Holocaust Denial Libel Suit: Denied

Historian David Irving, who has outraged survivors of Nazi death camps by challenging the scope of the Holocaust, Tuesday lost the libel suit that he launched to save his academic reputation.

Irving sued American scholar Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, in Britain's High Court. He said their 1994 book branded him a "Holocaust denier" and accused him of distorting the truth of what happened in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

Irving, whose books include Hitler's War, said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths.

He claimed that after the publication of Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, his academic work was increasingly shunned by publishers and agents.

But Judge Charles Gray said he failed to prove his reputation had been damaged. Under British law, Lipstadt and Penguin were not able to rely solely on truth as a defense.

Shortly before the ruling, Irving said that whatever the outcome "my reputation is bound to be enhanced because of my ability to stand up to the experts...to take them all on single-handed."

He said he would not appeal.

Irving, who represented himself during the nine-week, non-jury trial, is not new to controversy. His comments — some made while addressing neo-Nazi groups — have drawn fire from Jewish organizations around the world, and he has been banned from Germany, Canada and Australia.

Irving told the court he had been the victim of a 30-year international campaign to destroy his reputation "as a human being, as an historian of integrity."

Richard Rampton, the lawyer representing Penguin and Lipstadt, who holds the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said during the trial that Irving perpetuated falsifications "for the sake of a bogus rehabilitation of Hitler and dissemination of virulent anti-Semitic propaganda."

Irving conceded he had made some "mistakes of copying, mistakes of omission," but said he corrected those errors. He claimed that rather than deny the Holocaust, he drew attention to major aspects of the tragedy.

Irving questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted. He said most Jews who died at Auschwitz did so from diseases such as typhus, not gas poisoning.

In a sign of the international outrage directed at Irving, Israel even agreed to release the previously secret memoirs of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for use by Lipstadt and Penguin's legal team, saying it was morally obliged to help them.

In the 1,300 handwritten pages penned in an Israeli prison, Eichmann plays down his own role in the mass killing but also provides methodical descriptions of the genocide, including timetables of death transports.

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