1.5 Methods used to draw up this Report
1.5.1 I have never met, spoken to, or corresponded with David Irving. I have not previously
concerned myself with his work in any way. The only references to him in any
of my books come on pages 38 and 76 of In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians
and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989), in the context, not of
a detailed examination of Irving’s work itself, but of a discussion of the work of other
historians, namely Ernst Nolte and Hans Mommsen. Irving is mentioned on these
two pages briefly, and in passing.
1.5.2 I had leafed through the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War and because of its style and
content considered it a work of journalism rather than of professional history. Like
the overwhelming majority of professional historians, I rejected its argument that
Hitler did not order the extermination of the Jews. However, I was also aware of the
widespread assumption amongst professional historians that Irving’s work (like that
of a number of other journalists who have written historical work) reached generally
acceptable standards of historical scholarship. I also knew of Irving’s reputation as
someone who had a good knowledge of the archival and other sources for the history
of the ‘Third Reich’ and had discovered previously unknown material on this subject.
1.5.3 I had never met, corresponded or had any dealings with Deborah Lipstadt, but I had
read Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust and quoted it on pages 239-41 of my book In
Defence of History in the context of a discussion of the implications of postmodernist
theories of knowledge for historical scholarship, especially on the history of the Nazi
extermination of the Jews. Lipstadt’s treatment of Irving in the book was a matter of
completely marginal interest to me. In general, my view of the book was that it was a
solidly researched and strongly but rationally argued work of scholarship. However,
Denying the Holocaust does not deal in any detail with Irving’s historical arguments,
so that on being asked to write this Report, I had no difficulty in approaching Lipstadt’s
account of Irving’s writings in an open and critical spirit, the same spirit, in fact, as
that in which I approach Irving’s work, the vast majority of which was completely
unfamiliar to me.
1.5.4 The material on which this Report is based consists in the first place of Irving’s
published books. These have gone through numerous editions, and many of them
are available both in English and in German in different versions. They are available
in libraries in Britain and Germany, though some are rather hard to track down, and
I was startled to find that the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War can only be read at the desk
in the Rare Books Room of the British Library that is reserved for literature deemed
by the Library to be pornographic. Secondly, Irving has published a number of articles,
mainly in The Journal of Historical Review, which are also available for public
inspection in institutions such as the Wiener Library. Thirdly, Irving maintains a very
extensive website on the Internet (
http://fpp.co.uk) on which the text of various
speeches by Irving is posted, together with a large quantity of other material revealing
of his views on the history of the ‘Third Reich’.1
1.5.5Fourthly, the legal process of Discovery has provided a large amount of further material
of relevance to the issues at the centre of the case. As Irving remarked in 1991,
The first thing that happens in a libel action is this: only a few weeks after
you’ve served a writ on a gentleman there comes a very expensive stage for
both parties known as Discovery. The word ‘Discovery’ written with a capital
‘D’, just like the word ‘Holocaust’ written with a capital ‘H’. Only this time
the word is on my side. Because Discovery is an ugly phase, for plaintiff and defendant, when you face each other across a lawyer’s table, at the choosing
of the Plaintiff, and you say, “I want to see your documents and you can see
mine”. And at that stage usually all the defendants crack up and cop out.2
1.5.6 In the present case, however, no-one has wanted to ‘cop out’, and Irving has been
obliged to disclose an enormous mass of material in addition to the list of documents
he initially agreed to supply. I have had access to many videotapes and audiocassettes
of Irving’s speeches, tens of thousands of pages of documents, his complete private
diaries, thousands of letters and a great deal of other material, much of it from the
huge private archive in which he records his various activities and in which he stores
the materials for his historical work
1.5.7 It soon became apparent that the amount of material available was too vast for me to
master in the relatively short space of time I had to compile this Report, especially
given my other commitments such as my regular academic work. I was fortunate
therefore to obtain the research assistance of two of my PhD students, Nikolaus
Wachsmann, who is now Junior Research Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge,
and Thomas Skelton-Robinson, who is now researching for a PhD at Churchill College,
Cambridge. Both had first-class honours degrees in History (from the London
School of Economics and from Glasgow University respectively), both had a firstrate
knowledge of German (Wachsmann is a native speaker, Skelton-Robinson lived
in Germany for five years after graduating), and both had a good knowledge of twentieth-
century German history.
1.5.8 The two researchers compiled transcripts of the salient parts of the audiocassettes
and videotapes and went through the material supplied by Irving during the process
of Discovery, taking extensive notes. It was of course impossible to cover the whole
of Irving’s oeuvre with complete thoroughness, and some principle of selectivity had
to be applied. We decided that I would cover Irving’s general reputation as a historian,
Irving’s attitude to Hitler, and the central issue of whether or not Irving was a
Holocaust denier. On the equally important matter of whether or not Irving distorted
and falsified history, we decided to concentrate on the ‘chain of documents’
which Irving on various occasions had claimed proved Hitler’s ignorance and disapproval
of the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews. Each document was
assigned to one or other of the research assistants for preliminary analysis. In this
way we covered the entire documentary basis for Irving’s controversial claim.
1.5.9 In addition, we decided to sample a number of other important issues on which
Lipstadt’s allegations of manipulation and falsification could be tested. These were
the bombing of Dresden by the Allies early in 1945, a subject on which Irving had
written the book which established his reputation; Irving’s use of the evidence of
Hitler’s adjutants; and the explanations offered by Irving for such antisemitic actions
by the Nazis as he was prepared to concede were actually carried out. Here again
preliminary analysis was carried out by my research assistants. During the period
January 1998 to April 1999, we met frequently, exchanged drafts, and carried out
numerous revisions to what we had written. In addition, my research assistants undertook
research in German archives and libraries. The compilation, structure and
writing of this Report as a whole was undertaken by myself, and I alone bear the final
responsibility for what it contains. I am satisfied that the amount of material we have
examined, and the number of issues in Irving’s writings which we have addressed,
constitute a thoroughly representative sample of his work, and that any further investigation
on our part would simply have replicated the conclusions we reached on the
basis of the sample we looked at.
1.5.10 On all the issues concerned, this Report examines carefully and in detail Irving’s
writings and speeches over the whole of his career, from the 1960s to the present. Its
method has been to identify what Irving wrote or said, and to note whether he changed
his views over time, and if so, how and in what respects. The Report is written from
the point of view, and with the expertise, of a professional historian. That is, it is not
concerned with the issue of whether or not ‘Holocaust denial’ is morally wrong, or
whether what Irving has written and said is politically or morally objectionable.
Throughout, it bears in mind the pleaded issues in the case, but its method is not to
subject them to any kind of forensic criteria or legal scrutiny, but rather to treat them
as matters of historical and historiographical investigation.
1.5.11 Thus in examining each of the key ‘chain of documents’ which Irving claims prove
Hitler neither knew or nor approved the antisemitic policies of the ‘Third Reich’, this
Report is not concerned to demonstrate conclusively that Hitler did know or did
approve of these policies: that is not the issue at hand. The issue is whether or not
Irving distorts and manipulates the historical record in trying to prove that Hitler did
not know and approve of these policies. In dealing with this issue, the Report takes
each document in turn, examines Irving’s translation of it (all the documents in
question were originally written in German), scrutinises his interpretation of it, and
brings as many other relevant documents to bear on this interpretation as it has been
possible to research in the time available, in accordance with the standard method of
historical research, in which every original document used has to be set in a wider
documentary context in order to elucidate its historical significance.
1.5.12 Many of these documents are well known to historians, some less so; many of them
would appear at first sight to support the view that Hitler did know about antisemitic
policies and actions in the ‘Third Reich’, and it has been necessary in the course of
this Report to point this out. Historians who are advancing a particular argument
have to take all relevant documentary evidence into account, and where documents
appear to go against their argument, they have to explain them; failing to mention
them at all constitutes suppression of relevant evidence and is not acceptable in a
reputable historian. Citing these documents, as is done extensively in this Report,
should not be seen as an attempt to prove conclusively that Hitler knew about the
extermination of the Jews and other antisemitic actions during the ‘Third Reich’,
only as evidence which has to be taken into account by anyone who, such as Irving,
wishes to prove the contrary.
1.5.13 Very few historians have actually gone to the trouble of subjecting any of Irving’s
work to a detailed analysis by taking his historical statements and claims and tracing
them back to the original and other sources on which Irving says they rest. This is
because doing so is an extremely time-consuming exercise, and most historians have
better things to do with their time than undertaking a minute analysis of other people’s
historical writings. It is also because historians generally assume that the work
of fellow-historians, or those who purport to be fellow-historians, is generally reliable
in its footnoting, in its translations and summaries of documents, and in its
treatment of the evidence at a basic level. That is, historians may make mistakes and
errors of fact, but they do not generally deliberately manipulate and distort documents,
suppress evidence that runs counter to their interpretations, wilfully mistranslate
documents in a foreign language, consciously use unreliable or discredited
testimony when it suits their purpose, falsify historical statistics, or apply one standard
of criticism to sources which undermine their views and another to those which
support them.
1.6 Argument and structure of the Report
1.6.1 Very soon after we had begun our examination of Irving’s work along the lines sketched
out above, it became clear that Irving did all of these things. Penetrating beneath the
confident surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation
in every issue we tackled that was so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up
many more words than had been devoted to it in Irving’s original account. Unpicking
the eleven-page narrative of the anti-Jewish pogrom of the so-called
Reichskristallnacht in Irving’s book Goebbels: Mastermind of the ‘Third Reich’ and tracing
back every part of it to the documentation on which it purports to rest takes up
over seventy pages of the present Report. A similar knotted web of distortions,
suppressions and manipulations became evident in every single instance which we
examined. We have not suppressed any occasion on which Irving has used accepted
and legitimate methods of historical research, exposition and interpretation: there
were none.
1.6.2 The discovery of the extent of Irving’s disregard for the proper methods of historical
scholarship was not only surprising but also deeply shocking. As this Report will
show, it goes well beyond what Lipstadt alleges. I was not prepared for the sheer
depths of duplicity which I encountered in Irving’s treatment of the historical sources,
nor for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken
output. It is as all-pervasive in his early work as it is in his later publications. In this
respect the change of view which, as this Report will note, he underwent in 1988
with respect to the Nazi extermination of the Jews, has done no more than emphasise
an already existing pattern. It is clear from all the investigations which I and my
research assistants have undertaken that Irving’s claim to have a very good and thorough
knowledge of the evidence on the basis of which the history of Nazi Germany
has to be written is completely justified. His numerous mistakes and egregious errors
are not, therefore, due to mere ignorance or sloppiness; on the contrary, it is
obvious that they are calculated and deliberate. That is precisely why they are so
shocking. Irving has relied in the past, and continues to rely in the present, on the
fact that his readers and listeners, reviewers and interviewers lack either the time, or
the expertise, to probe deeply enough into the sources he uses for his work to uncover
the distortions, suppressions and manipulations to which he has subjected
them. The late Martin Broszat and the American historian Charles W. Sydnor, Jr.,
whose work is referred to below, are virtually the only previous historians to have
gone some way down this road; this Report, however, is the first full-length investigation
of Irving’s work on a large scale.
1.6.3 Because of the scope of what we have uncovered, this Report cannot confine itself
simply to the allegations made by Lipstadt, though it does deal fully with each one.
The detailed analyses in this Report are all illustrative of the points made at the
beginning of this Introduction, but inevitably in some cases they also go beyond
them. It should be noted that this Report deals both with Irving’s writings and speeches
before the publication of Lipstadt’s book in Britain in 1994, and in the years since
then, up to 1998. As will become apparent, Irving’s methods have not changed substantially
since Lipstadt completed her book; indeed, however much his views have
changed over the years, his methods have remained substantially the same. It is these
methods which form the main object of scrutiny in this Report. The fundamental
question to which Irving’s historical writings and speeches will be subjected is this:
do they conform to generally accepted standards of historical scholarship?
1.6.4 That is, in other words, does Irving give a reasonably accurate account of the documents
he uses; does he translate them in a reasonably accurate and unbiased manner;
does he take into account as many other relevant documents as any professional
historian could reasonably be expected to read and cite when he is using one particular source to substantiate an argument; does he apply consistent criteria of sourcecriticism
to all the original material he uses, examining it for its internal consistency,
its consistency with other documents, its provenance, the motives of those who were
responsible for it, and the audience for which it was intended; are his arguments, his
statistics and his accounts of historical events consistent across time and based on
reliable historical evidence; does he take account of the arguments and interpretations
of other historians who have examined the same documents; does he, in other
words, advance his arguments and interpretations in a reasonably objective and unbiased
manner?
1.6.5 Historians, of course, notoriously disagree on many aspects of the interpretation of
the past. It is seldom, if ever, the case that one particular interpretation of a past
event or a process is irrefutably right and all the others wrong. The records left to us
by the past are fragmentary and incomplete and susceptible of a variety of interpretations.
Historians have to take all kinds of evidence into account: immediate sources
written at the time, eyewitness accounts written down shortly after the event in question,
interviews and testimony from long afterwards – all these have their problems,
and although historians generally give a greater weight to a source the nearer it is to
the event with which it deals, this means neither that such proximate sources are
entirely unproblematical, nor that more distant sources are to be dismissed out of
hand. That is why gathering as many sources as possible relating to an event, whatever
their nature, and comparing them with one another, is the basis of the historian’s
reconstruction of the past.
1.6.6 Historians may disagree with one another for a variety of reasons, and such disagreements
are the stock-in-trade of historical controversy. However, such differences of
opinion are generally confined within the limits set by the evidence: the number of
possible interpretations of an event is not limitless, and historical controversy usually
reveals some to fit more closely with the historical evidence than others. Thus for
example there has long been a considerable difference of opinion amongst historians
as to when the Nazis reached a decision to undertake a systematic extermination of
all the Jews in Europe; some, though not many, have put the decision early in 1941;
rather more have argued for a date in late July or early August 1941; some have
favoured October 1941; more recently one younger German scholar has argued for
December 1941 and another for late March or early April 1942. All these estimations
have their merits and demerits, and the argument continues, based on a detailed
examination and comparison of the documentary record. However, the position
can broadly be summed up by saying that there is a general consensus that a
decision was taken at the highest level some time between the beginning of 1941 and
the Spring of 1942, and most probably between June 1941 and April 1942. The
limits set by the available evidence do not allow of a date, say, in January 1933, or
January 1943. The view that, for example, no decision was ever taken, or that the
Nazis did not undertake the systematic extermination of the Jews at all, or that very
few Jews were in fact killed, lies wholly outside the limits of what it is reasonable for
a professional historian to argue in the light of the available evidence.3 Scholarly
disagreements often involve accusations of misreading or neglecting sources, or stretching
interpretations beyond what the evidence seems to allow; but although there is
sometimes room for a certain amount of disagreement at the margins, reasonable
historians do not find it difficult to distinguish between interpretation and fantasy,
argument and tendentiousness, imaginative readings of the sources and outright manipulations of them, minor errors of fact and deliberate distortions of the documents,
or the accidental omission of relevant material and the deliberate suppression
of inconvenient evidence. In this Report, these differences will be spelled out repeatedly
and in very considerable detail in the course of subjecting Irving’s historical work to critical scrutiny.
1.6.7 This task is, in a sense, made easier by Irving’s repeated insistence that he is not
putting forward an argument for debate, but simply telling the truth. His philosophy
of history, such as it is, was revealed in a press conference held in Brisbane, Australia,
on 20 March 1986:
Journalist: It could be argued, couldn’t it, that history is always subjective, and
your view of history too.
Irving: Oh yes. Look at the life of Rommel here, the life of Rommel, The Trail of
the Fox. In writing that, I used two thousand letters that he wrote to his wife
over his entire life….Well, two thousand letters, that manuscript was probably
six hundred pages long when it was finally (completed), you’re doing a lot of
condensing, you’re condensing an entire man’s life into six hundred pages of
typescript, and that process of condensing it is the nice way of saying, “but of
course you’re selecting, you’re selecting how to present this man.” And that is
undoubtedly a subjective operation. And this is why I hope that the readers
look at the overall image presented of David Irving by the media and they think
to themselves: “Well, on balance we can probably trust him better than we can
trust Professor Hillgruber, or Professor Jacobsen, or any of the other historians
who write on the same kind of period.”4
Journalist: Surely the same argument that you’re putting up against the bulk of
historians could be levelled at you.
Irving: Ah, but then, you see, but this is the difference: they can’t prove their
points, they can’t prove their points. I can prove all my points because I’ve got
all the documents and the evidence on my side, but they can’t find even one
page of evidence to attack me, and that is why they’re beginning to rant and
rave instead.5
1.6.8 In other words, Irving admits a degree of aesthetic subjectivity in condensing and
organizing his material, but concedes none at all in formulating his arguments (or, as
he would put it, proving his points). This Report takes him at his word and asks
whether there is indeed any evidence available to disprove his points, or in other
words, to demonstrate that his arguments are specious and arrived at not through an
accumulation of documents and evidence but by manipulation, falsification, suppression,
distortion, mistranslation, misinterpretation and other wilful violations of
the basic methods of the professional historian in dealing with the sources on which
historical reconstruction and interpretation are based.
1.6.9 The first part of the Report following this Introduction examines Irving’s output as
a historian, his reputation amongst professional historians, and his relations with the
historical profession in general. In the course of the discussion, this section deals on
a general level with Irving’s use of historical evidence and the criteria to which he
subjects it. The second part of the Report then turns to the question of whether
Irving is, or is not, a Holocaust denier. This requires an outline of what is the generally
accepted definition of the Holocaust and what Irving’s attitude is to that definition.
This part of the Report goes on via a survey of the literature on Holocaust
denial to establish four criteria by which, it is argued, it is reasonable to judge whether
or not someone denies the Holocaust, and then applies each of these criteria to
Irving’s work as a whole.
1.6.10 A third and longest part of the Report takes the ‘chain of documents’ on the basis of
which Irving has sought to dissociate Hitler from the antisemitic policies of the ‘Third
Reich’, and subjects each of them to an extremely detailed and rigorous examination
in terms of Irving’s treatment of the document or documents in question and in the
light of the other documentation which is relevant to the issue under discussion. The
purpose of this third part is to demonstrate at length, and as exhaustively as possible,
Irving’s admiration for Hitler and his determination to manipulate the available historical
evidence in the service of this admiration. In case it might be thought that
Irving’s manipulations of the historical record in this respect are an exceptional aspect
of an otherwise reliable historical oeuvre, the product of a peculiar bee in the
bonnet of a generally honest and competent professional historian, the fourth part of
the book turns to three other aspects of Irving’s work and uncovers a similar story of
lies and deceptions in Irving’s presentation of past history. It begins by comparing all
the available versions of Irving’s account of the Allied bombing of Dresden early in
1945 with the evidence on which they rest and the researches carried out by competent
and reasonably objective British and German historians of this event. It moves
on to illustrate Irving’s method by studying a sample of the members of Hitler’s
entourage on whose testimony, often elicited in personal interviews with Irving himself,
he so frequently relies. And it concludes by taking some examples of Irving’s
explanation of those aspects of Nazi antisemitism which he is prepared to admit
actually existed.
1.6.11 Once again, it should be emphasised that these topics, numerous though they are,
were not chosen as particularly egregious examples of Irving’s disregard of proper
historical method. On the contrary, his account of the bombing of Dresden was
selected for scrutiny because his book on the subject has been reprinted many times
and did much to establish his reputation. His use of the evidence of Hitler’s adjutants
was chosen for examination because his access to their private papers, and his
use of exclusive interview material generated in his meetings with them, have been
presented as strengths of Irving’s research not just by himself but by others as well.
And finally, his analysis of the reasons for Nazi antisemitism was singled out for
investigation because it seemed on the face of it that this might cast light on, or in
some way modify or relativise, his insistence that Hitler was not involved in it. In
every case, however, as this Report will demonstrate, Irving has fallen so far short of
the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve
to be called a historian at all.
