David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer, best known for his denial of the Holocaust, who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. He is the author of 30 books on the subject, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).
His work on Nazi Germany became controversial because of his sympathy for the Third Reich, antisemitism and racism. He has associated with far right and neo-Nazi causes, famously during his student days seconding British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a University College London debate on immigration. He has been described as "the most skillful preacher of Holocaust denial in the world today."
From the book
To historians is granted a talent that even the gods are denied – to
alter what has already happened!’
I bore this scornful saying in mind when I embarked on this study
of Adolf Hitler’s twelve years of absolute power. I saw myself as a stone
cleaner – less concerned with architectural appraisal than with scrubbing
years of grime and discoloration from the facade of a silent and forbidding
monument. I set out to describe events from behind the Führer’s desk,
seeing each episode through his eyes. The technique necessarily narrows
the field of view, but it does help to explain decisions that are otherwise
inexplicable. Nobody that I knew of had attempted this before, but it seemed
worth the effort: after all, Hitler’s war left forty million dead and caused all
of Europe and half of Asia to be wasted by fire and explosives; it destroyed
Hitler’s ‘Third Reich,’ bankrupted Britain and lost her the Empire, and it
brought lasting disorder to the world’s affairs; it saw the entrenchment of
communism in one continent, and its emergence in another.
In earlier books I had relied on the primary records of the period rather
than published literature, which contained too many pitfalls for the historian.
I naïvely supposed that the same primary sources technique could within
five years be applied to a study of Hitler. In fact it would be thirteen years
before the first volume, Hitler’s War, was published in and twenty
years later I was still indexing and adding to my documentary files. I
remember, in , driving down to Tilbury Docks to collect a crate of
microfilms ordered from the U.S. government for this study; the liner that
brought the crate has long been scrapped, the dockyard itself levelled to
the ground.
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