the matter in hand ; and , more importantly , whether or not he was a Holocaust denier . At one point Irving claimed that he was not a Holocaust denier because the Holocaust had never happened , and how could you deny something that didn ’ t exist , but the circular nature of this argument was obvious to everybody , and so it was disregarded . Much more important was the fact that he agreed with our definition of Holocaust denial , a definition extracted from the Holocaust denial literature that formed the basis of Lipstadt ’ s book Denying the Holocaust . This made it relatively easy for me : all I had to do was to comb through the material and find statements that conformed to the definition . I could also show that Irving ’ s Holocaust denial had hardened and become more extreme over the years , for example by comparing the first edition of Hitler ’ s War ( 1977 ) with the second ( 1992 ), where references to Auschwitz as an extermination centre had been replaced by its designation as a ‘ labour camp ’.
We also decided to go through Irving ’ s successive accounts of the Allied bombing of the Baroque city of Dresden in February 1945 as a kind of ‘ control ’, to see if he falsified evidence when he was dealing with subjects other than Hitler ’ s role in the Holocaust . This turned up a real gem . Irving clearly intended to present the bombing raids as morally and historically a crime equal to that of the Holocaust , so we found successive instances in his work of inflation of the statistics of deaths in the bombing , including , almost unbelievably , his use of a document he had a few years before dismissed as a falsification – a police report on the bombing giving the number of dead as 25,000 to which Joseph Goebbels ’ s Propaganda Ministry had added a ‘ 0 ’, making it 250,000 , in order to impress neutral opinion and perhaps persuade some country such as Sweden to intervene to try and bring the war to an end before Germany was totally defeated . There were many other falsifications in his account , including the claim that Allied fighter planes had strafed people fleeing from the scene , along with a wholly unsubstantiated claim that there were hundreds of thousands of refugees in the city at the time of the bombing .
The movie , obviously , had to leave out the great majority of the subjects we dealt with . It needed to be economical with the details , or audiences would soon get bored . It also needed to find imaginative ways of conveying the issues at stake . The courtroom proceedings consisted mostly of hours of tedium , interrupted only by brief moments of high drama . To bring out the issues with greater clarity , the film uses another character , Laura Tyler , a young paralegal assistant to Anthony Julius , played by Carmen Pistorius . Tyler was , and is , a real person , but while she mostly worked behind the scenes the film foregrounds her by showing her in conversation with her boyfriend Simon discussing the trial at various points , bringing a bit of youth and glamour into a movie peopled mostly by the middle-aged . The defence team also travelled to Auschwitz itself , for a guided tour by Van Pelt , another excursion beyond the courtroom walls which served the dual purpose of showing the actual location of the crimes Irving denied , and providing Rampton with the evidence with which to attack one of Irving ’ s key claims .
Towards the end of the trial , the judge , Sir Charles Grey , alarmed the defence team by asking Rampton whether he thought Irving was sincere in his Holocaust denial . There was , to be sure , an element of the naughty schoolboy in Irving ’ s
6 . Deborah Lipstadt portrait | United States Holocaust Museum
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