For nine weeks at London’s High Court at the turn of the millennium, historian Deborah Lipstadt had to keep uncharacteristically schtum – ordered by her lawyers to let their expert witnesses do the talking.
The 78-year-old American is making up for lost time today as she holds forth in the middle of her former solicitors, Anthony Julius, 68, and James Libson, 58, in their offices at Mishcon de Reya in central London, to mark 25 years since their landmark legal battle.
British author David Irving had sued Lipstadt for libel for describing him as “an Adolf Hitler partisan” and Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust.
Julius and Libson were determined to keep the focus on Irving’s wilful twisting of history, following his paper trail of footnotes to reveal a “tissue of lies”, including that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
It meant that neither Shoah survivors nor Lipstadt herself were called to give evidence. Julius – previously Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer – describes the burden on his client, “essentially to be a spectator in her own trial”.
Deborah Lipstadt and Felix Klein visit the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe during a meeting of special envoys and coordinators to combat antisemitism in Berlin, Jan. 30, 2023. (Wolfgang Kumm/picture alliance via Getty Images)
“That was very difficult. I was passive,” says the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta (whose silence was characterised by a friend as “an unnatural act”).
“I meant to tell you guys,” she quips to the men either side of her. “Because this is the first time I heard it,” deadpans Julius.
While Irving stood in court 73 representing himself – as Jonathan Freedland reported at the time, delightedly “rolling around in swastika-embossed paper” – Lipstadt found a way to respond to his daily affronts, including once addressing the judge as “mein Fuhrer”.
“Well, you took out your frustrations by hitting and pinching me in the court,” recalls Libson, who had fractured his arm in a bike accident at the start of the trial. “That’s right,” Lipstadt says with a chuckle. “[Irving] would say these terrible things and I would hit the broken arm.”
Panel featuring Anthony Julius, Jonathan Freedland, Deborah Lipstadt, James Libson and Sir David Hare ving mark the 25th anniversary of the case against David Irving
Julius had previously worried that Lipstadt’s publisher Penguin would accept Irving’s last-minute offer to settle the case for £500 and an open letter withdrawing the allegations. Taking no chances, the solicitor pointed out that Lipstadt’s team would respond by suing Irving for defamation – and moving to have Penguin bound “back in as defendants to our claim”.
“If you say of Irving that his criticisms of Deborah were correct and that’s why you settled with Irving, you don’t leave the battlefield, you’ve just changed your allegiances.”
Of the trio’s level of confidence that they would win the case, Lipstadt says: “I wasn’t, they were.” But the Jewish establishment in the UK was nervous too. At a dinner, a leading figure from the Board of Deputies urged Lipstadt to silently retreat.
“There was a segment of the leadership which was very scared, worried. My read was that they saw this as the Americans descending on Britain, oblivious to the mess we would leave behind, and the better thing was to be quiet and settle. It was emblematic of the different approaches of British and American Jewry. Thank God, I found these two guys who were not emblematic of British Jewry – then. I have to say, they came around.”
Julius remembers that sentiments quickly reversed once the judge’s 355-page verdict delivered Irving a thumping defeat. “After the judgment, they were absolutely ferocious for the fighting of the case, on the principle that victory has many generals while defeat is an orphan.”
Libson is satisfied the ruling that branded Irving a racist and pro-Nazi polemicist remains a “line in the sand”. “That old-school Holocaust denial with the veneer of scholarship around it doesn’t really exist in the same way.”
Anthony and James after the verdict.
“It’s the difference between what I call hardcore and softcore Holocaust denial,” explains Lipstadt, who was until January President Joe Biden’s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism. “Usually we use that in relation to pornography and I do that advisedly, because it’s sort of pornographic history, Holocaust denial.”
But while they obliterated the former: “What we couldn’t demolish is the Holocaust inversion, the ‘Jews are like the Nazis’, ‘Why are they complaining so much?’, ‘Why do we have to hear again about the Holocaust?’ That’s much squishier, much harder to fight.”
Lipstadt understandably declines to respond to a 2017 quote from Irving, who remarked that “the traditional enemy” – his phrase for Jews – does not “have a handle” on how to deal with a new generation finding denial online. “He took six years of my life,” she says. “Enough.”
But Julius rejects the idea that the hydra-headed threat of social media means we are living in an era where truth has ceased to matter.
“This is not a post-fact world. The facts are the facts. In every historical period, there are particular challenges. In the early Middle Ages, the challenge was the destruction of libraries.”
But he adds: “There’s now an [online] archive at Emory for anybody actually interested in establishing the facts for themselves. People who are not interested have to live with the unhappy knowledge that other people will be able to go and ascertain how utterly worthless the denier’s statement of the position is.”
On the lessons the wider community can learn, Libson says: “There are times to fight. And we’re in a period where it is a time to fight and organise ourselves to protect our interests.” He adds: “There’s more fighting spirit than there used to be.”
In 2016, the case was turned into a Hollywood film, with Rachel Weisz starring as Lipstadt, Andrew Scott as Julius and Jack Lowden as Libson, introducing the episode to a new generation. All three are clearly proud of the trial’s enduring significance, a quarter of a century on.
“This was a victory for truth,” says Lipstadt, “and this was the demolishing of a man who had made sport of Jewish tragedy. Not just denied it, but made sport of it, and with glee.
“So for one shining moment in April 2000, the bad guy really lost.”
