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Change Your Life! |
Judge rules against controversial historian David Irving |
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April 12, 2000
LONDON, APR 11 (AP) - Historian David Irving, who has outraged survivors of Nazi death camps by challenging the scope of the Holocaust, on Tuesday lost the libel suit he launched to save his academic reputation.
The verdict, delivered at the start of a lengthy judgment was greeted in near-silence in the High Court, packed with Holocaust survivors and others who have closely followed the no-jury trial.
Judge Charles Gray said American scholar Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, were justified in publishing a 1994 book Irving said branded him a "Holocaust denier" and accused him of distorting the truth of what happened in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.
"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," he added.
Irving, the author of several books, including "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.
After considering the case for almost four weeks,Judge Charles Gray ruled against Irving, saying he failet Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, contended during the trial that Irving perpetuated falsifications "for the sake of a bogus rehabilitation of Hitler and dissemination of virulent anti-Semitic propaganda."
Irving portrayed himself as subjected to a campaign of vilification. Throughout the trial, Irving conceded that 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.
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