title: Asherah

text: The name Asherah appears forty times in the Hebrew Bible, but it is much reduced in English translations. The word "ʾăšērâ" is translated in Greek as (grove; plural: ἄλση) in every instance apart from Isaiah 17:8; 27:9 and 2 Chronicles 15:16; 24:18, with (trees) being used for the former, and, peculiarly, Ἀστάρτη (Astarte) for the latter. The Vulgate in Latin provided "lucus" or "nemus", a grove or a wood. From the Vulgate, the King James translation of the Bible uses "grove" or "groves" instead of Asherah's name. Non-scholarly English language readers of the Bible would not have read her name for more than 400 years afterward. The association of Asherah with trees in the Hebrew Bible is very strong. For example, she is found under trees (1 Kings 14:23; 2 Kings 17:10) and is made of wood by human beings (1 Kings 14:15, 2 Kings 16:3–4). Trees described as being an asherah or part of an asherah include grapevines, pomegranates, walnuts, myrtles, and willows.


title: Asherah

text: Episodes in the Hebrew Bible show a gender imbalance in Hebrew religion. Asherah was patronized by female royals such as the Queen Mother Maacah (1 Kings 15:13). But more commonly, perhaps, Asherah was worshiped within the household and her offerings were performed by family matriarchs. As the women of Jerusalem attested, "When we burned incense to the Queen of Heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, did not our husbands know that we were making cakes impressed with her image and pouring out drink offerings to her?" (Jeremiah 44:19). This passage corroborates a number of archaeological excavations showing altar spaces in Hebrew homes. The "household idols" variously referred to in the Bible may also be linked to the hundreds of female pillar-base figurines that have been discovered.


title: Asherah

text: Popular culture defines Canaanite religion and Hebrew idolatry as sexual "fertility cults," products of primitive superstition rather than spiritual philosophy. This position is buttressed by the Hebrew Bible, which frequently and graphically associates goddess religions with prostitution. As Jeremiah wrote, "On every high hill and under every spreading tree you lay down as a prostitute" (Jeremiah 2:20). Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in particular blame the goddess religions for making Yahweh "jealous", and cite his jealousy as the reason Yahweh allowed the destruction of Jerusalem. As for sexual and fertility rites, it is likely that once they were held in honor in Israel, as they were throughout the ancient world. Although their nature remains uncertain, sexual rites typically revolved around women of power and influence, such as Maacah. The Hebrew term "qadishtu", usually translated as "temple prostitutes" or "shrine prostitutes", literally means "priestesses" or "priests".


title: Asherah

text: Some scholars have found an early link between Asherah and Eve, based upon the coincidence of their common title as "the mother of all living" in the Book of Genesis 3:20 through the identification with the Hurrian mother goddess Hebat. There is further speculation that the Shekhinah as a feminine aspect of Yahweh, may be a cultural memory or devolution of Asherah.


title: Asherah

text: In Christian scripture, the Holy Spirit is represented by a dove—a ubiquitous symbol of goddess religions, also found on Hebrew "naos" shrines. This speculation is not widely accepted. Goddess symbology nevertheless persists in Christian iconography; Israel Morrow notes that while Christian art typically displays female angels with avian wings, the only biblical reference to such figures comes through Zechariah's vision of pagan goddesses.


title: Asherah

text: Ugaritic amulets show a miniature "tree of life" growing out of Asherah's belly. Accordingly, Asherah poles, which were sacred trees or poles, are mentioned many times in the Hebrew Bible, rendered as "palus sacer" (sacred poles) in the Latin Vulgate. Asherah poles were prohibited by the Deuteronomic Code that commanded "You shall not plant any tree as an Asherah beside the altar of the Lord your God". The prohibition, as Dever notes, is also a testament to the practice of putting up Asherah poles beside Yahweh's altars (cf. 2 Kings 21:7) amongst Israelites. Another significant biblical reference occurs in the legend of Deborah, a female ruler of Israel who held court under a sacred tree (Book of Judges 4:5), which was preserved for many generations. Morrow further notes that the "funeral pillars of the kings" described by the Book of Ezekiel (43:9, variously translated as "funeral offerings" or even "carcasses of the kings") were likely constructed of sacred wood, since the prophet connects them with "prostitution."


title: Asherah

text: The lioness made a ubiquitous symbol for goddesses of the ancient Middle East that was similar to the dove and the tree. Lionesses figure prominently in Asherah's iconography, including the tenth century BC Ta'anach cult stand, which also includes the tree motif. A Hebrew arrowhead from eleventh century BC bears the inscription "Servant of the Lion Lady".


title: Asherah

text: As "ʾAṯirat" (Qatabanian: "") she was attested in pre-Islamic south Arabia as the consort of the moon-god "ʿAmm".


title: Asherah

text: One of the Tema stones (CIS II 113) discovered by Charles Huber in 1883 in the ancient oasis of Tema, northwestern Arabia, and now located at the Louvre, believed to date to the time of Nabonidus's retirement there in 549 BC, bears an inscription in Aramaic that mentions "Ṣelem of Maḥram" (), "Šingalāʾ" (), and "ʾAšîrāʾ" () as the deities of Tema. This "ʾAšîrāʾ" may be Asherah. It is unclear whether the name would be an Aramaic vocalisation of the Ugaritic "ʾAṯirat" or a later borrowing of the Hebrew "ʾĂšērāh" or similar form. In any event, the root of both names is a Proto-Semitic "*ʾṯrt".


title: Asherah

text: The Arabic root "ʾṯr" (as in "ʾaṯar',' ""trace") is similar in meaning to the Hebrew "ʾāšar", indicating "to tread", used as a basis to explain Asherah's epithet "of the sea" as "she who treads the sea" (especially as the Arabic root "yamm" also means "sea"). Recently, it has been suggested that the goddess name Athirat might be derived from the passive participle form, referring to "one followed by (the gods)", that is, "pro-genitress or originatress", corresponding with Asherah's image as the "mother of the gods" in Ugaritic literature.""


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Super 8 is a 2011 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by J. J. Abrams and co-produced by Steven Spielberg. The film stars Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, and Kyle Chandler and tells the story of a group of young teenagers in 1979 who are filming their own Super 8 movie when a train derails, releasing a dangerous presence into their town. The film was shot in Weirton, West Virginia, and surrounding areas, portraying the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: "Super 8" was released on June 10, 2011, in conventional and IMAX theaters in the United States. It received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised Abram's direction, its nostalgic elements, visual effects, musical score and for the performances of the cast, in particular, both Fanning and newcomer Courtney's acting was cited, while also being compared to such thematically similar films as "E.T.", "Stand by Me", and "The Goonies", featuring a darker interpretation of those iconic premises. "Super 8" was also a commercial success, grossing over $260 million against a $50 million budget. The film received several awards and nominations, primarily in technical and special effects categories, Giacchino's musical score, as well as for Courtney and Fanning's performances.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: In 1979, Deputy Sheriff Jack Lamb and his 14-year-old son Joe, mourn wife and mother Elizabeth, killed in a workplace accident. Jack blames Louis Dainard, whose shift she was covering as he showed up drunk. Joe clings to her memory in the form of a locket.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Four months later Joe's friend Charles is making a zombie movie for a Super 8 film competition. He enlists Joe's help along with friends Preston, Martin, and Cary, as well as Dainard's daughter, Alice. Though their fathers are opposed to their friendship, Joe and Alice become close.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: While filming at a train depot at midnight, a train approaches and a pickup truck rams the train head-on, derailing it and destroying the depot. The children are separated in the chaos. Joe sees the door of a train wagon violently thrown off. The kids regroup and find crates of strange white cubes amid the wreckage before discovering the truck driver to be their biology teacher Dr. Woodward. Gravely injured, he warns them at gunpoint to forget what they have seen. They flee, as a convoy from the local Air Force base, led by Col. Nelec, arrives. Nelec finds an empty super 8 film box.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: In the following days the town experiences strange events; dogs run away, several townspeople go missing, the electrical power fluctuates, and electronic items are stolen. Jack approaches Nelec but Nelec arrests him. Nelec orders flamethrowers to start a wildfire as an excuse to evacuate the residents to the base. Joe and Charles watch their derailment footage and see that a large creature escaped the train. Nelec confronts Woodward in a military hospital, seeking information about the creature, but when Woodward rebukes him, Nelec has him killed.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Alice's father tells Joe the creature has abducted her. Joe, Charles, Martin, and Cary persuade Jen, Charles' older sister, to flirt with Donny so he can get them into town to rescue Alice. Breaking into Dr. Woodward's trailer they find documents and a film from his time as a government researcher.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: The film and tape recorder reveal that in 1958, the Air Force captured an alien when it crash-landed. They experimented on the alien, while withholding its space craft, composed of the strange white cubes, which allowed the craft to shape-shift. The alien had established a psychic connection with Woodward, convincing him to help it escape Earth, but Nelec sabotaged, discredited, and discharged Woodward. While the kids are watching Nelec captures them but the alien kills Nelec and the airmen, allowing the kids to escape. Jack escapes and agrees with Louis to put their differences aside to save their kids.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: The military attacks the alien but their hardware goes haywire in its presence, resulting in significant collateral damage. Joe and Cary find a massive tunnel system under the town. The missing townfolk, including Alice, are hanging unconscious from the ceiling of a cavern. Here, the alien is creating a device, constructed from the missing electronics, and attached to the base of the water tower. Using firecrackers as a distraction, Joe frees Alice and the others. The alien grabs Joe, who quietly speaks to it. Establishing an emotional connection between the two of them, the alien allows them to return to the surface.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Everyone watches as metal objects from the town are pulled to the top of the tower by an unknown force. The white cubes reassemble to create a spaceship and, as the alien enters it, the locket in Joe's pocket is drawn toward the tower. After a moment, he lets it go, completing the ship. As the ship rises into space, Joe takes Alice's hand.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: The detective-zombie short film the children were making in Super 8 rolls runs at the end of the movie beside the credit roll. In it, Charles asks for his short film "The Case" to be picked for a local film festival before being attacked by Alice as a zombie.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: J.J. Abrams had the idea to start a film by showing a factory's "Accident-Free" sign long before he came up with the rest of the ideas for the film. "Super 8" was actually the combination of two ideas; one for a film about kids making their own movie during the 1970s, and another for a blockbuster alien invasion film. Abrams combined the ideas, worried that the former would not attract enough attendance.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Abrams and Spielberg collaborated in a storytelling committee to come up with the story for the film. The film was initially reported to be either a sequel or prequel to the 2008 film "Cloverfield", but this was quickly denied by Abrams. Primary photography began in fall (September/October) 2010. The teaser itself was filmed separately in April. "Super 8" is the first original J. J. Abrams film project produced by Amblin Entertainment, Bad Robot Productions, and Paramount Pictures.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Abrams wanted to find new faces to play the parts in his movie. He conducted a national talent search in order to find the child actors to play each of the leading roles. Courtney (who was hoping to land a part in a commercial) was picked out of many boys because Abrams found something "different" in him. Riley Griffiths sent Abrams a tape of himself in order to land the part of Charles.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Filming took place in Weirton, West Virginia, from September 20, 2010, to December 16, 2010. To promote the film, Valve created a short video game segment and released it alongside the Windows and Mac versions of "Portal 2".


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Abrams' original plan was to film all of the sequences for the film-within-a-film, "The Case", in Super-8 using Pro8mm stock and cameras. However, this approach proved unsuccessful, as visual effects house Industrial Light and Magic found it impossible to integrate CGI into the footage due to the format's graininess. For sequences involving CGI, cinematographer Larry Fong used Super-16 instead.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: The score for the film was composed by Michael Giacchino, Abrams' long-time collaborator. The soundtrack was released on August 2, 2011, by Varèse Sarabande. It won the 2012 Saturn Award for Best Music.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: During the ending credits, the songs "Don't Bring Me Down" by Electric Light Orchestra and "My Sharona" by The Knack are featured. The Blondie song "Heart of Glass" and The Cars song "Bye Bye Love" are also featured in the film.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Like "Cloverfield", an earlier J. J. Abrams-produced film, "Super 8" was promoted through an extensive viral marketing campaign. The first trailer for the movie was attached to "Iron Man 2", released in May 2010. The trailer gave the premise of a section of Area 51 being closed down in 1979 and its contents being transported by freight train to Ohio. A pickup truck drives into the oncoming train, derailing it, and one of the carriages is smashed open while a Super 8 camera films. Fans analyzing the trailer found a hidden message, "Scariest Thing I Ever Saw", contained in the final frames of the trailer. This led to a website, www.scariestthingieversaw.com, which simulated the interface of a PDP-11 and contained various clues to the film's story-line; the computer was eventually revealed to belong to Josh Woodward, the son of Dr. Woodward, who is trying to find out what happened to his father. Another viral website, www.rocketpoppeteers.com, was also found, which like Slusho from "Cloverfield" plays no direct part in the film but is indirectly related. The official "Super 8" website also contained an "editing room" section, which asked users to find various clips from around the web and piece them together. When completed, the reel makes up the film found by the kids in Dr. Woodward's trailer, showing the ship disintegrating into individual white cubes, and the alien reaching through the window of its cage and snatching Dr. Woodward. The video game "Portal 2" contains an interactive trailer placing the player on board the train before it derails, and showing the carriage being smashed open and the roar of the alien within.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: The film was released on June 9, 2011, in Australia; June 10, 2011, in the United States; and August 5, 2011, in the United Kingdom. On June 8, Paramount also launched a “Super 8 Sneak Peek” Twitter promotion, offering fans a chance to purchase tickets for an advance screening, taking place on June 9, 2011, in the United States. The film opened at #1 in the U.S. Box Office for that weekend, grossing about $35 million.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: The film was released on Blu-ray and DVD on November 22, 2011. The release was produced as a combo pack with a Digital Copy, including nine bonus features and fourteen deleted scenes. A 4K Blu-Ray edition was released on its tenth anniversary (May 24, 2021).


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: "Super 8" had a production budget of $50 million. It was commercially released on , 2011. In the United States and Canada, it opened in and grossed over $35.4 million on its opening weekend, ranking first at the box office. The film grossed $127 million in North America with a worldwide total of some $260 million.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: On the film-critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 81% based on 295 reviews, and an average score of 7.30/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "It may evoke memories of classic summer blockbusters a little too eagerly for some, but "Super 8" has thrills, visual dazzle, and emotional depth to spare." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score based on reviews from critics, gives the film a score of 72 out of 100 based on 41 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Chris Sosa of "Gather" gave the film an A rating, calling it, "a gripping and exciting tale of finding one's place in the world amidst tragedy". His review concluded, "While the genre-bending occasionally unsettles, the film's genuine and emotionally gripping nature make its journey believable."


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four and said, ""Super 8" is a wonderful film, nostalgia not for a time but for a style of film-making, when shell-shocked young audiences were told a story and not pounded over the head with aggressive action. Abrams treats early adolescence with tenderness and affection." Richard Corliss of "Time" gave it a similarly positive review, calling it "the year's most thrilling, feeling mainstream movie". He then named it one of the Top 10 Best Movies of 2011. Jamie Graham of "Total Film" gave the film a perfect five-star rating, saying, "like Spielberg, Abrams has an eye for awe, his deft orchestration of indelible images – a tank trundling through a children's playground, a plot-pivotal landmark framed in the distance through a small hole in a bedroom wall – marking him as a born storyteller". Christopher Orr of "The Atlantic" called it a "love letter to a cinematic era", while Claudia Puig of "USA Today" praised it as "a summer blockbuster firing on all cylinders".


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: Critics and audiences alike were polarized on the film's ending. Some found it to be emotional, powerful, and satisfying while others found it rushed and forced. For example, writing for MUBI's Notebook, Fernando F. Croce alleged that "no film this year opens more promisingly and ends more dismally than J.J. Abrams' "Super 8"." Other critics commented negatively on the film's frequent homages to early works of Spielberg, particularly in its depiction of broken families (a theme Spielberg has explored in nearly all of his films). For example, CNN's Tom Charity felt that "Abrams' imitation [was] a shade too reverent for [his] taste." David Edelstein, of "New York" magazine, called it a "flagrant crib," adding that "Abrams has probably been fighting not to reproduce Spielberg's signature moves since the day he picked up a camera. Now, with the blessing of the master, he can plagiarize with alacrity."


title: Super 8 (2011 film)

text: In addition to these awards, the film was short-listed for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and Best Original Score, and the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound, and Best Special Visual Effects. Paramount submitted it for several considerations for the BAFTAs including Best Film, Best Director (J. J. Abrams), Best Original Screenplay, Leading Actor (Kyle Chandler), Supporting Actress (Elle Fanning), Supporting Actor (Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso, Noah Emmerich), Cinematography, Production Design, Editing, Costume Design, Original Music, Sound, Makeup and Hair, and Special Visual Effects.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons (; Latin for Mount Olympus) is a large shield volcano on Mars. The volcano has a height of over 21.9 km (13.6 mi or 72,000 ft) as measured by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). Olympus Mons is about two and a half times Mount Everest's height above sea level. It is one of the largest volcanoes, the tallest planetary mountain, and approximately tied with Rheasilvia as the tallest mountain currently discovered in the Solar System. It is associated with the Tharsis Montes, a large volcanic region on Mars.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons is the youngest of the large volcanoes on Mars, having formed during Mars's Hesperian Period with eruptions continuing well into the Amazonian. It had been known to astronomers since the late 19th century as the albedo feature Nix Olympica (Latin for "Olympic Snow"). Its mountainous nature was suspected well before space probes confirmed its identity as a mountain.


title: Olympus Mons

text: The volcano is located in Mars's western hemisphere, with the center at , just off the northwestern edge of the Tharsis bulge. The western portion of the volcano lies in the Amazonis quadrangle (MC-8) and the central and eastern portions in the adjoining Tharsis quadrangle (MC-9).


title: Olympus Mons

text: Two impact craters on Olympus Mons have been assigned provisional names by the International Astronomical Union. They are the Karzok crater () and the Pangboche crater (). The craters are notable for being two of several suspected source areas for shergottites, the most abundant class of Martian meteorites.


title: Olympus Mons

text: As a shield volcano, Olympus Mons resembles the shape of the large volcanoes making up the Hawaiian Islands. The edifice is about wide. Because the mountain is so large, with complex structure at its edges, allocating a height to it is difficult. Olympus Mons stands above the Mars global datum, and its local relief, from the foot of the cliffs which form its northwest margin to its peak, is over (a little over twice the height of Mauna Kea as measured from its base on the ocean floor). The total elevation change from the plains of Amazonis Planitia, over to the northwest, to the summit approaches . The summit of the mountain has six nested calderas (collapsed craters) forming an irregular depression × across and up to deep. The volcano's outer edge consists of an escarpment, or cliff, up to tall (although obscured by lava flows in places), a feature unique among the shield volcanoes of Mars, which may have been created by enormous flank landslides. Olympus Mons covers an area of about , which is approximately the size of Italy or the Philippines, and it is supported by a thick lithosphere. The extraordinary size of Olympus Mons is likely because Mars lacks mobile tectonic plates. Unlike on Earth, the crust of Mars remains fixed over a stationary hotspot, and a volcano can continue to discharge lava until it reaches an enormous height.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Being a shield volcano, Olympus Mons has a very gently sloping profile. The average slope on the volcano's flanks is only 5%. Slopes are steepest near the middle part of the flanks and grow shallower toward the base, giving the flanks a concave upward profile. Its flanks are shallower and extend farther from the summit in the northwestern direction than they do to the southeast. The volcano's shape and profile have been likened to a "circus tent" held up by a single pole that is shifted off center.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Due to the size and shallow slopes of Olympus Mons, an observer standing on the Martian surface would be unable to view the entire profile of the volcano, even from a great distance. The curvature of the planet and the volcano itself would obscure such a synoptic view. Similarly, an observer near the summit would be unaware of standing on a very high mountain, as the slope of the volcano would extend far beyond the horizon, a mere 3 kilometers away.


title: Olympus Mons

text: The typical atmospheric pressure at the top of Olympus Mons is 72 pascals, about 12% of the average Martian surface pressure of 600 pascals. Both are exceedingly low by terrestrial standards; by comparison, the atmospheric pressure at the summit of Mount Everest is 32,000 pascals, or about 32% of Earth's sea level pressure. Even so, high-altitude orographic clouds frequently drift over the Olympus Mons summit, and airborne Martian dust is still present. Although the average Martian surface atmospheric pressure is less than one percent of Earth's, the much lower gravity of Mars increases the atmosphere's scale height; in other words, Mars's atmosphere is expansive and does not drop off in density with height as sharply as Earth's.


title: Olympus Mons

text: The composition of Olympus Mons is approximately 44% silicates, 17.5% iron oxides (which give the planet its red coloration), 7% aluminum, 6% magnesium, 6% calcium, and particularly high proportions of sulfur dioxide with 7%. These results point to the surface being largely composed of basalts and other mafic rocks, which would have erupted as low viscosity lava flows and hence lead to the low gradients on the surface of the planet.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons is an unlikely landing location for automated space probes in the near future. The high elevations preclude parachute-assisted landings because the atmosphere is insufficiently dense to slow the spacecraft down. Moreover, Olympus Mons stands in one of the dustiest regions of Mars. A mantle of fine dust obscures the underlying bedrock, possibly making rock samples hard to come by and likely posing a significant obstacle for rovers.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons is the result of many thousands of highly fluid, basaltic lava flows that poured from volcanic vents over a long period of time (the Hawaiian Islands exemplify similar shield volcanoes on a smaller scale – see Mauna Kea). Like the basalt volcanoes on Earth, Martian basaltic volcanoes are capable of erupting enormous quantities of ash. Due to the reduced gravity of Mars compared to Earth, there are lesser buoyant forces on the magma rising out of the crust. In addition, the magma chambers are thought to be much larger and deeper than the ones found on Earth. The flanks of Olympus Mons are made up of innumerable lava flows and channels. Many of the flows have levees along their margins (pictured). The cooler, outer margins of the flow solidify, leaving a central trough of molten, flowing lava. Partially collapsed lava tubes are visible as chains of pit craters, and broad lava fans formed by lava emerging from intact, subsurface tubes are also common. In places along the volcano's base, solidified lava flows can be seen spilling out into the surrounding plains, forming broad aprons, and burying the basal escarpment. Crater counts from high-resolution images taken by the Mars Express orbiter in 2004 indicate that lava flows on the northwestern flank of Olympus Mons range in age from 115 million years old (Mya) to only 2 Mya. These ages are very recent in geological terms, suggesting that the mountain may still be volcanically active, though in a very quiescent and episodic fashion.


title: Olympus Mons

text: The caldera complex at the peak of the volcano is made of at least six overlapping calderas and caldera segments (pictured). Calderas are formed by roof collapse following depletion and withdrawal of the subsurface magma chamber after an eruption. Each caldera thus represents a separate pulse of volcanic activity on the mountain. The largest and oldest caldera segment appears to have formed as a single, large lava lake. Using geometric relationships of caldera dimensions from laboratory models, scientists have estimated that the magma chamber associated with the largest caldera on Olympus Mons lies at a depth of about below the caldera floor. Crater size-frequency distributions on the caldera floors indicate the calderas range in age from 350 Mya to about 150 Mya. All probably formed within 100 million years of each other.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons is asymmetrical structurally as well as topographically. The longer, more shallow northwestern flank displays extensional features, such as large slumps and normal faults. In contrast, the volcano's steeper southeastern side has features indicating compression, including step-like terraces in the volcano's mid-flank region (interpreted as thrust faults) and a number of wrinkle ridges located at the basal escarpment. Why opposite sides of the mountain should show different styles of deformation may lie in how large shield volcanoes grow laterally and in how variations within the volcanic substrate have affected the mountain's final shape.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Large shield volcanoes grow not only by adding material to their flanks as erupted lava, but also by spreading laterally at their bases. As a volcano grows in size, the stress field underneath the volcano changes from compressional to extensional. A subterranean rift may develop at the base of the volcano, causing the underlying crust to spread apart. If the volcano rests on sediments containing mechanically weak layers (e.g., beds of water-saturated clay), detachment zones (décollements) may develop in the weak layers. The extensional stresses in the detachment zones can produce giant landslides and normal faults on the volcano's flanks, leading to the formation of a basal escarpment. Further from the volcano, these detachment zones can express themselves as a succession of overlapping, gravity driven thrust faults. This mechanism has long been cited as an explanation of the Olympus Mons aureole deposits (discussed below).


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons lies at the edge of the Tharsis bulge, an ancient vast volcanic plateau likely formed by the end of the Noachian Period. During the Hesperian, when Olympus Mons began to form, the volcano was located on a shallow slope that descended from the high in Tharsis into the northern lowland basins. Over time, these basins received large volumes of sediment eroded from Tharsis and the southern highlands. The sediments likely contained abundant Noachian-aged phyllosilicates (clays) formed during an early period on Mars when surface water was abundant, and were thickest in the northwest where basin depth was greatest. As the volcano grew through lateral spreading, low-friction detachment zones preferentially developed in the thicker sediment layers to the northwest, creating the basal escarpment and widespread lobes of aureole material (Lycus Sulci). Spreading also occurred to the southeast; however, it was more constrained in that direction by the Tharsis rise, which presented a higher-friction zone at the volcano's base. Friction was higher in that direction because the sediments were thinner and probably consisted of coarser grained material resistant to sliding. The competent and rugged basement rocks of Tharsis acted as an additional source of friction. This inhibition of southeasterly basal spreading in Olympus Mons could account for the structural and topographic asymmetry of the mountain. Numerical models of particle dynamics involving lateral differences in friction along the base of Olympus Mons have been shown to reproduce the volcano's present shape and asymmetry fairly well.


title: Olympus Mons

text: It has been speculated that the detachment along the weak layers was aided by the presence of high-pressure water in the sediment pore spaces, which would have interesting astrobiological implications. If water-saturated zones still exist in sediments under the volcano, they would likely have been kept warm by a high geothermal gradient and residual heat from the volcano's magma chamber. Potential springs or seeps around the volcano would offer exciting possibilities for detecting microbial life.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons and a few other volcanoes in the Tharsis region stand high enough to reach above the frequent Martian dust-storms recorded by telescopic observers as early as the 19th century. The astronomer Patrick Moore pointed out that Schiaparelli (1835–1910) "had found that his "Nodus Gordis" and "Olympic Snow" [Nix Olympica] were almost the only features to be seen" during dust storms, and "guessed correctly that they must be high".


title: Olympus Mons

text: The Mariner 9 spacecraft arrived in orbit around Mars in 1971 during a global dust-storm. The first objects to become visible as the dust began to settle, the tops of the Tharsis volcanoes, demonstrated that the altitude of these features greatly exceeded that of any mountain found on Earth, as astronomers expected. Observations of the planet from Mariner 9 confirmed that Nix Olympica was a volcano. Ultimately, astronomers adopted the name "Olympus Mons" for the albedo feature known as Nix Olympica.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons is located between the northwestern edge of the Tharsis region and the eastern edge of Amazonis Planitia. It stands about from the other three large Martian shield volcanoes, collectively called the Tharsis Montes (Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons). The Tharsis Montes are slightly smaller than Olympus Mons.


title: Olympus Mons

text: A wide, annular depression or moat about deep surrounds the base of Olympus Mons and is thought to be due to the volcano's immense weight pressing down on the Martian crust. The depth of this depression is greater on the northwest side of the mountain than on the southeast side.


title: Olympus Mons

text: Olympus Mons is partially surrounded by a region of distinctive grooved or corrugated terrain known as the Olympus Mons aureole. The aureole consists of several large lobes. Northwest of the volcano, the aureole extends a distance of up to and is known as Lycus Sulci (). East of Olympus Mons, the aureole is partially covered by lava flows, but where it is exposed it goes by different names (Gigas Sulci, for example). The origin of the aureole remains debated, but it was likely formed by huge landslides or gravity-driven thrust sheets that sloughed off the edges of the Olympus Mons shield.


title: Law of large numbers

text: In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value and tends to become closer to the expected value as more trials are performed.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The LLN is important because it guarantees stable long-term results for the averages of some random events. For example, while a casino may lose money in a single spin of the roulette wheel, its earnings will tend towards a predictable percentage over a large number of spins. Any winning streak by a player will eventually be overcome by the parameters of the game. Importantly, the law applies (as the name indicates) only when a "large number" of observations are considered. There is no principle that a small number of observations will coincide with the expected value or that a streak of one value will immediately be "balanced" by the others (see the gambler's fallacy).


title: Law of large numbers

text: other formulas that look similar are not verified, such as the raw deviation from "theoretical results":


title: Law of large numbers

text: not only does it not converge toward zero as "n" increases, but it tends to increase in absolute value as "n" increases.


title: Law of large numbers

text: For example, a single roll of a fair, six-sided die produces one of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, each with equal probability. Therefore, the expected value of the average of the rolls is:


title: Law of large numbers

text: According to the law of large numbers, if a large number of six-sided dice are rolled, the average of their values (sometimes called the sample mean) will approach 3.5, with the precision increasing as more dice are rolled.


title: Law of large numbers

text: It follows from the law of large numbers that the empirical probability of success in a series of Bernoulli trials will converge to the theoretical probability. For a Bernoulli random variable, the expected value is the theoretical probability of success, and the average of "n" such variables (assuming they are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.)) is precisely the relative frequency.


title: Law of large numbers

text: For example, a fair coin toss is a Bernoulli trial. When a fair coin is flipped once, the theoretical probability that the outcome will be heads is equal to . Therefore, according to the law of large numbers, the proportion of heads in a "large" number of coin flips "should be" roughly . In particular, the proportion of heads after "n" flips will almost surely converge to as "n" approaches infinity.


title: Law of large numbers

text: Although the proportion of heads (and tails) approaches , almost surely the absolute difference in the number of heads and tails will become large as the number of flips becomes large. That is, the probability that the absolute difference is a small number approaches zero as the number of flips becomes large. Also, almost surely the ratio of the absolute difference to the number of flips will approach zero. Intuitively, the expected difference grows, but at a slower rate than the number of flips.


title: Law of large numbers

text: Another good example of the LLN is the Monte Carlo method. These methods are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The larger the number of repetitions, the better the approximation tends to be. The reason that this method is important is mainly that, sometimes, it is difficult or impossible to use other approaches.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The average of the results obtained from a large number of trials may fail to converge in some cases. For instance, the average of "n" results taken from the Cauchy distribution or some Pareto distributions (α<1) will not converge as "n" becomes larger; the reason is heavy tails. The Cauchy distribution and the Pareto distribution represent two cases: the Cauchy distribution does not have an expectation, whereas the expectation of the Pareto distribution (α<1) is infinite. One way to generate the Cauchy-distributed example is where the random numbers equal the tangent of an angle uniformly distributed between −90° and +90°. The median is zero, but the expected value does not exist, and indeed the average of "n" such variables have the same distribution as one such variable. It does not converge in probability toward zero (or any other value) as "n" goes to infinity.


title: Law of large numbers

text: And if the trials embed a selection bias, typical in human economic/rational behaviour, the law of large numbers does not help in solving the bias. Even if the number of trials is increased the selection bias remains.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) stated without proof that the accuracies of empirical statistics tend to improve with the number of trials. This was then formalized as a law of large numbers. A special form of the LLN (for a binary random variable) was first proved by Jacob Bernoulli. It took him over 20 years to develop a sufficiently rigorous mathematical proof which was published in his ("The Art of Conjecturing") in 1713. He named this his "Golden Theorem" but it became generally known as "Bernoulli's theorem". This should not be confused with Bernoulli's principle, named after Jacob Bernoulli's nephew Daniel Bernoulli. In 1837, S. D. Poisson further described it under the name ("the law of large numbers"). Thereafter, it was known under both names, but the "law of large numbers" is most frequently used.


title: Law of large numbers

text: After Bernoulli and Poisson published their efforts, other mathematicians also contributed to refinement of the law, including Chebyshev, Markov, Borel, Cantelli, Kolmogorov and Khinchin. Markov showed that the law can apply to a random variable that does not have a finite variance under some other weaker assumption, and Khinchin showed in 1929 that if the series consists of independent identically distributed random variables, it suffices that the expected value exists for the weak law of large numbers to be true. These further studies have given rise to two prominent forms of the LLN. One is called the "weak" law and the other the "strong" law, in reference to two different modes of convergence of the cumulative sample means to the expected value; in particular, as explained below, the strong form implies the weak.


title: Law of large numbers

text: There are two different versions of the law of large numbers that are described below. They are called the" strong law of large numbers" and the "weak law of large numbers". Stated for the case where "X", "X", ... is an infinite sequence of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Lebesgue integrable random variables with expected value E("X") = E("X") = ...= "µ", both versions of the law state that the sample average


title: Law of large numbers

text: Introductory probability texts often additionally assume identical finite variance formula_5 (for all formula_6) and no correlation between random variables. In that case, the variance of the average of n random variables is


title: Law of large numbers

text: which can be used to shorten and simplify the proofs. This assumption of finite variance is "not necessary". Large or infinite variance will make the convergence slower, but the LLN holds anyway.


title: Law of large numbers

text: Mutual independence of the random variables can be replaced by pairwise independence or exchangeability in both versions of the law.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The difference between the strong and the weak version is concerned with the mode of convergence being asserted. For interpretation of these modes, see Convergence of random variables.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The weak law of large numbers (also called Khinchin's law) states that the sample average converges in probability towards the expected value


title: Law of large numbers

text: Interpreting this result, the weak law states that for any nonzero margin specified ("ε"), no matter how small, with a sufficiently large sample there will be a very high probability that the average of the observations will be close to the expected value; that is, within the margin.


title: Law of large numbers

text: As mentioned earlier, the weak law applies in the case of i.i.d. random variables, but it also applies in some other cases. For example, the variance may be different for each random variable in the series, keeping the expected value constant. If the variances are bounded, then the law applies, as shown by Chebyshev as early as 1867. (If the expected values change during the series, then we can simply apply the law to the average deviation from the respective expected values. The law then states that this converges in probability to zero.) In fact, Chebyshev's proof works so long as the variance of the average of the first "n" values goes to zero as "n" goes to infinity. As an example, assume that each random variable in the series follows a Gaussian distribution with mean zero, but with variance equal to formula_9, which is not bounded. At each stage, the average will be normally distributed (as the average of a set of normally distributed variables). The variance of the sum is equal to the sum of the variances, which is asymptotic to formula_10. The variance of the average is therefore asymptotic to formula_11 and goes to zero.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The strong law of large numbers (also called Kolmogorov's law) states that the sample average converges almost surely to the expected value


title: Law of large numbers

text: What this means is that the probability that, as the number of trials "n" goes to infinity, the average of the observations converges to the expected value, is equal to one. The modern proof of the strong law is more complex than that of the weak law, and relies on passing to an appropriate subsequence.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The strong law of large numbers can itself be seen as a special case of the pointwise ergodic theorem. This view justifies the intuitive interpretation of the expected value (for Lebesgue integration only) of a random variable when sampled repeatedly as the "long-term average".


title: Law of large numbers

text: Law 3 is called the strong law because random variables which converge strongly (almost surely) are guaranteed to converge weakly (in probability). However the weak law is known to hold in certain conditions where the strong law does not hold and then the convergence is only weak (in probability). See differences between the weak law and the strong law.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The strong law applies to independent identically distributed random variables having an expected value (like the weak law). This was proved by Kolmogorov in 1930. It can also apply in other cases. Kolmogorov also showed, in 1933, that if the variables are independent and identically distributed, then for the average to converge almost surely on "something" (this can be considered another statement of the strong law), it is necessary that they have an expected value (and then of course the average will converge almost surely on that).


title: Law of large numbers

text: The "weak law" states that for a specified large "n", the average formula_14 is likely to be near "μ". Thus, it leaves open the possibility that formula_15 happens an infinite number of times, although at infrequent intervals. (Not necessarily formula_16 for all "n").


title: Law of large numbers

text: The "strong law" shows that this almost surely will not occur. Note that it does not imply that with probability 1, we have that for any the inequality formula_17 holds for all large enough "n", since the convergence is not necessarily uniform on the set where it holds.


title: Law of large numbers

text: Suppose "f"("x","θ") is some function defined for "θ" ∈ Θ, and continuous in "θ". Then for any fixed "θ", the sequence {"f"("X","θ"), "f"("X","θ"), ...} will be a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables, such that the sample mean of this sequence converges in probability to E["f"("X","θ")]. This is the "pointwise" (in "θ") convergence.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The uniform law of large numbers states the conditions under which the convergence happens "uniformly" in "θ". If


title: Law of large numbers

text: Borel's law of large numbers, named after Émile Borel, states that if an experiment is repeated a large number of times, independently under identical conditions, then the proportion of times that any specified event occurs approximately equals the probability of the event's occurrence on any particular trial; the larger the number of repetitions, the better the approximation tends to be. More precisely, if "E" denotes the event in question, "p" its probability of occurrence, and "N"("E") the number of times "E" occurs in the first "n" trials, then with probability one,


title: Law of large numbers

text: This theorem makes rigorous the intuitive notion of probability as the long-run relative frequency of an event's occurrence. It is a special case of any of several more general laws of large numbers in probability theory.


title: Law of large numbers

text: Chebyshev's inequality. Let "X" be a random variable with finite expected value "μ" and finite non-zero variance "σ". Then for any real number ,


title: Law of large numbers

text: Given "X", "X", ... an infinite sequence of i.i.d. random variables with finite expected value formula_22, we are interested in the convergence of the sample average


title: Law of large numbers

text: This proof uses the assumption of finite variance formula_5 (for all formula_6). The independence of the random variables implies no correlation between them, and we have that


title: Law of large numbers

text: As "n" approaches infinity, the expression approaches 1. And by definition of convergence in probability, we have obtained


title: Law of large numbers

text: By Taylor's theorem for complex functions, the characteristic function of any random variable, "X", with finite mean μ, can be written as


title: Law of large numbers

text: The limit  "e"  is the characteristic function of the constant random variable μ, and hence by the Lévy continuity theorem, formula_35 converges in distribution to μ:


title: Law of large numbers

text: μ is a constant, which implies that convergence in distribution to μ and convergence in probability to μ are equivalent (see Convergence of random variables.) Therefore,


title: Law of large numbers

text: This shows that the sample mean converges in probability to the derivative of the characteristic function at the origin, as long as the latter exists.


title: Law of large numbers

text: The law of large numbers provides an expectation of an unknown distribution from a realization of the sequence, but also any feature of the probability distribution. By applying Borel's law of large numbers, one could easily obtain the probability mass function. For each event in the objective probability mass function, one could approximate the probability of the event's occurrence with the proportion of times that any specified event occurs. The larger the number of repetitions, the better the approximation. As for the continuous case: formula_37, for small positive h. Thus, for large n:


title: Law of large numbers

text: With this method, one can cover the whole x-axis with a grid (with grid size 2h) and obtain a bar graph which is called a histogram.


title: David Irving

text: David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His 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.


title: David Irving

text: 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 Ernst Zündel. That trial, and his reading of the 1988 pseudoscientific Leuchter report, led him to openly espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp.


title: David Irving

text: Irving's reputation as a historian was further discredited in 1996, when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt 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.


title: David Irving

text: David Irving and his twin brother Nicholas were born in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex, England. They had a brother, John, and a sister, Jennifer. Their father, John James Cawdell Irving (1898–1967), was a career naval officer and a commander in the Royal Navy. Their mother, Beryl Irving ("née" Newington), was an illustrator and a writer of children's books.


title: David Irving

text: During World War II, Irving's father was an officer aboard the light cruiser HMS "Edinburgh". On 30 April 1942, while escorting Convoy QP 11 in the Barents Sea, the ship was badly damaged by the German submarine U-456. Two days later, the ship was attacked by a surface craft, and now beyond recovery was abandoned and scuttled by a torpedo from HMS "Foresight". Irving's father survived, but severed all links with his wife and children after the incident.


title: David Irving

text: Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum as: "Unlike the Americans, we English suffered great deprivations ... we went through childhood with no toys. We had no kind of childhood at all. We were living on an island that was crowded with other people's armies". According to his brother, Nicholas, David has been a provocateur and prankster since his youth. Nicholas Irving has said that "David used to run toward bombed out houses shouting 'Heil Hitler!, a statement which Irving denies.


title: David Irving

text: Irving went on to say to Rosenbaum that his negationist views about World War II dated to his childhood, particularly due to his objections to the way Adolf Hitler was portrayed in the British media during the war. Irving asserted that his sceptical views about the Third Reich were rooted in his doubts about the cartoonist caricatures of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders published in the British wartime press.


title: David Irving

text: After completing A levels at Brentwood School, Irving studied for a physics degree at Imperial College London, leaving after the first year. He did not complete the course because of financial constraints.


title: David Irving

text: Irving later studied for two years toward a degree in Economics in the department of Political Economy at University College London. However, he again had to drop out due to lack of funds. During this period at university, he participated in a debate on Commonwealth immigration, seconding British Union of Fascists founder Sir Oswald Mosley.


title: David Irving

text: Irving's time as an editor of the "Carnival Times", a student rag mag of the University of London Carnival Committee, became controversial in 1959 when he added a "secret supplement" to the magazine. This supplement contained an article in which he called Hitler the "greatest unifying force Europe has known since Charlemagne". Although Irving deflected criticism by characterising the "Carnival Times" as "satirical", he also stated that "the formation of a European Union is interpreted as building a group of superior peoples, and the Jews have always viewed with suspicion the emergence of any 'master-race' (other than their own, of course)". Opponents also viewed a cartoon included in the supplement as racist and criticised another article in which Irving wrote that the British press was owned by Jews. Volunteers were later recruited to remove and destroy the supplements before the magazine's distribution. Irving has said that the criticism is "probably justifiable" and has described his motivation in producing the controversial secret issue of "Carnival Times" as being to prevent the "Carnival" from making a profit that would be passed on to a South African group which he considered a "subversive organisation".


title: David Irving

text: After serving in 1959 as editor of the University of London Carnival Committee's journal, instead of doing national service, Irving left for West Germany, where he worked as a steelworker in a Thyssen AG steel works in the Ruhr area and learned the German language. He then moved to Spain, where he worked as a clerk at an air base.


title: David Irving

text: By 1962 he was engaged in writing a series of 37 articles on the Allied bombing campaign, "Und Deutschlands Städte starben nicht" ("And Germany's Cities Did Not Die"), for the German boulevard journal "Neue Illustrierte". These were the basis for his first book, "The Destruction of Dresden" (1963), in which he examined the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. By the 1960s, a debate about the morality of the carpet bombing of German cities and civilian population had already begun, especially in the United Kingdom. There was consequently considerable interest in Irving's book, which was illustrated with graphic pictures, and it became an international best-seller.


title: David Irving

text: In the first edition, Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 – notably higher than most previously published figures. These figures became widely accepted in many standard reference works. In later editions of the book over the next three decades, he gradually adjusted the figure downwards to 50,000–100,000. According to Richard J. Evans at the 2000 libel trial that Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt, Irving based his estimates of the dead of Dresden on the word of one individual who provided no supporting documentation, used a document forged by the Nazis, and described one witness who was a urologist as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. The doctor later complained about being misidentified by Irving, and further, that he, the doctor, was only repeating rumours about the death toll. According to an investigation by Dresden City Council in 2008, casualties at Dresden were estimated as 22,700–25,000 dead.


title: David Irving

text: Irving had based his numbers on what purported to be "Tagesbefehl 47" ("Daily Order 47", TB 47), a document promulgated by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and on claims made after the war by a former Dresden Nazi functionary, Hans Voigt, without verifying them against official sources available in Dresden. Irving's estimates and sources were first disputed by Walter Weidauer, Mayor of Dresden 1946–1958, in his own account of the Dresden bombing. When it was later confirmed that the TB 47 used was a forgery, Irving published a letter to the editor in "The Times" on 7 July 1966 retracting his estimates, writing that he had "no interest in promoting or perpetuating false legends". In 1977, the real document TB 47 was located in Dresden by Götz Bergander.


title: David Irving

text: Despite acknowledging that the copy of "TB 47" he had used was inaccurate, Irving argued during the late 1980s and 1990s that the death toll at Dresden was much higher than the accepted estimates: in several speeches during this period he said that 100,000 or more people had been killed in the bombing of Dresden. In some of the speeches Irving also argued or implied that the raid was comparable to the Nazis' killing of Jews.


title: David Irving

text: In November 1963, Irving called the Metropolitan Police with suspicions he had been the victim of a burglary by three men who had gained access to his Hornsey flat in London by claiming to be General Post Office engineers. Anti-fascist activist Gerry Gable was convicted in January 1964, along with Manny Carpel. They were fined £20 each.


title: David Irving

text: After the success of the Dresden book, Irving continued writing, including some works of negationist history, although his 1964 work "The Mare's Nest" – an account of the German V-weapons programme and the Allied intelligence countermeasures against it – was widely praised when published and continues to be well regarded. Michael J. Neufeld of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has described "The Mare's Nest" as "the most complete account on both Allied and German sides of the V-weapons campaign in the last two years of the war."


title: David Irving

text: Irving translated the "Memoirs" of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in 1965 (edited by Walter Görlitz) and in 1967 published "Accident: The Death of General Sikorski". In the latter book, Irving claimed that the plane crash which killed Polish government in exile leader General Władysław Sikorski in 1943 was really an assassination ordered by Winston Churchill, so as to enable Churchill to betray Poland to the Soviet Union. Irving's book inspired the highly controversial 1967 play "Soldiers" by his friend, the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, where Hochhuth depicts Churchill ordering the assassination of General Sikorski.


title: David Irving

text: Also in 1967, Irving published two more works: "The Virus House", an account of the German nuclear energy project for which Irving conducted many interviews, and "The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17," in which he blamed British escort group commander Commander Jack Broome for the catastrophic losses of the Convoy PQ 17. Amid much publicity, Broome sued Irving for libel in October 1968, and in February 1970, after a 17-day-trial before London's High Court, Broome won. Irving was forced to pay £40,000 in damages, and the book was withdrawn from circulation.


title: David Irving

text: After "PQ-17", Irving largely shifted to writing biographies. In 1968, he published "Breach of Security", an account of German reading of messages to and from the British Embassy in Berlin before 1939 with an introduction by the British historian Donald Cameron Watt. As a result of Irving's success with "Dresden", members of Germany's extreme right wing assisted him in contacting surviving members of Hitler's inner circle. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Irving claimed to have developed sympathies towards them. Many ageing former mid- and high-ranked Nazis saw a potential friend in Irving and donated diaries and other material. Irving described his historical work to Rosenbaum as an act of "stone-cleaning" of Hitler, in which he cleared off the "slime" that he felt had been unjustly applied to Hitler's reputation.


title: David Irving

text: In 1969, during a visit to Germany, Irving met Robert Kempner, one of the American prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials. Irving asked Kempner if the "official record of the Nuremberg Trials was falsified", and told him that he was planning to go to Washington, D.C., to compare the sound recordings of Luftwaffe Field-Marshal Erhard Milch's March 1946 evidence with the subsequently published texts to find proof that evidence given at Nuremberg was "tampered with and manipulated". Upon his return to the United States, Kempner wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, that Irving expressed many "anti-American and anti-Jewish statements".


title: David Irving

text: In 1971, Irving translated the memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, and in 1973 published "The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe", a biography of Field Marshal Milch. He spent the remainder of the 1970s working on "Hitler's War" and "The War Path", his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler; "The Trail of the Fox," a biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; and a series in the "Sunday Express" describing the Royal Air Force's famous Dam Busters raid. In 1975, in his introduction to "Hitler und seine Feldherren", the German edition of "Hitler's War", Irving attacked Anne Frank's diary as a forgery, claiming falsely that a New York court had ruled that the diary was really the work of American scriptwriter Meyer Levin "in collaboration with the girl's father".


title: David Irving

text: In 1977 Irving published "Hitler's War", the first of his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler. Irving's intention in "Hitler's War" was to clean away the "years of grime and discoloration from the facade of a silent and forbidding monument" to reveal the real Hitler, whose reputation Irving argued had been slandered by historians. In "Hitler's War", Irving tried to "view the situation as far as possible through Hitler's eyes, from behind his desk". He portrayed Hitler as a rational, intelligent politician, whose only goal was to increase Germany's prosperity and influence on the continent, and who was constantly let down by incompetent or treasonous subordinates. Irving's book faulted the Allied leaders, especially Winston Churchill, for the eventual escalation of war, and argued that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler to avert an impending Soviet attack. Irving also argued that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust: while not denying its occurrence, he argued that SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich were its originators and architects. Irving made much of the lack of any written order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust; he offered to pay £1,000 to anyone who could find such an order. , his offer still stood.


title: David Irving

text: In "Hitler's War", Irving quoted a 1942 memorandum by Hans Lammers, the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, to the Reich Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger, saying: "the Führer has repeatedly pronounced that he wants the solution of the Jewish Question put off until after the war is over". Irving took this as proof that Hitler ordered against the extermination of the Jews. He falsely claimed that "no other historians have quoted this document, possibly finding its content hard to reconcile with their obsessively held views" about Hitler's responsibility for the Holocaust. However, the interpretation of the document is not as simple as Irving made it out to be in his book. The memorandum has no date and no signature on it, although historians estimate that it was issued at some point between 1941 and 1942 by looking at the other documents where the memorandum is located. They have concluded that the memorandum was more than likely from late 1941 when Hitler was still advocating the expulsion of the Jews, rather than later when he advocated their extermination.


title: David Irving

text: Critical reaction to "Hitler's War" was generally negative. Reviewers took issue with Irving's factual claims as well as his conclusions. For example, American historian Charles Sydnor noted numerous errors, such as Irving's unreferenced statement that the Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 were well supplied with weapons from Germany's allies. Sydnor pointed out that Hitler had received an SS report in November 1942 which contained a mention of 363,211 Russian Jews executed by the "Einsatzgruppen" between August and November 1942. Sydnor remarked that Irving's statement that the "Einsatzgruppen" were in charge in the death camps seems to indicate that he was not familiar with the history of the Holocaust, as the "Einsatzgruppen" were in fact mobile death squads who had nothing to do with the death camps.


title: David Irving

text: Months after the release of "Hitler's War", Irving published "The Trail of the Fox", a biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In it, Irving attacked the members of the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, branding them "traitors", "cowards", and "manipulators", and uncritically presented Hitler and his government's subsequent revenge against the plotters, of which Rommel was also a victim. In particular, Irving accused Rommel's friend and Chief of Staff General Hans Speidel of framing Rommel in the attempted coup. The British historian David Pryce-Jones in a book review of "The Trail of the Fox" in the edition of 12 November 1977 of "The New York Times Book Review" accused Irving of taking everything Hitler had to say at face value.


title: David Irving

text: In 1978, Irving released "The War Path", the companion volume to "Hitler's War" which covered events leading up to the war and which was written from a similar point of view. Again, professional historians such as Donald Cameron Watt noted numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Despite the criticism, the book sold well, as did all of Irving's books up to that date. The success of his books enabled Irving to buy a home in the prestigious Mayfair district of London, own a Rolls-Royce car and enjoy an affluent lifestyle. In addition, Irving, despite being married, became increasingly open about his affairs with other women, all of which were detailed in his self-published diary. Irving's affairs caused his first marriage to end in divorce in 1981.


title: David Irving

text: In the 1980s, Irving started researching and writing about topics other than Nazi Germany, but with less success. He began his research on his three-part biography of Winston Churchill. After publication Irving's work on Churchill received at least one bad review from Professor David Cannadine (then of the University of London):


title: David Irving

text: In 1981, he published two books. The first was "The War Between the Generals", in which Irving offered an account of the Allied High Command on the Western Front in 1944–45, detailing the heated conflicts Irving alleges occurred between the various generals of the various countries and presenting rumours about their private lives. The second book was "Uprising!", about the 1956 revolt in Hungary, which Irving characterised as "primarily an anti-Jewish uprising", supposedly because the Communist regime was itself controlled by Jews. Irving's depiction of Hungary's Communist regime as a Jewish dictatorship oppressing Gentiles sparked charges of antisemitism. In addition, there were complaints that Irving had grossly exaggerated the number of people of Jewish origin in the Communist regime and had ignored the fact that Hungarian Communists who did have a Jewish background like Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő had totally repudiated Judaism and sometimes expressed antisemitic attitudes themselves. Critics such as Neal Ascherson and Kai Bird took issue with some of Irving's language that seemed to evoke antisemitic imagery, such as his remark that Rákosi possessed "the tact of a kosher butcher".


title: David Irving

text: In 1982, Irving described himself as an "untrained historian" and argued that his lack of academic qualifications did not mean that he could not be considered a historian. He listed Pliny the Elder and Tacitus as examples of historians without university training.


title: David Irving

text: In 1983, "Stern", a weekly German news magazine, purchased 61 volumes of Hitler's supposed diaries for DM 9 million and published excerpts from them. Irving played the main role in exposing the Hitler Diaries as a hoax. In October 1982 Irving had purchased, from the same source as "Stern"'s 1983 purchase, 800 pages of documents relating to Hitler, only to conclude that many of the documents were forgeries. Irving was amongst the first to identify the diaries as forgeries, and to draw media attention. He went so far as to crash the press conference held by Hugh Trevor-Roper at the Hamburg offices of "Stern" magazine on 25 April 1983 to denounce the diaries as a forgery and Trevor-Roper for endorsing the diaries as genuine. Irving's performance at the "Stern" press conference where he violently harangued Trevor-Roper until ejected by security led him to be featured prominently on the news: the next day, Irving appeared on the "Today" television show as a featured guest. Irving had concluded that the alleged Hitler diaries were a forgery because they had come from the same dealer in Nazi memorabilia from whom Irving had purchased his collection in 1982. At the press conference in Hamburg, Irving said, "I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here". Irving was proud to have detected and denounced the hoax material and of the "trail of chaos" he had created at the Hamburg press conference and the attendant publicity it had brought him, and took pride in his humiliation of Trevor-Roper, whom Irving strongly disliked for his sloppy work, in not detecting the hoax, and past criticism of Irving's methods and conclusions. Irving also noted internal inconsistencies in the supposed Hitler diaries, such as a diary entry for 20 July 1944, which would have been unlikely given that Hitler's right hand had been badly burned by the bomb planted in his headquarters by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg earlier that day.


title: David Irving

text: A week later on 2 May, Irving asserted that many of the diary documents appeared to be genuine: at the same press conference, Irving took the opportunity to promote his translation of the memoirs of Hitler's physician Theodor Morell. Robert Harris, in his book "Selling Hitler", suggested that an additional reason for Irving's change of mind over the authenticity of the alleged Hitler diaries was that the fake diaries contain no reference to the Holocaust, thereby buttressing Irving's claim in "Hitler's War" that Hitler had no knowledge of it. Subsequently, Irving conformed when the diaries were declared a forgery by consensus. At a press conference held to withdraw his endorsement of the diaries, Irving proudly claimed that he was the first to call them a forgery, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call them genuine.


title: David Irving

text: By the mid-1980s, Irving had not had a successful book for some years, and was behind schedule in writing the first volume of his Churchill series, the research for which had strained his finances. He finished the manuscript in 1985, and the book was published in 1987, as "Churchill's War, The Struggle for Power".


title: David Irving

text: Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust has changed significantly. Since at least the 1970s, he has either questioned or denied Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust and whether or not the Nazis had a plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.


title: David Irving

text: Irving always denied Hitler was antisemitic, even before he openly denied the Holocaust. Irving claimed Hitler only used antisemitism as a political platform, and that after he came to power in 1933 he lost interest in it, while Joseph Goebbels and other Nazis continued to espouse antisemitism. In 1977 on a BBC1 television programme, he said that Hitler "became a statesman and then a soldier ... and the Jewish problem was a nuisance to him, an embarrassment." In 1983, Irving summarised his views about Hitler and the Jews when he said that "probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich, certainly when the war broke out, was Adolf Hitler. He was the one who was doing everything he could to prevent things nasty happening to them." In the same year, he further declared about Hitler and the mass killing of Jews, "There is a whole chain of evidence from 1938 right through to October 1943, possibly even later, indicating that Hitler was completely in the dark about anything that may have been going on." Irving boasted that he had not been disproved.


title: David Irving

text: Irving in his first edition of "Hitler's War" in 1977 argued that Hitler was against the killings of the Jews in the East. He claimed that Hitler even ordered a stop to the extermination of Jews in November 1941 (British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that this admission blatantly contradicted Irving's claim that Hitler was ignorant about what was happening to Jews in Eastern Europe). 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. 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'."


title: David Irving

text: In June 1977, British television host David Frost aired a debate. During the debate, Irving argued that there was no evidence Hitler even knew about the Holocaust. Frost asked Irving whether or not he thought Hitler was evil, he replied, "He was as evil as Churchill, as evil as Roosevelt, as evil as Truman".


title: David Irving

text: From 1988, Irving started to espouse Holocaust denial openly: he had previously not denied the Holocaust outright, and for this reason many Holocaust deniers were ambivalent about him. They admired Irving for the pro-Nazi slant in his work and the fact that he possessed a degree of mainstream credibility that they lacked, but were annoyed that he did not openly deny the Holocaust. In 1980, Lucy Dawidowicz noted that, although "Hitler's War" was strongly sympathetic to the Third Reich, because Irving argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust as opposed to denying the Holocaust happened at all, his book was not part of the "anti-Semitic canon". In 1980, Irving received an invitation to speak at a Holocaust-denial conference, which he refused on the grounds that his appearance there would damage his reputation. In a letter, Irving stated his reasons for his refusal as: "This is pure "Realpolitik" on my part. I am already dangerously exposed, and I cannot take the chance of being caught in flak meant for others!" Though Irving refused at this time to appear at conferences sponsored by the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review (IHR), he did grant the institute the right to distribute his books in the United States. Robert Jan van Pelt suggests that the major reason for Irving wishing to keep his distance from Holocaust deniers in the early 1980s was his desire to found his own political party called Focus.


title: David Irving

text: In a footnote in the first edition of "Hitler's War", Irving writes, "I cannot accept the view ... [that] there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich speaking of the extermination of the Jews". In 1982, Irving temporarily stopped writing and made an attempt to unify all of the various far-right splinter groups in Britain into one party called Focus, in which he would play a leading role. Irving described himself as a "moderate fascist" and spoke of plans to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but his efforts to move into politics, which he regarded at the time as very important, failed due to fiscal problems. Irving told the "Oxford Mail" of having "links at a low level" with the National Front (NF). Irving described "The Spotlight", the main journal of the Liberty Lobby, as "an excellent fortnightly paper". At the same time, Irving put a copy of Hitler's "Prophecy Speech" of 30 January 1939, promising the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" if "Jewish financiers" started another world war, onto his wall.


title: David Irving

text: Following the failure of Focus, in September 1983, Irving for the first time attended a conference of the IHR. Van Pelt has argued that, with the failure of Irving's political career, he felt freer to associate with Holocaust deniers. At the conference, Irving did not deny the Holocaust, but did appear happy to share the stage with Robert Faurisson and Judge Wilhelm Stäglich, and claimed to be impressed with the pseudoscientific allegations of neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Friedrich "Fritz" Berg that mass murder using diesel gas fumes at the Operation Reinhard death camps was impossible. At that conference, Irving repeated his claims that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust because he was "so busy being a soldier". In a speech at that conference, Irving stated: "Isn't it right for Tel Aviv to claim now that David Irving is talking nonsense and "of course" Adolf Hitler must have known about what was going in Auschwitz and Treblinka, and then in the same breath to claim that, "of course" our beloved Mr. Begin didn't know what was going on in Sabra and Chatilla". During the same speech, Irving proclaimed Hitler to be the "biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich". In the same speech, Irving stated that he operated in such a way as to bring himself maximum publicity. Irving stated that: "I have at home... a filing cabinet full of documents which I don't issue all at once. I keep them: I issue them a bit at a time. When I think my name hasn't been in the newspapers for several weeks, well, then I ring them up and I phone them and I say: 'What about this one, then?


title: David Irving

text: A major theme of Irving's writings from the 1980s was his belief that it had been a great blunder on the part of Britain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that ever since then and as a result of that decision, Britain had slipped into an unstoppable decline. Irving also took the view that Hitler often tried to help the Jews of Europe. In a June 1992 interview with "The Daily Telegraph", Irving claimed to have heard from Hitler's naval adjutant that the "Führer" had told him that he could not marry because Germany was "his bride". Irving then claimed to have asked the naval adjutant when Hitler made that remark, and upon hearing that the date was 24 March 1938, Irving stated in response "Herr Admiral, at that moment I was being born". Irving used this alleged incident to argue that there was some sort of mystical connection between himself and Hitler.


title: David Irving

text: In a 1986 speech in Australia Irving argued that photographs of Holocaust survivors and dead taken in early 1945 by Allied soldiers were proof that the Allies were responsible for the Holocaust, not the Germans. Irving claimed that the Holocaust was not the work of Nazi leaders, but rather of "nameless criminals", and claimed that "these men [who killed the Jews] acted on their own impulse, their own initiative, within the general atmosphere of brutality created by the Second World War, in which of course Allied bombings played a part." In another 1986 speech, this time in Atlanta, Irving claimed that "historians have a blindness when it comes to the Holocaust because like Tay–Sachs disease it is a Jewish disease which causes blindness". In 1986, he told reporters in Brisbane, Australia, without explaining how the Allied bombing raids on Germany had made non-Germans to be antisemitic that:


title: David Irving

text: By the mid-1980s, Irving associated himself with the IHR, began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), and publicly denied that the Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II. Irving in his revised edition of "Hitler's War" in 1991 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."


title: David Irving

text: Irving was present at a memorial service for Hans-Ulrich Rudel in January 1983 after the latter's death, organised by the DVU and its leader Gerhard Frey, delivering a speech, and was given the Hans-Ulrich-Rudel-Award by Frey in June 1985. Irving was a frequent speaker for the DVU in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but the relationship ended in 1993 apparently because of concerns by the DVU that Irving's espousal of Holocaust denial might lead to the DVU being banned.


title: David Irving

text: In 1986, Irving visited Toronto, where he was met at an airport by Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. According to Zündel, Irving "thought I was 'Revisionist-Neo-Nazi-Rambo-Kook!, and asked Zündel to stay away from him. Zündel and his supporters obliged Irving by staying away from his lecture tour, which consequently attracted little media attention, and was considered by Irving to be a failure. Afterwards, Zündel sent Irving a long letter in which he offered to draw publicity to Irving, and so ensure that his future speaking tours would be a success. As a result, Irving and Zündel became friends, and Irving agreed in late 1987 to testify for Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust. In addition, the publication in 1987 of the book "Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945" by Ernst Nolte, in which Nolte strongly implied that maybe Holocaust deniers were on to something, encouraged Irving to become more open in associating with Zündel.


title: David Irving

text: In 1988, Irving argued that the Nazi state was not responsible for the extermination of the Jews in places like Minsk, Kiev and Riga because according to him they were carried out for the most part by "individual gangsters and criminals".


title: David Irving

text: In 1989, Irving during a speech told an audience that "there is not one shower bath in any of the concentration or slave labour camps that turns out to have been some kind of gas chamber." He described Jewish Holocaust survivors as "liars, psychiatric cases and extortionists." In 1990, Irving said on 5 March that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that "30,000 people at the most were murdered in Ausschwitz ... that's about as many as we Englishmen killed in a single night in Hamburg." He reiterated his claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz on 5 March 1990 to an audience in Germany:


title: David Irving

text: During the same speech, he said, "I and, increasingly, other historians ... are saying, the Holocaust, the gas chamber establishments in Auschwitz did not exist." Later on in the same year, Irving told an audience in Toronto, "The gas chambers that are shown to the tourists in Auschwitz are fakes."


title: David Irving

text: Irving denied that the Nazis gassed any Jews or other people, with the exception of admitting that a small number of people were gassed during experiments.


title: David Irving

text: In 1990, Irving told an audience in Canada that "particularly when there's money involved and they can get a good compensation cash payment out of it" there would be people claiming to be eyewitnesses to gas chambers or extermination camps. He continued:


title: David Irving

text: In 1991, Irving espoused an antisemitic conspiracy theory when he stated that the Jews "dragged us into two world wars and now, for equally mysterious reasons, they're trying to drag us into the Balkans."


title: David Irving

text: In 1995 when Irving was confronted with a Holocaust survivor, he repeated the same claim and asked, "How much money have you made from that piece of ink on your arm, which may indeed be real tattooed ink? Yes. Half a million dollars, three-quarters of a million for you alone?"


title: David Irving

text: On 6 October 1995, Irving told an audience in Tampa, Florida, that he agreed with the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels that the Jews "had it coming for them". He continued:


title: David Irving

text: In January 1988, Irving travelled to Toronto, Ontario, to assist Douglas Christie, the defence lawyer for Ernst Zündel at his second trial for denying the Holocaust. Working closely with Robert Faurisson, who was also assisting the defence, Irving contacted Warden Bill Armontrout of the Missouri State Penitentiary who recommended that Irving and Faurisson get into touch with Fred A. Leuchter, a self-described execution expert living in Boston. Irving and Faurisson then flew to Boston to meet with Leuchter, who agreed to lend his alleged technical expertise on the behalf of Zündel's defence. Irving argued that an alleged expert on gassings like Leuchter could prove that the Holocaust was a "myth". After work on the second Zündel trial, Irving declared that based on his exposure to Zündel's and Leuchter's theories that he was now conducting a "one-man "intifada"" against the idea that there had been a Holocaust. Subsequently, Irving claimed to the American journalist D. D. Guttenplan in a 1999 interview that Zündel had convinced him that the Holocaust had not occurred.


title: David Irving

text: In the 1988 Zündel trial, Irving repeated and defended his claim from "Hitler's War" that until October 1943 Hitler knew nothing about the actual implementation of the Final Solution. He also expressed his evolving belief that the Final Solution involved "atrocities", not systematic murder: "I don't think there was any overall "Reich" policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was." Similarly, Irving disputed the common held view among historians that the Wannsee Conference meeting on 20 January 1942 was when the extermination of Jews in the near future or later was discussed, he argued:


title: David Irving

text: Between 22 and 26 April 1988, Irving testified for Zündel, endorsing Richard Harwood's book "Did Six Million Really Die?" as "over ninety percent... factually accurate".


title: David Irving

text: As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited "The Leuchter report" by Fred A. Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Irving said in a 1999 documentary about Leuchter: "The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of cyanide in the brickwork. That's what converted me. When I read that in the report in the courtroom in Toronto, I became a hard-core disbeliever". In addition, Irving was influenced to embrace Holocaust denial by the American historian Arno J. Mayer's 1988 book "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?", which did not deny the Holocaust, but claimed that most of those who died at Auschwitz were killed by disease: Irving saw in Mayer's book an apparent confirmation of Leuchter's and Zündel's theories about no mass murder at Auschwitz.


title: David Irving

text: After the trial, Irving published Leuchter's report as "Auschwitz The End of the Line: The Leuchter Report" in the United Kingdom in 1989 and wrote its foreword. Leuchter's book had been first published in Canada by Zündel's Samisdat Publishers in 1988 as "The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek". In his foreword to the British edition of Leuchter's book, Irving wrote that "Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved". The alleged swindle was the reparations money totalling 3 billion DM paid by the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel between 1952 and 1966 for the Holocaust. Irving described the reparations as being "essentially in atonement for the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz", which Irving called a "myth" that would "not die easily". In his foreword, Irving praised the "scrupulous methods" and "integrity" of Leuchter.


title: David Irving

text: For publishing and writing the foreword to "Auschwitz The End of the Line", on 20 June 1989, Irving together with Leuchter was condemned in an Early Day Motion of the House of Commons as "Hitler's heirs". The motion went on to describe Irving as a "Nazi propagandist and longtime Hitler apologist" and "Auschwitz The End of the Line" as a "fascist publication". In the Motion, the House stated that they were "appalled by [the Holocaust denial of] Nazi propagandist and long-time Hitler apologist David Irving". In response to the House of Commons motion, Irving in a press statement challenged the MPs who voted to condemn him, writing that: "I will enter the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz and you and your friends may lob in Zyklon B in accordance with the well known procedures and conditions. I guarantee that you won't be satisfied with the results!".


title: David Irving

text: In a pamphlet Irving published in London on 23 June 1989, he made the "epochal announcement" that there was no mass murder in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp. Irving labelled the gas chambers at Auschwitz a "hoax", and writing in the third person declared that he "has placed himself [Irving] at the head of a growing band of historians, worldwide, who are now sceptical of the claim that at Auschwitz and other camps were 'factories of death', in which millions of innocent people were systematically gassed to death". Boasting of his role in criticising the Hitler diaries as a forgery in 1983, Irving wrote "now he [Irving] is saying the same thing about the infamous 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. They did not exist – ever – except perhaps as the brainchild of Britain's brilliant wartime Psychological Warfare Executive". Finally, Irving claimed "the survivors of Auschwitz are themselves testimony to the absence of an extermination programme". Echoing the criticism of the House of Commons, a leader in "The Times" on 14 May 1990 described Irving as a "man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost everything of an innocent and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception".


title: David Irving

text: In the early 1990s, Irving was a frequent visitor to Germany, where he spoke at neo-Nazi rallies. The chief themes of Irving's German speeches were that the Allies and Axis states were equally culpable for war crimes, that the decision of Neville Chamberlain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and that of Winston Churchill to continue the war in 1940, had been great mistakes that set Britain on a path of decline, and the Holocaust was just a "propaganda exercise". In June 1990, Irving visited East Germany on a well-publicized tour entitled "An Englishman Fights for the Honour of the Germans," on which he accused the Allies of having used "forged documents" to "humiliate" the German people. Irving's self-proclaimed mission was to guide "promising young men" in Germany in the "right direction" (Irving has often stated his belief that women exist for a "certain task, which is producing us [men]", and should be "subservient to men": leading, in Lipstadt's view, to a lack of interest on Irving's part in guiding young German women in the "right direction"). German nationalists found Irving, as a non-German Holocaust denier, to be particularly credible.


title: David Irving

text: In January 1990, Irving gave a speech in Moers where he asserted that only 30,000 people died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, all of natural causes, which was equal—so he claimed—to the typical death toll from one Bomber Command raid on German cities. Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at the death camp, stating that the existing remains were "mock-ups built by the Poles". On 21 April 1990, Irving repeated the same speech in Munich, which led to his conviction for Holocaust denial in Munich on 11 July 1991. The court fined Irving DM 7,000. Irving appealed against the judgement, and received a fine of DM 10,000 for repeating the same remarks in the courtroom on 5 May 1992. During his appeal in 1992, Irving called upon those present in the Munich courtroom to "fight a battle for the German people and put an end to the blood lie of the Holocaust which has been told against this country for fifty years". Irving went on to call the Auschwitz death camp a "tourist attraction" whose origins Irving claimed went back to an "ingenious plan" devised by the British Psychological Warfare Executive in 1942 to spread anti-German propaganda that it was the policy of the German state to be "using 'gas chambers' to kill millions of Jews and other undesirables". During the same speech, Irving denounced the judge as a "senile, alcoholic cretin". Following his conviction for Holocaust denial, Irving was banned from visiting Germany.


title: David Irving

text: Expanding upon his thesis in "Hitler's War" about the lack of a written "Führer" order for the Holocaust, Irving argued in the 1990s that the absence of such an order meant that there was no Holocaust. In a speech delivered in Toronto in November 1990 Irving claimed that Holocaust survivors had manufactured memories of their suffering because "there's money involved and they can get a good compensation cash payment out of it". In that speech, Irving used the metaphor of a cruise ship named Holocaust, which Irving claimed had "...luxury wall to wall fitted carpets and a crew of thousands ... marine terminals established in now virtually every capital in the world, disguised as Holocaust memorial museums". Irving went on to assert that the "ship" was due for rough sailing because recently the Soviet government had allowed historians access to "the index cards of all the people who passed through the gates of Auschwitz", and claimed that this would lead to "a lot of people [who] are not claiming to be Auschwitz survivors anymore" (Irving's statement about the index cards was incorrect: what the Soviet government had made available in 1990 were the death books of Auschwitz, recording the weekly death tolls). Irving claimed on the basis of what he called the index books that, "Because the experts can look at a tattoo and say 'Oh yes, 181, 219 that means you entered Auschwitz in March 1943" and he warned Auschwitz survivors "If you want to go and have a tattoo put on your arm, as a lot of them do, I am afraid to say, and claim subsequently that you were in Auschwitz, you have to make sure a) that it fits in with the month you said you went to Auschwitz and b) it is not a number which anyone used before".