David Irving

His works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it. Though Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes in World War II (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were never taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents. Irving marginalised himself from the mainstream of the study of history in the 1970s when he began to claim that Hitler had neither ordered the extermination of the Jews nor known about the Holocaust. He went even further in 1988 when based on his reading of the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, he began to openly espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving's reputation as a historian was discredited in 1996 when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, he was proven to have deliberately misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.