Publications dealing with Holocaust denial appearing throughout the world since the 1970s can be divided into two kinds: the first, vulgar, unsophisticated antisemitic propaganda, and the second, books and articles written in an academic style, with a research methodology, primary sources, "scientific findings" and a complete set of claims.² Those belonging to the latter group, including publications by Robert Faurisson and Arthur Butz, do not deny that the Jews fell victim to Nazi persecution and that a large number of them died during the war in the concentration camps, mainly as a result of epidemics and maltreatment. They do, however, deny the existence of a systematic, industrial plan of organized destruction which resulted in the death of six million Jews.³

By the late 1980s/early 1990s David Irving had become one of the most prominent representatives of this stream of Holocaust denial. Unlike other authors in this school whose primary interest in World War II was the attempt to distort or deny the Holocaust, Irving came to the question of the destruction of the Jews as part of his revisionist writing on World War II, which he began to publish as early as the 1960s. He argued mainly against the demonic image of Hitler created by what he described as "years of intense wartime propaganda and emotive postwar historiography."⁴ However, up until the late 1980s Irving refrained from explicitly denying the extermination itself.

This article will focus on the transition from a revisionist approach, which presents a historical picture different from the one commonly accepted in World War II and Holocaust scholarship, to the adoption of views which question the uniqueness, and indeed the very historical veracity, of the Holocaust. It will attempt to determine when and under what circumstances this transition occurred and whether the ideas adopted by Irving in the late 1980s were immanent in his general historical concept and early historical writings.