Twenty years later, Professor Deborah Lipstadt relives the trial that rocked the world
At stake was the veracity of the Holocaust itself
The nondescript letter that landed on Deborah Lipstadt’s desk on that fall morning in 1995 gave no indication it had the power to upend her life. A professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Lipstadt had stopped in her office that morning before a meeting with a graduate student. The letter was from Penguin, the British publisher of her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. In that book, she argued that Holocaust denial was no longer a fringe movement, but was becoming a serious threat.
Curious, Lipstadt opened the envelope, read a few lines, and then — to the astonishment of her secretary — began to laugh.
“This is really nuts,” she exclaimed.
David Irving, an author and well-known Holocaust denier, was threatening a libel suit over her claim that he denied the Holocaust. Considering that Irving had openly acknowledged his Holocaust denial, and that she had meticulously researched everything she had written about that subject, Lipstadt instantly dismissed the threat as “nothing more than sound and fury.” As the next tumultuous five years would show, however, she was seriously wrong.
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