The controversial author, Mr David Irving, faces the possibility of bankruptcy after losing his appeal against a High Court libel judgment which branded him an "active Holocaust denier".
Mr Irving was not in the Appeal Court in London yesterday to hear three judges reject his application to overturn last April's High Court ruling that he had deliberately misrepresented history to portray Hitler in a favourable light and had denied the Holocaust.
Mr Irving lost his libel case against the US author Prof Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, over her description of him in her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory as a "Hitler partisan".
Mr Irving must now pay £150,000 of an estimated £2.4 million costs bill within 20 days. However, Mr Richard Rampton, QC, for Penguin and Prof Lipstadt, said the costs issue was complicated by "the real possibility of the need to take bankruptcy proceedings against Mr Irving".
Ruling that the High Court judge, Mr Justice Gray, was "fully entitled" to find Prof Lipstadt's and Penguin's defence of justification had succeeded, Lord Justice Pill said: "Mr Davies [Mr Irving's counsel] has not persuaded us that it is arguable that the judge's general conclusions were unjustified".
The court acknowledged that in recent years, Mr Irving had modified his views on relevant events during the second World War. However Lord Justice Pill said, "the respondents were justified in describing him as `one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial',".
Mr Justice Gray, he ruled, was correct in his conclusion that "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 of thousands of Jews".
After the hearing, Mr Kevin Bays of Davenport Lyons, solicitors for Penguin Books, said the Appeal Court had vindicated Penguin's decision to support Prof Lipstadt and defend Mr Irving's claims as a matter of principle.
Prof Lipstadt was "gratified" by the Appeal Court ruling and insisted that while her battle with Mr Irving was over, she would continue to "fight against those who will pervert the historical record for their own political and ideological goals".