Follow-on reading to Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial (see below for review on August 2, 2011).
Here, in History on Trial, Lipsdtadt recounts her defense against and victory over David Irving who sued Lipstadt for libel in Britain following the publication of Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust. In that book, Lipstadt outed Irving as a Holocaust denier and, perhaps more importantly, a historian with a penchant for twisting historical sources to serve his own contrived view of history. Outing Irving was no small event, for prior to the publication of Denying the Holocaust, Irving was regarded as one of the preeminent historians of the Third Reich and Hitler, even if his writings tended to cast Hitler in a much more favorable light than had many of Irving's contemporaries.
The drama of History on Trial lies partly in the procedural posture of the legal action Irving filed against Lipstadt. Under UK libel law, unlike in the U.S., the defendant--in this case Lipstadt--bears the burden of demonstrating that the alleged libelous statements are indeed true. Thus, Lipstadt and her defense team had to show that Irving was in fact a Holocause denier. What follows is a stinging indictment of Irving's historical methods and subjective representations of the historical record. As Lipstadt relates, she and her adept lawyers felt they simply had to discredit a man who had said that "no documents whatsoever show that a Holocaust had ever happened."
Recounted here in delicious detail are the courtroom confrontations between an evasive and self-contradictory Irving (serving as his own lawyer) and Lipstadt's strategically brilliant barrister, Richard Rampton, and the scholars who testified in her defense. The record against Irving was overwhelming and powerfully discrediting. In 2000, Judge Charles Gray decided in Lipstadt's favor, finding it "incontrovertible" that Irving was a Holocaust denier. No one who cares about historical truth, freedom of speech or the Holocaust will avoid a sense of triumph from Gray's decision.
Comments