Hitler's War is a biographical book by the British author and Holocaust denier David Irving. It describes the Second World War from the point of view of Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany.
It was first published in April 1977 by Hodder & Stoughton and Viking Press. Avon Books reissued it in 1990. In 2002 Focal Point Publications published a revised illustrated edition, combined with Irving's The War Path, as a 1024-page hardcover.
Critical reception was mostly negative, with academics largely criticizing the book for historical negationism around Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust. Despite (or perhaps because of) the controversy Hitler's War generated, it was a best-seller in 1977. In particular, Hitler's War was a best-seller in Germany.
Primary theses
Irving's book Hitler's War, the first published installment of his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler (the prequel The War Path was published in 1978), had originally been published in German as Hitler und seine Feldherren (Hitler and his Generals) in 1975. Irving's intention in Hitler's War was to clean away the "years of grime and discolouration from the facade of a silent and forbidding monument" to reveal the “real Hitler”, whose reputation Irving claimed had been slandered by historians.. In Hitler's War Irving tries to "view the situation as far as possible through Hitler's eyes, from behind his desk". He portrays Hitler as a rational and intelligent politician whose only goal was to increase Germany's prosperity and influence on the continent, and who was constantly let down by incompetent and/or treasonous subordinates. Irving's book faults the Allied leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, for the eventual escalation of war, and claims that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler to avert an alleged impending Soviet attack. Irving comments that in light of the "preventive war" that he feels Hitler was forced to wage, the Kommissarbefehl was merely something that Stalin forced on Hitler. He also claims that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust; while not outright denying its occurrence, Irving claims that Heinrich Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, were its originators and architects. Irving makes much of the lack of any written order from Hitler concerning the Holocaust (and for decades after the book's publication has offered to pay £1,000 to anyone who could find such an order).. In addition, citing the work of such historians as Harry Elmer Barnes, David Hoggan, and Frederick J. P. Veale, Irving argues that Britain was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1939.
Irving in his first edition of Hitler's War in 1977 argues that Hitler was against the mass killing of Jews. He claims that Hitler even ordered a stop to the extermination of Jews in November 1941 (the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper stated that this admission contradicts Irving's other claim that Hitler was ignorant about the mass killing of Jews). On 30 November 1941 Heinrich Himmler went to the Wolf's Lair for a private conference with Hitler and during it the fate of some Berlin Jews was mentioned. At 1.30 pm Himmler was instructed to tell Reinhard Heydrich that the Jews were not to be liquidated. Himmler telephoned SS General Oswald Pohl, the overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the order: "Jews are to stay where they are." Irving argued that "No liquidation" (Keine Liquidierung) was "incontrovertible evidence" that Hitler ordered that no Jews were to be killed. However, although the telephone log is genuine, it provides no evidence that Hitler was involved at all, only that Himmler contacted Heydrich and there is no evidence that Hitler and Himmler were in contact before the phone call. This is an example of Irving's manipulation of documents since there was no general order to stop the killing of Jews. The German historian Eberhard Jäckel wrote that Irving "only ever sees and collects what fits his story, and even now he will not let himself be dissuaded from understanding what he wants to by the phrase postponement of the Jewish question’."
In a footnote in Hitler's War, Irving first introduced the thesis later popularised in the 1980s by Ernst Nolte that a letter written by Chaim Weizmann to Neville Chamberlain on 3 September 1939, pledging the support of the Jewish Agency to the Allied war effort, constituted a "Jewish declaration of war" against Germany, thus justifying German "internment" of European Jews.. In 1975, when without Irving's permission the firm Ullstein-Verlag removed the passages claiming Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust from the German edition of Hitler's War, Irving sued Ullstein-Verlag. Despite his much-vaunted disdain for professional historians (most of whom Irving accused of slandering Hitler), Irving attended a historians' conference in Aschaffenburg in July 1978 to discuss "Hitler Today – Problems and Aspects of Hitler Research".. Irving spent his time at the conference attacking all of the historians present for alleged sloppy research on Hitler, and promoting Hitler's War as the only good book ever written on the Führer..
Irving in his 1991 revised edition of Hitler's War removed all mentions of "gas chambers" and the word "Holocaust". He defended the revisions by stating, "You won't find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even in a footnote, why should [you]. If something didn't happen, then you don't even dignify it with a footnote."
The British historian Ian Kershaw wrote in his book The Nazi Dictatorship (1985) that although Irving's thesis of Hitler's ignorance of the Holocaust in Hitler's War was almost universally rejected by historians, his book was of value in that it provided a huge stimulus for further research on Hitler's role in the Holocaust (which had not been widely explored until then) as a way of rebutting Irving. By the time of Kershaw's fourth edition of The Nazi Dictatorship (2000), Kershaw described Irving as having engaged in provocations in the 1970s to provide an "exculpation of Hitler's role in the Final Solution".
Reactions and criticism
Critical reception of Hitler's War was mostly negative. Various historians such as Richard J. Evans, Gitta Sereny, Martin Broszat, Lucy Dawidowicz, Gerard Fleming, Charles W. Sydnor, and Eberhard Jäckel wrote articles and books rebutting erroneous information in Hitler's War. Writing in The Sunday Times, Sereny called Irving's work "closer to theology or mythology" than history, while Broszat labelled Irving a "Hitler partisan wearing blinkers".. Lance Morrow wrote in Time that Irving's picture of the "Führer as a somewhat harried business executive too preoccupied to know exactly what was happening in his branch offices at Auschwitz and Treblinka" was hard to accept.. In an article published in The Sunday Times under the title "The £1,000 Question" on 10 July 1977, Sereny and the journalist Lewis Chester examined Irving's sources and found significant differences from what Irving published in Hitler's War. In particular, while interviewing one of Irving's primary informants, Otto Günsche, the latter stated that "one must assume that he [Hitler] did know" about the Holocaust.
Some historians, such as John Keegan and Hugh Trevor-Roper, praised the book as well written and well researched – although they disputed Irving's claim that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust, and Trevor-Roper was strongly critical of Irving's repeating the "stale and exploded libel" about Churchill ordering the "assassination" of General Sikorski. Keegan wrote that Hitler's War was "Irving's greatest achievement... indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the war in the round".
Hugh Trevor-Roper Trevor-Roper's praise was circumspect. Trevor-Roper commended Irving's "indefatigable, scholarly industry" and wrote "I have enjoyed reading his long work from beginning to end", but he also went on to note that many of the conclusions Irving drew were not supported by the evidence. Trevor-Roper objected to Irving's argument that one entry from Heinrich Himmler's phone log on 30 November 1941, ordering Heydrich to ensure that one train transport of German Jews to Latvia not be executed on arrival, proved that Hitler was opposed to genocide. Trevor-Roper argued that the message concerned only the people aboard that particular train and was not about all the Jews in Europe. (Irving, claiming to have misread the original source document as referring to transportation generally, rather than a specific train, later accepted that his reading of the message was wrong and that it actually referred to a single trainload out of Berlin.)Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat EWHC QB 115 (11 April 2000) at paragraph 5.99 Trevor-Roper noted the contradiction in Irving's argument, based on the assumption that it was Hitler who ordered Himmler to spare the people aboard that train and the claim that Hitler was unaware in the fall of 1941 that the SS were rounding up German and Czech Jews to be sent to be shot in Eastern Europe (the first gassings via gas vans started on 8 December 1941). Trevor-Roper commented about Irving's claim that Hitler was unaware of the mass murders of Jews carried out by the SS while at the same time intervening to save Jewish lives that: "One does not veto an action unless one thinks that it is otherwise likely to occur". Finally, Trevor-Roper complained about Irving's "consistent bias" for Hitler and that "Mr. Irving's sympathies can hardly be doubted".
Alan Bullock The British historian Alan Bullock writing in The New York Review of Books on 26 May 1977 dismissed Irving's depiction of Hitler as a leader too busy with the war to notice the Holocaust as contrary to all of the historical evidence.
Eberhard Jäckel The German historian Eberhard Jäckel wrote a series of newspaper articles later turned into the book David Irving's Hitler: A Faulty History Dissected, attacking Irving and maintaining that Hitler was very much aware of and approved of the Holocaust. Jäckel attacked Irving for claiming that a note from Heinrich Himmler's notebook – "Jewish transport from Berlin, not to be liquidated", dated 30 November 1941 – proved that Hitler did not want to see the Holocaust happen.. Jäckel maintained that the order referred only to that train (a claim which, as noted above, Irving later accepted), and argued that if Hitler had ordered the people on that train to be spared, it must stand to reason that he was aware of the Holocaust. Jäckel went on to argue that because the "Final Solution" was secret, it is not surprising that Hitler's servants were ignorant of the Holocaust, and that anyhow, five of Hitler's servants interviewed by Irving later claimed that they believed that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust.. Jäckel argued on the basis of Hitler's statements in Mein Kampf that it was a reasonable assumption he was committed to the genocide of the Jews because Hitler had attempted to execute the foreign policy he had outlined, which in Jäckel's opinion disproves Irving's claim that Hitler was unaware of the Shoah.. Jäckel used Hitler's tendency to involve himself in minutiae to argue that it is simply inconceivable that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust.. As evidence against Irving, Jäckel used the "prophecy" made in Hitler's 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech, when Hitler declared: