The Holocaust On Trial | Granta

  • Published: 10/01/2002
  • ISBN: 9781862074866
  • 130x20mm
  • 352 pages

The Holocaust On Trial

D.D. Guttenplan

David Irving is a leading Holocaust revisionist. In 1996, He sued Penguin Books for libel, claiming he had been falsely labelled a Holocaust denier. The trial was one of the strangest to take place in an English court: the judge had to give a verdict on history. At stake was the freedom of neo-fascist historians to exonerate Hitler and to deny that the Nazis set out to commit genocide, but this was also a trial about the present day, about what out society finds it politically and morally acceptable to say in public. It was also a libel trial about evidence: how do we know that the genocide happened? D. D. Guttenplan has followed David Irving’s career for years and has studied the furious debates over the Holocaust. This is a dramatic recreation of a bizarre trial and a meditation on truth and memory.

Don Guttenplan sat through every day of the trial, and no wiser, more honest or more melancholy book will ever be written about it

Neal Ascherson

Well written, this is the best overall account we have so far of the trial as a whole and the personalities involved in it

Sunday Telegraph

The Author

D. D. Guttenplan is an American writer who since 1994 has been living in and reporting from London. He is currently a contributing editor of The Nation.

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