....although Irving’s identification with Holocaust denial was announced publicly only in 1988, it is clear that this admission was not a dramatic turnabout, rather the end of a prolonged process. Irving’s attraction to these ideas as the missing link in his historical concept was visible already in his first public meeting with deniers at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference (see above). Shortly after the conference two observers from two totally opposite school of thought, Robert Faurisson and the historian Gerald Fleming, pointed out that Irving deliberately used in his lecture conditional words and phrases which indicated his doubt as to whether the Holocaust had occurred.50 Moreover, when relating to the death camps, Irving said, "We do know in the meantime that Dachau is a legend, that everything that people found in Dachau was in fact installed there by the Americans"; as to Auschwitz and other extermination camps, the question "about the actual goings-on inside" was left open by him "as a matter of controversy."51 It is also significant that in contrast to Hitler’s War, at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference Irving refrained from mentioning the role of Himmler and Heydrich in the Jewish liquidations, which indicated that he tended to accept the deniers’ claim that the Nazi leadership did not initiate global destructive measures against the Jewish people. "I would say I am satisfied in my own mind that in various locations Nazi criminals, acting probably without direct orders from above [emphasis added], did carry out liquidations of groups of people including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally incurable people and the rest."52
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