Irving says Holocaust ‘logistically impossible’

The Times
London, Thursday, January 13, 2000

THE main plank of David Irving’s case rests on Deborah Lipstadt’s claim that he is a “Holocaust denier”. Mr Irving says that he has never claimed that the Holocaust did not take place, although he has questioned the number of Jewish dead and the system by which the victims were killed (Tim Reid writes).

Unlike most libel trials, this case is not being heard by a jury but by a sole judge: Mr Justice Gray, one of the most senior High Court libel judges. Under the civil procedure rules, the judge in charge of a case has the power to dispense with a jury if the case’s length and the volume and complexity of evidence appear to be too onerous for a jury.

THE libel case was triggered in 1995 when Deborah Lipstadt published

Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory

. The book grew from her concern about the worldwide proliferation of claims that there was no systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. The book is the first full-length study of the history of those who attempt to deny the Holocaust.

THE Hitler historian, David Irving, denied yesterday that the Nazis killed millions of Jews in concentration-camp gas chambers. The SS may have had gassing experiments, he said, but such mass murder was logistically impossible.

Pressed on his own definition of the Holocaust, he said that although tragedy befell the Jews “it was the whole of the Second World War and the people who died were not just Jews but Gypsies and homosexuals, the people of Coventry and the people of Hiroshima”. Asked how many innocent Jewish people he thought the Germans had killed deliberately, Mr Irving brought up the name of

, who died of disease in a camp at the age of 15. “She was a Jew who died in the Holocaust and she wasn’t murdered unless you take it in the broadest sense.”

“I sometimes think if sailors and soldiers who stormed the Normandy beaches could see what has happened since, they wouldn’t have got 50 yards up the beach. They would have given up in disgust.” He said that he paid no attention to Professor Lipstadt’s book until 1996 – three years after it was published – when his own new work, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, was being marketed. He found that bookshops began to show an aversion and refused to stock his work.

Pressed on his own definition of the Holocaust, he said that although tragedy befell the Jews “it was the whole of the Second World War and the people who died were not just Jews but Gypsies and homosexuals, the people of Coventry and the people of Hiroshima”.

Asked how many innocent Jewish people he thought the Germans had killed deliberately, Mr Irving brought up the name of Anne Frank, who died of disease in a camp at the age of 15. “She was a Jew who died in the Holocaust and she wasn’t murdered unless you take it in the broadest sense.”