Month: June 2009

Although David Irving possesses no formal qualifications, he nonetheless has a certain reputation as a British historian of WWII and its background, much in the same sense in which the mafia can be said to have a reputation. On the basis of his earlier denial of the reality of the Shoah, the government of Austria convicted him, since this historical position is a crime in that republic when publicly avowed. This was not only politically wrong but also a strategic error, as it allowed Irving to play the martyred historian, all the more since he puts enormous efforts into presenting himself as a ‘respectable’ conservative Briton of the old school, rather than as an anti-semitic fascist and ultrareactionary, which his opponents accuse him of being. In order to justify himself after his stint in an Austrian prison, he wrote a publicly available essay-cum-memoir on the topic. Analysis of this will prove highly fruitful in order to understand how narrow and sometimes practically invisible the line is between ‘respectable conservatism’ and outright fascist tendencies. The text involved is titled Banged Up: Surviving as a Political Prisoner in 21st Century Europe. As we shall see, although he may lack historical sense, one thing Irving has a surfeit of is self-pity and pathos, and the title is just the beginning. (For those who wish to read along, it can be freely found at http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Banged/up.pdf .)

After a romantic introduction to the horrors of war, which Irving seems to have mostly boyish fantasies about based on his boyhood memories, we are easily led to believe that here is a man who has never fully grown up, and sees war as an adventure. As we shall see, little he says later on will dispel this notion. All the more since he feels the need to emphasize his cavalier attitude toward women and to boast about his expensive car, sure signs of the mental maturity of a 14 year old. He gets to the point soon enough though – his arrival in Austria, invited by the Olympia Bursenschaft. Of course, he does not see the need to inform us of the justified reputation of right-wing elitism prevalent among the Bursenschaften, whose traditions of ‘patriotism’, duelling, casual anti-semitism and so forth remind us more of 1815 than of 2009.

Moreover, he realizes that the invitation does not imply that he is actually welcome from the point of view of the government, as shown by his manner of entry into the country: “In a Swiss rental car I drove east all night through Zürich and into Austria. I had decided not to risk fying direct to Vienna. Many countries in western Europe are police states now, with state police—Staatspolizei, which operate broadly like the Gestapo with which we historians are familiar.” Yes, pathetic as this sounds, the minor political repression exercised by various post-fascist nations on the continent is considered by this eminent historian to be wholly equivalent to the Gestapo. This does not, of course, reflect in any way on his capacity to make proper historical judgements on WWII or reveal his sense of proportion, or lack thereof. Irving is an honorable man.

He continues to describe his rather clandestine meeting with a representative of Olympia, which has to take place as undercover as possible since both of them are aware that the Austrian secret police will be on their trail. This also offers him the opportunity to comment on his problematic prior visit to the country: “Still half suspecting that the function might not take place, I asked him to grab a snapshot under the Landtmann’s canopy as proof that I was in Vienna. It would certainly irritate some folks back in London. The Board of Deputies of British Jews had written in June 1992 to the Austrian government, livid at hearing of a recent visit by me to the country, and demanding my immediate arrest the next time. Some “Britons”!“. As the reader will see, this will not be his last comment on the apparently rather dubious national status of Jews in this article, which he sees fit to bring up fairly regularly, whether relevant for his train of thought or not. Of course, this by no means implies he believes in retrograde 19th Century conspiracy theories. Irving is an honorable man. Especially when he then adds, in case the point was not clear enough: “Strange, the things that turn out to have been going on all along un-seen, unheard—like the termites gnawing at the woodwork of a rotten building. Not that they are an International Conspiracy of course, they have always denied that.” It is well known of course that respectable conservative historians normally compare ethnic groups to termites and other insects. It truly takes a rabid nutcase to see anything fascist in this. Irving is an honorable man.

Later, it transpires that before the meeting can take place, the Staatspolizei is already on their trail. After posturing in front of a statue of Goethe, our intrepid hero flees in a car toward the border, only to be apprehended before reaching it. Subsequently, he is charged under the Wiederbetätigung laws, that is, the legal mechanism to suppress attempts to revive fascism. Although Austria has never been properly denazified, these laws have been created and remain still, an attempt (however futile the means) to create a bulwark against fascism in a country where it was at its most popular. Irving, of course, makes of this: “Since there is little prospect of a Nazi movement re-emerging now, it is widely used to harass political opponents.” There is some truth to this, but those ‘political opponents’ are without exception those associated with the extreme right nonetheless, whether or not they truly pose a danger. After all, it would be hard to convict the KPÖ of trying to revive Nazism. But our historian does not see the need to reflect on this, or why he is a ‘political opponent’.

In jail, he describes one of a series of worrying events that take place throughout the whole affair: events that indicate his popularity. Irving is of course wholly unreliable when it comes to himself, since his self-perception is supported by little other than his juvenile romanticism of the Persecuted Tell-it-like-it-is Decent Conservative, but knowing Austrian politics there may well be reason to believe that his stories are not entirely made up. So when he begins his term in jail awaiting trial, and tells us that “On the second or third day several offcers knocked on my cell door (yes, they knocked on a cell door), unlocked it, and brought in my books from their homes for me to autograph“, there is probably little reason to doubt it. Clearly in Austria there are many traces and remnants still of the old order, and the consequences of its denazification not having been seriously carried out can be seen. He then complains: “The justice system was less accommodating. My requests to speak to a lawyer or to Bente in London were fruitless. Six weeks or more would pass before I could phone my family from Vienna. The illegality of this was obvious.” The Gestapo of course would have let him phone much sooner. He then has the gall to make the following comparison, since he has not sufficiently, according to his own lights, shoveled the Nazi comparisons onto the compost heap of his self-pity: “I remained philosophical. It was much harder on Bente. In London,they feared I was dead; when I did not return from Vienna on time, sheand her friends phoned the embassies, the police, the hospitals, the mortuaries, the car hire firms; but nobody knew what had happened to me. Unable to contact me to access bank accounts or use key system-passwords, she lost our home and possessions. Nacht und Nebel was the system, as invented by Reinhard Heydrich and his police. One vanished, as though in Night and Fog.” Yes. Truly, according to our respected and serious historian of WWII, sitting a few weeks in pre-trial arrest in Jakomini is equivalent to Nacht und Nebel, with all that implies. Of course, this should not lead us to declare him insane, hysterical, or wholly unfit for any historical judgement. Irving is an honorable man. And “philosophical” at that.

Irving then tells us about his reading materials, which the new Gestapo apparently gladly provided to him, which unsurprisingly are stolid British works of slight antiquity and requiring little imagination: Sherlock Holmes, P.G. Wodehouse, the Hornblower novels. More interesting is his commentary on the prevalence of suicide among the prisoners in his jail. Although we may well assume that he emphasizes this in order to underline the horrors his victimized innocence has had to endure, it is likely a reflection of reality, and moreover shows that when he really desires, he can show some real empathy. It is all the more unfortunate that this has been warped by his descent into the swamp of ‘historical revisionism’.

He then describes the visit of the British consul representative, and asks her to send a coded message, “COPENHAGEN”, to his girlfriend Bente Høgh. As he explains: “Copenhagen was the codeword we had arranged; Bente was to watch for it. However it was used—if I said it to a journalist, or on TV, or on a postcard message, it meant I had been arrested and was unable to contact her, and she was to take certain steps. Just like the BBC’s “Verlaine” messages to the French Resistance before the Normandy landings.” Our pseudo-academic hero obviously misses no opportunity for WWII comparisons. Indeed, an unfriendly commentator might suggest a slight obsession with the topic. This is not of itself all that remarkable, as there are probably more amateur historians and devotees of WWII history than of all other subjects combined (except in the United States, where their Civil War plays this role); what is more intriguing are the analogies he makes. Desiring both to produce apologetics for the actual fascists as well as to be a ‘decent conservative’, he veers back and forth between comparing himself to the Allies and to the victims of Nazi persecution, but those analogies do not really seem to sit well with him, because he sticks to none of them. This is also seen a few paragraphs farther in his tale, when he describes his preparedness to expect the worst (i.e. arrest) when visiting other countries. He produces the following gem of a historical parallel: “In fact I was always steeled for the worst: I was a Boy Scout in my youth, and be prepared was on our belt-buckle, just as some Germans, including Günter Grass as it now turns out, had Meine Ehre Heisst Treue embossed on theirs.” This indeed summarizes well the viewpoint of our historical protagonist. On the one hand Boy Scout, on the other hand the Waffen-SS, and incapable of seeing the difference. Not that we would accuse him of making a bagatelle out of that deadly organization: Irving is an honorable man.

David Irving is then sent to the main jail in Vienna in a “Krokodil”, a particular transport vehicle apparently used by Austrian justice for prisoner transports, and which Irving emphasizes as being unsafe and illegal elsewhere, as he also does with the prison itself at Josefstadt where he is brought. Irving’s text provides us with some intriguing information on the average continental prison system from the inside, written by a clearly intelligent commentator, and this is something worthwhile about it. However, the intellectual price paid for access to this is too high. In any case, Irving is brought to trial before Mr. Justice Seda, whom he mocks as having a high voice. Our respected historian, as we will see more often, is not above a few ad hominems of a rather simplistic kind when it suits him: another sign of his maturity seemingly having ceased around the time when Irving himself stopped having a high voice. Perhaps that is why he makes such a point of it. More worryingly and relevantly, we get in this jail also a description of his apparent popularity with the rank-and-file: “As word spread round the Josefstadt jail on who I was, I received a stream of uniformed, if not always offcial, visitors. Jailers brought me packets of good-quality coffee or gifts. At Christmas, one offcer unlocked my cell, invited me to his room, and offered me a glass of whisky—“This remains strictly between us, Mr. Irving.”” Aside from Irving’s word apparently not quite being his bond, despite his claims to the Boy Scout ideals, one can wonder what kind of society has jailers encouraging visits and gifts, “not quite officially”, to people accused of reviving Nazism. Not that Irving would be guilty of such an inclination – Irving is an honorable man.

En passant, he remarks upon the efforts apparently on the part of the Austrian Ministry of Justice to get his books removed from the library prisons, of itself well enough – although there is little point in banning Irving’s works, this does not oblige a government to make them freely available to wards of the state, especially if they are to be rehabilitated in a manner so that they can improve society in the future. Irving sneers that the press reported the books would be burned, which according to him proves the provenance of Austria as a Nazi state. It’s hard to tell whether that is true, but if so, it was a silly move. Sillier however is Irving not realizing that if Austria were really a Nazi state now, this is precisely what would explain his warm reception among the prison visitors and guards! Subsequently, Irving discusses his lawyers for the trial. He desires to pick Herbert Schaller, whom he at different points describes as a defender of free speech, a ‘patriot’, and so forth. Such compliments coming from our historical friend are indeed more damning than many an insult, and it may be no surprise then that Dr. Jur. Schaller himself has been repeatedly accused of Holocaust denial, including denial of the existence of gas chambers, and so forth, and that he has also attended the infamous conference organized in Teheran on ‘Holocaust denial’, intended a publicity stunt against Israel on the part of Iran’s government. Not, of course, that Irving sees the need to inform the reader of any of this, although surely if it is so legitimate and above-board, this should not reflect poorly on Schaller or himself? In any case, he decides eventually not to pick Schaller, but takes on an attention-hungry fool named Kresbach instead, who is obviously out to use Irving’s case for propagating his own renown. Our intrepid historian realizes this too late, and is stuck with him for the trial. In between commenting on these affairs, he also presents a vignette (the text is filled with various vignettes showing off either his books or himself in various poses and with various decors), showing: “The Unmentionable: My book on the 1956 Hungarian Uprising mentions that most of the secret police and their Communist bosses were Jews.” A legitimate and totally relevant fact for historical research of course, which David Irving has justly taken much effort to present to the world. Only a truly uncharitable spectator could see anything suspicious in this. Irving is an honorable man.

The trial itself, both because Irving was clearly guilty of what he was accused of (that is, having on Austrian soil denied the Shoah in its full extent), and because of his lawyer’s incompetence and guilty plea, is a disaster for Irving. He does however gloat about the favorable media reception, at least as he sees it: “The Italian newspapers, particularly Silvio Berlusconi’s, went overboard with their contempt of Austria, and I saw newspaper photographs of one major championship football match in northern Italy at which a section of the crowd unfurled a banner reading IRVING LIBERO for the television cameras.” This tells us many things: first, it tells us quite a lot about the ‘respectability’ of Berlusconi’s government; second, it tells us much about Irving’s common sense in judgement, since he apparently is not very aware of the political leanings of many Italian football fans (one is tempted to think the team involved could be Juventus or Hellas Verona or a similar one with a history of fascism); third, it tells us that despite the Gestapo nature of his prison, he apparently had no trouble getting access to even international newspapers. One thing it does not tell us though, and that is what Irving thinks it tells us, namely the legitimacy of his cause. All the more when he then continues with: “Der Spiegel ran a fine five-page article which attracted angry letters from my opponents, including Hungarian writer Paul Lendvai, who snarled that my book Uprising was anti-Semitic (my book mentioned that all the Hungarian communist monsters like Kun, Revai, Farkas, Gerö, and Rakösi were Jewish; as is Lendvai himself).” Truly the “snarling” Lendvai must be absolutely hysterically deluded to see any anti-semitism in Irving’s research into an important and relevant topic as whether various randomly selected Communist “monsters” were also all Jews. Irving is an honorable man.

Well, back to his prison, since Irving had no chance of winning the trial, and didn’t. In the prison he helpfully informs us of the demographics present: “Once I was shown into the holding tank, and it contained only fifteen very disgruntled Blacks (twenty-five percent of the prisoners were from Africa, nearly all for drug dealing, some for murder or rape).” Fortunately, the Blacks, capital letter and all (is there anyone who does not faintly hear an Afrikaner accent in his mind when reading this?), have a refined sense of humor and appreciate Irving’s Etonian jokes: “I hesitated as the steel door behind me slammed shut, and said: “Sorry, I think there’s been a mistake. Where’s the waiting room for Whites?” They bellowed with laughter. It’s the kind of joke that needs split-second timing, and one that you can only risk in certain circumstances.” Those circumstances presumably do not include any situation in which people with a less subtle sense of humor are present, or things might end grimly for our respected would-be academic some day. After some complaints about the “jungle” in the prison, what with all the African languages spoken, Irving continues with explaining the nature of his complaint. He is given the files proving he had denied the Holocaust on Austrian soil. It is telling, according to our protagonist, that the complaint came from the Document Centre for the Austrian Resistance, which, he hastens to tell us, is “a well-known Jewish and Communist-front organisation”. Sic. To add to the ignominy of being accused by such lowlifes as the Jews and Communists of the Austrian resistance archives, he is also condemned by the leading Austrian historian Erika Weinzierl. Since she is not Jewish, Irving has to go for the second-best option for any ‘respectable’ British public school boy: misogyny. He makes much hay out of finding different ‘subtle’ ways to describe her lack of good looks, which apparently according to his historiographical expertise is of great importance to judge the truth of someone’s statements. Once is inclined to comment that this would not do his own case that much good either, however.

The trial itself is in his description of little interest – as mentioned, he could not win, his lawyer was incompetent, and most of the description consists of Irving’s repeated complaints about how those crazy Austrians have the gall to have different customs than back home in Britain. The whole affair exudes a highly suffocating Little Englanderism, emphasizing the parochial pettiness of Irving’s neuroses. The same is shown by his petty attempts at playing to the crowd, as when he makes a big deal out of always having a pen and book with him when entering the courtroom, to underline apparently that he is a writer, in other words, murdered innocence. I doubt that anyone saw this press stunt for anything else than what it was, but Irving’s Little England cleverness always thinks that it can fool any foreigners. To finish it off, the Austrian jury turns out to be mostly women, who also do not happen to meet our protagonist’s exacting aesthetic standards, and therefore can be up to no good. One gets the impression that Irving’s view of women relies on a tradition virtually unchanged since the days of St. Paul. What’s more, Irving’s tendency to judge his antagonists by their physical appearance also leads him to consistently insinuate Nazism on their part by means of physical analogy: the prosecutor, Klackl, reminds him of the sinister Jew Aronsfeld, or “even more oddly of Adolf Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem at that same time.” His own lawyer’s incompetence, of course, makes him equivalent to the July Coup conspirators of 1944, even though Irving chose him himself: “I found myself recalling the Berlin People’s Court after the July 20, 1944 Bomb Plot, where one defence lawyer began his opening submission with the words, “Having listened to the opening remarks of my colleague the Public Prosecutor about the disgraceful behaviour of my client, I find that I can only wholeheartedly endorse them. . .”” With this quality of ‘recalling’, it is no surprise Irving’s approach to historiography has not met with much acclaim amongst his peers. Of the judge he writes: “All the while the Judge sat on his high podium, pink cheeked and puffy faced, oddly reminiscent of Mr Justice Gray in the Lipstadt libel trial.” There is of course nothing neurotically juvenile about calling your opponents ugly and therefore wrong, or about seeing conspiratorial parallels between one’s supposed persecutors – Irving is an honorable man.

Eventually he is convicted, and although according to his own claims receiving many letters in support and only one hostile one (which sounds unlikely), he is remitted to jail, of course awaiting appeal. Again he notes how he attempts to stay sane in jail by seeing his jail as a friendly place, shielding him from unwanted outside intrusions, but also remarks upon the many suicides that seem to take place in the prison, although prison authorities attempt to hide it. As a prison writer, Irving could do worse. Would that one could say the same of him as a historian. In jail he reads the documents relating to his conviction, and angrily remarks that the judge has tried informing himself on the person of Irving on his own before the trial, which apparently is highly offensive to his British judicial sensibilities. Worse is the fact that he read in the Süddeutsche Zeitung an article described by Irving as “a raving article by Eva Menasse, a young Jewish jour-
nalist.” Although he claims to have liked her before when meeting her, something which apparently did not prevent him from making a point of her Jewishness, now her articles praising his conviction are “suspiciously well-informed”. It is difficult to see what this means, other than that apparently reading up on Austrian constitutional law is part of a greater conspiracy by unnamed, but presumably Jewish, elements. More laments about the press follow, and some attempts to ingratiate himself with the reader by describing his happy family life and how he misses his poor children, while commenting along the way about the unpleasant “Romany laments” of a “gypsy out of the window”. He also is visited by a certain Brigitte Müller, whom he seems to have cheated on his wife with (or at least he hints as much), but this does not seem to diminish his perception of himself as a happy family man of honesty and ‘respectability’. He is also visited by a Hungarian woman named Réka, who seems to be a fan of his political-historical works and finally does pass his aesthetic tests that all women are to be judged by. Given the recent success of the ultrareactionary Jobbik party in Hungary, and the general worryingly fascist trend in Eastern European politics, this unfortunately comes as no surprise. Despite the Gestapo-like, Nacht und Nebel-nature of his evil Nazi jailers, he is quite capable of even holding long-distance interviews with the BBC. Herein he manages to present the death march from Auschwitz, which killed many of the prisoners who had survived the operation of that cursed institution itself, and the abandoning of the sick prisoners to whatever slow decrepit death presumably faced them, in the following way: “ the clear evidence that even when the Auschwitz site was about to be overrun in January 1945 the Nazis either evacuated the 70,000 Jews still there to the west (including Anne Frank) or left those who so chose (including Anne’s sick father Otto) in the camp hospital being tended by SS doctors until the Russians came.” Evacuated! “Tended by SS doctors”! Contrast this with the description of the same events given in Elie Wiesel’s much-lauded memoir Night, in which his father dies with most of the other almost-survivors along the harrowing death trail from southern Poland to Germany, or with the description in Primo Levi’s The Reawakening of the abandonment of the sick prisoners (not a single “tending” SS-doctor in sight) to slow death by disease and hunger which was only ended by the final arrival of the liberating Soviet troops, and one can see well enough what kind of history-writing David Irving and his ‘revisionist’ colleagues are capable of. Not, of course, that these bald lies should be seen as apologetics for Nazism. David Irving is an honorable man.

Irving finally fires Kresbach and replaces him by Schaller, who is more of one mind with him (one wonders whether, when Irving says that “Nobody in their right mind can deny that the Nazis did kill millions of Jews”, he told his lawyer this too), and a “faithful soldier” besides, who “cuts a Churchillian figure in court” (the only points of comparison seem to be decrepit age and vile politics) and of course gets the obligatory physical comparison to a Nazi official: only this time, it is Erwin Rommel, which Irving clearly intends as great praise. Journalist Christa Zöchling writes a sarcastic article about Schaller, whom she cleverly calls a “Rechts-Anwalt” (the pun works only in German); as a result, Irving creepily inserts a vignette which shows her in a cafe reading a document, and describes her as a “flawed” journalist writing for Communist papers. These supposed insults are not very serious, but that the ‘respectable’ Irving apparently has people follow his antagonists around and take pictures of them unnoticed is a lot more worrying, and telling about the resemblance between his approach and those of Neonazis. After this, more descriptions of the life in jail follow, with some slightly amusing anecdotes about fellow prisoners and their cases, as well as the many ‘Blacks’ in the jail. He also notes the power of Austrian judges to effectively extort money from people who write critical articles about their judicial system, using the fact that slander is a penal crime in Austria (as in most countries based on the French legal system), and then suggesting out-of-court settlements. Again, Irving is not a reliable source on anything whatever, but it is an interesting observation if true. He also writes a letter to a certain Lady Renouf, which seems to have no content other than to show off he has friends among the nobility. This surely tells us more about British nobility than about him. More worrying is the vignette where he proudly presents his good relations and talks before the German military, the Bundeswehr. Knowing the problems with Neonazism in this institution, inviting Irving to hold talks is surely the last thing that ought to be on their mind. It is essential that the German public put pressure on their military to prevent a revival of right-wing militarism and revanchism of any kind. In the meantime, he writes on his biography of Himmler, whom he describes as “this strange character of Hitler’s Reich, who lived only forty-four years but achieved so much that was both grotesque and spectacular“, and loses a pen which Erhard Milch apparently had personally bequeathed to him. Friends in high places, indeed.

In the meantime his prison time slowly comes to an end. He takes the opportunity, when referring to Raul Hilberg, to usefully and informatively note that “there were only two Jews in this jail, on the foor above ours, C-2: one was made Blockschreiber, or block-clerk, although the jailers told me he could, or would, write only in Hebrew script; the other was allowed to keep his cell door permanently open on some pretext or other.” Never mind the unlikelihood of an Austrian Jew only writing in Hebrew, clearly the Jews “on some pretext or other” have managed to extend their termite-like powers to keeping doors open in Josefstadt prison. Surely this shows what virtually invincible forces our intrepid hero is up against. At least he has the grace to say that Hilberg “shared many of my views”, which is very appropriate since he then quotes an interview where Hilberg calls him a Hochstapler, meaning something like charlatan or fraud. A rare moment of honesty on Irving’s part! The objective reader will be glad he agrees. We can spare the reader summarizing the tale of the crook who in turn tries to defraud our charlatan himself, but more interesting is a supposed Sinti named “Gitan W.”, who tells Irving a tale of woe which mostly revolves around anti-gypsy sentiment among the Austrian government and judicial officials. Here Irving again shows he can have an empathetic side (if perhaps the empathy of one who thinks he knows ”one of the good ones” among the Jews or Communists or whatever), and there is little reason to doubt the truth of this Gitan W.’s story at least in this respect. Again, Irving’s tale gives us some material that is worthwhile, as long as Irving is not talking about his actual subject. Fortunately, our friend W. knows Irving well enough, and makes a point out of adding the important fact that ““The Judge was a Jewess,” he recalled, as an afterthought, and he gave me her name. “Sonja Allyes.””

After having compared himself with Imre Nagy (a rather odd comparison to say the least), Irving is then released after the appeal, his sentence having been commuted to time served, effectively. In between follows a diatribe about Israel in its fight against Lebanon, which shows the principle that a person can be right for the wrong reasons, and of course the obligatory comparison of his appeal trial judge to Martin Bormann. By now, this modus operandi becomes tiresomely familiar. Insert also a vignette about his friendly relations with Albert Speer – in fact, together with Joachim Fest, David Irving is highly responsible for the general view of Speer as a foolish artist caught up in Hitler’s web and quickly coming to resist him. This view is based entirely on the convenient fabrications of Speer himself and has no basis in reality, but Speer has enlisted the above historians quite effectively for his PR campaign. Gitta Sereny’s book on this topic, Speer und Er, gives more detail on this affair. In the meantime, Irving can go, according to him to the “bafflement of the Israelite Cultural Community and Leftist politicians at our appeal victory“. Of course, his imprisonment is all part of a greater whole, as he does not hesitate to tell us, and which apparently his Austrian guards wholeheartedly agree with, confirming the problems I alluded to above: “The officers accompanying me began cracking off-colour jokes, and two even began educating me about what they and everybody else knew: “You’ve been the victim of a small religious clique, a people not like us at all. They were the ones really behind your arrest in 2005.” I made no response.” Let us hope that this commentary was yet another “off-colour joke”, since Irving is so good at subtle humor. He is, after all, an honorable man. At least it turns out the stint in jail had some advantages, at least with regard to his weight: he happily tells us “I weighed in at 110 kilos, six less than when I was arrested in 2005, and height 186 cm; but for the weight and being English, I could have just made it into the Leibstandarte, Hitler’s Guards Brigade.”

Our tale of torment is then practically over, with our hero finally freed from the shackles of his Jewish Nazi Communist oppressors, who do however use the opportunity to declare him non grata in Austria in the future. Too bad for the Bursenschaften, where now will they learn “what everyone knows” about who is behind the conspiracy of historians? Fortunately for them, Irving is always happy to inform them, be it in a veiled manner, of the real nature of the case: as he returns to London, speaking to a journalist, he “fed him the words: “Mel Gibson was right.”“. One is glad he tells us before this that he had “reset his mental dials to zero”, else one could be tempted to think ill of our ‘respectable’ conservative historian. Not that Irving is easily intimidated by the you-know-whos, of course. As he assures us, he has “not studied the life of Dr. Joseph Goebbels for nothing. It was one of his recommended techniques: Always counter-attack, but elsewhere.” The reader can be glad for this little insight into the sources of David Irving’s historiographical method. Truly a ‘Revolution in History’ from this honorable man.