"Court rise!" begins D.D. Guttenplan's courtroom thriller The Holocaust on Trial. "With the clerk's shout we stop talking and struggle to our feet. David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt opens on a gray morning at the height of London's flu season." Unlike other courtroom thrillers, in this story the defendants are on trial not for murder but for libel. David Irving, the historian and author of such highly praised works as Hitler's War, took to court when an American academic named Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book terming him "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial" and charging that he bent historical evidence "until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda." (Among Irving's claims was that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz, which was merely a slave labor camp. It is that thesis that ultimately brought the opponents to court.)

Irving's contention that the label "Holocaust denier" was a professional death sentence and erroneously applied, and Lipstadt's defense of the claims she made in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, shape Guttenplan's book. The trial took place over a three-month period in 2000, with Irving representing himself before a judge but no jury. Guttenplan, who with Maria Margaronis heads The Nation's London bureau, not only followed the trial but conducted extensive interviews with the principals, both before and after judgment.

The trial's implications extended far beyond the libel question. "Where does our knowledge of the past come from? How is it transmitted? Do documents deserve greater weight than the testimony of witnesses?" asks Gutttenplan. And politically, "Does a history of persecution create any entitlement--for example, to legal protection from those who would deny that history? What is the proper response to hate speech?... What is the connection between hate speech and racial violence? Is the protection of free speech always a good thing?" The judge, by the way, found for Lipstadt and Penguin, calling Irving "a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist" and his falsification of the historical record "deliberate."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.