Update on CSpan, the Harvard presentation, and splitting hairs

It's late and I have just returned from the Harvard presentation. CSpan did not show up but they did call Alan Dershowitz last night to try to convince him that he, as a great supporter of the First Amendment and free press, could not possibly support me in my decision to keep them out of the Harvard presentation. Dershowitz said he fully supported me.

He asked if they would put a slavery denier on. They said no. Why then, he asked, were they putting on a Holocaust denier. They said they were not putting Irving on to talk about Holocaust denial. He was to speak about the trial. [This is slipping hairs in the extreme, given that the trial was about Holocaust denial.]

But the story gets even worse. CSpan seemed completely unaware that at his talk in Atlanta -- at which they had a camera crew filming -- Irving engaged in repeated Holocaust denial. For example, he denied that gas chambers could have been gas chambers to kill humans. When he did his audience laughed appreciatively.

Obviously CSpan has not even screened Irving's presentation, they very presentation they are fighting so hard to broadcast.

In any case, the Harvard presentation went very well. Dershowitz was exceptionally complimentary of my work and my stance. The questions were first rate. The crowd a good size. It would have been a perfect CSpan event.... But, that was not to be.

Good night

Wyman Institute Condemns C-Span Broadcast of Holocaust-Denier

PHILADELPHIA, March 15 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies today sent the following letter to C-SPAN regarding the cable television channel's plan to broadcast a lecture by Holocaust-denier David Irving:

March 15, 2005

Connie Doebele, Executive Producer, Book TV, C-SPAN 2 or booktv@c-span.org

Dear Ms. Doebele:

On behalf of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, I am writing to express our opposition to your reported decision to broadcast a lecture by Holocaust-denier David Irving, to "balance" your intended broadcast of a lecture by Holocaust historian Prof. Deborah Lipstadt.

We support Prof. Lipstadt's refusal to participate in this project. Falsifiers of history cannot "balance" historians. Falsehoods cannot "balance" the truth. Justice Charles Gray of the British Royal High Court of Justice, in his verdict on April 11, 2000 dismissing Irving's libel suit against Prof. Lipstadt, concluded that Irving "is antisemitic and racist" and ruled: "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."

Just a few weeks ago, we concluded Black History Month. Presumably C-SPAN did not consider broadcasting a program about Black history that would be "balanced" by a program featuring someone denying that African-Americans were enslaved. C-SPAN should not broadcast statements that it knows to be false, nor provide a platform for falsifiers of history, whether about the Holocaust, African-American history, or any other subject.

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies recently issued its second annual report on Holocaust-denial around the world. It found that Holocaust-denial is a real and growing problem, and continues to be actively promoted in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere, and in some cases enjoys government sponsorship. If C-SPAN broadcasts a lecture by David Irving, it will provide publicity and legitimacy to Holocaust-denial, which is nothing more than a mask for anti-Jewish bigotry.

We strongly urge you to cancel your planned broadcast of the Irving lecture, and to proceed with your original plan to broadcast Prof. Lipstadt's forthcoming lecture at Harvard University.

Cordially,

Rafael Medoff, Ph.D.

Director, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

------

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, located on the campus of Gratz College (near Philadelphia), is a research and education institute focusing on America's response to the Holocaust. It is named in honor of the eminent historian and author of the 1984 best-seller The Abandonment of the Jews, the most important and influential book concerning the U.S. response to the Nazi genocide.

The Institute's Advisory Committee includes Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, Members of Congress, and other luminaries.

The Institute's Academic Council includes more than 50 leading professors of the Holocaust, American history, and Jewish history.

The Institute's Arts & Letters Council, chaired by Cynthia Ozick, includes prominent artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers.

(A complete list is available upon request.)

© 2005 U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/

Balance of the Absurd

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35346-2005Mar14.html

C-SPAN's Balance of the Absurd

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, March 15, 2005; Page A23

You will not be seeing Deborah Lipstadt on C-SPAN. The Holocaust scholar at Emory University has a new book out ("History on Trial"), and an upcoming lecture of hers at Harvard was scheduled to be televised on the public affairs cable outlet. The book is about a libel case brought against her in Britain by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, trivializer and prevaricator who is, by solemn ruling of the very court that heard his lawsuit, "anti-Semitic and racist." No matter. C-SPAN wanted Irving to "balance" Lipstadt.

The word balance is not in quotes for emphasis. It was invoked repeatedly by C-SPAN producers who seemed convinced that they had chosen the most noble of all journalistic causes: fairness. "We want to balance it [Lipstadt's lecture] by covering him," said Amy Roach, a producer for C-SPAN's Book TV. Her boss, Connie Doebele, put it another way. "You know how important fairness and balance is at C-SPAN," she told me. "We work very, very hard at this. We ask ourselves, 'Is there an opposing view of this?' "

As luck would have it, there was. To Lipstadt's statements about the Holocaust, there was Irving's rebuttal that it never happened—no systematic killing of Jews, no Final Solution and, while many people died at Auschwitz of disease and the occasional act of brutality, there were no gas chambers there. "More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz," Irving once said.

For obvious reasons, Lipstadt cited Irving in her 1993 book, "Denying the Holocaust," which was also published in Britain. Irving sued her for libel. Under Britain's libel laws, Lipstadt had to prove the truth of what she wrote, which, after a lengthy trial, she did in spades. Her lawyer's opening statement—"My Lord, Mr. Irving calls himself a historian. The truth is, however, that he is not a historian at all, but a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar."—ultimately became the judgment of the court itself. In matters of intellectual integrity, Irving is an underachiever.

Once, this was not all that apparent. By dint of maniacal industry, Irving had turned himself into an admired writer on Nazi Germany. He mined the archives for material that others appeared to have overlooked. Some of it was genuine; some of it was false. Increasingly, though, his books gave off the whiff of anti-Semitism and a certain admiration of Hitler. When Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge University historian (and one of Lipstadt's expert witnesses), carefully examined Irving's work, he found it a stew of misrepresentations, falsifications and outright quackery. Irving was authoritatively exposed: a propagandist hiding behind seemingly scholarly footnotes.

This is the man C-SPAN turned to for "balance." It told Lipstadt that since it was going to air her lecture, it would do one of Irving's, too. As luck would have it, he was appearing March 12 at the Landmark Diner in Atlanta. C-SPAN was there for this momentous event—although Irving's advance warning that cameras would be present apparently held down attendance. (His people seem to prefer anonymity—or, in the old days, sheets.) Lipstadt was in effect being told that if she wanted to promote her book on C-SPAN (an important venue) she would also have to promote Irving. If she was to get a TV audience, then so would he.

C-SPAN's cockeyed version of fairness—it told Lipstadt that it had bent over backward to ensure its coverage of the presidential election was fair and balanced—is so mindless that I thought for a moment its producers and I could not be talking about the same thing. This is the "Crossfire" mentality reduced to absurdity, if that's possible. For a book on the evils of slavery, would it counter with someone who thinks it was a benign institution? Why does it feel there is another side to the Holocaust or to Irving's assertion that he was libeled? He was not. He was described to a T.

In the end, Lipstadt had to choose between promoting her own book—a terrific read, by the way—and giving Irving the audience of his dreams and a status equal to her own. C-SPAN said it was only seeking fairness, but it was asking Lipstadt to balance truth with a lie or history with fiction. On this occasion, at least, Irving did what he could not do with his libel suit: silence Lipstadt. He may still appear on C-SPAN, but Lipstadt will not—a victory for "balance" that only the truly unbalanced could applaud.

cohenr@washpost.com

Lipstadt interviewed by The Book Guys

3-10-05-

Deborah Lipstadt discusses history, Holocaust denial, British vs. US libel law and David Irving, convicted denier and liar ...

Lipstadt is interviewed by Allan Stypeck and Mike Cuthbert, "The Book Guys".

http://www.bookguys.com/archives.htm

(Scroll down the page to item #0510)

3/16 Lipstadt and Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Hillel

"History on Trial" with Deborah Lipstadt and Alan Dershowitz

7 p.m.

Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, is the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory and a new book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving [Ecco 2005]. The book is Lipstadt's account of the 2000 trial that attracted international attention in which she mounted a defense against Holocaust denier, David Irving, who sued her for libel for calling him a denier. Irving suffered a resounding loss. Alan Dershowitz, who wrote the afterword to the book, will respond to Lipstadt.

Harvard Hillel, 52 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge

Lipstadt presentation at UTD

The UTD Mercury - News
Issue: 2/14/05

Lipstadt retells legal struggle with 'Holocaust denier' Irving

By Tahir Mahmood

Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt recounted her legal battle with historian David Irving to a full audience in the Conference Center auditorium Feb. 6.

The Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Lipstadt's legal troubles began when she labeled Irving a "Holocaust denier" in her 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." Irving sued her for libel when the book was published in England, commencing a long five-year legal fight in the courtroom, described in Lipstadt's new book "History on Trial: My Day in Court with Holocaust Denier David Irving."

Lipstadt's lecture was part of the Burton E. Einspruch Holocaust Lecture series, sponsored by the Holocaust Studies Program at UTD.

Lipstadt began the lecture with comic flair by turning off her cell phone on stage.

She then described how her legal battles with Irving ensued after she described Irving's written histories as mostly right-wing and sympathetic to Nazi Germany.

When Irving filed suit in England, Lipstadt refused to settle the suit and apologize.

"How could I apologize to him?" Lipstadt said. "In England, I had to prove that what I wrote was not libel. I wanted a trial that proved Lipstadt was right when she called David Irving a denier."

Lipstadt said she assembled a "Dream Team of historians" to testify on her behalf.

"Things reversed to make him look like he was on the defensive," she said.

Approximately 3,000 pages of evidence were presented to support her case. In one of his diaries, Lipstadt said he wrote God makes people of another race of a different species, and he referred to himself as a "baby Aryan."

The judge found in Lipstadt's favor.

"Let me close by sharing with you the verdict, which was a slam dunk," Lipstadt said. "The judge called Irving fallacious, absurd, undeniably racist and an anti-Semitic racist.

Many faculty and students in the audience responded positively to Lipstadt's lecture.

"She's absolutely fantastic," said Vincent Cirillo, professor of biology at UTD. "I am glad she had the courage to do this. She is a scholar in the Temple Shalom in Dallas, where she conducts religious services like closing of the Sabbath."

Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, director of the Holocaust Studies Program and literary studies professor at UTD, shared in the enthusiastic response at the end of the lecture.

"She is capable of melding together the intellectual side of historical research with deeply emotional understanding," Ozsvath said.

Some students were so interested they said they plan to read her new book.

"Professor Deborah Lipstadt gave an extraordinary lecture and it was very informative," said Melody Sadjadi, a doctoral student in literary studies. "I look forward to reading her new book."

Lipstadt interviewed in DW-World (Deutsche Welle)

10.03.2005

Dealing a Blow to Holocaust Deniers

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1513920,00.html

Deborah Lipstadt never took the stand during the landmark libel case she won against British Holocaust denier David Irving. Now, five years on, the US historian tells the story of her six-year legal battle in a new book.

In "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving," Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt recounts her legal battle with David Irving, the widely-read World War II writer, and a man she called "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial" in her acclaimed 1993 book, "Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." Following the book's publication, Irving accused Lipstadt of damaging his reputation as a historian. But by the end of the ensuing libel trial -- in which Irving defended himself -- his reputation was thoroughly skewered. Justice Charles Gray condemned Irving, saying that he had "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence," and called him an "active Holocaust denier…anti-Semitic and racist." While in Berlin to present her latest book, Lipstadt spoke about her court victory in a DW-WORLD interview.

DW-WORLD: Six years of your life, a lot of effort, expense and emotion went into this libel case brought against you by David Irving (photo). Was it worth it?

Deborah Lipstadt: I think it was. First of all, I had no choice. British libel law places the onus on the defendant, so that you're essentially, from an American perspective, guilty until proven innocent. If I hadn't fought, he would've won by default. He could have said that his version of the Holocaust -- which is that there was no central program to kill the Jews, no Hitler involvement, no gas chambers and in which the survivors are all liars and psychopaths -- was telling the truth. If you look back now, any time David Irving is mentioned, his name is followed by some version of the adjectives "Holocaust denier," "racist" or "anti-Semite." He's no longer reviewed in the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, or the Times Literary Supplement, for example, so I think in that sense it was "worth it."

A lot of people might be tempted to label Holocaust deniers as extremists that don't need to be taken seriously. Your trial showed that this isn't the case, as Irving was well-respected in some circles. How prevalent is the threat posed to history by Holocaust deniers now?

It's a little hard to judge because with the Internet, geographical borders become amorphous or porous. I don't think the threat is really prevalent. I think the deniers have been dealt a very serious blow. The main source for Holocaust denial today is in the Arab world, where it is very prevalent, and is almost gross in its lack of sophistication. But I don't think in Europe it's a major issue, because essentially, as a result of the trial, we laid waste to virtually every Holocaust denial argument as they stood through 2001/2002.

In Germany though, there is a debate going on, not about outright denial, perhaps, but about revisionism as we saw recently with the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. In the run-up to that anniversary, the far-right NPD party tried to cast that event as a "bombing Holocaust" against Germans. Are you at all worried about the situation in Germany?

I am worried, not about denial, but about relativism. I'm worried about things like the Flick collection being brought to Berlin, I'm worried about Dresden. Ironically, it's David Irving who is responsible for the feeling that Dresden was such a crime, because his book was one of the first books on the topic early in the 1960s. In the trial, we found that he tremendously exaggerated the number of victims. There were even Germans who were writing to him back then, trying to correct him and saying that his numbers were way out of whack. He just ignored their comments. Dresden was a tragedy. It's a tragedy anytime people die, particularly civilians in a war, but inflating the horror of it was in order to make what I call immoral equivalencies. It was in order for him to say, "Well yes, maybe 80,000 people died at Auschwitz from war-related privations" -- which is not true, they were murdered and it was more than 80,000 -- "but a quarter of a million people died in one day and one night of bombing in Dresden, now that's a real tragedy."

David Irving defended himself in court, so you heard plenty from him. You did not take the stand -- why was that?

First of all, I wasn't obligated to take the stand. I offered to. I continuously told my lawyers that I was more than willing to take the stand, that I could hold my own against this guy. But the standard operating procedure in libel trials is not to put the author on the stand. The author is being sued for what they wrote. So my book was at issue. We had to prove that what I wrote in my book was correct, and there was nothing I could add by taking the stand. Though I do have to say that for me, someone for whom keeping quiet is an unnatural act, it was terribly difficult to restrain myself and listen to a man who was spewing anti-Semitism and racism.

That's where your latest book comes in.

The book is my voice at long last coming out, and it really follows three strands. It follows our legal strategy, the historical issues -- how does this man twist the truth, how does he play with the documents, and so on -- and the third strand is the personal. There was a very heavy personal element, first of all in terms of the disruption to my life, but that's the least of it. The most striking personal element was the encounter with survivors and children of survivors and veterans. People would stop me as I walked into the courtroom in the morning and put pieces of paper in my hand with lists of victims' names, and they would say, this is my evidence. There was a day when Irving was trying to argue that the Allies were responsible for the people who were found in the concentration camps in Germany who looked like cadavers at the end of the war, because the Allies had bombed the pharmaceuticals factories and the infrastructure so the Germans couldn't get food and medicine to the camps. At the end of that day, an older man walked up to me. He had a cane, but he still had a sort of military bearing, very ramrod straight. He said, "Madam, I was in the British forces that liberated the camps. It's awful to hear that man blame it on us. Get the bastard, madam, get the bastard."

Deanne Corbett interviewed Deborah Lipstadt

History on Trial reviewed in The Columbus Dispatch

Columbus Dispatch (Ohio)

March 6, 2005

NONFICTION HISTORY ON TRIAL

LIBEL BATTLE UNCOVERS MISSTEPS OF HISTORIAN

Margaret Quamme

In the fall of 1995, Deborah Lipstadt, director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta and author of Denying the Holocaust , received a letter informing her that she had been threatened with libel for a few paragraphs she had written in that book about British historian David Irving.

She tossed the letter onto a pile on her desk, and a few weeks later, asked a research assistant to spend a little time tracing the sources of her arguments and refuting Irving's claims.

But the matter didn't end there.

By January 2000, Lipstadt was in London for the start of a 10-week libel trial. History on Trial reconstructs the events of that trial and of the months and years that led up to it.

Throughout the trial, her lawyers would not allow Lipstadt, who describes herself as "feisty and combative," to testify. Hard though it was for her to be "a spectator—observing but not participating—in a drama where my work and reputation were on the line," she mostly managed to keep her mouth shut and devoted her energy to taking copious notes on the trial, which she brings to vivid life in the book.

Lipstadt's defense—she was eventually acquitted—ended up costing more than $1 million. Her publisher contributed to her defense fund, and her university helped, but she was still left with an overwhelming financial burden.

One of the first individuals to offer help was Les Wexner, with whose Wexner Heritage Foundation Lipstadt was involved. He also motivated other people to contribute to the defense fund.

History on Trial is a compelling introduction to the British legal system, where the burden of proof is on the defendant. To clear her name, Lipstadt's legal team had to prove that "Irving had lied about the Holocaust and had done so out of anti-Semitic motives."

Although she confesses that before the trial most of her legal knowledge "was gleaned from television's Law & Order ," Lipstadt caught on fast, and she clearly defines the differences between British and American courts.

She paints thumbnail sketches of many of the individuals who entered into the courtroom drama, but the most memorable are the antagonists, Lipstadt's barrister, Richard Rampton, and Irving, who represented himself in court.

The contrast between the sharp but subdued Rampton, who occasionally appears to be napping, and the theatrical Irving, who elicits a hummed Twilight Zone theme from a member of the court audience when he addresses the judge as "mein Fuhrer," engages the reader.

But beneath the courtroom theatrics lies a deeper drama: the battle for the truth about a period of history receding into the past as those who experienced it dwindle in number.

Lipstadt's lawyers pointed out how in his books, Irving omitted a word here, mistranslated another there, decided that a subject would "bore" his readers and slipped changes into successive versions.

Himmler's diary, for example, records that Hitler asked that one trainload of Jews not be deported. Irving repeatedly translated the term as trainloads and used the passage as evidence that Hitler had forbidden all deportation of Jews.

In quoting a German general about Hitler's involvement in the execution of 5,000 Jews in Riga, Latvia, Irving cut the testimony in half: What Irving had done was include the first half of Hitler's orders that the mass shootings "must stop"—but he omitted the second half of the orders, which instructed that the executions be carried out more discreetly.

None of these transgressions is earth-shattering, but the cumulative effect is to erase the experience of millions of people.

3/20 Lipstadt at Museum of Jewish Heritage, Battery Park, NYC

Sunday, March 20, 2005, 2:30 P.M.

History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving
With Professor Deborah Lipstadt, Emory University

Deborah Lipstadt discusses her six-year legal battle with Holocaust denier David Irving, who sued her for libel in Britain. Though Lipstadt's courtroom victory exposed in meticulous detail how deniers pervert and distort the historical record, Irving's ideas have paved the way for the emergence of increasingly vocal Holocaust denial.

Free with suggested donation Advance reservations recommended

Phone: Call 1.646.437.4202

In Person: Visit the Museum Box Office at 36 Battery Place, Battery Park City, New York.

Museum of Jewish Heritage
A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
36 Battery PlaceNew York, NY 10280

General Information1.646.437.4200

History on Trial reviewed in Baltimore Sun

Editor's Choice

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/booksmags/bal-bk.editors06mar06,1,5639899.story?coll=bal-society-utility&ctrack=1&cset=true

Holocaust denier's day in court has chilling implication

By Michael Ollove

Sun Book Editor

March 6, 2005

History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving

By Deborah E. Lipstadt. Ecco, 346 pages. $25.95.

I have not been inclined to take Holocaust deniers seriously. I've tended to consign them to the category of crackpots, anti-Semites and extremists - revolting, certainly, but, I thought, so fringe as to be barely tethered to this Earth. Better, I told myself, to focus my worrying on those who seemed to represent a more imminent threat.

Nowadays, I'm not so sure. Reality seems to be losing its luster. Not long before the November election, 40 percent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. Even more surprising, creationists have elbowed their way back into public life. Reborn as techno-hip "Intelligent Designers," they are needling public schools into granting equivalency between notions of evidence and belief. Is the Age of Reason something to be nostalgic about?

The current subversion of fact by ideology makes History on Trial, historian Deborah Lipstadt's account of her legal torment during the late 1990's at the hands of the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving, especially resonant. Whether the Holocaust occurred would not strike most civilized people as worthy of reasonable conversation, let alone something that would occupy a British court at the dawn of the 21st century.

The case was prompted by the 1993 publication of Lipstadt's first book, a scholarly study of Holocaust denial. In it, Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University, asserted that Irving's pronouncements about the Holocaust (he said it didn't happen) and Hitler (if it did happen Der Fuhrer knew nothing about it), were built on willful distortions, crass manipulations of evidence, and anti-Semitism. Nothing unusual there for a Holocaust denier. But, Lipstadt observed in that book, because Irving had also written some well-regarded histories of World War II, he was accorded a measure of credibility, which, in her view, made Irving the most dangerous Holocaust denier of all.

Irving took umbrage (although it is not clear why, given his long outspokenness on the subject), and he sued Lipstadt for defamation in his native Great Britain. History on Trial is Lipstadt's chronicle of her long ordeal to defend herself against this bizarre, preening, repugnant character.

At first blush, Irving's suit struck many, including Lipstadt, as preposterous. By then, Irving was already a notorious figure who once spouted to an audience that "more women died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz," who dismissed the Holocaust as a Hollywood legend, who taunted survivors with an obscene acronym and accused them of cashing in.

Yet, not only did Irving's case progress, but in a reflexive even-handedness, some media reports sized it up as battle between differing views of history. Certain scholars (among them, the esteemed military historian Sir John Keegan) even criticized Lipstadt, complaining she was trying to prevent Irving from merely expressing a contrary, if outlandish version of history (ignoring that it was Irving who had dragged Lipstadt into court, not vice versa).

But the case was not about historic interpretation at all; it ultimately concerned standards of historic research - and the cynical abuses thereof. Irving was no historian; he was a charlatan, a deceiver, a liar who used the veneer of scholarship to propagate his anti-Semitic ideology.

The bulk of History is given over to Lipstadt's rendering of the three-month trial in 2000. Not surprisingly, she is a sympathetic, mostly appealing heroine, even if she demonstrates the self-righteousness that lawsuits inevitably accentuate in their participants.

Despite Lipstadt's understandable apprehension about what was at risk (even though many sympathizers stepped forward to fill a defense fund on her behalf), the showdown is hardly the tension-filled drama that the first third of her book promises. It's not just that Irving, who insisted on representing himself, is a clownish presence in the courtroom, emerging neither as a heavyweight of legal argument or a compelling inquisitor. In truth, once the trial begins, Lipstadt's legal team and its impressive historian witnesses slice through his claims like thoroughbreds through the fog.

The perverse fascination in History lies in seeing the tricks of the contortionist revealed, the lengths to which a pernicious man will go to subvert truth. Using faulty translations and dubious testimony (including those from the Nazi perpetrators), minimizing evidence contrary to his purposes and misstating facts and dates (even after learning of their fallacy), Irving stooped to any means to refute the existence of the Holocaust and to distance poor, misunderstood Adolph Hitler from it.

How much succor scoundrels like Irving have given to ever-strengthening neo-Nazi movements (with whom he freely associated, both here and in Europe) and to extremists in the Muslim world, can only be imagined and feared. The outcome of the trial was a matter of surpassing concern (not least of all to Holocaust survivors, understandably anxious about that coming day when they will no longer be here to bear witness). But no matter what the result, History offers less cause for optimism than its plucky author may have intended. The case preoccupied and diverted Lipstadt for nearly six years at a cost of well over $1 million, all to establish what might have been considered evident in the first place. One can't help fretting about what happens when lesser truths come under assault.

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun

Review of History on Trial in Fulton County Daily Report

Monday, February 28, 2005

A Tale of Fighting Holocaust Denial

Steven H. Pollak
spollak@amlaw.com

At one point, a prominent Jewish lawyer in London approached Emory University professor Deborah E. Lipstadt and urged her to settle the libel case brought by a powerful author who denies the Holocaust ever happened.

Lipstadt, who recounts the incident in her new book “History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving,” began mulling over the absurd calculations of such a settlement: Would she ask the plaintiff to accept four million Jews killed? Three million? One set of gas chambers? Two?

Before she could think of a response, her attorney, Anthony Julius of Mishcon de Reya in London, stepped in and said, “We will not negotiate with an anti-Semite on historical truth.”

Lipstadt then did something she rarely does: She stayed quiet.

“I said nothing but felt exceptionally well-represented,” Lipstadt wrote.

Lipstadt, the Dorot professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Rabbi Donald Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, has just published a chronicle of her six-year legal battle with David Irving. A well-known British writer of books on the Third Reich and World War II, Irving routinely says things such as “more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.”

The author of more than 20 history books on WWII, Irving became notorious for his assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Such a claim might have been dismissed without attracting attention outside extremist circles, except for Irving’s reputation as a popular historian. Given Irving’s high profile as an author and historian, Lipstadt felt compelled as a scholar to include his dubious claims in her 1993 book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.”

Irving responded by suing Lipstadt for libel, claiming the book undermined his professional reputation. Though Lipstadt had to take the suit seriously because of the nature of British libel law, it also gave her the opportunity to debunk the theories of Holocaust revisionists in a public forum.

Irving’s libel case against Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, culminated in 2000 with a three-month bench trial and a ruling for Lipstadt in London’s High Court of Justice. The litigation finally concluded in July 2004, when the Emory professor decided not to continue efforts to recover her legal expenses.

At trial, Lipstadt and her legal team delivered a stunning blow to Irving’s reputation. In a decision that made front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, Judge Charles Gray said it was “incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier” and went on to call the plaintiff a “racist” and an “anti-Semite.”

No Friendly Competition

The new book, Lipstadt’s third, is more than a retelling of the case. It brings the trial to life by weaving personal insight and observations with a meticulous recounting of the trial and explanation of legal strategy.

In one aside, Lipstadt described how at the end of the trial when the judge finished reading the stinging decision, Irving stood, stretched out his hand to opposing counsel and said, “Well done, well done.”

It was “as if he had just been bested in a rugby match,” Lipstadt wrote.

The trial, however, was no friendly competition.

In the 1993 book at issue, Lipstadt described Irving as a “dangerous spokesman for Holocaust denial” and said he had been “accused of skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, particularly those that exonerate Hitler.” She also said Irving frequently associated with anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and other extremists.

Irving, who represented himself at trial, claimed the 1993 book and subsequent remarks by Lipstadt in the press ruined his reputation and caused publishers to retreat from book deals. In particular, Irving wanted to hold Lipstadt responsible for St. Martin’s Press’ backing away from a contract in 1996 to publish his biography of Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels.

In an e-mail to the Daily Report, Irving said he did not wish to comment on Lipstadt’s latest book because he had not read it.

“I have no real comment on the Lipstadt book, and it would be impertinent of me to offer any as I have not read it and cannot do so until it arrives in the UK, when no doubt I and others in this jurisdiction will scrutinise it most closely,” he wrote.

British vs. American

Unlike the American system, British libel law places the onus of proof on the defendant—in this case, Lipstadt.

Therefore, once Irving initiated the suit, the Emory professor had to demonstrate that her published words were true. Lipstadt said the other legal defenses—that Irving misinterpreted her words or that they were not defamatory—were not options. After all, she agreed that Irving had not misinterpreted her allegation that he was a “denier, Hitler partisan and right-wing ideologue.”

In another contrast to American law, British courts do not distinguish between private and public figures.

On these shores, Irving probably would have been considered a public figure and therefore would have had to prove not only that Lipstadt’s words were false but also that her actions involved “actual malice” as discussed in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).

Julius, who served as the architect of Lipstadt’s defense, was already known to much of the British public as Princess Diana’s lawyer. Lipstadt knew of Julius through his book on anti-Semitism in T.S. Eliot’s writings. (The book was a dissertation for a doctoral degree in literary theory Julius earned while working full-time as a lawyer.) James Libson, another Mishcon litigator, assisted Julius in the case.

Lipstadt and her lawyers opted for what was described in the book as the “atom bomb defense” of British libel law: They would claim that Lipstadt was justified in what she wrote because “the words at issue were true, even if they were defamatory.”

In yet another distinction from the American system, the British courts do not grant audiences to solicitors such as Julius and Libson except under rare circumstances. Instead, solicitors must rely on a barrister to present their case to the judge.

For their voice in the courtroom, Lipstadt’s team chose Richard Rampton, an Oxford educated barrister whose earlier work earned him the honored title of Queen’s Counsel.

Rampton also has the distinction of being the barrister who argued the longest civil trial in English legal history (313 days in court over about three years). In that case, Rampton represented McDonald’s in its libel suit against two amateur activists who had been distributing pamphlets portraying the restaurant chain as an enemy of the environment, a promoter of unhealthy lifestyles and a greedy capitalist enterprise.

A pair of Atlanta attorneys appear briefly in “History on Trial”: Kilpatrick Stockton’s Joseph M. Beck helped Lipstadt ensure that she complied with discovery, and Greenberg Traurig’s David N. Minkin discussed the implication of Penguin UK’s counsel inquiring about the indemnification clause of the contract Lipstadt signed with the book’s American publisher.

“When I told my lawyer, David Minkin, that Penguin was asking about the indemnification clause, his eyes opened wide and face grew taut,” Lipstadt wrote. “He seemed to be trying to mask his concerns, but the tension in his voice came through clearly as he explained that Penguin might be contemplating shifting the financial burden of the case to my shoulders.”

To Lipstadt’s relief, Penguin stood by her.

Denying Death

The defense team marshaled an array of experts to prove that Irving manipulated, misrepresented and mistranslated works from a variety of sources—all in an unsuccessful bid to disprove the Holocaust.

On one point—the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau—Irving remained firm in his belief that no one was gassed to death in the now-destroyed rooms. He suggested on the witness stand that the gas chamber at Birkenau had been a morgue where the Nazis used Zyklon B to delouse corpses.

But as Rampton grilled him in court and shot holes in that theory, Irving proposed that the room also could have been an air raid shelter for SS guards.

“Now it is an air raid shelter, is it?” Rampton asked.

The barrister then demanded to know why the Nazis would build a bomb shelter several miles from the SS guards’ barracks. According to Lipstadt, the distance is two miles.

“If this is for the SS, this air raid shelter, it is a terribly long way from the SS barracks, is it not?” Rampton asked. “They would all be dead before they ever got there if there was a bombing raid. Have you thought about that?”

Irving stood by his claims, even after the defense team presented reams of other gas-chamber evidence, including accounts from death-camp inmates and SS guards, architectural blueprints, aerial photos and corroborating post-war sketches done by an inmate. The defense also found numerous instances where Irving’s footnotes and sources did not confirm the things he wrote and said.

Why did Irving appear eager to twist the facts? Lipstadt and her legal team pointed to his political affiliations with extremists and said he used his writing to further those views.

Although Irving discounted his association with extremists, his affinity for Nazis came through when he addressed the judge as “mein Fuhrer” during closing arguments.

In his e-mail to the Daily Report, Irving was unrepentant.

“I am not a whinger, and I find this loud and endless whining about The Holocaust and its ‘survivors’ (i.e. people to whom relatively little happened, in comparison with, say, the survivors of Dresden, Hiroshima, or Coventry, or of Iwo Jima for that matter) unattractive; no, not a whinger,” he wrote, using an informal British term for “whiner.” “I am a fighter, and I shall fight on,” he added.

The legal drama in “History on Trial” was alternately comical, sad, absurd and compelling. However, one of the book’s more pointed lawyer moments came not in the courtroom, but at a lunch in Rampton’s office during the second week of the trial.

As the legal team munched on crustless white bread, egg salad and salmon sandwiches, Lipstadt gained insight into a life in the law when she told Rampton about a young paralegal who earlier said she felt like she was “making a difference” at the start of her legal career by working on this case. After the trial, the paralegal told Lipstadt, commercial cases will seem so petty.

Rampton, who had been nursing a glass of French Burgundy, eyed Lipstadt with a quizzical look and said, “But Deborah, that’s true for all of us.”

Little kids ask David Irving to teach them about the Holocaust

I was going through some old emails and found that about two years ago someone had sent me to Irving's website to see how a 13 year old American girl had turned to him with questions about the Holocaust. I had recently been asked whether I thought deniers were really a danger. They have failed miserably at convincing many people of their views. [More people believe Elvis is alive than believe the Holocaust did not happen.] However, they continue to ply their wares, motivated as they are, or so it seems to me, by hatred, antisemitism, and philo-Nazism.

For Irving as teacher of 13 year olds see:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Letters/Auschwitz/Melanie040503.html

Daily News Tribune on Lipstadt Presentation

Brandeis grad returns to tell tale of rebuffing 'Holocaust denier'

http://www.dailynewstribune.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=51634

By Mark Benson / Daily News Correspondent

Thursday, March 3, 2005

WALTHAM -- Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar, enthralled the audience yesterday inside Brandeis University's Shapiro Campus Center with her clear arguments and passionate voice stating that the horrors of World War II were real and worth remembering.
"History can be interpreted. We can debate the start of World War II and what caused it, but not whether it existed. World War II happened," said Lipstadt. She is a 1976 Brandeis doctorate degree recipient who was invited to give the keynote speech for Truth at Stake, a conference sponsored by the Fisher-Bernstein Institute for Jewish Philanthropy and Leadership.
"The Holocaust deniers want the debate to be about two versions of history. It isn't," continued Lipstadt, who spoke about her successful defense against libel charges by David Irving, a British military historian who took action against Lipstadt for labeling him a "Holocaust denier." "This is about truth and lies, not about versions of history."
Lipstadt's defense of historical truth began years before the libel trial. In 1993, Lipstadt deconstructed Irving's claims about the "Legend of the Holocaust" in her book, "Denying the Holocaust."
Audience members lined up to ask Lipstadt to sign copies of her 2005 memoir, "History on Trial," her first-hand account of her experiences with Irving and the libel suit.
"You can't fight every battle, but there are some battles you can't walk away from," said Lipstadt to Brandeis student Stuart Klammer as she wrote him a personal note on the inside cover of his copy of "History on Trial."
Dorit Ingber, a Brandeis student involved in running the Truth at Stake conference, asked Lipstadt to sign her conference T-shirt.
Lipstadt laughed, then agreed to do it.
"I feel like a rock star!" said Lipstadt, a popular professor at Atlanta's Emory University.
During Lipstadt's hour-long speech yesterday, she cited historical inaccuracies Irving made, including Irving's characterization that in mid-1943, German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler took action against Jews concentrated in Budapest, Hungary, because 50,000 Jews in a Warsaw, Poland, ghetto had just staged an uprising against Nazi rule.
"The concern Irving attributes to Hitler about Jews in Budapest and its connection to the Jewish uprising in Warsaw is odd, since the uprising hadn't happened yet," Lipstadt said.
During her libel trial, Lipstadt never said a word. On the advice of counsel, Lipstadt did not testify on her own behalf, nor did she speak to the media.
"For me, not talking is an unnatural act. I love to talk," said Lipstadt, drawing laughter from the audience in the first floor foyer of Shapiro, as Antony Polonsky, Brandeis professor of Holocaust studies, stood by her side. "I begged them to let me talk."
Yet, by deciding not to settle Irving's suit, Lipstadt put her scholarship to the test in a court hearing, confident she would be vindicated.
She was. Judge Charles Gray validated Lipstadt's right to call Irving a Holocaust denier, stating that "no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt" that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, given the consistency of the voluminous information in records and eyewitness accounts available to scholars today.
"She is gutsy in the fact that in this particular episode in her life, she stood up for the truth, which is why she is one of our profiles in leadership," said Amy Sales, Leadership Institute director and an organizer of yesterday's conference.
"There are people around the world who don't believe there was a Holocaust, that six million people did die," said Masha Lokshin of the Brandeis Center for Modern Jewish Studies, a conference co-sponsor.
In a spirit of open inquiry, Lipstadt still invited the audience to look at Irving's side.
"You can go to his Web site to read his arguments, but if you click a particular button, you'll donate (to his cause), so be careful," Lipstadt said, smiling.
Later in her speech, Lipstadt said historians have refuted all arguments by Holocaust deniers up to the year 2001, but this work continues.
"If David Irving had won, then my mother would have been a victim a second time," Lipstadt read from a letter she got from the daughter of an Auschwitz victim after Lipstadt won her libel case.
"Taking care of the dead is the most genuine act of loving kindness," Lipstadt said.
Lipstadt's Web log is located at www.lipstadt.blogspot.com.

Emory Wheel on Lipstadt Presentation

http://www.emorywheel.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/02/25/421e04f24cee0

Prof confronts case with Holocaust denier

By Jessica Rudish
Contributing Writer
The Emory Wheel

February 25, 2005

Five years after defending herself against a libel suit by British Holocaust denier David Irving, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies Deborah Lipstadt used sarcasm and jokes to elicit laughter as she recalled the experience.

Lipstadt published her latest book on Holocaust denial earlier this month.

History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving focuses not on the history of Jews in World War II, as did her last scholarly work, but on her own personal history in a battle to air the truth.

Speaking to a crowd of about 70 people in the Woodruff Library Jones Room on Wednesday, Lipstadt related her intensely personal experience of the trial.

“I think it’s the story of a professor, well known, but not on a world stage, suddenly being thrown into a very public defense of her own work,” Lipstadt said before the event.

In her latest release, Lipstadt chronicles her legal encounter with Irving, a man she called one of the most dangerous Holocaust deniers in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Because he so clearly seemed to be a Holocaust denier — he said that the Holocaust was a legend and that Adolf Hitler was the German Jews’ best friend — and because she had dedicated only a few hundred words to him in her book, she thought the matter would be quickly resolved.

As a result, she did not take the lawsuit seriously and laughed when she heard about it.

“I thought the whole thing was stupid,” she said. “Very quickly I learned otherwise, that this was a very serious thing.”

She was in for a rude awakening, because Irving filed suit in London against both Lipstadt and her United Kingdom publisher, Penguin Books Ltd., and the trial began in January 2000. Unlike in America, British libel laws place the burden of proof on the defendant, not the plaintiff, making Lipstadt’s case more difficult to defend.

Lipstadt searched for various ways to prove her case, finally coming to one conclusion: she had to discredit Irving as a historian.

“I didn’t want this to become a ‘Did the Holocaust happen?’ trial, but a ‘Deborah Lipstadt told the truth’ trial,” she said.

She set out to reveal the falsifications in Irving’s works, including his 1977 book Hitler’s War, in order to show that he is a Holocaust denier.

By following his footnotes and checking their accuracy, it was revealed that many of the facts in his books were purposely misleading and falsified, even when describing nonHolocaust-related events, she said.

Lipstadt said his description of the Allied bombing of Dresden, Germany toward the end of the war claimed that the Allies killed hundreds of thousands of people, when the actual figures are closer to 20,000 or 30,000.

As an example of the dangers posed by Irving’s writings, Lipstadt pointed to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which drew from Irving’s work on Dresden.

“That’s how lies and distortions enter the public arena,” she said.

Although she had to face the four-month trial and three subsequent appeals, Lipstadt felt it was worth it.

“The trial devastated deniers’ arguments as they stood until the year 2001,” she said. “It just laid waste to them.”

Although mostly faculty and staff, some Emory students came to hear Lipstadt’s presentation, including College sophomore Joanna Green, who was encouraged by a Holocaust survivor to research deniers in high school.

“I want to get a book signed by her so that I can give it to a Holocaust survivor,” she said. “That’s what began my inquiry into this subject.”

Lipstadt must still face Irving in yet another legal battle, scheduled to take place in two weeks in London. Irving is suing her for the cost of the trial, something the court ordered him to pay her.

Interview in U.S. News and World Report

3/7/05
U.S. News and World Report

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/050307/usnews/7lipstadt.peo.htm

The Week

Until a landmark libel case turned her world upside down, Deborah Lipstadt was known as a chronicler, not a maker, of history. In her acclaimed 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, the Emory University professor cited widely read World War II writer David Irving--who referred to the Holocaust as a "legend" and refused to acknowledge Adolf Hitler's responsibility in the systematic killing of 6 million Jews--as one of the most prominent deniers. Irving sued Lipstadt for libel. Her new book, History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving, recounts the six-year legal battle that vindicated her.

In what way was history on trial?

We exposed as bogus virtually every argument and contention that Holocaust deniers, like Irving, make to supposedly prove that the Holocaust didn't happen. We showed that you can't take history and twist it any way you want. There is a historical record. There is a massive cache of documents, all of which prove quite clearly that there is evidence for every step of the killing process.

Besides debunking Irving, what else did the trial accomplish?

It was emblematic of the passing of the torch of memory from Holocaust survivors, the youngest of whom are in their 60s or 70s, to historians. Poet Paul Celan once asked, Who will be the witnesses for the witnesses? This trial showed historians can do that.

Why did you fight back?

The case was brought in Britain, where the defendant must prove the truth of what she wrote. This is the mirror image of libel law in the United States, where Irving would have had to prove that I lied. If I had not defended myself, Irving would have won by default and could have claimed that his description of the Holocaust was legitimate. I could not ignore this.

So the suit backfired on Irving.

The irony is that if he had not sued me, no one would have known the extent to which he distorted or misrepresented evidence.

Yet Holocaust denial goes on.

I'm no more amazed that Holocaust denial exists than I am that the Holocaust happened. -Diane Cole


Copyright © 2005 U.S.News & World Report, L.P. All rights reserved.

Review of History on Trial in Washington Times

Rescuing history from the lies and distortions
Published February 27, 2005

HISTORY ON TRIAL: MY DAY IN COURT WITH DAVID IRVING
By Deborah E. Lipstadt
Ecco, $25.95, 346 pages
REVIEWED BY CLIVE DAVIS

http://washingtontimes.com/books/20050226-101210-2795r.htm

It was a curiously anonymous setting for such a dramatic confrontation. Think of London's Royal Courts of Justice, and images of ancient oak-panelled chambers immediately swim into view. But Courtroom 73, where Deborah Lipstadt went to war five years ago against the champion of Holocaust denial, David Irving, could easily have been some anonymous seminar room on a 1970s campus.

The furnishings were drab and functional, adorned with rows of files and laptop computers. After spending one afternoon there during the three-month libel, I wondered how anyone could possibly stay sane in such a depressing room over such a long period.

The answer, of course, is that amidst the swirl of minutiae and legalese, the case generated riveting theater. Everyone present in the room -- from reporters to concentration camp survivors -- was aware that the outcome would had historic consequences.

The title of Ms. Lipstadt's memoir is no overstatement. By demolishing Mr. Irving's claims, her team of lawyers stripped Holocaust denial of the few lingering shreds of credibility it had ever possessed. That may sound a straightforward task; Holocaust deniers are, after all, the flat-earthers of our age. But it is worth remembering that until he met defeat in this case -- which he himself initiated -- David Irving was widely regarded as a legitimate if cranky historian of the Third Reich.

The real mystery is how on earth he ever thought he would prevail. Having issued a libel writ against Ms. Lipstadt in 1995 over her book, "Denying The Holocaust," the British author had ample time for second thoughts. Anthony Julius, the astute London solicitor who marshalled Ms. Lipstadt's team of researchers and historians, assumed that Mr. Irving was simply seeking publicity and would abandon the suit sooner or later.

If Mr. Irving made his task even more difficult by representing himself in court, the incriminating evidence scattered throughout his journals and archives gave his opponents no end of ammunition. The historian John Lukacs -- quoting his Spanish counterpart, Altamira -- has spoken of Mr. Irving's "idolatory of the document," that is, a willingness to build a towering edifice on a single document or fragment.

As Mr. Julius and Ms. Lipstadt's barrister, QC Richard Rampton, demonstrated over and again, the plaintiff was so eager to minimize or conceal the Nazis' crimes that he not only made a point of quoting documents out of context but mistranslated them into the bargain. To see him caught red-handed again and again is almost the stuff of farce. Even Ms. Lipstadt had to repress laughter at times.

There was one all-important factor working in her antagonist's favor, however. In Britain, in stark contrast to America's libel laws, the burden of proof rests on the defendant. (British publishers are acutely aware of this problem, which also explains why so many foreign VIPs choose to pursue cases in London rather than the country where the offending material was actually published.)

Ms. Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University, was thus put on the back foot. What made her position even more frustrating was that Mr. Irving, a past master of public relations, often managed to present himself in media reports as the victim of a legal juggernaut which he had, in fact, set it in motion.

The story of the confrontation has been told before, most notably in D. D. Guttenplan's book "The Holocaust on Trial" and "Telling Lies About Hitler" written by the defence's chief witness, the Cambridge historian Richard Evans. Still, Ms. Lipstadt's acount of her journey from uncertainty and despair to triumph is immensely readable.

At her lawyers' request, she did not testify during the trial itself, and kept her public statements to a minimum. Finally free to unburden herself, she has delivered an account that is fast-moving, shrewd and often unexpectedly droll. Unfamiliar with the archaic rituals of the British legal system, she initially found herself chafing against the coolly forensic approach of her barrister, Mr. Rampton. (Mr. Julius, as a solicitor, was not allowed to address the court.) It is only as the case gains momentum that she realizes that Mr. Rampton's emotional commitment to the trial is no smaller than hers.

We gain a vivid sense of Ms. Lipstadt's combative personality in the chapters devoted to her liberal New York upbringing and her youthful visits to Israel. (Unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not wait until the Six Day War to discover her emotional bond with the Jewish state.)

Mr. Irving's assault on her integrity was consequently more than a purely scholarly affair. Ms. Lipstadt was so consumed by the case and its ramifications that, while in London, she was slow to notice the incongruity of her choice of leisure outing. In the circumstances, "The Merchant of Venice" and a camp "singalong" version of "The Sound of Music", tuneful Nazis and all, were hardly the ideal way to relax.

Even in the moment of victory, a sour note intruded. Immediately after the verdict -- which was even more conclusive than she could have hoped -- two distinguished British historians, Sir John Keegan and Donald Cameron Watt, who had both been subpoenaed to give evidence by Irving -- published newspaper articles which appeared to make excuses for their countryman.

Mr. Watt asked plaintively, "Show me one historian who has not broken into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment?" It was a strange complaint, given what we now know about Mr. Irving's modus operandi.

Sir John's comments were even odder. Praising Mr. Irving's "strong, handsome" appearance, he seemed to find him much more worthy of sympathy than the defendant. He continued: "Professor Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again. Mr. Irving, if he will only learn from this case, still has much that is interesting to tell us." Reviewing this book in The Washington Post, the controversial Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argued that Mr. Irving's apologetics had found favor among "a part of the politicized historical profession that has a weakness for such exculpatory writings."

That seems a slight exaggeration. As Ms. Lipstadt acknowledges, even the judge's verdict praised Mr. Irving's work as a military historian. But it remains puzzling that two such distinguished figures -- who had both dismissed Mr. Irving's Holocaust theories -- were still willing to go out of their way to find virtue in a writer who displayed so little respect for truth.

Ms. Lipstadt suspects the Old Boy network may be to blame. It is a depressing thought. Thankfully, the rest of "History on Trial" restores one's faith in the power of good scholarship.

Clive Davis writes for The Times of London and keeps a weblog at clivedavis.blogspot.com


Copyright © 2005 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Review of History on Trial in Los Angeles Jewish Journal

History on Trial

Deborah Lipstadt opens up about the libel case that pitted Holocaust scholarship against denial.

by Michael Berenbaum

“History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving,” by Deborah E. Lipstadt (Echo, 2005) $25.95.

For five excruciating years, from the moment that David Irving sued her for libel in England until the appeals process ran its course, Deborah Lipstadt had to remain silent. Others defended her scholarship and revealed the deceitfulness and deliberately misleading nature of Irving’s writings. But Lipstadt would not, did not take the stand in her own defense.

Lipstadt is a contemporary women not known for her reticence. Silence was hard on someone who prides herself on fighting her own fights — but it was necessary. Now, finally, she speaks freely.

It all started in 1993, when Lipstadt wrote “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault Against Memory and Truth,” a book which described Holocaust denial in our age. A few paragraphs were devoted to Irving, the most informed, original and therefore most dangerous of Holocaust deniers.

Irving could not bring action against Lipstadt in the United States, because as a public figure, the burden was on him to prove that Lipstadt engaged in reckless disregard of truth — a near impossible task — since what she said was true. In England, the burden of proof is reversed. So when Penguin published the book in England, Irving sued both the author and publisher in London.

Lipstadt wrote that Irving was “a Hitler partisan wearing blinkers, who distorted evidence, manipulated documents and skewed and misrepresented data,” and that “Irving seems to conceive himself as carrying out Hitler’s legacy.”

She considered him a dangerous Holocaust denier. As the court determined in 2000, Lipstadt was not wrong, merely understated.

Perhaps Irving thought that Lipstadt would back down, issue a pro forma apology and settle for a symbolic sum. As the trial neared, he asked for a pittance — 500 pounds — to go to charity. Perhaps he thought the potential liability would force the parties to back down.

Lipstadt could not back down. To concede would be to accept defeat, inflict injury upon Holocaust survivors and desecrate the memory of the dead. She had to take a stand to preserve her standing, her dignity and her values.

The lawyers decided that the case would not be tried in the court of public opinion in the press, but in a courtroom. The trial was held before Judge Charles Gray — without a jury.

The press fury Irving induced as he played to them for months allowed his side of the story to be ubiquitous, while Lipstadt was silent. In the end, it was up to the judge to deliver a decisive, clear judgment.

What did Lipstadt do during five years of public silence?

As a blind person may hear more clearly; a deaf person see more intently, one who is muted may listen more carefully.

Lipstadt proves to have the keen eye of a journalist, observing the setting, the demeanor and even the fashion style of everyone from the court clerk to the judge and her barrister. She writes with a novelist’s sense of plot, so that while the reader is led through the entire trial, from first accusation to final vindication, the major story is never lost in the details. She doesn’t tell everything — but she does convey the drama, the anguish and the wealth of emotions that were her day-in, day-out experiences.

She writes without self-pity, but the reader is likely to pity her restraint. For those who did not follow the trial day by day, this book is fascinating reading that gives one a sense of what it was really like to sit there, to see the nature of the evidence, and see how strategic decisions were made.

In the end, all drama aside, the judge understands and renders the clearest of judgments by unmasking the pretense and politics of Irving’s pseudo-scholarship and the racism and anti-Semitism of his beliefs. And the plaintiff, Irving, plays his role to perfection, exceeding even our fondest wishes for him, by destroying himself in public. In defeat, his sting is diminished.

As Lipstadt writes, she did not stand trial alone. Her book is a tribute to those who stood by her. She is the first to recognize their importance, their competence, generosity and dedication.

Her brilliant and dedicated legal team included Anthony Julius, a fine lawyer and literary scholar, who wrote a doctoral thesis on T.S. Eliott’s anti-Semitism, and was a proud Jew known as Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer. His partner, James Libson, and his law firm, Mishcon de Reya, were prepared to take the case pro bono. They recruited Richard Rampton, a distinguished London barrister, to try the case after they prepared it. He, too, was prepared to work pro bono.

In the end, adequate funds were raised for the defense from Leslie and Abigail Wexner, Steven Spielberg, William Lowenberg and other Jewish philanthropists. Rabbi Herbert Friedman, whose distinguished career began as a U.S. Army chaplain working with soldiers and survivors and working with Bricha, organized the fund-raising effort discretely. (For the record, I was honored to assist him.)

The American Jewish Committee stepped in without seeking credit or publicity. Ken Stern, a lawyer and an authority on Holocaust denial, masterfully ran its efforts. Emory University, where Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, stood by her and gave her paid leave. Others taught her Holocaust course; friends visited, called, e-mailed and supported her through the long ordeal.

Scholars were recruited: Richard Evans of Cambridge, a superb historian and an expert on historiography, read each of Irving’s works and then checked and double-checked the original documents Irving cited and his translations — a tedious and increasingly loathsome task, as the depth of Irving’s deceit became clear.

Christopher Browning of the University of North Carolina, a worthy successor of Raul Hilberg as the leading authority on German documents, worked on German documentation of the “Final Solution.” Robert Jan Van Pelt, a Canadian of Dutch origin, an architectural historian who wrote brilliantly of the gas chambers of Auschwitz and who reads German documentation, testified on gassing at Birkenau.

Peter Longerich, a German living in England, analyzed the work of the Einsatzgruppen in former Soviet territory in 1941-42. Hajo Funke examined Irving’s association with neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and racist groups; the speeches he made, and the manner in which he played to his crowd.

Evans examined Irving’s footnotes and documentation. Their findings were devastating to Irving.

The team’s scholarship became contributions to the historiography of the Holocaust. Evans’ case became an extended discourse on how historians should read documents and reach their learned conclusions, an expression of historiography at its best — that demonstrated the most egregious violations of the cannons of the profession. The books that emerged from this team have added significantly to our knowledge of the Holocaust in clarity and in depth.

No survivors were called as witnesses, no Israelis. The trial was designed to be a trial of documents — an added benefit, since we are approaching the day when the last survivor will leave this earth and living memory will become the stuff of history. To those who feared that this natural development of time would put the memory of the Holocaust at risk, the trial proves otherwise.

Lipstadt is entitled to gloat, but does not. She understands the importance of her vindication — and its limitations. The British press was nasty, seeing it as a battle of class — an English gentleman against an American Jewish woman upstart Some barely concealed their anti-Semitism, and sometimes they confusingly presented the trial as an issue of free speech.

In our world, where rumor and innuendo parade as fact and insight, there is a tendency to believe that in every squabble there is some truth to each side and a basic laziness to uncover the truth. At least in England, Lipstadt was spared cable’s Court TV spinning.

Anyone who opens this book will be gratified by Lipstadt’s vindication. But what was all-important was the unmasking of Irving. He may have made the greatest contribution to that himself by bringing the suit in the first place, defending himself and then destroying himself.

Irving was the superstar of Holocaust deniers, and now he is known as the racist and anti-Semite who deliberately misread and mistranslated documents toward one end, the exoneration of Adolf Hitler. This case — and this book — prove that good scholarship can beat bad scholarship, and that even in our age of relativism and deconstructionism, there is a difference between good history and fraud.

Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust and an adjunct professor of theology at the University of Judaism.

Transcript of Wash. Post Online Discussion

Here's a transcript of Deborah Lipstadt's online discussion with WashingtonPost.com on Tuesday:
 

Washingtonpost.com
February 22, 2005 Tuesday 03:00 PM

SECTION: LIVEONLINE

LENGTH: 3198 words

HEADLINE: Book World LiveSOURCE: washingtonpost.com

BYLINE: Author, Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University

HIGHLIGHT:
Author Deborah E. Lipstadt discussed her book, "History on Trial," about her six-year legal battle with Holocaust denier David Irving.

BODY:
In 1993, Deborah E. Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" dissected a fringe, relatively isolated phenomenon of hard-core deniers. By the time she walked into a British court in 2000 to defend herself against a libel suit filed by one of those deniers, David Irving, Holocaust denial had been so transformed as to have become a critical part of the mushrooming global anti-Semitic movement. The trial was an event, covered around the world.

Lipstadt was online Tuesday, Feb. 22, at 3 p.m. ET to discuss her book and her six-year legal battle.

Lipstadt is Dorot professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.

Join Book World Live each Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET for a discussion based on a story or review in each Sunday's [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/print/sunday/bookworld/ ]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/print/sunday/bookworld/" target="new Book World section.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

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Gaithersburg, Md.: Do you agree that David Irving lost his case not based on facts but rather because the judge was afraid that, as it says in Book World, "...had Irving prevailed on the narrow legal issue... (it would have cast) doubt on the ... Holocaust itself."

A few years ago I heard David Irving speak and bought one of his books. He did not deny the Holocaust, he merely presented facts.

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Irving lost his case because on every historical issue that we brought up he was repeatedly shown to have either lied, perverted the evidence, ignored available evidence, or committed some other historical "malfeasance." There were no "legal" issues as such involved in the case. In fact, the judge said exactly that on the day of the verdict when he rejected Irving's attempt to appeal on the basis of the legal issues involved. The judge said, there are none, there are only historical issues.

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Deborah E. Lipstadt: For those interested in transcripts of the trial, the expert witness reports, the Judge's judgment, and other material on the trial, you might be interested in going to [ http://www.hdot.org/ ]www.hdot.org. It is an Emory-sponsored website on the trial. No bells or whistles just documentation. You might also want to check out lipstadt.blogspot.com

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Cleveland, Ohio: Did anyone ever take David Irving to Auschwitz and the other death camps?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Irving made a big fuss at the trial that he is banned from visiting Auschwitz. When my barrister reminded him that the Auschwitz ban was not issued until eight years after he first testified [at the Zundel trial] that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Why, my barrister inquired, in those intervening eight years did he not ever visit the archives? Irving, chuckling, said he would probably have been banned earlier if he had tried to visit. "It is like the big casinos in Las Vegas. They do not the want the big winners to come." When he said that I heard someone in the public gallery gasp. I almost fainted. [See History on Trial, pp. 122-23.]

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Washington, D.C.: Deborah,

A voice from your past here. First, congratulations on your perseverance not to mention your victory.

My question relates to the academic community here in the U.S. In the past decade, it seems to be swinging in a more anti-Israel direction which often translates into anti-Semitism. Did you find your peers at colleges and universities supportive of you or did they keep their distance.

Arthur Chotin

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Some of my colleagues [not here at Emory] thought the whole thing was silly. They compare Irving to a flat-earth theorist upon whom it is of no use to expend any time or energy. They contended that I should simply ignore him. Of course, given the nature of British libel laws, I could not do that.

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Palo Alto, Calif.: Thanks for carrying the truth torch, and inveighing against an Orwellian mind-set.

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Thanks for your good wishes. I did what I had to do. In the UK the burden of proof was on me. Had I not fought him he would have won by default. I could not let that happen

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Laurel, Md.: The fact that 6 millions Jews died in the Holocaust is so widely accepted that almost no one asks the obvious question -- what are the sources for this number and how reliable are they? (Not to suggest the number is zero; but how well established is six million as opposed to 4 or 10 million?)

On a related question -- the number of non-Jews killed is usally quoted as 2 to 6 million. Why is this number known to only a rough approximation, while the number of Jews is almost universally accepted at a single figure?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Our guesstimate is based on comparing the pre-war Jewish population with the number of survivors. There are, in fact, respected historians [Hilberg] who have lower numbers and those who, in the light of information gleaned from archives that were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, argue that it is higher. It is generally accepted to be between 5-6 million. Regarding non-Jews: the number 2-6 million has no basis in fact. It depends who you are counting. The number of Soviet citizens, for example, who died in the war is far higher than that. Are you refering to non-Jews who died in concentration camps? In that case the number is far lower. Are you talking about wartime casulties? On the battlefield? Off? Simon Wiesenthal used to talk of the 11 million victims [6 Jews, 5 non-Jews]of the Holocaust. until historians challenged him to demonstrate what 5 million non-Jews he was talking about. He had to admit he virtually pulled the number out of the air. There were many more than 5 million non-Jewish deaths, but not as part of the Holocaust.

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Washington, D.C.: Is David Irving still active and what is the extent of his "influence" at this time?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: David Irving continues to lecture and [self] publish his books. He travels and lectures, speaking to his ardent supporters. From reading what he has to say about the case, I sometimes get the impression that he is dealing in "verdict" [actually its called a judgment] denial, i.e. you might think he won the case based on what he has to say about it.

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Belmont, Mass.: What differences do you find between Holocaust denial when you wrote your book and today?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: As a result of the trial, all Holocaust denial arguments as they stood until 2001 have be shown to be completely bogus. The deniers suffered a real setback in that when the evidence was on the table their claims were shown to be essentially worthless. Today, the most active area of Holocaust denial is the Arab/Muslim world. You see some really crude examples of it in that arena. In fact, some [though certainly not all] Arab/Muslim intellectuals have caustioned against using Holocaust denial [as well as known forgeries such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion] in the fight against Israel. It just, they argue, makes their side look silly. The kind of Holocaust denial you see today in the Western world [particularly in Europe] is a comparison of the Holocaust with the actions of Israel. However one might feel about the State of Israel and its policies, there is no comparison. To do so is to whitewash the Third Reich

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Washington, D.C.: What is to be gained from denying The Holocaust? I mean, who benefits from making these claims? Is it an orchestrated effort by anti-semetic groups alone or are there others who benefit as well?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: It is primarily an antisemitic effort. There is a strange irony here. Deniers say the Holocaust did not happen but suggest that, should it have happened, it would have been entirely justified. [I know that is a convoluted sentence but these are people who think in a very convoluted fashion.] Many deniers [it is hard to generalize about all of them] resent the sympathy they feel Jews have gained as a result of the Holocaust. They resent [if not more so] the existence of Israel. They cannot abide Jews. Denying the Holocaust is deniers' way of getting at the Jews... or trying to do so.

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Washington, D.C.: What was Irving's aim in denying the Holocaust. Would you label him an antisemite#63;

Deborah E. Lipstadt: I am not sure of Irving's aims but I can tell you that the judge declared his writings, speeches, and comments to be antisemitic and racist. It seems to me that another factor is that he loves the publicity and this wins him a lot of attention. That, in fact, is one of the challenges in fighting these kind of folks. Defeating them without giving them undue pr.

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Tampa, Fla.: What's wrong with denying history? It's really quite common. Goldhagen said Germans had genocide in their genes, until Birn and Finklestein demolished his case. Peters said Palestine was empty when the Zionists first came, until Finkelstein pointed out the flaws in her arguments. Many supporters of Israel claim the Palestinians left of their own accord in 1948, until Benny Morris showed the fraud in that argument. The Israeli and U.S. governments deny the holocaust of the Armenians, yet Bernard Lewis was fined by a Fench court for genocide denial. (And before you blow a gasket, remember the term "holocaust" was first used in a genocidal sense to describe what the Turks did to the Armenians). Cristol says the attack on the USS Liberty was a mistake, even though every survivor allowed to speak says otherwise, as Bamford notes. Yet all these falsifications persist today, encouraged by official governmental policies.

David Irving merely follows a long line of history deniers. It's worked for others, so why single out Mr. Irving? We can shelve his books alongside those of Goldhagen, Cristol, Peters and Lewis. Right in the Holocaust Museums across America.

Deborah E. Lipstadt: I am not going to point out all the historical flaws in your question. I just want to remind you that I did not go after Mr. Irving. He sued me. He tried to force me to withdraw my book from circulation. He tried to curtail my freedom of speech. I don't believe in suing historians or dragging these issues into court. He does.

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Falls Church, Va.: Did Irving ever contact you privately after the legal battle#63; Also, do you ever fear that being so outspoken could make you a target#63;

Deborah E. Lipstadt: I don't see why I should have contacted him. I had nothing to say to him and I certainly had heard enough from him during the close to 3 month legal battle. A target? Not really.

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Silver Spring, Md.: Would you say that the community of deniers is larger or smaller now than it was 10 or 20 years ago#63;

Deborah E. Lipstadt: It's a bit hard to answer that question. I don't think they have grown substantially but with the Internet their ability to spread their tales has grown. They get to "speak" to a wider audience than they did before. I do believe that my trial -- by hewing closely to the facts -- dealt them a severe blow. As Judge Gray ruled. Their arguments about the Holocaust "distort," "pervert," "[are] misleading," "unjustified," "travesty, and "unreal."

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Cheyenne, Wy.: How are Holocaust-denial claims presented (in Muslim/Arab world and the likes of Irving), in light of known facts and pictures that have been available for years? Are these "fakes," not unlike UFO sightings?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: I should have mentioned earlier that for examples of Holocaust denial in the Arab/Muslim world check out MEMRI, the organization which translates from the Arab press. It is a treasure trove of information. Of course the "fakes" are like UFO sightings. There is no logic or factual basis to them. That's why I don't debate them. There is nothing to debate. I am not suggesting that there is nothing to debate about the Holocaust. Historians engage in fierce debates, e.g. could Auschwitz have been bombed? Were the Germans "pre-disposed" to being willing executioners? When did Hitler et.al. decide on the murder of the Jews? These things are all open to debate. What is not open to debate is whether it happened or not. On that the victims, bystanders, perpetrators, documents, material evidence etc. etc. etc. all agree.

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Washington, D.C.: Can you tell us more about your work at Emory University#63;

Deborah E. Lipstadt: At Emory I teach about the Holocaust. I also have helped set up a website on my trial, [ http://www.hdot.org/ ]www.hdot.org, which is, as I mentioned at the outset, a great resource for historical documentation about the trial. Let me also briefly mention -- since you asked -- how supportive of me Emory was during this whole long story. I discuss it in the book. However, since we who work in the unviversity arena are so often cynical about university's and especially their administrations, I thought I should reiterate this. In any case see History on Trial, pp. xvii-xix, 25, 68, 97, 151, 189, 203, 308-09.

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Urbana, Ill.: I followed the trial closely, and was particularly impressed by the detail of the judgment against Irving -- a complete point-by-point evisceration of Irving's (sometimes shifting) claims. Isn't it interesting, though, how even this chat shows to what extraordinary lengths some people will go to deny the evidence?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Though I should not be surprised by it, it does continue to blow my mind. For examples of even more denial see some of the comments on lipstadt.blogspot.com [especially in relationship to Ward Churchill's declaration that there is no difference between a Deborah Lipstadt and an Adolf Eichmann].

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Woodbourne, N.Y.: Is the trial you had similar to the QB VII trial that Leon Uris was involved in many years ago?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: It is based on the same principle in that both Uris and I, as the defendants, were required to prove the truth of what we wrote as opposed to the Claimant [Plaintiff] having to prove the falsehood. The difference is that Uris lost because he said the Polish doctor has been responsible for the death of thousands when he was responsible for "only" the death of hundreds. [He had to pay the fine of the lowest coin in the realm, a ha'penny.] BTW, on the eve of the trial I made a small private pilgrimage to Courtroom 7 [QB 7] and resolved that while Uris lost in the courtroom but won in the court of public opinion, I wanted to win in both.

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Alexandria, Va.: Ms. Lipstadt,

I just wanted to say thank you for all of your work. I studied the Holocaust while attending the University of Vermont and we would occasionally have a denier sign up for one of the classes or attend a lecture. It was flabergasting how steadfast these people were in their beliefs -- even when presented infallible truths such as detailed records kept at the camps, videos made (show anyone Night and Fog and they will understand the utter distruction of life), and many other examples. And I think that is the scariest part of it all.

Deborah E. Lipstadt: While deniers' attempts to pervert history are deeply disturbing, don't let them get you down. They really are unimportant [as long as we know how extensively they twist history] as are most haters, whomever the object of their hatred. Also, when I last checked, there were more people in the US who believed Elvis was alive and well than who believed the Holocaust did not happen. That may only be half a consolation...

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Gaithersburg, Md.: A few years ago a book called "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (or something like that) caused quite a controversy by suggesting that the existence of the Holocaust was wildely known and supported by the German populace.

Is there a common understanding of how many people willingly and with full knowledge participated?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: This is a very important question. We now know that many people in Germany had extensive knowledge of the killings. Let me give you just a few examples. There was a professor who lived in Dresden, Victor Klemperer, who despite having to live in a "Jew house" and was prevented from having a radio, had no family members in the Wehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen, or SS [who could report firsthand on the mass shootings in the East or the killings in the camps] yet he was able to write in August 1942 about a report of a 17 year old boy who died in a concentration camp. Boy supposedly died of colitis. Kelempers wondered, "Since when does a vigorous young person die of this?" In mid-January 1943 Klemperer writes about suffering from a constant and ghastly fear of Auschwitz, a place from which no body every comes back. Now if he knew this, imagine how much more people with direct contacts with the front knew. BTW, there is new book by Eric Johnson and Kar-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew, [Basic Books] which is an oral history of Germans living during that time and addresses precisely this issue. They demonstrate, as have many other historians before them including Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, just how extensive the knowledge of the killing and the participation -- directly and indirectly -- in it by Germans was.

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Washington, D.C.: You cite MEMRI as a source for information on Holocaust denial in the Middle East. That seems ironic to me given that that organization is extremely selective in what it chooses to translate and publish.

Deborah E. Lipstadt: I can't speak to what MEMRI doesn't choose to translate and publish. I can only speak to what it does choose to translate and publish and much of that, especially in regard to antisemitism in general and the Holocaust in particular, is pretty frightening. [And MEMRI is not my only source for this kind of material.] And no one has ever argued that their translations are off the mark.

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Deborah E. Lipstadt: I think that there are a number of things to keep in mind regarding Holocaust denial in general and my trial in particular: 1. Irving sued me. As I said in answer to another question: I don't believe history belongs in the courtroom. 2. Irving lost in an overwhelming fashion. There was not ONE point of history on which he prevailed and, as Professor Richard Evans, our lead historical witness noted, on every single one of Irving's statements about the Holocaust he found a "tissue of lies." 3. More importantly however, is the fact that deniers themselves are really not important. In fact, they are pretty pathetic figures as their futile attempts to try to disporve the truth are exposed. 4. Those who choose to expose their manipulations of the truth must try to do so without building them up into more than they are. 5. The same goes for racists and other sources of prejudice.