On David Irving's book Hitler's War

by P. D.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - fall 2001)

Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich of Germany carried out horrific acts in their attempts to commit genocide on the European Jewish community during World War II. Germany first invaded Poland in September of 1939. This was not only the first step taken in World War II, but was also the beginning of a comprehensive plan to concentrate and eventually annihilate European Jewry. Germany began to expand its influence throughout Poland to the east, into the Soviet Union, and moved south into the rest of Europe. During this movement the German army began rounding up the Jews and placing them in camps to await their eventual death. Adolph Hitler killed 2/3 of the Jews living in Europe, during the attempted genocide, nearly six million total.

Following World War II many revisionists have tried to manipulate the events that occurred and change the facts to portray their idea of what happened during the Holocaust. In this paper I will explain the impact David Irving has had on the depiction of World War II and its main players, Hitler and Germany. I will show how in Irving’s book, Hitler’s War, Irving portrays Hitler as being a less powerful and influential leader than he is depicted to be in history books. Irving places the blame for the destruction of the Jews on Hitler’s two top advisors, therefore making Hitler not responsible for the genocide. Irving’s own political views are shown in this book and offer foreshadowing for the rest of his career in Holocaust Denial. I will also show the growth Irving has made throughout his career both as a believer and an activists for the Holocaust Denial. I will be using various websites to help gain factual knowledge of the Holocaust, along with other web-sites that David Irving is involved with to find information about his own career in Holocaust Denial. David Irving has tried to change the events and facts of World War II and the Holocaust to manipulate the public and depict his own anti-Semitic viewpoint to the people of the world. I will show how his writings and influence have badly misconstrued the events of the Holocaust and the way he manipulates information for his own benefit in his portrayal of Adolph Hitler. The main argument that I will be examining in this paper is David Irving’s portrayal of Adolph Hitler. Irving argues in his book that Hitler was not responsible for the Final Solution, which was to exterminate the Jews. Irving takes the blame from Hitler and shifts the blame to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. According to Irving, in Hitler’s War, Himmler, "on November 30, 1941 was summoned to the Wolf’s Lair for a secret conference with Hitler, at which fate of Berlin’s Jews was clearly raised. At 1:30 P.M. Himmler was obliged to telephone from Hitler’s bunker to Heydrich the explicit order that Jews were not to be liquidated." Heydrich then took it upon himself, according to Irving, to let the extermination plan continue.

In Hitler’s War, Irving discussed the events that took place before the deportment of the Jews in Poland. Irving contends that Hitler was not responsible for the fate of the Jews, simply the deportment of them. He puts the blame on Himmler. "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 Russian Jews and to European Jews after their arrival in "the east" rested with Himmler, Heydrich, and the local authorities there." David Irving uses Hitler’s War, to depict Adolph Hitler as a weak leader who was taken advantage of by his advisors. Irving stated he considers Hitler one of Germany’s weakest leader of the 20th century. Irving portrays Hitler as a, "realistic, fair-minded leader, who strove to restore Germany’s political status as a dominant power in Europe. As a solution to Germany’s rapid population growth, he sought to acquire new territories in the East, a goal also motivated by a genuine fear of Bolshevist expansion and by a build a connection between the east and the west." Well known Historian Martin Broszat states Irving’s portrayal of Hitler took, "the strategy of de-domonization." Broszat has wrote that Hitler was a fanatic dictator.

Irving is also well known for playing the numbers game. At Auschwitz between one million and one million five hundred thousand Jews were killed. Irving claims that those one million people could not have died there due to cremation. In a radio interview on November 8, 1996, Irving claims, "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." David Irving began his career, as a writer not focused on denying the Holocaust. It was not until ten years after his release of Hitler’s War that Irving began to be a denier. In fact in Hitler’s War, Irving refers to the fact that Jews were exterminated by firing squads, mobile gas trucks, and finally by way of death camps. Ten years later he rescinded these early beliefs when he found out about The Leuchter Papers. The Leuchter Papers, were a report by Fred Leuchter about the extermination camps at Auschwitz. Leuchter stated in these papers that he collected "forensic samples" for chemical analysis. He claimed that the facilities in these camps were not capable of mass annihilation. After reading Leuchter’s report, Irving had now been able to figure out, in his mind, what had really happened during World War II. Irving now developed a thesis that concluded his reasoning why there was an absence of written proof that Hitler had ever given written orders to exterminate European Jewry. Irving then re-released Hitler’s War, after taking out all references to the extermination camps. He then went out publicly to denounce the fact that the gas chambers every existed at Auschwitz and that no more than one million Jews died during the events of World War II. In 1992 he was convicted of saying this by a Munich court.

Because Irving now believes that the gas chambers did not exist, he drew further conclusions into the role of Himmler and Heydrich and their role in the execution of the Jews in the East. Irving was able to say Himmler and Heydrich were solely responsible for the fate of the Jews in the East. He insists that Himmler and Heydrich went through with the extermination plans on their own accord. Irving states, "Himmler’s own papers reveal how he pulled the wool over Hitler’s eyes." In 1992 Irving presented the same thesis at the eleventh conference of the Institute for Historical Review. In the year prior to this, Irving had acquired Adolf Eichmann’s monologues on the events of World War II. Irving read the monologue and claimed, "the Eichmann memoirs were an important confirmation of the true distinction that should be made between the "legend of the gas chambers" and "certain My-Lai-type atrocities" by German troops, mainly in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union… Moreover, for Eichmann, claimed Irving, the words "Final Solution" meant only the evacuation of European Jews to Madagascar, "where they couldn’t bother any of their neighbors and where none of their neighbors could bother them." Irving then went on to theorize that this would have been an ideal solution to the world tragedy.

Another one of Irving’s claims is that Germany did not want to start war with Britain, rather he wanted to make an accord for peace with Winston Churchill. Once Churchill denied Hitler’s plan for peace, he devoted all of his time and energy into the preparation of his troops into defeating Britain.

A major argument that Irving addresses is about the fact that Hitler and the German people acted harshly against the Jews because they felt the Jews were a major threat to them. Hitler felt that the Jews were going to be one of Germany’s fiercest enemies in World War II. In September 1939 Hitler was about to engage Germany in war. "Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the President of the Jewish Agency, had written to Neville Chamberlain promising explicitly that all Jews everywhere stood by him and would fight on the side of the democracies against Nazi Germany. The Times published Weizmann’s letter on September 6, and Hitler no doubt considered it an unorthodox Jewish declaration of war." Hitler took this threat seriously and with his already anti-Semitic views, used this as further evidence that the Jews were a major enemy. This threat by the Jews led Hitler to organize the deportation of the Jews.

Although there was never an actual written document referring to the "Final Solution", it does not mean that there was not a plan to exterminate the Jews. Irving uses the fact that there was no document to mislead his followers and the public into believing the Holocaust was a hoax. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust states, "it was the culmination of a long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy." It was a slow process that began to grow slowly as Hitler and the Nazi party took over Germany. The "Final Solution" took years to form and it was shaped gradually by many thousands of directives. Himmler, Heydrich, and Hitler in fact carried out the final goal of annihilation. As early as 1919, Hitler had the goal of the removal of all Jews from Europe. When Hitler finally took over in 1933, he quickly implemented measures to exclude all Jews from German Society. In 1939 Hitler was concerned of a revolution by the Jews and warned, "The result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." After invading Poland, Heydrich had the Einsatzgruppen round up all the Jews and concentrate them into the ghettos. This tactic was used so it would be easier for the German troops to annihilate the Jews without wasting ammunition and troops.

As Germany moved deeper into Soviet territory, "Heydrich, acting on Hitler’s orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen to implement the "special tasks" of annihilation in the Soviet Union of the Jews and Soviet commissars." As the Germans got further into the war and as time went on the practice of annihilation continued to be more prevalent. In the summer of 1941, wrote the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, "and Himmler said to me, "The Fuhrer has ordered the Final Solution to the Jewish Question… I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose." As the war continued talk about the "Final Solution" began to be discussed more often. An important conference discussing the "Final Solution" was held at Wannsee. In that conference exact words were exchanged about what was going to happen to the Jews. The conference was held to plan the details of how the "Final Solution" was going to implemented and to coordinate the details of the plan. Adolf Eichmann testified about the events of the conference. "These gentlemen… were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language that I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it all… they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination." Irving’s claim that the gas chambers at Auschwitz did not exist is unfounded and false. Starting in September of 1941 the gas chambers opened at Belzec, Lublin, Solibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz. The gassing took place for over three years until November 1944. At its peak, Auschwitz would kill up to about 20,000 Jews a day. They would enter the 225 square foot chamber in-groups of 700 to 800. By the end of 1943 and the early part of 1944 nearly two-thirds of the extermination process took place. There has been a controversy over the number of deaths that actually took place at Auschwitz in the last decade. The controversy was caused because the Soviets originally put up a memorial that said over four million Jews dies there, then in 1991 the memorial was changed to read one million. The Soviets made the first calculations and then was re-calculated by western historians. All in all, nearly six million Jews lost their lives during the Holocaust. Holocaust Deniers engage in the numbers game as a strategy to misguide the reader. David Irving is not an exception. He claimed that six million Jews are too high of a number to have lost their lives in the Holocaust. At an International Military Tribunal two SS officers testified that around six million Jews lost their lives. "Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of rounding up the Jews and transporting them to labour and death camps, confirmed the figure at his Jerusalem trial in 1961." Many historians have tried to calculate the number, and most have exceeded the five million mark, some as high as seven million.

At a different International Military Tribunal, in 1947, commandant Rudolf Hoess states, "I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated by gassing and burning and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about three million. This figure represents about 70-80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used as slave labour in the concentration cap industries…" Hoess’s testimony only covers what took place at Auschwitz. There were still five other death camps in Poland were nearly two million more Jews were exterminated. David Irving’s claim the Nazi party felt the Jews were going to be a difficult enemy in the war, consequently leading the Germans to deport all Jews, does not explain the events taking place in Germany prior to the war. As soon as Hitler took over in 1933 he set up ways of keeping the Jews out of German society. The Jews were forced to live in their own communities and were not able to hold normal jobs. The Jews became socially dead in Germany. In Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen described the policies the German people enacted upon the Jews. The Germans had two goals in mind when dealing with the Jews. "1. To turn the Jews into "socially dead" beings- beings that were violently dominated, natally alienated, and generally dishonored- and, once they were, to treat them as such. 2. To remove the Jews as thoroughly and permanently from social and, as far as possible, from physical contact with German people, and thereby to neutralize them as a factor in German life." German people, starting at the top of society, went out of their way to make Jews lives miserable. The Jews were so weak by the time the war started; they were not a formable enemy to the Germans. Hitler used the letter written to Chamberlain as an excuse to do what he had always wanted to do, exterminate the Jews. The uprising of the Jews was not a real possibility in Germany at that time. With the majority of social and political power taken away from the Jews, they were not going to be able to present a strong opposition to Hitler and the rest of the Nazi Party. David Irving and other Holocaust Deniers ideas stem from the Nazi policy of trying to disguise what they were doing. The Holocaust Deniers take facts and twist them to portray an understanding of the situation to their followers and to the public. The reasons for the deniers to re-examine the Holocaust are simple. Irving and the other deniers base a strong anti-Semitic feeling as the root of all their works. David Irving pretends to be a historian interested in uncovering the past. Irving, "by pretending to engage in serious research, quoting seemingly authoritative sources, and by flaunting an occasional document or statistic, the Holocaust Deniers hope to persuade their audience of the authenticity of their scholarship." Irving hopes to manipulate the minds of people enough so that he will be considered mainstream, which in turn will influence more people. David Irving encompasses a strong anti-Semitic view, which he conveys freely in his research and to the public. His shameful attempt to cover up one of the most horrific tragedies in history is an ongoing effort. He now has his own web-site and newsletter promoting his hatred for Jews. All of his arguments and the other Holocaust Deniers arguments are unfounded and rooted in hatred. They are overlooking the larger picture of what really happened. By manipulating the data and making assumptions they are disregarding the number of lives lost during the Holocaust. "To anyone with any sense, it is obvious that the exact number dead is not the issue. The ruthless, pointless extermination of even one person is as reprehensible as the murder of one million or six million."

Bibliography

1. www.ushmm.org

2. www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/irving.html

3. www.holocaust-history.org/pamphlets/irving/pamphlets.shtml

4. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Volume 2

5. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York.    Vintage Books, 1997

6. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York, 1985

7. Holocaust. Jerusalem. Keter Books, 1974

8. Holocaust Denial: Bigotry in the Guise of Scholarship. A Simon    Wiesenthal Center Report, 1994

9. Irving, David. Hitler’s War. New York. The Viking Press, 1977

10. Irving, David. Journal of Historical Review. March/April 1993

11. Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust. New York, London, Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Penguin Books, 1993

12. O’Keefe, Theodore J. "Irving on Churchill". Journal of Historical Review    4. Winter 1986

13. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study.    Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 1982

14. Times. May 16 1992