After the verdict
The trial closed on 20 July 2001 when the Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal. What followed: the historians' books, the Austrian conviction for Holocaust denial, the Denial film, and how the case is referenced today.
The trial adjudicated David Irving. It did not adjudicate Holocaust denial. Denial continued, and continues, in forms the trial did not anticipate and could not have settled. This page is a record of what happened after the appeal was refused — biographically for Irving, scholarly for the historians who appeared, and culturally for the case itself.
Entries below are sourced from public records, contemporary press, and the published works listed on the About page. The framing — that the trial settled Irving's writings without settling denial as a phenomenon — is editorial.
-
2002April
Richard Evans publishes Lying About Hitler
The book-length statement of the historiographical case Evans made under oath during the trial. Basic Books, New York. Builds out the 1,367-paragraph expert report into a continuous narrative. Robert Jan van Pelt publishes The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial the same year through Indiana University Press, doing the parallel work for the architectural-forensic case on the camp.
-
2002summer
House of Lords refuses leave to appeal further
Irving petitioned the House of Lords (then the UK's apex court) for leave to appeal the Court of Appeal's refusal. The petition was refused. With that, the legal route closed completely; the 11 April 2000 judgment stood as the final adjudication.
-
2005Apr
Lipstadt publishes History on Trial
Deborah Lipstadt's first-person memoir of the trial, Ecco / HarperCollins. Records the courtroom day-by-day from the defence-table perspective. The source of the 'mein Führer' slip preserved on this site (Chapter 16, pp. 263–264), which the official transcript silently corrected. Reissued in paperback in 2017 with a new preface for the Denial film tie-in.
-
200511 Nov
Irving arrested in Austria
Irving was arrested in Styria, Austria, on a warrant issued in 1989 for offences under the Austrian Verbotsgesetz 1947 — speeches he had given in Leoben and Vienna in November 1989 in which he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. Held on remand for three months.
-
200620 Feb
Vienna: conviction for Holocaust denial
A Vienna jury convicted Irving of Wiederbetätigung — re-engaging in National Socialist activity — under the Verbotsgesetz. He pleaded guilty. The trial judge sentenced him to three years' imprisonment. The Austrian press and most international coverage noted that the sentence exceeded prosecution expectations. Irving served the sentence at Josefstadt prison in Vienna until December 2006, when the Vienna Court of Appeal reduced the custodial portion to time served and converted the remainder to probation.
-
2009
HDOT launches at Emory University
Holocaust Denial on Trial, an Emory University project under Deborah Lipstadt's direction. Digitises the trial transcripts, expert reports, judgment and appeal materials, and maintains an extensive myth-and-facts catalogue. Without HDOT, the trial record would not be publicly accessible in machine-readable form, and this site could not exist.
-
2014
Peter Longerich publishes Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Oxford University Press, the standard one-volume reference work on the Holocaust by the historian who wrote two reports for the trial. The book draws on the same documentary apparatus Longerich brought to bear on Days 24–26. His earlier The Unwritten Order: Hitler's Role in the Final Solution (Tempus, 2001) developed the Hitler-knowledge case from the trial directly. Christopher Browning's The Origins of the Final Solution (Heinemann, 2004) does the same for the Reinhard period.
-
2016Sept
Denial — the film
Directed by Mick Jackson, screenplay by David Hare (adapted from Lipstadt's memoir). Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt, Tom Wilkinson as Rampton, Timothy Spall as Irving, Andrew Scott as Anthony Julius. Premiered Toronto International Film Festival, September 2016; UK and US theatrical release in autumn 2016. The film dramatises the closing days of the trial in particular and is the single most-watched representation of the case to date. Hare's screenplay is closely faithful to the transcript.
-
Now
The case in the present
Irving continues to publish and to maintain a personal website. His standing as a historian remains as Gray found it in April 2000: he is not regarded as a credible historian within mainstream Holocaust historiography. The judgment itself is cited routinely in three settings — in defamation litigation involving historians of Nazi Germany or of the Holocaust, where Gray's findings establish the threshold; in undergraduate and graduate history teaching, as the standard example of historical evidence under adversarial test; and in popular discussion of Holocaust denial, where the trial is the most-cited single answer to the question "has this been adjudicated?"
The trial answered that question for Irving's writings and for the Auschwitz, Hitler-knowledge, and racism allegations specifically. It did not — and could not — settle Holocaust denial as a phenomenon. That work continues, and continues to draw on this trial as its evidentiary anchor.