David Irving answers questions from a Greek Journalist*, Thursday, April 12, 2007, about his life and works

How would you describe your childhood in England? As a child you must have lived the war. What you remember mostly of that period?

[Here are a few pages of my childhood memories of the war, which I wrote while I was in prison in Austria. They will be in my memoirs]

Did you then have a specific idea about Hitler? He was a . . . demon?

Because of the war, we had no toys -- damn that Mr Hitler! -- but we never felt deprived. I became curious about him, of course, this man who had figured so large in the conversation of the grown ups, and wanted to find out more.

How did you decide to become a historian? Which is your relationship with History?

In fact History was the one subject in which I failed at school; I had no memory for dates -- now it is the opposite, I have my head stuffed with the important dates in twentieth century history. When I left school I had the vague idea of becoming an architect. I won a scholarship place in Imperial College of Science, and found that the steel magnate Albert Vögler, one of Hitler's backers, had studied engineering there. I wrote about him for the college magazine The Phoenix, and later became its editor (it was founded by H G Wells).

After that university period I went to work in the Ruhr, in a German steel mill, to complete my knowledge of the language. (Not the ideal method, I might add). In our dormitory at the steelworks was a man who had survived the holocaust of Dresden. He told me about it. I was horrified, and decided to write a book on this unknown atrocity. Published on April 30, 1963, The Destruction of Dresden became a best seller. I decided to become a writer, therefore. "The rest is History."

Your name became enormously famous because you were considered a denier of the Nazi's Holocaust. You still declare that never happened the Jews Holocaust at the extent we have been taught the last decades (after the 1970's)?

Like any other major historical event, we must be able to investigate and research freely into and even to challenge popular myths about what the Jewish community rather arrogantly call "the" Holocaust -- with a capital H -- as though this was unique in history. The fact that they respond to any questions and scepticism with ad hominem attacks and blanket smear-coverage must cause intelligent people to wonder what they are trying to conceal.

Their current campaign to have Holocaust teaching protected by law is even more puzzling. Real history does not need huge monetary fines and jail sentences to protect it.

Over the years the revisionist historians have successfully destroyed many areas of the legend: the Jews-turned-into-soap propaganda story; the existence of a homicidal gas chamber at Dachau and certain other camps; the "four million killed at Auschwitz" story, and so on.

Like the hideous monuments the American Jewish Council has erected on top of the sites at Sóbibor and Majdanek, the legends have obscured the truth, and this still needs to be dispassionately researched. To the Jews, the Holocaust is a means of extorting billion-dollar sums of money for their big umbrella associations; to neo-Nazis and anti-Semites, it is a vehicle for more anti-Jewish propaganda. I have no interest either way.

In 1988 you changed radically your mind about the Holocaust. What happened? Which are the strong evidences for this change?

Until April 1988 I was ambivalent about the history. In that month Ernst Zündel's defence lawyers asked me to appear at Toronto as an expert witness on Hitler and the Holocaust.

I have researched Hitler's personal involvement very closely for my Hitler biography, "Hitler's War" (Millennium Edition, 2002) published by Govostis. In Toronto the lawyers showed me the report of an American, Fred Leuchter, whom they had hired to visit Auschwitz and carry out forensic tests on the big crematorium buildings, Krema I and II, identified by the conformist historians as the gas chambers.

Leuchter's laboratory tests, conducted in the USA by reputable laboratories, showed no significant trace of cyanide compounds, while very large quantities were found in the brickwork of the fumigation chamber at Auschwitz. Having a more than moderate interest in chemistry, this result surprised me. (The Germans have just sentenced to five years' jail the scientist Germar Rudolf who reached the same conclusion). This does not mean that gassings did not occur in other buildings at Auschwitz -- only that they were certainly not in the buildings claimed by the conformist historians. (See my website diary for March 2007, where I visit all the Nazi death camp sites in Poland.)

Your book about Dresden is devastating. You describe amazing details. From the pages rises the humanist historian. Unless I am wrong, nobody found any faults in this book, but it was written in 1963, before the 1988 change. If you have written the "Dresden" after 1988 it would have been a different book?

I have produced a revised edition of the book, called "Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden", and is being printed in England this month. The story is unchanged, but I have examined the statistical question of the actual death roll more closely.

Which were the new elements that your survey brought to light in the Dresden book?

I was particularly shocked by the cynical and methodical manner in which the British attempted to kill as many German civilians in Dresden (and other cities) as possible in WW2. To give one example: at Dresden on February 13-14, 1945 the British air force conducted two air raids, separated by two and half hours; they calculated that the fires caused by the first raid would enable the less well trained second and larger force to find the target easily from hundreds of miles away; and that two and half hours would give time for fire brigades and ambulances from all over Germany reach the city, so that the second raid would kill all these rescue workers too.

In some air raids the British dropped 15,000 tons of bombs on one city in one night (for example on Duisburg in October 1944). Now, of course, the British complain if the Irish terrorists put a ten-kilo bomb in a street, or if the Iraqis destroy one tank with a car-bomb (my grandson is a British army solder in Iraq). I am congenitally opposed to hypocrisy. Such things can bite you in the tail. As the Americans say, "What goes around, comes around."

Is it true that the last years the word "Dresden" has from the aspect of the war crimes of the Allies almost the same meaning with the word "Auschwitz" for the Holocaust?

Since my book was first published in 1963, when it became an international best-seller, Dresden has joined the names of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Treblinka in the catalogue of atrocities. That is my achievement. It is no wonder that the Jewish community have made it their lifelong task to destroy my name and reputation. Their undercover war against me began on April 30, 1963, the day that The Destruction of Dresden was first published, as I now know from their own secret archives.

Instead of the word Holocaust, which has been introduced after the seventies, which would be for you the right word for what has happened?

The Jewish tragedy.

In 1990 you said in Dresden "The Holocaust of the Germans in Dresden really happened. But the Holocaust of the Jews is an invention. I am ashamed of being British". You hate your nationality. Why?

On the contrary I am very proud of Britain and her historic achievements, as my memoirs will show; the British Empire in which I grew up was a great civilising force around the world, as the subsequent history of the countries from which the British have withdrawn (Rhodesia!) demonstrates. World War II was an unfortunate and costly aberration, into which cunning 1938 and 1939 immigrants to England lured certain opportunist British politicians, with Winston Churchill at their head; as Machiavelli once wrote, Never let your policies be determined by immigrants. President George W Bush could learn that lesson too (Ahmed Chalabi!).

The State of Turkey officially denies that there was the Armenian genocide. From different points it seems that you meet with the Turks. I would like your comment about the Armenian genocide.

I have really no informed comment to make on Turkish affairs or history.

For what reason you decided to write your book about Hitler? You try to explain many decisions of him. But can you get into his mind? Which was his real problem with the Jews?

I suspected, and later established, that historians had very wrongly described him. In August 1944 Hitler told his doctor -- who gave me his diary -- that history would not treat him justly for fifty years after his death; that was an under-estimate.

Fortunately I won the confidence of his closest staff and advisers, and they provided me with documents that no other historian saw. This enabled me to examine more closely his attitude toward the Jews and his role in their tragedy. Dr Brigitte Hamann of the University of Vienna established very clearly in a recent book on Hitler [Hitlers Wien, Lehrjahre eines Diktators, Munich, 1996] that he had used anti-Semitism only as a means of coming to power before 1933 and that he was not an anti-Semite during the war years. I wrote exactly the same in Hitler's War in 1977. Not surprisingly, her book has been given little coverage in the newspapers -- in Austria they imprison you for that sort of thing.

As my coming Heinrich Himmler biography will show, Hitler himself was not consulted in that tragedy and took none of the major lethal decisions; he was kept in the dark, and where he did learn of impending steps against the Jews he repeatedly intervened to prevent them. The documents are quite clear on this, and my opponents cannot produce one single document to disprove it.

You are an admirer of Hitler? How would you describe his personality? Which you believe were his crimes? You are an admirer of the theory of Nazism? You have relationship with the neo-Nazi parties? It is said that you are related to NPD , David Duke and the National Alliance .You are an nationalist?

I have no connection with "neo Nazi" parties (or any other party for that matter). No doubt some of their members read my books and attend my lectures, in free countries where such lectures are possible; and so do Blacks, Communists, and Jews.

On David Duke, I have seen that Jewish propagandists accuse me of "editing his memoirs." Short answer: No, I did not "edit the David Duke memoirs."

Long answer: In about 1994 during a tour through the USA, at Baton Rouge, a member of the audience was introduced to me as DD's fiancée; she was Christie Martin, a spectacularly good looking Cajun girl in her early twenties. When I reached New Orleans, she brought DD himself to my function there. He eventually dumped her. . . She asked me, at DD's request, to stop by one day for a chat, to which I happily agreed.

DD buttonholed me with a heap of typescript, the early chapters of his memoirs, and insisted I run my eye over them. I did give him general advice: If you want to rehabilitate your name (he had just come a close 2nd, winning 40 % of the vote, in Louisiana governor's election) then you should try to get the book published by a mainstream Madison-Avenue publisher, and I said it was not impossible (after glancing at the two opening chapters); he wanted however to self-publish . . ., and that meant it had to be edited.

I read the opening two chapters: they were a fair attempt at a self appraisal, his Negro "mammy," his jailing for three days during the McGovern election campaign, etc., and not uninteresting. As for the tips I gave him on editing, I recommended him in particular to "cut the word Jew out of every page at least fifty times". I showed him by examples drawn from the first 2 chapters how to edit his own book. For instance, every sentence should have a verb, no split infinitives, no misrelated participles, word-consistency, etc.

He later visited us in Key West. . . Bente and Christie soon fell out. No surprises there. Each even checked out the other's wardrobe in her absence!

He totally disregarded all my advice on editing and publishing. No surprises there either. . . Deborah Lipstadt must have found these entries in my private diaries during the Discovery process, which she is now abusing: a clear contempt of court, by the way.

Can you reveal which party you vote for?

The last time I voted it was in 1996, for Sir James Goldsmith's independent Referendum Party. (He was a Jew, and died some years ago). I have not voted since. Both main British Parliamentary parties today supported the illegal invasion of Iraq, a clear war crime, and that alone makes it impossible for me to vote for either.

You have been widely accused of being anti-Semitic. Which is your real opinion about the race of Jews?

Millions of people around the world now frown on the Jews and what they do; not a few of them are Jews themselves. As Judge Gray said in the Lipstadt trial in 2000, I am fully entitled to criticise the Jews for what they have been attempting against me since 1963, and I cannot be called anti-Semite for that. (Here are the actual words he used: "I have more sympathy for Irving's argument that Jews are not immune from his criticism. He said that he was simply expressing legitimate criticisms of them. Irving gave as an example what he claimed was his justified criticism of the Jews for suppressing his freedom of expression. Another legitimate ground of criticism might be the manner in which Jews in certain parts of the world appear to exploit the Holocaust. I agree that Jews are as open to criticism as anyone else.")

How do you find the policy of their State against the Palestinians?

It has often, and rightly, been equated with the policies of the Nazis against the Jews

It has been written that you are also xenophobic. Is it true that after your first visit to Greece you wrote in your diaries that contemporary Greece follows it's glorious past, because in a whole day you saw only four Africans in the streets of Athens? You believe in the racial ''cleaning''?

Different government adopt different policies on immigration. I take a very hard look at those policies, and I find an element of hypocrisy in the British government now, which is celebrating the abolition of Negro slavery, while for the last sixty years it has taken a leading role in luring cheap coloured labour from the Caribbean and West Africa to work in the undesirable jobs in London, which is nothing other than slavery in a different form.

In following this money-driven policy, they have ignored the disastrous side-effects -- the clash of cultures, the rise in drug addition, the gun crime, and the epidemic of single-parent families, which have all been direct result of Black immigration into the UK.

As the social disaster has become apparent the British government has introduced criminal penalties for any Englishman criticising its immigration policies, using loaded words like "racism" to justify these laws.

In Europe I find widely differing policies: Greece has evidently avoided the disaster; Hungary too; Poland to a certain degree. Austria and Germany on the other hand seem to be following the British example -- with the result that in the Vienna prison where I was confined for over 400 days in solitary last year one quarter of the men were Black.

The Americans say, If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If we Europeans could not learn from the race riots that have resulted from the race-mixing policies of the US Governments, in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities, then we deserve the misfortunes that now befall us.

The enemies of Europe, having failed with Marxist-Leninist Klassenkampf, class-warfare, have replaced it with Rassenkampf, race-war, as their next best hope of dividing and conquering. It began with East Germany's injection of the Tamils into West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, and now the little trickle has become a flood.

You have implied that there are historians who are being patronised by some upper powers. You meant the Jews' lobby? You have accused the American Jew lobby, between them and the director Steven Spielberg, that sponsored the Penguin's fight against you.

Deborah Lipstadt herself frequently boasted of the billionaire gang of Americans who slush-funded her "defence" in the British High Court against my action. They paid "fees" of sometimes half a million dollars to the experts to give their opinion about my writing and me.

Who are your enemies? You have also said that several of your friends are in prison. Why? And whom do you mean?

German schoolteacher Günter Deckert, who served seven years in prison for having chaired a lecture I gave in Weinheim, Germany. He is now in freedom (but for how long?) Ernst Zündel, German publisher, who lived half his life in Canada, now sentenced to five years in Germany for views his California-based website expressed. Germar Rudolf, the German chemist and scientist, who published a magnificent revisionist historical quarterly, and came up with a politically incorrect scientific conclusion on the permanence of cyanide compounds in brick buildings, and many others.

You have 1,000 Friends in UK, 3,000 in USA and another 3,000 in the rest of the world. What kind of persons are they?

I never discuss the circle of friends who support me. There are over ten thousand around the world now. I know most of them by first name.

"I regard you and my other friends," I write to them now, "in much the same way as the great composers and scientists of the 18th century would have regard their kings and dukes who kept them going while they produced."

They fund you with money. For what purpose exactly?

To enable me to research and publish Real History independently of the big money forces.

In your last speech in Hungary you said that "Mr.Bush and Mr.Blair are the real holocaust deniers, not the historians like you". How did you meant that?

Both refuse to accept that their illegal war has killed more than 30,000 innocent Iraqis; The real figure is over 600,000, not including the one million Iraqis who died of malnutrition and epidemics as a result of their "sanctions" campaign.

"Shall we ever see Blair and Bush hang for their crimes?", you asked in the same speech (in the 15th of March), in which you compared the ''criminal attack'' or Blair and Bush in Iraq with what Hitler did from 1938 to 1944. Is it the same?

Our family motto (Latin) is dum spiro spero, while I breathe I hope. One lives in hope. Bush and Blair do not expect to hang. Nor did Saddam Hussein.

How do you find the policy of the western governments?

Totally dependent on that of the United States Government of the day, which is largely directed by the Israeli lobby and AIPAC, the America-Israel Public Action Committee.

Do you believe that they will start a war against Iraq? Why?

You mean Iran. All the evidence is that Bush is clinging pathetically to his original 2001 programme, which called for Americans to control all the oil supplies of the Middle East and much of its other costly liquid, water, too. The suicidal bravery of the Iraqis has drawn a line through his calculations, but -- like Churchill in the spring of 1940 -- come hell or high water, he knows no other way forward but prolonging the war, if his own personal reputation is to be salvaged.

The widespread fight against terrorism is just an alibi?

There is an easy solution to the terrorism threat. Every time I have to take my shoes off in yet another airport, or throw away a freshly purchased can of shaving cream as I check in, I now tell all those around me: "We have Israel to thank for all this." Everybody -- everybody - loudly agrees.

• Who are the terrorists? You have pronounced Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Why?

Mr Mandela when arrested in 1963 was found in possession of 48,000 (I think that was the figure) land mines which he intended using to kill South African civilians in a terror campaign. He was quite properly tried and sentenced for terrorism, and served twenty years in jail during which -- groomed to this end, I suspect, by the Pretoria government -- he turned into a world-class statesman and one of the finest leaders of the twentieth century.

What is your opinion about the European Union?

Difficult to pass judgment right now. Too many disparate nations are being joined to it; London particularly is suffering from an influx of immigrants from the poorer countries, which is bound to dilute English culture still further. The common euro currency is a good idea -- it thwarts the usurers and money-changers; the idea that all nations shall freely mix is less good in practical terms.

How was the experience of the 400 days solitary confinement in an Austrian prison?

I learned to enjoy it. I had (after a time) paper and obtained (with difficulty) ink, and wrote 4,000 pages of my Himmler and memoirs books.

You were abused?

No, not even threatened. I was the oldest prisoner among the 1,400 in the building, and the only Englishman. But I had my hair cut to 1-millimetre all over to look more brutal.

What were you thinking those days? The revenge?

Christians are not taught to thirst for revenge. I used the months to improve myself, to reset all my dials to zero, to recalibrate; I obtained from friends works of fine literature -- particularly the books of Graham Greene -- and taught myself all over again how to write.

You were punished for expressing an ''illegal opinion" in a talk you made in 1989. I believe that we live in a democratic free world and that everybody can express anything he wants even if we disagree. You believe that the contemporary democratic societies lack of the virtues of Democracy? We live in a season of censorship?

Apart from the Government-controlled press of Austria and Germany, whose reporting of the trial and imprisonment was despicable, most of the world's newspapers roundly condemned Austria for imprisoning me (while mouthing the usual reservations of course: they know where their advertising money comes from). The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Times, and other world-class newspapers all defended me to a greater or lesser degree. At the time I did not know this of course; for six months I could not telephone, and had no newspapers or media.

In court you have said that "courts are unable to determine the historic truth". But how can we really determine it? We all say that the victor writes history. But, have you ever thought that you also may fail?

If you think only of failure, you will not succeed.

Apart from your adventure in Austria, do you feel safe in Europe as a European?

Under present laws, yes. I was advised not to travel to Hungary, and certainly not to Poland; I did both in March 2007, and I shall travel elsewhere -- but many countries have now been pressured by special-interest groups (no need for me to name them here) into banning my entry. My fourth daughter (of five) is now an Australian citizen and lives with her husband and two children in Brisbane. Despite my having an automatic right in law to visit Australian relatives, I am not permitted to visit them, and their prime minister John Howard (left) -- his party heavily financed by Jewish billionaires -- has promised to Parliament that he will change the law if necessary to keep me out.

Are you still banned from visiting Germany, Austria, USA, Canada, Italy, South Africa and New Zealand?

Yes -- but Italy and South Africa are probably now permitted again.

What are the dangers of globalisation?

No comment

Is there currently a political personality that you admire?

Hilary Clinton

There will be back in print your books. Will you add new elements?

I have a major programme to reprint all my books in the English language this year. As readers know, all my books are available as free downloads from my Internet website.

There is a historical period or personality that interest you so much that you intend to write about it/him?

There is one episode on September 11, 2001 which interests me and I have been collecting a dossier on it. Do not expect me to reveal it here.

Which is going be your next book?

I am working on three books -- the Heinrich Himmler Biography, my memoirs, and "Churchill's War", vol. iii: "The Sundered Dream".

Anybody can download your books free from your Internet website. Why?

This is a source of great anger to the Jewish community worldwide: they have spent millions of dollars trying to silence me ($13 million dollars on the defence of their heroine Deborah Lipstadt alone), and yet I can still be heard -- and my books read.

In your personal time what do you love to do?

Be with my family. I have five beautiful daughters (one alas dead now, but she is always with me); my fifth, Jessica, 13, is my great pride at the moment. I love women -- particularly just looking at them, they are among the most beautiful of God's creations.

Which kind of art amuses and moves you most? There an artist you adore?

I come from a family of artists -- my father painted, my daughters paint, my mother was a professional illustrator. British photographer Jane Bown has been a great inspiration through all my life. David Hockney is one of my favourite artists. When we lost our first great libel action in 1970 -- I was the defendant -- and we were nearly ruined, I commissioned Anna Zinkeisen (1901-1976) to paint the portrait of my wife just to prove to my family that we were not finished; Zinkeisen had painted most of the royal family, and was a fine artist. (The cost of the portrait nearly did ruin me.)

Who are the writers you read?

Until Austria provided me with the opportunity, I had had very little time to read. In prison, the governor informed me that the Minister Frau Garstinger had ordered that I was not to be allowed any non-fiction books (she had ordered all my own books withdrawn from the prison libraries, 120 of them, and burned). I read Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's entire works on the great detective Sherlock Holmes (I found that Holmes never once used the phrase, "Elementary my dear Watson!" That too is a myth.)

Why should somebody read today history?

Over the entrance to the US National Archives building in Washington DC is inscribed: What is Past is Prologue.

In our days do people know history?

Bush and Blair, and their minions, evidently do not.

The last weeks we live in Greece an idea war about the new school history book, which refers to the Turks massacre of Greeks in Smyrne (in 1922) with a "light" way: cleaning out the element of violence. It seems that Greeks left Ionia almost peacefully. Do you believe that history school books must rub out comments and things that raise national hate?

The writing of history should be entirely cleansed of politics. Unfortunately academic historians have risen through the appropriate channels -- being taught history by professors who have themselves risen the same way; they all have their horse-blinkers on, and don't realise it.

Students who think for themselves are penalised. It is all very discouraging. My enemies cry, "Irving never studied history! He has no degree!" I reply: "The same goes for Walter Laqueur, Cicero, Livy, Thucydides, Churchill, Macaulay, Gibbon ('Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire') and most of the other great writers on history."

The professional historians of today serve the wrong purpose: they are the claqueurs of government, when they should be the Cassandras. To them success is marked by a Knighthood, or by the number of times their equally spineless colleagues quote them in their footnotes. To myself, success will be the knowledge that my books are being read a hundred years from now -- while theirs are not.

Answers to questions from a Greek Journalist about how the book 'Nuremberg, the Last Battle' came to be written