David Irving - Author

Author

After the success of the Dresden book, Irving continued writing, including some works of revisionist history. In 1964, he wrote The Mare's Nest, an account of the German secret weapons program and the Allied intelligence countermeasures against it; translated the Memoirs of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in 1965 (edited by Walter Görlitz); and in 1967 published Accident: The Death of General Sikorski. In the latter book, Irving claimed that the plane crash which killed Polish government in exile leader General Władysław Sikorski in 1943 was really an assassination ordered by Winston Churchill, so as to enable Churchill to betray Poland to the Soviet Union. Irving's book inspired the highly controversial 1967 play Soldiers by his friend, the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, where Hochhuth depicts Churchill ordering the "assassination" of General Sikorski. Also in 1967, he published two more works: The Virus House, an account of the German nuclear energy project for which Irving conducted many interviews, and The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, in which he blamed the British escort group commander, Commander Jack Broome for the catastrophic losses of the Convoy PQ-17. Amid much publicity, Broome sued Irving for libel in October 1968, and in February 1970, after 17 days of deliberation before London's High Court, Broome won. Irving was forced to pay £40,000 in damages, and the book was withdrawn from circulation.

After PQ-17, Irving largely shifted to writing biographies. In 1968, Irving published Breach of Security, an account of German reading of messages to and from the British Embassy in Berlin before 1939 with an introduction by the British historian D.C. Watt. As a result of Irving's success with Dresden, members of Germany's extreme right wing assisted him in contacting surviving members of Hitler's inner circle. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Irving claimed to have developed sympathies towards them. Many ageing former mid- and high-ranked Nazis saw a potential friend in Irving and donated diaries and other material. Irving described his historical work to Rosenbaum as an act of "stone-cleaning" of Hitler, in which he cleared off the "slime" that he felt had been unjustly applied to Hitler's reputation.

In 1969, during a visit to Germany, Irving met Robert Kempner, one of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg. Irving asked Kempner if the "official record of the Nuremberg was falsified", and told him that he was planning to go to Washington, D.C. to compare the sound recordings of Field-Marshal Milch's March 1946 evidence with the subsequently published texts to find proof that evidence given at Nuremberg was "tampered with and manipulated". Upon his return to the United States, Kempner wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, that Irving expressed many "anti-American and anti-Jewish statements".

In 1971, he translated the memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, and in 1973 published The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, a biography of Luftwaffe Marshal Erhard Milch. He spent the remainder of the 1970s working on Hitler's War and the War Path, his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler; The Trail of the Fox, a biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; and a series in the Sunday Express describing the Royal Air Force's famous Dam Busters raid. In 1975, in his introduction to Hitler und seine Feldherren, the German edition of Hitler's War, Irving attacked the diary of Anne Frank as a forgery, claiming falsely that a New York court had ruled that the diary was really the work of an American scriptwriter Meyer Levin "in collaboration with the girl's father".

The description of Irving as a historian, rather than a historical author, is controversial, with some publications continuing to refer to him as a "historian" or "disgraced historian", while others insist he is not a historian, and have adopted alternatives such as "author" or "historic writer". The military historian John Keegan has praised Irving for his "extraordinary ability to describe and analyse Hitler's conduct of military operations, which was his main occupation during the Second World War". Donald Cameron Watt, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the London School of Economics, wrote that he admires some of Irving's work as a historian, though he rejects his conclusions about the Holocaust. At the libel proceedings against Irving, Watt declined Irving's request to testify, appearing only after a subpoena was ordered. He testified that Irving had written a "very, very effective piece of historical scholarship" in the 1960s, which was unrelated to his controversial work; he also suggested that Irving was "not in the top class" of military historians.