David Irving: Shoah Trial By Media?

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A new survey from Ireland released ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day last week suggests that around 9% of young Irish people aged 18-29 don’t believe the Holocaust ever took place at all, whilst 19% believe its extent to have been exaggerated. Maybe this is because there are so few Jews living in Ireland (around 2,700) that the country’s inhabitants refuse to believe that six million Jews ever existed throughout Europe in the first place; Ireland’s total population itself is only 5.4 million. If Hitler had tried exterminating the Irish instead, he would have succeeded with 0.6m spare capacity in his camps left over.

Whoever can have influenced the good folk of Ireland to begin denying or downplaying the Holocaust? It certainly can’t have been David Irving, the controversial English historian commonly known as being the world’s most famous alleged Holocaust denier. The last time he was invited to give a speech there in 2008, as part of a debate upon the subject of freedom of speech and censorship organized by University College Cork, it was cancelled following protests from a self-styled “Stop Irving Campaign” rent-a-mob, who were threatening violence (and even murder) should the event go ahead.

This caused a major problem for the debate’s organizers, who claimed they were in favor of free speech for all, even David Irving. So how did they get around this awkward conundrum? By inviting the very people threatening violence and murder if Irving’s speech went ahead to give the speech in his place instead! Using some very contorted logic indeed, Ross Frenett, the debate organizer, explained how this supposedly still counted as defending free speech in the following sophistic fashion:

We have invited the Stop Irving Campaign to take part. After all, the motion [being debated] is “That this house believes free speech should be free from restraint.” We have invited them to give their views on why they feel Mr. Irving is not entitled to free speech.

Brilliant logic indeed! The true dangerous zealots here sound much more like the members of the Stop David Irving Campaign, not David Irving himself—he wasn’t the one sending out rabid death-threats to the conference organizers, after all.

Irving Berlin

Who, precisely, did the protestors think David Irving was? Some kind of dangerous, rabble-rousing, wannabe Jew-slayer, evidently, whose very presence in Cork would lead to those paltry 2,700 Irish Jews being herded into the nearest shower-block immediately. But would such an assessment really be true, or is it derived from ignorance, fueled by sheer media hyperbole about the man?

Asked to write about Irving for this site to fit in with my last piece about Holocaust Anticipation Day, I was initially a little wary as, to be honest, I know next to nothing about him either, just like his Irish cancellers probably didn’t. The first time I recall becoming aware of Irving was as a teenage Sixth Form schoolboy, reading about his infamous 2000 libel trial, in which he foolishly sued the historian Deborah Lipstadt for accusing him of being a Holocaust denier in print. Irving lost his case, reportedly being forced to pay several million in legal costs (although, aptly, estimates of precisely how many million keep on shifting).

Whether Irving is a Holocaust denier or is not (his opinions seem to have changed repeatedly down the years), the one thing I really took away from media coverage back at the time was simply the minor comical titbit that the court was told he had once composed the following piece of racially tinged doggerel for his infant daughter and recited it aloud whenever passing by any lesser “half-breed” children when walking the baby in her pram:

I’m a Baby Aryan,
Not Jewish or sectarian,
I have no plans to marry
An ape or Rastafarian.

I found this highly amusing at the time, and so did some other boys in my class; we memorized the verse and repeated it back to one another in the common room. We were also tickled by the alleged fact that Irving liked to employ nannies with “a certain type of breast” to look after said Baby Aryan; what precisely this “certain type” could possibly have been was sadly never revealed by reporters. Nice white ones, I guess?

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These are the kinds of trivial courtroom details that teenage boys are pre-programmed to pick up on. But, to be able to pick up on such details, they of course have to be reported by the media in the first place: which they were, with evident glee. But why, given their utterly trivial nature? With retrospect, I can now see our young minds were perhaps being in some sense groomed to see Mr. Irving as purely some kind of comical nut, a laughable lunatic, as all revisionist historians were evidently supposed to be viewed by sane, compliant members of mainstream Western society, the veritable Erich von Däniken of the Holocaust history world. That was certainly the initial childhood impression I took away of him, correct or not.

I decided to make a virtue of my own ignorance and read through a selection of popular newspaper and magazine profiles of Irving to see what kind of image of Irving they were presenting to the wider world. Like me, most readers of the popular press will never have read any of Irving’s books, attended any of his talks, or met him first-hand. As such, the popular media image of David Irving, much like the popular media image of WWII, Adolf Hitler, and the Holocaust itself, are all that most ordinary, non-specialist folk have to go on.

Personally, I fully accept the Holocaust took place, but, as a teenage schoolboy at the time of the Irving Trial, I also believed, from what I had been told in the media (and by my equally media-duped teachers), that it involved things like dead Jews being industrially transfigured into soap and lampshades, too, when it later turned out this was not so. Was there really any need to transform one of the most significant events of WWII into an even more heightened, cartoonish, version of itself in this way for easy mass public consumption? Perhaps not, but the media transformation had occurred anyway. Had such a process also taken place with David Irving? I dug up a few characteristic but long-forgotten articles to try and find out.

Bomber Harris

First, I found a short pen-portrait of Irving by the noted English journalist turned novelist Robert Harris, most famous for his alt-history thriller novel Fatherland, set in a post-WWII 1960s universe where Hitler had basically won, but in which a potential final peace-treaty with the USA is threatened at the final moment when whistle-blowers try to give the American President evidence of the previously hushed-up Holocaust. Fatherland was first published in 1992, the same year Harris’ portrait of Irving appeared in The Oldie magazine, so I presume he was writing about Irving as some kind of publicity drive for his new book here.

Harris’ tactic to discredit or mock Irving was to present him as an inveterate shock-merchant, whose main motivation in writing works of WWII revisionism was simply to generate outrage, and thereby easy free publicity and extra book-sales. The future author says he first met David in 1977 as a student at Cambridge, where, as the head of the university’s Left-wing Fabian Society club, “in a moment of mad ecumenicism” he had invited the older man to give a talk entitled “The Falsification of Historical Evidence.” Shaking one another’s hands at Cambridge railway station, Irving boasted of his acquaintance with some of Hitler’s old wartime colleagues, saying “Congratulations. You’ve just shaken the hand that’s shaken the hand that shook the hand of the Führer.” Later, when offered a glass of wine, David refused it, saying that he didn’t drink, as “Adolf didn’t drink, you know.”

Harris’ view was that this was all simply an act, which taught the young student “all I ever needed to know about his technique,” which was based upon nothing but “the carefully nurtured reputation for being controversial which will always win him a platform, especially among the young.” Irving, Harris explained, was deliberately acting as a parody of himself for what in the Internet age we may now term “clicks,” like an early precursor of Nick Fuentes, but more learned and less secretly Mexican. Irving possessed a “willingness to send himself up” which made him appealing not simply in spite of his prior negative public reputation, but because of it: “He may be a wicked man, but a funny wicked man; like Satan in Paradise Lost, he is more interesting to read about than the angels.” He’s certainly more interesting to read about than Deborah Lipstadt.

Irving was later involved in a major public controversy about an English broadsheet being duped into paying megabucks to a forger to publish some fake purported “diaries” of Adolf Hitler, an affair Harris later penned his own account of, Selling Hitler. When doing so, Harris contacted his old associate, being lent Irving’s diaries from the time as a source. They were apparently very candid about his motives for involvement, with the image of Irving which emerged being “of such mendaciousness and rapacity that the publisher’s lawyers warned us of possible trouble if we published it.” But this was not so. When it hit the shelves, far from suing, Irving was “ecstatic” at how he was portrayed.

When Harris’ book was later dramatized for British TV, Irving was cartoonishly caricatured on-screen as “a cross between Arturo Ui and Dick Dastardly.” Did he sue the broadcasters for this? No, says Harris: “Again, he loved it.” After Harris wrote “a nasty profile” of Irving in Tatler magazine, entitled “Meeting Mr. Reich,” his old frenemy even “sent me a letter of congratulation.”

A typical completely accurate UK media depiction of the life and work of David Irving.

Harris’ ultimate assessment was this:

And here, in my experience, is the real key to Irving’s character. “All publicity is good publicity” is, for him, not a comfort after a bad review, but a religion, a way of life. He is addicted to notoriety. He achieves it by steadily increasing the shock-quotient of what he says, rather as drug addicts are said to start out as teenagers experimenting on the kitchen table with home-brew, before progressing through cannabis and cocaine to heroin.

Irving’s career as a historian, Harris points out, began with a fairly sober revisionist 1963 account of the WWII Allied bombing campaign against Nazi Germany, The Destruction of Dresden, which presented the fire-bombing of said city as a militarily pointless war-crime upon behalf of Winston Churchill and others. He then went further with his somewhat sympathetic Hitler’s War in 1977, which claimed the Holocaust was real, but that Hitler himself knew nothing about it, the program of genocide being all planned behind his back by the likes of Himmler and Heydrich. This, hypothesized Harris, was “the real breakthrough” in Irving’s career in terms of getting him mass public attention-cum-notoriety, and so he eventually moved on from the weak cannabis of “Hitler didn’t know!” to the infinitely stronger crack-cocaine of “He didn’t know because it didn’t even happen!”

Perhaps, Harris concluded, with his name now expertly blackened thanks to sardonic profiles like his own, Irving would next move on towards perpetrating “the ultimate shock: turning respectable.” As it is, however, David Irving never did see fit to gain yet more headlines by doing a sudden about-turn and declaring “No, actually, the gas-chambers were real, and Hitler ordered them all!” despite the obvious benefits that would have gleaned him; recanting his old beliefs and presenting himself as a penitent “reformed Nazi” would have meant no more anti-Irving cancellation mobs for his potentially lucrative speaking tours to venues like the University of Cork. So maybe that means the historian’s ultimate opinions on the matter of the reality or otherwise of the Holocaust were wholly sincere after all, rather than just a cheap PR-stunt?

To be honest, Robert Harris’ sentiments about whether someone is or is not to be trusted about matters of top-secret military intelligence is not all that high anyway. Until all the lies he told about the Iraq War finally came out, Mr. Harris once used to be very good friends with Tony Blair.

Dirty Hari

We now move ahead to 2009, when another negative but undoubtedly diverting hit-job profile of Irving appeared in Left-leaning UK broadsheet The Independent, from journalist Johann Hari. The piece, headlined “David Irving: ‘Hitler Appointed Me His Biographer’” followed several separate well-trodden journalistic paths often used to destroy a public figure’s credibility amongst readers.

The first chosen method was, quite simply, to present Irving as being mentally ill—which, to be fair, was something Irving himself made easily possible by virtue of making a very bizarre claim right at the beginning of the interview. Here is how Hari’s lengthy write-up of their meeting begins:

“Hitler appointed me his biographer,” David Irving says. He is not laughing. He is announcing that the Führer – the man he has revered since he was a child – saw him coming. Yes: Hitler prophesied Irving as the man who would clear away the smears and bring The Truth at last to an unwilling world. Irving discovered this prophecy when he was writing a biography of Adolf Hitler, but he is only prepared to disclose it baldly now. “I made a great point of tracking down all Hitler’s surviving doctors,” he says, “and I identified Erwin Giesing as the doctor who treated Hitler after the bomb attempt on his life in 1944.” He tracked him down in the 1970s to Aachen in West Germany, and when Irving called, he claims Giesing said: “Yes, I’ve been expecting you.” Irving arrived at Giesing’s surgery and, he says, was immediately handed a 400-page file. “Giesing said it was his diary … ‘That’s what you have come for,’ [he said]. I asked why, why me? Why haven’t you given it to Jacobson or Hilburg or any of the other great historians?” Giesing said the answer lay on page 385. Irving flicked to this page, and, he says, “it is August 1944 and he is treating Hitler … [who told him that] “One day, an Englishman will come along and write my biography. But it cannot be an Englishman of the present generation. They won’t be objective. It will have to be an Englishman of the next generation, and one who is totally familiar with all the German archives.” Irving sits back with an expression of beatific calm. “So [when] I phoned the doctor and he said ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ the Messiah had come. The one he had been waiting for all these years. And of course all the other historians hate that because they don’t fit.” I stare silently for a moment. To clarify: you actually think Hitler wanted you to be his biographer? “Yes. Yes and I am not ashamed of that. Hitler knew that. Hitler himself said that for fifty years they won’t be able to write the truth about me.” And then I realize this interview isn’t about history; it’s about pathology.

To Hari himself, of course, Irving is most definitely not the Messiah, just a very naughty boy. With this dismissive assessment of his interviewee suffering from some sort of “pathology” in mind, Hari then goes out of his way to record other clear examples of Irving’s alleged lunacy:

We settle in the living room looking out over the grounds, and our photographer begins to snap him. He mentions that the white coffee-cup Irving is holding works well against the green, and Irving says: “Well, it is an Aryan cup.”

But this is very obviously just a joke, isn’t it, rather than evidence of outright mental disturbance? Likewise, when quoting his “mad” interviewee to the effect that Hitler supposedly enjoyed a wartime psychic vision of Irving’s future coming, Hari doesn’t seem to consider the possibility (or at least pretends not to consider it at the article’s beginning; right at the end he suddenly does an abrupt reverse-ferret) that Irving is just engaging in rhetorical hyperbole here. By grandiosely casting himself in the role of the Messiah, is it not eminently plausible that Irving is simply very knowingly playing up to his common media image as a larger-than-life megalomaniac, in the full knowledge his silly statement will give Hari a great headline and gain him more easy publicity? Realistically, Irving has done Hari a big journalistic favor by obliging opening their chat with such a ridiculous claim, thereby giving him fantastic copy, and almost doing half his job for him. There is perhaps more symbiotic journalistic collusion between the pair going on here than Hari is willing to openly admit.

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If there really is a “pathology” at work here, though, then its origins of course will then need to be analyzed too. Perhaps, Hari implies, some of the roots of Irving’s attempts to excuse Hitler any responsibility for the Holocaust lie in the events of Irving’s own tragic past? Irving had admired the Führer since he was a young child, says Hari, yet in later life this hero-worship may have become tempered by the fact that, besides the Jews, Hitler had also ordered the mass medical killing of the disabled. This became a potential issue for Irving in older age when his own daughter, Josephine, began suffering from mental delusions, culminating in a suicide-attempt in which she threw herself out of a window, ending up in a wheelchair with a broken spine and both her legs amputated. This leads to the following conversation occurring between Johann and David:

You do realize, I say as gently as I can, that Hitler would have killed Josephine? “Yes, Hitler had one of his own cousins killed, this is one of the appalling things.” He then quickly goes off on another tangent, talking about a radio programme he was once on, and I have – for once – to draw him back to the Hitler. I can almost see the conflict within him, as he veers back and forth from admitting Hitler did something wrong. “Hitler had the very best of reasons, if I can put it very oddly like that.” He claims the first case of euthanasia authorized by Hitler was of “a child who had been born hideously disfigured in some way, and the doctors and the parents wanted to put the child down for its own sake … And so he concedes with a sigh: “Had we been in Nazi Germany then Josephine would have been swept up in that procedure.” … “The way the Nazis did it was always in the nicest possible way,” he says at last. “The parents were told ‘oh she has succumbed to pneumonia’, something like that. [It was] evil with good intentions.” … He looks over at the ashes [of his dead daughter], and then looks down, speechless for the first time in our interview.

So, Irving is lying to himself, as well as to his public, then, for reasons of his own mental well-being? That is what Hari appears to suggest.

Then again, maybe the true “pathology” here, as Robert Harris also advanced, lies in Irving’s inveterate desire to shock, something Hari infers may have been present in him since childhood, when, after winning any book of his choice as a prize due to be publicly presented to him by the Deputy Prime Minister at a school assembly, he asked to be given a copy of Mein Kampf (which teachers swapped around at the final moment to avoid all the intended fuss and furor). As Hari observes, not wholly inaccurately:

What could be more taboo in the Britain of the 1950s than to embrace Adolf Hitler, the man the country had united to defeat, as an alternative father-figure? [Irving’s own father had abandoned him] It was the most absolute and shocking way to reject everything around him.

Irving’s twin brother Nicky is also cited by Hari as saying of his sibling that:

I’ve never been entirely convinced that, deep down, David really holds these ridiculous views [about Hitler and the Holocaust]. It’s possible that he was simply doing what we did when we were children – anything to get attention. It’s almost a sickness with him.

According to Hari, such pathologies may even run in the family’s genes. Not only was Irving’s daughter schizophrenic, telling wild fibs about seeing Satan in the street, his absent father was also a compulsive liar who may have falsified his own purported brave war-record in the Royal Navy. With all this in mind, here, then, is Hari’s concluding paragraph:

[Irving] laughs at this suggestion [that he is a liar like his father]. ‘I am a scamp, yes a scamp,’ he says. ‘Ever since school. I like to have one piece of mischief on every page I write so you go to turn the page and are thinking, well, what was that page about?’ And he closes his eyes tightly in the freezing air. For one moment, it seems as though he is back at Brentwood School, asking for a copy of Mein Kampf for speech day, and thinking all this – all this hate, and all this hard work to rehabilitate the worst genocidal killer of the twentieth century – is only a jolly, jolly jape.

But a subsequent conclusion inevitably to be drawn from this amateur medical diagnosis upon Hari’s behalf is that Irving must inevitably be an actual, outright fraud, one who simply concocts his evidence and opinions to suit his latest cunning, outrage-based PR-scheme, not because he truly believes them. Hari observes that Irving’s first book about the fire-bombing of Dresden, unlike his later ones, specifically condemns Hitler and his Nazi atrocities, presumably including the Holocaust. This fact being pointed out to Irving, he responds by saying that such passages were inserted into his book by his publisher without his prior knowledge, so as to avoid any unnecessary flak from critics who might otherwise have accused it of being much too pro-fascist. Hari’s response is to profess incredulity and imply that Irving is lying.

Yet, as an experienced professional journalist, surely Hari must know full well that editors fairly often change authors’ work around somewhat prior to publication? I have myself sometimes been surprised to find myself reading phrases which I never myself actually wrote in some of my own published articles, particularly ones tempering my own viewpoints with ameliorative, lawsuit-repellant phrases about things like “hateful ideologies” when discussing the Nazis, or race-rioters, or the Great Replacement, or whatever. Publishers understandably don’t want to get prosecuted for “hate-crimes,” or lose over-sensitive readers, so sometimes they really do alter their authors’ phrasing like this. Sometimes, editors even add in their own jokes. This is pretty common practice, overall: editors edit, it’s what they do. Doesn’t Johann Hari know how journalism even works?

Possibly not, as, in 2011, his previously stellar career in this field was virtually ended after it turned out he was a plagiarist. Quite what familial pathologies caused him to act in this disturbed manner, I couldn’t possibly say.

Evil Twins

There are of course other similarly dismissive media profiles out there of David Irving (see here and here for two lengthy examples), but the hit-job strategies they use are all pretty similar—he’s mad/a show-off/a liar/a professional controversialist, etc.—so endless repetition here would be pointless. Pointless for me when writing this present article, that is: not pointless for the more general journalistic purpose of discrediting Mr. Irving in the eyes of the wider world. Maybe his historical conclusions are all wrong, from start to finish: if so, exposing them is fair enough, in and of itself. But depicting him as a dishonest retard who thinks his teacup is an Aryan is perhaps going a little too far.

As I say, I am basically ignorant of the man and his work. Maybe he deserves to be treated and presented in this way. Maybe he does not. But, as most people will never bother to so much as open even one of his books (if they can even find them on sale anywhere nowadays), the above comically negative picture is the only one they will ever realistically absorb of him.

Considering this fact, it now appears as if the tactics of Irving’s cancellation mob at Cork University back in 2008 were rather primitive and self-defeating. Rather than shut him up and then thereby allow him to go around posing as a free-speech martyr, surely far better for his enemies, from their own perspective, to instead let him speak freely before then hanging him with the rope of his own words, possibly by presenting them in an intentionally biased or disingenuous fashion, after the rough manner of Hari and Harris?

In his interview with Johann Hari, David Irving described having met and quizzed Hitler’s personal employees for his Hitler’s War book, observing how the Adolf they all knew and loved in private was very different from the Adolf later presented to the public as an unleavened psychopathic hate-figure by the Allied media: “And I thought to myself—there must be two Hitlers, there’s the Hitler we’re told about by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and there’s the Hitler that these people worked for.” Even Adolf Hitler himself was capable of occasionally tipping his chauffeur, or complimenting his secretary on her nice new hair-cut, I suppose, as well as of gassing millions of Jews or invading Poland—or, at least, that’s the kind of intentionally provocative statement Mr. Iving might be expected to smilingly make.

Just as with Adolf Hitler, it may well be the case that there are two competing and contrasting David Irvings existing in this world, too, the public one and the private one. The question is, how much did the former collude in the subsequent mass media creation of the latter—and why?