Great is this truth.(Critical Essay)

An underworld exists of people who believe that we are deceived about the nature of much recent history in general and the Second World War in particular. To them, Hitler was a great man and Churchill was evil. To bypass the objection that Hitler launched not only war but also mass murder on a continental scale, these people have to deny that there ever was a Holocaust, that nothing much happened to the Jews in the war, or if it did then they deserved it and more. They sec themselves as "revisionists," which is a fancy way of saying that they are defying the usual processes of fact-finding and reasoning whereby the rest of us know our history.

Plenty of academics and critics in other fields today argue that there is no such thing as truth, and every assertion of objective knowledge is therefore in need of deconstruction. It follows that there are no moral absolutes or intellectual standards. That is the ride which carries within it these "revisionists" and Holocaust deniers. Their cause of postwar Nazism and anti-Semitism can only be pursued through their specific variety of deconstruction, involving the denial of some facts and the invention of others. So they have spawned a variety of institutions and associations, such as the misleadingly named Institute for Historical Review in California. The common purpose is to degrade everybody else's facts as prejudices and to glorify their own prejudices as facts.

In this underworld, David Irving has long been an acknowledged star, earning himself a wide reputation as "controversial," that euphemism for anything and everything which goes against common sense, reason, and humanity. He is familiar with German, has read in the archives, interviewed a good many Nazis, and written some thirty books. His admiration for Hitler and Nazism, his Jew-baiting, his detestation of Churchill have left behind him a persistent trail of outrage. Nobody has tried harder or with more success to deconstruct facts on these topics and to replace them with his personal animosities and prejudices. He has argued that the British bombing of Dresden in 1945 was a war crime comparable to any committed by the Germans. He libelled a British naval officer about his conduct during an Atlantic convoy (and had to pay damages). He accused Churchill of ordering the destruction of an aircraft flying the Polish General Sikorski home from Gibraltar in 1943 (with the death of all on board, including Victor Cazalet, a close friend of Churchill's and a fellow Conservative Member of Parliament). The Hungarian uprising of 1956 was in his view a Jewish conspiracy, and as such the Soviets were right to suppress it.

Hitler, Irving has maintained, was neither aware of the Holocaust until about 1943, nor responsible for it. If anyone, Goebbels was to blame. Irving concedes that rogue S.S. men killed some Jews, but the majority had died of disease and starvation. To a woman who told him to his face that her grandparents had died in Auschwitz, he replied, "You can be comforted in the knowledge that they most likely died of typhus, like Anne Frank." In his opinion, Auschwitz had no gas chambers, there was no systematic mass murder, and the Jews themselves put about this talc in order to receive financial compensation to which they had no right. To an audience of sympathetic listeners in Canada in 1990, he hit upon the acronym ASSHOLS, standing for "The Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars."

Confronted with his work, writers who ought to have known better have bent over backwards to find merit in it. In tones of dismay, Richard J. Evans, in his new book, Lying About Hitler,(1) quotes Michael Howard, formerly Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, declaring that Irving was "at his best as a professional historian demanding documentary proof for popularly-held beliefs"--the very opposite of Irving's procedure. Or again Gordon A. Craig, who asserted that Irving "knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in the field," following this up with the preposterous (and condescending) sentence, "It is always difficult for the non-historian to remember that there is nothing absolute about historical truth." Another prolific writer on military affairs, John Keegan, believes that Irving has "many of the qualifies of the most creative historians." If these men were indeed familiar with Irving's sources, plainly none of them had taken the trouble to verify Irving's use or abuse of them. Slapdash opinions of this kind reflect the decline of standards in historiography and book reviewing.

Honorable exceptions of course exist. The authoritative Martin Broszat showed how Irving had manipulated documents to build a case. Peter Hoffmann, no less authoritative an historian, called him "a great obfuscator." Wolfgang Benz dismissed such new evidence as Irving uncovered as coming from "the perspective of the keyhole." In the United States, John Lukacs pointed out the unreliability of Irving's documentation, and in a long review Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., concluded that Irving's research was "pretentious twaddle."

There the matter might have rested, with Irving always "controversial," if Deborah Lipstadt had not published in 1993 her book Denying the Holocaust. Exposing the pullulating underworld of Hitler admirers and anti-Semites, she singled out Irving as one of the leading falsifiers of the history of the Nazis. His real political agenda was clearly to exonerate Hitler and Nazism, and denial of the Holocaust was one of the chief means to that end. Irving duly sued for libel, and the case came to court in 2000 in London.