The trailer for the upcoming film Denial, about David Irving’s failed libel-suit in 2000 against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, purposefully misrepresents David Irving’s position on the Holocaust, and specifically what he said to Deborah Lipstadt on 11 November 1994.
On that occasion, Professor Lipstadt told an audience that there was a blueprint of a gas-chamber that showed holes in the roof for introducing Zyklon-B pellets. In fact there is no such thing. David Irving stood up and issued the following challenge:
“I have here a thousand dollars for you if you can produce to this audience, now or at any time in the future, this document about which you have just lied to them.” (D. Irving, A Radical’s Diary, 11 November 1994)
That is what Mr. Irving recorded himself as saying in his Radical’s Diary, and there are also two video-recordings of the exchange, one of them made by Emory University.
The trailer for Denial, however, represents David Irving as saying:
“… I’ve got a thousand dollars to give anyone who can show me a document that proves the Holocaust.”
That is very different from what David Irving actually said. David Irving knew that there was no blueprint of an Auschwitz gas-chamber as Lipstadt had claimed, because Robert Faurisson had acquired and published the blueprints for the alleged gas-chambers in 1976: the rooms supposed to be gas-chambers are clearly marked in the blueprints as mortuaries. Irving challenged Lipstadt only on that specific point. The film however has him daring her — or anyone — to prove the entire Holocaust.
The obvious purpose of this misrepresentation is to facilitate labeling David Irving as the quintessential Holocaust Revisionist, or “Denier,” which he really never was. David Irving (unlike the much more rigorous and courageous Robert Faurisson) never took the position that there was no Holocaust.