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David Irving & Revisionism

by Dr. Karl Kolcheck

An aging David Irving, who has begun to look more and more like a demented Rudolf Hess with lantern jaw and sunken eyes, was once considered the enfant terrible of the world of historical writers.

Now, he is merely the enfant, having slipped into almost total obscurity. This diminution of public attention is highly distressing to Irving, the victim of a deprived, fatherless childhood, who lusts after public attention like a hart panteth after water but in his case, the well has run dry.

His early books such as the "Destruction of Dresden," first published in 1963, were well-researched and crafted but the decline set in early and progressed to the terminal state, an awful biography of Hitler's propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, published in 1996. Based to a very large degree on completely fictitious documentation prepared by the former Soviet KGB as political disinformation, this book is full of pointless anecdotes, sniggering sexual innuendo and leaves an objective reader with the distinct feeling that the book should have been written in the sort of soft crayon supplied to therapy patients in locked wards.

Although Irving has written, co-authored or translated, thirty-odd books, the great majority of them have the greatest overall similarity to a meringue; there is bulk but no substance.

This plenitude of books must be viewed by their owners as being of great value because they are so seldom touched.

A fair number of Irving's works could have been found, in palmier days, in many major, and some minor, public and academic libraries but as he has diminished in an accelerated fashion, these books have been removed from the shelves in increasing numbers.

Their author attributes this to the underhanded work of malicious Jewish groups but since the index cards have also been removed from the library files, it would be safer to assume that librarians, like so many others, have had quite enough of David Irving.

Irving ascended, or descended (depending entirely upon the view of the reader), from a pro-German writer to a fierce and highly partisan supporter of Adolf Hitler, his acquired and well-worshipped father figure, and an intemperate and completely inaccurate denigrator of his legion of critics.

He had access to the personal diaries of a number of luminaries of the Third Reich and was able to publish a great deal of interesting information that proved to be of limited use to legitimate historians. Unfortunately for students of history, most historical diaries are, more often than not, completely self-serving and Irving's interpretations of them have proved to be equally so.

His major fault as a historical writer, aside from a serious lack of literary style, has been that he wrote to an idea and instead of making a study of authentic documentary, as opposed to anecdotal, sources, he selected material that supported his various ideological thesis and deliberately ignored anything else that might refute the ideas he tried to nourish in the minds of his readers.

Also, Irving has no problem whatsoever in inventing conversations or archival records and putting these spurious evidences into his political screeds with perfect aplomb.

The respected historian John Lukacs has devoted what amounts to more space than he deserves to Irving in his 1997 book, "The Hitler of History." In this work, which is a scholarly and reasonably balanced work on Hitler's place in historical reporting, Lukacs, on pages 229 through 232 points out a small sampling of Irving's deliberate distortions of records and his habit of not identifying any references for important assertions.

In a number of specific cases, it is obvious that Irving has simply invented sources, quotes and other supportive data.

British author and historian Martin Middlebrook has dealt with Irving's failings very clearly in his 1973 book, "The Nuremberg Raid." On pages 293 through 296, Middlebrook dissects a story that Irving reported in his work "And the German Cities Did Not Die-A Documentary Account" published by a small, right wing Swiss house in 1963.

In this book, Irving stated categorically that the Germans had learned in advance about the disastrous 1944 British air raid on Nuremberg in which a very large percentage of the raiding aircraft were lost to German action.

Irving quotes three British airmen, who were prisoners of war in Germany, to the effect that the Germans had prior knowledge of this raid.

Very extensive research on the part of Middlebrook proved that two of the named airmen had no knowledge whatsoever of the statements attributed to them by Irving, in fact flatly denying them, and the third alleged witness simply never existed anywhere except in Irving's imagination.

Another exposition of Irving's literary mendacity can be found in a chapter of a 1994 book entitled "The Churchill Papers" by Alexander Baron, pages 13 through 17.

This study lists a large and significant number of serious errors of fact appearing in Irving's book, "Churchill's War."

In all of his books, Irving consistently misstates or creates facts, invents important dates and proper titles and generally acts as if has never read any of the works in the lengthy bibliographies he always provides as proof of his research.

Probably the worst example of this can be found in "Hitler's War", published in 1977, in which Irving discusses the German Freikorps leader, Albert Leo Schlageter. This man was involved in the Ruhrkampf in the 1920's and was caught and executed by the French in Dusseldorf in 1923.

This part of Irving's reportage is correct.

What is not correct, however, and is an error exposing such a gross unfamiliarity with the subject of German history as to stagger the imagination, is the connected statement that at Schlageter's side on that date was also shot one Andreas Hofer.

As any legitimate scholar of German history will instantly recognize, Hofer was the man who raised the Austrian Tyrol against Napoleon I and was indeed captured and shot by the French but in Mantua, Italy in 1810!

Also in "Hitler's War", on page 260, Irving speaks of a "secret meeting" held at the Kremlin by Josef Stalin on May 5, 1941. Present at this meeting were top members of his government. In this "secret meeting", Irving claims that Stalin outlined his plans to attack Hitler.

This episode was tailor-made by Irving to support his thesis that Hitler did not have any reason to attack Stalin in 1941. Unfortunately, this "secret" speech (and another one on the following evening) was not secret and copies of it survive in the Russian archives.

In spite of the historical importance of this speech, Irving completely neglects to credit or footnote it.

Irving, who once had access to Russian archives, must doubtlessly have seen these files, which are certainly not secret nor permitted to be viewed by only a select few, among whom Irving, by inference, includes himself.

If he ever had such a positive relationship with the Russian archives, it was quickly terminated when the archive authorities discovered that Irving had been systematically pilfering their papers and selling them to document collectors. Irving, in breach of an agreement which he had made and without permission, removed and transported abroad certain microfiches of Goebbels’ diaries, thereby exposing them to a real risk of damage; Judgement, Paragraph 4, section 5. (in Appendix)

The brilliant historian was promptly jailed and, looking like an unshaven and sockless refugee from Bosnia, was physically expelled from the country. Once he had gained the safety of England, one heard his loud cries of Jewish persecution for his heroic activities in search of the Real Truth, as he likes to term his pathological flights of fancy.

This light-fingered, and very profitable lifting, (an original Hitler signature is worth over a thousand dollars on the autograph market) has not been limited to the contents of the Moscow archives but extends to the German Bundesarchiv, the American National Archives and several other prominent repositories of Third Reich documents.

In 1996, Irving attempted to sell a number of valuable papers from this era to Charles Hamilton, New York-based autograph expert and dealer.

Hamilton became suspicious of the origins of these documents and contacted a number of archives. Discovering that most of them had been stolen, Hamilton informed various authorities both in Germany and England.

-Letter from Hamilton to author Gregory Douglas-

An article appearing in a Toronto, Canada, paper of November 9, 1996 was headed:

AUTHOR'S LONDON HOME RAIDED, bylined by Canadian Press and covered a raid conducted by British police at the London Mayfair apartment of David Irving wherefrom a large number of documents allegedly stolen from British, American and German archives were recovered.

It is also interesting to note that the raid also uncovered a "considerable quantity of documents with Nazi letterheads, a folder containing what appears to be Adolf Hitler's personal note paper, 1940's-era German typewriters, Nazi document stamps and seals and examples of original signatures of prominent Nazi officials."

Perhaps this latter information indicates the source of the oft-repeated comments from outraged, legitimate historians that if Irving can't find a supporting document, he makes one.

Irving has developed an understandably strong interest in the subject of forgeries; loudly criticizing the authenticity of any documents discovered and utilized by any other writer whose work refutes his own pet theories and postulations. In these denunciations, he is shrill, vindictive and completely devoid of substance, lending some credence to the old saying that it is the kicked dog that yelps.                          

Also in his "Hitler's War", Irving states, on page xxiii, that postwar faked Mussolini diaries were "perpetuated by two Italian nuns." If Irving had taken the trouble to research the subject, he would have found that the forgeries, which fooled all of the recognized experts, had been prepared by an Italian woman named Amalia Panvini and her eighty-four-year old mother.

At the time Irving made this statement, the actual and accurate information on these faked diaries was certainly well-known, especially in England and reference to it can be found in the highly entertaining book by Robert Harris entitled "Selling Hitler" which appeared in 1986. The section on the Panvini fraud can be found on pages 289-290.

This work also contains a number of uncomplimentary commentaries on Irving’s personal behavior in the Hitler diary scandal including references to a £26,000 overdraft on Irving's bank account.

It is an enormous series of errors of omission and commission that render Irving's literary excursions into historical fiction as little more than propaganda pamphlets for the promulgation of the godhead of Adolf Hitler and which have no place in the history section of any library.

A compilation of these errata would fill, at the very least, a small book and are viewed as absolutely appalling by any serious historical researcher, regardless of whatever point of view they espouse.

Most of these exposed errata are of such a nature as to very clearly establish that David Irving is either an ideological fabricator of the worst kind or a grossly incompetent and thoroughly careless researcher.

His desperate craving to be noticed, to be the cynosure of all eyes, once led him to initially attack the authenticity of the Stasi-created "Hitler Diaries" that caused so much amusing havoc in the publishing world in 1983, and then, seeing that the tide appeared to be running in the favor of their authenticity, Irving at once publicly reversed himself and claimed that the terrible fakes were indeed authentic.

According to a British writer, Irving was the first to call the documents fake and the last to authenticate them.

By doing this, Irving certainly obtained the print media attention that he so frantically craves, but in the long view, he forever destroyed the tattered remnants of his professional reputation.           

Irving, who once enjoyed considerable fame and recognition in ideological circles, has certainly given validity to the statement by Charles DeGaulle that old age is shipwreck. His extramarital adventures in sundry different arenas cost him his wife and daughters and his increasingly polarized and erratic political views resulted in his being banned from Germany, Canada, Australia, Italy, Russia and New Zealand.

There is a strong, and hopefully successful, movement now in train to have him permanently banned from the United States to which he had fled after losing a libel suit in England and being forced into involuntary bankruptcy. This would leave only France and England for Irving to sport in.

The French, it should be noted, revere the actor Jerry Lewis as a brilliant performer and the British are simply stuck with him.

Being banned from a county in no way discourages Irving. In August of 1998, Irving ostensibly came to America to address what he claimed was a "crowd" of thousands at a meeting in Buffalo, New York. He did indeed travel to Buffalo but instead of addressing the multitude from the balcony of the city hall in emulation of the Führer or the Pope on Easter Sunday, he was quietly driven into Canada via Windsor, and did address a meeting of his Canadian minions in Montreal where he regaled the house with his daring exploits in swimming across a river in the dead of night and escaping Canadian border guards and their snarling dogs.

Since Irving has considerable difficulty getting in and out of his bathtub due to various infirmities, it is doubtful that he could brave more than a tepid wading pool at a day care center.

A head count of the Montreal meeting disclosed that the total number of attendees was one hundred and five, three less than his biggest house in Los Angeles, earlier in the year. At the Los Angeles meeting, held in a motel meeting hall by the Institute for Historical Review, Irving sold an incredible fifteen copies of his book on Goebbels.

The impressively titled Institute was once a reputable historical revisionist entity but was taken over by ideological radicals and now is housed in a rented garage in a run-down commercial area of Costa Mesa, California. They once produced a historical journal with a large circulation, but chronic mismanagement coupled with expensive legal problems has reduced their subscription list to less than two hundred individuals of the type who once worshipped Irving and their slim "Journal" appears about as often as Irving's books after the fall.

One of its two "directors" was once arrested in Germany for defacing a Catholic church with swastikas and now supplements his income by acting as a shift manager for a fast food restaurant in South Central Los Angeles and the other does duty as an automobile mechanic.

A second “director” abruptly resigned his position after posting on his Internet site the stunning revelations that he was a space alien whose parents had been giant turtles.

A third "director" found it necessary to leave the United States and he now lives in a small village in Central Mexico and runs a Flying Saucer Research Center. His own newsletters specialize in well-illustrated articles on anal probes allegedly conducted by small, pale men with large black eyes. The illustrations come from a book on proctology and are not recommended for viewing before eating.

On this particular trip to Los Angeles, as on many others, Irving was accompanied by a very young woman who was passed off as a "research assistant." His antics with her were such that his California host had to remove them from his home and put them up at a local hotel where the bill for three days of frolic amounted to over three thousand dollars.

But still Irving made his presence known to the masses, diminished though their numbers might be.

Where once he addressed large crowds of screaming young former East Germans, his later meetings with his admirers are confined to small rooms with ten or fifteen strange, pale people of the sort who believe in flying saucers and Martin Bormann's survival as a fruit stand operator in Brazil.

When Irving's book on Goebbels was finally rejected by the mainline American publishing company of St. Martin's Press as being absolutely impossible from a literary standpoint, Irving lost his last pretense to being a legitimate historical writer and has been reduced to publishing his own screeds.

However, as long as vanity presses exist, Irving will always be able to pay someone to print his increasingly disoriented books.

These he has dragged around the United States in a rented car, offering them like so many wilted cabbages to the attendees of Nazi relic shows. Even this avenue has finally been closed to Irving who was unceremoniously forbidden entrance to the prestigious American Military Extravaganza show held on a yearly basis in Pennsylvania and he is now totally dependent on occasional sales to those of his devoted followers who are still at liberty or above room temperature.

In England, a photograph was published in a British newspaper in 1984 that showed Irving, in shabby clothes, selling his book, "The Destruction of Dresden" on the sidewalk in front of his former apartment house on Duke Street, a practice that eventually resulted in his being ordered by the police to cease and desist because of a flood of complaints by his neighbors.

At the same time he was proffering his books like overripe melons to disinterested passersby, Irving was also accused by the same police report of making "loud and incoherent" speeches about his persecutions by "powerful Jewish groups."

Stories of persecutions, including mythic break-ins at his flat and public assaults, are part and parcel of Irving's standard speech to his loyalists.

Two examples of Irving's bizarre pursuit of any kind of public attention he can obtain are herein dissected.

According to a number of British newspaper articles, on November 27, 1963, Irving excitedly informed the media that a number of "dangerous men" attempted to smash down the door of his flat and assault him. He claimed he drove them off by physically confronting them.

The actual truth of the matter, in an article in the "Evening Standard" of November 28, 1963, was that three men attempted to gain entrance to Irving's apartment by displaying a stolen government television technician's card. Irving invited them in, called the police and the three men were arrested for "an attempt at burglary."

The police reports indicated that no one attempted to smash down a door. Irving, needless to say, did not chase the putative burglars away, being genuinely terrified of anything over ten years of age and not confined to a wheelchair.

Another incident, often mentioned by Irving in his speeches, is one that occurred in 1992.

Irving claimed that on Sunday, July 12, 1992, he was having lunch at the Richoux restaurant in London with his mistress, one Bente Hogh, then 28, a Danish citizen.

He again called the press and claimed that he was attacked by an irate mob, which he was able to drive off although there were "a large number of them, all armed."

This got into the press the next day but was immediately refuted by the manager of the restaurant, along with other witnesses, who stated that the "armed mob" consisted entirely of a young man having dinner in the expensive Mayfair restaurant. The diner had addressed several negative remarks to Irving on his way out of the building.

Irving, the witnesses stated, immediately jumped up from his table, and his mistress, and ran into the back of the Richoux in what was described in the police report as a state of terror, barricading himself in the men's lavatory. He remained there, inconveniencing other patrons, and wouldn't leave until a waitress gallantly escorted him out of the establishment through the kitchen. By mixing both stories together, it is apparent that Irving covered himself with glory on the one hand and flour on the other.

These entirely fictional accounts harken to the bombast of the Baron von Münchhausen and are designed to impress a shrinking legion of the awestruck with the importance of David Irving.

Irving constantly alludes to death threats, assassination plots, attempted kidnappings, avoided beatings, projected arsons and on and on to impress upon others, having first impressed it upon himself, that he is indeed a man of great importance in the scheme of things and a heroic and dauntless fighter for what he calls "Real Truth."

This small band of fanatical followers continues to fan the dead ashes of his career with worshipful, if badly scrawled, letters, homemade fruitcakes and small checks.

If it were not for this support, Irving and Bente, his young Danish paramour, would have to go onto public assistance.

Of course there is a very strong belief in many circles, some official, that Irving has, in the past, received large amounts of money from various Saudi groups in order to encourage him to harass and embarrass the Jewish community.

Once Irving drove a Rolls Royce but now rides a bicycle or takes public transportation. He lived in an apartment that had one small room set aside as "David Irving's War Room" and the walls of the entire establishment were covered with hundreds of pictures of David Irving in various mock-heroic poses as well as a number of sketches by the late, former Nazi Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer.

This interesting individual spent his own declining years making small ink sketches and passing them off, for considerable sums of money, to true believers and the gullible as "original Hitler artworks."

It seems ironic that Irving, whose career has been based on self-delusion, prevarication and a frenzied campaign of Hitler-worship, would, in the end, have his apartment walls covered in sacred Hitlerian relics that are as fake as his own documentary references.

Miss Hogh was interviewed for an article in the "Spectator" on April 27, 1996, and her comments on her lover are both amusing and instructive.

The reporter, Nicholas Farrell, noted that Irving was constantly complaining in his presence about the fact that his mistress was not keeping the apartment clean and certainly not ironing his shirts. The interview was then moved to a nearby cafe where Ms. Hogh explained that Irving was a very moody, unpredictable man, an egoist who reveled in his disruption of governments and institutions and who boasted often, long and loudly about his many lawsuits against anyone he disliked.

And Irving apparently disliked nearly everyone who did not view him as having a nimbus surrounding his fundament.

The interview also disclosed that Irving was obsessive about his eating habits, demanding that his coffee cup be pre-heated in boiling water, that his beer be served in a frosted glass and that he refused to cook any meals or perform even the most simple of household tasks.

This lack of breeding has manifested itself a number of times over the years when Irving is engaged in speaking engagements in the United States.

He has been known to severely criticize his hosts for not serving him the kind of food he is used to or in neglecting to provide the sort of creature comforts he deems proper to his station in life.

Also, Irving, as a rule, will never thank his hosts for their hospitality.

While Ms Hogh expressed no particular animosity towards Jews, one of Irving's most obsessive topics, she did indicate that both of them shared a hearty and highly vocal detestation of individuals of the colored persuasion who have emigrated to the United Kingdom from its former colonies.

At one time, Irving founded a political party in England, with a mercifully short lifespan, that advocated rounding up all the "Coloured people in England", putting them into detention camps and then deporting them to any country that would accept them.

It is obvious from this that Irving has made excellent use of his research into similar activities during the course of what he firmly believes is his very own Third Reich.

In conclusion, Ms. Hogh also stated that her lover was sadistic towards others, supporting published interviews with Irving himself who stated that he was a very strong believer in corporal punishment.

Irving has always denigrated women, claiming that they were intellectually inferior to men and it has been openly discussed, and published in at least one book, by Alexander Baron, that Irving was homosexual. Given his frenzy to sue anyone who publishes even the mildest criticism of him, it is strange that Irving never filed a suit against Mr. Baron for his published and well-circulated accusations.

While Irving takes every opportunity to criticize women, he very publicly and aggressively drags around an assortment of attractive younger women on his book-selling tours. One of these, a 22-year old Miami waitress named Charlene Touhy, a high school dropout, was introduced as his "research assistant" and shown off to his hosts and admirers in America. Eventually a severely chastened, and apparently well-blistered, Charlene departed the Irving ménage and has made a number of very unkind remarks about the world-renowned writer, calling him, among other printable things, "Mr. Spanky", which needs no further comment.

Mr. Baron has produced no evidence in support of his accusations but there are a series of letters that have surfaced between Irving and someone named Diane Schreiber that might bear on this issue.

Schreiber, a resident of Keene, New Hampshire, ran a Nazi relic emporium called "Brandenburg Militaria" and became closely associated with Irving when he was still permitted to attend the larger militaria shows in America.

After establishing contact in the mid-90s, Schreiber and Irving have kept in constant touch with each other by letter, fax, email as well as personal contact.

The only flaw in what on the surface might appear to be a romantic interlude is that Diane Schreiber is actually one Frank Russo, a fact that becomes quickly obvious to any first-hand observer.

It is doubtful in the extreme that Irving is unaware of the real gender, cross-dressing and other inclinations of his close associate but perhaps their shared interests extend well beyond busts of Josef Goebbels and photo albums of blonde, well-muscled former East German soldiers.

In the years following his decline and fall, Irving has increasingly sought more publicity by filing legal actions against as many people as he can identify as having criticized his inaccuracy, ideological nonsense and general literary buffoonery.

His lawsuits, which he files in his own name, being unable, as he falsely claims, to afford an attorney, are universally thrown out by the courts but only after he has put his victims through great expense and travail.

On July 22, 1994, the "Guardian" published a story about Irving receiving public aid to permit him to file suit against "The Sunday Times." Public aid, in this case, was granted because Irving was believed to be significantly below the poverty level.

How much money Irving has is not known. It is known that he keeps several accounts in Florida banks in which he hides the money he gets from selling books in America. Irving does this to avoid the payment of taxes to the British Inland Revenue and the American IRS.

It is also known that Irving received money from Syrian Arab sources via a bank in Lebanon for promoting Arab points of view and for launching attacks against the Jewish holocaust writers and organizations.

Libel laws in England are very severe and Irving has delusional hopes that his victims will pay him off and avoid the expenses of lawsuits. To date, no one has accommodated him and he has seen case after case thrown out of court by indignant judges as having no merit whatsoever.

There is a provision in British law called barratry, which prohibits the continuous filing of frivolous lawsuits, and the courts in England have repeatedly threatened Irving with this but to no avail.

Irving became outraged by negative comments about his activities by American religious history professor, Deborah Lipstadt, a fanatic holocaust supporter and Jewish equivalent of David Irving, filing a libel suit against the academic and her publishers.

Claiming, in this case rightly, that he had no funds, Irving made the enormous error of appearing as his own attorney in the case while Lipstedt was ably supplied with an the services of an excellent firm of British attorneys, paid for by the Jewish community.

The outcome was never in doubt and Irving lost his case, the judge finding that he was not libeled. The court also confirmed that Irving had stolen valuable documents from the Russian archives in his research into the book on Goebbels.

British law had a provision that a litigating party in a civil action that loses his case is responsible for the legal expenses of the winner. In this case, Irving would owe Lipstedt and her backers over £2,000,000!

In essence, this defeat means that Irving can never publish, or republish, another book because all of his advances and royalties are subject to attachment. His publishers, one must note, are not held to answer for this but any monies intended for the author are now subject to seizure. Not only was Irving forced into bankruptcy by the British courts, his copyrights were seized by the same courts as valuable assets. This means that Irving can no longer publish any of his previous works without them being immediately attached by the Bankruptcy Court Trustees and anyone foolish enough to finance such a publishing venture would lose their investment.

The British firm of bankruptcy referees, Baker-Tilly in London, have possession of all of Irving’s copyrights.

Defeated in his libel action and held accountable for the immense legal fees opposing attorneys ran up, Irving was pushed into bankruptcy by the courts and subsequently fled to the United States where he lives, at last report, in a small rental house on Angela Street in Key West, Florida.

To his few supporters left in the United States, Irving has revealed his secret plan of becoming an American citizen and to achieve this worthy goal, he has gone to ground and refrained from any publishing ventures that would tend to irritate the American authorities.

As Irving's star sinks quickly, and mercifully, from the sight of mortal men, the failed writer had loudly blamed a great catalog of mythic enemies for his eclipse and obliteration.                  

He sets these earth-shattering truths forth in a newsletter for his true believers called "David Irving's Action Report" which reads like the product of a remedial middle-school class in beginning journalism and contains such weighty statements as..."Today a man gave me a ride in a big car"...and shows a picture of a small child looking at plant life over the caption..."Jessica sees the big leaf." This occasional publication, printed on yellow paper, covers Irving daily activities, his travels, his sore feet, waitresses he has met, the weather in various cities he visits and a plethora of miscellany of endless and boring intensity.

Irving, in his "David Irving Fighting Fund" newsletter, written and mailed from his rented beach cottage in Key West, Florida, his "American Battle Headquarters", produces an endless series of whining requests for funds from the true believers, the "Inner Circle."

Accompanying these tearful entreaties is a colored picture of an aging Irving clutching a very small child. This is presumably his out-of-wedlock daughter but if not, it makes him appear as an aged poster boy for pedophiles.

Irving moans that if he does not pay his rising legal bills, bills incurred solely because of the dismissals by various British courts of his endless and merit less lawsuits, he will be "driven from the battlefield of Real History forever."

This is a consummation devoutly to be wished by anyone with a respect for written history and these feelings include historians of all beliefs and persuasions.

His Action Report has been filled with paranoid mutterings accusing anyone criticizing him with being an agent provocateur, a probable Zionist spy and a functional idiot.

Irving’s newsletters read like the diaries of a paranoid in the final stages of disintegration and he sees the hand of Zionism behind every unpleasant episode in his life, from inflamed piles, electrical problems to his recent eviction from his London apartment for non-payment of rent.

This Action Report, sent to his drooling devotees, was seized upon by the Lipstadt attorneys and used, very tellingly, against Irving in court

Being what he is, Irving has viewed his crushing defeat as a stunning victory and has regaled cheering dozens throughout the United States with such idiotic phrases as “Yes, Irving has scored once more!” and “We certainly showed the other side who was right and who was wrong, didn’t we?”

A person like Irving cannot keep silent for long and from his secret Florida command post, he has issued confidential bulletins to the faithful concerning his latest book that he feels will be his magnum opus. This, he says, will be a scathing investigation into Jewish control of American media and banking institutions and he claims he can show clearly that the American President is a tool of the Israeli Mossad.

As a prelude to his literary and political rebirth, Irving has posted on his internet site, a doctored photograph of concentration camp inmates purported to have been forged by the California-based Simon Wiesenthal Institute.

This picture, which shows a chimney belching smoke in the background, has obviously been doctored but has been in existence long before the Wiesenthal people set up shop and has been used for years as “absolute proof” by the lunatic fringe of forgery concerning allegations of mass murder in the German concentration camps.

In addition to his own lawsuits against others, Irving himself has been sued for copyright violations and accepting moneys given to him by foolish, small publishing houses for books that he has not, never will, or can, write for them.

An article in the "Independent" of February 22, 1994 discussed Irving being thrown in jail in England because of a lawsuit against him for his refusal to return a £50,000 advance from a gullible German publisher.    

As Irving loudly claims to have no money, these lawsuits only serve to goad him into greater frenzies of manic activity.

No one seems to be successful in halting his increasingly disordered behavior and the catalog of his baseless charges, complaints, lawsuits and slanders continues unabated.

One of his most insistent, and meglomaniacal, charges is that criticism of him and his scribblings has made him fearful of assassination!

Famous, public figures like presidents and popes are assassinated but the killing of David Irving would be far more in the way of euthanasia than assassination.

Instead of being ashamed of his lunatic antics, Irving boasted of them on what he called his "Inner Circle" website. This site, which he terms "a confidential location which I have created for the inner circle of my supporters at http://www.fpp.co.uk/ Inner/ Circle.html" was a bizarre arena that was a compendium of whining pleas for money, psychotic and badly written attacks on everyone whom Irving sees as his enemy and delusional pages about his importance in the world order.

In addition to his Internet nuisances, Irving produced a pamphlet that was a color copy of a cover from the German "Stern" magazine, an institution that loathes him. This counterfeit printing, which Irving takes very seriously, was filled with pompous pictures of himself and accompanied by a thoroughly faked cover story about his greatness, coupled with a fictitious abject apology from the editorial staff of the German magazine for having defamed him.

There have appeared, from Irving's hand, a number of his printed speeches, which would indicate that he addressed a "Clarendon Club" in London. These speeches appear to be very well received by the audience with a number of textual comments such as "loud laugher" and "wild cheering" from what one would assume were the assembled, aristocratic guests.

Unfortunately, there is no such club. Irving invented it and copyrighted the name so he could use it for his reportage. The speeches are made not to cheering upper class Britons but to a tape recorder in his London flat and the background noises are not loud laughter and wild cheering but the domestic sounds of his housekeeper-cum-mistress vacuuming his carpets and dealing with a screeching child.

As a matter of fact, in reading through these dismal anti-Semitic and anti-black babblings, the observation could well be made that anyone who would either laugh at or wildly cheer the speaker's dismal bigotry would have to be either completely drunk or coked to the gills.

Probably the most illustrative, and bizarre, example of Irving’s eccentricity is to be found in a decades-long feud launched by Irving against a minor military historian, Peter Stahl.

Stahl, who has published a number of books on German military subjects, met with Irving in San Jose, California in June of 1980 at Irving’s request. Stahl was a friend of Dr. Charles Burdick, an academic historian specializing in German military subjects and as Irving was visiting California, Burdick suggested to Irving that perhaps Stahl could assist Irving in locating specific Third Reich documents.

Burdick described Irving to Stahl as “a boorish type” who usually toured with “teenaged tarts” in tow but was a fairly competent researcher in his genre.

During the course of the meeting, Irving informed Stahl that he was looking for any period Third Reich documents that could prove, conclusively, that Adolf Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust. He also indicated that he would pay “most generously” if Stahl were able to locate such documents.

In a subsequent conversation with Dr. Burdick, Stahl described the British writer as overbearing and not overly conversant with his subjects. When he informed Burdick of Irving’s request, they both laughed because it was highly doubtful if such documents ever existed, saving in the imagination of David Irving.

Stahl did, however, contact Agnes Peterson of the Hoover Library at Stanford University and when queried about the possible existence of the Hitler-knew-nothing papers in the libraries’ extensive collection, the librarian, like Burdick, laughed and commented that David Irving had been frantically searching for something to exculpate his hero for a number of years and was considered to be a comic figure at the library.

She also advised Stahl to “keep his distance” from the British writer who, Peterson said, was a “terrible, rude pest” and highly demanding.

Shortly after this, Stahl discovered that Peterson was entirely correct in her evaluation of Irving’s persona. No sooner had Irving returned to London than he began to telephone Stahl on a regular basis, usually at four or five in the morning. When advised that the sun had not yet come up in California, Irving always replied with a giggle that it was certainly after lunch in England and then demanded to know what progress Stahl was making in his efforts at locating the desired documents. Since Stahl had quickly abandoned the project as a thoroughgoing waste of his time, he attempted, without any success whatsoever, to convince Irving that he was having no success in his searches.

Irving responded to this by increasing the number of  pre-dawn telephone calls until Stahl finally had to resort to leaving the telephone unplugged until a more reasonable hour. This did not deter Irving who merely began his calling regimen very late in the evening instead of early in the morning.

Stahl discovered that Irving was totally incapable of comprehending that no Hitler-exculpating documents had been found and probably never would be. Irving’s response to this information was to become typically, sarcastic and verbally abusive, claiming that Charles Burdick had highly recommended Stahl as a source and urging him to “press forward” in his labors in the vineyards of what Irving called, the “needs of the most important of all modern historians.”

Finally, in a thoroughly misguided effort to silence the annoying Irving, Stahl asked a friend of his who had been a U.S. Army clerk once stationed in Germany, to write up a fake document in the most atrocious German he could muster. This production turned out to be a mythical letter from Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, to Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS Economics Office. The letter claimed that Hitler had no knowledge of the killing of Jews in the Concentration Camp system and believed that Jews were being sent to these camps to work for the Reich.

The next time Irving called, Stahl gleefully advised Irving that he had indeed found the document Irving was so eager to have. Irving at once demanded that the document be read to him over the phone and when this was done, Stahl said Irving was “absolutely ecstatic” and promised to “liberally reward” Stahl.

A photo copy of the document (see below) was duly sent to a delighted Irving.

As Irving was very conversant with good German, Stahl naturally thought that Irving was being sarcastic with his outlandish praise but several days later, he was called by Dr. Burdick regarding the “remarkable find.” It seems that Irving had telephoned Burdick, bubbling with high spirits, and advised him that the redoubtable Peter Stahl was indeed the expert Burdick has so lavishly praised.

Irving’s “liberal reward” consisted of a wartime propaganda photograph of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, worth about twenty dollars on the postcard market.

Burdick, quite naturally, wanted to know what this miraculous document consisted of and when Stahl dropped a copy of it off at Burdick’s office at San Jose State University, Burdick laughed so loudly that his secretary rushed in expecting to see her employer in the midst of a seizure.

Not only had Irving swallowed this outrageous practical joke whole, he sent messages around to his supporters, bragging of his earth-shattering find.

Here we have David Irving in all his self-invented glory: "admiration", "congratulations", "justified... for my lifetime", repulsively megalomaniacal, even comparing himself with Copernicus.

In his 1977 book Hitler's War, he first uttered his thesis that Hitler didn't know anything about the final solution against the Jews, which stirred up quite a controversy and was rejected by all reputable historians. In his (probably invented) diary entry from June 21, 1980 and subsequently posted on his website, he openly writes that he was searching for corroborating evidence to support his controversial thesis that Hitler didn't know, a theory that seems to be supported by the above quoted faked Himmler letter.

In other words, this entry suggests that Irving is not adjusting his theories according to the evidence he has at hand, but that he is frantically trying to find evidence to support his theories; that because of his ideological zeal, he turned a blind eye for years to the obvious fact that this "document" was an obvious forgery!

Furthermore, in his invented diary entries, he never mentioned that (and when) he finally received a copy of this "document"  (or at least he didn't post it), which he certainly ought to have immediately recognize it as a very crude forgery and to expose the evil man "Peter Stahl" who had cost him so much time and effort and led him on the wrong track.

Such an outrage must have left traces in his alleged diary, certainly producing the longest and most vicious attack on "Peter Stahl" to be found in it, but no such entry exists! (I am sure, though, that after he will have read this, he will invent this entry and post it immediately). It is not before February 15, 1997--17 years after Irving allegedly wrote down the text of this "document"!--that he describes this Himmler "letter" as being "phony." But surprisingly, he does not mention the impossible German language of this forgery.

The text of the joke “Himmler letter”