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Defense Documents


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(e) Conclusion

1. Irving's claim that the 1991 edition of Hitler's War and the 1989 biography of Göring indicate that he is not a Holocaust denier is not credible when the Index references he cites in support of this contention are actually consulted. Both books give an account of Nazi policies and actions towards the Jews during the Second World War that is perfectly compatible with the central tenets of Holocaust denial as this is normally understood by historians. In his reply to Lipstadt's defence, Irving refers to two further books authored by himself Von Guernica bis Vietnam and The Trail of the Fox, as evidence that he is not a Holocaust denier.Von Guernica bis Vietnam, however, was published in 1982, and is no evidence of Irving's recent views, which, as we have seen, differ markedly on these issues from the views which he expressed in the 1977 edition of Hitler's War and which (there is every reason to believe) he still held in the early 1980s. The same is true of his book on Rommel, The Trail of the Fox, which was also published in 1977. An examination of Irving's recent writings and speeches, since his self-confessed change of mind towards the end of the 1980s, demonstrates that his portrayal of equivalences between the Nazi extermination of the Jews and the Allied bombing raids on Germany is very different from what his reference to these two books would lead one to suspect. These equivalences as claimed by Irving will be examined in more detail below.
2. None of the writings and publications cited in Irving's defence against Lipstadt's charge that he is a Holocaust denier thus stands up to close examination. Lipstadt's book is quite clear that Irving had been 'converted' to Holocaust denial during the Zündel trial in 1988, and it is irrelevant to cite work published by, or statements made by, Irving on this subject before that point, since Lipstadt stated unequivocally that 'prior to participating in Zündel's trial, Irving...had never denied the annihilation of the Jews.' 22
3. In August 1988 Irving confessed that his thesis that Hitler knew nothing about the extermination of the Jews 'was a kind of half-way house in my conversion'.23 Already in the mid-1980s, as this Report will show, Irving was refusing to be definite or explicit about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. In 1983, the 'mole' Ray Hill, who had infiltrated the far-right scene in Britain with a view to exposing its beliefs and ramifications, had a private discussion with Irving in the latter's flat. Believing that Hill, who by that time had achieved a leading position in the extreme right-wing British National Party, was sympathetic to his view, Irving told him that the figure of six million Jews killed by the Nazis was 'ridiculous'. 'There may have been a million or so', he said. If it had been   admitted that only about one million Jews had died in the Holocaust, then the whole affair would have begun to fade from the memory of the world just as the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915 had done. But the Holocaust issue had to be kept alive to ensure money and influence for the state of Israel. If this was so, Hill asked, why hadn't Irving exposed the six million figure as a lie? 'The time still isn't right', Irving said.24 Five years later, at the Zündel trial in Canada, it clearly was.


22. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, pp. 162, 179.
23. Audiocassette 99: Irving in Toronto, August 1988, 247-248.
24. Ray Hill, with Andrew Bell, The Other Face of Terror. Inside Europe's Neo-Nazi Network (London, 1988), pp. 244-46.
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