A side trip into a David Irving issue

IT'S NO SECRET that I comment on certain Unz Review articles. Currently there has been another flurry of attention on David Irving as a reliable historian. While I am still organizing my promised article on the present available knowledge of Hitller's role in the Hess "secret" flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941, I came across the comments to Hadding Scott's important aritcle on David Irving found here: https://carolynyeager.net/hadding-scott-talks-frankly-about-david-irving...

There are several good comments there, but one in particular I thought deserved re-publishing as a post. It's by "David," who often wrote  long, thoughtful comments here that I always appreciated. It went like this:

I've read Hadding's 12 page essay and find it fascinating. It took me back to my younger days, when I devoured Irving's books, like so many others, because of his 'revisionist' reputation and his alleged sympathies for the Germans. (You can find free copies of his books for download at white nationalist and racialist sites). But, when you open up one of Irving's books, you find - gassings and shootings of Jews galore. Irving even gives credence to some of the other anti-German atrocity stories, for example, the 'OperationTannenberg' slaughter of 20,000+ Poles by German death squads after 1939. After reading Irving, I became a confused individual: even though I didn't believe in the full Holocaust story, I believed in parts of it - in the so-called 'Rumbula' massacre, for example. I used to tell my friends, 'Okay, the Germans didn't gas the Jews, but they did shoot dead thousands of Jews in pits in Riga'.
 
Why did I believe? Because, Irving! His books seemed based on a scrupulous analysis of original documents (well, Hadding has exposed that misconception) and also, he has the reputation in the world's media as Revisionist Number One. When you mention Holocaust Revisionism to an educated person, the first thing they say is, 'Oh, that's David Irving, right?'. In my experience, they've never heard of Faurisson, Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Butz...
 
The other reason I believed is that so much of the rest of Irving's work is good for the German cause. He does a brilliant job, in his book on Rommel, of exposing the treachery of some of the top German generals and their aiding and abetting of the Normandy invasion. He was probably the first historian to tackle the subject of the mass rapes and murders of French women by the Allied soldiers in France (after the Allied invasion at Normandy, Irving writes, French civil disobedience of the German occupiers went down - the Allies made the Germans look good in the eyes of the French).
 
But, in the end, he'll always be known as a 'Holocaust Revisionist'. These days, I think that the media - and Jewry - have pushed the notion of Irving as the world's foremost Holocaust denier as a means of tricking people. The layman who picks up his books will come away [with]  the impression that 'Holocaust Revisionism' (as epitomised by Irving) doesn't deny the Holocaust, only Hitler's responsibility for it. On their own initiative, the SS gassed and shot millions of Jews, and Hitler didn't know a thing about it.

... Thank you David for sharing so freely your wide reading and experience with us at cy.net.

My post on the Hitler-Hess question re the so-called 'secret peace mission' to Great Britain' is coming soon. I've had a lot going on lately. But it hasn't taken me nearly as long as David Irving's promised book on Himmler which drug on year after year and, when it finally appeared to much fanfare some eight years later, did not contain the promised answer to the true NS culprit responsible for "killing the Jews." It was labeled Book 1, with Book 2 containing these answers to be arriving shortly. That was several years ago; still no sign of Book 2. What a scam. But the true believers will continue to wait upon the Great Man.