WEBVTT 00:00:00.430 --> 00:00:07.110 David Irving was born in Essex, England in 1938, the son of the Royal Naval Historian Commander John Irving. 00:00:07.110 --> 00:00:14.510 Mr. Irving was educated at Sir Anthony Brown School in Brentwood and went on to win a scholarship to study physics at London University. 00:00:14.510 --> 00:00:21.390 In 1959, he traveled to Germany and was employed as a worker in a steel factory, learning the German language in the process. 00:00:21.390 --> 00:00:28.750 He is the author of more than 20 books, including a definitive three-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, The War Path, and Hitler's War, 00:00:28.750 --> 00:00:36.710 as well as The Destruction of Dresden, The Trail of the Fox, Uprising, and his latest, Churchill, Triumph and Decline. 00:00:36.710 --> 00:00:43.910 The Sussex printing place where Mr. Irving's magazine Focal Point was produced was burned to the ground by Mr. Irving's enemies. 00:00:43.910 --> 00:00:52.590 His apartment has been burglarized and he's been arrested by the State Police of Austria in 1983 on trumped-up charges in the course of a lecture tour. 00:00:52.590 --> 00:00:56.790 Mr. Irving considers himself a dissident rather than a revisionist historian, 00:00:56.790 --> 00:00:59.070 and Hugh Trevor Roper, writing in the Sunday paper, 00:00:59.070 --> 00:01:00.230 The Times stated, 00:01:00.230 --> 00:01:04.950 No praise can be too high for Irving's indefatigable scholarly industry. 00:01:04.950 --> 00:01:08.320 Mr. Irving, thank you for joining me today. 00:01:08.320 --> 00:01:12.080 There is a continuing debate about the uses of war propaganda. 00:01:12.080 --> 00:01:16.000 There is a new book out now called Faces of the Enemy, which talks about this theme, 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:22.560 the idea of producing a vicious image of the Hun or the raping Negro or whatever. 00:01:22.560 --> 00:01:27.840 How do you see that process as sort of an anachronistic leftover from World War II? 00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:29.840 We seem to still be in the middle of World War II. 00:01:29.840 --> 00:01:31.600 What's your propaganda heroine now? 00:01:31.600 --> 00:01:32.840 This is the basic problem. 00:01:32.840 --> 00:01:40.200 The people who set the propaganda machine in motion and are not denying that when you're fighting a war, you need propaganda, psychological warfare. 00:01:40.200 --> 00:01:46.560 The people who set the propaganda machine in motion are the generals and the ministers and the heads of the psychological warfare departments. 00:01:46.560 --> 00:01:52.800 And when a war is over, they don't have any vested interest in standing up one minute after Victory Day and saying, 00:01:52.800 --> 00:01:55.200 All right, fellas, we lied to you. 00:01:55.200 --> 00:01:56.840 Now we can tell you the truth. 00:01:56.840 --> 00:01:58.240 Idi Amin was a nice guy. 00:01:58.240 --> 00:01:59.080 Adolf Hitler. 00:01:59.080 --> 00:01:59.680 Mao Zedong. 00:01:59.680 --> 00:02:00.880 Whatever you want to say. 00:02:00.880 --> 00:02:02.320 They don't say that. 00:02:02.320 --> 00:02:05.160 So the lies have a kind of momentum of their own. 00:02:05.160 --> 00:02:14.480 The flywheel of propaganda continues to churn out the same old lies because anybody who stands up and put his hand on that flywheel to try and stop it is going to get burned. 00:02:14.480 --> 00:02:20.360 There seems to be almost a demon theory of history with regard to World War II and that chief demon being Adolf Hitler. 00:02:20.360 --> 00:02:21.360 How do you feel about that? 00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:22.840 Yes, there's no question at all. 00:02:22.840 --> 00:02:28.720 In England, when we went into the war in 1939, we were told that we were fighting on behalf of Poland. 00:02:28.720 --> 00:02:29.640 Well, nobody tried to maintain it. 00:02:29.640 --> 00:02:31.480 We maintained that in 1945. 00:02:31.480 --> 00:02:40.280 In 1940, imperceptibly, the war aim of the British people was shifted by Winston Churchill to pretend that we had to fight to defend the British Empire. 00:02:40.280 --> 00:02:42.280 And in June 1940, Churchill began saying, 00:02:42.280 --> 00:02:43.280 Not all that was a complete lie. 00:02:43.280 --> 00:02:46.720 The British Empire was never under attack by Nazi Germany. 00:02:46.720 --> 00:02:47.920 Japan, of course, is a different case. 00:02:47.920 --> 00:02:52.760 But Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler had repeatedly said that he wanted only good for Britain and the British Empire. 00:02:52.760 --> 00:02:56.920 Secretly, he told the British government that he was willing to provide German forces to help to throw any aggressors out of the British Empire anyway, including Italy. 00:02:59.640 --> 00:03:01.640 Japan and the Soviet Union, his own allies. 00:03:01.640 --> 00:03:09.640 And December 1941, of course, that had to be changed again because the Americans, the United States, weren't going to fight to defend the British Empire. 00:03:09.640 --> 00:03:14.640 And so we were told that we were fighting the devil incarnate, Adolf Hitler. 00:03:14.640 --> 00:03:16.640 And this was the propaganda lie that was built up. 00:03:16.640 --> 00:03:25.640 And, of course, that propaganda lie has been churned out ever since then by Hollywood, by Madison Avenue, by the broadcasting corporations, the media, the television of the Western world. 00:03:25.640 --> 00:03:27.640 You have to say, there was a lot of people who were killed in World War II. 00:03:27.640 --> 00:03:28.480 And for somebody to stand up and say, well, you know what? 00:03:28.480 --> 00:03:29.480 It's a lie. 00:03:29.480 --> 00:03:34.480 You have to stand up now and say, it was all a big lie because we had to tell the lie to make people fight the Germans. 00:03:34.480 --> 00:03:38.480 A lot of people are going to be very unhappy, including us, including the British. 00:03:38.480 --> 00:03:49.480 And yet it would appear almost absurd from the standpoint of mainstream history and seemingly the whole weight of academic historians who have insisted that Adolf Hitler was, in fact, this demonic figure. 00:03:49.480 --> 00:03:58.090 Yes, but the trouble is that the academic historians, very nice, charming people, most of them, they have no time to do original research. 00:03:58.090 --> 00:04:00.090 By original research, I mean they don't have time. 00:04:00.090 --> 00:04:12.090 They don't have time to do what I did, which is to spend ten years of my life researching the original documentation on Adolf Hitler, looking for those lies, looking for the original, looking for any evidence that Hitler knew about the Holocaust, for example. 00:04:12.090 --> 00:04:17.090 Anything which would make him worse in any way than Churchill or Roosevelt or Stalin or Truman. 00:04:17.090 --> 00:04:18.090 And you don't find it. 00:04:18.090 --> 00:04:20.090 When you look in the original records, you don't find it. 00:04:20.090 --> 00:04:24.090 You only find it if you look in the books of the academic historians because they're all quoting each other. 00:04:24.090 --> 00:04:28.500 They're all quoting each other and they don't bother to look for the original records. 00:04:28.500 --> 00:04:30.500 You've written a book about the German invasion. 00:04:30.500 --> 00:04:31.500 It's an atomic bomb. 00:04:31.500 --> 00:04:41.500 And I'm wondering whether or not you feel that had Germany gotten the bomb first, whether or not it would have used it on civilian populations in the same way it utilized the V1s and V2s. 00:04:41.500 --> 00:04:44.500 I think the evidence is that they probably wouldn't have done. 00:04:44.500 --> 00:04:47.500 I don't think that Hitler would have used the atomic bomb the way the United States did. 00:04:47.500 --> 00:04:49.500 The evidence of this is quite simple. 00:04:49.500 --> 00:04:52.500 If you look at the direct parallel, the use of poison gas. 00:04:52.500 --> 00:04:54.570 The Germans had poison gases. 00:04:54.570 --> 00:04:56.570 In fact, they had nerve gases. 00:04:56.570 --> 00:04:59.730 The Germans were the world's forerunners. 00:04:59.730 --> 00:05:03.730 They were the world's forerunners in the field of the invention of nerve gases. 00:05:03.730 --> 00:05:09.730 They invented tarim, sabun, the famous nerve gases that were still used by the Russians even now in Afghanistan and Angola. 00:05:09.730 --> 00:05:14.730 And they had 10, 20, 30,000 tons of these nerve gases during the war. 00:05:14.730 --> 00:05:18.730 But Adolf Hitler again and again ordered his staff, we will never use poison gas. 00:05:18.730 --> 00:05:23.730 I'm not going to allow the use of poison gas anywhere even if it would win a battle or a victory for us. 00:05:23.730 --> 00:05:28.730 The enemy must use it first and we will then retaliate because the Germans had signed the Geneva Convention. 00:05:28.730 --> 00:05:34.340 And although this isn't the received picture of Hitler that we have now, this is very much what's in the documents. 00:05:34.340 --> 00:05:37.340 We see Hitler ordering that poison gas is never to be used. 00:05:37.340 --> 00:05:45.340 We see Winston Churchill in July 1944 trying to persuade his general staff to allow the British to bring a surprise poison gas attack on German cities. 00:05:45.340 --> 00:05:50.340 So I think that although the evidence is thin, this is very iffy and putty. 00:05:50.340 --> 00:05:57.340 We have to say that if the Germans had the atomic bomb, they probably would have demonstrated it first somewhere before using it on a civilian city. 00:05:57.340 --> 00:05:58.340 Look at the bombing of Britain. 00:05:59.340 --> 00:06:02.400 For 12 long months, no British town was bombed. 00:06:02.400 --> 00:06:04.400 Hitler wouldn't allow the bombing of any British towns. 00:06:04.400 --> 00:06:10.400 He absolutely forbade the bombing of London until Churchill began the bombing of Berlin in August 1940. 00:06:10.400 --> 00:06:12.400 The evidence there is solidly in that direction also. 00:06:12.400 --> 00:06:15.400 But of course this isn't the picture you get if you read the modern history books. 00:06:15.400 --> 00:06:17.400 You get a completely different picture. 00:06:17.400 --> 00:06:26.400 Although establishment historians suggest that the Germans set a pattern for barbaric civilian population bombing during the Spanish Civil War. 00:06:26.400 --> 00:06:27.400 Do you feel that that's correct? 00:06:27.400 --> 00:06:28.400 No. 00:06:28.400 --> 00:06:29.400 It is hui. 00:06:29.400 --> 00:06:34.400 They look at the air raid on Guernica in April 1937. 00:06:34.400 --> 00:06:36.400 Well, I went to Guernica and I had a look over the records there. 00:06:36.400 --> 00:06:39.400 And I looked in the diaries of the German airmen responsible. 00:06:39.400 --> 00:06:42.400 Field Marshal Richthofen, later German Air Force Field Marshal. 00:06:42.400 --> 00:06:48.400 He was at that time the commander of the Legion Condor, which was operating in Spain on behalf of General Franco's forces. 00:06:48.400 --> 00:06:56.400 A total of nine planes, I repeat, nine planes, three times three, went in and bombed a bridge at Guernica. 00:06:56.400 --> 00:06:57.400 The bridge was invisible because of the dust. 00:06:57.400 --> 00:07:00.400 That part of Spain gets very dusty in the summer. 00:07:00.400 --> 00:07:05.590 And the clouds of dust and smoke obscured the target. 00:07:05.590 --> 00:07:08.590 These nine planes dropped their tiny bomb loads. 00:07:08.590 --> 00:07:14.590 Well, German planes at that time, they didn't have bomb loads like the later B-17s or British Lancasters and Serlings or Halifaxes. 00:07:14.590 --> 00:07:15.590 They had tiny bomb loads. 00:07:15.590 --> 00:07:18.590 These nine planes dropped their bombs on Guernica. 00:07:18.590 --> 00:07:23.590 The retreating communists who pulled out of the town shortly afterwards set fire to the whole town. 00:07:23.590 --> 00:07:26.620 A total of 97 people were killed in the air raid on Guernica. 00:07:26.620 --> 00:07:28.620 97 people. 00:07:28.620 --> 00:07:33.620 I mean, less people than that are killed on the roads of California on one Easter weekend, probably. 00:07:33.620 --> 00:07:34.620 A total of 97 people. 00:07:34.620 --> 00:07:37.620 I know this because I checked over the death registers of that town. 00:07:37.620 --> 00:07:38.620 I do that kind of research. 00:07:38.620 --> 00:07:40.620 I didn't believe the newspapers. 00:07:40.620 --> 00:07:44.620 But, of course, Guernica, the Spanish Civil War, is now all propaganda. 00:07:44.620 --> 00:07:47.620 Pablo Picasso's famous picture of Guernica. 00:07:47.620 --> 00:07:50.620 Of course, that is symbolic for the kind of lies that emerge. 00:07:50.620 --> 00:07:54.620 We know, if you look at the Pablo Picasso record, you find out that Picasso painted that particular painting. 00:07:54.620 --> 00:07:55.620 He began the sketches. 00:07:55.620 --> 00:08:00.620 He began to work on that painting long before the Spanish Civil War even began. 00:08:00.620 --> 00:08:03.910 But, of course, truth is very often stranger than fiction. 00:08:03.910 --> 00:08:09.910 There is a parallel often drawn between the German bombing of the city of Coventry and the bombing of Dresden. 00:08:09.910 --> 00:08:12.910 How would you compare the two casualty raids and destruction on each? 00:08:12.910 --> 00:08:16.910 In the German bombing of Coventry, about 300 people were killed. 00:08:16.910 --> 00:08:23.910 Coventry was the biggest manufacturing town in Britain, producing aero engines, producing motor engines. 00:08:23.910 --> 00:08:24.910 It's famous for this. 00:08:24.910 --> 00:08:26.910 There's no denying that. 00:08:26.910 --> 00:08:31.910 If you look in the German Air Force archives, you can find the target maps that were issued to the pilots, 00:08:31.910 --> 00:08:34.910 the Pathfinder squadrons who had the job of marking the town of Coventry, 00:08:34.910 --> 00:08:38.910 and you can see the aero engine factories are quite clearly marked as the main aiming points. 00:08:38.910 --> 00:08:40.910 The Germans carried out a precision air raid. 00:08:40.910 --> 00:08:43.910 The bombing, of course, spilled over into the residential part of the town, 00:08:43.910 --> 00:08:47.910 did a great deal of damage to the gas mains, the electricity supplies, and so on. 00:08:47.910 --> 00:08:52.910 It became a copybook example of what you can do to an industrial town, 00:08:52.910 --> 00:08:54.910 not so much by the damage to the factories, 00:08:54.910 --> 00:08:56.910 but by the damage to the services supplying the factories. 00:08:56.910 --> 00:08:58.910 The actual factories were knocked out for about two or three months. 00:08:58.910 --> 00:09:01.910 But the morale of the working population declined so much 00:09:01.910 --> 00:09:05.910 that this probably did about 12 months loss of production in that town.