AAARGH
It was, said the Simon Wiesenthal centre yesterday, "a victory for history over hate." It was also a victory for the historians who had left their seminar rooms and lined up with the defendant, Deborah Lipstadt, in court to attempt to destroy David Irving's reputation as a historian.
Mr Justice Gray, in his devastating judgment, said the issue had been Irving's treatment of the available evidence. "It is no part of my function to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime," he said. "The distinction may be a fine one but it is important to bear it in mind."
"This wasn't a trial about what happened in the second world war, it was a trial about Irving's methodology," said Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge university, who gave evidence on behalf of Ms Lipstadt. "A serious historian has to take account of all the evidence. Irving does not do this; he fabricates."
Mr Evans, who spent six days in the witness box, said the experience had left him with a high opinion of the legal process. "We had limitless time in court. The trial lasted for three months and there was a chance to thrash everything out. The historians acquitted themselves well under the most offensive cross-examination from Irving. It is important for historians to say we can be objective."
David Cesarani, professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton university, said Mr Evans's report had destroyed Irving's reputation as a historian: "The defence showed that Irving massaged documents and that was crucial.
"Irving disputes the definition of the term Holocaust. He uses it to refer to all the civilians who were killed in the war, including Jews. He denies Hitler engineered the slaughter and that it was systematic; his view defies reason. [Note de l'AAARGH: This Cesarani probably did not read the Van Pelt's report stating that Auschwitz [is] a moral certainty. Since when has 'moral certainty' anything to do with reason ?]
"Holocaust denial is not just about the past; it's about now and it's about the future. It's about rehabilitating Nazism. It might appear academic for us, but in parts of Europe it's a vital issue."
David Cesarani said it was important for historians to take part in public debates, but had doubts about translating historical argument to a court of law.
"Evidence in history is not like evidence in court," he said. "Much of the discussion in the case hinged on the word Vernichtung - annihilation: but does it mean physical annihilation or removal?
"In a court of law, context and circumstance are the least important evidence; they may be deemed inadmissible, not real evidence. The court wants physical evidence, a fingerprint that no one can argue with, but in history context and circumstance matter a great deal."
The "fingerprint" in this case was Irving's massaging of the sources; only by concentrating on his methodology could the case be contained.
He was exposed as, in the words of Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, "a falsifier of history". The corollary is that his revisionist history of the Third Reich also collapses.
Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners, said it was ridiculous that Irving's views had ever been taken seriously. "The Holocaust is an established historical fact," he said. "That the deniers and their fellow travellers have gotten a discussion going at all is absurd; denying the Holocaust is like denying that there was slavery in the US or that the second world war happened at all." [Note de l'AAARGH: Goldhagen is the latest defensor of the racist theory that Germans are antiSemites by nature and nothing can be done against this fact. He has and is still very much criticizedby his coreligioners for this view.]
Mr Goldhagen is sceptical of the interplay between history and the legal process: "The ruling of a court has no bearing on historical fact: the court is a place where legal issues are adjudicated according to the particular legal standards of a given country, not where historical issues are decided according to the different and well-established standards of historical scholarship."
But as Steve Paulsson, senior historian for the Imperial War Museum's forthcoming Holocaust exhibition, argues, the Holocaust was not on trial: "The Holocaust was a reality. Holocaust deniers focus on the trees rather than the forest. It is a fact, based on demographic evidence, that 5m-6m Jews died.
For Irving, it appears that the war continues. But the world of real history has moved on.
In an emphatic and damning 334-page judgment Mr Justice Gray branded
David Irving a racist anti-semite who for "his own ideological
reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated
historical evidence".
He said Irving was "an active Holocaust denier" who associated with neo-Nazi extremists. The 62-year-old historian's ideological views led him to portray Hitler "in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews".
He ruled that the defence of justification by the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, had succeeded.
The judge said the central issue was Irving's treatment of the available evidence: "It is no part of my function to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime. The distinction may be a fine one but it is important to bear it in mind."
Offering a grain of comfort to Irving, he said: "My assessment is that, as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military history Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the archives.
"He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years.
"It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating crossexamination that his knowledge of world war two is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent.
"But the questions to which this action has given rise do not relate to the quality of Irving's military history but rather to the manner in which he has written about the attitude adopted by Hitler towards the Jews and in particular his responsibility for the fate which befell them under the Nazi regime."
Overall, he said, Irving had "treated the historical evidence in a manner which fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian".
The judge said the respondents had selected 19 instances where they contended Irving had in one way or another distorted the evidence.
He noted that many of the documents he had to analyse were chosen by Irving himself who claimed they demonstrated Hitler was a friend of the Jews. "I have come to the conclusion that the criticisms advanced by the defendants are almost invariably well-founded."
On the central question of Hitler's attitude to the Jews, the judge concluded that Irving's submissions had "a distinct air of unreality about them".
"In the result the picture which he provides to readers of Hitler and his attitude towards the Jews is at odds with the evidence. It is common ground between the parties that until the latter part of 1941, the solution to the Jewish question which Hitler preferred was their mass deportation."
The respondents, however, claimed that from the end of 1941 onwards "the policy of which Hitler knew and approved was the extermination of Jews in huge numbers. Irving on the other hand argued that Hitler continued to be the Jews' friend at least until October 1943".
"The unreality of Irving's stance, as I see it, derives from his persistence in that claim, despite his acceptance in the course of this trial that the evidence shows that Hitler knew about and approved of the wholesale shooting of Jews in the east and, later, was complicit in the gassing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Reinhard and other death camps."
He said Irving had accepted he was wrong in telling audiences in Australia, Canada and the US that the shooting of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen death squads was done without Hitler's approval.
Hitler was incontrovertibly, rabidly anti-semitic, the judge said, and spoke in sinister and menacing tones about Jews. He rejected Irving's claim that Hitler had stopped being anti-semitic after 1933.
On the issue of Auschwitz the judge said the central question of the case was whether the evidence supported the respondents' contention that the number of deaths ran into hundreds of thousands or whether Irving was right when he claimed the killing by gas was on a modest scale.
He said the cumulative effect of the documentary evidence for the genocidal operation of gas chambers at Auschwitz was "considerable".
"No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews."
Mr Justice Gray said it appeared to him to be "incontrovertible" that Irving was a Holocaust denier.
"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.
"By way of examples, I cite his story of the Jew climbing into a mobile telephone box-cum-gas chamber; his claim that more people died in the back of Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz; his dismissal of the eyewitnesses en masse as liars or as suffering from a mental problem; and his reference to an Association of Auschwitz Survivors and Other Liars or 'ASSHOLS'."
He rejected as untrue the claim made by Irving in his evidence that in his denial of the existence of any gas chambers at Auschwitz, he was referring solely to the gas chamber constructed by the Poles after the war for the benefit of visitors to the site or, as Irving put it, as a "tourist attraction".
Irving had also made broader claims which "tend to minimise the Holocaust", said the judge. He had minimised the number of those killed by means other than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere.
On anti-semitism, the judge said it appeared to him undeniable that most, if not all, of the statements made by Irving and cited by the respondents as demonstrating his anti-semitism, revealed "clear evidence that, in the absence of any excuse or suitable explanation for what he said or wrote, Irving is anti-semitic".
He added: "His words are directed against Jews, either individually or collectively, in the sense that they are by turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory in their references to semitic people, their characteristics and appearances."
Examples included Irving's claims that Jews deserved to be disliked; that they had brought the Holocaust on themselves; that Jews generated anti-semitism by their greed and mendacity; that Jews were among the scum of humanity and that they scurried and hid furtively, unable to stand the light of day.
Irving's principal explanation or justification for his comments about Jews was that he was seeking to explain to Jews why anti-semitism existed, said the judge.
"But I do not think that this was the message that Irving was seeking to convey to his audiences and it was certainly not the sense in which his remarks were understood. It appears to me that Irving has repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and prejudiced vilification of the Jewish race and people."
There was also ample evidence of Irving's racism. Mr Justice Gray cited the ditty composed by Irving for his daughter:
"I am a Baby Aryan Not Jewish or Sectarian I have no plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian."
As a historian, the judge said: "Irving appears to take every opportunity to exculpate Hitler." Yet on numerous occasions, "Irving has misstated historical evidence; adopted positions which run counter to the weight of the evidence; given credence to unreliable evidence and disregarded or dismissed credible evidence." The question is, whether his misrepresentations were deliberate.
"Over the past 15 years or so, Irving appears to have become more politically active than was previously the case. He speaks regularly at political or quasi-political meetings in Germany, the United States, Canada and the new world. The content of his speeches and interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias.
"He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they inflicted on the Jews. He is content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to share many of their racist and anti-semitic prejudices."
Mr Justice Gray roundly concluded: "The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his extracurricular activities reveals him to be a rightwing pro-Nazi polemicist. In my view the defendants have established that Irving has a political agenda.
"It is one which, it is legitimate to infer, disposes him, where he deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in order to make it conform with his political beliefs.
"It appears to me that the correct and inevitable inference must be that for the most part the falsification of the historical record was deliberate and that Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence."
An unrepentant David Irving today said he had received hundreds
of supportive emails after suffering a humiliating high court
libel defeat in which he was branded a racist.
"Over the last 24 hours or so since the judgment came out, I have had 322 emails from all over the world - I was up to 4am reading through them - from people who have read my books and saying: 'What on earth is going on here, Mr Irving?"'
Mr Irving spoke one day after his libel action against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books ended ignominiously with the judge calling him an anti-Semite. He now faces financial ruin after seeing his credibility ripped to shreds.
Playing down Mr Irving's claims of support, Professor Lipstadt said: "You have to treat whatever he says with a tremendous grain of salt and a tremendous question mark. So I am not so worried about how many 'hits' he says he has got."
Despite his devastating courtroom defeat, Mr Irving insisted he did not regret his libel action. "I have no regrets. It's been the most exhausting phase of my life but I put up a good fight," he told the Times. "They wanted a scrap, so I gave them one."
Judge Charles Gray ruled that Prof Lipstadt was justified in branding Mr Irving a "Holocaust denier" and an associate of right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism. Mr Irving now faces a ruinous £2m legal bill. Penguin, owned by the Pearson media group, said it would "resolutely pursue the costs" incurred in their defence. But Mr Irving has said he simply did not have the money. "I have no doubt [the defendants] would drive me to bankruptcy," he said.
Mr Irving has dismissed any idea that he would be silenced by the verdict, although the media uniformly denounced him. The Sun, Britain's best-selling tabloid newspaper, said Irving had no place in a civilised society. "Irving is a disgrace to Britain," it said in an editorial.
The author David Irving falsified history to exonerate Adolf Hitler,
driven by anti-Semitism and his own pro-Nazi views, the high court
ruled yesterday.
In a devastating judgment, Mr Justice Charles Gray ruled that a book which branded Irving a Holocaust denier was justified in its charges.
The defeat left his reputation as a historian utterly destroyed, and the author of the bestseller, Hitler's War, facing bankruptcy and the loss of his Mayfair flat.
Irving, 62, had sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin books, for libel.
Penguin books and Professor Lipstadt ran up £2.5m in legal and research costs to prove Irving had persistently and deliberately misrepresented and twisted historical evidence to suit his ideology.
Lawyers for Penguin plan to have bailiffs seize Irving's central London flat, worth £750,000, within three months to try to recover their costs, according to defence sources.
The Guardian has established that even before yesterday's verdict, Irving was in financial trouble having taken out five mortgages on his flat, according to land registry records.
To a packed court, Mr Justice Gray delivered a verdict that excoriated Irving as a man and a historian. Irving had increased his political activity over the last 15 years, addressing far right audiences in the US, Germany, Canada and the New World, the judge said. "The content of his speeches and interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias.
Irving had denied all the charges in Professor Lipstadt's book. The judge found: "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards, and responsibility for, the treatment of the Jews."
Mr Justice Gray ruled that the author was "an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with rightwing extremists who promote neo-Nazism".
The 32-day trial over Professor Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory, was one of the most emotive for a generation. In court, Irving had denied millions of Jews were exterminated in gas chambers, such as Auschwitz.
"It is my conclusion that no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews," the judge ruled.
Irving described the verdict as "firstly, indescribable, and secondly, perverse". The judgment was "understandable" given the judge's being "an up-and-coming member of the establishment", he added.
Explaining his defeat, he said: "I suppose it is my own fault for having explained myself inadequately clearly."
Last night he added: "My own feelings about race are precisely the same as 95% of the people of my generation. That is all I will say.
"If the British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could look forward to the end of the century and see what England has become, they would not have bothered to advance another 40 yards up the beach."
Asked if he had sufficient funds to cover the massive costs of his defeat he answered "no."
Most of his donors came from abroad, but Irving denied that his money had come from fellow Nazi sympathisers.
He said 4,000 supporters, the bulk from the US, had sent him varying amounts. One American had handed him $50,000 cash in a brown paper bag at Amsterdam airport, Irving said.
After the verdict Deborah Lipstadt told a news conference that Irving had "done a lot of evil things". She added: "The way he denigrated survivors and survivors' testimony in the courtroom was horrible."
The academic accused Irving of "perversion" for not merely denying the Holocaust but for "dancing on the graves" of its victims.
Almost in tears after a four-year battle, she said: "Soon there won't be people to tell the story in the first person singular and it'll be easier to deny."
Anthony Forbes-Watson, head of Penguin books UK, said it was unlikely all costs would be recovered: "Sometimes principles override financial considerations. How can you be a loss-maker when you win a case on such overwhelming grounds as these?"
Israel's ambassador to the UK, Dror Zeigerman, who sat in court to hear the result, said: "The lesson for the new generation - my generation - is that we have to continue the struggle. We cannot give up against these people who raise their voices, like Irving."
Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, the son of a Holocaust survivor and a spokesman for the Re form Synagogues of Great Britain, said: "It is a victory for 6m voices that cannot speak for themselves.
"But even more important for the long-term consequences, it is a defeat for the Holocaust denial industry and the bigotry that lies behind it."
Mr Justice Gray refused Irving leave to appeal, but Irving said in court that he intended to do so.
The son of a naval commander from Essex who served in both world wars, David Irving, 62, is best known for Hitler's War, his bestselling account of the second world war from the Fuhrer's perspective. It presents Hitler as a balanced leader who knew nothing of the Final Solution until it was too late.
After dropping out of university - he got 11 A-levels - and spending a year as a steelworker in the Ruhr, Irving made his name with a book about the allied bombing of Dresden and biographies of Rommel and Rudolf Hess.
He quickly gained a reputation as an awesome researcher, unearthing elderly Nazis from Alpine villages and Argentine ranches, but ran into trouble after disputing whether there were gas chambers at Auschwitz.
David Irving admitted his finances were on a knife edge even as he began his ruinous libel action. "They are out to ruin me," he told the Guardian yesterday."They want to take my work from me, my reputation and my home."
Ranged against him, in what he liked to paint as a "David and Goliath struggle", were Penguin and the American academic Deborah Lipstadt, who he claimed were bankrolled by the "traditional enemies of truth".
In fact, the brunt of the £2.5m cost of assembling the Lipstadt team was met by the publishers, though the Bronfman family, leading figures in the World Jewish Congress and owners of the distillers Seagrams, are believed to have made sizeable contributions.
Included in the £2.5m that Irving will now have to pay comes the £343,000 costs of Richard Rampton QC, the barrister who gave him such a roasting in court. Irving, however, looks to be in no position to pay that sort of money.
He may live in a large Mayfair apartment but as the Guardian today reveals he has mortgaged it to the hilt. Without a publisher for almost 10 years, he has had to rely on his own precarious imprint Focal Point. As well as writing and printing his own books, Irving drives the van to deliver them to those bookshops still prepared to sell them.
He also has two young daughters and his Danish wife, Bente, to support. Set against this, Irving's only real earnings of late have been in the courts. He was paid an estimated £75,000 by the Sunday Times in 1994 in an out-of-court settlement after they tried to disassociate themselves from him in the furore that followed his translation of the Goebbels diaries.
Irving already has a bankruptcy writ against him in the US to recover unpaid costs from a libel case he brought against the Jewish Board of Deputies six years ago.
The only real asset he appeared to have left is a holiday apartment in the fashionable Florida island of Key West, where he retreated to compose himself in the weeks before the verdict.
But this, in fact, is held in the name of a Sam Dixon, an Atlanta lawyer who has acted for the Ku Klux Klan.
Having at first refused to give details of the "4,000 people around the world who have contributed to my cause" for fear of leaving them liable for his costs, Irving has now revealed his big backers were American.
One US donor, he said, handed him $50,000 in cash in a brown paper bag at Amsterdam airport two years ago, and within the past month a banker's draft for £10,000 was sent to him from New York.
(As if to prove how deep his well of support in the States is, even as he lost in the high court, Irving was still organising a two-day "real history" conference in Cincinnati in September.)
Despite the fact that extremist websites carry links to his appeals for cash, Irving denies any of his funds come from neo-Nazis.
The New York-based Anti-Defamation League said they would be "shocked" if he was not getting money from supporters of the far-right National Alliance, National Association For the Advancement Of White People and the denialist Committee For Open Debate On The Holocaust.
Jewish organisations also suspect several of Irving's most consistent backers are German. Although he is banned from the country, he holds a bank account there and has been championed by the hard right German People's Union (DVU).
A party spokesman in Munich refused to say yesterday whether it had funded him but described Irving "as a good man and a seeker of the truth".
Last night Irving said: "When I have got money from Germany it comes in occasional 500 Deutschmark notes from a rather sweet old lady."
For
a man who was about to be condemned to certain bankruptcy, David
Irving seemed curiously unconcerned this morning.
He was still railing against those "traditional enemies of the truth" - Irvingspeak for Jews - who have set out to take "my work, my reputation and my home" from me.
But even without waging his hugely-expensive libel case against Penguin and the American academic Deborah Lipstadt, Irving's finances were, in his own words, "on a knife edge".
The Guardian has discovered that he had mortgaged his large Mayfair apartment to the hilt to keep his Real History website - which propagated his views on Holocaust denial - going, and was having trouble keeping up with the service charges on the building.
While Penguin shouldered the brunt of the £2.5m costs of assembling the defence team to nail Irving, members of the Bronfman family, who own the distillers Seagrams, and who are leading figures in the World Jewish Congress, are also believed to have made sizeable contributions to the defence fund.
Irving, on the other hand, claims to have gathered donations from 4,000 "mostly ordinary people in America and Europe".
"Some of them have sent me as little as $2," he claimed, "though a dear old lady in Germany has sent me 500DM notes."
However, Jewish groups claim that most of his cash has come from a network of far-right groups like the neo-Nazi National Alliance in the US and the openly-racist German People's Union (DVU).
Irving denies that he has taken money from neo-Nazis, particularly the DVU with which he was once closely associated. He said his biggest donor was a man from the US who handed him $50,000 in cash in a brown paper bag at Amsterdam airport two years ago. He also claims that within the past month a banker's draft for £10,000 was sent to him from New York.
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