Home U.K. Anti-Nazi
By Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) - David Irving does not see it as his job to be li ked.
The British historian's claims that Adolf Hitler did not mastermind any extermination of Jews and that the Auschwitz Nazi death camp is a fake built by Polish communists in 1948 to lure in Holocaust tourists are, he says, the historical trut h.
Those who brand him an anti-semite, a racist and a falsifier of history are "enemies of the truth" who are trying to weave a vast conspiracy to ensure that Jews go down in history as the people more sinned against than any other.
"The y (the Jews) want their atrocity to be unique. They want it to be bigger, and they want it to be unique," he told Reuters in a recent interview.
But in losing a High Court libel action on Tuesday against an American professor who claimed he was a "Holocaust denier", Irving has put his future as a historian in grave doubt.
He had asserted that Professor Deborah Lipstadt's claims, published by Penguin in her book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory", had done "v ery real damage" to his professional existence.
Judge Charles Gray, delivered a blistering verdict on Irving, branding him "an active Holocaust denier...anti-Semitic and racist" who associates with rightwing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.
"He has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews," Gray said.
Irving, 62, the author of more than 20 controversial books includin g Hitler's War and a biography of Goebbels, was born in Essex just before the start of World War Two.
His father, a naval officer, once stood for election as a Labour Party candidate, but was unsuccessful. His mother was a commercial artist.
He went to London University, originally to study physics, then switched to political science, then, as he puts it, "copped out" before he managed to complete a degree course in either.
Despite this, he is viewe d even by those who obviously profoundly dislike him as one of the leading experts on the Third Reich.
But his claim that all the buildings that can now be seen at Auschwitz -- including the giant chimney stack and the iron gate carrying the slogan "Work Makes Free" -- are fakes built after the end of the World War Two have not gained him any friends.
"In 1948 they built this kind of Disneyland for tourists as a money spinner. Everything they show the tourists is fake," he told Reuters.
Irving is banned from going to Germany after a 1992 conviction for denying the Holocaust and has also been refused entry to Canada, Italy, Austria and Australia.
He says such actions are proof of a global campaign to discredit him.
He claims he alone is telling the historical truth when he questions whether six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and claims the gas chambers at the notorious Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland did not exist.
"There were no gas cham bers -- certainly not on the scale that is now propagated. And I think the scale is an important point to make," he told Reuters.
"I've always maintained that what I wrote was the historical truth and that I alone have been getting it right."
But then Irving has never liked to disguise his opinions, unpopular or otherwise. He talks of his friendship with David Duke, once national director of the U.S. extremist group Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and he despairs at an "obsession with race" which he says has taken hold of the world. Irving maintains that he does not look down on any section of humanity. Yet he adds: "I can't say I applaud uncontrolled coloured immigration." And he defends himself against any personal charge of racism, claiming his "domestic staff" over the years have included a Barbadian, a Punjabi, a Sri Lankan and a Pakistani, who, he adds, were "all very attractive girls with very nice breasts".
As he says: "It is not a historian's job to be liked."
* *****By Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) - Hitler historian David Irving has lost a libel action against a U.S. professor and her publishers over claims that he was a "Holocaust denier" and "f alsifier of history".
Irving claims Adolf Hitler did not mastermind mass slaughter of Jews and says the Auschwitz Nazi death camp is little more than a "Disneyland for tourists" built after the war in 1948.
The historian, who conducted h is own case in the eight-week trial at London's High Court, lost his action against Penguin Books, a subsidiary of media giant Pearson Plc, and professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
The judge, Charles Gray, criticise d Irving's handling of the historical facts.
He told the court that Irving had "significantly misrepresented what the evidence... reveals".
Gray added: "The charges which I have found substantially true include the charges that Irving ha s for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."
The case was heard by Gray sitting alone since the details were considered too complex for a jury.
The verdict was welco med by Britain's main Jewish group, the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
"The decision shows that David Irving is a falsifier of history and a Nazi sympathiser, whose aim has been to sanitise Nazism and to absolve Hitler of the guilt of the Holocaust," the Board's president, Eldred Tabachnik, said in a statement.
Irving sued Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books, after Lipstadt said Irving was a Hitler partisan who "prostituted his reputation" as a historian to prove Adolf Hitler had no part in Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Irving has already made clear that he will not appeal against the verdict.
"I would have to represent myself again and I don't think I have the legal expertise to fight an action in a court of appeal," he said in a BBC radio interview before the verdict was announced.
Irving said a ruling against him would leave him no worse off than he was before the court case and he did not regret taking the action.
"You can't have fewer publishers than you do when they've all been intimidated and frightened away from you," he said.
Irving said he assumed he had a 70 percent chance of winning the case, which was "a matter of personal prestige and reputation".
"I'm not really interested in money," he said.
The ruling on the eight-week long trial is of profound significance both to survivors of what many term "the worst crime in human history" and to history itself.
The judge heard tha t Irving claims Hitler knew nothing until 1943 of Nazi plans to exterminate Jews during World War Two.
Irving "distorts, misstates, misquotes and falsifies" the historical record to deny the Holocaust and back up his right-wing views, according to Lipstadt's lawyers.
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