Irving's thesis concerning Hitler's character and policy, and especially his involvement in the Final Solution, provoked severe criticism from historians, such as Bullock, Jackel, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Martin Gilbert, Gerald Fleming and Martin Broszat. They showed that he omitted important evidence and that he misused, manipulated and even altered documents to support his theory.¹⁹ Not only were distinguished historians critical, so, too, were Holocaust deniers. This should be especially explained, in order to understand Irving's transition from revisionism to Holocaust denial and his later influence on this line of thought. 

In September 1983 Irving was invited to lecture at the International Revisionist Conference, organized by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in California which, since the early 1980s, has been the principal international forum for Holocaust denial.²⁰ During the conference, as well as in articles published in its wake, major Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson expressed ambivalence toward Irving. On the one hand, they felt solidarity since he was under attack for expressing "revisionist" ideas. This attitude affected far-reaching decisions such as preventing or censoring publications containing harsh criticism of Irving.²¹

On the other hand, the fact that Irving did not accept their claim that millions of Jews were not systematically exterminated provoked vehement attacks from deniers. Faurisson expressed his amazement that a serious historian such as Irving had raised an illogical claim that millions of Jews were killed without Hitler's knowledge. Irving, wrote Faurisson, did not find any orders to exterminate the Jews, because no such operation was ever planned and implemented. Irving who was known to his readers as "a master historian of World War II" must devote himself to investigating Nazi policy toward the Jews more thoroughly.²²

Like Holocaust denial writers, in the 1980s extreme rightists and neo-Nazis were also ambivalent toward Irving. Irving's attitude toward Hitler as a fair-minded leader, as well as his "balanced" approach toward the role of Germany in the outbreak of World War II and its atrocities, indeed made him popular in these circles.²³ By the late 1970s and early 1980s Irving was invited by extreme right-wing societies in Germany, among them the Gesellschaft für Frei Publizistik (GFP), to deliver lectures, which were reproduced by German far right publications such as Deutsche National-Zeitung and Nation Europa.²⁴ In contrast to their attitude toward mainstream German scholars, Irving was praised as one of the few reliable and unprejudiced historians. "When will our own historians begin to search for the truth," wrote Der Freiwillige, the journal of Waffen SS veterans, in late 1979, after a talk given by Irving to ex-servicemen in Stuttgart.²⁵ Nonetheless, the fact that he refrained from denying the Holocaust provoked criticism among leading neo-Nazi activists.²⁶

It is reasonable to assume that the unique status among wide circles of the extreme right that Irving had already acquired already at the beginning of the 1980s was influenced by his evident success as a writer. His books were published by respectable publishers and he gained worldwide publicity when Hitler's War appeared. In addition, Irving's thesis in regard to the question of Hitler's role in the destruction of European Jewry stimulated, as Ian Kershaw wrote, the ongoing debate in West Germany about the genesis of the Final Solution. This debate divided the historians of National Socialism into two camps: the so-called "intentionalist approach" and the "functionalist," or "structuralist," one."²⁷

It should be noted that some of Irving's basic arguments in Hitler's War in regard to the Final Solution were not essentially different from those already raised in the 1970s by ardent German "structuralists," who claimed that the extermination of the Jews in the occupied territories was an ad hoc improvisation when all other solutions had failed, and that Hitler did not direct, and was not even involved in, the actual planning of the Final Solution, which developed a dynamic of its own.²⁸

Nevertheless, there was a fundamental difference between Irving's attempt to whitewash Hitler's knowledge of the Final Solution and even to prove his objection to the annihilation concept, and the position taken by the German "structuralists." They claimed that even if Hitler did not issue an executive order to exterminate the Jews, his wish to destroy the Jewish people, and hence his principled support of the implementation of the Final Solution, was clear to his subordinates.²⁹ Extreme rightists were impressed by the fact that in contrast to eccentric neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial writers, Irving's thesis, although widely criticized, was part of the historians debate on the genesis of the Final Solution.³⁰ Moreover, even some of his strongest critics, such as Martin Broszat, agreed that he had "managed to produce a number of remarkable and hitherto unknown documents…on the National Socialist period."³¹