biography
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1938– )
|
| biography:
| Historian, born in Essex, SE England, UK. He studied at University College London, then joined August Thyssen as a steelworker in the Ruhr, Germany (1959), and worked as a clerk with the US Strategic Air Command near Madrid (1960). His Holocaust revisionist agenda began with his best-selling 1977 book, Hitler's War, and was followed by a number of publications including Goebbels; Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In them he denied the exterminationist nature of German anti-Semitism. In 2000 he sued the publisher, Penguin Books Ltd, and the American historian, Deborah Lipstadt, for libel and falsification of history in her book, Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993). The trial was heard at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. The legal issue at stake was whether there was irrefutable evidence backed by original source material to prove that the Holocaust had happened, not whether it had in fact happened. Both sides of the case had agreed to dispense with a jury because of the complexity of the case. Instead, after a hearing lasting 62 days, Justice Gray delivered his own verdict absolving Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books of libel and stating in his summing up that Irving had by his own evidence been proved a racist, an anti-Semite, and a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist. |
|
|
