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Real History and Censorship by its Traditional Enemies The index to this Lipstadtscandal your Deborah Lipstadt index your Lipstadt Trial index [images and captions added by this website] TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT July 5, 2005 History on trial Reporter: Tony Jones [ Introduction ] TONY JONES: With us now is the academic and historian, Deborah Lipstadt , the author of History on Trial. Thanks for joining us.

It seems to be the strangest thing of this case is that it was brought in the first place, the very basis of it that David Irving would actually claim that you had defamed him by calling him a Holocaust denier when that’s what he was actually most famous for. DEBORAH LIPSTADT: That’s right. It’s very strange.

It is strange because much of what we know about him now, in terms of his denial, in terms of his racism, in terms of his anti-semitism, we’d never have known had he not brought the case against me. I never would have sued him – I had no grounds – but I don’t believe in suing people for their historical views, even if those views are complete bonkers. His are. He came after me knowing full well that – he should have known full well that we would expose him as the liar that he is.

TONY JONES: He had been denying it from 1988, I think. He said there was no overall right policy to kill Jews. There were no documents whatsoever to show that the Holocaust had ever happened. Hitler was the best friend the Jews had ever had. DEBORAH LIPSTADT: Outrageous statements, but no-one had ever challenged him, no-one had ever tracked his footnotes. That’s not what historians do.

Historians generally try to find new information to uncover dark places that we don’t know about to shed light on unknown events in history. They don’t go over and look at someone who is clearly lying and say, “Let me show you how he is lying.” He forced us to do that. TONY JONES: Bearing that in mind, Irving defended himself here and in his opening statement to the court he promised to prove that the gas chambers in Auschwitz were nothing but fakes built by Poles after the World War 2.

He obviously was setting out to prove a point and that point was denial. DEBORAH LIPSTADT: The point was denial. There were such inconsistencies. At one point he was arguing, “I don’t deny”, but then he’s pointing out and trying to set out to prove denial. I think what he was doing is show to someone – let’s say a parent brings a child into the emergency room and the child is completely beaten up and someone says, “Who did this?” and the parent said, “I did.” They say, “That’s child abuse.”

The parent says, “No, that’s discipline.” He’s trying to reinvent, redefine and then say, “I don’t do it.” It doesn’t have a logical consistency. He should have realised this before. We were able to prove that and point it out over and over in the courtroom. TONY JONES: Let’s go through a little bit of what he tried to base his case on.

When it came to Auschwitz, he relied very heavily on the committed Holocaust denier, a man called Fred Leuchter , who claims to have gone to Auschwitz , gone to the gas chambers, chiselled out little pieces of concrete, put them into his underwear and took them