should you read david irving's books can
you trust
what he wrote i'm going to answer those
questions for you today
now many of you have asked my thoughts
on this and so has my patron craig
heinrich craig read some of irving's
works but then found out about irving's
career
and now says i don't know if what he
writes can be believed
since many of you may not know the issue
with irving let me tell you a quick
story
deborah lipstart wrote a book called
denying the holocaust
in which she said that david irving was
a holocaust denier
david irving then sued her and her
publisher for libel
in what is known as the irving vs
penguin books limited trial
as part of their defense penguin books
called upon historian richard evans as
an expert
witness who had just written a brilliant
book called in defense of history
evans examined irving's works for two
years compiled a huge report on him
and successfully defended himself during
cross-examination
here is what evan said of irving irving
has done all of these things from the
very beginning of his career
not one of his books speeches or
articles not one paragraph not
one sentence in any of them can be taken
on trust as an accurate representation
of its historical subject
all of them are completely worthless as
history because irving cannot be trusted
anywhere in
any of them to give a reliable account
of what he is talking or writing about
it may seem an absurd semantic dispute
to deny the appellation
of historian to someone who has written
two dozen books or more about historical
subjects
but if we mean by historians someone who
is concerned to discover the truth about
the past and to give as
accurate a representation of it as
possible then irving is not a historian
those in the know indeed are accustomed
to avoid the term altogether when
referring to
him and use some circumlocution such as
historical writer
instead irving is essentially an
ideologue who uses history for his own
political purposes
he is not primarily concerned with
discovering and interpreting what
happened in the past
he is concerned merely to give a
selective and tendentious account of it
in order to further his own ideological
ends in the present
the true historian's primary concern
however is with the past
that is why in the end irving is not a
historian
irving lost his court case and here's
what i'm going to recommend to you
if you already have read irving or if
you're tempted to
please get yourself a copy of this book
and read it
this is telling lies about hitler by
richard evans
brilliant book and it will explain
exactly why
irving cannot be trusted there's plenty
of evidence in here and
examples of irving actively distorting
history doing so to prove
that hitler knew nothing about the
holocaust and was actively trying to
save
the jews yes irving claimed
that probably the biggest friend the
jews had in the third reich certainly
when the war broke out was
adolf hitler he was the one who was
doing everything he could to prevent
nasty things happening to them
now that's a bold statement so here's
what i'm gonna do
i'm gonna give you three examples from
this book in this video
so that you can understand exactly why
irving cannot be trusted
the first example is an exercise so if
you'd like to play along
what i'm going to do is put you in the
role of the historian i'll read out what
david irving wrote about an incident
during the beer hall putch of 1923
hitler's failed attempt to seize bower
then we'll compare and contrast
irving's account to the primary source
document that irving based his account
on so it's a spot the difference
exercise
if you want to take notes go ahead and
grab a pen or type out a comment in the
comment section below
if you need to pause the video or
rewatch it to make sure you get the full
picture
do that too okay here's irving's account
of what
happened meanwhile hitler acted to
maintain order
learning that one nazi squad had
ransacked a kosher grocery store during
the night he sent for the ex-army
lieutenant who led the raid
we took off our nazi insignia first
ex-postulated the officer
to no avail as hitler dismissed him from
the party on the spot
i shall see to it that no other
nationalist unit allows you to
join either going goggled at this
exchange as did a police sergeant who
testified to it at the hitler trial a
few weeks later
if you need to pause the video or go
back and re-watch now's your chance to
do so
okay irving based what he wrote of a
policeman's testimony which i'll now
read to you
see if you can spot the differences
apart from this
i want to mention an earlier incident
because acts of violence which
individuals have committed have always
been ascribed
to him i once went along to hitler when
i was still in the force and said to him
this and that have happened again some
elements had attacked the israelite
delicatessen
that gives a bad impression of the party
and it's rather embarrassing
for us in the police that such a thing
should have to happen by chance the
leader of the group
a young wartime army lieutenant was
there
called on to speak this man said i took
off the party badge
hitler said by doing this you admitted
that you did not belong to the party at
the moment when you committed that
act you are expelled with immediate
effect from the party with your whole
team and i will take care that you don't
get admitted to any nationalist fighting
squad again
hitler always condemned these acts of
violence and the individual excesses
which occurred
if you want to pause and write all the
differences you can spot do so
now right here's the deal
irving is trying to paint the picture
that hitler was against
nazi violence towards the jews and
reading irving's account in isolation
you probably came away with the
impression that hitler wasn't happy that
the ex-army guy smashed up a jewish shot
even though he took off his party badge
to hide the fact he was a nazi as he
committed the act
and that's why he dismissed him from the
party but that's
not what the original source said hitler
was annoyed that he had removed the
party badge
because this confirmed that he didn't
belong to the party
at the time he committed the act the
reason why this was bad was because
the act therefore became a criminal act
rather than a political one and that the
party would be seen as a criminal band
of thieves
rather than a political revolutionary
party hitler wasn't protecting the jews
he was protecting the party had the
brown shirts kept their party badges on
hitler's words indicating that he might
well have had no
objection to their action also the
original source didn't mention guring
at all and yet irving said that goring
goggled
at hitler's discipline of the brown
shirt also the policeman didn't say he
goggled either
irving invented this goggle business to
implant the idea in your head
that hitler shouted at the guy and that
the others were surprised by
or in aurov hitler irving said that
hitler had summoned the brown shirt to
him but the source says that the brown
shirt just happened to be there
by chance and irving said that this
incident
happened during the punch of 1923 but
the policeman's account
doesn't say that he says it was an
earlier
incident so basically irving got almost
everything wrong his account is complete
and utter rubbish
and it's not just a semantic difference
either you come away with a completely
different interpretation of what
happened
if you rely on irving's work but what's
worse is that irving failed to consider
the fact that the policeman's account
is heavily biased nazis and holocaust
deniers will no doubt accuse me of being
biased and whatnot yet their own bias
is never questioned by them the
policeman a guy called
hoffman was a national socialist party
member
and who had not only participated in the
porch being with hitler on the night
but had also visited hitler in prison
before his trial
the court knew this and dismissed
hoffman's account
knowing he was a nazi as evans writes
i had no difficulty in discovering this
from the readily available published
documentation including the stenographic
record
of the trial itself all of these facts
cast serious doubts on the reliability
of hoffman's favorable assessment of
hitler's conduct
the most important feature of these
discrepancies it seemed to me
was that irving must have known the
basic facts about the police witness and
his testimony because he had read the
transcript of hoffman's evidence
his omission of any mention of these
facts could not be accidental
in view of his intention to use the
testimony in support of his view
that hitler was a friend of the jews so
irving deliberately concealed these
salient facts about hoffman and his
evidence and he made it difficult for
others to discover his deception
by failing to provide a usable footnote
reference to his source which consisted
of a few frames of microfilm out of
000. hopefully you can now start to see
the problem here
but now we move on to the second example
from
evans book which concerns us with the
jews of rome
here's what irving wrote himmler
evidently also considered the 8 000 jews
in rome a potential threat to public
order
ribbon drop brought hitler an urgent
telegram from his console in rome
reporting that the ss had ordered that
the 8 000 jews resident in rome was to
be rounded up and brought to upper italy
where they were to be liquidated again
hitler took a more moderate
line on the ninth ribbon trop informed
rome that the fiora had directed that
the jews were to be transported to mount
housing concentration camp in austria
instead where they were to be held
as hostages this was from irving's 1991
edition of hitler's
war evans confirms that the 1977 edition
had more or less the same passage
and i have here the 1983 version with
the passage
on page 575 with slight differences in
the language
point being that irving had the same
passage in his book through
multiple editions and had plenty of
opportunity to rectify the mistakes
so is this passage correct then
no not at all reading irving you get the
impression that hitler
acted to save the jews by holding them
as hostages rather than being liquidated
but in reality what happened was the
local commanders on the ground including
castlering
try to save the jews from certain death
by requesting that they be used to dig
fortifications in italy instead the
german consul
in rome a guy called molehausen sent a
message to the reich foreign minister
that said
over storm van fiora capital has
received orders to arrest the 8 000 jews
resident in rome and bring them to upper
italy
where they are to be liquidated a city
commandant to roam
general star hill informs me that he
will permit this action
only if it corresponds to the intention
of the hair right foreign minister
i am personally of the opinion that it
would be better business to employ the
jews for fortification work as
in tunis and together with kepler i will
propose this to field marshal kesslering
please advise molehausen after speaking
to kesselring he sent a second message
field marshal kessering has asked over
stone ban fiora capila to postpone the
planned due action for the time being
but if something has to be done he would
prefer to use the able-bodied jews of
rome for fortification work here
so the local commanders mulhausen kepler
and castlering
had stopped the planned deportation of
the jews to the north
the senior figures in rome morehouse and
catherine and probably also
kepler had effectively formed a
triumvirate
to block deportation molehausen had even
used the word
liquidated confirming that the messages
he'd previously received from hitler's
headquarters regarding the final
solutions of the jewish question
actually meant liquidation and thus
murder
this confirms that they knew exactly
what the planned
jew action and the final solution to the
jewish question
really meant this was the foreign
ministry's reply
the right foreign minister requests that
consuls ron and mulhausen be informed
that on the basis of a fury instruction
the 8 000 jews resident in rome should
be taken to mount housing upper danube
as
hostages the reich foreign minister
requests that ron and molehausen be told
under no circumstances to interfere in
this
affair but rather to leave it to the ss
yes hitler had stepped in and now
insisted that the 8 000 jews of rome be
sent
to mount housing concentration camp so
this wasn't hitler coming in to
save the jews but actually hitler
insisting that the jews
be killed in the end over 1 000 jews
from rome were shipped
to auschwitz not mount hausen where 14
males and one
female survived the rest were gassed
and it didn't really matter if hitler
had insisted that they go to mount
housing
rather than auschwitz since the death
rate at mount
housing was extremely high anyway so
that can't be used as an excuse to say
that
hitler was trying to save the jews
either but there's more to it than just
that irving's argument was that hitler
didn't know about the holocaust
well clearly he did irving was caught
here in the same logical trap into which
he fell in a number of his other
attempts to present documentary evidence
that
hitler did not know about or disapproved
of the mass murder of the jews
if hitler was intervening to stop the
roman jews from being killed
then he knew that the roman jews would
otherwise have been liquidated
he knew it was on himmler's orders and
he must have known this was part of a
much wider pattern of mass murder of
jews by the ss
or in other words he must have known it
was part of an exterminatory final
solution of the jewish question in
europe
by the way evans debunks a lot of the
holocaust denialist claims
about how there's no smoke from the
crematoria or how there's
no chemical residue on the walls of the
gas chambers the lucia report
how the british supposedly invented the
lie about the gas chambers
even though by irving's own sources they
didn't
uh how you can't trust eyewitness
accounts because they're all doing it
for the money
the claims about the dresden bombings
and numerous other false claims that the
holocaust denialists still preach about
and no doubt we'll be preaching about in
the comments below
you do get a lot of bang for your book
pun intended
and so if you want to educate yourself
i'd highly recommend it
but i'm going to give you one more
example of irving not being straight
with you the reader of history
in his goebbels biography irving wrote
this by dawn on november 10th 1938
101 of the country's 1400 synagogues had
been destroyed
about 7 500 of the 100 000 jewish shops
had had their windows smashed
36 of the country's half million jews
had been murdered
and hundreds more badly beaten except
these statistics are completely bogus
even in irvine's own source
it didn't say that 191 synagogues were
destroyed
it said 276. 191 of them had been burned
down and the rest were completely
smashed up
worse the source was only a preliminary
report all the reports that came later
suggested that 520 synagogues have been
destroyed or partially destroyed
irving stated that 7 500 jewish shops
out of 100 000 jewish shops
had only had their windows smashed but
his own source confirms that they had
been destroyed
and rather than seven thousand five
hundred shops out of one hundred
thousand
it was actually more like seven thousand
five hundred
out of nine thousand irving had used a
notoriously bad source for the total
number of jewish
shops again you can read more about it
in evans book which i'd recommend you
read
if you're interested in this subject for
further information on what hitler's
ideology was about and to learn why he
wanted to remove the jews from his
society
see my video on hitler's socialism which
will explain it all in great detail
thanks for watching and supporting bye
for now