As Deborah Lipstadt had consistently refused all media interviews, Darville interviewed British revisionist and historian David Irving for Australian Style magazine. He was suing the American Professor of Jewish Studies for describing him as a holocaust denier in her 1993 book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." (He lost and is currently appealing.)

lobby, who decided that because the author gave her characters sympathetic treatment, her political sympathies were therefore with the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Two days before her more recent interview with David Irving was published in Australian Style, Jewish columnist and longstanding critic Robert Manne launched yet another attack on Darville in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age newspapers, both Fairfax Limited stablemates. He was quickly followed in print and on air by experienced Darville-bashers Gerard Henderson and Jeremy Jones, who are also Fairfax regulars. Despite initially expressing interest in publishing an editorial response to this personal attack, when they read it the SMH bottled out and suggested a 'letter to the editor' instead.

None of Helen Darville's critics managed to notice it, but the author has decided to sign off on the subject of the Holocaust altogether, citing the number of nutcases it seems to attract. She wrote an entire article making this clear on Thursday 20th April for The Courier-Mail in Brisbane which was widely extracted in other News Limited Press. Since then the less than authoritative NIZKOR internet archive has decided:

1. That Helen Darville is "a committed racist and anti-semite" (expressed by contributor Don Yurman in a web article ostensibly about the Irving Trial). As you can imagine, her black Nigerian boyfriend wasn't best pleased.
2. That Helen Darville is a spotty British school boy recently posting to Alt.Revisionism (Don Yurman and his site manager's girl friend, Hilary Ostrov)
3. That Helen Darville is Jane Quantrill, an Australian country and western singer who recently set up a revisionist 'club' on Yahoo (NIZKOR site manager Ken McVay has since discreetly neglected to include correspondence from both Helen Darville and David Irving highlighting his error.).

Even the opportunity to review Norman G. Finkelstein's expose of "The Holocaust Industry" hasn't been enough to tempt her back. She apparently feels that "We are not worthy!" doesn't constitute the depth of analysis most media are looking for in a book review.

For those too busy spying, lying and frothing at the mouth Fairfax Are Yellow! is proud to present Helen Darville's final article on David Irving and The Holocaust.

Having given historian David Irving the benefit of the doubt, writer Helen Darville now believes the British High Court’s judgment is right - and Irving is wrong.

When David Irving was making his closing speech in the libel suit he’d brought against Deborah Lipstadt to the court on March 15, there was a truly surreal moment. Whether through oversight, or the tiredness and confusion he undoubtedly felt at the end of a long and gruelling trial, he addressed Justice Charles Gray as “Mein Führer” instead of “My Lord”.

Irving’s gaffe was symbolic of the trial’s progress. As the weeks passed, it became increasingly clear that - for want of a better word - he has been seduced by Hitler. Yes, you could argue, so were eighty million Germans and their multinational collaborators. The crucial difference, of course, is that they were taken in by a living, breathing human being and Josef Goebbels’ astonishing talent as a spin-doctor.

“You can see why they fell for it,” says a friend of mine, a designer in one of London’s leading graphic arts and advertising firms. “Kicking uniforms, stunning cinema, fabulous poster art, rallies that invented stadium rock forty years before its time. Amazing.” She points out that there isn’t a democratic politician on the planet who wouldn’t like a modern-day Goebbels on his staff.

Irving’s admiration for Hitler, however, is a clear case of seduction after the fact. Hitler had been chargrilled in his Berlin bunker quite a little while before Irving started a one-man crusade to clear his name. A cartoon on the day of the verdict showed Satan breaking the news to a slowly roasting Hitler: “Sorry mate. He lost. You stay”.

The exact terms of Irving’s crusade - the falsehoods and manipulation that it involved - have now been exposed by Justice Gray in his April 11 verdict. No doubt there are some who’ll think I’m sorry to see Irving so thoroughly toasted. They’re wrong, of course. I think Gray’s decision a model of both fairness and clarity.

I did find the trial in which Irving embroiled himself intriguing, however. In part this was due to Irving representing himself, thus producing what can only be termed “legal theatre”. That aside, the trial revolved around a topic that I should have left behind immediately after The Hand that Signed the Paper was published, but did not: the Holocaust.

That I failed to leave the Holocaust behind is a measure of the impact the subsequent controversy had on me. The label “anti-Semite” was flung in my direction so frequently I felt that this powerful, highly charged term was being drained of its proper meaning.

“Anti-Semite”, like its twin sister, “racist” is not - nor should it be - an example of mindless abuse. Newspapers don’t print it as a row of asterisks. It has a very precise meaning, one that I know doesn’t fit me. Still, the label hung in the air. As such, my coverage of the Irving libel trial - including this article - represents an attempt to sign off on that topic, Holocaust.

Along with many other people, I gave David Irving the benefit of the doubt. I did so in both this newspaper (CM March 4) and in Australian Style magazine. Unlike Gerard Henderson and Robert Manne, I did not think it right or fair to preempt Justice Charles Gray’s decision in the trial.

Besides, for a long time the eventual result was by no means clear. Sir John Keegan, Britain’s most distinguished military historian, commented after the verdict that “for more than a year now, the gossip between Britain’s historians has been about whether he would lose or not, a subject on which all hedged bets. ‘It depends whether the judge goes for Holocaust denial or slurs on his reputation’, was the general view. ‘If the first he’ll lose, if the second he might get away with it.’”

Gray has now delivered his verdict, and while he found for Irving on a few minor points and praised his work as a military historian, he agreed with Richard Rampton QC that - when it came to his writing and speaking about the Jewish fate in Nazi Europe - Irving “displays all the characteristics of a Holocaust denier”.

Gray found that “Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” and “portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light.” Perhaps most damning of all, Irving also “associated with right wing extremists who promote neo Nazism”.

If these words - taken from the conclusion to a three-hundred page judgment - seem unduly harsh, then I can only ask that people read his work in its entirety. It’s available online at www.focal.org/judg.html.

While reading his judgment, I came to believe that there is something in the old argument about law attracting the best intellects in the humanities. Gray has done an impressive job of sifting historical evidence in an extremely complex case. The quality of the verdict reflects well on British libel laws often castigated for their unfairness.

Irving, I think is finished, unless he has the sense to confine himself to that which Gray says he does well - military history. Keegan believes that “if he will only learn from this case, he still has much that is interesting to tell us.” The question, of course, is whether he wants to learn anything at all. When he spoke to me, he was completely unrepentant.

He says that he intends to appeal the decision, although from where he will find the money to do so is beyond me. Estimates for the bill he faces after this action range from £1.5 to £3.2 million, and rumours are rife that he has already mortgaged his luxury Mayfair home in order to finance his publishing company, Focal Point.

Should Irving be granted leave to appeal, the whole circus will start over again, chasing its tail all the way up to the Privy Council. I think it unlikely, however, that the law lords would overturn so rigorous and careful a judgment.

What of the fallout from the decision, apart from the wrecking of Irving?

London University’s Professor Donald Cameron Watt thought that “nothing of historical value” came out of the trial, and noted that “there are prominent American academics whose careers suffered no setback despite their denying the scale and scope of Stalin’s purges”.

Watt pointed out that every year, books are published alleging that Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor, or that Churchill was at one stage involved in secret peace negotiations with Rudolf Hess. He had not “noticed any books attacking the perpetrators of such twaddle.” Publishers, he said, were “poor arbiters of truth, interested only in making money”.

History may not be the winner, then. However, Gray explicitly stated in his judgment that he would not be ruling on the truth of history: “the distinction may be a fine one, but it is important to bear it in mind.”

Cambridge University’s Professor Richard Evans thought that the trial presented “a lesson in historical method” and showed conclusively that Holocaust deniers lived an “outlandish racist fantasy.”

Evans’ last point, I think, is the most important. Irving’s Holocaust denial is a species of racist fantasy. There is something truly peculiar about minimising the Holocaust, or pretending it didn’t happen. The untenable nature of Irving’s denial is made especially clear, Keegan argues, because it stands out so sharply from the rest of his work. When he is not writing about the Holocaust, he does his job as a historian properly.

“Unfortunately for him,” Keegan states, “he is admired only when he writes sense. When he writes nonsense, a small but disabling element in his work, he sacrifices all admiration and incurs blame mixed with incredulity. How can someone so good at history be so bad?”

The Holocaust denial in Irving’s work forms a pattern, repeated in book after book, lecture after lecture and statement after statement. It is this pattern that Gray so eloquently delineates in his judgment.

Interestingly, according to Lipstadt, immediately after WWII extreme anti Semites tried to justify the atrocity. Holocaust denial - which springs from the same anti-Semitism - is a newer phenomenon. It really only took off in the sixties.

Personally, I know that when confronted by someone who states, point blank, that the Final Solution was just and right, I can argue them into the ground. This happened once, on a packed bus in Fulham Palace Road. An extremely stroppy Chelsea FC fan decided to lecture the rest of us on how “Hitler had the right idea about the Jews” and why he was sorry that “Hitler didn’t finish the job”.

Chelsea had just played Tottenham - a club with many Jewish supporters - in a goalless draw. No doubt he and his fellow fans had spent several hours yelling “YOU’RE GOING TO BELSEN!” at the Tottenham fans - alas fairly typical of the abuse dished out by English football crowds.

Starting, I'm proud to say, with two or three Australians, the whole bus was soon in uproar. We told him where to stick his sick ideas. We told him what we thought of his racist views (in terms, even in these permissive days, quite unprintable here). But there was no violence. Nobody threw anything. When he got off at the next stop, no-one followed him.

However, arguing with a Holocaust denier is an altogether different matter. Holocaust deniers join you in condemning racist violence. They shake their heads and tut-tut in all the right places when discussing recent events in Kosovo or Rwanda. They calmly place themselves on the side of the angels. And then they look you in the eye and tell you that the Holocaust is a "myth".

I know they do. Because David Irving did when I interviewed him for AUSTRALIAN STYLE. He spent a good hour trying to convince me that there were no gas chambers in the death camps.

The trickery of the deniers' position - as compared with the unsophisticated racism of the Chelsea FC fan - reminds me of a ditty my mother taught me as a child:

"A lie that's half a truth is the wickedest lie of all, Because a lie that's all a lie can be met and fought outright - A lie that's half a truth is a harder matter to fight."

When I confronted Irving with the information that I had interviewed (at length) a former camp guard, a man who had often - along with twenty or so of his fellow guards - forced people into Treblinka's gas chambers, he had a neat, glib response. It was very difficult to argue with him, even though I have reasonable knowledge of the period. The best I could do was wring an admission from him that he "doesn't know much about Treblinka".

Lipstadt describes experiences like mine as the intellectual equivalent of trying "to nail jelly to the wall."

As someone who during the course of the trial - and at considerable personal cost - gave David Irving a fair hearing, I believe that his views on Hitler and the Holocaust are bunk. I doubt, however, that they are dangerous. The sources of racist violence are high unemployment, social exclusion and poverty. It is these that feed the rhetoric. It is these that elected Hitler in 1933.

Holocaust survivor Naomi Blake, interviewed on Channel 4, made the point that sometimes it is "psychologically easier to think it didn't happen". When quizzed by a surprised interviewer on why she thought this, she said that "the perpetrators were not devils with horns, but ordinary citizens."

What Blake says is undoubtedly true. It is the normality of the perpetrators that makes the Holocaust - and other genocides, including our own effort on the Tasmanian Aborigines - so terrifying. It is this fact that for me must be addressed above all others in future studies of genocide. I tried to do so through the medium of fiction in THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER.

The smiling SS man with his arm around his girlfriend's waist in Nuremberg's charming medieval Altstadt in one photo is the man directing a killing squad outside Kiev in another. The perpetrators of genocide are so often elder brothers, boyfriends, husbands and fathers. Given the right circumstances, you or I could stand in their places.

If there is any lesson to be learnt from this case, a case where all of us - lawyers, press, plaintiff, defendant, public and judge - have rolled around in blood and brutality for three months, it concerns the easy atrophy of human conscience. For all our supposed sensitivity, we have failed to prevent similar crimes from happening at least a dozen times in the fifty years since WWII.

It is well to remember this whenever someone says "Never Again".