1152 people have so far signed an online petition demanding the removal of David Irving’s books from the Manchester University library

The online petition was created by the North West Friends of Israel group and is addressed to University of Manchester Chancellor Lemn Sissay.

The Chancellor’s role is mostly ceremonial, although the petition is also directed to the “Governing Body,” which includes Vice-Chancellor Dame Nancy Rothwell.

The group have labelled the university “disgraceful” after it refused a request to remove Irving’s books from the library’s shelves.

They also claim the university rejected an appeal from the charity, Campaign Against Antisemitism, to insert a disclaimer in the books labelling them as ‘Holocaust denial Literature.’

The initial request was made by Dr Irene Lancaster, a former teacher at Manchester University, who established the study of Jewish History there in 2000.

In March, Churchill College, Cambridge University removed a biography of Winston Churchill by David Irving from its library’s shelves, after Dr Lancaster complained to the university about it.

University College London followed suit, labelling Irving’s books on the Holocaust ‘Holocaust denial literature’ and reclassifying his other works as ‘historiography.’

A university spokesperson said the books has been “moved from their regular place alongside works of serious scholarship.”

Manchester University have agreed to reclassify Irving’s books as ‘historical studies’ instead of ‘history.’ They have refused to go as far as UCL and label the books ‘Holocaust denial literature,’ nor make access to them restricted, like Cambridge.

The university justified its decision, saying it had “consulted both within [its] own Centre for Jewish Studies, and with the majority of the UK’s research libraries.”

It added that it was “committed to allowing [its] students to have access to challenging and controversial works on many different subjects in order to pursue their studies.”

Dr Lancaster has previously described the university’s position as a “disgrace.”

She told The Guardian, “My grandmother was murdered in Treblinka, and according to Irving I’m making that up. My concern is about the falsification of history.”

The David Irving books in Manchester University libraries:

The German Atomic Bomb: The History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany

The War Between the Generals: Inside the Allied High Command

The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel

Hitler’s War

The Mare’s Nest

The Destruction of Dresden

Uprising! — One Nation’s Nightmare: Hungary, 1956

The War Path: Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939

David Irving’s views on the Holocaust

David Irving first plunged into controversy with his 1977 book Hitler’s War, one of the works available at the University of Manchester library. The book claims that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust until late 1943 and never ordered the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Today the book is widely discredited by historians.

However, it wasn’t until 1988 when Irving testified at the trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, that he became notorious for his rejection of the Holocaust. Speaking at the trial, he said “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.”

Three years later, in the 1991 edition of his book Hitler’s War, he removed all mention of the word ‘Holocaust.’

In 2000, he took the American historian Deborah Lipstadt to court for calling him a “Holocaust denier” in her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. When asked by her barrister if he denied that the “Nazis killed millions of Jews in gas chambers in purpose built establishments,” Irving replied “Yes.” He lost the case against Lipstadt.

A report compiled for the defence, by the former Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University Richard Evans, said Irving had deliberately mistranslated documents, and falsified historical statistics. He concluded that Irving had “fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all.”

In February 2006, he was jailed for three years by an Austrian court for denying the Holocaust in two speeches on a visit to Austria in 1989. In one of the speeches he referred to the Holocaust as a “gas chambers fairy tale.”

During the trial, he renounced some of his previous remarks about the Holocaust: “I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz” he said. However, he called the figure of 6 million murdered Jews, “a symbolic number” and said his calculations amounted to 2.7 million.

He was released in December 2006 after serving less than a year of the sentence, but banned from ever returning to Austria.