#gonegrill

thank u my friend

i wanna hear the hot take!

David Irving was at one point a respected semi-mainstream historian. As an investigative historian I admire him and he goes the extra mile when other historians don’t. For example, he would approach the widows of famous Nazis and they would give him their husband’s personal diaries, something which no historian had ever read before (or ever thought to ask for). He was also the first person the Russian government allowed to have access to the diary of Joseph Goebbels in the KGB archives. Irving’s books provide some amazing first hand details of life under the Third Reich.

Nevertheless he made himself somewhat controversial by his position that Adolf Hitler was “out of the loop.” He thought individuals like Himmler and Heydrich conducted killing operations without Hitler’s knowledge, telling Hitler that jews were merely passing through the Polish camps until they were deported further east. This is what the jews were told too of course, they were told they were being deported east to start a new life and most of them had no inkling of what was coming. Irving believed that Hitler was a force for moderation within the Nazi government and would never have condoned killing of jews if he was aware of it. For example, Irving claims that Goebbels instigated Kristallnacht without Hitler’s consent and Hitler reprimanded him when he found out about it. Here you can see the beginnings of Irving’s problem: that he admired Adolf Hitler.

David Irving “went off the deep end” when he became convinced by Ernst Zündel than Auschwitz was not a death camp. This pretty much marked the end of his career as a mainstream historian. There are many frauds and exaggerations surrounding the holocaust: inflated death statistics, "soap and lampshades”, electric floors, the list goes on. As a Germanophile Irving was particularly keen to point that stuff out. His view was the the “gas chambers at Auschwitz” was just another one of those frauds.

For reasons I don’t fully understand Auschwitz plays a central role in the mainstream holocaust narrative. This is despite the fact that (it seems to me) the strongest evidence for the holocaust is non-Auschwitz stuff. All the documentary evidence I’ve seen related to the Reinhardt death camps or the einsatzgruppen (”death squads”). So by challenging the Auschwitz-gas chamber narrative it appeared to the general public that Irving was questioning the whole basis for the holocaust, which he really wasn’t. On the question of Auschwitz the Jewish journalist David Cole has pretty much the exact same view as Irving. As an aside, you should read David Cole’s exchange with Ron Unz, another Jew and a true bona fide “holocaust denier.”

If that’s so why does Irving not take pains to clarify this? My theory is that Irving wants to be a holocaust denier and so encourages the confusion. Irving is a germanophile, no doubt about that. He believes the idea of “the holocaust” is a terrible curse placed on the german people, a dark cloud of eternal guilt and shame and he wants to rebuild their pride and self-confidence. For this reason Irving never uses the term “the holocaust.” He also relentlessly criticises the behaviour of the allies, such as the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, allying with the Soviet Union, and the Nuremberg “show trials.” These criticisms are fair in my opinion.

He is also an anti-semite. He believes that the Nazis got into power because of the reaction of the german people to the misbehaviour of Jews, or probably he would say, a significant but small minority of jews. The germans had legitimate grievances. Irving has said “jews never ask ‘why us? why are we always the ones targeted?’” He goes on to say that he is the “best friend” of the jews because unless they wake up to their own misbehaviour they will always face an endless cycle of hostility and pogroms from gentiles. His attitude towards jews is expressed in his attitude to the holocaust. He believes that after the “tragedy” that the Nazis inflicted on them, Jews can’t resist embellishing and lying about what happened with lurid and gruesome stories and inflated death statistics.