The British historian who was labelled an anti-semite and a racist by a High Court judge in London today has said that he will appeal. David Irving lost his libel action against an American academic, who wrote that he was a Holocaust denier. Mr Irving dismissed the judge's comments as perverse; he is facing a possible legal bill of £2 million. He was refused leave to appeal by the judge, although he may be allowed to apply directly to the Court of Appeal.
The judge ruled in favour of Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers Penguin Books. During the three months trial, Mr Irving, who is 62, said that he did not deny that Jews had been killed by the Nazis but he disputed the numbers and reports of the manner of their deaths. Mr Irving, who conducted his own case in the trial, has claimed that Adolf Hitler did not mastermind mass slaughter of Jews. He has also claimed that the Auschwitz concentration camp is little more than a "Disneyland for tourists" built after the war in 1948. The publishers and Professor Lipstadt denied libel and pleaded justification. During the High Court trial, Mr Irving told the court he believed that the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz was completely fictitious and claimed trains said to be part of the extermination programme were actually used to help Jews start new lives in eastern Europe.
Richard Rampton, acting for the defence, branded Irving as a right-wing extremist, a racist and, in particular, a rabid anti-Semite, who had prostituted his reputation as a serious historian in pursuit of his obsessive desire to exonerate Hitler.
