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Hitler Apologists Loses Libel Suit

April 11, 2000

The historian who once called the Auschwitz death camp a "Disneyland for tourists" lost a libel suit in London against an American professor who branded him a "Holocaust denier" in a 1994 book. British historian David Irving said he would appeal High Court Judge Charles Gray's ruling, which he called "perverse." Gray told the near silent court gathered to hear the verdict, four weeks in the making, that Irving was "an active Holocaust denier, anti-Semitic, and racist. 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 sued Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Atlanta's Emory University, and her publisher, Penguin Books, over Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. In her book, Lipstadt stated that the British historian "prostituted his reputation" to prove Adolf Hitler was not responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. Irving claimed that had "done very real damage" to his career.

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."

Penguin Books and Lipstadt were 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 truth 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."

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. 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."

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Hitler's Willing Executioners
Ordinary Germans & the Holocaust
by Daniel Goldhagen
Goldhagen reaches conclusions that are both uncompromising and savage, rejecting as inadequate the conventional historical explanations for how an entire country could allow the Holocaust to happen, and gives the first detailed, broad-ranging account of the actual killers of the Jews.