Distributing or downloading David Irving’s PDFs may be legal in some countries (free speech protections in the US, for example), but in Germany, Austria, France, Poland, and Spain, Holocaust denial is a criminal offense. Furthermore, sharing Irving’s work supports an author who has served prison time in Austria for denying the Holocaust (2006). Ethically, historians urge readers to treat his books as primary sources of denialism, not as trustworthy secondary sources.
While the book became a bestseller, particularly in Germany, it was met with fierce criticism from mainstream historians. The following points were central to the backlash: Distributing or downloading David Irving’s PDFs may be