About
Who built this, why, and how to read what you find here.
The verdict
This is a trial that ended. David Irving lost on the central allegations.
On 11 April 2000, Mr Justice Gray found for the defendants on the central allegations. He ruled that Irving had "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence", that he was "an active Holocaust denier", and that he was "anti-semitic and racist". The Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal on 20 July 2001.
The judgment runs to 349 pages and is available in full in this archive. Gray's findings are documented in detail and grounded in the expert reports and cross-examination record that this site preserves; the verdict can be read in his own words at /judgment. What happened after the appeal was refused is on the postscript page.
Who built this
This archive was built by [YOUR NAME], an independent researcher with no institutional affiliation. I am not a historian by training. I have no funding for this work and no commercial interest in it.
I came to this material as a reader without scholarly training. Online, in the kinds of long arguments that play out under viral posts and in the kinds of articles and films that bring this case to general attention, I encountered claims about the Holocaust that sounded technical and well-sourced — figures cited, documents named, footnotes promised — and I wanted to know what the underlying record actually said. The closest thing to that record turned out to be this trial: thirty-two days in open court, against the most accomplished denier of the era, with five expert historians writing reports. What is available of that trial online is genuine but hard to navigate. The site you are reading is what I made to close that gap. It is the archive I wished had existed when I first went looking.
The site is not affiliated with Penguin, with Professor Lipstadt, with the historians who appeared at trial, or with any institution. The verbatim transcript is derived from the publicly available Holocaust Denial on Trial archive at Emory University, and credit for digitising the trial belongs to them. The editorial layer is my own work, and any errors in it are mine.
What this site is
A navigable archive of the complete Irving v Penguin Books & Lipstadt trial record — every turn of the transcript anchorable by line ID, every expert report readable in full, the judgment and appeal in one place.
The trial generated approximately 2.3 million words of verbatim transcript across 32 sitting days, six expert reports totalling several hundred thousand words, a 349-page judgment, and a Court of Appeal ruling. Before this archive, navigating that material required either access to the original court bundles or reliance on the incomplete and partially inaccessible version at hdot.emory.edu. This site makes the full record findable and linkable.
The editorial layer — chapter headings, day summaries, the Moments section — is this site's own work, clearly distinguished from the verbatim record. When a chapter title or summary appears, it reflects editorial judgment, not the court record. The verbatim transcript is preserved exactly as sourced and is not editorially altered.
What this site does and does not claim to be
This site preserves the trial record. It does not pretend to neutrality between the parties: the trial reached a verdict, the verdict is on the record, and this archive is built in the knowledge of that verdict. The verbatim transcript and the judgment do the editorial work; the site's job is to make them readable.
The trial addressed specific allegations against a specific person. Figures associated with Irving's network appear in the record (Faurisson, Leuchter, the IHR, the organisations documented in Funke's report), but only insofar as the trial itself examined them. For a broader history of Holocaust denial as a phenomenon, this is not the right archive.
The expert reports are reproduced in full. They are long, and the site's summaries are entry points to them, not substitutes for them. Where a denier claim is made about a specific document — the Höfle telegram, the Wannsee Protocol, the Leuchter Report, the Schlegelberger memorandum — the report that addresses it usually addresses it across many paragraphs, with the documents alongside.
How to use it if you've arrived from a denier claim
Use the search for a specific document or person. It covers every line of every day of the transcript. Try short stems: "höfle", "wannsee", "leuchter", "schlegelberger". The search is substring-based, so partial matches work.
The moments page picks out short exchanges that recur across the trial — exchanges that are complete in themselves and that show, in fifteen lines, what was actually at stake when one side held the documents and the other had to defend its published claims about them.
The expert reports are the substantive historiographical answer to the body of denier argument. Each report runs hundreds of paragraphs and reproduces the documents alongside.
Archival method
| Source | Treatment |
|---|---|
| Verbatim transcript | Sourced from the Holocaust Denial on Trial archive at Emory University, extracted May 2026. Approximately 2.3 million words of trial record. Preserved exactly as sourced. Editorial additions are marked in the interface. |
| Expert reports | Sourced from the same Emory archive. Rendered in full with paragraph numbers preserved. No text has been omitted or altered. |
| Judgment | The full Gray judgment, 349 pages. Sourced from the HDOT archive. |
| Appeal | Court of Appeal ruling, 20 July 2001, refusing permission to appeal. |
| Editorial layer | Chapter headings, day summaries, the Moments section, and glossary annotations are this site's own work. They are clearly distinguished from the verbatim record in the interface. Where editorial judgment is exercised, it is exercised in light of the trial record and the judgment. |
| The mein Führer slip | Not in the official transcript (Day 32, L0182 reads 'my Lord'). Court reporters in English legal proceedings routinely correct minor verbal slips in the typed record — this is standard practice, not specific to this trial. The slip is documented in Lipstadt's firsthand memoir (History on Trial, 2005, pp. 263–264) and is included here because it has been widely cited and because it is the kind of detail that deniers sometimes claim was suppressed. |
Further reading
This archive presents the trial record. For context, biography, and the broader history of Holocaust denial, the following are the standard published works that engage the trial directly. Links go to the publisher, the publishing institution, or the canonical reference where applicable.
- Holocaust Denial on Trial (HDOT) — Emory University's project, established by Professor Lipstadt in the wake of the trial. The source of the verbatim trial archive this site is built on, and the source of an extensive myth-and-facts catalogue addressing denier claims.
- Wikipedia: Irving v Penguin Books Ltd — the standard encyclopaedia entry, with a procedural overview, summary of the judgment, and biographical context for the principal participants.
- Deborah E. Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (Ecco / HarperCollins, 2005). The first-person account by the defendant. Source of the 'mein Führer' slip on day 32 and several other moments the official transcript redacted.
- Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (Basic Books, 2002). The book-length statement of the case Evans made under oath at trial. Builds on his expert report.
- D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial (W. W. Norton, 2001). Court-reporter's account from a journalist present for every day of the trial. Strongest contemporaneous narrative source.
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Indiana University Press, 2002). Book-length expansion of van Pelt's expert report on Auschwitz, with the documentary apparatus.
- Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order: Hitler's Role in the Final Solution (Tempus, 2001). The book-length companion to his Hitler-role expert report.
How to link to specific lines
Every spoken turn in the transcripts carries a stable line identifier (e.g. L0860) that can be linked directly. The URL pattern is day-14.html#L0860. These identifiers are stable across site updates and are intended to be citeable.
The site search covers the full verbatim trial transcript — approximately 50,000 turns, 2.3 million words. It is a substring search; try short stems if you don't find a hit on the full word.