Shilling for Hitler 1

On the David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt libel trial as reported in Richard Evans' Lying about Hitler and D.D. Guttenplan's The Holocaust on Trial

This article originally appeared in slightly different form in the publication formerly known as Salon in May 2001.

As many Monty Python sketches have pointed out, the dignity of British courtrooms is handicapped from the start by the silly, pompous powdered wigs the judges and barristers wear. But even the Monty Python boys never dreamed up a situation as ludicrous as the one that took place in a British courtroom last year when David Irving sued the American Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt for libeling him. Irving is a British author whose romances of the Third Reich have managed to get him acclaimed as a serious historian from the likes of John Keegan (“an extraordinary ability to describe and analyse Hitler's conduct of military operations”) and Christopher Hitchens (“Not just a Fascist historian, but a great historian of Fascism”). In her book Denying the Holocaust Lipstadt had written that Irving was “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial,” a man who twisted evidence “until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political propaganda.” When the book appeared in Britain, Irving sued both Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books.

Now comes the weird part. Under British libel law, all a plaintiff has to do to claim libel is to demonstrate that the words spoken or written about him are defamatory. As D.D. Guttenplan points out in The Holocaust on Trial, one of two new books about the case, there is no need, as there is in the United States, for the claimant to show that the words were used “in reckless disregard” of the truth. Instead, it becomes the defense's burden to prove that the disputed words are true. What that meant in this case was that because David Irving contended that the gas chambers were a hoax, British law required that in order for Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher to prove that Irving was a Holocaust denier, they first had to prove that the Holocaust actually took place.