The Holocaust on Trial

by Guttenplan, D. D.

• ISBN13: 9780393020441
• ISBN10: 0393020444
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

To his admirers, British author David Irving is one of the world's preeminent military historians. Scholars of World War II have described his biographies of Hitler, Rommel, Goering, and Goebbels as essential reading. But there is a dark side to these best-selling books as well, starting with the author's denial of Hitler's responsibility for the extermination of European Jewry and ending with his claim that the Holocaust never happened. Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, blew the whistle on Irving. Her book, Denying the Holocaust, describes him as a right-wing extremist who denigrated the memory of Hitler's victims. Irving sued for libel in England, where libel laws are famously biased in favor of the plaintiff. It was up to Lipstadt to prove the truth of what she wrote, and to prove, along the way, that hundreds of thousands of Jews were indeed gassed to death at Auschwitz. D. D. Guttenplan's brilliant coverage of this high-stakes duel, based on exclusive access to many of the participants, makes compelling reading and raises surprising questions about what we know, or can know, about history.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(16)
Court Full	17	(19)
The Claimant	36	(22)
The Defendants	58	(25)
Discovery	83	(23)
A paper Eichmann?	106	(32)
Mr. Death	138	(24)
Auschwitz	162	(34)
Massive confrontation	196	(39)
Germans	235	(20)
Closing arguments	255	(18)
A reasoned judgment	273	(14)
Numbers	287	(22)
Notes	309	(9)
Index	318