Published by Focal Point Publications, 1991, hardcover, index, 573 pages, some wear to dustjacket otherwise condition: very good.
Hermann Goring was the First World War combat pilot and "Ace" who served as the last commander of von Richtofen's "Flying Circus" and rose to become Hitler's Reichsmarschall; the "Second Man" of the Third Reich. In this major biography, based on hitherto undiscovered diaries and private and official documents, David Irving tells how Goring connived, intrigued, and conspired to bring Adolf Hitler to power, how he directed National Socialist Germany's industrial resurgence, commanded the mighty Luftwaffe, (Air Force), and served as Hitler's buttress through the years of struggle, triumph, and decline.
David Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Irving's works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it. Though Irving's negationist claims and views of German war crimes in World War II (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were never taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents, which he held closely but stated were fully supportive of his conclusions. His 1964 book The Mare's Nest about Germany's V-weapons campaign of 1944-45 was praised for its deep research but criticised for minimising Nazi slave labour programmes. By the late 1980s, Irving had placed himself outside the mainstream of the study of history, and had begun to turn from "'soft-core' to 'hard-core' Holocaust denial", possibly influenced by the 1988 trial of Holocaust denier . That trial, and his reading of the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, led him to openly espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving's reputation as a historian was further discredited in 2000, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian and Penguin Books, High Court Judge Charles Gray determined in his ruling that Irving willfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis, a view shared by many prominent historians. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.
