The Strange Case of David Irving

That he had a sneaking sympathy for fascism was obvious enough. But his work on the bombing of Dresden, on the inner functioning of the Churchill government and on the mentality of the Nazi generals was invaluable. He changed sides on the issue of the Hitler diaries, but his intervention was crucial to their exposure as a pro-Nazi fabrication. His knowledge of the German language was the envy of his rivals. His notorious flaunting of bad taste and his gallows humor were not likely to induce cardiac arrest in anyone like myself, who had seen many Oxford and Cambridge history dons when they were fighting drunk.

While helping to edit the New Statesman in 1981, I encouraged the American historian Kai Bird, now a distinguished student of the Cold War, to analyze Irving's work. Bird turned in a meticulous essay, which exposed Irving's obvious prejudice and incidentally trashed his least-known and worst book--a history of the 1956 Hungarian uprising that characterized the revolt as a rebellion of sturdy Magyar patriots against shifty Jewish Communists. Irving briefly threatened to sue and then thought better of it. In the early 1990s, he took part in a public debate with the extreme denier Robert Faurisson, at which he maintained that there was definite evidence of mass extermination at least by shooting (and gratuitously added that he thought the original Nazi plan to isolate all Jews in Madagascar was probably a good scheme). I noted this with interest--there's nothing like a good faction fight between extremists--but had no contact with him, direct or indirect, until he self-published in England his biography of Josef Goebbels in 1996.

This book is still on my shelf. I read it initially because St. Martin's Press in New York decided not to publish it, or rather, decided to breach its contract to do so. This action on its part was decisive, in that it convinced Irving that his enemies were succeeding in denying him a livelihood, and it determined him to sue someone as soon as he could. It was also important in that St. Martin's gave no reason of historical accuracy for its about-face. For the publisher, it was a simple question of avoiding unpleasantness ("Profiles in Prudence," as its senior editor Thomas Dunne put it to me ruefully).