Mass gassing of Jews not feasible, says Irving
Neil Tweedie

01/13/2000
The Daily Telegraph
Page 16
Copyright (C) 2000 The Daily Telegraph; Source: World Reporter
(TM)

DAVID IRVING, the historian, denied yesterday that millions of Jews
were systematically murdered in the gas chambers during the
Second World War.

Giving evidence in a libel action, Mr Irving claimed that the mass
gassing of Jews by the Nazis was not possible, and that there was
no evidence of a systematic programme of extermination
sanctioned by Adolf Hitler.

The 62-year-old author said he had removed the word Holocaust
from the second edition of his book Hitler's War because the term
was too vague and imprecise.

Mr Irving, one of Britain's most controversial historians, is suing
Deborah Lipstadt , an American academic, and her publishers,
Penguin Books, for libel after she claimed in her book Denying the
Holocaust, that he was one of the world's foremost "Holocaust
deniers" and had manipulated fact to prove his beliefs. The
defendants plead justification.

Yesterday Mr Irving, who is representing himself, went into the
witness box for cross-examination by Richard Rampton, QC, the
counsel for Prof Lipstadt and Penguin. The historian stood by
comments he made in Calgary in 1991 in which he claimed that that
the gassing of millions of Jews in "factories of death" was "just a
legend".

A million bodies weighed 100,000 tons, making disposal a "major
logistical problem". He did not believe gassing had been carried out
on anything other than an "experimental" level by the SS, and that
Jews who had not been worked or starved to death had been killed
by shooting, clubbing or hanging.

When asked if he believed that Jews had been gassed in great
numbers in the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps, Mr
Irving said he had no evidence of it. "I deny that it was possible to
liquidate millions of people in the gas chambers," he said. Mr Irving
also put the number of Jewish dead at between one million and four
million, as opposed to the generally accepted figure of six million.

Miss Lipstadt , a professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust
Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, accused Mr Irving of being an
admirer of Hitler who kept a portrait of the Fuhrer in his Mayfair flat.
Mr Irving denied having a painting of the Fuhrer, but said: "There
was a time when he [Hitler] was on the right course, but he went off
the rails. You can't praise his racial programme or penal methods,
but he did pick up his nation out of the mire after World War One,
reunified and gave it a sense of pride again."

He also denied being a fascist sympathiser, describing himself as a
laissez-faire liberal who had once been a member of the Young
Conservatives.

Mr Irving said that like most fellow Englishmen of his background
and age he regretted the passing of "the old England". He said: "I
sometimes think that if the soldiers and sailors of the Normandy
beaches in 1944 could have seen what England was like at the end
of the century, they would not have got 50 yards up the beach. They
would have given up in disgust."

He said he paid no attention to Prof Lipstadt 's book until 1996,
when he was trying to market his biography of Goebbels, which took
nine years to write and which he considered the crowning
achievement of his career.

"In many bookstores the head of the history department took an
aversion to me and after visiting a number of stores, it became quite
plain that the reason was that they were selling Denying the
Holocaust," he said.

In 1996 his American publishers decided not to go ahead with the
Goebbels biography. He decided he had no choice but to take legal
action against the book which he considered the cause of his
difficulties.

The libel case continues.



Gas chamber claims impossible, says Irving: Libel action
author denies that Holocaust was systematic
VIKRAM DODD

01/13/2000
The Guardian
Copyright (C) 2000 The Guardian; Source: World Reporter (TM)

Vikram Dodd

The author David Irving yesterday denied in the high court that the
Nazis used gas chambers to murder millions of Jews during the
second world war.

The alleged Nazi apologist is suing for libel over a book that called
him a 'Holocaust denier' and his claim came as he entered the
witness box on the second day of the trial.

Mr Irving said it was logistically impossible for millions of people to
have been gassed to death, and denied that the Holocaust had
been 'systematic' or ordered by the Third Reich's leadership.

He is taking legal action over a book, Denying the Holocaust: the
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says ruined his
career. Mr Irving is suing its author, the American academic
Deborah Lipstadt , and her publisher, Penguin Books.

Questioned by Richard Rampton QC, for both Professor Lipstadt
and Penguin, Mr Irving said he believed that the Nazis had killed
between one and four million Jews during the second world war.

Asked by Mr Rampton: 'Do you deny that the Nazis killed millions of
Jews in gas chambers in purpose built establishments?', he replied:
'Yes'.

Mr Irving, who is representing himself, said: 'I deny that millions died
in the gas chambers because of the logistical problems for a start.'

He said that a million people would weigh 100,000 tonnes and that
the 'logistical and architectural impossibilities' in constructing
extermination camps could not be over looked.

Mr Rampton quoted from a transcript of a 1991 press conference
Mr Irving gave, where the author said: 'The biggest lie of the lot, the
blood libel on the German people, is the lie that the Germans had
factories of death in which they li-quidated millions of their
opponents.'

Mr Irving conceded that he had cut the word Holocaust which had
appeared in his 1977 biography of Hitler, for its second edition in
1991.

Mr Rampton quoted Mr Irving as saying about the revision of the
book: 'You won't find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even
in a footnote, why should [you]. If something didn't happen, then you
don't even dignify it with a footnote.'

Mr Irving insisted that this passage referred only to the Holocaust
via gas chambers. He said that he found the term Holocaust
'offensive and unhelpful' and that it 'should be avoided like the
plague' because it was so imprecise.

Mr Irving accepted that his view about the non-existence of the gas
chambers put him at odds with the public's view that they existed.

The author repeatedly denied the mass murder of Jews had been
systematic, and said: 'The defendants will find it very hard to prove it
was a Third Reich decision and an Adolf Hitler decision. There were
multiple shootings but it was not pursuant to any programme.'

Mr Irving stood by this position despite being challenged by Mr
Rampton, who said it was undermined by a 1942 report seen by
Adolf Hitler detailing the massacre by one German unit of 363,211
Jews on the eastern front.

In August 1941 Hitler had ordered that he be kept informed of the
activities of the unit, the Einsatzgruppen, a special SS death squad
operating behind German lines.

Mr Irving described the document as 'an orphan', saying there were
no other reports of this nature which existed and were addressed to
the fuhrer.

Three-and-a half hours in the witness box left Mr Irving looking tired.

Mr Irving said he had at first ignored Prof Lipstadt 's book. But by
1996 he found its allegations had led to the ruination of his career.
A US contract for a biography of Goebbels was terminated.

He said her book had exposed him to 'a burden of hatred' that had
led to him being attacked by a Jew shouting that he was a
'Holocaust denier'.

Mr Irving added that after the recent death of his disabled daughter,
a wreath was sent in the name of the head of the Nazis'
extermination programme of the disabled.

It emerged yesterday that Prof Lipstadt will not testify in her
defence. But Mr Irving played a videotape of her on a 1994
Australian television programme, in which she said of revisionist
historians: 'They are the equivalent of people who believe the earth
is flat, Elvis Presley is alive and well, or there was no slavery.'

The trial, which is being heard before Mr Justice Gray without a jury,
continues.




Guardian Unlimited
By

01/13/2000
The Guardian
Copyright (C) 2000 The Guardian; Source: World Reporter (TM)

Gas chambers 'a myth' On the second day of his libel case against
American academic Deborah Lipstadt , and her publisher Penguin
books, author David Irving said it was logistically impossible for
millions of people to have been gassed to death by the Nazis, and
denied that the Holocaust had been 'systematic' or ordered by the
Third Reich's leadership



World News: Libel trial will hinge on precise facts of
Holocaust
RACHEL DONNELLY

01/12/2000
Irish Times
Page 13
Copyright (C) 2000 Irish Times; Source: World Reporter (TM)

One of the most sensitive libel trials to be heard in Britain got under
way at the High Court in London yesterday when the rightwing
historian, Mr David Irving, began his long-awaited courtroom battle
against a US academic, Prof Deborah Lipstadt , and Penguin
Books, who have accused him of being a 'falsifier of history' over his
published views on the Holocaust.

Over the next three months of the trial, questions will be raised
about historical facts of the second World War and the limits of free
speech. Ultimately, the trial will decide Mr Irving's reputation as a
historian.

Mr Irving (62), whose books include Hitler's War and Goebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich, has been condemned across the
world for questioning in print and in public whether the Nazis killed
six million Jews during the second World War and the extent of
Hitler's knowledge of such killing.

He is suing Prof Lipstadt and Penguin over her book Denying the
Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she
accused him of being a 'Holocaust denier' who manipulated history
to cast Hitler in a positive light and questioned the existence of the
gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Mr Irving is seeking as yet undisclosed damages and an injunction
against Prof Lipstadt 's book.

Rising to his feet at 12.15 p.m. to begin reading his opening
argument, Mr Irving said the action had arisen from his publication
Hitler's War, but he insisted he had never held himself out to be a
Holocaust expert and had not written books about the Holocaust.

If he was an expert on anything, he told the court, it was on the role
that Hitler played in the propagation of the second World War, the
decisions Hitler made and the knowledge on which he based those
decisions.

But such were the 'waves of hatred' generated against him by Prof
Lipstadt and Penguin Books that publisher after publisher had
turned away from him. His income from writing had vanished, he
said, 'as assuredly as if I had been employed by one of those
companies taken over by the late Mr Robert Maxwell'.

Mr Irving said that the phrase 'Holocaust denier' had become 'one
of the most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult'.

'The word 'denier' is particularly evil: because no person in full
command of his mental faculties, and with even the slightest
understanding of what happened in World War Two, can deny that
the tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident
historians may wish to quibble about the means, the scale, the
dates and other minutiae.'

He continued: 'Yet, meaningless though it is, the phrase has
become a part of the English language. It is a poison to which there
is virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas
jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same: for the chosen victim, it
is like being called a wife-beater or a paedophile.

Two hours later, when Mr Irving had finished reading his opening
remarks, Mr Richard Rampton QC, for Prof Lipstadt and Penguin
Books, opened his case with a strong attack on the historian's
reputation.

Mr Irving was not a historian at all, he said. 'To put it bluntly, he is a
liar. Lies may take various forms and may as often consist of
suppression or omission as of direct falsehood or invention, but in
the end all forms of lying converge into a single definition: wilful,
deliberate misstatement of the facts.'

Counsel continued: 'Mr Irving has used many different means to
falsify history: invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion,
manipulation and not least mistranslation.

'But all these techniques have the same ultimate effect: falsification
of the truth.'

Mr Irving's views on the Holocaust had undergone a 'sea-change'
between the publication of the first edition of Hitler's War in 1977
and the second edition in 1991. In the first edition he accepted the
historical truth of the Holocaust but by 1991 all trace of it had
disappeared from the book. Mr Irving, he said, had become
convinced by a researcher's bogus report on Auschwitz that it was
nothing more than a slave-labour camp.

###


Mid-day Thursday 011300 wire service report from the UK and two late
filings from the Times of London.


Copyright 2000 PR Newswire Europe Limited
Press Association Newsfile

January 13, 2000, Thursday 12:26 PM Eastern Time

HEADLINE:  GERMANY SEEKING MY EXTRADITION, HISTORIAN TELLS COURT

BYLINE:  Cathy Gordon and Jan Colley, PA News

Controversial historian David Irving today dramatically revealed that the
German government was seeking his extradition for alleged racial incitement.

The 62-year-old author told the High Court in London that it was another
example of "the kind of hatred I face and the problems I face because of the
repugnant allegations against me".

On the third day of his libel action over claims that he was a "Holocaust
denier", Mr Irving told the court that "the German government has asked for
my extradition to Germany on an alleged offence that I committed in 1990".

He referred Mr Justice Gray, the judge hearing his case against American
academic Deborah Lipstadt  and Penguin Books, to a January 12 press clipping
from a German newspaper about the extradition request.

Mr Irving said he drew the article to the court's attention in case "this
end of the bench should suddenly be empty".

The judge said it was "unlikely" that would happen.

The article shown to the judge, from Stuttgart Zeitung, stated that
"Weinheim magistrates court has requested the British Government to
extradite David Irving".

It further reported that "there has been since 1996 an indictment for racial
incitement" relating to a lecture Mr Irving delivered in Weinheim in
September 1990.

The article stated that Mr Irving "had made a name for himself on that
occasion among the circles concerned because he challenged Hitler's blame
for the war and among other things maintained that the Holocaust had not
occurred".

And it added that it was "doubtful that there will be any trial of Irving as
the allegations against him will run out of time in September this year".

After the end of today's sitting, Mr Irving told the media that the
controversy arose over a comment he made during a talk at Weinheim that the
gas chambers at Auschwitz were a fake and built after the war. Such a
statement was a criminal offence in Germany, he said.

He said he was fined the equivalent of =A315,000 in 1992 for making the same
statement in Munich in 1990. He was also banned from Germany.

The extradition proceedings revealed in court today were launched in August
1998, said Mr Irving. No attempt had been made to serve the warrant against
him, but the British Government had agreed to co-operate with Germany.

He said he had warned the Home Secretary that if they tried to serve a
warrant on him he would prosecute the Home Office for assault and he had
written to Jack Straw a few weeks ago.

Professor Lindstadt and Penguin Books deny libelling Mr Irving in her 1994
book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Mr Irving, of Duke Street, Mayfair, central London, who is representing
himself, says the book alleges he has denied the Holocaust, and has
distorted statistics and documents to serve his own ideological purposes and
reach historically untenable conclusions.

He claims the book has generated "waves of hatred against him".

The hearing was adjourned until Monday.



Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited
The Times (London)

January 13, 2000, Thursday

HEADLINE:   Irving says Holocaust 'logistically impossible'

BYLINE:  Michael Horsnell

  The Hitler historian, David Irving, denied yesterday that the Nazis killed
millions of Jews in concentration-camp gas chambers. The SS may have had
gassing experiments, he said, but such mass murder was logistically
impossible.

  Mr Irving, 62, said that the massacre of Jews - as occurred in the East
when Germany invaded Russia - was by shooting, but was without the knowledge
of Adolf Hitler and was not part of any systematic extermination by the
Third Reich.

  On the second day of his libel trial at the High Court, he said that he=
 had
never done anything to exculpate Hitler and in his book, Hitler's War, he
gave a list of crimes committed by the Fuhrer.

  "There was a time when he was on the right course and then went off the
rails," he said. "You can't praise his racial programme or penal methods.
But he did pick up his nation out of the mire after World War I, reunified
it and gave it a sense of pride again."

  Mr Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt,  the American academic, and Penguin
Books, who published her book, Denying the Holocaust, which claimed that he
is a "Hitler partisan" who has twisted history by denying the Holocaust
occurred. In the windowless Court 37, the judge, Mr Justice Gray, who is
sitting without a jury, listened as Mr Irving tangled with defence counsel
Richard Rampton, QC, over the vast numbers of Jews who died at the hands of
the Nazis.

  Was it six million who died in one of the blackest chapters of=
 20th-century
history? "A lot of the numbers are very suspect," the historian said. The
judge put it to him: "It's said against you that you tried to blame what was
done against the Jews by the Third Reich on Jews themselves." Mr Irving
replied: "I have said on a number of occasions that if I was a Jew, I would
be far more concerned not at who pulled the trigger, but why. Anti-Semitism
is a recurring malaise in society. There must be some reason why
anti-Semitic groups break out like some kind of epidemic."

  Mr Rampton asked him: "Do you accept that the Nazis killed by one means or
another - murdered, hanged, put to death - millions of people during World
War II?" "Yes," Mr Irving said. "I hesitate to speculate. It was certainly
more than one million, certainly less than four million." Mr Rampton: "Do
you deny the Nazis killed millions of Jews in gas chambers in purpose-built
establishments?"

  Mr Irving: "Yes, it's logistically impossible." He added: "One million
people weigh 100,000 tonnes - it's a major logistical problem. I deny that
it was possible to liquidate millions of people in gas chambers as presented
by historians so far." Asked about the Holocaust, the historian said: "I
find the word is misleading and unhelpful. It's too vague, imprecise and
unscientific and should be avoided like the plague."

  Pressed on his own definition of the Holocaust, he said that although
tragedy befell the Jews "it was the whole of the Second World War and the
people who died were not just Jews but Gypsies and homosexuals, the people
of Coventry and the people of Hiroshima". Asked how many innocent Jewish
people he thought the Germans had killed deliberately, Mr Irving brought up
the name of Anne Frank, who died of disease in a camp at the age of 15. "She
was a Jew who died in the Holocaust and she wasn't murdered unless you take
it in the broadest sense."

  At the start of five hours in the witness box, Mr Irving, who claims to be
the victim of an international conspiracy to ruin him as an historian,
described himself as a "laissez-faire liberal". He said: "I don't care about
political parties as long as they spend the money on hospitals and not the
Millennium Dome. I don't look down on any section of humanity, coloured
immigrant or females. But I can't say I applaud uncontrolled coloured
immigration. I regret the passing of old England.

  "I sometimes think if sailors and soldiers who stormed the Normandy=
 beaches
could see what has happened since, they wouldn't have got 50 yards up the
beach. They would have given up in disgust." He said that he paid no
attention to Professor Lipstadt's  book until 1996 - three years after it
was published - when his own new work, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third
Reich, was being marketed. He found that bookshops began to show an aversion
and refused to stock his work.

  He accused the defendants of blackening his reputation by labelling him a
spokesman for the forces of Holocaust denial, who spent his time with
anti-Semitic groups.

  Mr Irving claims that word was put about that he was an ardent admirer of
the German dictator who "conceived himself as carrying on Hitler's criminal
legacy".

  Extolling his virtue as an historian who excelled at recovering original
documents - from archives to collections of letters retained by the widows
of German officers - he said that his opponents and rivals were jealous of
the fact that he got to them first.

  He maintained that he had never knowingly or wilfully misrepresented any
document nor suppressed information that did not support his case and said
that he always passed the information he gathered to other historians.

  The case continues.



Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited
The Times (London)
  January 13, 2000, Thursday

HEADLINE:   David Irving Case

BYLINE:  Tim Reid

  THE CLAIMANT: NOT A HOLOCAUST DENIER

  The main plank of David Irving's case rests on Deborah Lipstadt's  claim
that he is a "Holocaust denier". Mr Irving says that he has never claimed
that the Holocaust did not take place, although he has questioned the number
of Jewish dead and the system by which the victims were killed (Tim Reid
writes).

  A Germanophile since his teens, Mr Irving won many plaudits with a string
of Second World War books. But his 1977 book, Hitler's War, provoked a storm
of controversy when he alleged that Hitler had not known about the mass
murder of Europe's Jews until 1943. In 1979 his German publisher apologised
for printing in Hitler's War that Anne Frank's diary was a forgery.

  From the mid-1980s Mr Irving regularly addressed right-wing groups in
Austria and Germany. In 1988 he testified on behalf of Ernst Zundel, a
Canadian on trial for spreading "false news" about the Holocaust. Zundel
also called Fred Leuchter, who claimed that Zyklon B cyanide gas was never
used at Auschwitz.

  The judge dismissed the evidence, but Mr Irving published a version of the
Leuchter report, writing in the foreword that British intelligence had
spread the "propaganda story that the Germans were using 'gas chambers' to
kill millions of Jews and other undesirables".

  When he repeated the claim at a meeting in Munich he was charged by the
German authorities, found guilty in May 1992 and heavily fined.

  Mr Irving says he is a victim of a "global conspiracy", led by Jews, of
which Professor Lepstadt is a major part. Her claim that he "denies" the
Holocaust threaten to destroy his reputation and leave him penniless, he
argues. THE JUDGE:CASE TOO HARD FOR A JURY

  Unlike most libel trials, this case is not being heard by a jury but by a
sole judge: Mr Justice Gray, one of the most senior High Court libel judges.
Under the Civil Procedure Rules, the judge in charge of a case has the power
to dispense with a jury if the case's length and the volume and complexity
of evidence appear to be too onerous for a jury.

  This libel trial, dealing with one of the most controversial and complex
episodes of the past century, is expected to take at least three months.
Both sides will call a host of eminent historians. "The documentary evidence
will be enormous," one lawyer said. Neither side opposed the judge's
suggestion, made before the trial, to dispense with a jury.

  A good example of a judge- only trial was the marathon "McLibel" case,=
 when
the hamburger giant McDonald's sued two environmental activists over claims
about its business practices. Mr Justice Gray, a former top libel silk, said
recently that the balance of success in British libel actions has shifted to
defendants - unlike the past, when plaintiffs could expect big rewards.

  THE DEFENDANT: CHALLENGING REVISIONIST CLAIMS

  The libel case was triggered in 1995 when Deborah Lipstadt  published
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The book
grew from her concern about the worldwide proliferation of claims that there
was no systematic mass murder of Europe's Jews during the Second World War.
The book is the first full-length study of the history of those who attempt
to deny the Holocaust.

  Postwar attacks on the veracity of the Holocaust began in 1948 with the
publication in France of Le Passage de la Ligne (Crossing the Line), by Paul
Rassinier, who had been sent to Buchenwald as a member of the Resistance. He
argued that there was no extermination policy towards the Jews, only an
emigration policy.

  In 1965, Austin App, an American professor, published the Six Million
Swindle, arguing that no more than 1.5 million Jews had been killed, and
that the Nazis had not planned to kill all Jews; and in 1973, Thies
Christopherson, a former Wehrmacht officer, published Die Auschwitz Luge
(The Auschwitz Lie), which claimed that no more than 200,000 Jews were=
 killed.

  Many more "denials" have followed, but in her book Professor Lipstadt
referred extensively to Mr Irving, whom she considered one of the most
vehement exponents of Holocaust denial. His mastery of historical documents
made him a particularly dangerous exponent of the claim, she said. She
asserted that he was associated with well-known Holocaust deniers - she
deliberately rejects their preferred term of "revisionist" - and distorted,
suppressed and manipulated history for a noxious ideology. She said that he
had denied the Holocaust as an historical fact.

###

Associated Press - Thursday 13 Janaury 2000 trial coverage

Writer said he did not try to portray Hitler as merciful 
  
01/13/2000 
Associated Press Newswires 
Copyright 2000. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. 

LONDON (AP) - British writer David Irving, waging a court battle against an
academic he says has accused him of denying the Nazi Holocaust, said Thursday
that he had not deliberately tried to portray Adolf Hitler as merciful.

On the third day of his libel case against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books,
Irving dismissed an allegation that he had deliberately mis-translated
documentary evidence to exonerate Hitler.

Irving says Lipstadt 's 1994 book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory," alleges that he has distorted statistics and documents
to serve his own ideological purposes and reach historically untenable
conclusions, and that he denies the Holocaust.

He says Lipstadt and her publisher were part of "an organized international
endeavor" to destroy his career and that "far from being a Holocaust denier,"
he had repeatedly drawn attention to major aspects of the Holocaust.

Lipstadt and Penguin deny libel.

Defense lawyer Richard Rampton said Thursday that Irving had written that
there was "incontrovertible evidence" that Hitler ordered on Nov. 30, 1941
that there should be no liquidation of the Jews.

But the reference should have been to a particular trainload of about 1,000
Jews deported from Berlin to Riga, Latvia, in November 1941, Rampton said.

###
Historian pressed in court for Holocaust views 
Bert Roughton Jr. 
  
01/13/2000 
The Atlanta Constitution 
Home 
Page A; 12 
(Copyright, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution - 2000) 

Maverick historical writer David Irving on Wednesday evaded
attempts in court to show that his public statements prove that he
rejects the conventional understanding of the Holocaust --- a central
issue in his libel suit against a professor from Atlanta's Emory
University.

Asked by the judge to give his interpretation of the Holocaust, Irving
offered a cautiously worded response. "The Holocaust is the
tragedy that befell the Jewish in World War II," he said. "But it was
the whole of the second World War, and the people who died were
not just Jews but gypsies and homosexuals, the people of Coventry
and the people of Hiroshima."

But later on cross examination, he denied as a "big lie" that millions
of Jews were killed in gas chambers at Nazi death camps or that
their extermination was part of a systematic campaign by the Third
Reich and Adolf Hitler.

Irving is suing professor Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher,
Penguin Books, for libel over her 1994 book, "Denying the
Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."

The book depicts the self-made historian as a "Holocaust denier"
who twists history to support his belief that the scope of the mass
murder has been greatly exaggerated.

He believes Jews have sought to use the Holocaust story to get
increased reparations from the German people.

Irving's position on the Holocaust is central to his argument that the
book defamed him by untruthfully asserting that he denies the
Holocaust occurred. While many of Irving's public statements seem
to indicate that he has disputed the existence of the Holocaust,
Irving insisted that he only denied certain aspects of it.

"I deny that the Nazis could have liquidated millions of people at gas
chambers at any of their locations during the Third Reich," he said.
He believes the gas chambers at Auschwitz were actually built after
the war.

Irving, who is representing himself, said the logistics of disposing of
so many bodies would have been overwhelming.

Nazis did murder many Jews, said Irving, who offered an estimate
of between 1 million and 4 million victims.

But he said the evidence indicates the killing program was operated
at a level below Hitler.

###

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