#When was the holocaust movie#
#When was the holocaust archive#
#When was the holocaust trial#
#When was the holocaust series#

#When was the holocaust movie#

Not long after this, Ridley Scott started to put together a movie on the case, commissioning the playwright Ronald Harwood to write a screenplay. Media interest in the case did not die down after the broadcast. “Yes,” I replied, “in fact you played me far better than I played myself, because you could rehearse the lines while I only had one shot at them!” Writer’s block “I hope I played you to your satisfaction,” he said. It’s not every day that an actor meets one of the characters he’s played in person. I wouldn’t normally do this, but the opportunity was too tempting to miss, so I went up to him. By a curious chance, I was walking through London’s Fitzrovia one sunny day a few months after the programme had gone out, when I spotted Michael Kitchen relaxing with a friend in a pavement cafe.

#When was the holocaust archive#

The programme was an effective and intelligent mix of archive footage, talking heads and courtroom scenes.

#When was the holocaust series#

They chose Michael Kitchen (the lead actor in the television series Foyle’s War). Some time later, however, there was a more considered documentary on BBC Two, Holocaust on Trial, for which the producers phoned me up beforehand to ask me my age, height, weight and hair colour, with a view to casting an actor who at least looked vaguely like me.

#When was the holocaust trial#

The trial was also the subject of a hastily put together drama-documentary on Channel 4 television, in which I appeared in the witness box as an old man with a white beard, which was evidently what the television people thought Cambridge professors looked like.

From Oscar Wilde to David Irving: 9 landmark libel & defamation cases through history.

It had a powerful educative effect, as all the newspapers carried detailed reports of the factual aspects of the Holocaust, Auschwitz, the gas chambers and the role of Hitler in ordering the extermination of the Jews. The case received massive and worldwide publicity and became the subject of several books apart from my own. It kept open the lines of public debate about the Holocaust, whereas if he had won, Lipstadt’s book would have been pulped, and nobody would ever again have been able to call someone a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history without facing the threat of an expensive libel suit. In the event, Irving lost the case comprehensively, and was ordered to pay more than £2m in legal costs, which led to his bankruptcy. All of this can be read in the transcripts of the trial, available online, and in my book Telling Lies About Hitler (Verso, 2002). But the effect was anything but random, indicating that the mistakes were deliberate and not accidental. If Irving had merely been careless, then his mistakes of fact and quotation would have had a random effect on his arguments, some telling for them, some against. The clinching factor was that all these errors went to support David Irving’s central contentions: that there were no mass gassings of Jews, that Adolf Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews (or if he did, tried to stop it), that there was no central planning of the mass killing of Jews, and that most of the evidence for the mass murder had been concocted after the war. Together with my team of researchers, I discovered a huge number of manipulations and falsifications of the historical record in his work, with words inserted into or taken out of documents where they were not present in the original, mistranslations, mistranscriptions, misdatings and much more besides.

In the event, I found that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier, at least after the late 1980s. Moreover, I had to swear in court that I had written my report objectively and without any fear or favour, and sign an affidavit to the same effect. It’s worth noting that I had complete freedom to do this, got no instructions from the defence, and was paid the standard expert witness fee, an hourly rate that meant that I could have concluded that Irving was a great historian and everything Lipstadt had written was wrong, and still received my payment. The defence lawyers asked me to go through Irving’s writings and speeches to see if Lipstadt’s charges were correct. Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “What they told us was, at the time, they felt it was the right thing to do”.A brief history of Auschwitz – the most deadly site of the Holocaust.The liberation of Auschwitz, 75 years on: what happened and how do we remember the Holocaust?.