the blood lie of the Holocaust which has been told against this country for fifty years".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 179" /> Irving went on to call the Auschwitz death camp a "tourist attraction" whose origins Irving claimed went back to an "ingenious plan" devised by the British Psychological Warfare Executive in 1942 to spread anti-German propaganda that it was the policy of the German state to be "using 'gas chambers' to kill millions of Jews and other undesirables".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 179" /> During the same speech, Irving denounced the judge as a "[[senile]], alcoholic cretin".<ref name="Shermer Grobman 50">{{Harvnb|Shermer|Grobman|2002|p=50}}.</ref> Following his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving was banned from visiting Germany.<ref>{{Harvnb|Lipstadt|1993|p=221}}.</ref>

[[File:Auschwitz I gas chamber - scratches on wall 2.JPG|thumb|left|upright|alt=photo of stone wall with many human scratch marks |Scratch marks made by victims as they were dying in the gas chamber of [[Auschwitz Birkenau|Auschwitz I]]. Irving likened the camps to "a cruise ship named Holocaust... with luxury wall to wall fitted carpets and a crew of thousands".<ref name="Pelt 57" />]]

Expanding upon his thesis in ''Hitler's War'' about the lack of a written order by the ''Führer'' for the Holocaust, Irving argued in the 1990s that the absence of such an order meant that there was no Holocaust at all.<ref name="Rosenbaum 233">{{Harvnb|Rosenbaum|1999|p=233}}.</ref> In a speech delivered in Toronto in November 1990, Irving claimed that Holocaust survivors had manufactured memories of their suffering because "there's money involved and they can get a good compensation cash payment out of it".<ref name="adl profile"/> In that speech, Irving used the metaphor of a cruise ship named Holocaust, which Irving claimed had "luxury wall to wall fitted carpets and a crew of thousands ... marine terminals established in now virtually every capital in the world, disguised as Holocaust memorial museums".<ref name="Pelt 57" /> Irving went on to assert that the "ship" was due for rough sailing because recently the [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] government had allowed historians access to "the index cards of all the people who passed through the gates of Auschwitz", and claimed that this would lead to "a lot of people [who] are not claiming to be Auschwitz survivors anymore" (Irving's statement about the index cards was incorrect: what the Soviet government had made available in 1990 were the death books of Auschwitz, recording the weekly death tolls).<ref name="Pelt 57" /> Irving claimed on the basis of what he called the index books that, "Because the experts can look at a tattoo and say 'Oh yes, 181, 219 that means you entered Auschwitz in March 1943{{'"}} and he warned Auschwitz survivors "If you want to go and have a tattoo put on your arm, as a lot of them do, I am afraid to say, and claim subsequently that you were in Auschwitz, you have to make sure a) that it fits in with the month you said you went to Auschwitz and b) it is not a number which anyone used before".<ref name="Pelt 57" />

On 17 January 1991, Irving told a reporter from ''[[The Jewish Chronicle]]'' that "The Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time".<ref name=s33>{{Harnvb|Stern|1993|p=33}}</ref> Irving went on to say that he believed anti-semitism will increase all over the world because "the Jews have exploited people with the gas chamber legend" and that "In ten years, Israel will cease to exist and the Jews will have to return to Europe".<ref name=s33/> In his 1991 revised edition of ''Hitler's War'', he had removed all references to [[death camp]]s and the Holocaust. In a speech given in [[Hamburg]] in 1991, Irving stated that in two years' time "this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, [[Majdanek]] and [[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka]] ... which in fact never took place" will be disproved (Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were all well established as being [[extermination camp]]s).<ref name="Rosenbaum 222">{{Harvnb|Rosenbaum|1999|p=222}}.</ref> Two days later, Irving repeated the same speech in [[Halle, Saxony-Anhalt|Halle]], in West Germany.<ref name="Rosenbaum 222" /> At another 1991 speech, this time in Canada, Irving called the Holocaust a "hoax", and again predicted that by 1993 the "hoax" would have been "exposed".<ref name="Pelt 57">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=57}}.</ref> During a speech given in Canada during 1991, Irving proclaimed that:
{{blockquote|"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of [[Ted Kennedy|Edward Kennedy]]'s car at [[Chappaquiddick incident|Chappaquiddick]] than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, or the ASSHOLS."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Elkins |first1=Ruth |title=Holocaust denier: 'I'm no Nazi' |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/holocaust-denier-i-m-no-nazi-6108768.html |access-date=19 March 2025 |work=The Independent |date=19 February 2006}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=Dodd |first1=Vikram |title=How the web of lies was unravelled |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/12/uk.irving1 |access-date=19 March 2025 |work=The Guardian |date=12 April 2000}}</ref>}}

In November 1992, Irving was to be a featured speaker at a world [[anti zionism|anti-Zionist]] congress in [[Stockholm]] that was cancelled by the Swedish government.<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 8" /> Also scheduled to attend were his fellow Holocaust deniers [[Robert Faurisson]], [[Fred A. Leuchter]], and [[Louis Farrakhan]], together with representatives of the Palestinian group [[Hamas]], the [[Lebanon|Lebanese]] [[Shiite]] group [[Hezbollah]], and the right-wing Russian antisemitic group [[Pamyat]].<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 8" /> In a 1993 speech, Irving claimed that there had been only 100,000 Jewish deaths at Auschwitz, "but not from gas chambers. They died from epidemics".<ref name="Pelt 56">{{Harvnb|Van Pelt|2002|p=56}}.</ref> Irving went on to claim that most of the Jewish deaths during World War II had been caused by Allied bombing.<ref name="Pelt 56" /> Irving claimed that "The concentration camp inmates arrived in Berlin or [[Leipzig]] or in [[Dresden]] just in time for the [[RAF]] bombers to set fire to those cities. Nobody knows how many Jews died in those air raids".<ref name="Pelt 56" />

[[File:Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945)-107820.jpg|left|thumb|upright=1.1|Inside a barracks in [[Auschwitz II Birkenau]]. In 1992, during appeal of his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving called Auschwitz a "tourist attraction".<ref name="Lipstadt 1993 179"/>]]

In a 1994 speech, Irving lamented that his predictions of 1991 had failed to occur, and complained of the persistence of belief in the "rotting corpse" of the "profitable legend" of the Holocaust.<ref name="Pelt 57" /> In another 1994 speech, Irving claimed that there was no German policy of genocide of Jews, and that only 600,000 Jews died in concentration camps in World War II, all due to either Allied bombing or disease.<ref name="Shermer Grobman 50" /> At the same time, Irving started to appear more frequently at the annual conferences hosted by the IHR.<ref name="Shermer Grobman 49-50">{{Harvnb|Shermer|Grobman|2002|pp=49–50}}.</ref> In a 1995 speech, Irving claimed that the Holocaust was a myth invented by a "world-wide Jewish cabal" to serve their own ends.<ref>{{Harvnb|Shermer|Grobman|2002|p=51}}.</ref> Irving also spoke on other topics at the IHR gatherings. A frequent theme was the claim that [[Winston Churchill]] had advance knowledge of the [[Imperial Japan|Japanese]] plans to attack [[Pearl Harbor]], and refused to warn the Americans, in order to bring the United States into World War II.<ref>{{Harvnb|Shermer|Grobman|2002|p=56}}.</ref> In 1995 he stated that, "We revisionists, say that gas chambers didn't exist and that the 'factories of death' didn't exist."<ref name="Evans 2002 133"/> In 1999, Irving said during a television interview, "I'm a gas chamber denier. I'm a denier that they killed hundreds of thousands of people in gas chambers, yes."<ref name="Evans 2002 133"/>

At the same time, Irving maintained an ambivalent attitude to Holocaust denial depending on his audience. In a 1993 letter, Irving lashed out against his former friend Zündel, writing that: "In April 1988 I unhesitatingly agreed to aid your defence as a witness in Toronto. ''I would not make the same mistake again''. As a penalty for having defended you then, and for having continued to aid you since, my life has come under a gradually mounting attack: I find myself the worldwide victim of mass demonstrations, violence, vituperation and persecution" (emphasis in the original). Irving went on to claim his life had been wonderful until Zündel had got him involved in the Holocaust denial movement: van Pelt argues that Irving was just trying to shift responsibility for his actions in his letter.<ref name="Pelt 56"/> In an interview with Australian radio in July 1995, Irving claimed that at least four million Jews died in World War II, though he argued that this was due to terrible sanitary conditions inside the concentration camps as opposed to a deliberate policy of genocide in the death camps.<ref name="Shermer Grobman 50" /> Irving's statement led to a very public spat with his former ally Faurisson, who insisted that no Jews were killed in the Holocaust.<ref name="Pelt 56" /> Depending on his audience, during the 1990s Irving either used the absence of a written {{lang|de|Führerbefehl}} (Führer order) for the "Final Solution" to argue that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust, or claimed that the absence of a written order meant there was no Holocaust at all.<ref name="Shermer Grobman 49-50" />