David Irving asked Pill, Mantell, and Buxton LJJ to reopen Gray's findings on Auschwitz, Kristallnacht, Hitler's 1943 meetings with Horthy, Dresden, and Irving's use of evidence. After a three-and-a-half-day hearing, the court refused permission to appeal.
The Court of Appeal ruling of July 20, 2001 lists the findings Irving challenged, the evidence his lawyers put forward, and why the judges refused permission to appeal. Penguin then enforced its costs. The resulting bankruptcy order came on March 4, 2002; Irving's 2006 prison sentence came from a separate Austrian prosecution based on statements he made in 1989.
“The claimant had played for high stakes on the central issue of his entitlement to be regarded as a genuine historian and had lost on grounds so damaging that they left no real room for discrete damage by the unfounded allegations.”Sedley LJ's reasons, reproduced and adopted in the Court of Appeal judgment, paragraph 96.
Adrian Davies presented Irving's renewed application over three of the hearing's three and a half days. The judges compared his arguments with Gray's reasoning and the trial evidence, then considered the evidence Irving sought to introduce after judgment.
On Auschwitz, Davies said the application failed if he could not show that Irving's views were ones a reputable historian could hold. The judges did not decide the application on that concession.
Irving had accepted at trial that a false assumption invalidated Leuchter's conclusion and that the report contained many other factual errors. The appeal judges also upheld Gray's treatment of the roof holes, death books, Bletchley decrypts, and coke consumption.
Appeal paragraphs 35–47; the roof-hole finding is reproduced at paragraph 43.
Gray preferred documents written at the time to accounts Hitler's adjutants gave years later. The appeal judges upheld his conclusion that Irving perverted the evidence by writing that Hitler was “totally unaware” of Goebbels's actions.
Official minutes placed Hitler's reassuring remark at the April 16, 1943 meeting. Hitler's War moved it into the April 17 account, directly after Hitler's statement that Jews unable to work had to perish. The appeal judges considered whether that transposition was innocent and found no reason to doubt Gray's conclusion that it materially distorted the evidence.
The judges reviewed Irving's changing casualty figures, his reliance on unidentified estimates, and his rejection of evidence placing the death toll at 25,000 to 30,000. He continued to put the toll at 100,000 or more in a later edition and in speeches during the 1990s. The judges said he had failed to cast doubt on Gray's conclusion.
Irving withdrew an application involving chemist Germar Scheerer and former Birkenau prisoner Zoe Polanska-Palmer after the defendants had prepared a detailed response. During the hearing, the judges refused photographs about Prussian blue staining and an attempt to use Richard Evans's new book as evidence of ill will.
Gray allowed Penguin to collect part of its costs while the full bill was assessed. He issued the interim order on May 5, 2000; Penguin later used the unpaid debt to petition for Irving's bankruptcy.
| Penguin's interim application | £500,000 |
|---|---|
| Gray's order, May 5, 2000 | £150,000 within 42 days |
| Paid by March 4, 2002 | Nothing |
| Enforcement | Bankruptcy order on Penguin's petition |
The amounts and deadline appear in Irving's appeal evidence, Adams affidavit paragraph 3. The unpaid debt and bankruptcy order were covered after the March 4 hearing by The Guardian.
Austria prosecuted Irving for two speeches and an interview from 1989, eleven years before Gray's judgment. The London trial tested the truth of the libel defendants' allegations. The Vienna court applied the Verbotsgesetz to statements Irving had made in Austria.
Irving was the claimant in a civil libel action. The question was whether Penguin and Lipstadt could prove the substantial truth of the pleaded allegations. His claim was dismissed, permission to appeal was refused, and the costs order was enforced.
Irving was a criminal defendant charged over statements made in Austria in 1989 under the Verbotsgesetz. He pleaded guilty and received a three-year sentence. The remaining term was later suspended.
Contemporary reports: arrest, November 2005; conviction, February 2006; release after sentence appeal, December 2006.
The site’s newspaper catalogue records 144 British Newspaper Archive article URLs on 124 physical pages from 2000. Fifty records fall on the judgment and immediate-reaction dates of April 11–12; later coverage includes book-trade commentary, letters, and reports of Irving’s response.
The catalogue lists each article and each viewer failure. Repeated wire copy, and multiple article identifiers falling on one page, are counted once.
Emory University's Beck Center encoded the judgment and trial materials in 2004. Holocaust Denial on Trial hosts the original files used here. The trial pages on this site carry line anchors, exhibit links, and full-text search over those records.
This site holds 49,980 transcript turns, six expert reports, Gray's 349-page judgment, and seven appeal documents.
Origins and editorial responsibility are set out on the About page. The institutional provider is Holocaust Denial on Trial at Emory University.