[5] That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific[Note 1] Leuchter report, led him to openly espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

[Note 3] The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist,[8] who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".

Although Irving deflected criticism by characterising the Carnival Times as "satirical",[23] he also stated that "the formation of a European Union is interpreted as building a group of superior peoples, and the Jews have always viewed with suspicion the emergence of any 'master-race' (other than their own, of course)".

[13] By 1962, Irving was engaged to write a series of 37 articles on the Allied bombing campaign, Und Deutschlands Städte starben nicht ("And Germany's Cities Did Not Die"), for the German boulevard journal Neue Illustrierte.

[36] In November 1963, Irving called the Metropolitan Police with suspicions he had been the victim of a burglary by three men who had gained access to his Hornsey flat in London by claiming to be General Post Office engineers.

Michael J. Neufeld of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has described The Mare's Nest as "the most complete account on both Allied and German sides of the V-weapons campaign in the last two years of the war.

For example, American historian Charles W. Sydnor Jr. noted numerous errors, such as Irving's unreferenced statement that the Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 were well supplied with weapons from Germany's allies.

[73] Robert Jan van Pelt suggests that the major reason for Irving wishing to keep his distance from Holocaust deniers in the early 1980s was his desire to found his own political party called Focus.

[76] In 1982, Irving temporarily stopped writing and made an attempt to unify all of the various far-right splinter groups in Britain into one party called Focus, in which he would play a leading role.

[46] Irving described himself as a "moderate fascist" and spoke of plans to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,[77] but his efforts to move into politics, which he regarded at the time as very important, failed due to fiscal problems.

[84] In 1986, he told reporters in Brisbane, Australia, without explaining how the Allied bombing raids on Germany had made non-Germans to be antisemitic that: the Jews were the victims of a large number of rather run-of-the-mill criminal elements which exist in Central Europe.

[85]By the mid-1980s, Irving associated himself with the IHR, began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), and publicly denied that the Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II.

[92] In 1988, Irving argued that the Nazi state was not responsible for the extermination of the Jews in places like Minsk, Kiev and Riga because according to him they were carried out for the most part by "individual gangsters and criminals".

[97] He continued: And the only way to overcome this appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere that surrounds the whole of this immense tragedy called World War II is to treat these little legends with the ridicule and bad taste that they deserve.

[101] For publishing and writing the foreword to Auschwitz The End of the Line, on 20 June 1989, Irving together with Leuchter was condemned in an Early Day Motion of the House of Commons as "Hitler's heirs".

[84] In response to the House of Commons motion, Irving in a press statement challenged the MPs who voted to condemn him, writing that: "I will enter the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz and you and your friends may lob in Zyklon B in accordance with the well known procedures and conditions.

[114] In January 1990, Irving gave a speech in Moers where he asserted that only 30,000 people died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, all of natural causes, which was equal—so he claimed—to the typical death toll from one Bomber Command raid on German cities.

[113] During his appeal in 1992, Irving called upon those present in the Munich courtroom to "fight a battle for the German people and put an end to the blood lie of the Holocaust which has been told against this country for fifty years".

A frequent theme was the claim that Winston Churchill had advance knowledge of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor, and refused to warn the Americans, in order to bring the United States into World War II.

As a penalty for having defended you then, and for having continued to aid you since, my life has come under a gradually mounting attack: I find myself the worldwide victim of mass demonstrations, violence, vituperation and persecution" (emphasis in the original).

[56] In 1992, Irving stated that "the Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time" and claimed he "foresees a new wave of antisemitism" the world over due to Jewish "exploitation of the Holocaust myth".

"[133] One example brought was his diary entry for 17 September 1994, in which Irving wrote about a ditty he composed for his young daughter "when half-breed children are wheeled past": I am a Baby Aryan Not Jewish or Sectarian I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian.

[110] On 27 April 1993, Irving was ordered to attend court to be examined on charges relating to the Loi Gayssot in France, making it an offence to question the existence or size of the category of crimes against humanity.

[142][143] In 1995, St. Martin's Press of New York City agreed to publish the Goebbels biography: but after protests, they cancelled the contract, leaving Irving in a situation in which, according to D. D. Guttenplan, he was desperate for financial help, publicity, and the need to re-establish his reputation as a historian.

Early in September 2004, Michael Cullen, the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, announced that Irving would not be permitted to visit the country, where he had been invited by the National Press Club to give a series of lectures under the heading "The Problems of Writing about World War II in a Free Society".

[165] Irving and Nick Griffin (then the British National Party leader) were invited to speak at a forum on free speech at the Oxford Union on 26 November 2007, along with Anne Atkins and Evan Harris.

Lars Saabye Christensen and Roy Jacobsen were two authors who had threatened to boycott the festival on account of Irving's invitation, and Anne B. Ragde stated that Sigrid Undset would have turned in her grave.

The head of the Norwegian Festival of Literature, Randi Skeie, deplored what had taken place: "Everything is fine as long as everyone agrees, but things get more difficult when one doesn't like the views being put forward.

[185] By the time of the fourth edition of The Nazi Dictatorship in 2000, Irving was described only as a historical writer who had in the 1970s engaged in "provocations" intended to provide an "exculpation of Hitler's role in the Final Solution".

[191] Donald Cameron Watt, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the London School of Economics, wrote that he admires some of Irving's work as a historian, though he rejects his conclusions about the Holocaust.