-Caveat Lector-
written by Jamie McCarthy
David Irving has been unable to find any errors in this
pamphlet.
He has a webpage reprinting the pamphlet, but he has had no
rebuttal except to add nine links to elsewhere on his site. We have
reproduced those links here with the icon. Where you see it below, click it
to be taken straight to Irving's website, where you can decide for yourself
if our pamphlet is wrong. As of March 1999, you will find that none of his
links directly address the issues raised here.
On the left is the original text of the pamphlet Who is David
Irving?, with additional notes on the right.
Who is David Irving?
This pamphlet is too small to list all the lies and
distortions David Irving has told about the Holocaust. Instead, it presents
some analysis of a few of them.
Holocaust-denial is not a field of history. Irving has written
many popular books, but is not a trained historian and his view of history
is very selective.
For more information and references, visit the world wide web
URL given inside.
This pamphlet was written to be handed out at a speech Irving
gave on April 13, 1998, at Washington State University.
(Irving's clippings and notes on the speech.)
If the people I spoke with at the Jewish Student
Organization are any indication, it seems there are many at WSU who believe
that his lies are best countered with facts, not censorship. In the interest
of informing his audience, I wrote a trifold pamphlet suitable for handing
out.
But here on the web, I'm not limited to one sheet of
paper, and so will provide more detail about the items mentioned. This
webpage is a companion to the brochure.
Regarding Irving's training as a historian, it is worse
than nonexistent. He failed elementary history, according to his testimony
in 1988: "I have no academic qualifications whatsoever."
(His self-description: "Imperfectly educated...")
The reader is also urged to visit Nizkor's information
on Irving, which is quite extensive and is referenced below.
Jamie McCarthy
The Holocaust History Project
April 12, 1998
annotation revised March 6, 1999
Irving Misuses Evidence
In a speech in 1993, Irving quotes Adolf Eichmann talking
about how the Holocaust was ordered. Eichmann meets Reinhard Heydrich, and,
according to Irving:
Heydrich utters to him the fateful words, "I've come from
the Reichsführer SS [Himmler]. The Führer [Hitler] has given the order for
the physical destruction of the Jews."
Irving admits here that Hitler ordered the physical
extermination of the Jews. But for the past 20 years he's become famous for
arguing that Hitler never did this!
(General information on Eichmann.)
(Wannsee Conference.)
This is taken from the website of the Holocaust-denial group
CODOH. It is part of Irving's speech The Suppressed Eichmann and Goebbels
Papers. The full text of what Irving said is:
Heydrich utters to him the fateful words, "Ich komme
vom Reichsführer SS. Der Führer hat den Befehl zur physischen Vernichtung
der Juden gegeben." ("I've come from the Reichsführer SS [Himmler]. The
Führer has given the order for the physical destruction of the Jews.")
That, of course -- given in quotation marks in the
manuscript -- is what gave me pause for thought. I've always said, "Hitler
wasn't involved, whatever happened -- Hitler gave no orders, there's no
proof of it." Here we have Eichmann writing something very specific indeed.
What is the explanation?
(Introduction to future Eichmann book with the above
quote included.)
He has to find a way out, so he says:
Well, if you look just at that sentence, we can say that
you've only got to change one or two words and you get a completely
different meaning. If it wasn't "The Führer has ordered the PHYSICAL
DESTRUCTION of the Jews," but rather "the extirpation of Judaism," you've
only changed the words by a fraction and yet you've got a totally different
meaning.
Historians shouldn't change words if their documents
contradict their claims.
Irving continues:
Well, if we look just at that sentence, we can say
that you've only got to change one or two words and you get a completely
different meaning. If it wasn't "The Führer has ordered the physische
Vernichtung [physical destruction], of the Jews," but rather "die Ausrottung
des Judentums," you've only changed the words by a fraction and yet you've
got a totally different meaning. You get something which is much more
similar to Adolf Hitler's public utterances and speeches. Ausrottung des
Judentums, the destruction of Judaism, is something totally different. You
don't do that by gas chambers and the machine gun, any more than destroying
Christianity or destroying usury can be done by the gas chamber and the
bullet. They're different concepts.
That is not more similar to Hitler's public speeches.
Just the opposite. Hitler occasionally spoke of the Ausrottung des
Judentums, which is less explicit, but he also spoke frequently of the
extermination of the Jewish people, the jüdische Volk or jüdische Rasse -
not "Judaism."
The first time was on January 30, 1939, before the war,
when he prophesied "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" (die
Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa). He reaffirmed this prophecy in
almost the same words on January 30, 1941; January 30, 1942; and September
30, 1942. See also our collection In the Nazis' Words.
It is the height of dishonesty for Irving, intimately
familiar with Hitler's speeches and writings, to ignore and contradict these
facts.
Immediately afterward, Eichmann said that ditches were being
dug to carry out Hitler's order. How would the Nazis have buried "Judaism"
in a ditch? Irving doesn't say.
Irving continues, just six paragraphs later:
What else is there in the Eichmann papers? Well, he
describes how, after Heydrich called him to Berlin and uttered this fateful
sentence about the Führer having given the order, Heydrich said that Himmler
has ordered Odilo Globocnik to carry out this task, and that Himmler had
actually ordered that the Russian anti-tank ditches were to be used for
disposing of the bodies.
I wrote Irving a letter on this subject in 1996, noting
no fewer than five places where Eichmann used exactly the words "physical
extermination" -- the same words that Irving finds necessary to change.
Irving's reply was to send a draft from his upcoming
book, in German, that did not address this question. He later suggested that
I "find something better to do with my life."
(The same draft from the same book, two years later,
and it still does not address the question.)
Irving Tells Outright Lies
Goebbels' diary on the Jews:
...the greater the number of Jews liquidated, the more
consolidated will the situation in Europe be after this war.
Joseph Goebbels,
March 6, 1942
The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be
described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the
whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be
liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.
Joseph Goebbels,
March 27, 1942
Short shrift is made of the Jews in all eastern occupied
areas. Tens of thousands of them are liquidated.
Joseph Goebbels,
April 29, 1942
Irving on Goebbels' diary:
I am very familiar with the Goebbels diaries... There is no
explicit reference either implicit in these documents or legible in these
documents to liquidation of Jews.
David Irving,
April 22, 1988
(in sworn testimony!)
For quotes from the Goebbels diary, and others in the same
vein, see our collection In the Nazis' Words or the Nizkor website.
The Irving quote is from his sworn testimony as quoted
on the "revisionist" Zundelsite. Irving said:
"I am very familiar with the Goebbels diaries insofar
as they have been publicly available..."
Did those sources - the Posen speech, the Goebbels
diary, the Wannsee Conference and the letter of July 31, 1941 - indicate any
plan to exterminate European Jews?, asked Christie.
"No," said Irving. "There is no explicit reference
either implicit in these documents or legible in these documents to
liquidation of Jews. They are all equally applicable to any other solution.
Of course, relocation of the Jews in the middle of a war was a radical
solution but it is not what is described as the 'Holocaust.'"
Obviously Irving is lying when it comes to the Goebbels
diary. I quoted it here because it makes the contrast most clear, using the
same word "liquidation" as Irving uses.
But I could have used some of the other documents he
names, as well. The Wannsee conference and the July 31 letter referencing it
use cloaked language to refer to extermination, so the contrast would not be
striking without making use of later testimony about Wannsee from, say,
Eichmann:
The discussion covered killing, elimination, and
annihilation.
Eichmann was present at Wannsee. Irving was not. Whom
should we believe? (Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, 1984, p. 92.)
(Text of the Wannsee minutes reproduced.)
I could also have used the Posen speech:
I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the
extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily
said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will
tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the
Jews, exterminating them, a small matter". [...]
We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people
to do it, to kill this people who would kill us. We however do not have the
right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one
cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because we
don't want, at the end of all this, to get sick and die from the same
bacillus that we have exterminated.
Regarding the March 27 entry of Goebbels diary, where he
says that "60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated," Irving has
commented elsewhere:
All he's actually saying here is that the Jews are
having a pretty rigorous time. They're being deported, it's happening in a
systematic way, and not many of them are going to survive it.
I cannot improve on Dr. Michael Shermer's reply:
Say what?? A "rigorous time?" "Deported?" This has to
be the most conservative interpretation of the word "liquidate" I have ever
read.
(Quote from Irving's book Goebbels; unrelated to the
March 27 diary entry or the Posen speech.)
Irving Tries to Mislead
Between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 people, mostly Jews, were
killed at Auschwitz. Almost all of them were cremated in ovens fueled by
coke.
Irving said in a radio interview, on November 8, 1996:
...what happened to those one million people? Were they
cremated? The answer is you couldn't have cremated them, there wasn't
sufficient crematorium capacity, there wasn't enough coke. It would have
taken forty thousand tons of coke...
He claims it takes 80 pounds of coke to cremate each body,
thus, very few people could have been killed at Auschwitz.
This is mendacious.
Just as meat burns on a barbeque when the fire gets hot
enough, the fuel for cremating a corpse can be the corpse itself. Burning a
pound of flesh gives off 1,000 BTU of heat. Once the oven is heated enough
with coke, it stays hot, and many corpses can be burned in a row.
The Nazis' own operating instructions for the Auschwitz ovens
read:
After each incineration, the temperature rises in the
furnace. For this reason, care must be taken that the internal temperature
does not rise above 1100°C (white heat)...
There is an enormous wealth of information on the Auschwitz
ovens and on cremation in general, all of which the deniers would prefer we
ignore.
We know the ovens operate as described, because we have:
a.. captured documents showing the plans for the
cremation ovens;
b.. instructions for their use;
c.. documents which show the evolution of
progressively-more-efficient ovens starting in the 1930s;
d.. testimony from the people who ran the ovens that
no coke was needed for the second corpse in a row and very little for the
third;
e.. a 1950 patent application based on a similar
design;
f.. and, of course, the ovens themselves.
The interested reader should consult Gutman et al.,
Eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 1994, essays 6, 7, and 8. In
particular, the section on pp. 185ff. shows the progression of the oven
design. We see that even in 1937:
Müller claimed that there was a direct relation
between increased use and increased economy. If the cold furnace required
175 kilograms (kg) of coke to start up a new incineration, it needed only
100 kg if it had been used the day before; a second and third incineration
on the same day would not require any extra fuel, thanks to the compressed
air; and those that followed would call for only small amounts of extra
energy. 4
4. Archive of the Memorial Place Dachau, files 943 and
2111.
The source for the 1,000 BTU figure is an interview with
the president of a crematory oven manufacturing company (it's unrelated to
the Holocaust):
According to B&L President Steve Looker, who designed
the Phoenix II, the average body gives off a modest 1,000 Btu per pound of
meat (burning wood, by comparison, gives off 6,000 Btu). But an extremely
obese corpse ... can run to 17,000 Btu. "That's like burning kerosene," says
Looker.
Simonds Manufacturing agrees:
Human and animal remains, consisting of carcasses
[...] These waste consist of up to 85% moisture and 5% incombustible solids
with a heating value of 1000 BTUs per pound as fired.
The effect of increasing temperature is described in the
Internet Cremation Society FAQ:
...in the retort we operate, the first cremation of
the day takes about two hours and the second takes about an hour. That is
because the retort already has a high internal temperature at the beginning
of the second cremation.
(The time of one hour is for a commercial crematory, and
includes the time to fully incinerate even the largest bones. The Auschwitz
ovens were operated faster.)
The source for the Auschwitz oven operating instructions
is Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Jean-Claude
Pressac, 1989, p. 136, as quoted by Mark Van Alstine.
A Speaker to Neo-Nazis
On September 20, 1996, David Irving was the featured speaker
at a meeting of the National Alliance.
The National Alliance is "the largest neo-Nazi group in
America," according to Klanwatch. It gained notoriety when its leader's book
The Turner Diaries, which is a battle plan for race war, was Exhibit A in
Timothy McVeigh's trial. Its membership handbook talks about using National
Socialism (Nazism) to recruit:
The recruiter who is working with the right sort of member
... can use the National Socialist idea ... for opening the mind of his
prospect to the Alliance message.
But in an Australian radio interview just two months later,
Irving said "I don't give speeches to neo-Nazis." And he has threatened a
lawsuit to keep a recording of his secret speech off the internet.
Irving's speech to the National Alliance is described -- but
not transcribed, under threat of lawsuit -- by Annie Alpert, who attended
with her tape recorder.
"Largest neo-Nazi group in America": Peggy O'Crowley,
staff writer, Bergen Record, September 18, 1996, quoting Richard Baudouin of
Klanwatch.
Membership handbook: not published openly, but quoted on
a white-supremacist mailing list in February 1996.
Radio interview with Julie Posetti of 2BL Radio in
Sydney, Australia, November 8, 1996.
Irving threatened a lawsuit in his letter to Annie
Alpert of September 23, 1996:
...all my remarks at the private lecture which you
attended on September 20 are what is known in law as "intellectual
property", and that any unlawful dissemination of either the tape recording
which you were observed to make or of any unauthorised transcript thereof
will constitute an infringment of my Copyright and will be treated
accordingly, and damages will be sought for breach of copyright.
Questions to Ask Irving
a.. In 1994, he said 600,000 Jews died in the Holocaust. In
July 1995 it was four million. In 1996 it was back to 600,000 or one
million. Why can't this expert make up his mind?
The first 600,000 figure comes from a 1994 interview with
Michael Shermer:
Irving (1994) believes that the number of Jews killed
"is wrong by an order of magnitude. In other words, 500,000 to 600,000
instead of five to six million."
The four million figure was from a July 1995 interview
with Ron Casey in Australia:
Casey: What is your estimate of the number of Jews who
died at the hands of Hitler's regime in the war years? What number - and I
don't like using this word - what number would you concede were killed in
concentration camps?
Irving: I think, like any scientist, I'd have to give
you a range of figures and I'd have to say a minimum of one million, which
is a monstrous crime, and a maximum of about four million, depending on what
you mean by killed. If putting people into a concentration camps where they
die of barbarity and typhus and epidemics is killing then I would say the
four million figure because, undoubtedly, huge numbers did die in the camps
in the conditions that were very evident at the end of the war.
Casey: I'm finding this more and more surprising as we
go along, Mr. Irving.
Irving: Yes.
Casey: No, hold on. Because I've always been told that
you deny the Holocaust, you deny the persecution of the Jews to the extent
to which the Jewish community would have us believe but here you have just
now admitted that you would go to a high figure of four million. [...]
Irving: There's been a lot of hard lying about me ever
since this unfortunate business began. ...I'm very grateful to you for
allowing me to speak, in fact...
[...] If you include everybody who died by whatever
means, then you could probably go as high as four million but an awful lot
of people died in World War Two...
The return to the 600,000 figure comes on August 3,
1996:
I think the figures have been magnified by an Order of
Magnitude.
And in an interview in November 1996, again with Ron
Casey:
Casey: ...you did say to me that the figures of the
victims of the Holocaust was higher than you had previously admitted.
Irving: I think the real figures probably are about a
million or less.
a.. Is he a Holocaust "revisionist"? If not, can he name
anyone other than a revisionist who agrees with his views?
There are several well-known writers and historians who agree
that Irving is a thorough researcher and prolific writer -- but to my
knowledge, no one except Holocaust-deniers expresses agreement with his
views.
a.. Is he an antisemite? His usual answer is "not yet" -- what
does that mean?
David Irving's Action Report Update #10:
Meanwhile the bigots have the wit to taunt him, "Mr
Irving, are you antisemitic?" His reply is thought-provoking: "Not yet."
a.. If he believes in free speech, why is he suing Americans
for libel in England? (England has the most draconian libel laws in the
world.)
David Irving's Action Report #13:
David Irving is also suing Deborah Lipstadt, a
professor of religion at Emory College, Atlanta, for libel...
(Information on libel suit.)
The British court system is renowned for its harsh laws
against libel, laws which would surprise those used to U.S. First Amendment
protections. There is no presumption of innocence.
Probably the best-known suppression of free speech
through British libel law was the so-called "McLibel" case, where the
McDonald's corporation sued two unemployed activists for handing out
leaflets protesting the company's environmental record. In most cases, the
defendants would quickly settle, and be banned from handing out further
leaflets. This case became famous only because the activists fought the
charges; the trial lasted for over two years because they were required to
prove the truth of each and every statement made in their pamphlets.
As their website reads:
...libel cases rarely even make it to court because
defendants face years of long, drawn out, complex and archaic proceedings,
all costing an absolute fortune: and Legal Aid is not available for libel
cases. Anyone defending a libel action also has to prove, from primary
sources of evidence, every single word which has been challenged - the
prosecution can just sit back smugly and wait for the almost inevitable
victory.
In many other cases, the British High Court, or the
threat of it, has been enough for McDonald's to censor its opponents.
In January 1999, Irving hinted he might sue the director
of the Nizkor website, for saying he had "lied." This, for once, appears to
have been an empty threat.
When a film was made that contained a short scene where
the cover of one of Mr. Irving's books was shown in a context considered
unflattering, he called it "prima facie libellous" and demanded that the
film company:
...either ... excise the scene concerned completely,
or at very least ... place an electronic smudge over the title and jacket of
the book THE TRAIL OF THE FOX throughout its appearance, rendering it
totally illegible and unrecognisable, during each and every transmission of
this movie within the jurisdiction of the British courts.... If I do not
receive this ... I shall instruct solicitors to commence injunction and if
need be defamation proceedings in the High Court....
Irving is proud of his bullying tactics, and there seems
to be no end to them. One Chicago resident, who was overheard using the word
"odious" to describe Irving on a radio program, was tracked down and
received an angry letter. In it, Irving expressed dissatisfaction with the
way that the U.S. Constitution protects personal opinion:
I understand that on July 16, in your morning talk
show on WGN, you bestowed upon me the adjective "odious". Such language is
protected by the First Amendment in your country, of course; over here,
where Deborah Lipstadt has tried using the same kind of language, she is
finding it is a costly business indeed -- in our High Court.
a.. The National Alliance is one of the nation's leading
neo-Nazi hate groups. Why did he speak at a National Alliance meeting on
Sept. 20, 1996?
See above.
a.. Why did he then say, on Nov. 8, 1996, "I don't give
speeches to neo-Nazis"?
To my knowledge, he has not addressed this contradiction.
a.. If he believes in free speech, why did he threaten to sue
if the unedited tape of that speech was released?
See above.
a.. Has he done any more research on the Listerine®
anti-German conspiracy?
(From Irving's May 1995 Newsletter: "there's currently a black
and white newsreel-type Listerine commercial showing on American television
with a sinister man intoning the message, 'They're Germs -- show no mercy!'
and slurring the G-word so it sounds like something else. Watch for it. And
learn.")
This does not seem to be a joke. Mr. Irving was suggesting that
anti-German catchphrases were hidden in Listerine advertisements. We cannot
explain this.
information about this pamphlet...
Last modified: June 4, 1999
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