"History on Trial" Optioned for a Movie

Check out this article in today's Variety and the blog, Cinematical.

As the Variety article notes, the producers of the Soloist have teamed up with Participation Media to make the film. Participation, established by Jeff Skoll, one of the founders of eBay, has made An Inconvenient Truth, The Kite Runner, Charlie Wilson's War, and the Sesame Street Story.

A caveat: Optioned is a long way from buying your popcorn for the movie.

So sit tight.

"History on Trial" Named One of Five Best Books on Legal Trials by Alan Dershowitz in Wall Street Journal

Alan Dershowitz, asked by the Wall Street Journal [January 17th], to list his pick of of five best books on momentous legal cases has included History on Trial, in his pick .

This is what he had to say about History on Trial.

History on Trial

By Deborah E. Lipstadt

Ecco, 2005

"History on Trial" is Deborah E. Lipstadt's compelling first-person account of her experience as the defendant in a libel suit brought in 1996 by British author David Irving, who was unhappy that she had described him in print as a Holocaust denier. As I wrote in an afterword for the book, the trial was a rare instance in which "truth, justice and freedom of speech [were] all simultaneously served." What was at stake in the case transcended Lipstadt's reputation and fortune. Her antagonist sought to put the Holocaust itself on trial. This worried survivors, concerned that their history was being subjected to a judicial test, with standards of evidence and proof that did not always produce truth. Moreover, under British law, truth was not necessarily a defense to defamation. Through the determination of Lipstadt and the brilliant legal work of her lawyer, Anthony Julius, especially his devastating cross-examination of Irving, the court ruled that she had written the truth -- Irving is indeed a Holocaust denier -- and that he had not been defamed. The verdict also helped to expand the right of truthful free speech in Britain.

The other four are The Leo Frank Case by Leonard Dinnerstein [Columbia University, 1968], Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson [Basic Books, 1997] on the Scopes trial, The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton [Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983], and Until Proven Innocent by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson [Thomas Dunne, 2007] on the Duke Lacrosse team.

Using History on Trial to connect Holocaust denial and 9/11 conspiracy theorists

A website devoted to debunking 9/11 conspiracies addresses the connections between such conspiracy theorists and my own work on Holocaust deniers, particularly as addressed in my book, History on Trial.

History on Trial: Reflections on my book from Germany

There are some interesting comments on my work, the trial, and on History on Trial at http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/category/books/

Review of HISTORY ON TRIAL in Journal of Genocide Research

Journal of Genocide Research, 9:3, pp. 485-87

History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving
Deborah Lipstadt
New York: Harper Collins, 2005
346 pp, $25.95 (hbk)

Reviewed by John Zimmerman

History on Trial is a personal memoir by the defendant in the London trial that garnered worldwide media attention and ended in disgrace for the plaintiff, David Irving. Lipstadt combines the best elements of personal narrative and history writing. Her book is a riveting human drama, as well as an excellent analysis of the historical issues raised at the trial.

The central figure at the trial was David Irving, who had written many books on World War II. Irving argued in Hitler’s War, published in 1977, that the Holocaust was carried out behind Hitler’s back by unruly subordinates. Eventually, he ended up denying the Holocaust altogether. In her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt identified Irving as a Holocaust denier who had distorted evidence for ideological reasons. This was obvious to anyone who had followed Irving over the years. Indeed, he would regularly appear at gatherings of Holocaust deniers.

At one of these gatherings, he announced that Hitler was “probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich. He was the one doing everything he could to prevent nasty things happening to them” (p xviii). This would prove typical of Irving’s antics when addressing Holocaust issues.

Irving sued Lipstadt’s British publisher, Penguin, over the assertions she made about him in Denying the Holocaust (2004). He would have been unable to sue in a US court, but British libel laws are far looser, and more weighted toward the plaintiff, than those in the United States. The suit promised to be very expensive for Lipstadt’s publisher. She feared the publisher might settle on terms favourable to Irving. Her lawyer, Richard Rampton, one of Britain’s foremost barristers and perhaps the major hero of the trial, agreed to take the case pro bono if the publisher chose not to pursue a litigation defence. Nevertheless, Penguin did not back out, and the trial went forward.

It is important to emphasize that it was Lipstadt’s right to free speech that Irving was challenging. His lawsuit could have led to the publisher withdrawing the book in Britain. Characteristically, Irving portrayed himself as the victim. Moreover, as Lipstadt learned, Irving was threatening similar lawsuits against journalist Gitta Sereny and the publisher of historian John Lukacs, both of whom had exposed his flagrant misuse of sources.

The centrepiece of the book is the trial itself. Irving had always craved attention, and now he was at the heart of a major drama unfolding in a London courtroom. Indeed, he decided to represent himself. The end result is that he used a world stage to make a fool of himself.

Lipstadt recounts in detail the massive evidence presented at the trial, which showed quite conclusively that not only was Irving a Holocaust denier, but that he intentionally misused historical sources to present Hitler in a favourable light. In Hitler’s War, he claimed that a memo by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, which instructed that Jews were not to be liquidated, showed that Hitler was against killings. As it turned out, the actual memo referred only to a particular transport, and was issued before Himmler met with Hitler that day. But Irving failed to draw the logical conclusion: that Hitler must have known of the Holocaust, if he was aware that this one transport was not to be liquidated.

Irving was also asked about a document that showed 363,000 Jews murdered over a four-month period—a document marked “shown to the Fu¨hrer.” Irving’s response was typical: that if Hitler saw the document, he probably paid no attention to it, because he was busy with the war.

For Irving, no absurdity was too great. When asked to explain how residues of poison gas ended up in morgues that had been identified in Auschwitz as homicidal gas chambers, Irving answered that the room was used “for fumigating objects or cadavers” (p 131). The presiding judge asked him why a corpse would be gassed. Irving replied that it was necessary to kill the vermin that inhabited the corpse. Yet, these bodies would be incinerated in the crematoria ovens located in the same buildings as the morgue. Why fumigate a body about to be incinerated?

Misrepresentations are common when Irving writes about Nazis and Jews. He claimed that the German authorities attempted to stop the anti-Jewish riots known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938. Yet, when reviewing Irving’s own sources, the exact opposite proved to be the case. The actual orders stated that the anti-Jewish demonstrations should not be hindered.

Irving was also adept at fabricating figures. He multiplied by a factor of ten the number of German deaths that resulted from the Allied bombings of Dresden to show that Allied crimes equalled, if not exceeded, those of the Germans. One of his most egregious examples was the claim in his biography of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that in 1932 German Jews were responsible for 31,000 cases of fraud, mainly from insurance. His source for this was an article in a Nazi propaganda publication. In fact, the real figure was 74 cases for all insurance fraud in 1932.

Irving claimed that his errors were not intentional. However, the presiding judge noted that all of his errors were in favour of Hitler, while none ran in the opposite direction. This suggested that the mistakes were hardly innocent.

The court’s verdict was that Irving was a Holocaust denier who had deliberately falsified the historical record to promote his ideological beliefs. Lipstadt concludes that “David Irving had been far less formidable than any of us imagined. His fanciful claims had crumpled under the simple weight of facts” (pp 298–299).

Yet, in a strange way, it was Irving, not Lipstadt, who made the best case for the Holocaust. Ironically, by revealing himself as a fraud in the global media spotlight, Irving has done more to discredit Holocaust denial than all the critical books written on the topic combined. In fact, in the conspiratorial world Irving inhabits, he could even be classified as an agent of the “traditional enemy” (i.e. Jews). For Irving, who so craves attention, this point is probably irrelevant. For at least some period, much world attention was focused on him.

His recent arrest and incarceration in Austria, for Holocaust denial, suggests that the verdict I passed on him in 2000 remains valid: “What can be said about Irving is that he knows a great deal but has learned nothing.”1

John C. Zimmerman
University of Nevada Las Vegas

Bibliography
Lipstadt, D. E. (2004). Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (London: Penguin).

Note
1 John C. Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial: Demographics, Testimonies and Ideologies (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), p 172.

History on Trial among Amazon's "Best of 2005"

Amazon.com has posted the "Best Books of 2005". In the History category, the list of Top 10 Editors' Picks puts History on Trial at number 4.

History on Trial reviewed in SPLC Intelligence Report

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Summer issue of their Intelligence Report features a review of History on Trial:

Defending Truth
A scholar recounts her titanic legal battle with Holocaust denier David Irving

By Heidi Beirich

History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving
By Deborah Lipstadt
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005, $25.95 (hardback)

In her new memoir History on Trial, Deborah Lipstadt, a renowned Emory University professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, tells a captivating tale of the British libel trial that she was forced into when the English Holocaust denier and Third Reich "historian" David Irving foolishly sued her. Irving claimed Lipstadt had ruined his reputation by describing him as a Holocaust denier and Nazi admirer in her 1994 work, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The trial, which began in January 2000, proved Irving was indeed as Lipstadt had written, and that he was a mean-spirited, racist buffoon and shoddy historian to boot.

History on Trial is peopled with somewhat eccentric characters whose dedication to defending the truth about the Holocaust is inspiring. And Irving — who, in one of the greatest Freudian slips of all time, actually referred to the judge as "Mein Fuhrer"— adds troubling color to the story. The book is a real page-turner, holding the reader until the end, even when the outcome of the trial is already known.

The book has some interesting tidbits about Irving. He comes across as a truly vile human being who likes to mock Holocaust survivors and hang out with neo-Nazis. The most telling anecdote describes how Irving approached former Nuremburg prosecutor Robert Kempner in 1969 to say that he intended to go to Washington to prove that the official record of the Nuremburg trial was falsified. Kempner noted at the time in a recently unearthed memo to J. Edgar Hoover that Irving made "anti-American and anti-Jewish statements." It seems Irving dedicated himself to Nazi views long, long ago.

Memory, Scholarship and the Law
There is a disturbing aspect to the memoir. Although the trial ended in a total legal victory for Lipstadt — and Irving will forever be tagged, as he was by Judge Charles Gray, as a slipshod researcher, a "racist" and an "anti-Semite" — the victory outside the courtroom was less than complete.

This is partly due to the nature of British libel law, which puts the burden of proof on the defendant, rather than on the plaintiff who is claiming to have been libeled (which is how the American system works). As a result, publishers are often reluctant to release controversial books in Britain. Indeed, as Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz points out in his afterword to Lipstadt's book, British libel law has led to a "chilling of free speech" and a stifling of academic inquiry. A case in point: The publication in Britain of John Lukac's The Hitler of History was delayed three years because of threats from Irving. When it was finally distributed — even though that wasn't until after the absolutely decisive verdict in Lipstadt's favor — Lukac's publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, had toned down the sections on Irving for the British market.

Another result of the British system is that defending even a flawless book can cost a fortune in legal fees. Indeed, the Lipstadt case might not even have seen the inside of a courtroom if it hadn't been for the willingness of Penguin Books, Lipstadt's publisher, and several donors to absorb the enormous costs of a drawn-out trial. Up to that time, Irving's skillful employment of libel threats had allowed him to maintain a reputation as a serious historian for far longer than he should have been able to. The trial was necessary for the truth about Irving to come out.

Another distressing aspect of this tale is the considerable academic cowardice that Lipstadt had to contend with when Irving sued. Lipstadt writes that a leading Holocaust historian suggested that she simply let Irving win. When she replied that that would effectively validate Irving's denial of the Holocaust, the reply was, "So what?" Others thought that going to court would transform Irving into a celebrity or free-speech martyr, as if that unlikely possibility mattered more than proving that his writings on the Holocaust are deeply flawed and animated by virulent anti-Semitism. And still others warned that Lipstadt was cheapening herself by becoming a media personality. It is unsettling that prominent historians would find defending the truth about the Holocaust so unimportant.

Truth and 'Fairness'
It is downright scandalous that a Hitler apologist like Irving could be taken seriously for so long by so many distinguished historians. For decades, Irving was publishing works on World War II to great applause, even though many falsified parts of the Nazi record. As the historical research presented at the trial made clear, Irving's obvious aim was to cleanse Hitler of his crimes. Irving was intent on dismissing the reality of the Holocaust, thereby relieving the Nazis of responsibility for their crimes, and he also used his research to legitimate Nazis lies about Jews.

The celebrated British military historian, Sir John Keegan, is Exhibit No. 1 of this problem. He praised Irving's book Hitler's War even though it falsely argued that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution — and Keegan was not alone in his praise. Even after Irving lost his libel case, Keegan criticized Lipstadt in an editorial, writing that the trial "will send a tremor" of fear through historical circles. Keegan also wrote that Irving's denial of the Holocaust was only "a small but disabling element of his work." Historians like Keegan have protected Irving's reputation over the years — even though Irving's work is sub par, something revealed by the in-depth examinations of his work and documentation undertaken by the defense team's assemblage of leading experts. Those studies, compiled by notable Holocaust historians such as Christopher Browning, will now stand permanently as a rebuttal to the disturbing farce that Holocaust denial "research" represents.

But the idea that Holocaust denial is merely the "other side of the story" persists in sometimes remarkable quarters. Just this March, the American cable channel C-SPAN was planning to televise a speech by Lipstadt about her memoir. In the interests of what a C-SPAN producer described to Lipstadt as "fairness and balance," C-SPAN decided to air a presentation by David Irving as well that would represent "the opposing view." C-SPAN apparently thought there was some kind of legitimate historical debate over the existence of the gas chambers and Hitler's knowledge of the Final Solution — a complete and utter misreading of contemporary historical scholarship. In fact, C-SPAN's bizarre position drew an angry letter of protest signed by more than 200 historians from around the world.

Lipstadt's memoir is a powerful reminder that truth needs to be vigilantly defended. If Irving and his ilk had their way, the largest state-ordered mass murder in history would actually disappear from the record.

Intelligence Report
Summer 2005

History on Trial reviewed in Australian Jewish News

The June 24 (print) edition of the Australian Jewish News has a review of History on Trial:

Triumph over Holocaust denier Irving
Book Review
Chemi Shalev

HISTORY ON TRIAL: MY DAY IN
COURT WITH DAVID IRVING
Deborah Lipstadt
HarperCollins, $25.95

The comfort of modern Diaspora life, especially in countries such as Australia and the United States, is not conducive to the creation of genuine heroes; these are usually the product of difficult times or dire circumstance.

One exception to this rule, however, is Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Like her namesake from the Book of Judges, Lipstadt can rightly be considered a latter-day Jewish heroine of truly biblical proportions.

Lipstadt did not seek this greatness; it was thrust upon her by Holocaust denier David Irving, who in 1995 sued her in a London court for libel and defamation.

In her relatively-unheralded 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory, Lipstadt had lambasted Irving as a Hitler-loving and history-distorting Holocaust denier.

Rather than being a legitimate and respected historian, as many considered him, Lipstadt described Irving as a Nazi sympathiser and a habitual distorter and contortionist of the facts at his disposal who consistently diminished the Holocaust and glorified its perpetrators.

Lipstadt's new book History on Trial is her gripping account of the five harrowing years that culminated on April 11, 2000, as Justice Charles Gray ruled against Irving, demolished whatever historical credentials he may have had and, by ordering him to pay court costs of close to £2 million ($A4.7 million), drove him to bankruptcy.

Lipstadt's book is based on the personal records that she kept throughout the gruelling ordeal, from the day she received a letter from her publisher, Penguin, about Irving's suit and mistakenly laughed it off as inconsequential, or "really nuts".

Lipstadt was unaware at the time that contrary to American law, British defamation practice places the burden of proof on the defendant, rather than the plaintiff. It was a formidable and, at times, seemingly-insurmountable task.

Her account of the trial itself is as riveting as only judicial high dramas can be, but horrifying as well in its dissection of the otherwise abhorrent.

Following the wise decision made by her counsel, Richard Rampton QC, to tackle Irving on forensic grounds rather than eyewitness testimonies, the court was subjected to many hours of debate on the exact number of Jewish bodies that could be buried in a ditch after being shot by the Einsatzgruppen death squads in Russia, the extermination capacity of the gas vans that operated at Chelmo and the intricate mathematics involved in calculating the number of cadavers that could have been moved from the gas chamber to the crematoria at Auschwitz.

Throughout the book one cannot but identify with Lipstadt's academic and personal revulsion at Irving, a man who under the cloak of a respected historian was allowed to continue publishing books while publicly claiming that "more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.".

The trial only deepened the impression of his malicious and infantile inner world, as revealed, for example, in his private diary entry of the song he would sing to his daughter: "I am a baby Aryan, not Jewish or Sectarian; I have no plans to marry, an Ape or Rastafarian."

And one can only empathise with Lipstadt's dismay at the fact that prominent historians, including the notable World War II expert John Keegan, testified on Irving's behalf, belittling his adulation of Hitler and his astonishing claim that the Nazi leader had little knowledge, if any, of the "unsystematic" killing of Jews while still extolling his "superb" research.

Ultimately, it was Irving who did himself in, by bringing the suit against Lipstadt in the first place, by repeatedly walking into the traps laid for him by the talented Rampton, and by his barely-concealed antisemitism and Hitler adulation, to the point that before his closing argument, in the ultimate Freudian slip, he referred to Justice Gray as "mein fūhrer".

By utterly destroying the credibility of Irving, the most prominent and well respected of Holocaust "revisionists", Lipstadt may not have crushed the Holocaust-denial movement completely, but she certainly dealt it a devastating blow. Her book is a sensational read.

Chemi Shalev is the AJN's associate editor.

History on Trial Reviewed in The Boston Globe

'Trial' digs into a Holocaust denier
By Judith L. Rakowsky, Globe Staff May 4, 2005

History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving, By Deborah E. Lipstadt, HarperCollins, 346 pp., illustrated, $25.95

The practice of media and academic programs offering microphones to Holocaust deniers for ''balance" prompted Emory University professor Deborah E. Lipstadt to write the 1993 book ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."

Polls had shown the public was not buying the anti-Semitic message, and some scholars thought it better to ignore the deniers. But she decided to chronicle the movement in hopes of shining light on the more sophisticated practitioners, such as British author David Irving, who she thought capable of sowing confusion.

Lipstadt's book devoted a few paragraphs to Irving, who calls Auschwitz ''a legend." Irving says, ''More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz."

Irving seized on Lipstadt's entries and used them to find his largest audience ever. He sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin UK, for libel, contending he was the victim of an international conspiracy to ruin his reputation.

The suit would have quickly died in US courts, where Irving would have had to prove she lied in defaming him. But British libel law required Lipstadt and the publisher to prove her words true. That is how Lipstadt and Penguin wound up making a case for gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz, and for Hitler's authorship of the ''Final Solution" to exterminate European Jewry.

Lipstadt has written a gripping account of the 10-week trial, a taut page-turner reminiscent of Jonathan Harr's ''A Civil Action," and she tightly weaves complex material through a nimble narrative.

She tells the story in strict chronology, which carries the potential for bogging down the tale in pretrial tedium. But it is that preparation phase that drives home how monumental was the trial team's task. It clearly needed money for expert analysis and raised most of the $1.5 million through businessman Leslie Wexner, head of the Limited clothing chain.

The courtroom drama quenches the American reader's thirst for the idiosyncratic details -- the wigs, robes, and Byzantine procedure. Lipstadt even writes about the luncheon conversations of the trial team, down to the vintage wine from the law-firm cellar and the crustless sandwiches.

The epic legal battle was truly a lopsided duel of evidence. Irving, in his rambling turns as inquisitor and witness, tried to argue against Nazi documents that showed Hitler had read progress reports of mobile killing squads targeting Jews, and of meticulous building plans and permits for gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz.

But while the main contest was clear cut, Lipstadt's team had a greater challenge in showing that Irving was not a bumbling scholar prone to sloppy translations and miscalculations but an ideologue intent on obfuscation and distortion. That's how the kitchen sink of evidence came in against Irving, including a ditty he sang to his infant daughter: ''I am a baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / I have no plans to marry / An ape or Rastafarian."

Ultimately, the British judge found the evidence ''incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier."

''Irving's treatment of the historical evidence is so perverse and egregious that it is difficult to accept that it is inadvertence. . . . He has deliberately skewed the evidence to bring it in line with his political beliefs," the judge found.

But neither Lipstadt's legal triumph nor her well-written book would silence Irving, a college dropout who casts himself as a historian. Irving solicits funds on his publisher's website, where readers can order three of his World War II books, now back in print.

Newsweek International Review of History on Trial

Newsweek [International Edition] reviews History on Trial

History on Trial by Deborah Lipstadt
In 1999 Lipstadt, a Jewish-studies professor at Emory University, set out to prove that the Holocaust had occurred, after historian David Irving sued her in a British court for calling him a Holocaust denier. This compelling volume shows how Lipstadt's defense team used visits to Birkenau, Adolf Eichmann's journalsunveiled by Israel for the trial—and Irving's own writings to prove the case. The judge ruled Irving an "anti-Semite" who "deliberately skewed [historical] evidence." Lipstadt's vigorous account is a window into a Jewish community still grappling with the loss of 6 million souls.
—T. Trent Gegax

History on Trial reviewed on law.com's Corporate Counsel

There is a review of History on Trial posted at law.com's Corporate Counsel site.

King of Denial

[...]

Lipstadt details her experiences in "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving," an account of what it's like to be an unwilling defendant in the justice system. In order to keep the focus on Irving, Lipstadt's attorneys decided that she shouldn't take the witness stand herself. But Lipstadt gets to tell her side in "History on Trial."

History on Trial reviewed in Atlanta Jewish Times

Lipstadt On Trial
How a court case took over her life

By Laurel Snyder
Special to the Jewish Times

For most of us, life unfolds without a visible outline, organized loosely because we take a new job or move to a strange city based on seemingly random events. However, we expect that our luminaries and history-makers must surely operate along clearer lines. We assume that a president or a scientist is supposed to become a president or a scientist. We believe that the foremost expert on Holocaust revisionism was following a childhood dream

So it’s fascinating, in the first pages of “History on Trial,” to discover the background of how a woman named Deborah Lipstadt became the keeper of Jewish memory. It’s amazing to read the human side of the story, to follow the unusual twists and turns that the Emory professor’s life took, as they led her first to write “Denying the Holocaust,” and then to a courtroom battle with the Holocaust revisionist David Irving, the historian and author who sued Lipstadt for libel in 1995.

Lipstadt explains that when she set out to write “Denying the Holocaust,” she thought she was combating a future problem, diverting a possible tide, rather than correcting an existing dilemma. At that time, she says, “surveys revealed that more people in the United States believed Elvis Presley was alive than believed the Holocaust was a myth.”

So she never expected an attack from a well-known, albeit fringe, historian like Irving. But when the storm came, she found she wasn’t alone. The Jewish community took on the fight and began to raise funds in support of Lipstadt’s legal battle. Her publisher stood behind her and refused to back down under pressure. Still, the case took over her life — and provided us with an interesting read.

The book has an easy flow and a simple structure. Each chapter is broken into short titled sections, as a textbook might be, and it reads quickly as a result, with a metered logic and outlined chronology. The stark language of these headings is effective, sometimes harsh, and often funny. “How many people can a gas van kill?” demands one section. “Innovative Crematoria” proclaims another.

The first half of the book introduces the situation, the characters and all the curious pieces of the puzzle in precise detail, but with a casual tone. As a result, the second half of the book instructs without ever feeling stilted, because we already care about the author and her legal team, as we would care about the characters in a good novel, because we have followed them out of the courtroom, to the dinner table, through countless bottles of wine and conversations.

“History on Trial” strikes an even balance as both memoir and historical document. It somehow weaves the physical and intimate world into the courtroom, while it manages to maintain a vernacular of plain speech, never wandering into gratuitous personal drama or dry courtroom jargon.

The major strength of the book is that it simultaneously reveals the changing psychology of the author, while providing an unadorned window into a complicated legal case. This is not an academic book, but a very personal journal by a complicated woman who also happens to be a fine academic.

The night of too much iced vodka, or a “Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show”-style-production of “The Sound of Music” are welcome diversions for the author as she struggles through a trying time in her life, and they are welcome details for the reader in much the same way, as relief from the tension of the legal history unfolding before us.

The humanity of the story is present to such a degree that Lipstadt is not only a narrator, but a flawed character, learning from her experiences, growing as a person as the book continues. After a difficult but well-handled cross-examination of a witness, Lipstadt catches up with Rampton, her attorney. “ ‘Do you remember when I got angry in Auschwitz because you challenged Robert Jan about why there haven’t been more tests on the gas chambers?’ Rampton took a long drag on his Gitanes and said, ‘I remember. Very well.’ ”

Lipstadt explains, “I wanted to apologize for challenging him. I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated not just his forensic skills, but the passion he brought to this case. Before I could formulate the words he said, ‘I think it’s time for some good wine.’ ”

The character we come to know as Deborah Lipstadt can be best described as frustrated. There is a tension in the book, a sense of impatience. The author is an intense woman, restraining herself constantly so that she can accomplish a massive and important feat, and this tension is compelling. It sweeps the reader into the story and creates a mystery, which is not, “How will the trial end?” but rather, “When will Deborah explode?”

In the case of this trial, as with the Holocaust itself, one question we ask ourselves over and over is “Why did this happen? How could this have happened in a world that makes sense?”

“History on Trial” seems farfetched because it seems impossible that a case of this nature, a case that disputes the Holocaust, would ever come to trial. But though Lipstadt herself finds the trial hard to believe, she reaches for the stabilizing comfort of logic and detail, and walks us through the case with care and precision, so that we are able to understand just how it happened, though we will never be able to comprehend why.

“History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, ” by Deborah E. Lipstadt; Harper Collins; 346 pages; $25.95

History on Trial Reviewed in Cleveland Jewish News

Michael Berenbaum's review of History on Trial has been published in this week's Cleveland Jewish News.

History on Trial reviewed in The Jewish Week

New York's The Jewish Week combines a review of History on Trial with the C-SPAN storm story:

(03/25/2005)
No Denying This Victory

Deborah Lipstadt’s new book tells the story of refuting a libel accusation by a Holocaust denier — but you won’t see her on C-SPAN.
Sandee Brawarsky - Jewish Week Book Critic

Deborah Lipstadt did something few authors of new books would dare: She rejected an invitation to discuss her work on national television on a show geared to serious book lovers.

Lipstadt, the author of “History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving” (Ecco), was scheduled to appear last week on C-SPAN’s “Book TV,” but later refused to let the network tape her appearance at the Harvard Hillel when she learned that the show was planning to feature a talk by David Irving with her remarks.

“This is a man who is a Holocaust denier, who was found to be a liar and a falsifier of history,” she said last weekend in an interview on the Upper West Side.

Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, explained that she would have no problem debating someone with a position diametrically opposed to her own, but this is a case where she had been asked to speak to someone with no grounding in truth.

“The producers would never ask Skip [Henry Louis] Gates to debate someone who said that slavery never happened. They wouldn’t dignify that position,” she said.

For Lipstadt and the more than 200 historians who signed a petition protesting C-SPAN’s decision, the notion of editorial “balance” doesn’t apply here.

“Falsehoods cannot balance the truth,” states the document, spearheaded by the David S. Wyman Institute of Holocaust Studies. The signatures were gathered in less than 48 hours; others have signed on since the petition was submitted.

“History on Trial” is an account of Lipstadt’s 2000 trial before the British High Court of Justice, where she was accused by Irving of libel in her previous book, “Denying the Holocaust.” In that book she identified Irving, a prolific writer on World War II-related subjects, as a Holocaust denier who repeatedly misrepresented history.

Unlike the American court system, where the accuser has to prove the charges false, British law places the burden on the accused, who must demonstrate that the statements considered libelous are in fact true.

Lipstadt had the options of trying to settle with Irving or going to trial. Given the nature of the accusations, however, she said there was no choice. Lipstadt ultimately raised $1.5 million for her defense.

The case received international press coverage. Irving served as his own lawyer, while Lipstadt did not speak at all. Her witnesses were historians and other experts involved in documenting Nazi genocide. Lipstadt’s legal team wanted to rely on documents, so it did not call any survivors to testify.

For the five years before the case went to trial and during the trial itself, Lipstadt kept a journal of developments and also her impressions. About six months before the trial, she realized that there was a book to be written. At first she thought about a joint venture, where members of her legal team would contribute a chapter. But Lipstadt realized later that she had a lot to say, especially since she would not be speaking at the trial or to the press.

“It’s my medium,” she said of writing. The director of Emory’s Institute for Jewish Studies, Lipstadt is also the author of “Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945” and many articles.

A compelling book, “History on Trial” is memoir and courtroom drama, a work of historical and legal import. Lipstadt succeeds in drawing textured portraits of the lawyers working on her case, as well as the historians, the judge and Irving, who comes across more as a clown than one to be taken seriously. Her narrative powerfully details the trial, weaving forensic and historical details and noting when a certain barrister would tug at his wig.

As a memoir, there are scant personal details, and Lipstadt admittedly is a very private person, even though she is frequently in the limelight. She is not, as many might assume, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her father left Germany before the Third Reich and her mother, whose family came from Poland, was born in Canada.

Her feisty, determined personality comes through in the few stories she tells of her years growing up in Manhattan and Far Rockaway, at summer camps and at college. In early 1967, while studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she was upset that Jews could not visit the holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, so she took a circuitous route to do so, traveling to Greece to obtain a new passport, then to Beirut, Damascus and Jordan, to the Old City and then through the Mandelbaum Gate back to Israel.

A person Lipstadt credits as being the seminal influence on her life, after her parents, is Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, who led the Far Rockaway synagogue where her family belonged, before he became chancellor of Bar-Ilan University. She was impressed with his knowledge of Judaism and the contemporary world, and of his efforts to reach out in intra- and inter-religious dialogue.

“Long before I knew precisely what a role model was, I knew that I wanted to be like him,” she wrote.

Featured in the book are two brief essays by outspoken defenders of free speech: an introduction by Anthony Lewis and an afterword by Alan Dershowitz. Although these two might often hold opposing viewpoints, here they provide affirming bookends.

Throughout the trial, Lipstadt remained anxious and cautious in her attitudes about potential outcomes; she was “living on the edge” with raw emotions.

“Not losing was critical,” she said. “If we lost it would have been a disaster, even if we said it was a legal fluke.”

For the two weeks between the closing arguments and the announcement of the judge’s decision, Lipstadt returned home to Atlanta, where she did what she did every year –– prepared for Passover and made a seder.

Ultimately she was confident that she would win, but was worried that the judge might have tried to be evenhanded in his decision or been unclear in a way that enabled Irving to further twist the truth. But the decision was clear-cut: The judge declared it “incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier” and that he “repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and prejudiced vilification of the Jewish race and people.”

In conversation, Lipstadt plays down the heroism attributed to her by Holocaust survivors and other observers of the trial. Many survivors thanked her profusely for protecting their history.

“It all made me very uncomfortable,” she said. “I’m not a person who’s averse to being thanked. I’m not so humble.”

The trial ended at just about this time of year on the Jewish calendar. The following Shabbat, she attended synagogue in London, the week of Parashat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance. Lipstadt says she stood instinctively when the additional reading, recalling the acts of Amalek, was read.

“I felt like I had really fought for that memory,” she said.

A few days later, back in synagogue for the reading of the Megillah for Purim, Lipstadt was struck by the lines in the text when Mordechai tells Esther that perhaps she has attained her royal position for just the crisis they faced.

“I heard that ringing in my ears. I don’t know for what reason people are put anywhere, and a lot of people do bigger chesed [acts of compassion and lovingkindness] that we don’t hear about,” she said. “I got a chance to do a thing that touched a lot of people. I didn’t seek it but I feel privileged, and now I have a voice and a responsibility to use that voice.”

In January, Lipstadt traveled to Poland as part of the presidential delegation for the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. She recalled looking out at the survivors and realizing that the vast majority won’t be around for the 70th anniversary.

“The torch of memory, or witness, is being passed from the survivors to the historians,” she said.

Since January, she has been an active blogger (lipstadt.blogspot.com), posting notes and recording impressions of the Poland trip as well as, more recently, the C-SPAN controversy. Until this week, readers were able to post their responses, but she halted that because the site was attracting a number of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. Lipstadt didn’t want to afford them a platform.

About blogging she said, “There’s always something going on to keep things interesting.”

Los Angeles Times review of History on Trial

From the Los Angeles Times

A strike against those who deny the Holocaust
History on Trial My Day in Court With David Irving
Deborah E. Lipstadt Ecco: 346 pp., $25.95

By Edmund Fawcett
Edmund Fawcett, the former literary editor for the Economist, is a contributor to several publications, including the (London) Times Literary Supplement.

March 20, 2005

Toward the end of his libel suit against fellow historian Deborah E. Lipstadt, David Irving made a telling and hilarious slip. His case for defamation, heard in London, was that by calling him a Holocaust denier and falsifier of facts she had traduced his reputation as a scholar of Nazi Germany and World War II. He had chosen to represent himself and was closing out an emotional summation. Bowing slightly to the judge, Irving addressed him, not in the normal way as "my lord," but as "mein führer." The packed courtroom froze for an instant then burst into riotous laughter. An intricate battle of grim documentary citations had morphed into "The Producers." Clownishly, Irving seemed to be admitting that he had lost.

Britain's libel laws are notoriously favorable to plaintiffs. In practice, defendants must show "justification," which means proving that the rude things they have said are true. The 1993 book Irving cited in his original complaint, Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust," made two principal claims about him. The first — that Irving denied the Holocaust and vindicated Hitler — was the lesser problem for her. In copious published writings and in speeches to neo-fascist audiences around the globe, he had belittled the extent of Nazi persecution and — somewhat contradictorily — denied Hitler's personal responsibility for genocide. Lipstadt's second charge was that the British author twisted the record knowingly and wrote not as a disinterested historian but as an ideologically motivated anti-Semite. Just by sniffing Irving's language on his website or riffling a few pages of his work most people could agree without more ado. Proving it in court to a scrupulous judge — this was a bench trial, with no jury — was another matter.

Lipstadt's highly readable book chronicles the two-month trial virtually day by day, making lively and pointed use of the court transcript. The Emory University professor writes with a campaigner's passion, but also with humor about herself, as, for example, when she wrestles with her prejudice that clever Englishmen are emotionally dead fish.

Her book opens in 1995, when Irving served his complaint, and ends in April 2000 when the judge gave his ruling. Despite its grave subject, "History on Trial" reads like a well-paced courtroom procedural. Even readers who know or guess the outcome can enjoy the book as the righteous struggling against the wicked.

Lipstadt gathered a powerful defense team: Anthony Julius, a London lawyer and author of a study on anti-Semitism in T.S. Eliot's poetry, supervised strategy. Richard Rampton, a gun-for-hire who had recently won damages for McDonald's in a libel suit against London Greenpeace, argued for her in court. To Lipstadt and Julius, it was important that Irving not only lose, but be seen to lose badly. The case was a cause for them from the start. She believes it also became one for Rampton, particularly after he visited Auschwitz to prepare for trial.

Lipstadt's British publisher and co-defendant, Penguin Books, stood behind her when she refused Irving's early offer to settle in return for the withdrawal of her book and an apology. Penguin had braved censorship laws with "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and death threats over "The Satanic Verses." It was not going to back down before Irving — and, like most prominent British publishing concerns, it had libel insurance.

The defense's central problem, as Lipstadt puts it, was that they had no smoking gun. There was and could be no killer evidence that he was propagandist first and historian second. Indeed, a shelf's worth of widely praised military histories by him suggested the opposite. Furthermore, Irving could always play the underdog. A onetime steelworker, poor and self-taught, he had turned himself into a researcher who mined archives across Europe. He had regrettable views, to be sure. Hadn't many scholars? Reputable historians have said as much of him in print.

The defense first asked Cambridge historian Richard Evans to assess Irving's oeuvre. Evans' 700-page report, which was put into evidence and became the core of his own book on the trial, "Lying About History," proved devastating. Evans found a pattern of transcription errors, twisted or elliptical quotations and slipperiness with dates. The errors tended to buttress the argument that Irving had prejudices. Rampton skillfully exploited this gold mine. With dry patience he exposed Irving's distortions, keeping careful count of the plaintiff's ever lamer excuses — "I was tired," "I was stressed," "I forgot."

Judge Charles Gray's 335-page ruling was a comprehensive defeat and disgrace for Irving. Gray found that in writing of Hitler and the Holocaust, far from offering objective history, Irving had repeatedly "perverted" the record and falsified the facts to bring them into line with an anti-Semitic and racist agenda. There could, in addition, be no serious doubt that gas chambers existed at Auschwitz or that these operated on a "substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews," both facts that Irving had repeatedly and often contemptuously denied. Holocaust denial is not a crime in Britain, as it is in some European countries. But Gray's ruling, twice confirmed on appeal, removed a layer of legal protection from Irving and others who make similar assertions: People could now publicly call them liars and scoundrels without fear of the libel courts.

Perhaps wisely, Lipstadt ends there. Her book is compelling enough as the self-contained story of a gripping and important trial. It is not an essay on the political uses and abuses of the Holocaust, on the obligations of historians to objective truth or on the appropriate limits, if any, to the freedom of speech, though no reader can put it down without wondering about all those things.

In closing, she notes the persistence of Holocaust denial in many forms and in many countries — a reminder of how much it matters that there be victories like hers. •

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.

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.”

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.