David Irving is a key British Holocaust denier, once considered to be one of the most successful and respectable of the “revisionists”. Irving made his reputation as a historian after gaining access to the hitherto unaccessed personal papers of former leading Nazis, some of whom he interviewed.

In 1988, Irving publicly denied the genocide of the Jews. Irving gained further public notoriety for launching a failed libel case in 2000 against the academic Deborah Lipstadt, who accused him of Holocaust denial. In the wake of this costly case, he relied on book tours to the United States, addressing small crowds of neo-Nazis, antisemites and anti-immigration activists.

In September 2010, Irving led a group of devotees to Auschwitz in support of his forthcoming biography of Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Final Solution. The trip also included a visit to Hitler’s bunker where, according to Irving, in 1944 “Germany army traitors” attempted to assassinate the Führer.

Irving has become increasingly irrelevant. While he remains an internationally recognised name in the Holocaust denial world, Irving is now an elderly man and rarely appears in public.

Old clips of his talks are still widely accessible but he is a shadow of his former self. He continues to update his archaic website but almost solely to add links to news articles from other sites. He also maintains the Focal Point Publications and Irving Books websites, where a dwindling audience of fans can still buy his books.

In February 2024, rumours circulated online that he had died, although these were later confirmed to be false. He is, however, currently facing serious health challenges and the few pictures that have emerged in the past year show him to be very frail. He now has an X account with 46,000 followers that distributes old clips and promotes past books, though it is almost certainly managed by someone else.