Irving is a falsifier and a liar, says publisher

The right-wing historian David Irving was described yesterday as a "falsifier of history" and a "liar" at the start of a High Court libel battle.

The right-wing historian David Irving was described yesterday as a "falsifier of history" and a "liar" at the start of a High Court libel battle.

In a packed court, Richard Rampton QC, representing Penguin Books, said: "Mr Irving calls himself an historian. The truth is, however, that he is not an historian at all, but a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar. Mr Irving has used many different means to falsify history: invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion, manipulation and - not least - mistranslation. But all these techniques have the same ultimate effect: falsification of the truth."

The historian is suing the publisher and the American author Deborah Lipstadt over her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she describes Mr Irving as a "Holocaust denier". Mr Rampton repeated the allegation. He said: "By this I mean that he denies that the Nazis planned and carried out the systematic murder of millions of Jews, in particular - though by no means exclusively - by the use of homicidal gas chambers, and in particular - though by no means exclusively - at Auschwitz in southern Poland."

But Mr Irving told the court that he he had never denied the existence of the Holocaust. He said: "No person in full command of his mental faculties and with even the slightest understanding of what happened in World War Two can deny that the tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae."

Mr Irving said the tag "Holocaust denier" had become "one of the most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult". He described the expression as "a verbal Yellow Star".

Mr Irving, 61, who has been banned from at least five countries because of his views, told the court he had never claimed any specialist knowledge of the Holocaust. He said: "If I am an expert in anything at all, I may be so immodest as to submit that it is in the role that Adolf Hitler played in the propagation of World War Two."

Mr Irving, who is representing himself, said the Holocaust should not be the focus of the libel case, which is expected to last three months. "What is moot here is not what happened in those sites of atrocities - but what happened over the last 32 years, on my writing desk in my apartment off Grosvenor Square," he said. "This inquiry should not leave the four walls of my study."

Mr Irving said publishers were afraid to be associated with him: "I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach."

The historian claimed that Ms Lipstadt and Penguin were part of an "organised international endeavour" to "destroy my career and to vandalise my legitimacy as an historian".

Mr Rampton suggested that Mr Irving used distorted history "in pursuit of his exoneration of Adolf Hitler and his denial of the Holocaust". He said the historian often gave talks to "radical right-wing, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi groups". During a speech in Canada in 1991, Mr Rampton said Mr Irving had said aboutAuschwitz: "Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?"