Author 'delighted' by Holocaust libel verdict

Judge calls Irving 'anti-Semitic and racist'

April 11, 2000
Web posted at: 8:41 p.m. EDT (0041 GMT)

In this story: Jewish groups applaud Trading on death camp tourism Irving denies racism RELATED STORIES, SITES

From staff and wire reports

LONDON (CNN) -- A British judge branded controversial historian David Irving "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist" Tuesday as he rejected Irving's libel suit against an American professor.

Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Atlanta's Emory University, and her publisher, Penguin Books, over Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," in which he was described as a "Holocaust denier."

Lipstadt said she was "delighted" by the verdict.

"What I said was correct," she said. "The judge went further than I did in my book."

Irving, who once called the Auschwitz death camp a "Disneyland for tourists," lost the suit. In announcing his verdict, High Court Judge Charles Gray said that Irving was "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist."

AUDIO Listen to the reactions of Deborah Lipstadt and of Lord Greville Janner, of the Holocaust Educational Fund, following Tuesday's ruling 672K/31 sec. AIFF or WAV sound     TIME.com analysis: Why loss in Holocaust libel suit is important     ALSO Profile: David Irving   MESSAGE BOARDS Holocaust historian

"The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his extra-curricular activities revealed him to be a right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist," the judge said.

Irving, in a reversal of his previous position, said that he would appeal the verdict, which he described as "perverse."

Irving claimed that Lipstadt, who said the British scholar had "prostituted his reputation" to prove Adolf Hitler was not responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, had "done very real damage" to his career.

Jewish groups applaud

But Irving's opponents said the damage done was only right.

"(The ruling is) a victory of history over hate," said a statement from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based center for Nazi victims. "Today's decision definitely places Irving where he belongs -- not as a historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history."

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center's founder, said Gray's ruling, "instead of debunking the Holocaust, has basically debunked David Irving."

Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the court decision showed Irving to be a "a falsifier of history and a Nazi sympathizer, whose aim has been to sanitize Nazism and to absolve Hitler of the guilt of the Holocaust."

Lipstadt's publisher, Penguin Books, was elated with the ruling.

"What today's judgment has proved is that we were right to stand by the content of our book and that it was entirely inappropriate of David Irving to seek to suppress the book by way of a libel action," said a statement from Penguin.

"The judge has said (Irving) is not a credible historian, and that has stripped him of any pretense of being a credible historian when it comes to the Holocaust," Lipstadt said.

Irving, whose books include "Hitler's War" and a biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, disputes the common wisdom about the Nazi reign of terror in Europe, denying that Hitler employed a "final solution" to rid his realm of Jews.

The structures at the Auschwitz death camp -- including the giant chimney stack of a crematorium and the iron gate with the slogan "Work Makes Free" -- were added after the end of World War II, he said.

"In 1948 they build this kind of Disneyland for tourists as a money spinner," he said in a recent interview with Reuters. "Everything they show the tourists is fake."

"There were no gas chambers, certainly not on the scale that is now propagated," he continued. "And I think the scale is an important point to make."

Most of those who died there, he said, died of typhus or other diseases.

Irving denies racism

Irving insisted that his writings were "the historical truth and that I alone have been getting it right."

Judge Gray vehemently disagreed.

"He has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews," Gray said. "The charges which I have found substantially true include the charges that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated history evidence."

But Irving said the case -- which he conducted on his own behalf -- would enhance his reputation "because of my ability to stand up to the experts ... to take them all on single-handed."

Irving, who was pelted by eggs on his arrival at the courthouse and slipped out a back way after the verdict was read, denies that he is racist but says he cannot "applaud uncontrolled colored immigration."

"It's not a historian's job to be liked," he said, adding that his "domestic staff" over the years including many young women from other cultures, including a Barbadian, a Punjabi, a Sri Lankan and a Pakistani. "All (were) very attractive girls with very nice breasts."

Correspondent Margaret Lowrie, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Pope tells Jews in Israel of grief over Holocaust
March 23, 2000
British take steps to return art plundered by Nazis
March 4, 2000
Manhattan museum plans to issue Holocaust looted-art study
March 2, 2000
U.S., German officials to meet Wednesday on Holocaust fund
September 28, 1999
Holocaust survivors, heirs sought for Nazi persecution settlement
June 29, 1999
3rd largest German bank to help compensate Holocaust victims
February 9, 1999

David Irving: Britain's Holocaust "revisionist"
David Irving's newsletter Action Report On-line
Deborah Lipstadt, Emory University
The Editor's Corner--Deborah Lipstadt's Trial and Us
Documents Relating to the Holocaust, War Crimes and Genocide
Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Holocaust: Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust
Welcome to the Simon Wiesenthal Center Online
Holocaust: A Layman's Guide to Auschwitz-Birkenau

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.