HA'ARETZ 04.12.00 Barak: Irving's loss is a triumph for free people http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=14&datee=04/12/00&id=7 5228 By Nitzan Horowitz and Yair Sheleg Ha'aretz Correspondents and Agencies Prime Minister Barak sent a special message from Washington to American scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who was vindicated in a libel suit brought against her in a London Court by controversial historian David Irving. Writing in the "name of the Israeli people and the Jewish people," Barak declared that Israel's strength today guarantees that "there can never be a second Holocaust, and that nobody in the world can dare to rise up against the Jewish people. But, in parallel, a persistent, determined battle is being fought against people who try to deny the Holocaust, which brought about the destruction of a third of our people." Barak told Lipstadt that her struggle and victory is a triumph for free people against "dark forces which want humanity's lowest point to be forgotten." A member of Barak's cabinet, Social and Diaspora Affairs Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior, invited Lipstadt to appear before the governmental forum for combating anti-Semitism, which he chairs. Melchior declared that the court's verdict "sent a message to the whole world" that the reality of the Holocaust is not open for philosophical or historical debate, and that Holocaust deniers should be ranked among "the worst Nazis." Speaking for Israel's government, Melchior congratulated Lipstadt for the "strong moral stature" she showed throughout the trial. The Emory University historian served as a "model of Jewish determination," Melchior concluded. Jewish Agency Chairman Salai Meridor stated that "it's regrettable and sad that a court had to be involved in matter of this kind." He expressed hope that "this will be the last time statements of this kind denying the Holocaust will be articulated in normal society around the world." March of the Living chairman MK Abraham Hirchson (Likud) added his hope that "the verdict will put an emphatic end to abominable attempts to deny the Holocaust." He said that he had invited Lipstadt to light memorial torches at the Auschwitz concentration camp on Holocaust Day during the upcoming March of the Living event. Yad Vashem announced that "the primary meaning of the verdict is not that the Holocaust occurred; the huge amount of documents and evidence held at Yad Vashem, and archives and libraries around the world prove this, undoubtedly. The verdict's meaning is to be found in the sharpening of borders between what counts as logical, and illogical, discussion about the Holocaust. The ruling has sent a message to the entire world, most significantly to young people, that the arguments used by Irving and others to deny and diminish the events of the Holocaust are not within the realm of acceptable or reasonable discourse.". But the revisionists survive The Chilean government said yesterday that it has banned about 100 foreigners from entering Chile after learning they were planning to attend a gathering planned by pro-Nazi groups. The government had previously prohibited the gathering. "We have compiled a list of some 100 people, duly identified, who will be stopped at airports or borders because they plan to attend the Nazi congress," deputy Interior Minister Jorge Burgos said. Burgos would not give any names, but he said some of those on the list are well-known pro-Nazi activists who have outstanding arrest warrants. President Ricardo Lagos last month said his government would not allow the gathering to take place in Chile. The five-day meeting was scheduled to start April 21, according to its organizer, Alexis Lopez, leader of the New Society Movement, a small pro-Nazi group. Burgos said the government believes organizers of the meeting have been mostly looking for some media attention "rather than organizing something real big." "But we are worried," he added, explaining the order to ban the foreigners. He admitted some foreigners may still slip into the country and that a small gathering may take place "at some private home, but they will not succeed in holding a massive gathering. JERUSALEM POST 04.12.00 http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/04/12/News/News.5337.html British court slams Irving as Holocaust denier By Douglas Davis LONDON (April 12) - The British High Court struck a blow for historical truth yesterday when it awarded US Prof. Deborah Lipstadt an overwhelming victory against UK Holocaust revisionist David Irving in a landmark libel trial. In a devastating 334-page judgment that also found in favor of Lipstadt's British publisher, Penguin Books, Justice Charles Grey exonerated Lipstadt, professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, of all the main libel charges stemming from her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Exactly three months after the start of the trial, the judge labelled Irving a "pro-Nazi polemicist" and found that he: * deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence to suit his own ideological agenda; * unjustifiably portrayed Hitler in a favorable light, particularly in his attitude toward, and treatment of, Jews; * associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism; * is an antisemite, a racist, and a Holocaust denier. In addition to legal defeat and public humiliation, Irving, who lives in a $1.5 million apartment in London's Mayfair district, now faces a bill for legal costs of at least $5m. and bankruptcy. Referring to Irving's political activities, the judge said "the content of his speeches and interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias. He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime, which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities they inflicted on the Jews. The picture of Irving that emerges... reveal him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist." Grey said he found that "for the most part, the falsification of the historical record was deliberate... Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs, even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence." He also ruled that Lipstadt had failed to prove that Irving had a self-portrait of Hitler above his desk; that he was a scheduled speaker at an anti-Zionist conference in Sweden which was to have been attended by neo-Nazi, Hamas, and Hizbullah representatives, and that he had exposed parts of the original Goebbels diary to potential damage. However, he found that the charges which had been proved were of "sufficient gravity" that the unproved charges did not have "any material effect on Irving's reputation." After the judgment, Lipstadt said she was filled with "intense joy and deep gratitude that I had people around me who helped me get through this ordeal." But she expressed sorrow for Holocaust survivors who had attended the trial and had witnessed Irving's taunts. She came close to tears when she recalled being "enveloped by survivors" who had approached her during the trial to thank her for her stand against Irving. "But the nightmare is not over," she warned. "There is no end to the battle against racism, antisemitism, and fascism." The trial, she said, had been "a long and difficult process" and she hoped that "this victory will save other authors from having to face such trials and tribulations. I see this not only as a personal victory but also as a victory for all those who speak out against hate and prejudice." Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that "Israel's strength today ensures that a second Holocaust will not take place and no one in the world will dare rise up against the Jewish people. At the same time Israel conducts a determined and brazen struggle against those who try to deny the Holocaust." The statement said that Barak spoke to Lipstadt and told her that her victory is a "victory of the free world against the dark forces seeking to obliterate the memory of the lowest point humanity ever reached." Ambassador to the UK Dror Zeigerman, who attended yesterday's two-hour reading of the judgment summary, told The Jerusalem Post that the trial represented another chapter in the fight against the twin evils of racism and antisemitism. "As I sat in court, I was again powerfully reminded why we need a State of Israel that is strong and democratic," he said. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, which provided archive material for Lipstadt's defense, said the verdict would help in the fight against neo-Nazism. "It has sent a message to the entire world, most significantly to young people, that the arguments used by Irving and others to deny and diminish the events of the Holocaust are not within the realm of acceptable or reasonable discourse," Yad Vashem said in a statement. "The issue is not of Irving's right to say or not to say ridiculous things, but that people understand that the ideas of Irving and his ilk are based on a political neo-Nazi ideology, and do not represent any form of historical truth." British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks hailed the judgment as "a victory for truth. Viewed against a European backdrop where parties espousing neo-Nazi views have been able to achieve electoral success, the message behind this verdict is highly significant - that those people who distort history must not be allowed to create an environment in which it is repeated." The Anti-Defamation League said the ruling vindicates Lipstadt's scholarship while reaffirming Irving's status as a "falsifier of history and a Nazi sympathizer." However, ADL director Abraham Foxman said "it is unfortunate that David Irving was able even to bring such frivolous charges into a courtroom. At least the trial provided an opportunity to reveal once again the reality of the Holocaust and the dangers of those who seek to deny it or trivialize it." However, Israeli author Tom Segev said he expects the verdict to have little impact. Holocaust awareness is strong around the world and those trying to deny or diminish the scope of the genocide are usually found on the margins, said Segev. "The Holocaust is considered a code for the ultimate evil in cultures that have never even heard of a Jew," said Segev, who has written a book on the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society. (Marilyn Henry, Janine Zacharia, and news agencies contributed to this report.) == Comment Unfortunately, Holocaust denial will not end here Anne McElvoy 04/12/2000 The Independent - London FOREIGN DAVID IRVING has secured a lasting claim to fame as the least convincing libel litigant to appear in the British courts since Neil Hamilton. A momentous self-delusion inspired him to take the stand against Deborah Lipstadt's claim that he was a Holocaust denier when he has spent the last 20 years advancing by all possible and impossible arguments the thesis that the mass extermination of the Jews in the Third Reich did not take place. This case was a crash course in perversity, underwritten by racial hatred. Mr Irving shared with us his belief that annihilation of the Jews by gas in Auschwitz could not have been possible because there were "no holes in the roof" to pump gas through, that the cyanide residues found in the hair of victims was due to a delousing programme, and that Hitler had not known of the killings until 1943. Strip away from Mr Irving's account the number of well-documented things which he alleges did not happen under Hitler, and the Germany of the Third Reich emerges as a benign, if accident-prone, place where things just happened to get out of hand because of the stroppiness of the Jews and some forgivable Aryan over-reaction. A number of observers in the courtroom were reminded of the self- definition of Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust Part 1: "I am the spirit that denies everything." Goethe then adds a twist to his Manichaean verbal game which is far more relevant to the Irving case. The Lord God intervenes in the dialogue to reassure us that the devil is not (so to speak) all bad: "He wills only the ill but ends up doing good." This court case has done us a power of good. It is worth a hundred Holocaust Memorial days because it provided a live example of the real nature of Holocaust denial and its inseparability from vile and active anti-Semitism. Mr Irving's zeal in unmasking what he believes to be a grand conspiracy distorting the scale of Nazi evil, his obsessive quest for mitigating evidence to "prove" that Auschwitz was merely a detention camp and not the dark heart of a killing machine, alerts us anew to the danger of treating the Holocaust as something to be filed away neatly, as understood, dealt with, catalogued and commemorated. The scale of the atrocities and the complicity of the German military, civil service, police and legal institutions remain awesome, incomprehensible. Their causes, and the distribution of responsibility, will always be the subject of dispute. The day we believe that there is nothing left to argue about is the day we have really learnt to forget. British libel law gets a rough press at the moment. In this case, however, it has served the admirable and civilised purpose of stripping bare the layers of false mystery which have long sheltered behind the description of the historian as "maverick". What we heard in the High Court was the testimony of an overt anti-Semite who sang racist ditties to his daughter. Mr Irving is a recognisable type in public discourse: the vain controversialist who believes that he has revealed a profound truth simply by saying something outrageous enough, sufficiently often to produce a hostile response. He then proceeds to describe the rejection of his views as an "organised international conspiracy". And we all know which racial group is behind organised international conspiracies, don't we? They are the same people, he once explained, "who shout `Ours! Ours! Ours!' when a hoard of gold turns up" and get upset when the "inevitable pogroms" occur. The respected conservative historian Andrew Roberts, perplexed by the mixture of Mr Irving's diligence as a researcher and unearther of fresh sources and his warped belief that Auschwitz was a "racket... baloney", once asked him how he accounted for the fact that a lot of people who had been alive in 1939 in Europe were missing by 1945. Mr Irving replied that they had succumbed to "typhus, suicide, natural wastage, ad hoc killings and local pogroms". The most intriguing question raised by the evidence was the judge's claim that Mr Irving's increasing political activism disqualified him from his claim to be a serious "objective" historian. This is marshy ground on which to pitch an argument and a sign that legal minds do not always grasp the pitfalls of referring matters to the deceptive higher court of objectivity. A lot of very good historians imbued their work with bias. AJP Taylor, the post-war Establishment's favoured interpreter of the Third Reich, shaped his presentation of German history as a continuous arc, from the militarism of Bismarck to the death camps, to fit his own anti-German views. Russia's Dimitri Volkogonov became the favourite historian of the glasnost era by "reinterpreting" Stalin and Lenin. This task, it soon emerged, was carried out with the support of the intelligence services, who could see the way the wind was blowing and the need to show a willingness to revise history in order to survive the present. Yet no one could deny Volkogonov's contribution to scholarship. With no future as a widely published historian and an insatiable appetite for self-publicity, Mr Irving will very probably devote himself to role of cause celebre among those who believe that no atrocity is well-documented enough to be beyond question. The notion of alternative truth, suppressed by established interests, remains a seductive one, even among those who have no sympathy for the anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler fantasies of Mr Irving. The wider the liberal consensus, the more enticing becomes the prospect of opposing it. This instinct of exaggerated and debilitating scepticism was roundly - although ultimately unsuccessfully - exploited by LM magazine to defend ITN's libel suit over the magazine's claims that it had falsified pictures inside a Bosnian camp. The magazine was a lively read with a genuinely challenging, entertaining and anti- consensual point of view. Alas, it also developed a nasty little stock in trade of callow journalistic questioning of the truth about human rights abuses. In this world of boundless relativities, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb psychopath, became "War Criminal or Whipping Boy?", mass graves look a lot like allotments when seen from the air, and no one could ever be quite sure who is to blame for the massacres. Mr Irving is the crudest, most pernicious face of that tendency. He put himself so far beyond the limits of acceptability by his increasingly eccentric, inflammatory statements on the "responsibility" of the Jews for their extermination that there was no longer much need for Ms Lipstadt's claim to prove that he had set out to whitewash the Third Reich. As a Holocaust denier, Mr Irving turned out to be less of a class act than his salon admirers had hoped. We should not fool ourselves that this victory is final. One day, a more calculating mouthpiece for similar views will emerge to put the revisionist case in a less foolhardy way, and the whole business will begin all over again. The big lies are never short of proponents. The big truths have to be defended again and again. Leading article: David Irving lost his case - and we can celebrate a victory for free speech 04/12/2000 The Independent - London ALTHOUGH IT must have been obvious to every interested party other than David Irving himself - and his band of devoted supporters - that he would lose his libel lawsuit against historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books, it is still a relief to be able to report that free speech has had a rare triumph in the British libel courts. For consider what would have happened if Mr Irving had been vindicated in his contention that the systematic destruction of European Jewry in the Nazi death camps never occurred, that the first- hand testimony to the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz was a tissue of lies, and that the meticulous accounts of historians who had devoted their careers to documenting the facts had been slipshod and unreliable. Mr Irving is not a cloistered academic disinterestedly pursuing uncomfortable revelations to their ineluctable, if uncomfortable, conclusion. He has made a point of addressing extreme right-wing rallies in Germany and elsewhere. His craftily measured insinuations have been used as "evidence" by Holocaust deniers and other anti- Semitic groupings to pursue their own deplorable racist agendas. If Mr Irving had convinced a British court that he was a reputable historian whose work did not "deny" the Holocaust, but merely adjusted the death figures downwards and ascribed the means of death to poor conditions in the Nazi labour camps, this would have been trumpeted as a victory for Holocaust denial tout court. It does seem absurd, on the face of it, that any event so well- attested as the German attempt to put into effect Hitler's "final solution" should be a subject of controversy. A visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem; the reading of powerful personal testimony such as, to take just one example, that of Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who wrote about his experiences at Auschwitz; even the viewing of the popular film Schindler's List; all provide a graphic and convincing account for anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear. This is backed up by more scholarship than has been applied to practically any other of the great crimes of the 20th century. At this point, denial of the fact of the Holocaust, and the broad outlines of the narrative, is more a matter for abnormal psychology than modern history. The judge's condemnation of the "historian" is along these lines, and is devastating. David Irving, he concludes on the most persuasive grounds, has "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". Those reasons include his being "an active Holocaust denier", who is "anti-Semitic and racist". What one can say in praise of the arguing out of this pathetic dispute in the High Court is that the great liberal principle, enunciated by John Stuart Mill, of the marketplace of ideas in which false coin is tested and replaced by true, has been vindicated both by the cogency of the testimony presented by the defence, and by the verdict. The crowning irony is that David Irving tried to use the notoriously restrictive British libel law to choke off critical examination of his own views in the name of his right to criticise the work of others. The Court, in the person of Mr Justice Gray, thankfully, saw through that typically discreditable manoeuvre. Racist. Anti-Semite. Holocaust denier. How history will judge David Irving Ian Burrell Home Affairs Correspondent 04/12/2000 The Independent - London THE REVISIONIST historian David Irving is facing ruin after a judge denounced him yesterday as an "anti-Semitic and racist" Holocaust denier and a "pro-Nazi polemicist". Mr Justice Gray ruled at the end of a High Court libel trial in London that Mr Irving had "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" to portray Hitler in "an unwarrantedly favourable light". The crushing and humiliating defeat for a historian who has claimed that the systematic murder of Jews in Nazi concentration camps never took place was last night hailed by Jewish groups as an "epic victory for truth and justice". Lord Janner of Braunstone QC, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: "The Irving case shows the crucial importance of educating our young people in the tragedy of the Holocaust especially as a symbol of the dangers of allowing racist dictatorships to rule." Mr Irving was facing a bill for defence costs of pounds 2m after the judge, Mr Justice Gray, ruled that the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and the publishers Penguin Books had been justified in describing Mr Irving as a Holocaust denier. Mr Irving, 62, claimed that Professor Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory, had destroyed his livelihood and generated "waves of hatred" against him. But after hearing 32 days of evidence, Mr Justice Gray found the charges against Mr Irving "substantially true". He said: "Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence." He attacked Mr Irving for his "pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias", saying: "He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they inflicted on the Jews. He is content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to share many of their racist and anti- Semitic prejudices." Mr Irving, who represented himself in the action, had said he never claimed that the Holocaust did not occur but questioned whether the killings were systematic or sanctioned by Hitler. He claimed that any distortions were genuine errors. But the judge, who pointed out that Mr Irving's position changed during the trial, had examined nearly 20 alleged distortions and found that he had consistently twisted the facts to present a pro- Nazi view. Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War, was found to have misrepresented Hitler's role in the Munich putsch of 1923, deliberately underplayed his part in the Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews in 1938 and wrongly portrayed him as a "friend" of the Jews until 1943. Mr Justice Gray was dismissive of evidence used by Mr Irving to support his conjecture that systematic gassing did not take place at Auschwitz. "No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews," the judge said. His belief that Mr Irving's errors were not the result of genuine mistakes was underscored by a view that the plaintiff was a talented military historian: "His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent," he said. Mr Justice Gray cited a series of examples as "clear evidence" of Mr Irving's anti-Semitism: "Irving has made claims that Jews deserve to be disliked; that they brought the Holocaust on themselves; that Jewish financiers are crooked; that Jews generate anti-Semitism by their greed and mendacity". He also said Mr Irving happily associated with neo-Nazis. "His association with such individuals indicates in my judgement that Irving shares many of their political beliefs," he said. Yesterday, Ms Lipstadt, 53, a professor in modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Georgia, United States, said she was delighted by the judgment and felt "exceptionally vindicated". Accusing Mr Irving of "dancing on the graves" of Holocaust victims, she said: "I had argued that David Irving was partisan and an apologist for the Nazis and anti- Semitic. The judge went further than I did in his ruling - and called him a racist." Mr Irving, who was hit by an egg as he arrived at the court yesterday, described the ruling as "firstly, indescribable and secondly, perverse" and said he was considering an appeal. In The Judge's Words Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence... he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light... he is an active Holocaust denier... he is anti-Semitic and racist and... he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism... The contents of his speeches and interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias. He makes... unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities they inflicted upon the Jews... He is content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to share many of their racist and anti- Semitic prejudices. The picture of Irving which emerges reveals him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist From Mr Justice Gray's judgment in the High Court yesterday The Irving judgement: `A victory for all who speak out against prejudice' The Vindicated Andrew Buncombe 04/12/2000 The Independent - London DEBORAH LIPSTADT said yesterday that she considered her libel victory not just a personal win but "a victory for all those who speak out against hate and prejudice". In a statement issued after her successful defence, Professor Lipstadt, 51, said she hoped other authors would be saved such "trials and tribulations". "Let us remember that this trial was not about whether the Holocaust happened but whether I was correct in describing David Irving as a denier of the Holocaust, a Hitler partisan, an anti-Semite and a right-wing extremist," she said. "The judge has found that I was correct in all these points." Professor Lipstadt, who occupies the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, United States, made the accusations in her book Denying the Holocaust, published in Britain in 1995. She said the idea for the book started in the late Eighties, when she became aware of the number of Holocaust deniers who were being offered respectable platforms. She said she was happy to discuss certain aspects of the Holocaust, such as whether the Final Solution was Hitler's alone, but she refused to discuss whether the Holocaust took place. "That would be equivalent to debating whether the Roman Empire existed," she once said. Born in New York to a German Jewish father and a Canadian mother, Professor Lipstadt describes herself as a traditionalist, but not an Orthodox Jew. She sits on the executive committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and chairs its educational committee. Yesterday she said she was grateful to her publishers, Penguin, for backing her case, adding: "I am very pleased that what I wrote has been vindicated. I never had any doubts that it would be, but none the less I am grateful." In a statement, Penguin said it fought to "defend our right as a publisher and to defend the right of our author to publish her serious and highly regarded book on the subject of Holocaust denial". It added: "We believed it was our duty to defend the claim which the evidence showed - and which the judge has now ruled - had no merit." The Irving judgement: Judge dismantles author's distorted view of history The Findings Andrew Buncombe 04/12/2000 The Independent - London BY THE time that David Irving slipped into Court 36 at the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday morning he knew the game was up. Because he was representing himself, he had been given Mr Justice Gray's written judgement the day before. He would have had ample chance to study it, ample opportunity to see how he had failed to have his view of history accepted. But though he was aware of the decision, Mr Irving could not have fully expected what was coming. Over the next hour and 50 minutes, Mr Justice Gray did not so much dismiss the historian's claim - that he had been libelled by Professor Deborah Lipstadt - as dismantle it, destroy it, turn it on its head and then throw it back into Mr Irving's heavy-joweled face. In doing so, he also fundamentally questioned his right to be called a historian. The judge started by saying it was not his job to decide what had happened under the Nazis: he was a trial judge and not an historian. But, as he hurried through his main findings, that was exactly the role he assumed. He started with the allegation contained within Professor Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, that Mr Irving had misrepresented the historical evidence. No one doubted, said the judge, that as a military historian Mr Irving had much to commend him. He had undertaken painstaking research. But then the turned to specific matters: Hitler's 1924 trial, Kristallnacht, the shooting of the Jews in Riga, the timing of the so- called final solution. Names and places from another world, known to most only from history books, echoed around the courtroom. "It is my conclusion," said Mr Justice Gray, "that, judged objectively, Irving treated the historical evidence in a matter which fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian. Irving ... misrepresented and distorted the evidence." Mr Irving's face turned the colour of his burgundy waistcoat as he listened. (He had removed his jacket after being pelted with an egg as he entered.) But the judge barely paused, as he turned to Mr Irving's argument over the absence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and the extent of the Holocaust. "No objective fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds and thousands of Jews," said the judge. Though the packed courtroom remained silent, one sensed that many in the public gallery were inwardly cheering. There was no respite for Mr Irving. He was a Holocaust denier; he may not be a racist in the usual sense, said the judge, but he mixed with racists and shared many of their right-wing views. And with a showman's timing Mr Justice Gray saved the best for the end - the matter of whether Mr Irving had deliberately got things wrong. "For the most part the falsification of the ... record was deliberate and that Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological evidence." The Irving judgement: State built on suffering breathes a collective sigh of satisfaction Reaction Phil Reeves in Jerusalem 04/12/2000 The Independent - London ISRAEL FOLLOWED the David Irving libel trial as closely as Britain, and reacted with satisfaction and relief yesterday. Almost no subject is as sensitive in the Jewish state - whose creation owes much to the appalling events that Mr Irving has questioned - as the efforts by the far right to deny that the Holocaust happened. Throughout the trial, the Israeli media carried regular reports on the case, including the occasional ranting and eccentric interview with the man himself. Israelis were awaiting the outcome with intense interest, seeing it as a measure of the advances - or otherwise - made by those seeking to rewrite their history. In a country whose elders know only too painfully that Auschwitz was not, as Mr Irving has contended, little more than a "Disneyland for tourists" built after the war, the issue has long been a source of deep concern. It was revived anew by Jewish anger over the proliferation of neo-Nazi claptrap on the internet. Mr Irving pushed it to the top of the headlines - and, in doing so, did a favour to the cause of those who want to ensure that the Nazi terror is never forgotten. A measure of Israel's interest came in February when the state archives released the 40-year-old prison memoirs of Adolf Eichmann, chief transport officer for the Nazi death machine, so that they could be used by the defendant, Professor Deborah Lipstadt. The fact that yesterday's verdict was no surprise did not dampen the Israeli response. "I am very pleased," said Dr Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi-hunter with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem. "But, given the anti-Semitic and racist statements made by Irving during the trial, I would have been very surprised if the result had been different. It would have been a disaster if he had won because it would have increased the willingness of other people to listen to this drivel. The verdict won't stop the deniers, as they are inveterate anti-Semites, but I think it will lessen the willingness of others to listen to them." Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial - which has 55 million pages of documents detailing the Holocaust and was built on the ashes of Jews slain by the Nazis - described the verdict as "gratifying" and of "great significance to those involved in the fight against neo- Nazism and neo-fascism, and who strive to teach the true events of history". Leading Article: The bad history man 04/12/2000 The Daily Telegraph THE DOWNFALL of David Irving does not mean the triumph of censorship. Nobody forced him to sue Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin, for libel. His failure to persuade the court that he had been defamed by her book Denying the Holocaust has no implications for free speech. It is not the facts of the Holocaust that have been on trial at the High Court for the past few months, but Mr Irving's reputation as a historian. Mr Justice Gray said yesterday that "it is no part of my function to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime". His 300-page judgment was remarkable for its severity, going beyond Professor Lipstadt's allegation of Holocaust denial and manipulation of evidence to find that Mr Irving was also an anti-Semite, a racist and a neo-Nazi sympathiser. But the judge offered no support to those who desire the suppression of historical debate by legal proscription. However offensive the views of Mr Irving undoubtedly are, he and others will continue to enjoy the freedom to express them in this country. Many people, it is true, have been profoundly disturbed by this case. The court at times threatened to become a theatre of the absurd, in which Auschwitz survivors were cross-examined by a man who clearly considered their traumatic experiences to be concocted. In and out of court, Mr Irving has received unprecedented publicity for his distortions and fantasies; yesterday, for instance, he was given several minutes of prime time on the BBC's Today programme. In Germany, where Holocaust denial is a criminal offence, a person of Mr Irving's opinions would never gain access to the media. That is some measure of the relative levels of anxiety in the two countries about their recent history. It is scarcely surprising to find such anxiety among the Germans, a nation that has subjected an entire continent to the wholesale falsification of history within living memory, and has spent the past half-century undoing the damage. The British, by contrast, are proud of their past and are notoriously tolerant of eccentrics - even those whose motivation is suspect. Mr Irving's anti-Semitism has not prevented his books being judged on their merits. Such tolerance is the mark of a self-confident society. The courts may have a didactic as well as a judicial function. The Irving case has done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations. The civil law acquitted itself well; a state prosecution under a statutory offence of Holocaust denial would have sent out illiberal signals. As it is, Mr Irving cannot blame the authorities for the catastrophe that has befallen his reputation and his fortunes. The judge paid tribute to his scholarship as a military historian: "He is beyond question able and intelligent." Those qualities render his betrayal of his vocation all the more heinous. Like Milton's Satan, "vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair", Mr Irving has damned himself. Comment: The trial of David Irving - and my part in his downfall: John Keegan, Defence Editor, argues in the wake of yesterday's verdict that there are two Irvings - the meticulous researcher and the flawed thinker John Keegan 04/12/2000 The Daily Telegraph THE news that David Irving has lost his libel case will send a tremor through the community of 20th-century historians. For more than a year now, the gossip between them has been about whether he would lose or not, a subject on which all hedged bets. "It depends whether the judge goes for Holocaust denial or slurs on his reputation", was the general view. "If the first he'll lose, if the second he might get away with it." What this insider talk meant was that Mr Irving might well persuade the judge of the unfairness of Professor Lipstadt's accusations of his bad historical method. That was what he cared about and he would no doubt argue his case well. If, however, her accusation that Irving's version of the Holocaust was so untruthful as to outweigh his merits as an otherwise objective historian, then he would get no damages and have to pay enormous costs. As the trial date drew nearer, talk turned to the question of who had been asked to give evidence. Eventually I was. I - like others I knew - declined. Earlier experiences had persuaded me that nothing but trouble comes of taking sides over Irving. Decide against him, and his associates accuse one of prejudice. On this occasion I was accused of cowardice. Decide for him, and the smears start. I have written complimentary reviews of Irving's work as a military historian to find myself posted on the internet as a Nazi sympathiser. Refusal did not get me off the hook. Last autumn, Mr Irving told me he intended to subpoena me and in January the summons appeared. To it was attached a cheque for pounds 50, thus making it an enforceable court instrument. I had to appear, like it or not. In practice, the appearance was painless. Mr Irving very decently gave me the chance at the outset to state that I was not present willingly. He allowed me to explain why, without interruption. There was no jury to unsettle one, the parties having agreed to leave it all to the judge, a distinguished former libel QC, Charles Gray (who represented Lord Aldington in the famous Tolstoy case). The judge was relaxed but a master of the material. All I had to do was answer Mr Irving's questions. They were about my opinion of him as a historian. He had quotations from favourable reviews of his work I had written. Could such opinions, he asked, in effect, be consistent with the contrary opinions of other historians? In a sense this was the central question, which would recur throughout the hearing. Prof Lipstadt's case was that the bad in Irving was so bad that it robbed all he wrote of value. Irving's case was that, if some historians of reputation praised parts of his work, the praise extended to all his work. Both positions are, of course, highly artificial. Fortunately, I did not have to give my opinion of Prof Lipstadt's work. It was easy, however, to say that a reviewer is at liberty to pick and choose. I had praised, and would praise again, I said, Irving's extraordinary ability to describe and analyse Hitler's conduct of military operations, which was his main occupation during the Second World War. That did not imply endorsement of Irving's view that Hitler did not "know" about the Holocaust until October 1943. That view was "perverse", I said. What did I mean? I meant, I said, that it defied reason, or common sense. Would it not, however, be the most extraordinary historical revelation of the war, Irving asked, if it could be shown that he did not know about the Holocaust? This was a very curious moment. I suddenly recognised that Irving believed that Hitler's ignorance could be demonstrated. I stepped down but stayed to watch the rest of the morning's proceedings. Mr Irving's performance was very impressive. He is a large, strong, handsome man, excellently dressed, with the appearance of a leading QC. He performs as well as a QC also, asking, in a firm but courteous voice, precise questions which demonstrate his detailed knowledge of an enormous body of material. There it was all around us, hundreds of box files holding thousands of pages telling in millions of words what had been done and suffered in Hitler's Europe. Irving knows the material paragraph by paragraph. His skill as an archivist cannot be contested. Unfortunately for him, the judge has now decided that all-consuming knowledge of a vast body of material does not excuse faults in interpreting it. Irving, the judge said, "repeatedly makes assertions about the Holocaust which are unsupported by or contrary to the historical record". This is the part of the judgment that will hurt. Mr Irving, perhaps because he left London University without taking a degree, is acutely concerned to be recognised as an academic historian among others. It is not enough for him to receive compliments from professors about his skill in uncovering lost documents or finding forgotten survivors of Hitler's court. Those are the sort of things journalists do. He wants to be praised for his source notes, for his exegesis, for his bibliographies, for what historians call "the apparatus". As a result, his books positively clank and groan under the weight of apparatus. Very good it is too. Irving, never confident enough to believe what he reads about himself, really is admired by some of those whose approval he seeks. Unfortunately for him, he is admired only when he writes sense. When he writes nonsense, a small but disabling element in his work, he sacrifices all admiration and incurs blame mixed with incredulity. How can anyone so good at history be so bad? There is an answer. It is that there are really two Irvings. There is Irving the researcher and most of Irving the writer, who sticks to the facts and makes eloquent sense of them. Then there is Irving the thinker, who lets insecurities, imagined slights and youthful resentments bubble up from within him to cloud his mind. It is as if he becomes possessed by the desire to shock and confound the respectable ranks of academe, to write the unprintable and to speak the unutterable. Like many who seek to shock, he may not really believe what he says and probably feels astounded when taken seriously. He has, in short, many of the qualities of the most creative historians. He is certainly never dull. Prof Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again. Mr Irving, if he will only learn from this case, still has much that is interesting to tell us. Irving libel trial: The loser : Advice from Hitler sends ally on road to defeat Neil Tweedie 04/12/2000 The Daily Telegraph IF David Irving loses everything as a result of his defeat in his libel action against Deborah Lipstadt he will have no one but himself to blame - except, that is, the Fuhrer. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph before yesterday's verdict, the author was asked how he would meet the enormous legal costs now being sought by her and Penguin Books. "It will be a total wipe-out," he said. "Being totally confident in victory, I have not done what Aitken did. I have not put property in any other people's names." He said that, in making his decision, he had followed Hitler's advice. "If people say why have I not done so I would say this is a lesson of World War II, of Adolf Hitler. He criticised his generals for wanting to be in rear defensive positions - in an East Wall. "He said as soon as you build an East Wall you are going to fall back on it in double-quick time. If they had no East Wall to fall back on, then they'd fight harder. So the knowledge that I have no fall-back position makes me fight that much harder. Of course, Hitler lost." History does indeed have a way of repeating itself. Mr Irving is now confronted with the loss of his main asset, his first-floor flat in Mayfair. Prof Lipstadt's and Penguin's lawyers believe it to be heavily mortgaged. Mr Irving shares it with Bente Hogh, a 36-year-old Danish blue-eyed blonde. They have a daughter, Jessica, six. The couple met after Miss Hogh and a friend rented the flat while Mr Irving was away. Mr Irving married in 1961 and had four daughters by his Spanish wife. They divorced in 1981. One daughter died last year at 18. Miss Hogh is counting cheques sent by wellwishers. Mr Irving claims total donations to his "fighting fund" of $500,000 (about pounds 340,000). "There are 5,400 people around the world who give me loads of money," he said. "They're in America, Australia. It all goes into the battle. It goes from about $2, where it's hardly worth the postage -they always get a personal letter of thanks from me - up to $50 or $60 or $70 or $80,000." So who thought him worth $80,000? "A wellwisher with no political bent." Mr Irving had denied in court being academic. Was that true? One should have known better than to expect a yes or no. He replied: "If I was a member of a Jewish family in Riga in 1941 being dragged towards pits on the edge of a forest, I would want to know why. And then I would look around and I would not necessarily say well, it's because the Nazis or the Lithuanian and Latvian collaborators are gangsters determined to kill us all. "I would possibly - and I should possibly - say well, it may be the way a number of my co-religionists joined the NKVD during the year when the Russians were here in power and carried out bestial murders of the non-Jewish population. "This may be possibly why I, an innocent Jew, am now finding myself being dragged with my wife and children towards the edge of that pit." Presumably, there were Gentiles in the NKVD? "Very few. The leadership was almost entirely Jewish. And this is one of the little facts of history you won't find very widely reported." Why Mr Irving turned out like this is hard to know. His upbringing was relatively conventional. He was born in 1938. His father, who served in the Royal Navy during the war, left home when he was a boy. His mother had to raise him, his twin brother and older brother with little money. He attended public school in Brentwood, Essex, before going to Imperial College, London. He failed to finish his degree, opting instead to work as a steelworker in the Ruhr. The still obvious bomb damage inspired his first book on the destruction by the Allies of Dresden, published in 1963. Mr Irving tried to claim it as a war crime equivalent to those committed by the Nazis. Both his brothers were in the RAF and were called to the Air Ministry for a "wigging" about his attack on Bomber Command. What motivated his desire to prove the non-existence of the Holocaust? "I am totally uninterested in the Holocaust. I'm totally uninterested in the survival of the story of the Holocaust or the survival or cohesion of the Jewish people or the Israeli government, or the big corporations who depend on it. My great consuming interest at the moment is my six-year-old daughter." Does he regret composing the verse Prof Lipstadt's defence team uncovered in his diaries? I am a Baby Aryan Not Jewish or sectarian I have no plans to marry An Ape or Rastafarian He said he regretted using Rastafarian and should have used vegetarian. What would you say to those who say you are polluting your daughter's mind? "Right. Out you go!" With that he is gone. Bente makes a softly-spoken apology and the interview is over. Irving libel trial: The historian who strode into court with a reputation but left facing ruin Neil Tweedie 04/12/2000 The Daily Telegraph THERE was at least one ally waiting for David Irving as he emerged from the High Court in London yesterday with his personal and professional reputation in tatters. An elderly man wearing a sandwich board shouted to anyone who cared to listen that Mr Irving was a "bringer of truth". His was a lone voice. Few plaintiffs in a libel action have had their characters so comprehensively demolished as Mr Irving. He must rue the day that he decided to sue Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Mr Justice Gray branded him a racist and anti-Semite, an associate of Right-wing extremists who promoted neo-Nazism. He was a Holocaust denier, who had persistently manipulated and misrepresented the historical record for ideological purposes. He had rubbished the existence of the gas chambers and twisted events to portray Hitler in a favourable light. Mr Irving faces the loss of his home in Mayfair and the threat of enforced bankruptcy. He was warned yesterday that he would be liable for the bulk of the costs, estimated at pounds 2.3 million. His chances of securing a contract from a British publisher in the future must be remote. How did he so successfully sabotage his own career? The journey to Irving v Penguin and Lipstadt began with the publication in 1977 of his most famous work, Hitler's War. Mr Irving claimed that the Fuhrer had not been aware of the mass extermination of European Jewry until 1943. There was the inevitable outcry. Mr Irving refused to repent, simply offering a reward to anyone who could find a document directly linking Hitler to the Final Solution. At that stage his stock among historians was relatively high. His journeys into the archives of the Third Reich had shed new light on its workings. Mr Irving liked to see himself as a hands-on historian, a maverick taunting the historical establishment with unorthodox views based on primary sources. But over time his views and associations assumed an increasingly disturbing character. Mr Irving was feted by neo-Nazis in Austria and Germany, his revisionist writings and speeches earning him star status. He had become one of the main speakers for the Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), a far-Right party preaching racial hatred. By 1988, Mr Irving was a confirmed Holocaust denier. In the second edition of Hitler's War, published in 1991, all mention of the Holocaust was expunged. Auschwitz the death camp was now Auschwitz the slave labour camp. The gas chambers were a myth, the result of British, Soviet and Jewish disinformation. He told an audience in Canada: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die - as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war - why believe the rest of the baloney? "I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. "Oh, you think that's tasteless? How about this: there are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. Because I'm going to form an Association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars, or the A-S-S-H-O-L-S." The Jews who died in the war had perished in the same way as other groups oppressed by the Nazis, in mass shootings, or through overwork, starvation or disease. Auschwitz, the place which more than any symbolised the horror of the Holocaust, was not a death camp, it was a slave labour camp. Outwardly, Mr Irving portrayed himself as a liberal, who, like many of his class and age, lamented the passing of the old England. But his diaries showed him in a different light. In April 1990, he attended a revisionist conference in Munich as its star speaker. The previous evening he had been invited to a dinner organised by Ewald Althans, a leading neo-Nazi. Mr Irving wrote: "It ended with a Trinkspruch (toast) spoken by him to a certain statesman whose 101st birthday falls today. All rose, toasted; I had no glass, as I don't drink." The statesman in question was Adolf Hitler. In 1993 Mr Irving was expelled from Germany and banned from re-entering the country for the crime of denying the Holocaust. He would also be banned from Canada and Australia. His diaries also revealed a rhyme he had composed for his baby daughter, Jessica. It went: "I am a Baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / I have no plans to marry/ an Ape or Rastafarian." Mr Irving found it difficult to conceal his anti-Semitism. In an interview in November 1998, he said: "The question which would concern me, if I was a Jew, is not who pulled the trigger, but why? Why are we disliked? Is it something we are doing? I'm disliked. David Irving is disliked. I know that, because of the books I write. "You people are disliked on a global scale. You have been disliked for 3,000 years and yet you never seem to ask what is at the root of this dislike. "No sooner do you arrive as a people in a new country than within 50 years you are already being disliked all over again. Now, what is it? And I don't know the answer to this. Is it built into our microchip?" Mr Irving was asked for the answer. "I'm a racist," he said. "I would say they're a clever race. I would say that as a race they are better at making money than I am. That's a racist remark. "But they appear to be better at making money than I am. If I was going to be crude, I would say not only are they better at making money, but they are greedy." When Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, decided to write a book on Holocaust denial, Mr Irving was bound to feature as one of its chief practitioners. The book was called Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, published in Britain by Penguin in 1995. Prof Lipstadt accused Mr Irving of being one of the most dangerous Holocaust deniers. He had used his acknowledged expertise as a researcher of Nazi archives to produce false history, she said. A sympathiser of the neo-Nazi cause, he was seeking to rehabilitate fascism by exonerating Hitler from responsibility for the Final Solution, and disproving the existence of the gas chambers. Prof Lipstadt wrote: "Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda." It was bound to provoke a response from Mr Irving. Over the years he had seen his income, once pounds 100,000 a year, shrink as publishers shunned him. In 1996 his American publishers, St Martin's Press, abandoned publication of his work, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, saying it had been mistaken to take on a book that described Hitler as a reluctant anti-Semite. The book had taken Mr Irving nine years to write. In Britain, Mr Irving was being cold-shouldered by bookshops which were at the same time stocking Prof Lipstadt's book. He sued Prof Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books, for libel. The matter could have ended with an an apology and pounds 500 payment to a charity of Mr Irving's choice if Penguin had wished, but the company decided to fight the case as a matter of principle. Prof Lipstadt, Professor of Jewish History at Emory University, Atlanta, was a former adviser to the American Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. She was raised in a traditional Jewish home, the daughter of German and Polish emigres. During her career she had specialised in the Holocaust. She explained: "Normally I don't debate with these people (Holocaust deniers) on principle because I don't think they should be treated as `the other side'. But if I had not fought, he (Irving) would have won by default and people would have thought his version of the Holocaust to be a legitimate definition." For two months, the parties would argue over the minutiae of one of history's darkest crimes, watched by a capacity audience. Either through necessity or hubris, Mr Irving decided to dispense with counsel and represent himself. Tall, burly, with blue pin-stripe straining across his back, he cut a lone figure in the court on one side of the court. On the other was Prof Lipstadt, almost lost among the formidable array of legal firepower assembled for the defence. At its head was Richard Rampton, QC, urbane veteran of the "McLibel" case. Both sides had agreed to dispense with a jury, the issues being considered too complex, so the decision rested solely with Mr Justice Gray. Mr Irving accused Prof Lipstadt of being part of an "organised international endeavour" by Jewish and Left-wing groups to destroy his career over 30 years. Being described as a Holocaust-denier was equivalent to being branded a wife-beater or paedophile, he claimed. Mr Rampton responded: "Mr Irving calls himself a historian. The truth is, however, that he is a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar." Throughout the case, Mr Rampton was to throw Mr Irving's words back at him, whether written, or spoken to audiences of Right-wing extremists. First he would prove that Mr Irving had falsified the historical record, then he would lay bare his motives. During cross-examination, Mr Irving said he believed that the total of Jewish dead was between one and four million, not the six million generally accepted. Gassing had not been carried out on anything but an experimental scale. The Jews who died were shot, starved and worked to death in slave labour camps or fell victim to disease. Auschwitz could not have coped. A million bodies weighed 100,000 tons, making disposal a major logistical problem. Mr Irving's justification for ridding the second edition of Hitler's War of any mention of the Holocaust lay largely in the so-called Leuchter report. Its author, Fred Leuchter, an American with experience of execution chambers in his own country, concluded that the gas chambers of Auschwitz did not exist. In 1991, Mr Irving explained his reason for purging his book of the Holocaust. "You won't find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even in a footnote," he said. "Why should you? If something didn't happen, then you don't even dignify it with a footnote." But the defence showed that the Leuchter report was a deeply flawed document written by a man with no formal training in engineering or forensic science. Prof Robert Van Pelt, a Dutch architect who had made a study of Auschwitz, dismissed Leuchter's analysis. He said there was an overwhelming body of documentary and eye-witness evidence to show that a million Jews had been exterminated in Auschwitz. Giving evidence, Prof Van Pelt spoke of his visits to Auschwitz: "I was frightened. I don't believe in ghosts, I have never seen one at Auschwitz, but it is an awesome place, and an awesome responsibility as an historian. In a map of human suffering Auschwitz would be at the centre." Mr Irving had argued that even if there had been a Holocaust in the sense of a planned extermination of the Jews, then it was not inspired by Hitler. The defence commissioned a number of reports from leading academics to examine Mr Irving's methods as a historian. They found that he had deliberately misinterpreted documents. In one case he used an order that one trainload of Jews should not be liquidated to suggest that Hitler had forbidden the killing of all Jews. In another, he misquoted an order issued by Heydrich to police across Germany to suggest that Hitler had tried to stop the anti-Jewish pogrom of Reichskristallnacht in November 1938. Prof Richard Evans, of Cambridge University, who investigated Mr Irving's use of documents, said he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of duplicity" in his treatment of sources. He concluded: "Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a selective and tendentious account of it in order to further his own ideological ends in the present. "The true historian's primary concern, however, is with the past. That is why, in the end, Irving is not a historian." One day during the trial Mr Irving was approached outside court by a woman who said her grandparents had died at Auschwitz in gas ovens. He replied: "You may be pleased to know that they almost certainly died of typhus, as did Anne Frank." Irving libel trial: Key argument over gas chambers was based on discredited report Neil Tweddie 04/12/2000 The Daily Telegraph IT WAS Prof Lipstadt's claims about Irving's methods as a historian that formed the core of the defence case, writes Neil Tweedie. She claimed that he had falsified and manipulated the historical record for ideological purposes. Her lawyers advanced 19 instances in which Irving had distorted evidence to place Hitler in a more favourable light or to disprove the existence of the Holocaust. Irving, said Lipstadt and Penguin, was also guilty of distortion by omission. In the case of Auschwitz, he failed to mention doubts surrounding the evidence he used to disprove the existence of gas chambers. The bedrock of his claim that the gas chambers at Auschwitz did not exist and, by extension, that there were not any gas chambers at any camp, was the report by Fred Leuchter, a self-taught expert in execution techniques recruited in 1988 by lawyers acting for Ernst Zundel, a German national living in Canada who was being prosecuted for denying the Holocaust in his pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? Leuchter spent three days at Auschwitz-Birkenau and half a day at Majdanek, concluding that the buildings at Auschwitz described as gas chambers were no such thing. He said there was no provision for gas-tight doors, and the chambers were not properly sealed to prevent leakage. People depositing Zyklon B pellets into vents would themselves fall victim to cyanide poisoning. He said there were no vents to introduce the gas into the chambers or to clear it once the gassing was completed. Irving seized upon Leuchter's report as "shattering in the significance of its discovery". But it was comprehensively demolished by the defence witness Robert van Pelt, Professor of Architecture at Waterloo University in Canada. Van Pelt pointed out that Leuchter was neither a trained engineer nor forensic scientist. His evidence had been ruled inadmissible in the Zundel trial. Leuchter's claim that there were no gas-tight doors was worthless given the evidence of SS officers who testified to their use. There was also documentary evidence of orders for gasketed doors and ventilation equipment, and Leuchter ignored testimony showing that gas masks were worn by guards administering Zyklon B. In his judgment, Mr Justice Gray concluded: "No objective fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz." Racist historian faces pounds 2m bill for libel defeat: Judge brands David Irving a Holocaust denier who falsified the facts to exonerate Hitler Neil Tweedie 04/12/2000 The Daily Telegraph DAVID IRVING, the historian and author, was facing financial ruin last night after defeat in his libel action against an American academic who accused him of denying the existence of the Holocaust. A High Court judge branded him a racist, anti-Semite and associate of neo-Nazi extremists who falsified history in order to disprove the existence of the gas chambers and exonerate Hitler from involvement in the mass murder of Jews. Mr Irving, 62, the author of some 30 works, faces a legal bill of about pounds 2.3 million for the three-month trial. Mr Justice Gray, who decided the case without a jury, warned him that he would be held liable for most of the costs. The verdict was applauded by Jewish groups around the world. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre described it as "a victory of history over hate". Mr Irving had sued Prof Deborah Lipstadt, an American Jewish scholar, and her British publishers, Penguin Books, for remarks made in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. She accused him of being one of the most dangerous "Holocaust deniers", a "Hitler partisan" who falsified, misrepresented and distorted history. Mr Irving denied the allegations, claiming that they had resulted in his being subjected to a wave of hatred. He said he had never claimed that the Holocaust did not occur, but did question the number of Jewish dead and denied their systematic extermination in gas chambers. Delivering his judgment to a packed court, Mr Justice Gray said the defendants had largely justified their allegations. "The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges that Mr Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with Right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism." Prof Lipstadt and Penguin had failed to justify some allegations, he said, but set against the findings of the court, they did not have any material effect on Mr Irving's reputation. Mr Irving, who had represented himself against a formidable legal team headed by Richard Rampton, QC, was forced to remove his jacket after an egg was thrown at him as he entered court. Following the two-hour hearing he said: "I would describe the judgment in two words: firstly, indescribable and secondly, perverse." He attacked some of the judge's conclusions as "historically incredible" and poured scorn on the testimony of historians and other expert witnesses called by the defence. "Their experts were speaking a load of baloney, but mine spoke from the heart," he said. Mr Irving, whose work as a military historian was praised by the judge, said he would not be able to meet the costs. He plans to appeal. His flat in Mayfair, west London, is believed to be heavily mortgaged, and his opponents believe Mr Irving might move to America. He said: "Why is everyone talking about money? I'm not interested in money. It is all about reputation." Prof Lipstadt, 53, who did not testify, said: "I feel incredibly vindicated by the judge's ruling. "It was an incredible relief. It went further in talking about Irving than I did. It left no doubt that this man distorts, manipulates, perverts the historical record, and it left his reputation as a man who has anything to say about the Holocaust completely in tatters. "The racist statements he has made and the way he tried to justify them in court was horrible. It was evil." Anthony Forbes Watson of Penguin said they had never been tempted to settle out of court. "There are certain interests that supersede commercial interests," he said. Op-Ed Disinfecting the Holocaust Eliahu Salpeter 04/12/2000 Ha'aretz Although British historian David Irving has lost the libel suit he brought against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for accusing him of denying the Holocaust and distorting history, the trial - despite its focusing on whether or not Irving is a "Holocaust denier" - is part of the processes that are promoting the gradual erasure of the memory of the six million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis and their collaborators. The very fact that the trial concerned itself with details - such as whether "only" three million Jews perished (as Irving claims), whether there were in fact gas chambers and whether Hitler issued instructions for the implementation of the Final Solution - actually paves the way for the obliteration and denial of the Holocaust. The road that ultimately leads to open denial of the Holocaust is not paved just by malicious intentions. It begins in many places, the number of which has recently increased. It is not only the Nazis and the anti-Semites who are sinning against the truth. Even individuals with good intentions sometimes present the Holocaust from angles that diminish its horrifying nature. People find it difficult to repeatedly view the atrocities in a direct manner and, apparently, film directors have come to understand this point. For example, the process can even begin with the diary of Anne Frank (whose credibility is again being questioned by circles close to Holocaust deniers). It is possible today to learn about what is contained in the diary not only by reading the text itself or by visiting the place where Anne wrote her entries. As of late 1999, there is now an animated film that has turned the diary into a sort of fairy tale. Thus Anne's life becomes a story about the fate of a charming young girl, a story that, despite its being anchored in historical facts, is based on a sentimentalization of the diary. The next stage in the distancing from concrete truth is the selection of topics that, thanks to the success of the selection, become symbols. A classic example is "Schindler's List." As we have begun to learn , Oskar Schindler was not the only German to risk life and limb to save Jews. However, individuals who displayed such heroism are a minority, and those who consider Spielberg's film to be an accurate portrayal of reality are falling victim to a loss of proportion. The same can be said for another aspect of Holocaust documentation. The books and films about the valor and courage of the ghetto fighters and partisans - including the warriors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising - describe the exception to the rule. Death in the course of armed struggle is perceived as more dignified than the death of the helpless. Millions of Jews were unable to defend themselves. The "selections" left no room for either heroism or dignity, but they were an integral part of the terrible truth of the Holocaust. A path in the opposite direction, but which inevitably leads to the same kind of distortion of the truth, is being paved by the so-called tragicomic films that have become the latest rage. There is a bizarre humor in such cinematic works as the "Train of Life" and "Jakob the Liar" - both of which were screened in Israel in 1999. A striking symbol of the new genre is "Life is Beautiful," a movie that landed its star, Roberto Benigni, an Oscar. No learned discussion of the need for effective ways of teaching the Holocaust today, no reports of thousands of moviegoers emerging from a screening with tears in their eyes can make up for the distortion of both specific and general truths: In Auschwitz, little children could not be told lies about their fate because little children were sent straight to the gas chambers. All attempts at establishing a link between concepts such as "Auschwitz" and "Life is Beautiful" - no matter how sophisticated the attempt -cross the permissible border of vulgarity. A taboo is violated and another opening is found for making the denial of the Holocaust that much easier. We should, however, not question the intentions of the institutions and government organizations that have reconstructed German concentration camps in order to enable millions of visitors to see with their own eyes how hell was created by human hands in the 20th century. The agencies responsible for the reconstruction work certainly had no intention of prettifying or glossing over the truth. However, those who remember Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald and who visit these reconstructed sites realize that the connection between the reconstruction and the reality is very distant. The reason is not simply that the structures have been cleaned up, renovated and repainted and that they no longer contain the odor of sweat and urine or the screams of the SS personnel and the kapos and the constant shadow of death. The atmosphere has become disinfected - a showroom window has been created to protect the viewers who are now standing on the other side, and the impression given is that the experiences of the inmates were horrible, but somehow bearable. This kind of impression makes it easier to forget the Holocaust, just as the missing pipes that once linked the chimney (which has been reconstructed) to the crematoriums (which have been renovated) enable the Holocaust deniers to claim that all these items are stage props. From this standpoint, the museums, such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the Holocaust Museum in Washington, declare in advance that they can offer only a secondhand experience, that they can only present facts that might be able to convince a sane individual, although they might have no impact on dyed-in-the-wool Holocaust deniers. An effective war on Holocaust denial must be conducted at two levels: The historical facts must be given in school and must appear in history textbooks, but there must also be legislation banning Holocaust denial. Anne Frank's diary, "Schindler's List" and the memoirs of Holocaust survivors are important for reinforcing what has been taught and for creating the sense of an emotionally experienced truth; however, they are not sufficiently powerful to convince those who refuse to believe all this happened. Those who attempt to present the Holocaust as a background to some tale of smart-aleck Jews, or to a comedy, a romance or a heroic epic - and there were humorous, romantic and heroic tales that unfolded even during the Holocaust - are running the risk of blurring the borderline between the terrible truth of the Holocaust and the world of fantas. nternational News Irving loses libel case in Holocaust denial suit British judge throws out historian's complaint against U.S. professor, branding the controversial British author a racist and an anti-Semite ALAN FREEMAN The Globe and Mail, Reuter News Agency 04/12/2000 The Globe and Mail London -- Historian David Irving emerged unrepentant yesterday after losing a landmark libel case, launching into a denial that the gas chambers at Auschwitz had existed and suggesting that Jews were responsible for their own fate at the hands of the Nazis. A British judge threw out his libel case against a U.S. academic, and branded the controversial British historian a racist, an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier who twists the facts to suit his ideological aims. "I can't be intimidated," said Mr. Irving, who plans to appeal the ruling even though he now faces a legal bill of close to $4.5-million. "Even if they take everything away, they will not destroy me. I can't be bought." In a television interview, Mr. Irving accused "self-appointed leaders of the Jewish community" in Britain and abroad of trying to destroy his life. He also repeated his comment, made during a speaking tour of Canada in 1991, that more women had died in the back seat of Ted Kennedy's car at Chappaquidick than had died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He also wouldn't back away from the statements that led the judge to determine that Mr. Irving was anti-Semitic. Asked whether he still believed that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves, Mr. Irving responded: "If I were a Jew, I would want to know not who pulled the trigger when I'm lying at the bottom of a pit in Russia or Riga or Minsk . . . I would want to know why. What is it that has generated the anti-Semitism and the xenophobia and the hatred around the world that makes us Jews again and again the victims of pogroms?" As for his comments that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has a "hideous, leering, evil face," Mr. Irving burst out laughing and responded: "It's true, have you ever seen him? But this isn't anti-Semitism, this is anti-uglyism." Deborah Lipstadt, who teaches at Emery University in Atlanta, was sued by Mr. Irving for defamation over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Ms. Lipstadt was ecstatic after the victory, which was delivered yesterday to a packed courtroom weeks after the prolonged trial ended. "I feel exceptionally vindicated in what has been five years of excruciating effort on my part," Ms. Lipstadt said. "I see this not only as a personal victory but also as a victory for all those who speak out against hate and violence." In his 330-page ruling, Judge Charles Gray said the 62-year-old Mr. Irving "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented historical evidence," that he portrayed [former Nazi leader Adolf] Hitler in an unwarrantedly sympathetic light and that he is "an active Holocaust denier." "He is anti-Semitic and racist and he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism." Mr. Irving, who handled his own defence, was pelted with eggs by demonstrators as he entered the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday for the judgment. Mr. Irving is a self-taught historian whose best-known book is a biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; the judge even commended him for the quality of his works on military history. But Mr. Irving also has long argued that Hitler knew nothing about the so-called Final Solution for Europe's Jews, and that Jews were killed by firing squads on the eastern front but not in gas chambers in death camps. Weighing the evidence from a series of eminent historians who testified during the trial, the judge said "no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kills hundreds of thousands of Jews." Mr. Irving may face personal bankruptcy after the judge ordered him to pay the legal costs of Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin Books, joint defendants in the case. Penguin, a subsidiary of Pearson PLC, said in a press release that it plans to make efforts to recover as much of its costs as possible but "will certainly be left significantly out of pocket." The publisher added that it believed from the start that it had a duty to stand behind Ms. Lipstadt and its right to publish. Ms. Lipstadt said she didn't believe Britain or other countries should take Germany's lead and make Holocaust denial a crime. "I don't think those laws really work. They tend to make martyrs of the deniers." Ms. Lipstadt emphasized that she and Penguin hadn't taken out the lawsuit, that Mr. Irving had sued them. "This was not an attempt to silence someone else. This was an attempt to silence me." She added that it was important to fight this case for the sake of Hitler's victims, and that it was particularly important to establish the truth of what happened when there are still survivors alive. "There is a finite amount of time for them to be there and tell their stories in the first person. It will soon be easier to deny it." Meanwhile, Mr. Irving defended himself from the judge's comments by commenting that he couldn't possibly be a racist. In the 32 years he has lived in his apartment on London's swank Grosvenor Square, he said, he has employed "probably a dozen girls working as my personal assistants who come from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Jamaica, Barbados, et cetera, et cetera." But in his ruling, Judge Gray cited a ditty that Mr. Irving had composed for his youngest daughter as evidence of his racism: "I am a baby Aryan . . . I have no plans to marry an ape or a Rastafarian." On his personal Web site yesterday, Mr. Irving continued the kind of vitriolic attacks that have long made him a favourite on the far-right speaking circuit and have resulted in his being barred from entering several countries, including Canada. In a comment on the judgment, Mr. Irving accused Seagram Co., the Canadian distilling and entertainment giant, and its chairman, Edgar Bronfman, of helping to finance the defence in the libel case, and attacked the company generally. Contacted in New York, a Seagram Co. spokeswoman could not say whether the company had provided any assistance to the defence team. In addition to his post at Seagram, Mr. Bronfman is president of the World Jewish Congress. THE JUDGE'S WORDS Here are key quotes from Judge Charles Gray, ruling in Britain's High Court against a libel action brought by controversial historian David Irving. "[Irving] is an active Holocaust denier . . . anti-Semitic and racist." "The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his extracurricular activities revealed him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist." "It appears to me to be incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier. Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions and sometimes in the most offensive terms." "He is content to mix with neo-Fascists and appears to share many of their racist and anti-Semitic prejudices. "He has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude toward and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews." "The charges which I have found substantially true include the charges that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence." Reuters News And Features; International News Irving Loses Libel Battle By Simon Mann Herald Correspondent 04/12/2000 Sydney Morning Herald The revisionist historian David Irving has lost his long-running legal battle to defend his controversial views on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. Britain's High Court ruled last night that a US academic had not libelled Irving when she described him as a ``Holocaust denier'' in a book published five years ago. Justice Gray said Irving's reputation had not been damaged by the claims. The decision was immediately welcomed by Jewish groups, who have campaigned against increasing assertions by revisionists that there was no systematic slaughter of Jews by the Nazis in World War II. Irving, 62, had told the court he had never claimed that the Holocaust did not occur, but he did question the number of Jews killed and denied their systematic extermination in concentration camp gas chambers. He had sued Professor Deborah Lipstadt and publisher Penguin over her 1995 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The work, he said, had destroyed his livelihood and generated waves of hatred against him. The publishers and Professor Lipstadt, 53, holder of the Dorot chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, had denied Irving's charge and pleaded justification. Lawyers for the defendants told the court that Irving ``distorts, mis-states, misquotes and falsifies'' historical records to justify his anti-Semitic views. Mr Richard Rampton, QC, said Irving was ``a right-wing extremist, a racist and in particular a rabid anti-Semite'' who had forfeited his reputation in pursuit of his obsessive desire to exonerate Hitler. During the month-long trial Irving, who represented himself, said he did not believe Hitler knew about the extermination of Jews until 1943. He also said the existence of specially marked genocidal gas chambers at Auschwitz was fictitious and that trains said to be a part of the killing program were used to take Jews to a new life in Eastern Europe. ``I know of no other historian or writer who has been subjected to a campaign of vilification even one-tenth as intense,'' he said. But he denied he was a racist. ``My views are independent and sometimes unorthodox, but never anti-democratic. I am not anti-Semitic.'' Irving did not offer an immediate reaction to the verdict and faces a huge legal bill as a result of his loss. Before the verdict he said even if he did lose, the case would enhance his reputation as someone brave enough to stand up to the establishment: ``I've been able to take them on single-handed and give them a good run for their money.'' Courtroom observers who listened to the verdict included prominent British Jews and the Israeli ambassador. Mr Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: ``The decision proves that David Irving is a falsifier of history and a Nazi sympathiser whose aim has been to sanitise Nazism and to absolve Hitler of the guilt of the Holocaust.'' *Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, 79, a Swiss revisionist who published articles denying the Holocaust happened and questioning the existence of Nazi gas chambers and that six million Jews died in World War II, was jailed in Lausanne on Monday for one year under Swiss anti-racist laws, Agence France-Presse reported. U.S. WRITER WINS BATTLE WITH HOLOCAUST DENIER Ray Moseley, Tribune Foreign Correspondent 04/12/2000 Chicago Tribune In the first major court case focusing on the historical truth of the Holocaust, British historian David Irving lost his libel battle Tuesday with an American academic who had branded him a partisan of Adolf Hitler and a Holocaust denier. International Jewish groups applauded the unsparing British court verdict against Irving, the most prominent among revisionists around the world who have challenged and derided the accepted view of one of history's most heinous crimes. In a 333-page judgment, Justice Charles Gray ruled that Irving, 62, was an anti-Semite and a racist who had deliberately distorted historical evidence to deny the Holocaust and to try to exonerate Hitler from responsibility for the mass murder of Jews. The verdict shredded Irving's reputation and exposed him to possible financial and professional ruin. Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Atlanta, the defendant in the case, hailed the ruling as "not only a personal victory but a victory for all those who speak out against hate and prejudice." She said the case had "eaten up five years of my life." The ruling also was a victory for Penguin Books, her British publisher. Pelted by eggs as he entered the court building Tuesday, Irving slipped out a side entrance afterward. Reached later by telephone at his home, he said he had two words to describe the ruling: "The first is unprintable, and the second is `perverse,'" he said. "The judgment is so laden with historical inaccuracies that the grounds for an appeal in the public interest are very evident," he said. "The first 200 pages are pure sunshine, but then suddenly it clouds over. The judge picks up the bucket of slime prepared by the defense counsel and tips it over me." Gray indicated he will assess Irving for most of the defendants' $3.1 million in costs. Asked whether that would bankrupt him, Irving laughed and said, "Why is everybody so interested in money?" He did not elaborate except to indicate he will challenge being asked to reimburse the high fees paid to some defense expert witnesses. He said he had no regrets about having brought the suit. Gray rejected Irving's request for approval to appeal the ruling but said it would be up to the Court of Appeal to decide whether the public interest is sufficient to justify its hearing the case. At an earlier stage, Irving had said he would not appeal because he was forced to act as his own attorney and lacked the legal expertise for appeal proceedings. The judge's ruling came almost a month after the end of an eight- week trial that was seen by many as a definitive showdown between those who deny the Holocaust happened and those who defend historical truth. However, Gray said it was not his function to find what actually happened during the Nazi regime but rather to judge Irving's treatment of available evidence. Lipstadt also said she did not believe the truth of the Holocaust was involved, as she considered that to be proved. "This is about a man who is a liar," she said. "This was about a man who purports to be a historian making it up, perverting truth." She expressed confidence that no reputable institution in the U.S. would now give Irving a "platform to spread his perverted and distorted views." In the past he has spoken to a number of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in the U.S. At a news conference after the ruling, Lipstadt fought back tears when she described the most moving moment of the proceedings for her. "It happened many times, when I walked out of court and was enveloped by survivors who said, `Thank you.' It was overwhelming to me to be thanked by them." She said she expected the ruling would have no effect on neo- Nazis and other Holocaust deniers. "There is no end to the battle against Holocaust deniers," she said. In her 1995 book "Denying the Holocaust," Lipstadt accused Irving of being a Hitler partisan and a Holocaust denier. That was the basis of his libel suit against her and Penguin Books. Irving has acknowledged hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed by the Nazis but denied that 6 million had been slain. He also has denied there were gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp. In his book, "Hitler's War," he asserted that the Nazi dictator had not known about the killing of Jews until 1943 and had not approved of it. Gray's rulings on nearly all the points in question was unsparing of Irving's long-tarnished reputation. Gray commented on 19 allegations raised by the defendants and sustained most of them, describing Irving's views with such terms as "perverted," "wholly untenable" and having "a distinct air of unreality about them." "I have come to the conclusion that the criticisms advanced by the defendants are almost invariably well-founded," he said. "Irving has significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively examined, reveals." In court, Gray read a 66-page summary of his findings, taking almost two hours to do so. Irving, stripped of his suit jacket because of the eggs that pelted it, sat stony-faced throughout. On two fundamental points, Gray offered these opinions: "No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews." "It appears to me to be incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier. Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers ... he has done so on frequent occasions and sometimes in the most offensive terms." Gray then dealt with the allegations of anti-Semitism and racism. "Irving is anti-Semitic," he said. "His words are directed against Jews, either individually or collectively, [and] are by turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory in their references to Semitic people, their characteristics and appearances." He agreed with Irving that Jews are not immune from criticism but said Irving had repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and "prejudiced vilification of the Jewish race and people." He said Irving's racism was proved by his negative comments in a speech about a black television news broadcaster and his proclaimed queasiness on seeing blacks playing cricket for England. Gray also found that Irving had associated with extreme right-wing, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in Germany and the U.S. He ruled that Irving's misrepresentations of historical evidence were not accidental but deliberate, as shown by the fact that he often gave credence to unreliable evidence and ignored credible evidence and that none of his misrepresentations cast Hitler in an unfavorable light. "The evidence has been deliberately slanted by Irving," he said. Gray ruled that Lipstadt had defamed Irving in claiming that he planned to speak at a conference attended by terrorists, that he keeps a portrait of Hitler over his desk and that he broke an agreement with Russian authorities concerning some archive material. But he said these defamations did not have a material effect on Irving's reputation when weighed against the charges that were proved. Penguin Books Chief Executive Anthony Forbes Watson said after the ruling that Penguin expects to be left "significantly out of pocket" because of Irving's inability to pay the full costs. He said Penguin would seek to recover as much money as possible. "Sometimes principles override cost considerations," he said. "I hope the fact we won will encourage other publishers to stand up and not be intimidated." Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the decision shows Irving was "a falsifier of history and a Nazi sympathizer." The Simon Wiesenthal Center hailed it as a "victory of history over hate." Critic of a Holocaust Denier Is Cleared in British Libel Suit By SARAH LYALL 04/12/2000 The New York Times LONDON, April 11 -- He sought to present himself as a legitimate historian with contrarian views on the Holocaust. But the British writer David Irving lost a libel case today when a judge declared that he was in fact an ''active Holocaust denier.'' The case has been closely watched by people alarmed at the rising tide of Hitler apologists and neo-Nazis who say there was no Nazi program to put the Jews of Europe to death, or who argue that the scale of the Holocaust has been greatly overstated. At issue were a number of assertions in ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,'' a book first published in 1993 in the United States by Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta. In the book, Ms. Lipstadt wrote that Mr. Irving, now 62, was ''one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial'' and said that ''he is at his most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to conform to his conclusions.'' Holocaust denial is not a crime in Britain, as it is in Germany. But Mr. Irving, the author of more than 30 books on World War II and the Holocaust, some of which historians have praised, sued Ms. Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, saying that the book had severely damaged his reputation as a historian. He brought the suit here because British libel law puts the burden on the defendants -- in this case, Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin -- to prove the truth of their assertions. The judge, Charles Gray of the British high court, handed a resounding victory to Ms. Lipstadt. In a scathing ruling notable for its stern wording, he declared that Mr. Irving was a racist Holocaust denier who deliberately distorted historical evidence in order to cast Hitler in a favorable light. Mr. Irving's treatment of history, he said, was often ''perverse and egregious.'' Under British law, Mr. Irving, who represented himself at the trial, is responsible for paying the costs incurred by Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin. Lawyers for Ms. Lipstadt said the costs were likely to exceed $3 million. Mr. Irving said he would seek permission to appeal. Commenting on the rulingduring a trip to Washington, Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel said: ''The strength of Israel today ensures that today no second Holocaust will take place, and no one in the world will dare rise against the Jewish nation. But in parallel, a determined struggle is going on against the people who deny the Holocaust that brought the death of a third of our nation.'' In the early years of his career, Mr. Irving wrote a number of admired books, notably ''Hitler's War'' (1977), and Justice Gray today praised his dogged use of primary sources and said that ''as a military historian, Mr. Irving has much to commend him.'' But in recent years, Mr. Irving's views have become more and more extreme and he has been linked with right-wing groups and neo-Nazis. In 1992 he was fined and banned from Germany after he was convicted under the German law that makes Holocaust denial a crime. He has also been refused entry to Canada, Italy, Austria and Australia. Among other things, Mr. Irving has said that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were not used to kill people -- Jews who died there suffered from typhus and other diseases, he argues -- and that Hitler neither ordered nor approved the Nazis' plans to systematically put Europe's Jews to death. In fact, he has argued, Hitler did not know about the mass killings until at least 1943. And while Mr. Irving has acknowledged that many Jews died during World War II, he has also said it was logistically impossible for the number to have been in the millions. In 1996 St. Martin's Press withdrew his biography of the Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, which contends that Goebbels, not Hitler, was behind the murder of the Jews. In the trial, Mr. Irving used the withdrawal as evidence that Ms. Lipstadt's book had fanned the flames of an ''organized international endeavor'' to destroy his career. To prove the merit of Ms. Lipstadt's statements about Mr. Irving, her lawyers presented testimony from a number of Holocaust historians who picked apart many of Mr. Irving's conclusions, showing them to be based on deliberate distortions and selective use of facts. In his denunciation of Mr. Irving's credibility, Justice Gray said, in essence, that Mr. Irving had no case. The judge refuted his argument that any misrepresentations he might have made were inadvertent. ''Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence,'' the judge said. ''For the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, particularly in relation to his attitude toward and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews.'' Mr. Irving, he concluded, is ''an active Holocaust denier'' and anti-Semite who ''associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.'' After the ruling, a jubilant Ms. Lipstadt, 53, said Mr. Irving had been ''hoist on his own petard,'' with his own evidence, and exposed as a liar. ''This was not about versions of the truth,'' she said. ''This wasn't about a historian with a controversial view of history. This was about a man who claims to be a historian making up, distorting, perverting, manipulating.'' Mr. Irving, who was splattered with a raw egg by a protester as he went to court this morning, so that he sat through the judge's ruling in his shirtsleeves and vest, slipped out a back door after the decision and did not speak to reporters. But he told the Press Association in an interview in his apartment in Mayfair that he found the ruling ''perverse'' and ''historically incredible.'' He accused Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin of enlisting the help of ''the leaders of the Jewish communities around the world'' in an orchestrated effort to discredit him. ''Their method was to pour a bucket of slime over me and say, 'Look, he's covered in slime,' '' he said. ''I am not at all anti-Semitic,'' he added. ''It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of the Jews.'' Anthony Julius, a lawyer for Ms. Lipstadt, said the case was not about whether the Holocaust took place, but whether there was any evidence to support Mr. Irving's views. ''We put the focus on his writing and proved that it wasn't up to standard,'' he said. ''It's important to secure definitive rulings against Holocaust deniers, to send them back into the anti-Semitic ghetto from which they came.'' In a statement, Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the dean and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, called the ruling a ''victory of history over hate'' and said it put an end to Mr. Irving's career. ''Today's decision definitively places Irving where he belongs -- not as an historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history,'' the rabbis said. ''Irving tried to manipulate the British legal system in order to put the victims murdered in the gas chambers on trial; instead, the net result is that he will be relegated to the garbage heap of history's haters.'' 'He is a Holocaust denier. He misstated evidence': The judgment Judge condemns deliberate falsification of historical record DAVID PALLISTER 04/12/2000 The Guardian In an emphatic and damning 334-page judgment Mr Justice Gray branded David Irving a racist anti-semite who for 'his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence'. He said Irving was 'an active Holocaust denier' who associated with neo-Nazi extremists. The 62-year-old historian's ideological views led him to portray Hitler 'in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews'. He ruled that the defence of justification by the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, had succeeded. The judge said the central issue was Irving's treatment of the available evidence: 'It is no part of my function to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime. The distinction may be a fine one but it is important to bear it in mind.' Offering a grain of comfort to Irving, he said: 'My assessment is that, as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military history Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the archives. 'He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years. 'It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating crossexamination that his knowledge of world war two is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent. 'But the questions to which this action has given rise do not relate to the quality of Irving's military history but rather to the manner in which he has written about the attitude adopted by Hitler towards the Jews and in particular his responsibility for the fate which befell them under the Nazi regime.' Overall, he said, Irving had 'treated the historical evidence in a manner which fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian'. The judge said the respondents had selected 19 instances where they contended Irving had in one way or another distorted the evidence. He noted that many of the documents he had to analyse were chosen by Irving himself who claimed they demonstrated Hitler was a friend of the Jews. 'I have come to the conclusion that the criticisms advanced by the defendants are almost invariably well-founded.' On the central question of Hitler's attitude to the Jews, the judge concluded that Irving's submissions had 'a distinct air of unreality about them'. 'In the result the picture which he provides to readers of Hitler and his attitude towards the Jews is at odds with the evidence. It is common ground between the parties that until the latter part of 1941, the solution to the Jewish question which Hitler preferred was their mass deportation.' The respondents, however, claimed that from the end of 1941 onwards 'the policy of which Hitler knew and approved was the extermination of Jews in huge numbers. Irving on the other hand argued that Hitler continued to be the Jews' friend at least until October 1943'. 'The unreality of Irving's stance, as I see it, derives from his persistence in that claim, despite his acceptance in the course of this trial that the evidence shows that Hitler knew about and approved of the wholesale shooting of Jews in the east and, later, was complicit in the gassing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Reinhard and other death camps.' He said Irving had accepted he was wrong in telling audiences in Australia, Canada and the US that the shooting of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen death squads was done without Hitler's approval. Hitler was incontrovertibly, rabidly anti-semitic, the judge said, and spoke in sinister and menacing tones about Jews. He rejected Irving's claim that Hitler had stopped being anti-semitic after 1933. On the issue of Auschwitz the judge said the central question of the case was whether the evidence supported the respondents' contention that the number of deaths ran into hundreds of thousands or whether Irving was right when he claimed the killing by gas was on a modest scale. He said the cumulative effect of the documentary evidence for the genocidal operation of gas chambers at Auschwitz was 'considerable'. 'No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews.' Mr Justice Gray said it appeared to him to be 'incontrovertible' that Irving was a Holocaust denier. 'Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions and sometimes in the most offensive terms. 'By way of examples, I cite his story of the Jew climbing into a mobile telephone box-cum-gas chamber; his claim that more people died in the back of Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz; his dismissal of the eyewitnesses en masse as liars or as suffering from a mental problem; and his reference to an Association of Auschwitz Survivors and Other Liars or 'ASSHOLS'.' He rejected as untrue the claim made by Irving in his evidence that in his denial of the existence of any gas chambers at Auschwitz, he was referring solely to the gas chamber constructed by the Poles after the war for the benefit of visitors to the site or, as Irving put it, as a 'tourist attraction'. Irving had also made broader claims which 'tend to minimise the Holocaust', said the judge. He had minimised the number of those killed by means other than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere. On anti-semitism, the judge said it appeared to him undeniable that most, if not all, of the statements made by Irving and cited by the respondents as demonstrating his anti-semitism, revealed 'clear evidence that, in the absence of any excuse or suitable explanation for what he said or wrote, Irving is anti-semitic'. He added: 'His words are directed against Jews, either individually or collectively, in the sense that they are by turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory in their references to semitic people, their characteristics and appearances.' Examples included Irving's claims that Jews deserved to be disliked; that they had brought the Holocaust on themselves; that Jews generated anti-semitism by their greed and mendacity; that Jews were among the scum of humanity and that they scurried and hid furtively, unable to stand the light of day. Irving's principal explanation or justification for his comments about Jews was that he was seeking to explain to Jews why anti-semitism existed, said the judge. 'But I do not think that this was the message that Irving was seeking to convey to his audiences and it was certainly not the sense in which his remarks were understood. It appears to me that Irving has repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and prejudiced vilification of the Jewish race and people.' There was also ample evidence of Irving's racism. Mr Justice Gray cited the ditty composed by Irving for his daughter: 'I am a Baby Aryan Not Jewish or Sectarian I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian.' As a historian, the judge said: 'Irving appears to take every opportunity to exculpate Hitler.' Yet on numerous occasions, 'Irving has misstated historical evidence; adopted positions which run counter to the weight of the evidence; given credence to unreliable evidence and disregarded or dismissed credible evidence.' The question is, whether his misrepresentations were deliberate. 'Over the past 15 years or so, Irving appears to have become more politically active than was previously the case. He speaks regularly at political or quasi-political meetings in Germany, the United States, Canada and the new world. The content of his speeches and interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias. 'He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they inflicted on the Jews. He is content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to share many of their racist and anti-semitic prejudices.' Mr Justice Gray roundly concluded: 'The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his extracurricular activities reveals him to be a rightwing pro-Nazi polemicist. In my view the defendants have established that Irving has a political agenda. It is one which, it is legitimate to infer, disposes him, where he deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in order to make it conform with his political beliefs. 'It appears to me that the correct and inevitable inference must be that for the most part the falsification of the historical record was deliberate and that Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence.' Author with no publisher and few funds landed with pounds 2.5m bill: The backers Supporters in US but 'not neo-Nazis' are main donors FIACHRA GIBBONS 04/12/2000 The Guardian David Irving admitted his finances were on a knife edge even as he began his ruinous libel action. 'They are out to ruin me,' he told the Guardian yesterday. 'They want to take my work from me, my reputation and my home.' Ranged against him, in what he liked to paint as a 'David and Goliath struggle', were Penguin and the American academic Deborah Lipstadt, who he claimed were bankrolled by the 'traditional enemies of truth'. In fact, the brunt of the pounds 2.5m cost of assembling the Lipstadt team was met by the publishers, though the Bronfman family, leading figures in the World Jewish Congress and owners of the distillers Seagrams, are believed to have made sizeable contributions. Included in the pounds 2.5m that Irving will now have to pay comes the pounds 343,000 costs of Richard Rampton QC, the barrister who gave him such a roasting in court. Irving, however, looks to be in no position to pay that sort of money. He may live in a large Mayfair apartment but as the Guardian today reveals he has mortgaged it to the hilt. Without a publisher for almost 10 years, he has had to rely on his own precarious imprint Focal Point. As well as writing and printing his own books, Irving drives the van to deliver them to those bookshops still prepared to sell them. He also has two young daughters and his Danish wife, Bente, to support. Set against this, Irving's only real earnings of late have been in the courts. He was paid an estimated pounds 75,000 by the Sunday Times in 1994 in an out-of-court settlement after they tried to disassociate themselves from him in the furore that followed his translation of the Goebbels diaries. Irving already has a bankruptcy writ against him in the US to recover unpaid costs from a libel case he brought against the Jewish Board of Deputies six years ago.The only real asset he appeared to have left is a holiday apartment in the fashionable Florida island of Key West, where he retreated to compose himself in the weeks before the verdict. But this, in fact, is held in the name of a Sam Dixon, an Atlanta lawyer who has acted for the Ku Klux Klan. Having at first refused to give details of the '4,000 people around the world who have contributed to my cause' for fear of leaving them liable for his costs, Irving has now revealed his big backers were American. One US donor, he said, handed him Dollars 50,000 in cash in a brown paper bag at Amsterdam airport two years ago, and within the past month a banker's draft for pounds 10,000 was sent to him from New York. (As if to prove how deep his well of support in the States is, even as he lost in the high court, Irving was still organising a two-day 'real history' conference in Cincinnati in September.) Despite the fact that extremist websites carry links to his appeals for cash, Irving denies any of his funds come from neo-Nazis. The New York-based Anti-Defamation League said they would be 'shocked' if he was not getting money from supporters of the far-right National Alliance, National Association For the Advancement Of White People and the denialist Committee For Open Debate On The Holocaust. Jewish organisations also suspect several of Irving's most consistent backers are German. Although he is banned from the country, he holds a bank account there and has been championed by the hard right German People's Union (DVU). A party spokesman in Munich refused to say yesterday whether it had funded him but described Irving 'as a good man and a seeker of the truth'. Last night Irving said: 'When I have got money from Germany it comes in occasional 500 Deutschmark notes from a rather sweet old lady.' History's verdict on Holocaust upheld: The evidence Historians claim victory after rigorous courtroom test STEPHEN MOSS 04/12/2000 The Guardian It was, said the Simon Wiesenthal centre yesterday, 'a victory for history over hate.' It was also a victory for the historians who had left their seminar rooms and lined up with the defendant, Deborah Lipstadt, in court to attempt to destroy David Irving's reputation as a historian. Mr Justice Gray, in his devastating judgment, said the issue had been Irving's treatment of the available evidence. 'It is no part of my function to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime,' he said. 'The distinction may be a fine one but it is important to bear it in mind.' 'This wasn't a trial about what happened in the second world war, it was a trial about Irving's methodology,' said Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge university, who gave evidence on behalf of Ms Lipstadt. 'A serious historian has to take account of all the evidence. Irving does not do this; he fabricates.' Mr Evans, who spent six days in the witness box, said the experience had left him with a high opinion of the legal process. 'We had limitless time in court. The trial lasted for three months and there was a chance to thrash everything out. The historians acquitted themselves well under the most offensive cross-examination from Irving. It is important for historians to say we can be objective.' David Cesarani, professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton university, said Mr Evans's report had destroyed Irving's reputation as a historian: 'The defence showed that Irving massaged documents and that was crucial. 'Irving disputes the definition of the term Holocaust. He uses it to refer to all the civilians who were killed in the war, including Jews. He denies Hitler engineered the slaughter and that it was systematic; his view defies reason. 'Holocaust denial is not just about the past; it's about now and it's about the future. It's about rehabilitating Nazism. It might appear academic for us, but in parts of Europe it's a vital issue.' David Cesarani said it was important for historians to take part in public debates, but had doubts about translating historical argument to a court of law. 'Evidence in history is not like evidence in court,' he said. 'Much of the discussion in the case hinged on the word Vernichtung - annihilation: but does it mean physical annihilation or removal? 'In a court of law, context and circumstance are the least important evidence; they may be deemed inadmissible, not real evidence. The court wants physical evidence, a fingerprint that no one can argue with, but in history context and circumstance matter a great deal.' The 'fingerprint' in this case was Irving's massaging of the sources; only by concentrating on his methodology could the case be contained. He was exposed as, in the words of Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 'a falsifier of history'. The corollary is that his revisionist history of the Third Reich also collapses. Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners, said it was ridiculous that Irving's views had ever been taken seriously. 'The Holocaust is an established historical fact,' he said. 'That the de niers and their fellow travellers have gotten a discussion going at all is absurd; denying the Holocaust is like denying that there was slavery in the US or that the second world war happened at all.' Mr Goldhagen is sceptical of the interplay between history and the legal process: 'The ruling of a court has no bearing on historical fact: the court is a place where legal issues are adjudicated according to the particular legal standards of a given country, not where historical issues are decided according to the different and well-established standards of historical scholarship.' But as Steve Paulsson, senior historian for the Imperial War Museum's forthcoming Holocaust exhibition, argues, the Holocaust was not on trial: 'The Holocaust was a reality. Holocaust deniers focus on the trees rather than the forest. It is a fact, based on demographic evidence, that 5m-6m Jews died. 'The Holocaust has its uses and abuses. It has been used politically by various people. People in different countries read their own national agenda into it. But as a historical fact it is as well established as the second world war itself.' 'Welcome to the world of real history,' says the home page of Irving's website. 'A thorough revision of Hitler's War [Irving's best-known book, first published in 1977] will be released later this month. I have found it necessary to correct only one factual error in the light of this trial; and I have introduced the SS police decodes of December 1, 1941 as further proof that Hitler's headquarters were vigorously opposed to the liquidation of German Jews then beginning.' For Irving, it appears that the war continues. But the world of real history has moved on. How the web of lies was unravelled: Fight for truth Academics spent four years identifying distortions and manipulations in work of bogus historian VIKRAM DODD 04/12/2000 The Guardian By the 32nd and final day of his libel trial, David Irving was tired from the strain of representing himself in court. His exhaustion helped to undermine his claim that he was a seeker of historical truth rather than a Hitler worshipper when, at a weary moment, he mistakenly addressed the judge as Mein Fuhrer. Irving had gone to the high court in London claiming that he was suing Penguin books and Professor Deborah Lipstadt to defend free speech and the right of historians to dissent from the mainstream view about the Holocaust. In fact, money and rehabilitating his foundering career may have been Irving's real motive for suing. The Guardian has established that Irving was in huge financial difficulty before the trial. He had taken out five mortgages on his flat off Grosvenor Square in London worth pounds 750,000. Records lodged with the land registry show that two of his creditors had filed bankruptcy petitions against him, which were not followed up. For Irving, 62, this also was a vanity libel trial, a chance to use the high court as a platform for his extreme views. Increasingly, he had been marginalised from the mainstream and confined to fringe neo-Nazi audiences. Before the verdict, Irving told the Guardian that whatever the outcome: 'My reputation as a historian has been greatly enhanced.' He took pride from holding his own in court without the help of a defence barrister. But a once glittering writing career, from which he earned up to pounds 100,000 a year, was in severe decline. The doors of reputable publishing houses were closed to him as concerns about his integrity grew more acute. In spring 1996, his American publisher, St Martin's Press, pulled out of a deal to publish his biography of Goebbels. That autumn, three years after the publication of Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust; the growing assault on truth and memory, he issued a writ for libel. Irving saw her book and its charge that he was a Holocaust denier as the climax of an international, Jewish-inspired and long-running conspiracy against him that threatened his livelihood. Lipstadt, 53, professor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory university in Atlanta, Georgia, was determined to fight the case: 'It became a personal quest for the preservation of truth and memory.' Irving's defeat was far from a foregone conclusion. The burden was on Penguin books and Lipstadt to prove their charges that Irving had wilfully distorted history to suit his fascist views. Their counsel, Richard Rampton QC, staked out the uncompromising ground on which they would stand or fall on the first day. 'Mr Irving calls himself a histo rian. The truth is, however, that he is not a historian at all, but a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar.' The decision by Penguin and Lipstadt to plead justification, namely that the charges against Irving in her book were true, was not only a vastly expensive business but also a mammoth academic task. Four years of research unearthed 30 examples of falsifications of history by Irving. It was the sheer weight of these and the consistent pattern they formed that won the day for Penguin and Lipstadt. The method behind Irving's deceptions were complex, the effects significant. The defence spent pounds 80,000 on a 700-page report on Irving's historical methods from Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge university and an expert on the writing of history. Prof Evans, who was paid pounds 750 a day, and two PhD students spent two years combing through Irving's work. His report, which was submitted to the judge, shows his shock at the scale of deceptions he found: 'Penetrating beneath the confident surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation . . . so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up many more words than Irving's original account. 'A similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations become evident in every single instance which we examined. 'I was not prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in Irving's treatment of the historical sources, nor for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken output.' Both sides agreed to dispense with a jury because of the complexity of the evidence, leaving the judge, Charles Gray, adjudicating over one of the most emotive trials in memory. The first sign of David Irving's Hitler worship came early, his twin brother Nicholas revealed. Recalling an incident in 1944 after a German bombing raid on Essex, he told an interviewer: 'We were only six years old, it was 1944. There were doodlebugs, windows were blown out and houses had been damaged. 'Suddenly, David said: 'We have to say something.' So he went up to them, did a Nazi salute and said 'Heil Hitler'.' Irving dropped out of a science degree after his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, was published in 1963. His lack of formal training as a historian did not stop him writing 30 books. The first clear sign that his apparent quest for historical truth seemed to be hiding an attempt to rehabilitate Hitler came in his 1977 bestseller, Hitler's war. In the book Irving claimed Hitler had not ordered the extermination of the Jews and had even intervened to stop the murder of Jews. This, said Irving, was based on documents detailing communications between top German military leaders. The court heard that one document referred to an order not to liquidate one trainload of 1,000 Jews sent from Germany to Latvia in November 1941. Irving, through mistranslating the document, had falsely portrayed it as an order from Hitler to halt all such killings. Before the trial, Irving claimed that the shooting of up to 1,500,000 Jews on Germany's eastern border with Russia, was not systematic but a series of random acts of which Hitler was unaware. During the trial, evidence was produced which forced Irving to concede Hitler had indeed sanctioned them. One such piece of evidence was an order on August 1 1941 to a mobile killing unit, the Einsatzgruppen, which said Hitler would be getting continuous reports about their shootings. This evidence had been known to Irving since 1982. A copy of the order was contained in a book found in Irving's study, in which he had written notes in the margin, suggesting he had read it. Gas chambers Irving later admitted that a report in December 1942 detailing the execution of 363,211 Jews in South Russia, Ukraine and Bialystok 'was in all probability shown to Hitler.' For the second edition of Hitler's War in 1991, Irving had expunged all references to the Holocaust. Irving's position in court was that the Nazis may have killed between 1m-4m people, but that it was not systematic and did not involve gas chambers. He posed as a thoughtful intellectual, burrowing away with original source documents to try to seek the truth about the Holocaust. But a series of viciously anti-semitic speeches he had made to neo-Nazi audiences, which suggested he had denied the Holocaust, put paid to that image. The judge heard extracts from a 1991 speech given by Irving in Calgary, Canada, in which he rubbished the idea that the Auschwitz camp existed to murder Jews. 'It's baloney. It's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney? Tasteless. I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. 'Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, or the ASSHOLS.' This trial turned on the death camp at Auschwitz. Despite evidence to the contrary, Irving clung to his view it was no more than a 'brutal slave labour camp'. The court heard how Irving misinterpreted documents involving the testimony of an Auschwitz survivor at the Nuremburg trials, a French woman called Marie-Claude Vaillant Couturier. Irving twisted the private diaries of Judge Francis Biddle, who presided over the trial where Vaillant Couturier testified, to try to rubbish her evidence. In a speech, Irving claimed that Biddle's notes of the trial, which he unearthed in an American university library, showed he disbelieved her evidence. Irving told an audience that Biddle wrote: 'I don't believe a word of what she's saying, I think she's a bloody liar.' Vaillant Couturier's evidence had set out the horror of the death camp. She had been a member of the French national assembly and was sent to Auschwitz in 1943. There she testified to seeing beatings, forced sterilisations and castrations and gas chambers. In fact, Biddle doubted only one small section of her testimony. According to Irving's own notes of the judge's diary, Biddle records her as saying: 'House of prostitution for SS selected young women as they were washing for maids. All camps used the same system.'. After this remark, Biddle, in brackets writes, 'this I doubt', namely that the same system was used at every SS camp. Irving dismissed the witnesses to systematic extermination at Auschwitz as wrong or lying. He claimed 100,000 people had died there, the same number as at Dresden, and that was through disease, overwork and some shootings. Irving's revisionist views on Auschwitz were prompted by a report written by American extremist Frederick Leuchter in 1989. In the report Leuchter claimed that samples of concrete taken from the surviving walls at Auschwitz's gas chambers contained quantities of hydrogen cyanide that were too low to kill human beings, and thus suggested the chambers were for delousing. But the truth was quite the reverse. The real amount of hydrogen cyanide needed to kill humans is 22 times lower than that needed to kill lice. Irving wrote the foreword to the Leuchter report. During the trial he was forced to admit it was riddled with errors. In court, Irving rejected the label of being a Holocaust denier, saying he did not question that it had happened, but merely queried the 'means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae.' The court heard evidence that Irving was an anti-semite and racist. He displayed his prejudice in front of his young daughter, singing the ditty: 'I am a baby Aryan/Not Jewish or sectarian/ I have no plans to marry an/Ape or Rastafarian.' Irving consorted with the far right, addressing meetings of the Hitler-worshipping British National Party, the German neo-Nazi DVU party and extreme right National Alliance in the US. Germany got so fed up with Irving that it eventually banned him from entering, as did Canada and Australia. Perhaps the biggest insight into his deeper motivation comes not from the libel case, but from the opening line of his introduction to the new edition of Hitler's War, posted on his website: 'To historians is granted a talent that even the gods are denied - to alter what has already happened.' Audio report from Vikram Dodd at the high court on the Guardian network at www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving Irving: consigned to history as a racist liar VIKRAM DODD 04/12/2000 The Guardian The author David Irving falsified history to exonerate Adolf Hitler, driven by anti-Semitism and his own pro-Nazi views, the high court ruled yesterday. In a devastating judgment, Mr Justice Charles Gray ruled that a book which branded Irving a Holocaust denier was justified in its charges. The defeat left his reputation as a historian utterly destroyed, and the author of the bestseller, Hitler's War, facing bankruptcy and the loss of his Mayfair flat. Irving, 62, had sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin books, for libel. Penguin books and Professor Lipstadt ran up pounds 2.5m in legal and research costs to prove Irving had persistently and deliberately misrepresented and twisted historical evidence to suit his ideology. Lawyers for Penguin plan to have bailiffs seize Irving's central London flat, worth pounds 750,000, within three months to try to recover their costs, according to defence sources. The Guardian has established that even before yesterday's verdict, Irving was in financial trouble having taken out five mortgages on his flat, according to land registry records. To a packed court, Mr Justice Gray delivered a verdict that excoriated Irving as a man and a historian. Irving had increased his political activity over the last 15 years, addressing far right audiences in the US, Germany, Canada and the New World, the judge said. 'The content of his speeches and interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias. He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they inflicted on the Jews. 'He is content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to share many of their racist and anti-Semitic prejudices. 'The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his extra-curricular activities reveals him to be a rightwing pro-Nazi polemicist. 'In my view, the defendants have established that Irving has a political agenda. It is one which, it is legitimate to infer, disposes him, where he deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in order to make it conform with his political beliefs.' Irving had denied all the charges in Professor Lipstadt's book. The judge found: 'Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards, and responsibility for, the treatment of the Jews.' Mr Justice Gray ruled that the author was 'an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with rightwing extremists who promote neo-Nazism'. The 32-day trial over Professor Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory, was one of the most emotive for a generation. In court, Irving had denied millions of Jews were exterminated in gas chambers, such as Auschwitz. 'It is my conclusion that no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews,' the judge ruled. Irving described the verdict as 'firstly, indescribable, and secondly, perverse.' The judgment was 'understandable' given the judge's being 'an up-and-coming member of the establishment', he added. Explaining his defeat, he said: 'I suppose it is my own fault for having explained myself inadequately clearly.' Last night he added: 'My own feelings about race are precisely the same as 95% of the people of my generation. That is all I will say. If the British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could look forward to the end of the century and see what England has become, they would not have bothered to advance another 40 yards up the beach.' Asked if he had sufficient funds to cover the massive costs of his defeat he answered 'no.' Most of his donors came from abroad, but Irving denied that his money had come from fellow Nazi sympathisers. He said 4,000 supporters, the bulk from the US, had sent him varying amounts. One American had handed him Dollars 50,000 cash in a brown paper bag at Amsterdam airport, Irving said. After the verdict Deborah Lipstadt told a news conference that Irving had 'done a lot of evil things'. She added: 'The way he denigrated survivors and survivors' testimony in the courtroom was horrible.' The academic accused Irving of 'perversion' for not merely denying the Holocaust but for 'dancing on the graves' of its victims. Almost in tears after a four-year battle, she said: 'Soon there won't be people to tell the story in the first person singular and it'll be easier to deny.' Anthony Forbes-Watson, head of Penguin books UK, said it was unlikely all costs would be recovered: 'Sometimes principles override financial considerations. How can you be a loss-maker when you win a case on such overwhelming grounds as these?' Israel's ambassador to the UK, Dror Zeigerman, who sat in court to hear the result, said: 'The lesson for the new generation - my generation - is that we have to continue the struggle. We cannot give up against these people who raise their voices, like Irving.' Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, the son of a Holocaust survivor and a spokesman for the Re form Synagogues of Great Britain, said: 'It is a victory for 6m voices that cannot speak for themselves. But even more important for the long-term consequences, it is a defeat for the Holocaust denial industry and the bigotry that lies behind it.' Mr Justice Gray refused Irving leave to appeal, but Irving said in court that he intended to do so. Disgrace of Irving, pages 4-6 Jonathan Freedland, page 21 Leader comment, page 23 Special report on the Irving case on the Guardian network at www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving Truth's sheer weight : Irving was the deniers' best shot 04/12/2000 The Guardian David Irving was the Holocaust deniers' best shot. However discredited he has long been among professional historians, he puts on a good show of his Nazi learning. He may even have deserved the praise as a military specialist bestowed on him by Mr Justice Gray yesterday as the sucker punch before his devastating depiction of Irving as a racist, anti-semite and - this was the nub of the case - a deliberate falsifier of the evidence. The Holocaust has been paraded through the law courts before, as if the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis were like some recidivist, forever to be called back before the bench. Long court cases, involving much of the Irving 'evidence' have unfolded in Canada, in France and here too. Irving's suit echoed the libel action brought by Wladislav Dering in the early 60s, later written up by Leon Uris in his novel QBVII. But Irving is the best of this bunch, the 'face' for those purulent haters behind the websites and the seamy pamphlets. The deniers will not give up. Irving demonstrated his intellectual disreputability by claiming to have learnt nothing, despite that stupendous parade of evidence. Neither accumulating scholarship nor judicial decisions will weaken an idea as fixed as this one. But never again will the deniers' claims to standing have even the sliver of credibility that attached to Irving before he took action against Professor Lipstadt. Yet there is no point pretending this verdict is some vindication of English court procedure let alone libel law. A few well-chosen hard words from a judge guarantees little by way of wisdom from his colleagues on the bench in future. The high court has established no claim to epistemological superiority: it was the convincing evidence presented in Mr Justice Gray's court that made his con clusion right. Besides, the English law of defamation remains an ass. The defendants in Irving's action had to scramble to prove the truth of large historical contentions. As for 'reputation', Professor Lipstadt's imputations against Irving, true or false, would have lowered the recognition he enjoyed before the trial as a Nazi sympathiser and Jew-hater not a jot. The judge in this case won admirers but the absence of a jury still raises hard questions about our alleged incapacity to assess evidence and ascertain truth. 'Our' as in us: would ordinary people empanelled in a jury really have found it impossible to see through David Irving? For is not the most compelling lesson of this marathon legal affair that truth is no shining city on a hill. It has to be worked at; the credibility of those who claim to express it is critical. Even a casual reader of the case reports could quickly see how painstaking genuine historical scholarship is; it builds detail upon detail, avoiding casual inference and thin deduction. Eventually, a plausible narrative is pieced together but even then it has to withstand the slings and arrows of competitive scholars. And the Holocaust is now hot history. Due, in part, to the persistence of the deniers, academic effort has been redoubled. Among the many Irving assertions to be comprehensively demolished was the suggestion that thought police prevent open challenge to received historical wisdom. It is precisely because of the historians' efforts from the early 50s on that there is now no room for doubt, despite the false trails and the lacunae left by a Nazi bureaucracy as assiduous about destroying the signs of its crimes as realising the final solution. Other jurisdictions make denying the Holocaust a crime. After this case, we can rely on empiricism and the sheer weight of evidence. Holocaust libel case is lesson for Germany: press 04/12/2000 Agence France-Presse LONDON, April 12 (AFP) - The crushing court defeat of British revisionist historian David Irving is a victory for free speech and a lesson for Germany, where denial of the Holocaust is a crime, British papers said Wednesday. Irving, who claims that Jews were not systematically exterminated by Nazi Germany during World War II, Tuesday lost a libel case he had brought against a US academic, Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher Penguin. He sued over a 1994 book in which she accused him of distorting statistics and documents to suit his own ideological purposes and to reach historically untenable conclusions. But judge Charles Gray concluded Irving was "an active Holocaust denier" who was "anti-Semitic and racist" and "associates with right- wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism." The verdict in the High Court in London, Irving's chequered career and the background to the case dominated Wednesday's papers, many of which devoted at least three pages, plus comment and editorials, to the subject. In editorials, The Times and the Daily Telegraph both said that freedom of speech meant Irving was allowed to expound his opinions. "Such tolerance is the mark of a self-confident society," the conservative Telegraph noted. Prosecution for a statutory crime of denial "would have sent out illiberal signals." But it also meant that his arguments could be publicly and comprehensively demolished in court for all to see, they pointed out. "The case has indeed been a victory for free speech, and truth as well: a lesson to be pondered in Germany where Holocaust denial is a crime," remarked The Times. It added: "A British court has produced a more sophisticated and effective cross-examination of Holocaust denial than a ban could ever provide." The Guardian said it was Irving's reputation as a historian that had been shattered. From being the Holocaust deniers' "best shot," he was now shown to be a "deliberate falsifier of the evidence." "Never again will the deniers' claims to standing have even the sliver of credibility that attached to Irving before he took action against Professor Lipstadt." The Independent said that if Irving had managed to convince the judge that he was a reputable historian only seeking to adjust the death toll downwards, it would have been hailed as a victory for those who would deny the Holocaust altogether. "The crowning irony is that David Irving tried to use the notoriously restrictive British libel law to choke off critical examination of his own views in the name of his right to criticise the work of others." The legal battle, in which Lipstadt and Penguin denied libel and pleaded justification, was the first concerning revisionism to come before a British court. Irving, who lives in London and represented himself throughout the 32-day hearing, described the ruling as "perverse" and has said he will appeal. U.S. Scholar Is Victorious In Holocaust Libel Trial; Historian's View on Hitler Rebuked in London Court T. R. Reid Washington Post Foreign Service 04/12/2000 The Washington Post LONDON, April 11 -- David Irving, a British historian who sought to chronicle World War II from Adolf Hitler's point of view, lost his long libel battle today as a High Court judge ruled he had "deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" when he wrote that the Nazi leader was unaware of the Holocaust. In a lengthy opinion, Justice Charles Gray said that American scholar Deborah Lipstadt was "substantially justified" in describing Irving as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Lipstadt--a professor of Jewish studies at Emory University who coined the term "Holocaust denial"--has charged that Irving is a "Hitler partisan . . . a racist, and an antisemite" who provided a "crucial degree of respectability" to neo-Nazis and others seeking to deny the Nazi effort to exterminate Europe's Jews. Gray ruled today that each element of Lipstadt's description was "substantially accurate." A prolific author who was once praised for his research by leading historians, Irving is now shunned by his former publishers. He sued Lipstadt and her publisher under Britain's plaintiff-friendly libel laws in an attempt to restore his academic reputation; instead, he now stands humiliated by the verdict and liable for the defendants' court costs, about $3 million. "There's no way I can pay the costs, because I have no money," he said today. Standing alone at a bus stop in the rain after hearing the verdict, Irving, 62, said he was "defeated but unbowed." "No publisher will touch me after this," he said, adding that he intends to publish his own books from now on. "I am higher-profile now than I was" before the trial, he went on, "and I think the negative sign in front of the profile will be erased over time." Lipstadt, 52, said after the verdict that she had challenged Irving because "the truth has to be kept alive." "As [Holocaust] survivors die off and there are fewer and fewer eyewitnesses," Lipstadt said tearfully, "there won't be people to tell the story in the first person, and it will be easier to deny it." This libel case was initially expected to put the Holocaust itself on trial, but Irving told the court in his opening statement that "no person . . . can deny that the tragedy actually happened." So the courtroom battle dealt mainly with the reasons why Irving and his once respected books are now so widely vilified. Irving claimed he was the victim of an "international conspiracy" led by Lipstadt because he "dared to write history that challenged the politically correct point of view." Irving has sought to show that the number of Jews who died in Nazi hands was "far smaller" than the widely accepted figure of 6 million and that "there was no industry-scale gassing of Jews." Gray said in his ruling that "as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him." But after listening to testimony from some of the world's leading historians, Gray said, he concluded that Irving's treatment of Hitler and his role in the Holocaust could "not be called history." Reading his opinion in a packed courtroom this morning--with several Holocaust survivors in attendance--the bewigged judge said Irving's sympathetic portrayal of Hitler in such books as "Hitler's War" in 1977 amounts to "distortion and manipulation." "He has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, principally in relation to his attitude toward and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews," Gray declared. The judge said Irving overstated any evidence that might suggest Hitler was innocent of the slaughter and ignored documents or testimony that demonstrated the dictator's involvement in the "Final Solution"--the Nazi euphemism for the destruction of the Jews. "This falsification of the historical record was deliberate," Gray said, "motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs." The judge dug deeply into Irving's contention that Jews were not killed in gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp, in Nazi-occupied Poland. "In common I suspect with most other people," Gray said, "I had supposed the evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was compelling. I have, however, set aside this preconception." While some of the evidence on Auschwitz is "variable," the judge said, a review of documents, photographs and eyewitness testimony led him to conclude that "no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that . . . gas chambers at Auschwitz . . . operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews." Irving asked the judge for "leave to appeal," but permission was denied on grounds that the key issues in the case were all factual and therefore not matters of law for an appellate court. Without the trial judge's permission to appeal, Irving will find it nearly impossible to take the case to a higher court here. Lipstadt's 1993 book, "Denying the Holocaust," which contains sharp attacks on Irving and his work, has been printed around the world. Publication of a Penguin Books edition here gave Irving the opportunity he had sought to sue Lipstadt in a British court. In a reverse of the American system, libel law here forces the defendant to prove the truth of any challenged statement, but even the legal presumptions in his favor failed to win the day for Irving. "David Irving's career as a historian is over," said a statement from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based organization representing Nazi victims. "Today's decision definitely places Irving . . . as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history." Irving said he will continue to present his views on his Web site. Lipstadt said this is no surprise to her. "There will always be haters," she said after the verdict. "The neo-Nazis will read this [verdict], and they'll say, 'Yech.' They'll just dismiss it. "This nightmare is not over," she added. "You just have to fight each new battle." Let's close the book: David Irving has been demolished. Now it is time to give Holocaust victims and survivors some peace 04/12/2000 The Guardian A dark, unwanted episode has reached a good and just end. David Irving wanted Britain's high court to rescue his reputation: instead it trashed it. He went in seeking vindication for his claim that the Holocaust never happened, that Adolf Hitler was not the murderer of the Jews but their friend. He walked out yesterday - through a back entrance, his jacket pelted with eggs - branded a racist and an anti-semite, a Hitler apologist and a 'pro-Nazi polemicist.' Those were not the words of his accusers, but the voice of British law, in the form of the judge, Charles Gray. From now on, it is a legally-established fact that a writer who once won plaudits for his military histories distorted the facts of the Holocaust to fit his ideological prejudices. From now on, he shall wear the scarlet letter of shame, branded a bigot and a cheat. A bad man is finished. Now he faces bankruptcy; his home may be seized to pay back the pounds 2m the defence spent fighting him. And, lest we be fooled by Irving's insistence that he was the penniless David battling the mighty Goliath of world Jewry, let's remember who brought this case. It was Irving who sued the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books - not the other way around. Short of apologising on bended knee to a Nazi sympathiser, Lipstadt had no choice but to defend herself in court. She was not, as Irving argued, the enemy of free speech: on the contrary, it was he who tried to use Britain's absurd libel laws to suppress his critics. He wanted Lipstadt gagged; instead he has brought ruin upon himself. But much more than the fate of David Irving was decided yesterday. The high court also drove a stake through the heart of 'revisionism' -the right-wing credo which says the Jews have mounted a con-trick on the rest of humanity by inventing a tragedy. Gray has nailed that lie. When he read his judgment to a packed and hushed Court 36 yesterday, he began by explaining that he could not rule on 'what actually happened during the Nazi regime'. He would leave that to the historians. But, within minutes, Gray was issuing declaration after declaration, demolishing Irving and his Holocaust-denying chums. In a typical, devastating sentence, the judge ruled 'that no objective, fair-minded historian would. . . doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews'. His theories in shreds, Irving himself shrank before our eyes: a windbag whose air was slowly seeping away. Gray's verdict matters not just to the victims of the Shoah and their families. It matters to all of us. For what became clear as this case unfolded was that Holocaust revisionism is an assault not only on Jews but on history itself - the very business of understanding the past. Irving argued that we could not trust eye-witness testimony (both survivors and Nazis had made it all up) and that any document that pointed at the systematic destruction of European Jewry was bound to be a forgery. With that as his method, Irving sought to sweep away the foundations of history and even of justice: for if we cannot believe the evidence of tens of thousands of witnesses, how can we believe anything? If Irving had won yesterday, the ground beneath our feet would have begun to feel shaky. The court would have declared that we, like David Irving, live in a topsy-turvy world where nothing can ever be known. That's why this verdict is not a victory for the defence; it is a victory for memory. Now what? There will be a temptation to shout this ruling from the rooftops. For the last two decades, particularly in the US, Jews have been oddly defensive about the Shoah: they have constructed memorials and museums, even made films like Schindler's List, in part to see off the deniers. They have wanted to gather the evidence that might silence the Irvings. Yesterday's verdict may bring release from that defensive crouch: now we can tell our story our way, happy that our accusers have been defeated in a venue respected around the world. I can see that happening, and yet I hope it does not. I would like the Jewish world to have a different, less expected response to this result. I would like to see a pause and even, frankly, a rest: for it's time we gave the victims and survivors of the Holocaust some peace. Thanks to jet travel I began yesterday morning, four hours before the verdict, in Prague. (Along with several Guardian colleagues, I was in the city for a weekend literary festival sponsored by the paper.) It made an eerily appropriate ante-room for Court 36. For what used to be Czechoslovakia once contained nearly 260,000 Jews; now only three or four thousand are left. Prague itself is filled with reminders of the Nazi effort. Take the Jewish Museum, a fine building brimming with holy books and religious artefacts. Visitors snake around the display cases, their cameras clicking - most of them unaware that the curators of this exhibition were the men of the Third Reich: Hitler had designated Prague as the site for a future Museum of the Extinct Jewish People. He wanted future tourists to see what strange creatures the Nazis had so bravely removed from the planet. The SS began bringing to Prague Judaica from destroyed synagogues and communities all over the region. Now, though, one has the queasy feeling that Hitler's macabre plan has come unexpectedly true. Tourists do indeed come to gaze at Jewish prayer books in glass cases, to marvel at the striking, lop-sided tombstones of Prague's Jewish cemetery, assembled like a mouthful of jagged teeth. In the Prague museum, Jews are like butterflies: rare and exotic - catalogued and pressed under glass. An entire cottage industry has built up, trading in a fascination not with Jewish life, but Jewish death. Jews cannot blame this process on others. American Jewry wanted a Holocaust museum in Washington DC, just as British Jews worked hard to get the Holocaust into the national curriculum. But several committed, thoughtful Jews are beginning to wonder if it isn't time to call a halt. In his landmark book, the Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick calls on his community to find something else to place at the centre of their identity. He has pleaded for an end to the commercialisation and 'sacralization' of the Shoah which has turned it into a kitschy, quasi-mystical event. At the Prague festival William Styron - whose novel, Sophie's Choice, came before the current Holocaust boom - suggested now might be the time for some 'quiet'. Not because the slaughter is a holy event which cannot be discussed by mere mortals, but because our collective interest in it is getting unhealthy. This would be a fine riposte to Irving, who likes to quip that the Holocaust is 'the only interesting thing that has ever happened to the Jews'. To follow the advice of Novick, Styron and others, would be to defy Hitler's plan for the Jews. He wanted to make us a dead people: it is time to prove we still live. No libel found in Holocaust suit Bert Roughton Jr. 04/12/2000 The Atlanta Constitution Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt said Tuesday she had no illusions her resounding court victory over maverick historical writer David Irving will have much influence with Holocaust deniers and other extremists. "But that's not who I'm writing for," Lipstadt told a packed news conference at a London hotel after the verdict was delivered. "It's to convince the people who might be influenced by people like David Irving." Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books won a nearly complete victory over Irving, who had sued them alleging libel for characterizations of him in "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." In her 1994 book, Lipstadt described Irving as a dangerous leader of the movement to minimize the Holocaust. She portrayed him as a false academic who manipulates history to support his extremist political views. During the trial, her attorneys described Irving as dishonest and deeply anti-Semitic. The judge ruled this portrayal, while damaging to Irving, was substantiated by evidence presented during the three-month trial. While it was argued that the case did not amount to a test of the accuracy of the traditional account of the Holocaust, the trial turned on historical evidence and the testimony of experts. By demonstrating that the weight of historical record overwhelmingly supports accepted understanding of the Holocaust, Lipstadt's lawyers showed that Irving's misrepresentations in books and speeches must have been deliberate. In a detailed, 66-page ruling, Justice Charles Gray assailed Irving for his 30-year record of attacking long-held accounts of the Holocaust, which Irving often has dismissed as fiction. Gray said the evidence showed that Irving "persistently and deliberately manipulated historical evidence" and that he portrayed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in a favorable light that is unsupportable by the historical record. "The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his extra-curricular activities revealed him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist," said Gray, who read much of his ruling in a calm, even voice. "It appears to me to be incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier. "Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions and sometimes in the most offensive terms," said the judge, wearing a periwig and robes. The trial featured the testimony of several highly respected historians, who presented reams of documentation about the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews. "It is my conclusion that no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews," Gray said. Lipstadt said her victory might help stem the tide of historical revision at a time when the ranks of people who remember the Holocaust are dwindling. "Soon there won't be people to tell the story in the first-person singular," she said. "That's why I think today's judgment is so important." "Whatever steam they may have built up, I hope was dissipated by this judgment," she said. Irving contended Lipstadt's portrayal was false and cost him his lucrative career as a historical writer and lecturer. He also said he has been exposed to scorn and perhaps personal danger because of her work. Irving depicted himself as an unconventional researcher who is simply challenging conventional wisdom. Seeing himself as a David battling a Goliath, Irving has argued that he is the victim of an international Jewish conspiracy. Although he waffled somewhat during the trial, Irving maintained for years that he didn't believe the Nazis killed as many as 6 million Jews in a systematic extermination effort. However, he said he accepted that the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of many Jews, maybe a million, most of whom died from malnutrition, disease or by firing squad. He contended the scope of the Holocaust has been overblown by Jews seeking to boost reparations payments from Germany. Irving sat silently, staring straight ahead, as the judge read the ruling. He was in shirt-sleeves because he had been hit by an egg as he entered the courthouse. Before the ruling, Irving told reporters that he would be a winner regardless of the outcome. "My reputation is bound to be enhanced because of my ability to stand up to the experts --- to take them all on single-handed," he said. Irving's decision to sue turned out to be catastrophic for him, however. Not only did Gray say that the evidence supported the book's depiction of Irving, he also said it is likely that the English author will be asked to pay $3.2 million in court costs. Gray also rejected Irving's request for an appeal. During her news conference, Lipstadt singled out Emory University for standing by her through the five-year ordeal. "Emory has been exceptionally supportive in many ways," she said. Emory President William M. Chace said the university "celebrates Deborah Lipstadt's victory in this case as a victory for free inquiry." The American Jewish Committee also applauded the verdict. Members of the Atlanta chapter were in the courtroom throughout the trial. "We were witnesses to the truth, lending our emotional support to Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, a revered member of our Atlanta community," said Sherry Frank, the committee's Southeast area director. "David Irving's distortion of historical facts and despicable hatred of Jews received full light of inspection in this courtroom. Justice, truth and free speech prevail." Lipstadt never testified during the trial, a course advised by her attorneys. "They thought the book spoke for itself," she said. While she believes the case was an important moment in her struggle against Holocaust deniers, she said it was a conflict she would happily have avoided. "This has wreaked havoc on my life," she said. "There are books I haven't written, articles I haven't written and students I've neglected." But she said it was worth it. "The most moving moment in the trial was when I walked out of the court and was enveloped by Holocaust survivors," she said, nearly breaking into tears. "Survivors who said, 'Thank you.' " The Roots of Holocaust Denial By Ron Rosenbaum 04/12/2000 The Wall Street Journal British historian David Irving gained wide publicity by filing a libel suit against American author Deborah Lipstadt, who in a 1994 book described him as a Holocaust denier. The verdict against Mr. Irving yesterday in London was welcome -- but unlikely, alas, to put an end to the pernicious fantasies of Holocaust deniers. So it is perhaps worthwhile to look into the origin of Holocaust denial in the pattern laid down by the first Holocaust denier: Adolf Hitler. And to ask some hard questions of historians who have tried to defend Mr. Irving by separating his "fact gathering" from his historical "interpretation." Perhaps the first recorded instance of Holocaust denial can be found in a passage in the massive compilation of Hitler's wartime "Table Talk," the stenographic record of his after-dinner conversations in the command bunker on the Eastern front in the early years of the war. On Oct. 24, 1941, Hitler's special guests were his two chief partners in the execution of the Final Solution, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and Reinhard Heydrich, the man in direct charge of the genocide to come. Already their hands were drenched in blood from the mass murders of Jews committed by the roving special-action squads (Einsatzgruppen). Nonetheless, in an obviously staged performance, Hitler said this: "From the rostrum of the Reichstag [in 1939] I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of war's proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me that all the same we can't park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who's worrying about our troops? It's not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing." At that moment, when Hitler puts on record the lie that extermination is just a "rumor," Holocaust denial was born. (Note, too, the perverse logic that will be adopted by most subsequent Holocaust deniers: It didn't happen, and if it did happen, the Jews deserved it.) Denial was not invented by postwar kooks and anti-Semites. It was built into the very process of the Holocaust. Hitler never allowed himself to be seen near a death camp; never, so far as we know, put his signature on a genocide order. Upon these absences, Hitler's cloak of denial, Mr. Irving built his own career of denial. He began, in his first book on the question, by arguing that the absence of a written Hitler order for extermination meant that Hitler was innocent or not personally involved. He later argued that the absence of a written order indicated it didn't happen at all. In Mr. Irving's view, he told me in a 1994 interview, a few hundred thousand Jews may have died from typhus, hunger and brutal conditions in places like Auschwitz, along with some sporadic unorganized killing. But, he said, no one was gassed, because the gas chambers were a myth. To back up this claim Mr. Irving cited Fred Leuchter's "scientific" proof (since definitively discredited) that cyanide gas was not to be found at Auschwitz. Later Mr. Irving phrased his view of the gas chambers at Auschwitz this way: "More people died in the back of Teddy Kennedy's car." Denial at the top of the Nazi chain of command was echoed by denial all the way down. Yes, the Nazis kept meticulous records of their train shipments of Jews to the camps. But the documents maintain the fiction that these were "work camps." So thorough was the process of denial that Nazi documents make no reference to the gassing apparatus, except by coded euphemism. A dramatic example of this was brought to light in Errol Morris's "Mr. Death," the recent documentary about Fred Leutcher, the "scientist" and Holocaust denier. In the film, Auschwitz historian Robert Jan van Pelt unearths a document from the camp's SS archives in which a functionary is reprimanded for actually using the word for gas chamber in requisitioning parts for it. Seeing the scrawled snarl of the SS officer at this slip in the denial process is as chilling and decisive a refutation of denial as a Hitler signature would have been. But the facade of denial was extensive enough to license people like David Irving to dismiss the eyewitness testimony of survivors, guards and even death camp commandants like Rudolf Hoess of Auschwitz, who all testified to the killing process, and to claim -- as Mr. Irving did in his recent biography of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels -- that Auschwitz was not a death camp but merely "the most brutal of all Himmler's slave labor camps and the one with the highest mortality rate." It is Mr. Irving's biography of Goebbels and its reception by some otherwise sophisticated historians that is more troubling then the kind of crude no-gassing denials that were at issue in the London libel trial. Mr. Irving's approach in the Goebbels book was not Holocaust denial but Hitler denial. It was the bad Dr. Goebbles who plotted mass murder with Himmler -- underneath the innocent Adolf Hitler's nose, but without his knowledge. The controversy over the Goebbels book in the U.S. centered on whether the publisher was right to cancel it. But the shocking aspect of that controversy was the argument some otherwise responsible historians made to separate a "good" David Irving, the fact gatherer who has been able to unearth vast amounts of original documents and eyewitness testimony about Hitler and his war, from the not-so-good David Irving who may get some of his interpretations wrong. This view that Mr. Irving is "good on the facts" has been sharply challenged by the historian John Lukacs (in "The Hitler of History"), who took the trouble to examine Mr. Irving's footnotes and produced a scathing critique of the way Mr. Irving's interpretive agenda infected his presentation of facts. Perhaps the London verdict might be an occasion for historians who argue that you can defend Mr. Irving by separating "fact gathering" from interpretation to reconsider. To learn the lesson that fact gathering can be prejudiced by what one is looking for -- and by what one is not looking for. Can one praise a fact gatherer who somehow has failed to find the facts of mass murder behind Hitler's pattern of denial? Can we praise historians who are charmed by Mr. Irving despite that failure? Unlike Mr. Irving himself, they are not guilty of Holocaust denial. But in their naivete about the relationship between fact and interpretation, they might fairly be charged with David Irving denial. --- Mr. Rosenbaum is author of "Explaining Hitler" (1998) and "The Secret Parts of Fortune," forthcoming in July, both published by Random House. Historian Loses Libel Suit on Holocaust View MARJORIE MILLER TIMES STAFF WRITER 04/12/2000 Los Angeles Times LONDON -- Britain's High Court called Hitler biographer David Irving "anti-Semitic and racist" in a scathing ruling Tuesday that rejected the libel charges he had brought over claims that he is a Holocaust denier. Irving had sued U.S. professor Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin UK, for portraying him as someone who falsifies history to suit his widely dismissed views on Hitler and the Holocaust--including the assertion that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. The British historian claimed that Lipstadt's book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" distorted the truth and damaged his reputation. High Court Judge Charles Gray said that Irving not only has denied the Holocaust but is "a right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist" who mixes with neo-fascists. "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence," the judge said after reading for more than two hours from his 334-page decision. Irving, who represented himself in the case and was pelted with eggs by protesters on his way into the courtroom, called the ruling "perverse." He boasted that the trial "undoubtedly has made me one of the best-known historians in the world." The ruling was an overwhelming moral victory for the defense, and particularly so given Britain's tough libel laws. In the United States, Irving would have been treated as a public figure and would have had to prove that Lipstadt and Penguin had maligned him with malicious intent. In Britain, it was up to the defense to prove that their charges against Irving were true. The defense brought in some of the top experts on World War II to prove not that the Holocaust took place--that was a given in its case--but that Irving had willfully distorted facts. The judge concurred with the majority of the 19 cases it presented in detail during the three-month trial. "We hoisted him on his own petard," said Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta. "We tracked his footnotes and followed his sources." Jewish leaders hailed the verdict as a significant defeat for hate and prejudice. "It is important to show again and again that we will not forget what happened in the Holocaust," Dror Zeiegerman, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, said outside the courtroom. The Israeli government had released the 1,300-page prison memoirs of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for use by Lipstadt's legal team. The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said the trial had exposed Irving as "a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history." In Los Angeles, where Lipstadt, a former UCLA professor, lived for many years, local Jewish leaders hailed the court's decision. "The ruling vindicates the scholarship of a true historian while reaffirming David Irving's status as a falsifier of history and a Nazi sympathizer," said David A. Lehrer, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. Irving argued in his career and in court that Hitler did not mastermind the execution of Jews during World War II and that the so-called Final Solution was instead orchestrated by his associate Heinrich Himmler. He calls Auschwitz a "tourist attraction" built by Poland after the war, and he asserts that it was logistically impossible for the Nazis to have killed millions of people. Mainstream historians accept the estimates that about a million people were gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone. The judge acknowledged that Irving is an expert in World War II military history, and he stressed that it wasn't his function to try to determine what actually happened during the Holocaust. He nonetheless concluded that the defendants were justified in asserting that Irving had misrepresented Hitler's views on Jews to try to exonerate the Nazi leader. "He has done so in some instances by misinterpreting and mistranslating documents and in other instances by omitting documents or parts of them," Gray said. The result is a picture of Hitler "at odds with the evidence." While acknowledging that historians make errors, the judge rejected Irving's claim that his mistakes were innocent. Gray said they consistently presented Hitler in "an unwarrantedly favorable light." He warned Irving that he will have to pay the bulk of the defense's legal fees, estimated by Penguin at more than $3 million. He said that Irving did not have grounds for appeal, but added that Irving could contest that determination. Irving insisted that the ruling was full of factual errors and that he would have no difficulty winning an appeal. Lipstadt responded that Irving is a "judge denier." She said she felt vindicated after a battle that had taken five years of her life, and she grew tearful in recounting the thanks she has received from survivors of the Holocaust. "There is a finite amount of time for them to be here to tell their story in the first person," Lipstadt said. When they are gone, "it will be easier to deny. That is why I wrote the book." PHOTO: U.S. professor Deborah Lipstadt leaves London court, where she successfully defended her book that calls David Irving a Holocaust denier.; ; PHOTOGRAPHER: Associated Press; PHOTO: (A2) VICTORY--U.S. professor Deborah Lipstadt and Holocaust survivor Martin Hecht celebrate in London after British court rejected libel charges brought against her by Hitler biographer David Irving. A1; ; PHOTOGRAPHER: Reuters USA: Israel's Barak hails Holocaust libel ruling. 04/11/2000 Reuters English News Service WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak welcomed a U.S. professor's court victory on Tuesday in a libel suit which exposed controversial British historian David Irving as a "Holocaust denier". In a statement from Washington, where Barak was due to meet U.S. President Bill Clinton on Middle East peacemaking, the Israeli leader welcomed the British court's verdict in the name of Israel and the entire Jewish people. It said Barak had told the professor, Deborah Lipstadt, that her struggle and victory "are a victory of the free world against the dark forces seeking to obliterate the memory of the lowest point humanity ever reached". Irving, who was pelted with eggs as he entered the court, claimed Adolf Hitler did not mastermind the mass slaughter of Jews and said the German death camp Auschwitz was little more than a "Disneyland for tourists" built after World War Two. Irving brought the action against Penguin Books, a subsidiary of media giant Pearson Plc, and Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. "(Israel) conducts a determined and steadfast struggle against those who try to deny the Holocaust that brought about the destruction of a third of our people," the statement said. In a blistering verdict, Judge Charles Gray slammed Irving as "an active Holocaust denier...anti-Semitic and racist" who associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism. ### The Irish Times Wednesday, April 12, 2000 (Opinion) Holocaust Denial An active Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite and a racist, a man who associates with right-wing extremists and promoters of neo-Nazism. The judgment handed down yesterday by a London High Court in the libel action, brought by the historian and author David Irving against Penguin Books and an American academic Deborah Lipstadt, is blunt and to the point. It is also entirely justified and much to be welcomed. Mr Justice Gray, who sat without a jury, deserves credit for cutting through Mr Irving's nonsense about freedom of speech and academic freedom. This was a case about truth - the truth regarding the single greatest crime of the 20th century. Irving has sought for years to portray himself as a humble seeker after truth, a lonely knight fighting, as he would see it, mythology and self-serving distortions about the Holocaust - mythology and distortions that were created, in his view, by Jews. But Judge Gray, in his damning 300 page judgment, said Irving was indeed a denier of the Holocaust. He denies the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz (a tourist attraction built by the Poles, he claims) and asserts that no Jew was gassed there. He has done so frequently and in the most offensive terms, said the judge. Irving's theories are not the stuff of irrelevant debate in some rarified recesses of academe. The man is a hero to Holocaust revisionists and those who seek to detach history's assessment of Adolf Hitler from the reality of what the Nazis did to their fellow human beings. Herein lies the poison of Irving's dumbing down of mankind's collective memory of the Holocaust. This event, the systematic, mass murder of some six million people, most, though not all of them Jews, is unparalleled in human history. No regime in recorded history has set out to wipe from the face of the earth an entire ethnic group simply because of its religious belief and culture. What happened in the famine (an Irish commentator recently made the comparison) is entirely different and more complex than is often allowed by some commentators. A true and accurate understanding of the Holocaust is important because it can inform us of the need to show respect and tolerance for minorities, for people who are different from ourselves. Those who control our memory of the past possess a unique opportunity to fashion our future. If one thinks the truth about the Holocaust is unimportant, ask a neoNazi in today's Germany - better still, ask an asylum seeker cowering in a hostel, living in terror of the mobs that regularly attack them. David Irving richly deserves the financial ruin now facing him and the destruction of what little reputation he had. And it is worth noting what did for him in the end. It was not argy-bargy on university campuses, it was not a hail of rotten eggs and the shouting down of his message by strident adolescent voices. It was the clinical, forensic examination of his credo, a calculated and methodical destruction of his untruthful version of history. == Irish Times, April 12, 2000 (Opinion) Irving exposed as a liar with no interest in truth The defeat of the Holocaust denier, David Irving, in a London libel court is a victory for truth and democracy, suggests David Cesarani A common misconception about the libel case brought by David Irving against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt is that history was on trial. It titillated the prurient who like to dabble in the pornography of Holocaust denial and appealed to those looking for a backlash against the Holocaust, to suggest that the factuality of the Holocaust was at issue. It never was. Irving said fatefully in his opening statement: "This trial is not really about what happened in the Holocaust, or how many Jews and other persecuted minorities were put to death. This court will, I hope, agree with me when the time comes that the issue before us is not what happened, but how I treated it in my works of history." He was right. The trial was not about interpretations of history, or what it is "permissible" to say. It was not about freedom of speech. Nor was it even about the past: its true gravity lay in the present and the future. The outcome of the trial will not alter events from 1933 to 1945, but it will have a profound impact on the defence of truth and democracy in years to come. Irving sued Prof Lipstadt after she labelled him a Holocaust denier in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, and placed him in the ranks of those who manipulate and distort history according to a political agenda. This was immensely damaging to his reputation because, until the early 1990s, Irving was treated as just a wayward, right-wing historian who was efficient at digging up new material about the Third Reich. His books were respectfully reviewed in worthy newspapers and his reputation as an English man of letters gave him stature in many countries. No one looked that hard at what he wrote or, more importantly, how he worked. Perhaps this was because he enjoyed the supreme condescension of the literary and academic establishment, who seem to have regarded him as little more than a pleb with a talent for grubbing around in archives and the patience to woo the shrivelled widows of Nazi functionaries who nobody else wanted to interview. In her book, Lipstadt only scraped the carapace of his technique, but the accusation that he perverted the sources was enough to provoke him to legal action. This, in turn, led Lipstadt's supporters to fund a small army of researchers, led by a Cambridge historian, Prof Richard Evans, who for the first time subjected his oeuvreto minute examination. The results were devastating. The expert reports for the trial, by Profs Christopher Browning, Robert Jan van Pelt, Richard Evans and Dr Peter Longerich, showed he systematically misrepresented documents in order to exculpate Hitler of anti-Jewish crimes and minimise the destruction wreaked on Europe's Jews. They demonstrated that he ignored evidence that the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis was a systematic campaign of genocide, that Hitler knew about it, and that it culminated in the slaughter of millions of Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This was not a matter of interpretation, a legitimate activity for historians. Irving could only reach his conclusions by wilful misinterpretation. For example, he claimed Hitler was innocent of the November 1938 pogrom called Kristallnacht and that, when he found out about it, he tried to limit the destruction of Jewish property. In support of this claim, Irving cited a telex by the head of the German police which, he claimed, ordered his men to prevent damage to Jewish property. But Irving neglected to mention that the property in question was only business premises: not synagogues or private dwellings. Nor did Hitler issue instructions to prevent Jews from being mistreated or killed. In another instance, he mistranslated a telegram from Hitler's headquarters in November 1941 requiring that a transport of Jews from Berlin to the East should not be liquidated as meaning that no transports of Jews should suffer this fate. In fact, it clearly referred to one transport of Jews from Berlin whom Hitler wanted to spare from the general massacre so they could serve as hostages. But is this mere quibbling over what happened in the distant past? Another expert witness, Prof Hajo Funke, a German political scientist, explained that Irving's rewriting of the past was music to the ears of the far right in Germany. For neoNazis desperate to break the association between Hitlerism and horror, Irving's benign portrait of the F|hrer and denial of the Holocaust was a step towards political rehabilitation. Indeed, the trial showed that Irving was a welcome speaker on far-right platforms all over the world. ITS outcome is unlikely to shake the faith of these true believers. If anything, it will confirm their paranoid fantasies about Jewish power. Irving will become the latest martyr to the world Jewish conspiracy, to which he referred throughout the trial as the cause of his problems. Does this mean it was a waste of time, energy and money? Critics of the process may depict it as a pyrrhic victory, since the trial gave Irving global coverage. They may say it offended against notions of free speech and could provoke a backlash in his favour. Yet for the public, the trial has destroyed Irving's reputation as a writer who needs to be taken seriously. It has exposed him as a liar with no genuine interest in the pursuit of truth. The trial was not about freedom of speech: it was about freedom for falsehood. History was not in question, but the so-called historian was. By unmasking the methods of the deniers, the trial has actually made space for legitimate research and debate about the history of the Nazi era. It has shown the politicians of the far right that they will never be able to rely on true scholarship to erase the crimes of the Third Reich. The world is a little bit safer for truth and democracy. David Cesarani is professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton University and director of the Wiener Library, London. == Wednesday, April 12, 2000 Irving's brother changed name to avoid link BRITAIN: David John Cawdell Irving was born in Essex in March 1938. One of four children, he has a twin brother who changed his name by deed poll to avoid the family connection. His parents, Beryl, a writer and illustrator, and John, a naval commander who served in both wars, separated early on and Irving got to know his father only towards the end of his life. The family lived in straitened circumstances and Irving attended a minor public school, but did not finish his degree due to lack of money. He then embarked on a rugged love affair with Germany, working for a year in the Ruhr steelworks, where he rose to the position of third smelter. Back in England, he again began a degree, financing his studies by working as a nightwatchman and writing articles. The publication of his first book, about the Allied air raids on Dresden, was followed by a score more with another three still in the pipeline. Irving claims that envy for his early success and research methods turned to malice after Hitler's War - with its claim that the F|hrer did not know about the mass killings until 1943 - appeared in the US in 1977. In 1961, Irving married the daughter of a Spanish industrial chemist, who was fiercely opposed to Franco. Before their divorce in 1981, the couple reared four daughters. The eldest, Josephine, committed suicide last September, aged 33, after a period of mental illness and an accident which led to the loss of her legs. Irving also has a daughter by his 36-year-old Danish partner. Irving, who has been banned from the German state archives and expelled from Austria, Italy, Canada and Germany, claims he has suffered a barrage of abuse and death threats on his unlisted phone number. He agrees he once had swizzlesticks adorned with swastikas at a book party - symptomatic of the in-your-face defiance of the gauche schoolboy he often resembles - but denies Nazi sympathies. And the tale of a portrait of Hitler over his desk is the stuff of legend, he says - the only signed photo on display is one of Winston Churchill. Irving has denied having any politics other than a brief student adherence to the Young Conservatives. "My views are independent and sometimes unorthodox, but never anti-democratic," he said. "I am not anti-Semitic." - (PA) == Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) April 12, 2000, Wednesday Racist who twisted the truth Michael Horsnell and Alex O'Connell DAVID IRVING'S reputation as an historian was demolished yesterday when his High Court libel case ended with him branded an anti-Semitic, racist Holocaust denier and pro-Nazi polemicist. "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence," Mr Justice Gray said at the end of the 32-day hearing. "For the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews". And while the judge said it was not his function to express a view of what happened during the Nazi era, his verdict will set a benchmark for historians of the period and Mr Irving faces a future as an academic pariah.. The crushing defeat has also left Mr Irving facing a Pounds 2.5million legal bill which he claims he cannot pay. Costs have still to be settled at a future hearing, but the judge warned the historian that he would have to pay the "vast bulk" of the expenses incurred by the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books. Mr Irving had sued them for libel over claims in her book, Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, that he was a "Hitler partisan" who had denied the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Before the judgment Mr Irving, who claims to have no significant assets but his spacious flat in Mayfair, told The Times that he expected Penguin Books to make him bankrupt if he lost. Penguin said it would take "active steps" to pursue him for its costs, but sources accepted that the company was unlikely to recoup its outlay. A statement from the publisher said: "What today's judgment has proved is that we were right to stand by the content of our book and that it was entirely inappropriate of David Irving to seek to suppress the book by way of a libel action." The defendants had turned down an offer from Mr Irving to settle out of court for Pounds 500 to be paid to charity. They decided to fight because it would have been "morally repugnant" to concede. Mr Irving says he has raised a fighting fund of $500,000 (Pounds 317,000) in an Internet appeal, but refuses to say who his backers are.After the verdict yesterday, he was escorted through the rear exit of the High Court by security staff to a waiting taxi, saying only: "The judgment was perverse. I shall be appealing." The judge had refused him leave to appeal, but said he was free to apply directly to the Court of Appeal. Later, at his home, Mr Irving said: "I would describe the judgment in two words - firstly, indescribable, and secondly, perverse." He refused to talk about the cost of losing the case. "Why is everyone talking about money? I'm not interested in money. It is all about reputation," he said. He remained unrepentant about what the judge saw as racist and anti-Semitic views, saying: "I am not at all anti-Semitic. It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of the Jews. But the leaders of the Jewish communities around the world have used the most horrific methods to try and destroy me. Some people are vindictive, but that is not in my nature. I am a Christian through and through." A jubilant Professor Lipstadt said she was delighted and felt "exceptionally vindicated". Later she told a press conference: "One of the most moving moments did not happen in the court proceedings but outside when I was enveloped by (Holocaust) survivors who said thank you." Professor Lipstadt had received a call the night before from a man who had been in the Resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. He had spoken indirectly on behalf of all Holocaust survivors to say: "Deborah, you sleep well tonight, because we're not sleeping." She added: "I've had enough of Irving's cesspool for the last five years. I would expect no respectable institution or publication to give him a platform. I hope this victory will save other authors from having to face such trials and tribulations." The judgment was hailed by Lord Janner of Braunstone, chairman of the Holocaust Education Trust, as an epic victory for truth. "The Irving case shows the crucial importance of educating our young people in the tragedy of the Holocaust especially as a symbol of the dangers of allowing racist dictatorships to rule," he said. The Israeli Minister for Israeli Society and World Jewish Communities, Rabbi Michael Melchior, said the judgment delivered the message that Holocaust deniers should be regarded alongside the worst of the Nazis. He called for the ruling to be taught in schools everywhere. Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) April 12, 2000, Wednesday He came to bury Irving not to praise him Valerie Grove IN A sea of black gowns, the man in shirtsleeves and waistcoat - his jacket stained by a flying egg from an ill-wisher - stands out. The profile is pugnacious, the eyebrow a quizzical arrowhead, the face imperturbable. Judged from an oblique courtroom view, David Irving looked bullish, iron-grey hair framing a fiercely florid complexion. Was it glowing health, mounting fury, or just the warmth in the packed courtroom? There was standing room only, to the dismay of those unseated for the two-hour duration of the judge's deliberations. The 66 pages concerning David John Cadwell Irving, litigant in person, v Penguin Books and Deborah E. Lipstadt were distributed five minutes before the judge made his entry. The whisper went round the court: "Irving's lost." It was as if the first-night audience at The Mousetrap had been issued with Agatha Christie's script and knew whodunnit before the curtain rose. Irving, too, knew that the game was up. But there was not a moment's boredom in court. Mr Justice Gray, Wykehamist and Oxford scholar, undaunted by the pronouncing of abtransportieren; Mischlinge; or Badenanstalten fur sonderaktionen, maintained a delivery that was unemphatic and judicious even at its most damning. No detail was left unscrutinised. He presented the court with a crescendo of evidence, diligently considered, even though he stressed: "It is no part of my function to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime." In the event, there was much to be learnt about what concentration of cyanide would be needed to penetrate brickwork and kill people rather than to fumigate clothing, and whether there were gas chambers at Auschwitz. Irving had sounded confident on the Today programme a couple of hours before his fate was known. He expected his reputation to be enhanced, having taken on the scholars single-handed in sustained cross-examination. And Mr Justice Gray did allow that "as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him". His research was thorough and painstaking, his knowledge of the Second World War "unparalleled". "He is beyond question able and intelligent, moreover he writes his military history in a clear and vivid style." This was a "Brutus is an honourable man" encomium, an oratorical ploy before the condemnation ahead. The judge acknowledged the possibility that camp survivors might have embellished or cross-pollinated their experiences, building up a corpus of false testimony. But in the light of such fair-minded caveats, the judge's conclusions were all the more devastating. Irving had distorted, misrepresented or manipulated the evidence to conform with his own preconceptions. His activities revealed him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist, anti-Semitic and racist and one who associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism. Irving had said on Radio 4 that he doubted he would have the legal expertise to appeal; and that a verdict against him could hardly leave him worse off than before, since no publisher would touch him. But when the moment came, he was not to be so summarily crushed. He stood to address the judge, manifesting neither anger nor contrition. He would, after all, appeal. He now realised that he had not explained himself with "sufficient clarity". Irving was defiant, unbowed, and, although a lone figure hoist with his own petard, somehow without pathos. Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) April 12, 2000, Wednesday Irving's cash backers stay in the shadows Alex O'Connell, Michael Horsnell and Linus Gregoriardis THE search was under way last night to identify the loyal supporters who financed David Irving's legal battle. The Jewish Board of Deputies in London believes that his main supporters are German Nazis who fled to America after the Second World War and young neo-nazi white supremacists living in the United States. The board last night claimed that Mr Irving had raised at least Pounds 2 million, although he has denied repeatedly having more than Pounds 315,000 in the coffers. Although Mr Irving has refused to name his backers, it is believed that funds have been received from some of the 4,000 supporters mentioned on his official website. The historian is believed to have been funded by such far-right groups as the National Alliance, based in Tampa, Florida. It was mentioned during the trial that he had spoken at eight of the alliance's events between 1990 and 1998. It is also believed that Mr Irving has been supported by the German People's Union, an anti-Semitic party. For ten years, until he was banned from Germany in 1993, he had a close relationship with the GPU leader Gerhard Frey, a wealthy publisher. Mr Irving has been a "star speaker" at revisionist conferences organised by Ewald Althans, named in court as a leading neo-Nazi in Munich who sells and distributes the historian's books, videos and cassettes. One independent name with far-right links who has been associated repeatedly with Mr Irving is David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klansman who is now a chairman of the New Orleans-based National Organisation For European American Rights (NOFEAR). He is known to be one of Mr Irving's admirers. Mike Whine, of the Board of Deputies, said he believed that Mr Duke had either directly or indirectly supported Mr Irving. "He will have introduced a lot of people to him for fundraising purposes over the last four or five years," he said. Vince Edwards, Mr Duke's administrative assistant and NOFEAR's media co-ordinator, said yesterday that he was disappointed, but not surprised, by the judgment. He said that Mr Duke had been "supportive" of Mr Irving. Commenting on the judge's decision, Mr Edwards said: "I was extremely disheartened but I couldn't have imagined what the judge would find in his favour. The way the system worked, he would probably have found himself out of a job. You can imagine if the judge had sided with Irving, what the Jewish Board of Deputies would have done to his family. There would have been a campaign aginst him." He added: "I think it is a disaster, but hopefully he can appeal." Mr Edwards said that the two men had met but were not "intimate" friends. "David is just supportive," he said. Mr Edwards did not believe that Mr Duke had given Mr Irving financial support. The historian's website lays out payment options for potential contributors who may "mail a personal cheque", "mail cash in an envelope", "make a bank transfer" or "simply use your credit card". The payment, it adds, will appear on the card as "History Bookshop". LINKS www.courtservice.gov.uk The High Court judgment www.fpp.co.uk David Irving's action report www.emory.edu/UDR/handbook/lipstadt.html Deborah Lipstadt www.wiesenthal.com Simon Wiesenthal Centre www.holocaust-history.org Holocaust History Project Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) April 12, 2000, Wednesday Judge delivers a devastating condemnation Michael Horsnell THE libel trial judge labelled David Irving a "right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist" who had manipulated the historical record to make it conform to his own political agenda. Mr Justice Gray said that the maverick historian was a Holocaust-denier with antiSemitic and racist views, and berated him for his "offensive" assertion that no Jew was gassed at Auschwitz. "No fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt" that hundreds of thousands were gassed at the Nazi camp, he said. Reading a 66-page extract of his full judgment, the judge said: "Over the past 15 years or so, Irving appears to have become more active politically than was previously the case. He speaks regularly at political and quasi-political meetings in Germany, the United States, Canada and the New World. The content of his speeches and interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias. "He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they inflicted on the Jews. "He is content to mix with neo-Fascists and appears to share many of their racist and anti-Semite prejudices. The picture of Irving that emerges from the evidence of his extra-curricular activities reveals him to be a right-wing, proNazi polemicist. "In my view, the defendants have established that Irving has a political agenda. It is one which, it is legitimate to infer, disposes him, where he deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in order to make it conform with his political beliefs." The judge said that he "has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards, and responsibility for, the treatment of the Jews". Mr Irving, in his shirtsleeves and a black and red waistcoat, sat in the row that was also occupied by his adversary, the defence counsel, Richard Rampton QC. The historian of the Third Reich stared into the middle distance as the judge said that he also found him to be "an active Holocaust-denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist". The judge said there were certain imputations in Deborah Lipstadt's book which he had found to be defamatory of Mr Irving. But he added that the charges against him which have been proved true were of "sufficient gravity" for it to be clear that the failure to establish the truth of other matters did not have any material effect on the author's reputation. The judge said that the issue with which he was concerned was Mr Irving's treatment of the available evidence. "It is no part of my function to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime. The distinction may be a fine one, but it is important to bear it in mind." On the credit side, he told the court: "My assessment is that, as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military history, Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the archives. He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years." He added: "It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating cross-examination that his knowledge of World War Two is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent." But, Mr Justice Gray told the court: "The questions to which this action has given rise do not relate to the quality of Irving's military history but rather to the manner in which he has written about the attitude adopted by Hitler towards the Jews, and in particular his responsibility for the fate which befell them under the Nazi regime." The judge said the defendants had selected 19 instances where they contended that Mr Irving had distorted the evidence. "I have come to the conclusion that the criticisms advanced by the defendants are almost invariably well founded". He was satisfied that "in most of the instances cited by the defendants Irving has significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively examined, reveals. The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges that Irving has, for his own ideological reasons, persistently and deliberately misinterpreted and manipulated historical evidence." He accused Mr Irving of "double standards" when assessing historical evidence and said his account of matters "flies in the face" of available evidence. He "deliberately skewed the evidence to bring it into line with his political beliefs". He added: "Irving appears to take every opportunity to exculpate Hitler." He quoted from the "undeniably racist" ditty composed by Mr Irving for his daughter, putting into her mouth the words: "I am a baby Aryan. I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian." There was also his queasiness about black men playing cricket for England. "I accept that Irving is not obsessed with race. He has certainly not condoned or excused racist violence or thuggery. But he has on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist." Branding him anti-Semitic, the judge said: "His words are directed against Jews, either individually or collectively, in the sense that they are by turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory in their references to Semitic people." As an example, he said Mr Irving claimed that Jews deserved to be disliked and had brought the Holocaust on themselves, that Jewish financiers were crooked, that Jews generated anti-Semitism by their greed and mendacity, and that the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal had a "hideous, leering, evil face". The judge rejected Mr Irving's claims that the gas chambers were a propaganda lie invented by British Intelligence and that few Jews died in them. "It appears to me incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust-denier," he said. "It is my conclusion that no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews." He added: "Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions and sometimes in the most offensive terms. By way of examples, I cite his story of the Jew climbing into a mobile telephone box-cum-gas chamber; his claim that more people died in the back of Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz; his dismissal of the eyewitnesses en masse as liars or as suffering from a mental problem; his reference to an Association of Auschwitz Survivors and Other Liars or 'ASSHOLS'." Mr Irving had also made broader claims which "tend to minimise the Holocaust". He had minimised the number of those killed by means other than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere. The judge said it appeared to him undeniable that most, if not all, of the statements made by Mr Irving and cited by the defendants as demonstrating his anti-Semitism revealed "clear evidence that, in the absence of any excuse or suitable explanation for what he said or wrote, Irving is anti-Semitic". He said: "His words are directed against Jews, either individually or collectively, in the sense that they are by turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory in their references to Semitic people, their characteristics and appearances." Mr Irving's principal justification for his comments about Jews was that he was seeking to explain to Jews why anti-Semitism exists, and not himself adopting the anti-Semitism, the judge said. "But I do not think that this was the message that Irving was seeking to convey to his audiences, and it was certainly not the sense in which his remarks were understood." The judge agreed that Jews were as open to criticism as anyone. But Mr Irving had "repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and prejudiced vilification". Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) April 12, 2000, Wednesday False witness Michael Horsnell David Irving was accused of being a racist zealot who, by denying the Holocaust, had manipulated history. Yesterday he lost the libel action brought to clear his name. Has he changed his mind? Interview by Michael Horsnell The watercolour on the wall behind David Irving's desk is not, as some detractors claim, Adolf Hitler's self-portrait. Irving does own that picture; it was given to him by Christa Schroder, the Fuhrer's private secretary, who had taken it for safe-keeping at the end of the war. But he has it locked away in a glass case. Instead, the unframed portrait is of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the avuncular American president. More interesting is the signed photograph of Churchill, whom Irving has condemned as a drunken warmonger, that hangs in the passage and bears the inscription: "Your friendship has been a very great privilege to me." When I remark on it, Irving smiles and raises his bushy eyebrows in a manner curiously reminiscent of Rudolf Hess. "Bought it at auction," he says. Irving is the maverick historian who sees Hitler as "no greater incarnation of evil" than the Allied leaders. He has just spent two months pursuing a libel case in the High Court against the American author Professor Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin. The action centred on Lipstadt's assertion in her latest book, Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, that Irving was one of the world's most prominent and dangerous "Holocaust deniers". Yesterday Mr Justice Gray came down on the side of Lipstadt. Losing will cost Irving dear; though he conducted his own case in court, he has still incurred costs put at Pounds 2.5 million. His imposing mansion flat in Mayfair - where he has lived for 32 years and which he shares with his Danish girlfriend Bente, 35, and their daughter Jessica, six - may have to be sold. "The consequences of losing should worry me a lot more, but you get to the position where you insulate yourself," he says. "I don't allow it to keep me awake. I have taken no steps whatever, like putting things in my partner's name. No smart accountants have been hired to hide funds away. There are no other significant assets; my assets are my intellectual properties. If disaster strikes, it's true disaster. "I have no doubt (the defendants) would drive me to bankruptcy. But there would be some consolation. I was growing tired of living in Mayfair anyway." Irving, 62, the author of 30 books, professes to have lost Pounds 200,000 a year for the past three years through not writing a line while concentrating on his litigation. But he is believed to have raised up to $500,000 on his fighting fund website, where he describes Lipstadt as "the golden-tipped spearhead of the enemies of truth". Irving supporters from America, Germany and Scandinavia have provided individual donations ranging from $5 to $50,000. Unsurprisingly, he wishes to keep the identity of his benefactors secret. During the High Court case, Richard Rampton, QC, the counsel for Lipstadt and Penguin Books, cited many examples of Irving's zealotry. They included his attempts to pervert the mind of his baby daughter with a racist ditty while walking her in her pram, and a quote from an Irving speech, delivered in Calgary, Canada, in September 1991, in which he asserted "more women died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz". By being so overtly anti-Semitic, Irving had, Rampton said, prostituted his calling as an historian. But Irving, as always, is unrepentant. He claims that at the outset of the case he offered to settle if the defendants paid Pounds 500 to charity in memory of his late daughter Josephine, one of his four daughters by his Spanish wife Pilar (the couple divorced in 1981), who died last year aged 34 . "They rejected it," he says. "They wanted a scrap, so I gave them one. I had to take action. I don't find it hurtful being called all sorts of names. But the campaign against me had reached such intensity that I could no longer ignore it. It would have destroyed my livelihood." Despite having been the one who pursued the libel case, he sees himself as the victim. The reading of extracts from his diaries by the defence counsel, he says, made him feel "violated". "You keep a diary for your personal use. When my daughter died I reread the entries I made about her when she was one and two. It was very distressing. Now they are public property. "But I am no fool. I realised as soon as I went into the witness box that they would have a field day with me. I have no regrets. It's been the most exhausting phase of my life but I put up a pretty decent fight." As a dedicated exponent of revisionism, Irving remains defiant in his assertion that Hitler knew nothing of a Final Solution, in which up to six million Jews died. He purports the Holocaust to be a myth deployed by Jews in order to blackmail the German people into paying vast sums in reparations. At his feet is what he calls the "holy of holies", an enlarged aerial photograph of crematorium No 2 at Birkenau. There is, he contends, no evidence of the manholes through which survivors say the deadly gas pellets were inserted. As he points to the picture, he spits out the words: "The so-called factory of death!" His beliefs may be considered by many to be outrageously distasteful, but they are not new. In 1970, he faced a bill of Pounds 70,000 in damages and costs for reinventing history in his book The Destruction of Convoy PQ17.He had libelled the convoy commander, Captain John Broome, by wrongly blaming him for its destruction by German aircraft and U-boats. At an unsuccessful appeal before Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, and Lord Justice Phillimore in 1971 Irving was described as a "grasping, conceited and foolish young man". His empathy with all things German had been evident from his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, published in 1963, written after he had spent a year as a steelworker in the Ruhr for Thyssen. Already a Germanophile, he listened intently to a fellow worker who told him of the Allied air raids, then began his research. Rampton, who read the book in preparation for his client's libel defence, says Irving had exaggerated the number of deaths in the Allied bombing of Dresden by tenfold - 250,000 fatalities, instead of the official estimates of 25,000 - to make a "false equivalence" between the victims and the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz. The Dresden book predicated Irving's career, giving him an entree to Hitler's inner circle. From those who had survived, and the widows of those who had not, he was to acquire a wealth of documents and accounts that put him head and shoulders above his peers as a researcher of the Third Reich's history. But by sanitising the Nazis and absolving Hitler of genocide, Irving's stance has led to clashes and controversy. Over the years, demonstrators have paraded placards outside his home demanding "Gas Irving"; he has been assaulted in a restaurant; and when his daughter Jessica was a baby, he says he had to keep a Moses basket handy by a window in order to lower her by rope to ground level in the event of his apartment being stormed. Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander who served at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and on Arctic convoys during World War Two. But his parents separated when he was young; John Irving was reunited with his son only in the last two years of his life, from 1965 to 1967, when David was in his late twenties. The young David was raised by his mother, a commercial artist who had studied at the Slade School of Art, and who was forced, because of the breakdown of her marriage, to bring up her four children in much-reduced circumstances. Irving has a twin, Nicholas, a civil servant, who announced their estrangement in 1992. The family originated from Portsmouth: Irving's earliest memories include cheering with the crowds as the troopships left for Normandy in 1944. Later he became a pupil at Sir Anthony Browne's, a grammar school in Brentwood, Essex, where he achieved notoriety by choosing a copy of Mein Kampf as a school prize, not because he wanted the book, he says, but because he wanted to shock. He gained 13 O levels, and eight A levels. But despite embarking upon two degrees - the first at Imperial College London, where he read physics, and the second at University College London, where he took economics - he dropped out of both courses and failed to graduate. From his earliest student days he was politically active. At Imperial he joined the Young Conservatives and edited Phoenix, the college magazine founded by H.G. Wells. In 1959, his final year there, he also edited the college's Carnival Times, causing a stink when he engineered it to incur costs that cancelled out the profits of that year's carnival after learning that the proceeds were destined for a South African subversive organisation. At University College, in 1962, he spoke with Oswald Mosley in support of the motion "This House would restrict Commonwealth immigration". His reputation, as a writer as well as an activist, was already gaining him enemies. In 1964, two Jews - Manny Carpel, then 20, and Gerald Gable, then 26 - posing as GPO engineers were fined after breaking into his flat. They believed he was a fascist and had hoped to find political material that they could take to Special Branch. Gable, who later became the publisher of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, remained a lifelong adversary. After publication in 1991 of the expanded edition of Hitler's War, Irving says, "it became evident that publishers around the country had pressure put on them directly or indirectly not to publish me". Undeniably, he has been ostracised by the publishing world;houses such as Macmillan in London and St Martin's Press in New York were not about to ignore protests from Jewish groups about his "repellent" views. He blames his exile on a "global endeavour" by his most powerful enemies: the Anti-Defamation League in the US, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Defence League, and the Simon Weisenthal Centre, which, he says, have established an "international campaign to destroy my legitimacy". He sees Lipstadt as an ambassador of what he deems the international Jewish conspiracy against him. Irving has been banned from a host of nations, including Germany, which is seeking his extradition on charges of racial incitement over a lecture he gave to the right-wing NPD at Weinheim. He says his exclusion has denied him access to precious Third Reich archives on which much of his research depends. But he is nothing if not tenacious. In 1990 he launched his own imprint, Focal Point Publications. With his libel case over, he says he is now editing Vol 2 of his Churchill biography, Triumph in Adversity, and is working on a biography of Heinrich Himmler, based on access he was given in America to 200 letters the SS chief wrote to his mistress. "I have all the material I need, though being barred from the German archives is a serious matter," he says. "There's a lot of material like this in American homes. US troops captured Himmler's house, looted it and carried trophies home. I want to get into Himmler's mentality rather than the history of the SS." Irving talks enthusiastically about the "astonishingly good economics" of publishing his own books, an enterprise that involves driving a truck to hundreds of bookshops around the country hawking his work. "I get the author's cut, the publisher's cut and the distributor's cut," he says with relish. He also sells his books via the Internet, though he mutters about an "Orwellian exercise" by some bodies to filter out his website. "They are trying to stop me expressing an opinion," he says. "My case against Lipstadt has been about free speech." He is disappointed that Lipstadt did not take the stand during the case, denying him the chance to cross-examine her. "I'd have asked about her racism, though I'm sure the judge would have intervened. She has written several articles about the importance of Jews marrying only Jews. That's racist. It's the hypocrisy that annoys me. "She is on record as saying she would never debate with revisionists, but it came as a surprise when she did not give evidence. I accuse her of a lack of courage." Ask Irving if he accepts he is a racist and he replies: "The scumbags say I am but I have had the most terrific blacks, Pakistanis, you name them, working for me, and I haven't seen one working on all the benches occupied by Lipstadt's team in court." His response to accusations of anti-Semitism is equally well versed. "If I were a Jew, I should be far more concerned not at who pulled the trigger, but why. Anti-Semitism is a recurring malaise. There must be some reason why anti-Semitic groups break out like some kind of epidemic." The next step in his crusade may be another libel case, against the writer Gitta Sereny over an article she wrote about obssession- even though she is gracious enough to acknowledge, amid her contempt for his revisionism, that he is a "man of talent, both as a researcher and a writer". Certainly Irving's greatest accomplishment is that he was the first historian to warn, in 1983, that The Hitler Diaries were fakes. Lord Dacre, who, as Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, originally authenticated the "diaries", says of him: "I regard Irving as a very industrious and efficient investigator, and hunter of documents, a hard worker and good writer. That is on the credit side. "But I don't regard him as an historian. I don't think he has any historical sense. He is a propagandist who uses efficiently collected and arranged material to support a propagandist line." Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, adds: "He has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among historians that he does not deserve to be called an historian at all." If his peers' views are any sort of template, Irving will be remembered as a pariah, a dangerous falsifier of the blackest chapter in 20th-century history and, ultimately, a man whose veracity could not be trusted. Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) April 12, 2000, Wednesday This awful lie and why I had to fight it Michael Horsnell MORE people believe Elvis Presley is still alive than those who dismiss the Holocaust as an invention. But denying that the darkest chapter of the last century ever took place is "like a slow invasion of termites" eating away at the truth, according to the Jewish American academic Deborah Lipstadt. With the gradual passing away of those who survived the Nazi death camps and the growing influence of right-wing revisionist historians such as David Irving, the engaging Professor Lipstadt has seen the writing on the wall. That is why she devoted her academic research to the subject and wrote Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, her third book, published by Penguin in 1994. In it she identified Irving as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial", and he sued for libel. Irving accepts that tragedy befell the Jews, but he defines the Holocaust (a word he normally shrinks from using) in somewhat rounder terms. He says: "It was the whole of World War Two, and the people who died were not just Jews but gypsies and homosexuals, the people of Coventry and the people of Hiroshima." Professor Lipstadt rejected an invitation to settle out of court before his action began. She says: "Normally, I don't debate with these people on principle because I don't think they should be treated as 'the other side'. It would be the equivalent of asking astronomers to debate whether the earth is flat. It's lunacy. "But if I hadn't fought, he would have won by default and people would have thought his version of the Holocaust to be a legitimate definition." Professor Lipstadt, a striking 52-year-old redhead, holds the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the daughter of Erwin Lipstadt, a German Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1928 and became a successful businessman, and his wife Miriam, a Canadian whose parents crossed the border when she was a child. A New Yorker, the Professor is a leading light in Jewish cultural studies. She has recently been reappointed by the White House to the executive committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Council, a body entrusted by Congress with responsibility for administering the Holocaust Museum in Washington. She has also just completed a term as adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on religious discrimination abroad and the United States's foreign policy response to it. After spending most of the last three months cooped up in a London hotel, she plans to write a book about the trial when she returns to America. To the irritation of David Irving, the woman who called him a dishonest historian and Hitler partisan became the quiet American in court by declining to enter the witness box and give evidence. She says: "On some levels I would love to have mixed it up with him. I was willing to take the stand but my lawyers felt there was no need for me to give evidence." With some satisfaction, she adds: "This trial demonstrated the degree to which Irving manipulates historical truth, and we entered numerous examples into the public record. "It reaffirmed the fact that the Holocaust can be easily and fully documented by historians through the use of primary sources." Despite her belief that Irving is guilty of rewriting history, the Professor defends the right of historians to reappraise the Holocaust. She says: "We are not dealing here with sacred canon and I defend the right of historians to re-examine and ask questions. But it must be based on the evidence, not on what they want it to say. That is their job. "If somebody could come up and prove that it was less or more than six million Jews who perished, that's OK. This is not theology. "But David Irving is not doing this. The evidence demonstrated this man is not an historian. His work is a tissue of lies, manipulation and distortion." How does Professor Lipstadt regard the dangers of revisionism? She says: "As long as there are survivors, the danger is mitigated. They can stand up and say 'I am not lying about the Holocaust; where are my parents and brothers?' I don't see deniers as a clear and present danger, I see them as a clear and future danger. "It is easy to plant the seed of doubt in people's minds. It makes sense in a perverse way. You are talking about something so monstrous in the Holocaust that it calls for a suspension of disbelief. It would be a much nicer world if, indeed, there had been no Holocaust. There is something in us that would prefer deniers to be right. The problem is, Irving is wrong, and he is lying." Despite that, Professor Lipstadt opposes laws in force in much of Europe that make Holocaust denial a criminal offence. "I don't think they work," she argues. "It makes martyrs out of deniers. It makes it look as if we have something to hide. I am an advocate of free speech as much as possible. But we can't cry fire in a crowded theatre. We can't have a free platform to allow people to say what they want regardless." Michael Horsnell Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) April 12, 2000, Wednesday History and bunk Mr Justice Gray's trenchant dismissal of the libel suit brought by the historian David Irving against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books confirms him to be the "liar and falsifier of history" of the Holocaust that the defendants held him to be. The judge further found him to be anti-Semite and "Holocaust denier" who "has repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and prejudiced vilification of the Jewish race and people". For both sides, the issues in this case were freedom of speech and professional integrity. Mr Irving, who conducted his own case in a two-month trial involving some 400 files of documents, claimed before the verdict that whatever the outcome, his reputation would be enhanced "because of my ability to stand up to the experts". His stamina held up; but his reputation has been damaged beyond repair, and by his own deliberate act in bringing the case. Mr Irving says that he is not an historian of the Holocaust and that the subject "bores" him. That has not prevented him from making the following assertions; Hitler did not order the extermination of Europe's Jews and was ignorant of their fate until 1943; there was no systematic Nazi plan; the total death toll was about one million, not six million; and the gas chambers of Auschwitz did not exist. To seek to defend such propositions in court might be thought by a layman to be pure folly. As both the judge and Mr Irving observed, however, the outcome hung not on what actually happened in the Second World War - a subject on which Mr Irving's mastery of the archival detail is formidable - but, in Mr Irving's words, on "what I knew of it, and what I made of it". Mr Irving complained that Professor Lipstadt's book was the culmination of a 30-year conspiracy to silence him, and with him, alternative historical interpretations of the Holocaust. The claim is preposterous. But to make the defence of justification stand, the defendants had to show not only that Mr Irving's facts were wrong, but that, as a "Hitler partisan", he deliberately and from ideological motives manipulated evidence, particularly of the Holocaust, in order, as the judge said, to portray Hitler "in an unwarrantedly favourable light". Mr Irving is an intellectual bruiser. In court, as outside, he dismissed eyewitness statements on Auschwitz - Nazi as well as Jewish - as "worthless". He held awkward documents to be either forgeries or unknown to him, leading him to claim in court not to have read books he owns or has publicly criticised. Asked what the Eichmann memoirs, released by Israel in February, meant by Gaseinlage (gassing camps), he said he had not had time to look at them. Mr Irving has always relied on the fact that the SS destroyed the gas chambers to argue that they never existed and that cyanide traces found in the camps showed only that the Nazis used "hygienic methods" to delouse corpses and combat typhus. When his most offensive anti-Semitic comments were read or played back to him, they were either just jokes, or an effort to explain why anti-Semitism exists. Shown evidence that in just three mobile gas chambers, 97,000 Jews were killed, he "humbly" said that he must then be wrong about "limited experiments" with gas. It was a rare and purely tactical retreat. History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory against Mr Irving's ideologically motivated abuse of the intellectual discipline of which he is a master. The case has indeed been a victory for free speech, and truth as well; a lesson to be pondered in Germany, where Holocaust denial is a crime. A British court has produced a more sophisticated and effective cross-examination of Holocaust denial than a ban could ever provide. The judge found that in 19 specific instances, Professor Lipstadt's criticisms were "almost invariably well-founded". For Mr Irving, that judgment is "perverse". The epithet applies with considerably more force to his own indefensible perversions of the 20th century's most appalling truth. Copyright 2000 The Irish Times The Irish Times April 12, 2000 Holocaust Denial An active Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite and a racist, a man who associates with right-wing extremists and promoters of neo-Nazism. The judgment handed down yesterday by a London High Court in the libel action, brought by the historian and author David Irving against Penguin Books and an American academic Deborah Lipstadt, is blunt and to the point. It is also entirely justified and much to be welcomed. Mr Justice Gray, who sat without a jury, deserves credit for cutting through Mr Irving's nonsense about freedom of speech and academic freedom. This was a case about truth - the truth regarding the single greatest crime of the 20th century. Irving has sought for years to portray himself as a humble seeker after truth, a lonely knight fighting, as he would see it, mythology and self-serving distortions about the Holocaust - mythology and distortions that were created, in his view, by Jews. But Judge Gray, in his damning 300 page judgment, said Irving was indeed a denier of the Holocaust. He denies the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz (a tourist attraction built by the Poles, he claims) and asserts that no Jew was gassed there. He has done so frequently and in the most offensive terms, said the judge. Irving's theories are not the stuff of irrelevant debate in some rarified recesses of academe. The man is a hero to Holocaust revisionists and those who seek to detach history's assessment of Adolf Hitler from the reality of what the Nazis did to their fellow human beings. Herein lies the poison of Irving's dumbing down of mankind's collective memory of the Holocaust. This event, the systematic, mass murder of some six million people, most, though not all of them Jews, is unparalleled in human history. No regime in recorded history has set out to wipe from the face of the earth an entire ethnic group simply because of its religious belief and culture. What happened in the famine (an Irish commentator recently made the comparison) is entirely different and more complex than is often allowed by some commentators. A true and accurate understanding of the Holocaust is important because it can inform us of the need to show respect and tolerance for minorities, for people who are different from ourselves. Those who control our memory of the past possess a unique opportunity to fashion our future. If one thinks the truth about the Holocaust is unimportant, ask a neo-Nazi in today's Germany - better still, ask an asylum seeker cowering in a hostel, living in terror of the mobs that regularly attack them. David Irving richly deserves the financial ruin now facing him and the destruction of what little reputation he had. And it is worth noting what did for him in the end. It was not argy-bargy on university campuses, it was not a hail of rotten eggs and the shouting down of his message by strident adolescent voices. It was the clinical, forensic examination of his credo, a calculated and methodical destruction of his untruthful version of history. Copyright 2000 The Irish Times The Irish Times April 12, 2000 Irving exposed as a liar with no interest in pursuit of truth The defeat of the Holocaust denier, David Irving, in a London libel court is a victory for truth and democracy, suggests David Cesarani A common misconception about the libel case brought by David Irving against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt is that history was on trial. It titillated the prurient who like to dabble in the pornography of Holocaust denial and appealed to those looking for a backlash against the Holocaust, to suggest that the factuality of the Holocaust was at issue. It never was. Irving said fatefully in his opening statement: "This trial is not really about what happened in the Holocaust, or how many Jews and other persecuted minorities were put to death. This court will, I hope, agree with me when the time comes that the issue before us is not what happened, but how I treated it in my works of history." He was right. The trial was not about interpretations of history, or what it is "permissible" to say. It was not about freedom of speech. Nor was it even about the past: its true gravity lay in the present and the future. The outcome of the trial will not alter events from 1933 to 1945, but it will have a profound impact on the defence of truth and democracy in years to come. Irving sued Prof Lipstadt after she labelled him a Holocaust denier in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, and placed him in the ranks of those who manipulate and distort history according to a political agenda. This was immensely damaging to his reputation because, until the early 1990s, Irving was treated as just a wayward, right-wing historian who was efficient at digging up new material about the Third Reich. His books were respectfully reviewed in worthy newspapers and his reputation as an English man of letters gave him stature in many countries. No one looked that hard at what he wrote or, more importantly, how he worked. Perhaps this was because he enjoyed the supreme condescension of the literary and academic establishment, who seem to have regarded him as little more than a pleb with a talent for grubbing around in archives and the patience to woo the shrivelled widows of Nazi functionaries who nobody else wanted to interview. In her book, Lipstadt only scraped the carapace of his technique, but the accusation that he perverted the sources was enough to provoke him to legal action. This, in turn, led Lipstadt's supporters to fund a small army of researchers, led by a Cambridge historian, Prof Richard Evans, who for the first time subjected his oeuvre to minute examination. The results were devastating. The expert reports for the trial, by Profs Christopher Browning, Robert Jan van Pelt, Richard Evans and Dr Peter Longerich, showed he systematically misrepresented documents in order to exculpate Hitler of anti-Jewish crimes and minimise the destruction wreaked on Europe's Jews. They demonstrated that he ignored evidence that the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis was a systematic campaign of genocide, that Hitler knew about it, and that it culminated in the slaughter of millions of Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This was not a matter of interpretation, a legitimate activity for historians. Irving could only reach his conclusions by wilful misinterpretation. For example, he claimed Hitler was innocent of the November 1938 pogrom called Kristallnacht and that, when he found out about it, he tried to limit the destruction of Jewish property. In support of this claim, Irving cited a telex by the head of the German police which, he claimed, ordered his men to prevent damage to Jewish property. But Irving neglected to mention that the property in question was only business premises: not synagogues or private dwellings. Nor did Hitler issue instructions to prevent Jews from being mistreated or killed. In another instance, he mistranslated a telegram from Hitler's headquarters in November 1941 requiring that a transport of Jews from Berlin to the East should not be liquidated as meaning that no transports of Jews should suffer this fate. In fact, it clearly referred to one transport of Jews from Berlin whom Hitler wanted to spare from the general massacre so they could serve as hostages. But is this mere quibbling over what happened in the distant past? Another expert witness, Prof Hajo Funke, a German political scientist, explained that Irving's rewriting of the past was music to the ears of the far right in Germany. For neo-Nazis desperate to break the association between Hitlerism and horror, Irving's benign portrait of the Fuhrer and denial of the Holocaust was a step towards political rehabilitation. Indeed, the trial showed that Irving was a welcome speaker on far-right platforms all over the world. Its outcome is unlikely to shake the faith of these true believers. If anything, it will confirm their paranoid fantasies about Jewish power. Irving will become the latest martyr to the world Jewish conspiracy, to which he referred throughout the trial as the cause of his problems. Does this mean it was a waste of time, energy and money? Critics of the process may depict it as a pyrrhic victory, since the trial gave Irving global coverage. They may say it offended against notions of free speech and could provoke a backlash in his favour. Yet for the public, the trial has destroyed Irving's reputation as a writer who needs to be taken seriously. It has exposed him as a liar with no genuine interest in the pursuit of truth. The trial was not about freedom of speech: it was about freedom for falsehood. History was not in question, but the so-called historian was. By unmasking the methods of the deniers, the trial has actually made space for legitimate research and debate about the history of the Nazi era. It has shown the politicians of the far right that they will never be able to rely on true scholarship to erase the crimes of the Third Reich. The world is a little bit safer for truth and democracy. David Cesarani is professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton University and director of the Wiener Library, London Copyright 2000 The Irish Times The Irish Times April 12, 2000 Judge finds Irving a 'Holocaust denier' and anti-Semitic Defeat of revisionist historian described as 'epic victory for truth and justice' By RACHEL DONNELLY The five-year battle by the revisionist historian, Mr David Irving, to salvage his professional and personal reputation ended in humiliating defeat and possible financial ruin yesterday when a judge in the High Court in London rejected his libel action and condemned him as an "active Holocaust denier, anti-Semitic and a racist". The judgment casts serious doubt on whether Mr Irving (62) will be able to resume his career with any credibility, condemning him as an academic who "fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian" in his treatment of historical evidence. The result, delivered in the tense atmosphere of court 36, was a highly charged finale to a six-week libel action brought by the historian against the US academic, Prof Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher, Penguin Books UK, who pleaded justification. It ended Mr Irving's battle to clear his name after Prof Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, branded the author of Hitler's War a Holocaust denier, who deliberately misrepresented historical evidence to diminish Hitler's role in the Holocaust. Mr Irving also cast doubt upon the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz designed for the systematic murder of Jews and also the broadly accepted historical fact that millions of Jews died during the second World War. Mr Irving was denied leave to appeal in the High Court but he will lodge an appeal with the Court of Appeal. He faces a bill for costs of up to (pounds) 2 million sterling. After the verdict Mr Irving spoke to reporters at his London home and said he felt "tired, very tired. I would describe the judgment in two words - firstly, indescribable, and secondly, perverse." As more than 200 journalists and observers sat in the cramped courtroom, Mr Justice Gray spent almost two hours reading a summary of his 300-page judgment, concluding that Mr Irving was a Holocaust denier and that he associated with right-wing extremists. Sitting at the front of the court, at times with his head bowed, Mr Irving heard Mr Justice Gray condemn him in the most unequivocal language. It was the first time an English court had heard a case relating to Holocaust denial, and Mr Justice Gray said it appeared to him "incontrovertible" that Mr Irving qualified as a Holocaust denier. Furthermore, he was anti-Semitic and often used "hostile, critical, offensive" language to describe Jews. Mr Irving had argued that there was no basis for Prof Lipstadt's claim that he falsified historical documents and statistics in his published works and in public statements to serve his ideological agenda. But the role of the judge in the case, Mr Justice Gray said, was not to make findings about what happened during the Nazi regime but to consider Mr Irving's treatment of the available historical evidence. With that role in mind, Mr Justice Gray held that while Mr Irving was a military historian whose knowledge of the second World War was unparalleled, the 19 examples that the defendants had relied on in court to demonstrate his distortion of evidence, racism and anti-Semitism "are almost invariably well founded". The only positive element in the ruling for Mr Irving came when the judge accepted the defendants had not proved defamatory charges made against him. Mr Irving was accused of putting extracts from the Goebbels diaries that he had obtained from a Moscow archive at risk, hanging a self-portrait by Hitler above his desk and of planning to speak at an anti-Zionist conference in Sweden. However, Mr Justice Gray held that the failure to prove the truth of the charges did not have any material effect on Mr Irving's reputation. As Mr Irving sped away from the court, avoiding protesters who had earlier thrown an egg at him, Prof Lipstadt was jubilant in victory. "I feel exceptionally vindicated in what has been five years of excruciating effort on my part," she said. She also accused Mr Irving of being "evil" and of "dancing on the graves" of victims of the Holocaust. The Israeli ambassador to Britain, Mr Dror Zeigerman, who was in court to hear the verdict, said the result was an important marker in the struggle against anti-Semitism and racism. Lord Janner of Braunstone QC, who is chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, described the verdict as "an epic victory for truth and justice". Copyright 2000 PR Newswire Europe Limited Press Association Newsfile April 12, 2000, Wednesday 03:31 AM Eastern Time I'M GETTING SUPPORT, SAYS LIBEL CASE HISTORIAN Danny Kemp, PA News Historian David Irving told today how he had received hundreds of supportive e-mails since a humiliating High Court libel defeat in which he was branded a racist. "Over the last 24 hours or so since the judgment came out I have had 322 e-mails from all over the world - I was up to 4am reading through them - from people who have read my books and saying 'What on earth is going on here, Mr Irving?"' The support came after his libel action against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin books ended in the judge calling him an anti-semite, leaving him facing financial ruin, Mr Irving, 62, told BBC1 Breakfast News. But Professor Lipstadt told the same programme: "Whatever David Irving says - I listened to him for 32 days in court and have read his books - and the judge said this too, you have to treat whatever he says with a tremendous grain of salt and a tremendous question mark. "So I am not so worried about how many 'hits' he says he has got." == Copyright 2000 Associated Newspapers Ltd. Daily Mail (London), April 12, 2000, p. 6 "A Brilliant Historian Ruined by a Fatal Flaw," by Tom Bower DAVID IRVING'S self-destruction over the past 20 years has been a bizarre spectacle. Fatally flawed by his obsession about Adolf Hitler's genius, Irving has propelled himself on to a downward spiral, degenerating from an internationally acclaimed historian into the reviled propagandist who denied the Holocaust. Irving's masterpiece, Hitler's War, published in 1977, was a landmark, challenging the essence of researching and writing the history of the Third Reich. >From the opening of the 926-page book describing Hitler leaving the 'elegant marbled halls' of his headquarters in Berlin on September 3, 1939 to step into 'Amerika', his special train 'parked in a dusty Pomeranian railroad station' to direct the beginning of the Second World War Irving revolutionised the historian's craft. Countless readers became enraptured by his original interpretation of the war, told for the first time through Hitler's eyes, and by his gripping narrative style. Instead of caricaturing German politicians and soldiers as stupid and brutal sausageeating Huns, Irving humanised the Nazi leaders, describing their undoubted skills and intelligence. For some of the Nazis' victims, Irving's style and crusade was offensive. But for those seeking an alternative interpretation of history, Irving's approach was refreshing. For 30 years, Britons had read flawed histories of the war which glossed over the errors perpetrated by the Allies. Irving, it appeared, was offering new insights which apparently were also factually accurate. His sources appeared to be impeccable. Irving's research was, at the time, revolutionary among historians. Instead of relying upon the official records of the British and American governments, Irving had crisscrossed Germany and Austria to meet unique eyewitnesses, their widows and their heirs who could shed a new light on key events. Unlike the historians who offered a dry recital of facts gleaned from archives, Irving met former Nazi officials, loyal secretaries, adjutants and grieving widows who were either eyewitnesses of critical meetings and conversations between Hitler, his generals and his ministers, or possessed unpublished diaries and records which had never reached the German archives. SPEAKING fluent German and clearly eager to give another interpretation of history, Irving acquired information which overturned the established version of Nazi history as written by British historians. With researchers and translators, Irving spent weeks in Germany's archives, finding Nazi documents and files which even German historians had not bothered to read. Over the years, Irving's own archive, weighing nearly half a ton, became a source of information for young historians. But gradually, most visitors to his Mayfair home began to recognise his fatal flaw. The unprecedented enormity of events and extraordinary personalities who inhabited the Third Reich mesmerises many of those who have immersed themselves in the astonishing detail about the secrets and lies of that extraordinary regime. In that sense, Irving was no different from countless intelligent men and women across the world whose lives are still dominated by sifting through the irreconcilable intrigues and human disasters of the Third Reich. But Irving was exceptional in one vital aspect. Irving had spent so much time with the widows of Nazi murderers and Wehrmacht generals, with Hitler's secretaries and, most importantly, with a huge cast list of the surviving luminaries of Hitler's regime, that he had adopted their self-interested and false interpretation of history. Reading through the extraordinary list of those surviving Nazi leaders who entertained Irving with coffee and cakes while offering their self-justification, it is possible to understand how he became beguiled by their civilised behaviour and refined intelligence. But others have also sat with Nazis, listened to their stories and retained sufficient objectivity to sift through their lies and extract the gems of truth. Irving found that task not only impossible but unwelcome. He not only sympathised with his host's prejudices, but he was even willing to distort information to enhance their case. And he went one fatal step further. He took advantage of the ignorance of British historians who could neither read German nor had visited his prime sources, and falsified history. His dishonesty was first exposed during the Seventies in his first book describing the bombing of Dresden and later in his unsuccessful libel trial about his book describing the destruction of PQ17, a wartime convoy carrying supplies from Britain to Russia. In both books, Irving had described the British as cowards and even criminals. In his 1977 biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, The Trail of the Fox, the German was glamorised as a dashing hero against the dull-witted Montgomery. His adoration of everything German took an irreversible twist with his next book, Hitler's War. Quite correctly, Irving pointed out that not one among the millions of surviving Nazi documents directly incriminated Hitler with the Final Solution. In Irving's mind, that irrefutable discovery excused Hitler from any knowledge of the Holocaust. THOSE distortions were contaminated by Irving's developing anti-Semitism. Outraged by the fierce criticism of Hitler's War, especially from Jews, Irving became obsessed and unbalanced by hatred of those critics. He turned against his critics and declared war on them. In a ludicrously flawed biography of Josef Goebbels, the brilliant minister for propaganda, Irving wil-fully distorted the position of Jews in Germany and blamed their persecution on Goebbels. In retrospect, it is clear Irving was never a reasoned historian. His falsification of history and his obsession with 'denying' the Holocaust was motivated by an uncontrollable hero-worship of Hitler. Compared to most people's heroes, Irving chose a monster whom he sought to rehabilitate by distortion. Yesterday, his perversion was exposed but in his Mayfair home, that will be merely shrugged off as a setback. And in years to come, his books will still be enjoyed as gripping yarns although hopefully no one will believe his fantasies. Tom Bower is the author of Blind Eye to Murder, the allied failure to de-Nazify Germany (Little Brown, GBP 6.99) == Copyright 2000 Associated Newspapers Ltd. Daily Mail (London), April 12, 2000, p. 6 "GBP 2m: Irving's Final Reckoning," by David Williams HISTORIAN David Irving faces a GBP 2million legal bill after a judge yesterday branded him a Holocaust denier, a racist and an anti-Semite. In a damning ruling, Mr Justice Gray said the 62-year-old author had portrayed Hitler 'in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews'. He described Irving as an associate of neo-Nazis and accused him of 'persistently and deliberately misrepresenting and manipulating historical evidence' for his own ideological reasons. The High Court ruling was greeted by Jewish groups. Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: 'It is an epic victory for truth and justice.' Irving, however, condemned it as 'indescribable, perverse' and said some of the judge's findings were 'historically incredible'. The military historian had sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt and publishers Penguin for libel over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, claiming it destroyed his livelihood and generated waves of hatred against him. But, yesterday, he sat red-faced and shirt- sleeved, staring at the desk in front of him, as the judge said he found that Irving 'is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with Rightwing extremists who promote neo-Nazism'. Examples of that anti-Semitism included claims that the Jews deserve to be disliked and brought the Holocaust on themselves; that Jews generate anti-Semitism by greed and mendacity; and that they are among the scum of humanity. The judge went on: 'A ditty composed by Irving for his daughter is undeniably racist in putting into her mouth the words "I am a baby Aryan . . . I have no plans to marry an ape or Rastafarian". 'Similarly, Irving's reference to "one of them" reading the television news strikes me as evidence of racism of a more insidious kind. The same applies to Irving's proclaimed queasiness on seeing black men playing cricket for England.' A downcast Irving, who was hit on the head by an egg thrown by chanting demonstrators outside the court, arrived from his Mayfair flat one minute before the judge came into the packed courtroom. After the verdict he said he intended to appeal after he was told he would be liable for most of the costs of the 32- day case. In contrast, Professor Lipstadt, hugged and kissed supporters. She said she never doubted she would be vindicated, adding: 'I hope this victory will save other authors from having to face such trials and tribulations. 'I see this not only as a personal victory but also a victory for all those who speak out against hate and prejudice. It was a struggle for truth and for memory and a fight against those who sow the seeds of racism and anti-Semitism.' The judge said Irving was beyond question able and intelligent. His mastery of the detail of historical documents was 'remarkable'and his knowledge of World War II 'unparalleled'. But the case involved the manner in which he had written about Hitler's attitude towards the Jews and his responsibility for their fate under the Nazis. Irving, who represented himself and brought the action with the help of 400 supporters worldwide, claims he is now facing financial ruin. He denied the book's claim that he distorted statistics and documents to serve his own ideological purposes and reach untenable conclusions. He had never claimed the Holocaust did not occur, he said, but did question the number of Jewish dead and denied their systematic extermination in concentration camp gas chambers. He argued that the killing of millions was logistically impossible and dismissed eyewitness accounts of gassings as lies. There were gassings on a limited scale at Auschwitz, he said, but he claimed a gas chamber at the centre of the case was used only to fumigate 'objects and cadavers' of typhus lice or as an air-raid shelter. The publishers and Professor Lipstadt, 53, holder of the Dorot chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, denied libel and pleaded justification. Their QC Richard Rampton said Irving was a 'Rightwing extremist, a racist and, in particular, a rabid anti-Semite' who had prostituted his reputation as a serious historian in his obsessive desire to exonerate Hitler. He argued that a convergence of testimony made it a 'moral certainty' the Holocaust killed five or six million Jews, gipsies and others between 1941 and 1944. Reliable estimates said 1.1million were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Holocaust was orchestrated by Heinrich Himmler, an intimate associate of Hitler, and it was 'inconceivable' it was without Hitler's knowledge and authority. The case, characterised by bitter exchanges, was the first time Holocaust denial had been considered by a British court. Eldred Tabachnik, QC, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said after the verdict: 'It proves Irving is a falsifier of history.' Kevin Bays of solicitors Davenport Lyons, which represented Penguin Books, said: 'The case shows the importance of educating young people in the Holocaust, especially as a symbol of the dangers of allowing racist dictatorships to rule.' d.williams@dailymail.co.uk == Copyright 2000 Associated Newspapers Ltd. Daily Mail (London), April 12, 2000, p. 7 "A Broken Marriage and Three Lost Daughters, the Awful Price of Obsession," by Geoffrey Levy FOR years David Irving has been telling a story about Hitler's right-hand man, Heinrich Himmler, watching a mass execution, and how a woman held out her baby. Himmler, in his own papers, recorded: 'I am a parent myself and I involuntarily stepped forward to take the child, but at that moment the shots rang out.' Himmler found himself with bits of brain on the hem of his leather greatcoat. Why does Irving repeat this grotesque little scene about the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, who organised the East European death camps where millions perished? Because Himmler allegedly holding out his hands testifies to the 'humanity' of the Nazis. Yesterday's condemnation of Irving by Mr Justice Gray will make little if any difference. You can be sure that Irving will be repeating this little anecdote again before long. For more than 40 years, ever since he spent a year working in a steel mill in the Ruhr to improve his German and fell in love with the country, the British naval officer's son has been on a revisionist mission to prove to the world that Hitler and the Nazis were not quite the monsters that history says they were. The question is: Why has Irving done it? Born in Essex, his own family has a proud military tradition. His late father John fought in the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and in the Arctic convoy battles of the Second World War as a Commander. His eldest brother, also John, was a senior RAF officer. Brother John, 69, a postwar Group Captain who served in the RAF for 23 years, is the holder of an MBE and is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. A chartered engineer with a PhD, he is these days an inventor and Wiltshire county councillor. Yesterday he offered this single terse comment on his brother's views of Hitler: 'I refer you to Genesis, Chapter IV, verse 9.' Verse 9 says: 'Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is Abel your brother?" And he said, "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?" ' Family estrangement is nothing new to Irving. He barely sees the three surviving daughters of his first marriage, which was dissolved. One of them, Paloma, 33, who works for an advertising company, did not invite him to her wedding. 'I'm completely opposed to his beliefs,' she said. 'In terms of women, what he says is a joke.' What Irving says is that women are 'mental chewing gum' created for decoration or childbearing. Another daughter, Pilar, 34, an artist who lives in Madrid, said: 'My views and my family's views are totally opposed to his, and anyone who reads what he says must find them totally laughable.' His third daughter, Beatrice, refused to give him her London address after returning from Australia. 'I don't agree with his opinions and I don't even want to be asked about them,' she said. A fourth, Josephine, who had a history of depression, threw herself from a window last year. Irving's flat is filled with Nazi memorabilia, as well as a self-portrait of Hitler and a small statue of the Fuhrer which he describes as 'rather sweet'. He lives with Bente, 37, the daughter of a Danish dentist, and their daughter Jessica, six. His attraction for her, she says, is that he is 'different . . . I like people who are different, a little eccentric'. She does not subscribe to her lover's views but loyally declares: 'It would have been easy for him to give up his beliefs, to stop writing and speaking out, but he hasn't. I respect him for that.' How different Irving's life might have been if he had never gone to Germany as a young man. He might, like his brother John, have been a boffin, having won a sciences ICI scholarship from his minor public school to Imperial College, London. He was one of four children, born the youngest of twins. The elder twin, Nicholas, a civil servant, lives alone in a rather rundown council block in Holborn, Central London. There is also a sister, Jennifer. According to Irving, their father, the sailor who served in two wars, abandoned the family when he was very young, leaving their mother, Beryl, an artist, to bring up the children alone. During the war they lived close enough to the bombing for Irving to remember the V1s, but he says it wasn't until he went to Germany that he learned of Dresden and its firestorms. Irving and his Spanish ex-wife, Pilar, divorced in the early Eighties after two decades of marriage, and she lives in West London. 'Some of the things he said you cannot believe I couldn't believe them for 20 years,' she has said. Some people saw a lonely bitterness about Irving's eyes long before the publishing world sent him to Coventry, a sourness with his lot which belies the almost boyish pleasure he seems to take, even in defeat, from being at the centre of a global argument. If bitterness is at the heart of his writings, what could have caused it? In the eyes of most other men, he has everything. Tall and distinguished, he had a good education and has a fine brain. Women were never a problem. An absentee father? Perhaps, but those were war years when most children's fathers were absent too although for very different reasons. A realisation that he would never be as bright as his brother, John, the PhD? This is warmer water, especially as after Imperial College he tried to enlist in the RAF but failed his medical. That was when he went to the Ruhr, and fell in love with Germany. But it was not the modernising Germany of then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer but the brutal Third Reich that became his spiritual homeland. And yet, certain seeds appear to have been sown much earlier when he won a school prize, he chose Hitler's Mein Kampf. He says he wasn't interested in it but simply wanted to shock. The tragedy is that he could have been a brilliant historian. He chose instead to do what he did as a boy to shock. Reading Hitler is one thing. Revising him is something else. But in Irving's final defeat, let us be as charitable to him as he has been to Hitler, and say he simply made an error of judgment. g.levy@dailymail.co.uk ===
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