From January 11, 2000, through March 16, 2000, an extraordinary trial captioned "Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt" took place in London. The Holocaust was not on trial in London. Neither was this case merely about whether statements made in Prof. Lipstadt's book "Denying the Holocaust" (1993) about David Irving were false and defamatory. This trial was about the freedom to criticize bigotry masquerading as scholarship. This case was nothing other than a single battle in a war waged by David Irving to silence his critics.
In the sense that a historical event like the Holocaust can be put "on trial," the Holocaust has been in that position since the IMT trial at Nuremberg and it has withstood all challenges. The fact that the Third Reich engaged in the planned genocide known as the Holocaust has been established in hundreds of civil and criminal trials under American, British, French, Canadian, German and Israeli law in the half century since the end of World War II. None of the fraudulent allegations of the lunatic fringe which denies the Holocaust has even been established as worthy of belief in any of those trials.
We have a series of articles entitled Irving's War by Yale F. Edeiken. These articles do not deal with the issues, direct or indirect, of that trial. They are about the legal realities of the trial and reasons why David Irving failed to prove his case.
