He did not complete the course because of financial constraints. Student yearsĪfter completing A levels at Brentwood School, Irving studied for a physics degree at Imperial College London, leaving after the first year. Irving asserted that his sceptical views about the Third Reich were rooted in his doubts about the cartoonist caricatures of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders published in the British wartime press. Irving went on to say to Rosenbaum that his negationist views about World War II dated to his childhood, particularly due to his objections to the way Adolf Hitler was portrayed in the British media during the war. Nicholas Irving has said that "David used to run toward bombed out houses shouting 'Heil Hitler! '", a statement which Irving denies. According to his brother, Nicholas, David has been a provocateur and prankster since his youth. We were living on an island that was crowded with other people's armies". Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum as: "Unlike the Americans, we English suffered great deprivations. Irving's father survived, but severed all links with his wife and children after the incident. Two days later, the ship was attacked by a surface craft, and now beyond recovery was abandoned and scuttled by a torpedo from HMS Foresight. On 30 April 1942, while escorting Convoy QP 11 in the Barents Sea, the ship was badly damaged by the German submarine U-456. ĭuring World War II, Irving's father was an officer aboard the light cruiser HMS Edinburgh. Their mother, Beryl Irving ( née Newington), was an illustrator and a writer of children's books. Their father, John James Cawdell Irving (1898–1967), was a career naval officer and a commander in the Royal Navy. They had a brother, John, and a sister, Jennifer. In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.ĭavid Irving and his twin brother Nicholas were born in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex, England. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". Irving's reputation as a historian was further discredited in 1996, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray determined in his ruling that Irving willfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians. That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, led him to openly espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp. īy the late 1980s, Irving had placed himself outside the mainstream of the study of history, and had begun to turn from "'soft-core' to 'hard-core' Holocaust denial", possibly influenced by the 1988 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. Though Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes in World War II (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were never taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents. In his works, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it. His works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany.
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