⚠️ Historical Documentation Notice
This document is part of a historical archive and is presented for scholarly research and educational purposes.
The content reflects historical perspectives and should be understood within its historical context.
Real History, and David Irving’s imprisonment in Vienna The Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech Alphabetical index (text) London, February 28, 2006 No point arguing with deluded minds Gillian Reynolds on radio YOU know when your mother made you a special dinner and you didn’t eat all of it? Remember how guilty you felt.
That was me on Sunday evening, listening to a special programme put on by Radio 4 in response to one of last week’s big news stories. The story was David Irving ‘s three-year jail sentence by an Austrian court for holocaust denial . The sentence was passed on Monday and the news sequences and phone-ins that day and thereafter gave it a lot of attention. Radio 5 Live buzzed with it.
David Irving comments: MISS Reynolds reports, in her penultimate paragraph, “This newspaper [The Daily Telegraph], I seem to remember, took the decision not to describe [David Irving] as a “historian” some years ago.” Yes, so much for objectivity. It was at the time of the Rolf Hochhuth controversy, in 1967. (That dates ya, Gillian!).
Maurice Green , their managing editor, had just assured me in a private letter that they were evenhanded as between the warring parties, when Private Eye discovered and gleefully reported that the newspaper’s house style-book instructed, ” David Irving, in the Hochhuth controversy, is not to be referred to as ‘the historian’, but as a writer .”
I wrote at once to Green that I cared not what term they used to describe me, my books would speak for themselves; they might call me a council dustman if they liked. He made a very clever reply, so clever that I have long since forgotten it. The World at One carried a reactive interview with Deborah Lipstadt , the American author sued in 2000 by Irving for libel. In a book first published in America and then in the UK, she had called him a holocaust denier , a falsifier of history.
He had lost that case, too. On The World at One last week, she said the Austrian sentence risks turning Irving into a martyr. Michael Cockerell made a documentary after the Lipstadt trial , telling its inside story, with rare testimony from those involved, including the judge, the defence counsel, Lipstadt, who did not take the stand, and Irving, who represented himself. This updated version, from the independent producer Bruce Hyman , who also happens to be a practising barrister, went