What is Holocaust denial?
Part of this case turned on the question: what is Holocaust denial? Lipstadt had called Irving a Holocaust denier, and for her legal defense to work, she had to show that it was true, that Irving was a Holocaust denier. And that in turn meant being able to define Holocaust denial.
We can go to the dictionary for a first stab at it. Here's the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:
Holocaust denial: the mistaken belief or assertion that the Holocaust did not happen, or was greatly exaggerated.
Notice that you don't have to deny 100% of the Holocaust to be a Holocaust denier; when someone tries to argue that only 300,000 Jews died in the camps, they're denying over 90% of the death toll, and that's rightly called denial.
But for a legal procedure the definition has to be more precise. So one of the expert witnesses, Prof. Richard J. Evans -- an excellent German speaker who taught a course the documenation of the Third Reich at Cambridge University -- and two of his PhD students (Nikolaus Wachsmann and Thomas Skelton-Robinson) went through thousands of pages of Holocaust denial materials looking for the common themes. They were able to boil it down to these four points.
- that Jews were not killed in gas chambers or at least not on any significant scale;(This is Justice Gray's paraphrase of Evans, taken verbatim from the text of the verdict, at paragraph 8.4.)
- that the Nazis had no policy and made no systematic attempt to exterminate European Jewry and that such deaths as did occur were the consequence of individual excesses unauthorised at senior level;
- that the number of Jews murdered did not run into millions and that the true death toll was far lower;
- that the Holocaust is largely or entirely a myth invented during the war by Allied propagandists and sustained after the war by Jews in order to obtain financial support for the newly-created state of Israel.
These points were part of Evans' submission to the court, serving as the trial's definition of what constitutes Holocaust denial. Significantly, David Irving did not challenge the definition, and it's the one the judge used to weigh the question of whether Irving is a Holocaust denier. (Spoiler: he is.)
Sometimes Holocaust deniers, trying to "prove" they're not really Holocaust deniers, will say "Of course, there was a Holocaust, just no genocidal plan, no gas chambers, no six million dead Jews." That's a bit like saying, "Of course I ride a bicycle -- just one without pedals, handlebars, wheels, chains, a seat, or any sort of motion." What they try to do, that, is hope you won't notice that what they say they believe isn't actually the Holocaust as the rest of the world knows it, but a much-reduced mini-Holocaust. share