The History-making
Irving Trial

History of the Holocaust goes on trial

Neil Tweedie reports

Auschwitz: Irving argued that Hitler did not know of such death camps until 1943 and he offered a cash reward ot anyone who could link the Führer to genocide.

The historian 'Claims are like being called a paedophile'

THE British historian David Irving told the High Court yesterday that being described as a "Holocaust denier" was "like being called a wife-beater or a paedophile".

Mr Irving, who is conducting his own defence in his libel case against Deborah Lipstadt, an American author, claimed that he had been the victim of an "organised international endeavour" to destroy his career.

Miss Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, claims Mr Irving is one of the most prominent and dangerous "Holocaust deniers" in the world.

In his opening address, Mr Irving told Mr Justice Gray, who is sitting without a jury, that far from being a "Holocaust denier", he had repeatedly brought attention to major aspects of the Holocaust through his discovery of fresh documents from the Second World War.

He had been the victim of a concerted attack on his character and work by an international network of Left-wingers and Jews who had succeeded in making him a "pariah". Mr Irving said it was not his intention in bringing the case to reopen the debate over the Holocaust. He had sued Miss Lipstadt because she had accused him of "manipulation and distortion", something he vehemently denied.

He said: "By virtue of the activities of the defendants and those who funded her and guided her hand, I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach . . .

"The defendants did not act alone in their determination to destroy my career, and to vandalise my legitimacy as a historian. They were part of an organised international endeavour at achieving precisely that."

"Holocaust denier" was, said Mr Irving, a particularly evil phrase because no one could deny what had happened in the war. Dissident historians were merely quibbling about dates, scale and other "minutiae".

He said: "It is like being called a wife-beater or a paedophile. It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star [of David]."

He denied he was anti-Semitic, citing his friendship with Jewish people from his schooldays. He said he numbered the publisher George Weidenfeld among his friends.

Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, said Miss Lipstadt and Penguin Books were part of "an organised international endeavour" determined to destroy his career and "vandalise" his legitimacy as a historian.

He said that he had always looked on his books as his pension fund and a legacy for his four children, but that was no longer the situation. Because of "the nature of the odium that has been generated by the waves of hatred recklessly propagated against me by the defendants" his 'pension' had vanished "as assuredly as if I had been employed by one of those companies taken over by the late Mr Robert Maxwell".

Mr Irving claims Miss Lipstadt's book alleges that he has denied the Holocaust, has distorted statistics and documents to serve his own ideological purposes and to reach historically untenable conclusions, and that he has knowingly consorted with extremists.

Penguin and Miss Lipstadt, holder of the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, deny libel and plead justification. They claim that Mr Irving has denied both the Holocaust and that gas chambers were used to carry it out, and that he holds extremist views and distorts history.

Mr Irving said that he had never held himself out to be a Holocaust expert and had not written books about it. If he was an expert on anything it was the role that Hitler played in the war. "As a peripheral matter to that topic, on which I have written a number of books, I inevitably investigated the extent to which Hitler participated in or had cognisance of the Holocaust. That was the sum total of my involvement as a book author up to the launching of these writs."

He said that he intended to show that "far from being a Holocaust denier" he had repeatedly drawn attention to major aspects of the Holocaust, had described them, and had "selflessly" provided historical documents both to scholars and the general public of which they had been previously unaware.

"I submit that, harsh though it may seem, the court should take no interest in that tragedy [the Holocaust]." What was at stake was not what happened in Poland or Russia 50 years ago, but over the last 32 years "on my writing desk in my apartment off Grosvenor Square".

He said that to justify her allegations it was not enough for Miss Lipstadt to show that he had misrepresented what happened but that he knew what happened and "perversely and deliberately" portrayed it differently.

Mr Irving said that he once earned more than £100,000 a year in royalties but had been done "very real pecuniary damage" by the defendants. He said Denying the Holocaust purported to be "a scholarly investigation of the operations of an international network conspiracy of people whom the second defendant (Miss Lipstadt) has dubbed 'Holocaust deniers'. It is not."

Holocaust deniers "has become one of the most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult, replacing the N-word, the F-word, and a whole alphabet of other slurs . . ." Mr Irving said. The judge would undoubtedly hear from the defendants, he said, that he was fined a very substantial sum of money by the German Government. .

"It is no matter for shame for me, although it has had catastrophic consequences, as it now makes me de facto 'a convict', with a criminal record and as such liable to a concatenation of further indignities and sanctions in every foreign country which I now wish to visit." It arose from a remark made during an address he made to an audience in Munich in 1990 - "We now know that the gas chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz is a fake built by the Poles after the war, just like the one established by the Americans at Dachau."

Mr Irving said: "This may well raise eyebrows. It might be found to be offensive by sections of the community and if they take such offence, I can assure this court that I regret it and that such was not my intention. The fact remains that these remarks were true; the Poles admitted it in January 1995 and under English law truth has always been regarded as an absolute defence."

The hearing continues.

Irving: provocative chronicler of the Third Reich	Lipstadt: claims Mr. Irving is a 'Holocaust denier'

DAVID IRVING was always a provocative chronicler of the Third Reich but his maverick interpretation of its workings took on an even more controversial - some would say sinister - aspect with the publication in 1977 of his book Hitler's War.

In the work he alleged that Hitler had not known of the Final Solution - the systematic extermination of European Jews - until 1943. The Führer, he claimed, had ordered that there was to be no liquidation of the Jews.

He responded to criticism from other historians by offering a cash reward to anyone who could find a document linking Hitler to the genocide. It was a contention that was to place Mr Irving, now 62 and the father of four children, beyond the boundaries of serious historical research in the eyes of many of his contemporaries.

In May 1992 he was fined a "substantial amount" by the German authorities after being found guilty of breaking laws that prohibit the denial of the existence of the Holocaust. Mr Irving's early works on the saturation bombing of Dresden and the circumstances surrounding the destruction of convoy PQ17 had earned him respect.

The son of a Royal Navy officer who served in both world wars, Mr Irving was educated at a minor public school in Essex and London University. He did not complete his course, opting to spend a year as a steel worker in the Ruhr, where he perfected his German.

From the mid Eighties he was increasingly associated with far-Right groups, regularly addressing meetings in Germany and Austria. His audiences readily consumed his revisionist theories, which included the belief that Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, was the true architect of the extermination programme. His increasing isolation from the academic and publishing mainstream provided the spur for his libel action.