David Irving vs Penguin and Lipstadt

International Campaign for Real History since 1991

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In April 2000 Mr Justice Gray delivered his unfavorable judgment in the action brought by David against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books. In June 2001 Mr Irving applied for permission to appeal, having assembled a formidable document book supporting his arguments that the Judgment was flawed. Permission to appeal was however denied. We reproduce some of the dossiers here.
auf dem Altmarkt
SO MANY innocents were killed in the 1945 British air raid on Dresden that the German authorities had to cremate the bodies on mass funeral pyres on the Altmarkt. Mr Irving was the first to publish these photographs in the west. When he produced one of them, enlarged to poster size, in Court, Defence Counsel Richard Rampton sneered, "So what!"
MR RAMPTON: Can we forget Dresden for the moment, Mr Irving?
MR. IRVING: I can never forget Dresden.
[Transcript, Day 7 January 20, 2000, page 170]
Index
The Dresden death-roll
[under construction]
[ The defence witness Evans made the bald and untrue allegation that Mr Irving's figure for the Dresden casualty figures was based on a document, i.e. "Tagesbefehl No.47", that Mr Irving knew to be a forgery.
There is no evidence of this in any edition of The Destruction of Dresden; in fact he gave a wide range of possible casualties, and selected as the best on the available evidence the 135,000 figure that was suggested to him in writing by Hanns Voigt, who headed the Deathroll Division of the bureau of missing persons after the Dresden air raid and who lived in West Germany as a schoolteacher in the 1960s. When other documents became available, after the book appeared, Mr Irving was the first to publish them in a letter to The Times. The notorious Tagesbefehl No. 47 on which Evans and the Court lingered for so long played no part whatever in the assessment of the death roll, as readers of the book know. ]
Extract from Friedrich Reichert: Verbrannt bis zur Unkenntlichkeit (DZA Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, published by Landeshauptstadt Dresden, November 1994): [Significance: An April 1945 document reveals that 30 hundredweight (15 tons) of clothing had been removed from the Dresden air raid victims before burial -- obviously this would have been only those killed outright e.g. by blast or carbon-monoxide poisoning, and not those thousands burned to ashes.]
Were civilians strafed from the air? A book says they weren't -- but a reader writes that his father died from machine-gunning.
Correspondence between David Irving and Dr max Funfack, chief medical officer in Dresden at the time of the air raids, 1965.
Help David Irving defend his career and reputation. It is a red-hot problem. Find out aboutto his fighting fund.