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Born in 1938, David Irving was brought up in Essex, near London. His father was a naval officer, whose ship – the HMS Edinburgh – was torpedoed by the Germans in 1942. Although he survived, he never returned to his family. Education David Irving was educated at a public school and his desire to shock is evidenced by his stories about hanging up communist flags and asking for Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf as a school prize. After a year studying physics at Imperial College, which he left after failing a maths exam, Irving worked as a steelworker in the Ruhr in Germany, perfecting his knowledge of German. He then began researching the Second World War in German archives and published a stream of controversial books on the subject. Career Since 1961, Irving has pursued a career as a freelance historian and writer. Although he has no degree, his enormous output of books includes The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Accident: The Death of General Sikorski (1967), The Destruction of Convoy PQ17 (1967), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising: The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 (1981), and Churchill's War (1987). Irving has also amassed a huge archive of original letters, diaries and documents written by German Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler. Irving has become famous not only because of his controversial views but also because he is an indefatigable self-publicist, an amateur eager to take on the experts. In 1983, when academics declared that the 'Hitler diaries' were genuine, he correctly pointed out that they were fakes. At first, Irving's books involved criticism of Britain's role in the Second World War, and he helped make public the destructive results of the Allied air raids on Dresden. By the 1970s, though, he had become an apologist for Hitler. A decade later, he was widely seen as a Holocaust denier. |
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