Behind the lies of Holocaust denial

"There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies," says historian Deborah Lipstadt, telling the remarkable story of her research into Holocaust deniers -- and their deliberate distortion of history. Lipstadt encourages us all to go on the offensive against those who assault the truth and facts. "Truth is not relative," she says.

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English Holocaust denier^[1] and author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he argued that Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews or, if he did, opposed it.^[2] Though Irving's revisionist views of World War II were never taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents.

Irving marginalized himself in 1988 when, based on his reading of the pseudoscientific^[3] Leuchter report, he began to espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz extermination camp.^[4][5]

Irving's reputation as a historian was discredited^[6] when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, he was shown to have deliberately misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial.^[7] The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist,^[8] who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".^[8][9] In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Adolf Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.