Judgment day for the Holocaust historians

Sunday Times
London, Sunday, January 9, 2000

David Irving will be at the centre of a marathon legal clash in the High Court over the issue of ‘Holocaust denial’, writes David Cesarani

battle looming in the High Court

between David Irving, the most controversial of Britain’s historians, and Deborah Lipstadt, an American expert on the Holocaust and anti-semitism, promises to be one of the most gripping of modern times.

If the clash between Neil Hamilton and Mohamed al-Fayed provided onlookers with scenes worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan, the action for defamation brought by Irving against Lipstadt and Penguin Books this Tuesday will be more reminiscent of trench warfare.

Lipstadt sought to demonstrate the links between this denial of the Holocaust and the activity of white supremacists in America and neo-Nazis in Europe. It was, she argued, not just a distortion of history that pained the Jews, but also part of a global effort to rehabilitate Nazism and, hence, a threat to liberty itself.

, his 1977 book, took him into a different realm of controversy when he alleged that Hitler had not known about the mass murder of Europe’s Jews until 1943. According to Irving, “the incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered that there was to be ‘no liquidation’ of the Jews.”

It was probably a combination of these developments that prompted Irving to sue Lipstadt. The label of “Holocaust denier” that hung around his neck was strangling him.

Margarette Driscoll

Hitler’s War, his 1977 book, took him into a different realm of controversy when he alleged that Hitler had not known about the mass murder of Europe’s Jews until 1943. According to Irving, “the incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered that there was to be ‘no liquidation’ of the Jews.”