Between History and Ideology

Since the Zündel trial and the publication of The Leuchter Report, Irving has been identified both by his opponents and his supporters as one of the main spokesmen of Holocaust denial. However, analyzing the theses of his various books on the war leads to the conclusion that joining the deniers did not constitute a fundamental change in Irving's historical outlook and weltanschauung, into which Holocaust denial had been well integrated. Revisionist concepts have been elaborated by Irving in the course of his 30 years as an "independent historian." The buds, however, can already be found in his early writings, having stemmed from the extreme right views he adopted when he was still a young man.⁴³ Holocaust denial was the missing link which made it possible for him to complete his general thesis in regard to the genesis and the course of World War II.

Two recurring, interrelated motifs in his books constitute the foundation of his historical viewpoint. The first, raised initially by American isolationists after the war, is the assertion that the suffering inflicted by the Germans was not essentially different from that perpetrated by the Allies.⁴⁴ Over the years this has become a central component of Nazi apologetics, and was incorporated also by the extreme right in Britain.⁴⁵ The alleged genocidal policy toward Germany was described by Irving as early as 1963 in his first book The Destruction of Dresden. While exagerating considerably the number of casualties, Irving claimed that the brutality of the Allies against the German population was unnecessarily vicious and unjustified.⁴⁶

Another recurring motif in Irving's books, as well as in his articles and lectures, is the claim that the British leadership, and especially Churchill, was responsible for the outbreak of World War II. Here again the influence on Irving's writings of such first World War II revisionists as David Leslie Hoggan, Harry Elmer Barnes and Frederick J.P. Veale is evident.⁴⁷ Adopting their historical approach, Irving claimed that British leaders could have prevented the war had they accepted Germany's reasonable peace proposals: The decision to enter the war was against the essential interests of the British; its main consequence was the decline of Britain as a world power.⁴⁸

These two motifs were central in Hitler's War. Hitler, the fair-minded leader, tried to reach an agreement with Britain; when he failed, he devoted all his time and energy to the victory of the German army. On the other hand, Churchill, described by Irving as an irresponsible and ruthless leader, led Britain consciously into an unnecessary war. He wantonly destroyed all hope of peace by deliberately launching RAF bombing raids in the heart of Germany -- although he himself behaved in a cowardly manner during the blitz on London.⁴⁹

Denial of the gas chambers, which actually meant denial of the systematic machinery of destruction, was intended to reinforce Irving's claims in regard to the relativism of German atrocities. By adopting the Holocaust denial concept he could argue that German violence against the civilian population, including local killings and atrocities against the Jews, was not morally different from Allied atrocities. Denial of the Final Solution removed not only from Hitler but from the whole Nazi regime the Satanic label which had created a clear distinction between Nazi Germany and the Allies. So while it is true that until the end of 1980s Irving refrained from denying the Holocaust explicitly, the conceptual foundations were laid years before, originating in the desire to change the widely-accepted Satanic image of Nazi Germany.

Moreover although Irving's identification with Holocaust denial was announced publicly only in 1988, it is clear that this admission was not a dramatic turnabout, rather the end of a prolonged process. Irving's attraction to these ideas as the missing link in his historical concept was visible already in his first public meeting with deniers at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference (see above). Shortly after the conference two observers from two totally opposite schools of thought, Robert Faurisson and the historian Gerald Fleming, pointed out that Irving deliberately used in his lecture conditional words and phrases which indicated his doubt as to whether the Holocaust had occurred.⁵⁰ Moreover, when relating to the death camps, Irving said, "We do know in the meantime that Dachau is a legend, that everything that people found in Dachau was in fact installed there by the Americans"; as to Auschwitz and other extermination camps, the question "about the actual goings-on inside" was left open by him "as a matter of controversy."⁵¹ It is also significant that in contrast to Hitler's War, at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference Irving refrained from mentioning the role of Himmler and Heydrich in the Jewish liquidations, which indicated that he tended to accept the deniers' claim that the Nazi leadership did not initiate global destructive measures against the Jewish people. "I would say I am satisfied in my own mind that in various locations Nazi criminals, acting probably without direct orders from above [emphasis added], did carry out liquidations of groups of people including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally incurable people and the rest."⁵²