“David Irving presents a wealth of hitherto suppressed information, that shows a shockingly unfamiliar portrait of the great statesman, Churchill. Readers will discover a power-hungry leader who prolonged the war to advance his own career, and much more to astonish one and all. “CONTROVERSIAL.
In a review of Irving’s 1988 book Churchill’s War, David Cannadine criticised Irving’s “double standard on evidence”, accusing Irving of “demanding absolute documentary proof to convict the Germans (as when he sought to show that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust), while relying on circumstantial evidence to condemn the British (as in his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden)”. Irving was once highly regarded for his expert knowledge of German military archives.
Much of his scholarship was disputed by historians to the point that his standing as a historian was challenged from his earliest publications.Contentious in large part for advancing interpretations of the war considered favourable to the German side and for association with far-right groups that advanced these views, by 1988 he began advocating the view that the Holocaust did not take place as a systematic and deliberate genocide, and quickly grew to be one of the most prominent advocates of Holocaust denial, costing him what scholarly reputation he had outside those circles.
A marked change in Irving’s reputation can be seen in the surveys of the historiography of the Third Reich produced by Ian Kershaw.
In the first edition of Kershaw’s book The Nazi Dictatorshi (1985), Irving was called a “maverick” historian working outside of the mainstream of the historical profession. By the time of the fourth edition of The Nazi Dictatorship in 2000, Irving was described only as a historical writer who had in the 1970s engaged in “provocations” intended to provide an “exculpation of Hitler’s role in the Final Solution”.
First Edition thus, pp. 666 illusts #0419/ 050325 SCARCE