The Court of Appeal in London has upheld a lower court libel ruling that branded historian David Irving a Holocaust denier. Mr Irving had sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher, over her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" which, he claimed, destroyed his livelihood and generated waves of hatred against him.
The judge in the original case, Mr Justice Gray, said that Mr Irving had, for his own ideological reasons, deliberately misrepresented historical evidence and portrayed Hitler in an unwarranted favourable light.
His counsel, Adrian Davies, said last month that the author had never said that the killing of the Jews was in any way excusable. He also argued that Mr Justice Gray erred seriously in weighing the evidence, so that his findings were wrong and unjust. He added that Mr Irving's work must be assessed in the context of what was reasonably available to him at the time he was writing books such as "Hitler's War", which was published in the '70s.
