From www.sightings.com
1-12-2000
LONDON (AFP) - British historian David Irving, who is widely vilified for questioning whether six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, began a libel battle on Tuesday against claims he is a "Holocaust denier."
The 62-year-old historian, who wrote "Hitler's War" and "Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich," told London's High Court that a US academic and her publishers were part of "an organised international endeavour" to destroy his career.
Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies in Atlanta, Georgia, argued in a book published by Penguin in 1994 that Irving was one of the most dangerous and prominent exponents of denying that the Holocaust took place.
Lipstadt and Penguin Books deny libel and plead justification.
Like Irving, they have amassed considerable funds to fight the 12-week case at the London courtroom, in which it was standing room only on Tuesday.
The case, heard without a jury, comes as the British government continues to ponder plans to introduce laws making Holocaust denial a crime, as it is in France and Germany.
The historian, who is representing himself, told the court that Lipstadt and her publishers had generated "waves of hatred" against him, prompting publishers to refuse to reprint his works.
Irving said he once earned more than 100,000 pounds (164,000 dollars, 160,000 euros) a year in royalties but had been done "very real pecuniary damage" by the defendants.
The historian, who has published more than 20 books, also took issue with the epithet "Holocaust denier" coined by Lipstadt in her work.
"If a writer, no matter how well reviewed and received until then, has that phrase stuck to him, then he can regard his career as rumbling off the edge of a precipice," Irving said.
In her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," Lipstadt described Irving as an "Adolf Hitler partisan who wears blinkers and skews documents and misrepresents data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, specifically those that exonerate Hitler."
The defendants are to call some of the world's leading experts on the Holocaust and the Second World War, including Anthony Julius, a solicitor and author of a book on the poet T S Eliot's anti-semitism.
Irving was fined by a German court and subsequently banned from the country after he told a public meeting there in 1990 that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
He is also reported to have been refused entry to Canada, Italy, Austria and Australia.
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