THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving by Deborah E. Lipstadt (Ecco, 368 pp., $25.95). Before long the generation of eyewitnesses who survived...
...Although not the first publication to deal with the subject (see Lying About History: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial by Richard Evans, and The Holocaust on Trial by D.D...
...Irving's court defeat was a momentary setback for a movement that seeks to deny the Holocaust so as to rehabilitate Hitler and his racial ideas...
...Gut-tenplan), Lipstadt's book informs us with background information that only an insider can relate...
...History on Trial is Lipstadt's riveting account of the trial...
...The volume under review is Lipstadt's response to the proceedings that some pundits hailed as the most important Holocaust judgment since Adolf Eichmann's trial...
...Jack Fischel...
...Most valuable, however, is Lip-stadt's description of how Irving's distortions of the Holocaust were exposed...
...Lipstadt's book is a welcome addition to the fight against the distortions and lies that characterize Holocaust denial...
...She is silent no longer...
...Fortunately, they suffered a setback when Deborah Lipstadt was awarded damages from David Irving in a London courtroom in April 2000...
...From the exchange between Irving and scholars on the gas chambers in Auschwitz to the question of the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary, Lipstadt recounts how expert witnesses under oath demolished the manner in which deniers have distorted and lied about the Holocaust...
...Before long the generation of eyewitnesses who survived Hitler's war against the Jews will pass on, thus removing an obstacle to Holocaust deniers...
...She describes, for example, how her supporters were able to raise $1.5 million for her defense, the strategy that Rampton employed in his cross examination of Irving, and her impressions of the witnesses and personalities that participated in the trial...
...Richard Rampton, Lipstadt's attorney, informed her early on that she would not testify inasmuch as the trial was about what she had written, and putting her on the stand would divert the judge's attention from the main focus, David Irving...
...In her book, Lipstadt called Irving one of the most dangerous spokesmen of the Holocaust denial movement...
...Irving, among his other claims, had declared that there were no gas chambers (he once stated that "more people had died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz"), nor was there a systematic extermination of 5 to 6 million Jews, and he absolved Hitler of any involvement in the Holocaust...
...Irving, a prominent World War II historian (at least until the aftermath of the trial) had sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin UK, for defamation following the publication of her Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993...
...Unfortunately, Holocaust "revisionism" will not soon disappear...
...The ensuing trial attracted a great deal of attention, as a judgment for Irving might have emboldened the Holocaust deniers who claim that the genocide of European Jewry was a hoax...
...Lipstadt writes that she was disappointed that she would not be able to openly express her contempt for Irving, and also "feared that people would think that I was frightened of facing him...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 17
