David Irving is a key British Holocaust denier, once considered 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. He 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-immigrant 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 as the years have progressed. While he remains an internationally recognised name in the Holocaust-denial world, he is now an elderly man and rarely appears in public. 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.

Old clips of his talks are still widely accessible, and his estate maintains the Focal Point Publications and Irving Books websites, where a dwindling audience of fans can still buy his books. 

He also has an X account with 65,000 followers, a YouTube channel with over 13,000 subscribers and small Instagram and Tik Tok accounts. These accounts, run by his family and team, distribute old clips of Irving, promote his past books and share other far-right content. In recent years, some modern deniers, like the neo-Nazi YouTuber Sam Wilkes (AKA Zoomer Historian), have attempted to introduce Irving’s works to a younger audience.