for the Holocaust. Also in the same interview, Irving claimed wanting acceptance as a scholar by other historians and bemoaned having to associate with what he called the lunatic fringe anti-Semitic groups; he claimed he would disassociate himself from these groups full of "cracked" people as soon as he was accepted by the historians' community. Rosenbaum sarcastically wrote in his book Explaining Hitler that if Irving wanted to be considered a historian, he was going about it in a rather strange way by denying the Holocaust at neo-Nazi rallies. 21st century Canadian academic and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott has written that "even Irving’s enemies give him grudging credit for his standard historical writings. And I believe that to write in this field, it is impossible to ignore what Irving has written." Holocaust deniers were still attending Irving's meetings and tours in 2010 but others may see him as unbalanced. According to journalist Julian Kossoff, "It's as if everyone has come round to realising that Irving's as pathetic as he's pathological. As one Holocaust survivor succinctly put it: "I used to really hate him but now I just think he's a nutter." In 2017, Irving claimed to have a younger generation of followers. Inaccuracies exposed The author Martin Middlebrook published a number of books on second world war operations. In two of his books he exposes inaccuracies in the works of David irving : In the book 'The Mare's Nest' Irving describes the English bombing raid on Peenemünde. Part of the English attack plan on Peenemünde was to lure the German fighters away from the target by a small diversion attack on Berlin. Irving describes how the Germans fell for this trap and that subsequently there was a huge 'méléé' of German fighters and flak shooting at each other over Berlin ( pp 108-9 ) Subsequently many of the German aircraft were supposed to have been lost when they all tried to land on the same airfield. None of this could be found back in surviving squadron war diaries, reports of casualties and losses nor in the interviews that Middlebrook had with German pilots who participated in the battle. No battle took place over Berlin that night and no German aircraft were attacked nor lost near Berlin. Middlebrook supposes that Irving has been misled by accounts of 'unscrupulous' Luftwaffe personalities that were in conflict with each other and were trying