David Irving’s Hitler: The "Reluctant Anti-Semite"

by D. F.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - fall 1998)

For all the controversy surrounding David Irving, one thing is certain: he is very controversial. Ever since his 1959 publication from London University which included a defense of South African apartheid, an appreciative article on Nazi Germany, and the allegation that "the national press" in England "is owned by Jews," Irving has consistently promoted his right-wing views and made known his disdain for "established" history. Irving, who never graduated from college and has no academic credentials as a historian, nonetheless has been classified as perhaps one of the three or four necessary historians of the Third Reich and the Nazi period. There are many historians and members of academia who would agree with this assessment of Irving. Stanford professor Gordon C. Craig stated in 1996 that "Such people as David Irving, then, have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views." However, there are many scholars who would become ill if someone were to propose this idea to them. Irving has undoubtedly built a reputation for himself that offends many people. Among them is Tina Rosenberg, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "David Irving...is not just wrong, he appears to be engaging in deliberate distortion. Worse, he is a sneak; the uncautioned reader will absorb a version of history exonerating Hitler and minimizing the evil of the Holocaust without knowing it." A similar, yet not as harsh, take on Irving was expressed by historian Gitta Sereny: "As a researcher he is good enough to make it difficult for anyone to fault him who doesn’t know the material he uses as well as he does--and let’s face it, few do. As a writer, he simply writes well; for the unwarned reader, his stuff--and here is the danger--can be fun."

Well who doesn’t want to read something "fun"? This is not the problem, though. Irving proclaims himself to be a practitioner of legitimate revisionist historiography, while at the same time maintaining contacts with neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, speaking before the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), testifying for the defense of Ernst Zundel, addressing far-right groups around the globe, and ultimately denying the Holocaust publicly and in his writings. It seems that what Irving claims and what he actually practices do not go hand-in-hand. In his monumental work entitled Hitler’s War (1977), Irving attempts to dispel the "legends" that have been perpetuated about Hitler by unworthy and lazy biographers. He proposes that Hitler was actually a weak and "less than omnipotent" Führer. Second, that the burden of guilt for the bloody and mindless massacre of the Jews rests on a large number of Germans and not just on one "mad dictator" whose order had to be obeyed without question. Through his research, Irving found that Hitler’s own role in the "Final Solution" has never been examined and that "For thirty years, our knowledge of Hitler’s part in the atrocity has rested on inter-historian incest."

His hypothesis on the nature of the liquidation of the European Jews is that the killing was partly of an "ad hoc" nature, the way out of an awkward dilemma, chosen by the middle-level authorities (SS, party bosses, state commissars) in the eastern territories who were unable to cope with the continuously arriving trainloads of deported Jews needing accommodations. These authorities are said to have simply liquidated the deportees, partly in response to their "animal desire" to rob them and partly out of "cynical extrapolation" from Hitler’s anti-Semitic decrees.

In his thesis argument, then, Irving attempts to paint the picture of a Hitler who was indeed anti-Semitic and did initiate the deportation of Jews, but did not have any responsibility in the mass execution of Jews. This argument is more subtle and cunning than a revisionism that denies the Holocaust entirely, and therefore it may appeal to many people. In this view, Hitler remains charged with many crimes, but not nearly as many, or as abominable, as legend says he committed. This is Irving’s intent--to relativise or de-demonize Hitler. He once stated, "I was taught that Hitler was the incarnation of evil. I now see him as no greater an incarnation of evil than Churchill, Truman or Roosevelt." He also called Hitler a "reluctant anti-Semite." In an additional attempt to make Hitler look better comparatively, Irving tells of the British cabinet’s hard core opposition to making a deal with Hitler to bring peace in October of 1939: "Hitler was probably right in identifying the main source of this stubborn anti-German line as Churchill [...]."

The contention that Hitler neither ordered or even knew about the genocidal policies of the "Final Solution" (and even tried to resist the mass murders) is supported by Irving with the following evidence: first, that no written order to exterminate the Jews has been found; second, that Hitler never mentioned it even to those in his inner circle (Irving says he interviewed all of them: adjutants, house servants, secretaries--and none of them had heard Hitler speak of it); third, and above all else, is Hitler’s counter-order of Nov. 30, 1941 that the Jews are not to be liquidated. This is Irving’s trump card--he refers to it again and again and it accounts for the only illustration in the book.

While Irving makes clear Hitler’s determination to rid Germany and eventually all of Europe of Jews, he remarks that "it is harder to establish a documentary link between him and the murderous activities of the SS ‘task forces’ (Einsatzgruppen) and their extermination camps in the east." For the pogroms that now began, Himmler and General Heydrich provided the initiative and drive themselves, using arguments of Reich security. Additionally, Irving states that Hitler’s only order to Himmler in this context was one for the general consolidation of the German racial position, an ultimate concern for the quality of the German species, and that no evidence exists that Hitler gave him any more specific instruction than this, nor did Himmler ever claim so.

In the Polish campaign, Irving presents evidence for his thesis that other top officers actually ran the show. Special task forces led by Heydrich were ordered by Hitler to conduct "security" operations in the new territories. But the order’s practical interpretation--what Heydrich referred to as liquidation of several thousand Polish leaders--evidently sprang from him. Irving then states that Heydrich had his eye on bigger game. He was quoted as saying, "We will let the small fry off; but the nobility, the papists and the Jews must all be killed." Additionally, according to a conference record of Sept. 14, 1939, "The Chief (Heydrich) enlarged on the Jewish problem in Poland and set out his views on this. The Reichsführer (Himmler) will put certain suggestions to the Führer, on which only the Führer can decide [...]." Hitler, however, favored only a deportation of Jews, as became clear to both Himmler and Field Marshall Brauchitsch in separate meetings with Hitler on September 20. "To Brauchitsch he talked only of a ghetto plan for the Jews" and to Himmler he gave the responsibility of rounding up Jews and resettling them in the new territories. Heydrich was also authorized by Hitler to "unload as many Jews as possible into the Russian zone."

From the last days of September through October, 1941, Irving reports that 75,00 Russian Jews were executed at Kiev. (Here Irving is showing that executions of Jews did in fact happen, and therefore is not denying the Holocaust entirely.) Prior to these executions, Heydrich instructed special task forces commanders in June of 1941 that these Ostjuden were the intellectual reservoir of bolshevism and "in the Führer’s view" were to be liquidated. Late in September, Himmler toured the task force headquarters "and announced to them--for example, to Otto Ohlendorf, commander of task force D--that he alone ‘in association with Hitler’ was responsible." Irving then goes on to report that there are documents which strongly suggest that Hitler’s responsibility--as distinct from Himmler’s--was limited to the decision to deport all European Jews to the east, and that responsibility for what happened to them after their arrival in the east rested with Himmler, Heydrich and the local authorities there.

To support his second argument, Irving offers examples of Hitler’s lack of communication (and therefore knowledge) concerning the Final Solution to even his closest and most trusted officers such as Goebbels. He reports that in "an unpublished section" of Goebbels’ diary, he wrote: "The Führer’s opinion is that bit by bit the Jews must be got out of Germany altogether." So even to Goebbels, "his most trusted and anti-Semitic minister, Hitler made no specific mention of any extermination of either the German or Russian Jews." Furthermore, Irving reports that Hitler’s surviving adjutants, secretaries, and staff stenographers have all uniformly testified that never once was the extermination of either Russian or European Jews mentioned--even confidentially--at Hitler’s headquarters. Furthermore, "Even SS General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s Chief of Staff and liaison officer to Hitler, was at this time (1942) ignorant of the pogrom that now got under way."

Irving provides another illustration of Hitler’s plan to deport the Jews, but with his responsibility ending there. In October of 1941, Hitler proclaimed that all Jews must be removed from the Protectorate (see note 15), Berlin and Vienna. The intention of Hitler, according to Irving, was twofold--to establish a Jewish labor force for his grandiose plans in the east, and to hold them hostage. There was no word of massacring them. This exodus began shortly after, with over twenty thousand Jews sent to the Lodz ghetto between October 15 and November 8. Himmler reluctantly kept the Jews alive for work, but further east the Gauleiters had no intention of preserving the unemployable Jews: "Adolf Eichmann approved Gauleiter Lohse’s proposal that those arriving at Riga should be killed by mobile gas-trucks. This initially ad hoc operation gathered momentum". The Jews (numbering about 152,000) were sent further east, to the extermination camp at Chelmno, where they were liquidated starting December 8. (Again, Irving is not denying the fact that massacres of Jews occurred.)

At this stage of the "Jewish massacre", Irving claims that it is possible to be more specific about the instigators, because on May 1, 1942, Gauleiter Artur Greiser himself mentioned in a letter "that the current ‘special treatment’ program of the hundred thousand Jews in his own Gau (territory) had been authorized by Himmler ‘with the agreement of’ Heydrich. Hitler was not mentioned." Irving writes also that no documentary evidence exists that Hitler was aware that the Jews were being massacred upon their arrival. He argues that Hitler was, however, a pragmatist and that it would have been unlike him to use scarce transport space to move millions of Jews east for the sole purpose of liquidating them there; nor would he willingly destroy manpower, which was desperately needed. Hitler is said to have made the following comment after hearing an Allied radio broadcast announcing that Jews were being exterminated: "Really, the Jews should be grateful to me for wanting nothing more than a bit of hard work from them." Irving then confidently states that it was Heydrich and the "fanatical Gauleiters" in the east who were "interpreting with brutal thoroughness Hitler’s decree that the Jews must ‘finally disappear’ from Europe." But Himmler’s personal role is ambivalent.

Irving contends that Hitler, in a meeting with Himmler on November 30, 1941, issued an order that the Jews were not to be liquidated. This is Irving’s trump card of sorts. Because of this "stop order", Irving contends that Hitler did not engage in the massacre of Jews and even tried to prevent it from happening. This is what supposedly took place on November 30: Himmler was summoned to the Wolf’s Lair for a secret conference with Hitler, at which the fate of Berlin’s Jews was clearly raised. At 1:30 p.m. Himmler phoned Heydrich with the explicit order that the Jews were not to be liquidated. The next day, Himmler phoned SS General Oswald Pohl, the overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the order: "Jews are to stay where they are."

Yet, despite this order, the blood purge continued; the extermination program had gained a momentum of its own.

Irving also mentions instances when Hitler is "fooled" or purposely uninformed about the killing operations. One of the most telling involves Himmler and his desire to conceal the truth from Hitler. He felt the "job" should be done as quickly as possible, if only for reasons of concealment. His concealment was quite effective--his own papers reveal how he "pulled the wool over Hitler’s eyes." In September of 1942, while the murder machinery was operating at peak capacity (here again Irving admits that extermination of Jews happened), Himmler still jotted in his notes for that day’s conference with Hitler: "Jewish emigration--how should we proceed?" And in March 1943 he was to order a "too-explicit" statistical report rewritten to remove a stray reference to the massacre of Europe’s Jews before it was submitted to the Führer. This report, Irving writes, detailed the "special treatment" of almost 1.5 million Jews. Himmler knew too well that the Führer "had in November 1941, ordered that the Jews were not to be liquidated. So he had the report edited "for submission to the Führer" and also instructed that in the version for Hitler, he "did not want there to be any mention of ‘special treatment of Jews’ whatever." The new version had them "channeled through" the camps to Russia. And on April 9, 1943 he wrote that the report would serve magnificently for "camouflage purposes" in later years. Irving suggests that it is conceivable that Hitler was unaware that his order forbidding the liquidation of the Jews was being violated on such a scale. He tells how Himmler, for the sake of Germany and its Führer, understood himself to be the bearer of a horrible burden, "of which nobody could ever know."

So was Hitler really "in the dark" about the genocidal policies of the Final Solution? Is it true that his top-level officers, such as Himmler, Heydrich and Goebbels, were actually the ones responsible for the Holocaust? And did Hitler in fact try to prohibit the execution of Jews in 1941?

While many historians, scholars and members of academia have praised the work of David Irving, in reality it seems that he has managed to pull the wool over many people’s eyes. Claiming to be a revisionist, in search of the true history of the Nazis and the Holocaust, Irving instead purposely distorts, alters and includes or excludes (depending on what he needs) information to fit his agenda of relativising and justifying the atrocities committed by the Nazis, exonerating Hitler and propagating the seeds of Holocaust denial. Irving’s recent work, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996), has been criticized for its misleading, even ridiculous conclusions, such as the downgrading of Auschwitz to Himmler’s "most brutal...slave labor camp" with the "highest mortality rate" (thus contending that the gas chambers are a myth) and that the Final Solution was masterminded by lesser Nazi leaders such as Goebbels without the knowledge of Hitler (thus the title of the book). Reporter Gitta Sereny states that Irving uses "selected quotes from Goebbels’s diaries, while carefully avoiding passages which show clearly that Goebbels was only informed by Hitler himself of the annihilation of the Jews many months after it had begun." So, in attempting to prove the innocence of the Führer he admires so much, Irving has sacrificed historical truth. Alan Bullock wrote in The New York Review of Books after the publication of Hitler’s War that "there is so great a volume of evidence against [Irving’s] view that it is astonishing anyone can seriously suggest it." In the National Review, historian John Lukacs wrote that Hitler’s War contained "hundreds of errors: wrong names, wrong dates, and...statements about events...that did not really take place. These errors, however, are not the result of inadequate research...They are the result of the dominant tendency of the author’s mind."

With the help of documented evidence and much exhaustive research by many historians, Eberhard Jäckel foremost among them, the faulty thesis and conclusions drawn by Irving will be exposed and discredited. The deception practiced by Irving in Hitler’s War can easily be taken for the truth--which can have dire consequences if we are not able to combat this kind of assault of memory. The following aphorism provides a poignant illustration of this danger:

The attempt to justify an evil deed has perhaps more pernicious consequences than the evil deed itself. The justification of a past crime is the planting and cultivation of future crimes. Indeed, the repetition of a crime is sometimes part of a device of justification: we do it again and again to convince ourselves and others that it is a common thing and not an enormity.

The Problem of the "Missing Order"

The fact that no document exists that expressly describes the implementation of the "Final Solution" does not provide proof that the Holocaust was a myth, as the deniers persist on. If one considers the process of history, it is evident that no rules or contracts are involved; it is not a financial transaction with receipts or vouchers. Many things that happen in the world are not written and recorded. These are very common sense examples that Jäckel puts forth. That no single document exists does not mean there was no understood, unwritten plan. The Final Solution was, as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust observes, "the culmination of a long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy." The destruction process was shaped gradually: it was borne of many thousands of directives. The ever-present lens through which the Nazis viewed Jews was anti-Semitism. Jews were seen as the enemy of Germany and had to be removed in any way possible. According to Daniel Goldhagen, this subconscious anti-Semitism provides the motivation for the extermination of the Jews. Hitler’s favorite metaphor for the Jews was that they were bacillus infesting Germany. The unchanging pattern of his anti-Semitism and his constant obsession with the "Jewish question" can be traced all the way back to a letter he wrote in 1919 stating the final goal must steadfastly remain the removal of the Jews altogether. Throughout the 1920’s, the "Jewish question" remained the pivotal question for his Party and would be solved "with well-known German thoroughness to the final consequence." He implemented his racial notions upon seizing power in 1933. Hitler also addresses the "Jewish question" in the second volume of Mein Kampf (1927): "No people can free itself from that fist [the Jew’s] other than by the sword...Such an event is bound to be a bloody encounter." And what was to happen if war was once again to besiege Europe? Hitler’s "prophecy", announced on January 30, 1939, tells of his ultimate goal, the meaning of which would only later become clear:

I shall once again be your prophet: if international Jewry...should manage once more to draw the peoples of the world into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of Jewry but rather the total destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.

In the summer of 1941, alongside preparations for invading Russia, large-scale mass-murder initiatives were broadly enacted against Jews. Also in the summer of the same year, Heydrich, acting on Hitler’s orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen to implement the "special tasks" of annihilation in Russia of Jews. Following the end of the war, two Nazi officials, Eichmann and Hoess, both related who issued the order to exterminate the Jews: In 1960, Eichmann, while awaiting trial in Israel, related that Heydrich had told him in August 1941 that "the Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews" and Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in 1946 that "In the summer of 1941...Himmler said to me, ‘The Führer has ordered the Final Solution to the Jewish question...I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose.’ "

Although not a written document, the Wannesee Conference on January 20, 1942 was convened to discuss and coordinate the implementation of the Final Solution. Eichmann later testified at his trial: "These gentlemen...were discussing the subject quite bluntly...they minced no words about it at all...they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination." Ten days after the conference, in a speech in Berlin, Hitler restated his "prophecy":

"The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews" and just over a year later, on February 24, once again: "This struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe."

Hitler Was Not Ignorant

The diaries of Goebbels and Himmler contain evidence that shows Hitler to have known about and even pioneered the plan to exterminate the Jews. Goebbels, who Irving attempts to place a large part of the responsibility for the Final Solution on, wrote on March 27, 1942 that "The Führer’s prophecy...is now beginning to become real in utterly horrendous dimensions...If we were not fighting them off, the Jews would destroy us." Also on the same day:

No other government or regime has been able to rouse itself sufficiently to tackle and solve this conundrum. Here too the Führer has shown himself to be the unflinching pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, one that fits the circumstances and is therefore unavoidable.

Hitler’s prophecy was, according to Goebbels, being carried out and it was coming directly from Hitler himself, the "unflinching pioneer and spokesman."

Contrary to Irving’s thesis, Himmler was entrusted with the responsibility of carrying out the Final Solution--the destruction of the European Jews--by Hitler. It is understandable that he regarded this task with pure horror, and even thought it impossible. In October of 1943, he said "that short sentence, ‘The Jews are to be destroyed’ is easily spoken. But for him who must carry it out, it requires the hardest and most difficult tasks possible." Even stronger evidence of Hitler’s involvement is found in Himmler’s writings on May 5, 1944:

...the Führer warned the Jews: "Should you once again incite the European peoples to war, it will not lead to the destruction of the German people but to the destruction of the Jews."...Perhaps you can feel with me how difficult it was to follow this soldierly order that had been given me and which I have fulfilled in obedience and good faith.

Who besides Hitler could have ordered that terrible task, that "soldierly order"? Between the two men stood no middleman. If Himmler really acted without Hitler’s will and knowledge, as Irving wants us to believe, why would he have referred to an order?

Jäckel has also dug up some self-incriminating statements made by Hitler himself. They lead only to one conclusion: that Hitler was the originator and of course fully informed of the plan to exterminate the Jews. Nor did he always cloak himself in secrecy. For instance, on December 1, 1941, he addressed his guests at dinner: "Many Jews are quite unaware of the destructive nature of their very existence. But whoever destroys life courts death, and that is exactly what is happening to them!" Not only at dinner parties, but also in his public addresses Hitler had the peculiar habit of mentioning the massacre of the Jews. He did so no less than five times in 1942. On January 1: "The Jew will not exterminate the European peoples, but will instead be the victim of his own assassination attempt." And on February 24: "...my prophecy will be fulfilled, namely that this war will result not in the annihilation of Aryan humanity, but in the extermination of the Jew." Hitler almost beats the subject to death and as Jäckel suggests, it seems as if he wanted to make his work manifest before history. Or perhaps he was letting his assistants-in-murder know that he, with his authority, was standing behind them and their every action.

Personal Testimonies and Irving’s Misuse of Them

In any legitimate history, the testimony of people closely connected to the subject in question would garner a good amount of respect for their truthfulness and reliability. But concerning David Irving, this is simply not the case. He draws confidently on the testimony of Hitler’s long-term personal servants as witnesses to Hitler’s ignorance of the murder of Jews. Historian Martin Broszat comments on this testimony in detail:

It is...simply incorrect when Irving, on page 327 of his book claims that ‘all surviving adjutants, secretaries and official stenographers had uniformly declared’ that in Hitler’s headquarters no word was ever spoken about the extermination of the Jews...

The real value of such ‘crown-witnesses’ in support of Irving’s thesis was shown by English reporter Gitta Sereny...she managed to locate and interview five of them. All of them declared--as was to be expected--that in their presence Hitler had not spoken of the extermination of the Jews, but that they could not imagine that he did not know about it. [my emphasis]

Broszat also dispels the notion that SS Colonel Karl Wolff, Himmler’s liaison to Hitler, was also ignorant of the murders. But the fact is that he toured Auschwitz with Himmler in 1942. In the 1964 Munich State Court case, he asserted his ignorance of the policy. But the court "refused to believe this, since it runs counter to the truth." So Irving based his findings on the records of the court testimony and accepts Wolff’s version as if it were a proven fact. Nowhere does he mention the contrary view of the court, even though he knows it.

Another tactic that Irving uses to cleanse the reputation of Hitler is the misrepresentation of information and testimony, especially from post-war trials such as Nuremberg. A particular example of this distortion concerns Himmler’s announcement to Otto Ohlendorf, chief of Einsatzgruppe D, in the summer of 1941, concerning the order to liquidate Jews at Nikolaev. Broszat illustrates how Irving alters the testimony of Ohlendorf at Nuremberg:

In late summer 1941 Himmler was in Nikolaev. He ordered the leaders and troops of the Einsatzkommando to fall in, and there and then he repeated the established ‘liquidation order...[saying] that it was given on his responsibility together with the Führer’s.’ Irving cites this last sentence on page 326 [of Hitler’s War], but does it in this way: ‘that he [Himmler] alone, in association with Hitler, was responsible.’

The word "alone" is pure Irving invention. Since I am unable to read German, nor do I have access to the original documents or speeches written by Nazi leaders, I am not able to decipher these kinds of delicate alterations that Irving makes, but many informed readers of Hitler’s War and other books have attacked Irving for his constant manipulations, distortions and falsifications. The example above is only one of the more revealing instances.

Hitler’s Counter-order: Three Interpretations

The so-called "counter-order" issued by Hitler is Irving’s trump card. He asserts that on November, 30, 1941 Hitler ordered that the Jews were not to be liquidated. At 1:30 p.m. from the Wolf’s Lair, Himmler passed this message on to Heydrich. Irving interprets this "order" from Himmler’s telephone notes of that day: "Judentransport aus Berlin keine Liquidierung." Which is: "Transport of Jews from Berlin. No liquidation." The faulty reasoning used by Irving here does not take an expert to counter it, notes Jäckel. From the order not to liquidate a certain transport of Jewish people, Irving concocts a universal order that Jews are henceforth not to be "liquidated." But actually the opposite is true:

If Hitler had not ordered the general destruction of the Jews, it would have made no sense for him to have forbidden it in a single case. That he did forbid it in this case would seem to be proof of the fact that a general order had been given and that in this case an exception was to be made. (emphasis added)

However, the certain transport referred to left Berlin on the 27th and upon arrival in Riga on the 30th were murdered anyway. Jäckel reasoned that Hitler’s order had come to late.

But is it possible that Jäckel was incorrect? Lucy Dawidowicz has come up with her own interpretation of the matter, drawing on additional lines in Himmler’s telephone notes. She provides evidence that no counter-order of Hitler’s existed at all, nor was there any intention of saving the Jewish people being transported to their deaths at Riga. She observes that Irving’s conclusion fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of the two lines in view of what actually happened. And to understand those two lines it is necessary to also read the first two lines of the phone conversation. These are: "Arrest Dr. Jekelius. Presumably Molotov’s son." And together with the second two lines: "Transport of Jews from Berlin. No liquidation." She explains that the last two lines now make sense, as follows:

Himmler called Heydrich to instruct him that a certain Dr. Jekelius, presumed to be the Soviet Foreign Minister’s son, was to be taken in custody by the security police. Jekelius could be located in the transport of Jews from Berlin...and unlike the rest of the transport, was not to be liquidated.

Perhaps Jäckel had assumed the first two lines were unrelated to the second two, as Irving did. Although he did believe that Hitler had forbidden the execution of this particular transport, Jäckel fervently objected to Irving’s ridiculous conclusion that Hitler wanted the mass murder of Jews stopped altogether. And even though their methods and information were different, Jäckel and Dawidowicz agree that Hitler could not and would not have ordered a stop to the extermination. They rightly believe that Hitler himself was the unrivaled architect of the Holocaust.

Over the last twenty years or so, there has been an appalling growth in efforts to revise Hitler’s ideology and reputation. The works of David Irving account for but a minute percentage of the swelling amount of Holocaust denial, ultra-right, and neo-Nazi literature throughout the world. But his voice and his word are extremely powerful and convincing. All who are concerned with upholding the values of truth and honest scholarship must vehemently oppose the rushing tide of denial which is aiming to wipe the Holocaust out of our collective memories. They want to erase it out of the history books. The words of Irving speak directly to this aim: The Holocaust "is something like a religion...The Intellectual Adventure is that we are reversing this entire trend within the space of one generation--that in a few years time no one will believe this particular legend anymore." It has become far too late to write the deniers off as deranged lunatics. They are not kidding around. The sinister intentions of deniers like Irving: the moral upgrading of the Third Reich and its leader, even suggesting their innocence in the most atrocious crime ever committed, make them too dangerous to ignore. Larger and larger sections of the public are falling prey to the outrageous anti-Semitic beliefs of the deniers. As of 1993, the Roper Organization announced that 22 per cent of the American adults it polled said that it seemed possible the Holocaust had never happened; an additional 12 per cent said they did not know if it was possible. This is frightening; the realization of Irving’s goal is almost a quarter of the way complete.

One explanation for this infestation may be the very way in which our own culture views history. Historical study, contemplation and discussion have become unpopular within our society. We have become unconcerned with the past and tradition and obsessed with the present and moreso, the future. Journalist Robert Fulford warns of the danger in this trend:

In this vacuum, when a large part of the population has lost any sense of history and how it is written, a bizarre thesis like Holocaust denial can flourish. Perhaps the most pressing and painful of the lessons forced upon us by Irving and the Holocaust deniers is that we need to renew our relationship with history. If we are not attentive to the past, if we carelessly forget it or regard it as only marginally important, then the past can become a playground for evil.