Twenty years later, Professor Deborah Lipstadt relives the trial that rocked the world

Twenty years ago, this Holocaust scholar was forced to defend her scholarship in court.

At stake was the veracity of the Holocaust itself

The nondescript letter that landed on Deborah Lipstadt’s desk on that fall morning in 1995 gave no indication it had the power to upend her life. A professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Lipstadt had stopped in her office that morning before a meeting with a graduate student. The letter was from Penguin, the British publisher of her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. In that book, she argued that Holocaust denial was no longer a fringe movement, but was becoming a serious threat.

Curious, Lipstadt opened the envelope, read a few lines, and then — to the astonishment of her secretary — began to laugh.

“This is really nuts,” she exclaimed.

David Irving, an author and well-known Holocaust denier, was threatening a libel suit over her claim that he denied the Holocaust. Considering that Irving had openly acknowledged his Holocaust denial, and that she had meticulously researched everything she had written about that subject, Lipstadt instantly dismissed the threat as “nothing more than sound and fury.” As the next tumultuous five years would show, however, she was seriously wrong.

Distorted History

Irving brought his libel suit in the United Kingdom, where, unlike the United States, the onus is on the defendant. In other words, Lipstadt would have to prove that what she had written about Irving was true.

Early on, some members of the British Jewish community advised her that she could settle out of court, but she refused. At that point in her career, Lipstadt, who grew up in a Modern Orthodox home in Queens, had been a Holocaust scholar for over 20 years and was a member of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Council. She was determined not to allow Irving to bully her, or to retreat even an inch on the historical truth of the Holocaust.

In short order, a cadre of top-notch professionals and Holocaust experts rallied to her cause, including Anthony Julius, a prominent London-based Jewish attorney who counted Princess Diana among his clients, and Professor Robert Jan van Pelt, a top Auschwitz expert.

The best defense is a good offense, Lipstadt’s team believed. So instead of attempting to prove the Holocaust had indeed happened, they focused on proving that Irving had falsified claims about the Holocaust in his works, and that he did so out of anti-Semitic motives.

One of Irving’s more egregious claims, in his book Hitler’s War, was that the German dictator tried to end the mass murder of Jews. Another was that most Jews died of “epidemics” during the war, and were not murdered. For four years, the team researched every single footnote in Irving’s works and sourced them back to the original documents. That research unearthed a trove of clearly falsified information.

One example: The word “feldöfen” is used in important German documents in connection with the concentration camps. Irving translated feldöfen as “field kitchens.” But the real translation is “field ovens” — whose purpose was to incinerate corpses.

On April 11, 2000, after four years of strategic planning, marshalling evidence — including a trip to Auschwitz — and ten weeks of the actual trial itself, Judge Charles Gray read his judgment to a packed courtroom.

If you are imagining a dramatic courtroom scene, where Gray delivers a scathing final verdict against Irving, the reality was more prosaic. The full verdict, in fact, was 355 pages — and written in tortuous legalese. Instead of writing, for instance, that “Irving consorts with neo-Nazis,” Gray wrote: “I pointed out in paragraph 13.139 above that there may be circumstances extraneous to Irving’s practice of his profession as an historian from which it may be legitimate to draw inferences as to whether his misrepresentation of the historical evidence has been deliberate.” The closest Judge Gray comes to a clear-cut indictment, in one place, is: “Irving is an anti-Semite and a racist,” and, later on, “[He] manipulate[s] the historical record in order to make it conform with his political beliefs.” But the British media pulled no punches when it came to their elucidation of the verdict: The London-based Times declared that “history has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.”