# Talk:David Irving


### David Irving
The sources provided for the discredited comment in the lead are rather lacking. One is a blurb from a website for a PBS documentary 20 years ago, an awful source. Another is from a book published by journalist Peter Wyden, who doesn't have credentials as a historians. Then the comment by Graham Long refers to Irving being "discredited" but does not state he has been "discredited by historians", so this is SYNTH. 
I think this comment should be removed until there's actual evidence in the form of statements by multiple historians (or polling data for historians) proving it. JDiala (talk) 07:56, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

This is an impressive attempt at barrel-bottom-scraping.  Taking everything together, the sources are more than adequate.  If you feel a need to reinforce it, perhaps you could explore some of the >3000 sources potentially useful for this purpose: [1].  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 09:03, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
The sources in that link do not justify the claim. JDiala (talk) 08:49, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Please, stop @JDiala. Our fellow @Nomoskedasticity made a serious and useful suggestion for your. You can look at Denial (2016 film) too. After this, you need provide some WP:RSs to support your claims. If you don't like the sources here, you can notify WP:RSN. WP:NOTDUMB. You can learn a lot if you take some time to navigate in archives of this discussion. Ixocactus (talk) 18:39, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
This is a bizarre personal attack. Material needs to be properly sourced. The onus is on those wanting to include material to properly explain why their source supports their claim. It just seems odd to me that for such a definitive statement being made, editors have had difficulty finding actual historians calling him discredited. I should also note (for utmost clarity) that I am not a supporter of Irving or his views. However, I do take the integrity of the project seriously, especially for BLP articles. JDiala (talk) 23:37, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Try Evans, Richard J. (2002). Telling Lies About Hitler. Verso. p. 271.-- Toddy1 (talk) 13:58, 25 May 2025 (UTC)

Change "In his works, he falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it.[2]" to [blank]. 
This citation is unfounded. Page 101 and 102 of the cited text (ISBN 046502152) are as follows: 
101
used the word liquidate was reason enough to surmise that
Hitler’s order
used Mauthausen and hostage to reassert the prescribed phraseology.lO’
As for Mauthausen, if Hitler did indeed mean what he said when he
ordered the Roman Jews to be sent
there, he was surely aware that it
was
perhaps the deadliest of all concentration camps. In January 1941 the
head of the Reich Security Service SS-Obergruppenfulzrer Reinhard
Heydrich divided the concentration camps into three grades to deter-
mine conditions
of detention and
work in each.lo2 Grade 111 was
intended to deal with the worst category of prisoner, and was reserved
solely for Mauthausen. The mortality rate, especially for Jews, was terri-
ble. Deportation to Mauthausen was effectively a death sentence, often
by forced labor in the quarries or in camp constru~tion.’~~
Thus Hitler’s intervention was not one that ‘mitigated’ the lot of the
Jews of Rome. On the contrary, it counteracted a concerted
local attempt
to save them and condemned them to extermination. Hitler’s order was
not a revision of Himmler’s, but a forceful reaffirmation of it. Hitler surely
knew that for the Jews to be deported
from Italy ‘as hostages’ was their
death warrant, whether it
was to Mauthausen or whether this was simply
a euphemistic deception on
his part. I could
not avoid the conclusion that
in this instance, too, Irving had manipulated and falsified the documen-
tation. He suppressed material that he knew ran against his case, in order
to support an untenable conclusion which was in fact the exact opposite
of what the documents indicated.
VI I
After this lengthy examination of Irving’s ‘chain of documents,’ I had to conclude that Irving consistently and repeatedly manipulated the histor-ical evidence in order to give the impression that it supported his view that Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews, or, if he did, opposed it. Irving’s method of working with documents had been noted
by previous investigators, who had trodden the same path through the
obscure undergrowth of his footnote references. Thus, for example, Irv-
ing’s use in Hitler’s War of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s
Nuremberg prison notes to support the thesis that Hitler
knew nothing
.
102
LYING ABOUT HITLER
of the ‘Final Solution’ had already been exposed as a falsification in the
197Os.lo4 In a footnote on page 851 of the 1977 edition of Hider’s War,
Irving had reported:
Writing a confidential study on Hitler in his Nuremberg prison cell, Ribbentrop also exonerated him wholly. “How things came to the destruction of the Jews, I just don’t know. As to whether Himmler began it, or Hitler put up with it, I don’t know. But that he ordered it I refuse to believe, because such an act would be wholly incom-patible with the picture I always had of him.”
The journalists Gitta Sereny and Lewis Chester had tracked down
this reference for a critical assessment
of Irving’s book in 1977. The orig-
inal document in the Bavarian State Archives contained an additional
sentence, not included by Irving: “On the other hand, judging from his
(i,e., Hitler’s) Last Will, one must suppose that he at least knew about it,
if, in his fanaticism against the Jews, he didn’t also order it.” When con-
fronted with the omission, Irving had said that the sentence concerned
was “irrelevant” to the logic of his argument and that he did not “want to
confuse the reader.”lo5
Following the appearance of the article by Chester and Sereny, Irv-
ing had written to the editor
of The Sunday Times on 14 September 1977
claiming: “The passage from Ribbentrop’s statement which I omitted is
totally irrelevant to my claim that u p to October 1943 there is no evidence
for the claim that Hitler knew what was going on.”lo6 But this irrelevant
observation did nothing to justify Irving’s manipulation of the record,
which revealed, once again, how he had plucked out the part of a single
statement which suited his purposes and suppressed the other part
which
did not. At no other point in this letter or in his subsequent correspon-
dence did Irving try to defend his editing of the Ribbentrop note.lo7
Despite such devastating criticism
by Chester and Sereny, the quotation
remained intact and was still without the missing sentence on page 809
of the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War:
Irving’s argument that Hitler did not
know or approve of actions
against the Jews thus clearly rested on a substantial number
of historical
falsifications. Although some of them, looked at individually, might
appear relatively insignificant, there were others that, in my view. were
end citation
The relevant aspect of this citation is that Irving included a quote from Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Nuremberg prison notes. He did not claim that Hitler knew nothing of the extermination of Jews. He merely inserted a quote from Ribbentrop's journal outlining how Hitler's order for the extermination of the Jewish individuals did not fit Ribbentrop's own perception of Hitler (In fact, not even Ribbentrop's journal notes claim that Hitler knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews, rather that he couldn't imagine Hitler being the originator of the idea). Nowhere in this secondary text does Irving make the claim that Hitler was unaware of the mass executions of Jews. Instead, the author of the text makes a spurious and unfounded claim that such is the case, using only the insertion of Ribbentrop's memo of internal conflict with regard to his image of Hitler as support.
Were this to be upheld, the citation should quote Irving's book directly, not this secondary source. JarmoTheKing (talk) 00:51, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Page 101 of the 2001 edition says "Irving had manipulated and falsified the documentation. He suppressed material that he knew ran against his case, in order to support an untenable conclusion which was in fact the exact opposite of what the documents indicated. ... After this lengthy examination of Irving's 'chain of documents,' I [Evans] had to conclude that Irving consistently and repeatedly manipulated the historical evidence in order to give the impression that it supported his view that Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews, or, if he did, opposed it."
Page 5 of the 2002 edition says: "This has not stopped him [Irving] from continuing to try to prevent the publication of material, such as I [Evans] present in this book, that exposed him as a manipulator of historical documents and a Holocaust denier."
Pages 10-11 of the 2002 edition says: "With the publication of his massive study of Hitler's War in 1977, Irving stirred up fresh debate.  In this book, he argued that far from ordering it himself, Hitler had not known about the extermination of the Jews until late in 1943, and both before and after that had done his best to mitigate the worst antisemitic excesses of his subordinates."
We could leave it as it is, because what is stated is supported by the citation, or we could alter:
In his works, he falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it.
to
In his book Hitler's War he falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews until late 1943, and "tried to mitigate the worst antisemitic excesses of his subordinates".
-- Toddy1 (talk) 11:00, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
The policy (WP:PSTS) would not allow us to back a statement about Irving making false claims with a citation to one of Irving's books.  Primary sources can only be used to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts, such as what Irving wrote.  A secondary source is required to support the judgment that Irving's claims were false, and that he manipulated historical documents to support his claims.-- Toddy1 (talk) 09:48, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

The Kennedy quote is included twice in the article, one in block quote format and the other in regular quotes. Not sure where the placement "should" be, but I don't think it's something that needs to be emphasized twice. I'll also note that the way the Goebbels' diaries is covered here is much better than the section dedicated to it there (it implies he only lost the deal because of protests/political pressure). Courtesy ping to Nick-D because you're probably quite knowledgeable about everything regarding this article/sourcing with the recent GA review. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 08:48, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting this - I've removed the block quote. Nick-D (talk) 08:54, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
Well, I only really caught it because I was reading the whole article in one go. It occurs to me that I should probably be a bit more specific about what I meant on the second part. I'm talking about the state of the #David Irving controversy subsection in History. I realize it's another article entirely but it bothers me when I notice inconsistencies in framing between articles that cover the same subject. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 09:07, 4 November 2025 (UTC)