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"History is like a constantly changing tree."

"I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?"

"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz."

"Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. Because I'm going to form an Association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, or the ASSHOLS."

Within two weeks of his arrest, he asserted through his lawyer that he had come to acknowledge the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers. Before the trial began, Irving told reporters he now acknowledges that the Nazis systematically slaughtered Jews during World War II.

In the first edition of the book, Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 - nearly an order of magnitude higher than previous numbers. These figures became authoritative and widely accepted in many standard references and encyclopedias. Over the next three decades, later editions of the book gradually modified that figure downwards to a range of 50,000 to 100,000. Forty years later, during the hearing of Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, these figures were publicly discredited. Today, the Dresden bombing casualty figures are estimated as most likely in the range of 25,000 to 35,000 dead, and probably toward the lower end of that range.

Irving tried to describe the war from "Hitler's point of view." He portrayed Hitler as a rational, intelligent politician, whose only goal was to increase Germany's prosperity and influence on the continent. For instance, Irving's book faulted the Allied leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, for the eventual escalation of war. Where Irving's path to infamy truly began, however, was his controversial claim that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust. While not denying its occurrence, Irving claimed that Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich were its originators and architects.