David Irving

David John Cawdell Irving is an English author and self‑styled historian born on 24 March 1938 in Hutton, Essex, England. From a childhood marked by wartime scarcity and a turbulent family background, he developed an early fascination with German military history, which later shaped his controversial career. After brief studies in physics at Imperial College London he abandoned academia for a series of low‑paid jobs in West Germany and Spain, where he learned German and began researching the Allied bombing of Dresden. His first book, The Destruction of Dresden (1963), became an international bestseller and established his reputation for uncovering obscure archival material, even though later investigations revealed that many of his casualty figures were based on forged or unverified sources. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he produced a prolific output including The Mare’s Nest, Hitler’s War, and a biography of Hermann Göring, works that were initially praised for their meticulous detail but increasingly criticized for selective use of evidence and a revisionist narrative that downplayed Nazi atrocities. By the late 1970s Irving’s public statements began to reflect a more overt alignment with Holocaust denial, a shift cemented after the 1988 Ernst Zündel trial and his subsequent participation in the Institute for Historical Review. In 2000 a British libel trial brought by Deborah Lipstadt resulted in a landmark judgment that Irving had willfully distorted historical records, labeling him an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist. Despite the legal defeat, he continued to publish and lecture, maintaining a small but dedicated following among far‑right circles, while remaining barred from entering several European countries. His life illustrates the complex interplay between scholarly ambition, political ideology, and the ethical responsibilities of historical scholarship.