‘I’m a Holocaust sleuth’: Has David Irving changed his mind?

After being outed as anti-Semitic and racist, has David Irving changed his tune?

David Irving in 2010.

David Irving emails me: “I will be at the airport with my Rolls.” And there he is, in the small crowd at arrivals in Inverness, Scotland: black-belted overcoat, cord trousers that seem a little short. The once-handsome face looks crumpled, angry and anguished. He leads me out to the Rolls-Royce — an old, restored Silver Spur.

After a short drive through snow-covered fields we arrive at a big, brown classical house with a grand, curved Doric portico. There are, he says, 40 rooms; these are split, seemingly at random, between Irving and another tenant. Inside, there are antlers everywhere and an organ. The two occupiers are feuding about many things. Irving says this will eventually drive him out of this little Highland paradise. We struggle down a corridor lined with a hundred-plus cardboard boxes. “These,” says Irving grimly, “are from the trial.”

They are, in fact, why I am here. The trial in question happened in 2000 and there is the new movie about it, Denial. Irving lost the case catastrophically, the judge concluding “that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism”.

“He couldn’t do anything else,” says Irving of the judge. “If he had found for me, it would have been the end of his career. It was pressure of circumstance.”

Irving was ruined professionally and financially; costs of £2 million were awarded against him and he was bankrupted. Yet he remains ­defiant and convinced that, when he self-publishes his memoir in, perhaps, three years, he will be vindicated. “Straight away, before you get to it,” he says urgently: “Am I a Holocaust denier? The answer is: no, I am not a Holocaust denier … I’m a Holocaust sleuth and I’m looking outside the box.

“How can you call someone a Holocaust denier who every year takes 25 or 30 international tourists to the extermination sites — Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek — which I do? And if you have that background, they can’t go round saying these ridiculous things.”

Irving says he was never a denier, though there seems copious evidence that he was. Now he believes at least four million and possibly six million Jewish people died, many of disease, though unquestionably most were murdered. He does not believe many died at Auschwitz, however. The current official figure is about 1.1 million. “Auschwitz has been grossly inflated. They use it now because it has an airport nearby and it’s got hotels everywhere and there’s a McDonald’s and a hot dog stand actually in the parking lot, which makes it very agreeable for tourists and visitors. It’s highly commercialised in the sense that Disneyland is commercialised.” This is an odd complaint since he arranges tourist trips to death camps.

He suggests the rarity of Heinrich Himmler’s visits to Auschwitz shows it was unimportant. This is contradictory because he also says the full extent of the Holocaust was kept from Himmler by ­Reinhard Heydrich, who everybody agrees was the prime architect of the program. This leads to his central and most improbable belief: that Hitler knew nothing of the Final Solution because ­Heydrich also kept it from him. “Hitler’s actions were in favour of the Jews,” Irving says. “He did what he could to protect the Jews against Heinrich Himmler. I don’t think Hitler was anti-Semitic.”

So does Irving admire Hitler? He has certainly expressed admiration in the past. “That’s neither here nor there. As a biographer you can’t admire somebody or hate them. You have to have a ­completely dispassionate view.”

In Denial: Timothy Spall as David Irving.

Finding the Führer innocent on the charge of anti-Semitism leads to his next improbable belief: that there was moral equivalence between the allies and Nazi Germany. The bombing of Dresden and ­Hiroshima, he suggests, were our versions of the Holocaust. He says 135,000 people died in the allied raid on Dresden in February 1945. The ­official estimate is about 25,000.

“I find it difficult to understand [the difference between] the evilness of killing people because of their religion or race and burning them alive when they happen to be German on the wrong side of the frontier,” he says.

But, I point out, the Germans bombed civilian targets in Britain. “Where? Coventry — 390 people?” he replies. “And Coventry was a military target; it had factories around it.”

But German expansionism started the war. “That’s a political characteristic, a political event. There’s no question the Germans wanted to get back what they had lost, and they found a man who was capable of doing it.”

They hadn’t lost France, I say.

They lost a large chunk of France — Alsace-Lorraine.”

That’s a very small chunk.

“But they wanted to give the rest back,” he says, a reference to his belief that the Nazis would eventually have returned France to the French.

The invasion of Poland, which brought ­Britain into the war, he dismisses as an aspect of Hitler’s desire for lands in the east, implying it was the fault of the Poles themselves. And the catastrophic invasion of Russia was launched because Russia was about to mount an assault on Germany. And so on.

The Jewish people are the primary source of Irving’s anger. He says: “They have spent the last 50 years trying to destroy me.” This will be a chillingly familiar idea to anybody who knows about the Nazis: I don’t like the Jews, but that’s their fault.

Sometimes he evokes “the Jews” directly, sometimes with a sort of absurd coyness. I ask him why he is always in the midst of a storm of controversy. “Big money. I underestimated the effect of money. They decided I was a threat to their existence.”

Who?

“The people who put up big money.”

The Jews?

“I’m not going to say it.”

Of the film Denial, he says: “It hasn’t done well in America. It’s the kind of film they don’t care whether it makes money or not. The people behind it have money and it’s going to serve their cause and they don’t care who gets thrown out of the business in the process. Eventually, the people who made the film, even the actors and actresses involved, will be exposed for what they’ve done.”

The film, Irving says, is “full of lies” — though he also says he has only seen the trailer. He adds that he wishes Steven Spielberg, the Jewish director of Schindler’s List, had made it. Noting my amazement, he says: “Well, he would have cut me to pieces but at least it would have been a good film.”

Irving makes money by self-publishing and selling his books and concentration-camp tours via his website. He also has Christmas appeals to which sympathetic rich Americans contribute. He is finishing a book on Himmler and his multi-­volume biography of Churchill; then he promises the memoirs. His struggles for restored respectability will continue, he says, until “there’s an amber light and then a red” — his euphemism for death.

It is one of the strangest interviews I have ever done, by turns creepy, absurd and pathetic. At moments I feel pity. Afterwards, however, I discover a tab on his website I had not noticed: “David Irving’s Daily Newswatch on Freedom of Speech and Human Rights”. This turns out to be a toxic cauldron of Jew-baiting, probably for his American revisionist audience and donors. Pity evaporates. My mother was a Jew. That makes me a Jew. So, Mr Irving, on behalf of my people, f. k you and the Rolls you rode in on.

© The Sunday Times