British historian Mr David Irving began an appeal today against a libel court ruling that branded him a Holocaust denier.
He denied falsifying the Nazi treatment of Jews and insisted he had never said the murder of Jews did not happen.
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Mr David Irving at London's High Court
last year to hear a libel case result. |
Mr Irving lost a libel action last year against an American Professor, Ms Deborah Lipstadt, and her publishers, Penguin Books, who had accused him of denying the Holocaust.
At the opening of his appeal against that decision by the High Court, Mr Irving's lawyer Mr Adrian Davies told the Appeal Court in London: "There is nothing to say he [Irving] thinks that the Nazis did a jolly good thing or even an excusable thing rounding up Jews and putting them in appalling camps."
Mr Davies was referring to passages in a 1970s book by Irving which formed the basis for allegations in Prof Lipstadt's 1994 Penguin book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memorythat he was a Holocaust-denier .
At the opening of an appeal expected to last four days Mr Davies said: "The charges against Mr Irving are that he has falsified history."
He said the charges were not that he was a Nazi supporter - "they are not that he is a nasty person who holds horrible views and knows lots of people who hold even more horrible views."
Mr Davies said Mr Irving did not deny Jews were murdered by the Nazis and accepted four million of them died.
But he said the claims in Mr Irving's book which were attacked by Prof Lipstadt were based on knowledge at the time the book was written. That knowledge was inferior to the information now available, said Mr Davies.
Mr Davies said that in his appeal Mr Irving now claimed the High Court's decision to dismiss the libel action was against the weight of the evidence and that the judge was legally wrong to admit some of the evidence given in the case.
The hearing continues.