AAARGH
LONDON (AP) -- Historian David Irving, who has outraged survivors of Nazi death camps by challenging the scope of the Holocaust, today lost the libel suit that he launched to save his academic reputation.
Irving sued American scholar Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, in Britain's High Court. He said their 1994 book branded him a "Holocaust denier"and accused him of distorting the truth of what happened in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.
The verdict was greeted in near-silence by a courtroom packed with Holocaust survivors and others.
"The decision proves that David Irving is a falsifier of history,"said Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. "Although the Holocaust itself was not an issue at the trial, we welcome the fact that attempts to manipulate the truth about the tragic events of that time have been shown to be baseless."
Irving, whose books include Hitler's War, said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths.
He claimed that after the publication of Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, his academic work was increasingly shunned by publishers and agents.
Under British law, Lipstadt and Penguin were not able to rely solely on truth as a defense. But Judge Charles Gray said Irving failed to prove his reputation had been damaged and called him "anti-Semitic and racist."
"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence,"the judge said.
"He has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews," he said.
Jewish groups expressed relief at the verdict against Irving, 62.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based movement dedicated to victims of the Nazis, hailed the verdict as a "victory of history over hate."
"David Irving's career as a historian is over," the center said in a statement. "Today's decision definitely places Irving where he belongs -- not as a historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history."
Shortly before the ruling, Irving said that whatever the outcome "my reputation is bound to be enhanced because of my ability to stand up to the experts ... to take them all on single-handed."
He said he will not appeal. He faces legal costs of $3.2 million for Lipstadt and Penguin's lawyers, Britain's Press Association news agency said.
Irving, who represented himself during the nine-week, nonjury trial, is not new to controversy. His comments -- some made while addressing neo-Nazi groups -- have drawn fire from Jewish organizations around the world, and he has been banned from Germany, Canada and Australia.
Irving told the court he had been the victim of a 30-year international campaign to destroy his reputation "as a human being, as an historian of integrity."
Richard Rampton, the lawyer representing Penguin and Lipstadt, who holds the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said during the trial that Irving perpetuated falsifications "for the sake of a bogus rehabilitation of Hitler and dissemination of virulent anti-Semitic propaganda."
Irving conceded he had made some "mistakes of copying, mistakes of omission," but said he corrected those errors. He claimed that rather than deny the Holocaust, he drew attention to major aspects of the tragedy.
Irving questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted. He said most Jews who died at Auschwitz did so from diseases such as typhus, not gas poisoning.
In a sign of the international outrage directed at Irving, Israel even agreed to release the previously secret memoirs of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for use by Lipstadt and Penguin's legal team, saying it was morally obliged to help them.
In the 1,300 handwritten pages
penned in an Israeli prison, Eichmann plays down his own role
in the mass killing but also provides methodical descriptions
of the genocide, including timetables of death transports.
LONDON (AP) -- A judge branded historian David Irving as an anti-Semite racist and an apologist for Hitler in a strongly worded decision Tuesday, ruling that an American scholar was justified in calling him a Holocaust denier.
Jewish groups hailed the verdict against Irving, who sued Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, over a 1994 book that he said damaged his academic reputation and accused him of playing down the horrors of the Holocaust.
``I had argued that David Irving was partisan and an apologist for the Nazis and anti-Semitic,'' Lipstadt said after the verdict. ``The judge went further than I did in his ruling -- and called him a racist.''
Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, issued a statement saying the judge sent a message to the world ``that the arguments used by Irving and others to deny and diminish the events of the Holocaust are not within the realm of acceptable or reasonable discourse.''
In his two-hour judgment delivered to a packed courtroom, High Court Judge Charles Gray found that Irving ``misrepresented and distorted'' historical evidence and that he is ``anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.''
``Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated'' history to paint Adolf Hitler in a favorable light, the judge said.
Irving, the author of nearly 30 books, including ``Hitler's War,'' said he does not deny that Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. He called Tuesday's ruling ``perverse'' and said he would seek to appeal.
The 62-year-old Briton represented himself during the nine-week, nonjury hearing, but as the loser must pay the huge legal costs, estimated at $3.2 million, for Lipstadt and her publishers.
Irving, who has been banned from Germany, Canada and Australia, maintained during the trial that he had been the victim of a 30-year international campaign to destroy his reputation.
He claimed that after publication of Lipstadt's book, ``Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,'' his academic work was increasingly shunned by publishers and agents.
Under British libel law, Lipstadt and Penguin had to prove not only that Irving distorted the historical record, but that the distortion was deliberate.
Lipstadt, who holds the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, briefly hugged supporters after the verdict.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak sent his congratulations to Lipstadt ``in the name of Israel and the entire Jewish people.''
``Her struggle and victory is the victory of the free world against the forces of darkness that would wish to obliterate from memory the (depths) humanity reached,'' he said in a statement.
In an interview with Sky TV on Tuesday, Irving denied being a racist and repeated his claim that Jewish deaths during the Holocaust have been exaggerated. Gassings of Jews occurred, he said, ``but on nothing like the scale that's talked about now.''
And shortly before the verdict, Irving said he had reviewed some of his theories during the trial, but his basic position remained that ``the Holocaust has been grossly inflated and there has been a hell of a lot of lying by the eyewitnesses.''
Jewish groups expressed relief at the judge's ruling.
``Today's decision definitely places Irving where he belongs -- not as a historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history,'' said the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based movement dedicated to victims of the Nazis.
``Here is a man who carried out a serious attempt to debunk the Holocaust,'' said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center's founder. ``But it is not the Holocaust that has been debunked, it is David Irving himself.''
During the trial, Israel gave Lipstadt and Penguin's lawyers the previously secret memoirs of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, which contained methodical descriptions of the genocide, including timetables of death transports.
``It is a victory
for 6 million voices that cannot speak for themselves,'' said Rabbi Jonathan Romain, son of a
Holocaust survivor and a spokesman for Reform Synagogues in Britain.
``It is a
defeat for the Holocaust denial industry and the bigotry that
lies behind it.''
LONDON, April 11 -- He sought to present himself as a legitimate historian with contrarian views on the Holocaust. But the British writer David Irving lost a libel case today when a judge declared that he was in fact an "active Holocaust denier."
The case has been closely watched by people alarmed at the rising tide of Hitler apologists and neo-Nazis who say there was no Nazi program to put the Jews of Europe to death, or who argue that the scale of the Holocaust has been greatly overstated.
At issue were a number of assertions in "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," a book first published in 1993 in the United States by Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta.
In the book, Ms. Lipstadt wrote that Mr. Irving, now 62, was "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial" and said that "he is at his most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to conform to his conclusions."
Holocaust denial is not a crime in Britain, as it is in Germany. But Mr. Irving, the author of more than 30 books on World War II and the Holocaust, some of which historians have praised, sued Ms. Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, saying that the book had severely damaged his reputation as a historian.
He brought the suit here because British libel law puts the burden on the defendants -- in this case, Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin -- to prove the truth of their assertions.
The judge, Charles Gray of the British high court, handed a resounding victory to Ms. Lipstadt. In a scathing ruling notable for its stern wording, he declared that Mr. Irving was a racist Holocaust denier who deliberately distorted historical evidence in order to cast Hitler in a favorable light. Mr. Irving's treatment of history, he said, was often "perverse and egregious."
Under British law, Mr. Irving, who represented himself at the trial, is responsible for paying the costs incurred by Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin. Lawyers for Ms. Lipstadt said the costs were likely to exceed $3 million. Mr. Irving said he would seek permission to appeal.
Commenting on the rulingduring a trip to Washington, Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel said: "The strength of Israel today ensures that today no second Holocaust will take place, and no one in the world will dare rise against the Jewish nation. But in parallel, a determined struggle is going on against the people who deny the Holocaust that brought the death of a third of our nation."
In the early years of his career, Mr. Irving wrote a number of admired books, notably "Hitler's War" (1977), and Justice Gray today praised his dogged use of primary sources and said that "as a military historian, Mr. Irving has much to commend him."
But in recent years, Mr. Irving's views have become more and more extreme and he has been linked with right-wing groups and neo-Nazis.
In 1992 he was fined and banned from Germany after he was convicted under the German law that makes Holocaust denial a crime. He has also been refused entry to Canada, Italy, Austria and Australia.
Among other things, Mr. Irving has said that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were not used to kill people -- Jews who died there suffered from typhus and other diseases, he argues -- and that Hitler neither ordered nor approved the Nazis' plans to systematically put Europe's Jews to death. In fact, he has argued, Hitler did not know about the mass killings until at least 1943.
And while Mr. Irving has acknowledged that many Jews died during World War II, he has also said it was logistically impossible for the number to have been in the millions.
In 1996 St. Martin's Press withdrew his biography of the Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, which contends that Goebbels, not Hitler, was behind the murder of the Jews.
In the trial, Mr. Irving used the withdrawal as evidence that Ms. Lipstadt's book had fanned the flames of an "organized international endeavor" to destroy his career.
To prove the merit of Ms. Lipstadt's statements about Mr. Irving, her lawyers presented testimony from a number of Holocaust historians who picked apart many of Mr. Irving's conclusions, showing them to be based on deliberate distortions and selective use of facts.
In his denunciation of Mr. Irving's credibility, Justice Gray said, in essence, that Mr. Irving had no case. The judge refuted his argument that any misrepresentations he might have made were inadvertent.
"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence," the judge said. "For the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, particularly in relation to his attitude toward and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews." Mr. Irving, he concluded, is "an active Holocaust denier" and anti-Semite who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."
After the ruling, a jubilant Ms. Lipstadt, 53, said Mr. Irving had been "hoist on his own petard," with his own evidence, and exposed as a liar.
"This was not about versions of the truth," she said. "This wasn't about a historian with a controversial view of history. This was about a man who claims to be a historian making up, distorting, perverting, manipulating."
Mr. Irving, who was splattered with a raw egg by a protester as he went to court this morning, so that he sat through the judge's ruling in his shirtsleeves and vest, slipped out a back door after the decision and did not speak to reporters. But he told the Press Association in an interview in his apartment in Mayfair that he found the ruling "perverse" and "historically incredible."
He accused Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin of enlisting the help of "the leaders of the Jewish communities around the world" in an orchestrated effort to discredit him. "Their method was to pour a bucket of slime over me and say, 'Look, he's covered in slime,' " he said.
"I am not at all anti-Semitic," he added. "It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of the Jews."
Anthony Julius, a lawyer for Ms. Lipstadt, said the case was not about whether the Holocaust took place, but whether there was any evidence to support Mr. Irving's views.
"We put the focus on his writing and proved that it wasn't up to standard," he said. "It's important to secure definitive rulings against Holocaust deniers, to send them back into the anti-Semitic ghetto from which they came."
In a statement, Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the dean and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, called the ruling a "victory of history over hate" and said it put an end to Mr. Irving's career.
"Today's decision definitively places Irving where he belongs -- not as an historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history," the rabbis said. "Irving tried to manipulate the British legal system in order to put the victims murdered in the gas chambers on trial; instead, the net result is that he will be relegated to the garbage heap of history's haters."
'Racist' Historian Irving Has No Regrets
LONDON (Reuters) - British historian David Irving, branded by a judge as a racist anti-Semite with neo-Nazi sympathies, insisted on Wednesday he did not regret his libel action against an American professor and her publishers.
``I have no regrets. It's been the most exhausting phase of my life but I put up a good fight,'' Irving told the Times newspaper, describing the eight-week case which ended in his humiliating failure on Tuesday.
``They wanted a scrap, so I gave them one,'' he said of his opponents Professor Deborah Lipstadt, of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her publishers Penguin Books.
The judge ruled that Lipstadt was justified in branding Irving a ``Holocaust denier'' and an associate of right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.
Irving now faces a ruinous two million pound ($3.17 million) legal bill.
Penguin, owned by Pearson Plc, said on Tuesday it would ''resolutely pursue the costs'' incurred in their defense. But Irving later said in a television interview he simply did not have the money.
He told the Times: ``I have no doubt (the defendants) would drive me to bankruptcy.''
But he dismissed any idea that he would be silenced by the verdict.
``I will still continue to write what I find to be true history. I can't be intimidated,'' Irving told Sky television hours after he lost the case.
Flying in the face of all the evidence, Irving maintains that Adolf Hitler did not mastermind the mass slaughter of Jews and that the Nazi death camp Auschwitz was no more than a ''Disneyland for tourists'' built after World War Two.
In a damning verdict, Judge Charles Gray on Tuesday condemned Irving as ``an active Holocaust denier...anti-Semitic and racist.''
``Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions and sometimes in the most offensive terms,'' Gray told a packed courtroom.
``The charges which I have found substantially true include the charges that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.''
Lipstadt said after the ruling that the historian had ''danced on the graves'' of those who perished in the Holocaust.
In tears, she told a news conference: ``It was evil.''
British media almost unanimously pilloried Irving.
The Sun, Britain's best-selling tabloid newspaper, said Irving had no place in a civilized society. ``Irving is a disgrace to Britain,'' it screamed from its editorial page.
The Times called Irving ``an intellectual bruiser'' and said his rout in the libel case was a fitter punishment than the bans on Holocaust deniers in some countries including Germany.
``A British court has produced a more sophisticated and effective cross-examination of the Holocaust denial than a ban could ever provide,'' its comment page said.
Irving hit back, saying the judgement was ``perverse.'' He vowed to appeal, although it was unclear where he would find the money required to do so.
``There are any number of grounds for appeal,'' he told Reuters on Tuesday. ``I have no doubt that the Court of Appeal will hear the appeal on grounds of public interest.''
Lipstadt said the ruling signaled ``a great day'' for authors and publishers. But she said the victory was tainted with sadness that victims of the Holocaust had had to listen to Irving's perverted and distorted view of history.
``There were moments that were disgusting, just disgusting,'' she said.
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