By DAVID BUNCOMBE
LONDON - By the time that David Irving slipped into Court 36 at the Royal Courts of Justice he knew the game was up.
Because he was representing himself he had been given Mr Justice Gray's written judgment the day before. He would have had ample chance to study it, ample opportunity to see where he had failed to have his propagandist view of history accepted.
But though he was aware of the decision, as he took his place at the front of the court, even Irving could not have fully expected what was coming next.
Over the next hour and 50 minutes, Gray did not so much dismiss the historian's claim that he had been libelled by Professor Deborah Lipstadt, but rather dismantle it, destroy it, turn it on its head and then throw it back into Irving's heavy-jowled face. In doing so, he also fundamentally questioned his right to be called a historian.
The judge started vy saying it was not his job to decide what had happened under the Nazi regime: he was a trial judge and not a historian. But over the next two hours as he hurried through his key findinds, that was exactly the role he assumed.
Firstly, he turned to the allegation contained in Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, that Irving had misrepresented the historical evidence.
No one doubted, said the judge, that as a military historian Irving had much to commend him. He had undertaken painstaking research.
But then he turned to specific matters: Hitler's 1924 trial, Kristallnacht, the shooting of the Jews in Riga, the timing of the so-called Final Solution. Names and places from another world, known to most only from history books, echoed around the wood-panelled courtroom.
"It is my conclusion," said Gray, "that judged objectively, Irving treated the historical evidence in a matter which fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian. Irving ... misrepresented and distorted the evidence."
In his seat, Irving's face steadily took on the colour of his burgundy waistcoat. (He had removed his suit jacked after being pelted with an egg as he entered court.) The lines on his forehead became deeper and he fiddled with his reading glasses placed on the desk in front of him.
But the judge barely paused, turning instead to Irving's arguments over the absence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and the extent of the Holocaust.
"No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds and thousands of Jews," said the judge.
Though the packed courtroom remained silent, one sensed that in the public gallery and among the 100 or more tightly-packed journalists from around the world, many were inwardly cheering.
There was no respite for Irving. He was a Holocaust denier; he might not be a racist in the usual sense, said the judge, but he mixed with racists and shared many of their right-wing views.
And with a showman's timing Gray saved the best for the end - the matter of whether Irving had deliberately got things wrong. "For the most part the falsification of the ... record was deliberate and that Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological evidence."
On the other side of the court Lipstadt clasped her hands as if in a prayer of thanks. She too, would have been told of the decision before entering court, but she looked elated by the judge's words.
Irving meanwhile, surrounded by security guards, left the court by a backdoor. Asked about the court's decision as he made his hurried exit, he had just one word. "Perverse."
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