Into the bargain, Lipstadt convincingly characterizes Irving as a litigious anti-Semite with a penchant for bending historical facts to suit repellent theories, as the court concluded. Lipstadt’s reconstruction of the trial as it played out day by day has its dry patches, but her account rises above the case itself to indict the demimonde of Holocaust deniers generally. Evans examining the sources Irving claims to have used in making his years-long argument that Hitler was innocent of having ordered the extermination of European Jews. It took six years for the case to come to trial, but when it did, Lipstadt and her legal team were stunningly well prepared among other documents, they had a 700-page dossier prepared by historian Richard J. Irving, who had earned enough money from the sales of his books to own a Rolls-Royce and keep a place in London’s fashionable Mayfair district, was quick to sue.

In Denying the Holocaust (1993), Lipstadt (History/Emory Univ.) described British historian David Irving as “a Hitler partisan wearing blinkers,” a man who “on some level seems to conceive himself as carrying on Hitler’s legacy.” Dangerous words, particularly since Irving had written books on the history of the Third Reich that had been well received the eminent military historian John Keegan, for instance, praised Irving’s Hitler’s War as one of the best books ever written about WWII.

Absorbing account of the famed libel trial, in London, that brought the whole enterprise of Holocaust denial to the bench.

History on Trial by Deborah E. Lipstadt