David Irving, the self-trained British "historian" currently cooling his heels in an Austrian jail cell, appears to have recanted his denial of the Nazi Judeocide. The Nov.5 UK Guardian reports [2] that a "repented" Irving plans to plead guilty to charges he lied about the Holocaust during speeches in Austria 16 years ago, violating a 1947 Austrian law banning Nazi revivalism and criminalising belittling or justifying the crimes of the Third Reich. Irving claimed at the time there were no gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp, something he first said publicly at the 1988 trial of his friend Ernst Zundel, currently on trial as well in Germany for Holocaust denial. According to his lawyer Elmar Kresbach, Irving said, "I fully accept this, it's a fact. The discussion on Auschwitz, the gas chambers and the Holocaust is finished ... it's useless to dispute it." Kresbach added:
"Irving told me that he has changed his views after researching in the Russian archives in the 1990s. He said, 'I've repented. I've no intention of repeating these views. That would be historically stupid and I'm not a stupid man'."
If Irving indeed changed his views during the 1990's, he's taken a long time to say so publicly. In fact he has been a leading force behind organizing Holocaust revisionist conferences in recent years. Doubtless many of his revisionist colleagues will be thrown into a tizzy by his jailhouse confession.
In concluding remarks during Irving's spectacularly unsuccessful libel suit against historian Deborah Lipstadt, which ended in 2000, Justice Charles Gray found that: [3]
Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.
Let the last word go to Irving. The following ditty was sung by Irving while pushing his baby in a stroller in the park, according to his diaries: [4]
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.
See our last post [5] on this vile crypto-Nazi.