Historian lied about Holocaust, libel trial told

Daily Telegraph
London, Wednesday, January 12, 2000

THE controversial British historian David Irving claimed he was the victim of an “organised international endeavour” to destroy his career at the opening of a libel trial in London yesterday.

The case is likely to prove one of the most emotive seen in an English libel court in recent years, taking one of the greatest human tragedies of the 20th century as its subject matter. Journalists from Israel, Germany and America crowded into the High Court for the beginning of the trial, which opened with vitriolic attacks from both sides.

“Lies may take various forms . . . but in the end all forms of lying converge into a single definition: wilful, deliberate misstatement of the facts. Mr Irving has used many different means to falsify history: invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion, manipulation and – not least – mistranslation.”