The case of David Irving v Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books is very complex and the trial has been full of technical and historical detail, but the issues can be summed up as follows:

Irving claimed that he had been libelled by being falsely accused of being a Holocaust denier.

Lipstadt and Penguin Books defended themselves in the only way possible, which was to say that what they had printed in Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, was true and factually accurate.

In Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt called Irving 'one of the most dangerous' historical 'revisionists', who is 'familiar with the historical evidence' of the Holocaust but 'bends it until it conforms to his ideological leanings and political agenda'.

In other words, she argued that Irving consciously misused historical evidence for his own ideological ends.

Irving insisted that he did not deny the fact that the Holocaust happened but, based on his extensive knowledge of the archives, he challenged three vital aspects of the history of Hitler's extermination of European Jews:

1. That Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland;
   
   
2. That Hitler directly ordered the mass murder of the Jewish population of Europe;
   
   
3. That there was any systematic plan by the Nazis to destroy European Jewry.

During the trial, much of Irving's case rested on whether the gas chambers at Auschwitz had been used to kill Jews. He claimed that they had simply been used to delouse the corpses of people who had died of typhus. After hearing extensive evidence from historians and experts, the judge disagreed and ruled that Irving's questioning of the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz constituted Holocaust denial.

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