Editing David Irving (section)

===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" />