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David John Cawdell Irving (born March 24, 1938) is one of the most accomplished and successful proponents of historical and Holocaust revisionism. Author of controversial works such as Hitler’s War and The Destruction of Dresden, Irving is a non-academic self-taught historian who from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s was a leading British author on World War II. In the mid-1980s he started openly associating with Neo-Nazi and extremist groups, and his reputation began to wane. In the late 1990s he sued the prominent Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt for listing him as a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust; after a much publicized trial Irving lost and was found to be a Holocaust denier by the court.Among the Holocaust deniers, Irving is perhaps the only one who for some time managed to keep up the reputation of a serious, if controversial, historian. Irving is considered an icon to many in the Holocaust denial camp, but after the Lipstadt trial verdict he has fought an increasingly lonely battle. He has since been barred from entering many countries.
1 Early life
Born in Essex, England, his father John James Cawdell Irving was a Commander in the Royal Navy, his mother Beryl an illustrator. During the Second World War his father was an officer aboard the Light Cruiser HMS EdinburghSix ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Edinburgh for the Scottish city of Edinburgh. The first Edinburgh a 32 gun 5th rate, was transferred from the Scottish Navy in 1707, lasting only two years before being sunk as breakwater at Harwich The seco, on May 2May 2 is the 122nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (123rd in leap years). There are 243 days remaining. Events 1194 King Richard I of England gives Portsmouth its first Royal Charter. 1335 Otto the Merry, Duke of Austria, becomes Duke of Carinth, 1942, while escorting Convoy QP11 in the Barents SeaThe Barents Sea is part of the Arctic Ocean located north of Norway and Russia. It is a rather deep shelf sea (average depth 230 m), bordered by the shelf edge towards the Norwegian Sea in the west, the island of Svalbard (Norway) in the north-west, and t, she was sunk by the German U-456. Irving’s father survived, but after the incident cut off all ties with his wife and their children.
Irving first gained his notoriety as a student of the Imperial College LondonIntroduction Imperial College London is a college of the University of London which focuses on science and technology, and is located in South Kensington in London. Imperial College London is the new official name of what used to be called Imperial Colleg, where he wrote for the student newspaper and served as the editor of the London University Carnival Committee’s journal, Carnival Times. Here Irving made allegations such as "the national press is owned by Jews", and contributed to a variety of extremist features, including racist cartoons, a defense of South African apartheidApartheid ap-ar-taed is an Afrikaans word meaning "separation" or literally "aparthood" (or "apartness"). It was the name of the policy and the system of laws implemented and enforced by "White" minority governments in South Africa from 1948 till 1990., and an appreciative look at Nazi GermanyNazi Germany or the Third Reich commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933 1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of National Socialism with Adolf Hitler as dictator. The term Nazi is a short form of the German [1]; as a result Irving was removed from his editorial duties.
2 "The Destruction of Dresden"
Irving soon dropped out of college and went to Germany where he worked in a Thyssen steel works in the Ruhr and learned German. He then left Germany and moved to Franco's Spain where he worked as a clerk at an airbase near Madrid. Establishing contacts with Europe’s far-right, in 1962 he wrote a series of thirty-seven articles on the Allied bombing war, Wie Deutschlands Städte Starben, for the German right-wing journal Neue Illustrierte. These served as the basis for his first book The Destruction of Dresden, published in 1963. In it he examined the Allied bombing of Dresden during the final months of World War II. By the 1960s, a debate about the morality of the carpet bombing of German cities and civilian population had already begun, especially in the UK. Hence, the public was receptive to Irving's persuasively written book, illustrated with graphic pictures. The book became an international bestseller.
In the first edition of the book Irving's figures for deaths in Dresden (which he initially reported as estimated authoritatively at 135,000, and which he himself estimated at between 100,000 and 250,000) were an order of magnitude higher than anyone else's. Nonetheless, these figures became widely accepted and were repeated in many standard references and encyclopedias. Over the next three decades later editions of the book gradually modified that figure downwards to a range of 50,000-100,000, but during that time Irving also made a number of public statements indicating that 100,000 or more Germans had been killed. It was not until the hearing of Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in 2000 that the figures were discredited. Today, the Dresden bombing casualty figures are estimated at about 40,000 dead.
