I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

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. Irving asserted that his "sceptical" views about the Third Reich were due to his doubts about the cartoonist caricatures of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders that appeared in the British press during the war. 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".

The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier antisemite and racist who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism" and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". His work on Nazi Germany became controversial because of his sympathy for the Third Reich antisemitism and racism. Irving's reputation as an historian was widely discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.