Vindication of a Horrible Truth

Hitler biographer David Irving went to a London court a few years ago demanding punishment of a fellow historian who had accused him of distorting history in his denials that the Holocaust occurred. When the case got to trial, Irving instead got what he deserved. In a trenchant opinion issued Tuesday, the British court found him to be a “liar and falsifier of history,” as well as a racist, an anti-Semite and a neo-Nazi sympathizer. The ruling exposes Irving’s intellectual bankruptcy and marks a victory for painstakingly assembled and amply documented historical truth.

Irving sued former UCLA professor Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher for portraying him in her book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,” as a Hitler apologist who skewered history to deny that the Holocaust, the Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jews in Europe, ever took place. He is not the usual deluded crackpot, and his knowledge of World War II archives is formidable. But, as the High Court found, Irving spun the reams of documents he unearthed into a highly prejudiced whitewash of Adolf Hitler. He dismissed eyewitness testimony of Auschwitz prisoners as “worthless” for historical research, disregarded incontrovertible evidence that didn’t suit his purpose and, with astounding flippancy, attributed the Jews’ suffering in World War II to mere harsh living conditions in the concentration camps.

High Court Judge Charles Gray was unsparing in his dismissal of Irving’s libel lawsuit, condemning him as a “right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist” who, for his own ideological reasons, deliberately manipulated historical evidence. The ruling slams a door on well-told lies posing as history and vindicates the years of serious work that went into exposing the horrors of the Holocaust.