Holocaust denial keeps historian vigilant in fight to preserve facts

Historians have to be 'very brave and indefatigable' in pushing for the truth, says Deborah Lipstadt, a history professor in the US and author of the book Denying the Holocaust - the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Professor Lipstadt, 60, prevailed in a six-year legal battle with British Holocaust denier David Irving who sued her for libel over that book. The Atlanta-based academic, invited to Hong Kong for a Jewish community centre programme, believes that facing up to history liberates nations and people from living a lie.

'Why do psychologists try to force people to find the truth in their past? Because it doesn't go away,' she said during her visit last week. 'Everybody uses history selectively. The more totalitarian the regime the more likely they are to control that kind of history.'

Professor Lipstadt and her defence team, which included Princess Diana's solicitor Anthony Julius, made their own history in the libel trial eight years ago in London. She is still at the front line whenever Holocaust denial arises, tracking and exposing it through her blog.

In her 1993 book Professor Lipstadt described author David Irving as 'a Hitler partisan wearing blinkers'. She said he distorted evidence, manipulated documents and misrepresented data 'to reach historically untenable conclusions'. After Penguin UK published the book in Britain, where a defendant in a libel action must prove the truth of what he or she wrote, Irving sued.

The defence strategy was not to prove that the Holocaust happened - 'any more than it is necessary to prove that the second world war happened', said Professor Lipstadt. This obviated the need to call Holocaust survivors as witnesses, sparing them the likelihood of distressing cross-examination by Irving, she added, who represented himself in court.

Instead, the defence team set out to furnish scholarly proof, with other historians as expert witnesses, that her statements about Irving were true. The trial preparation involved intricate analysis of his writing, footnotes and use of sources, and 'a forensic journey' to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. At the end of the 12-week trial, the High Court judge delivered a 355-page judgment saying it was 'incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier'. The judge found that he was an anti-Semite and a racist, had deliberately falsified the historical record and 'was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence'.