Penguin to Publish Irving Judgement

[Penguin contact Nellie Flexner]

Penguin will be publishing the judge's summary from the libel action brought by David Irving against Penguin and the author Deborah Lipstadt. The 250-page paperback will be available at £7.99 on 3 August.

On 11 April 2000, David Irving lost his libel action against Penguin and Lipstadt. He had claimed that passages in Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust, published by Penguin in 1994, wrongly accused him of being a Holocaust denier, who distorts, manipulates, and falsifies history for his own ideological purposes.

In a 330-page judgement Mr Justice Gray said that Irving's falsification of the historical record was 'deliberate' and that it was 'incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a holocaust denier.'

The full text of the judgement examines Irving's historiography and Irving's analysis of Hitler's attitude towards the extermination of the Jews, Auschwitz, and the bombing of Dresden. It also demonstrates that Irving is an anti-semite and a racist with associations with right-wing extremists.

Editorial Director Simon Winder says, 'This is a judgement of major historical and legal importance and by publishing it we wish to bring it to the widest possible readership.'

The Irving Judgement will be published in Penguin paperback on 3 August, price £7.99, ISBN 0140 298991 For more information please contact Nellie Flexner on 0207 416 3156

We are indebted to Canadian resident Hilary Ostrov for posting an edited text of the above on the Internet. Original press release: Magic link (because a normal link does not enable you to return to our website).

Website fact: The stamina of the defence team in the Lipstadt libel action was aided by a six million dollar slushfund provided by Steven Spielberg, Edgar J Bronfman, and the American Jewish Committee, which enabled them to pay 21 lawyers and "experts". A million pound lollipop was figuratively brandished from the defence lawyers' table throughout the trial, and all those who behaved got a lick at it; their experts like the "scholars" Prof. Evans, Prof. Longerich and others were paid up to £125,000 each (on top of the academic salaries they continued to draw) to testify as they did. Nobody was paying for Mr Irving. His defence witnesses testified without payment, from conviction. [Help!]