One of the most sensitive libel trials to be heard in Britain got under way at the High Court in London yesterday when the rightwing historian, Mr David Irving, began his long-awaited courtroom battle against a US academic, Prof Deborah Lipstadt, and Penguin Books, who have accused him of being a "falsifier of history" over his published views on the Holocaust.
Over the next three months of the trial, questions will be raised about historical facts of the second World War and the limits of free speech. Ultimately, the trial will decide Mr Irving's reputation as a historian.
Mr Irving (62), whose books include Hitler's War and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, has been condemned across the world for questioning in print and in public whether the Nazis killed six million Jews during the second World War and the extent of Hitler's knowledge of such killing.
He is suing Prof Lipstadt and Penguin over her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she accused him of being a "Holocaust denier" who manipulated history to cast Hitler in a positive light and questioned the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Mr Irving is seeking as yet undisclosed damages and an injunction against Prof Lipstadt's book.
Rising to his feet at 12.15 p.m. to begin reading his opening argument, Mr Irving said the action had arisen from his publication Hitler's War, but he insisted he had never held himself out to be a Holocaust expert and had not written books about the Holocaust.
If he was an expert on anything, he told the court, it was on the role that Hitler played in the propagation of the second World War, the decisions Hitler made and the knowledge on which he based those decisions.
But such were the "waves of hatred" generated against him by Prof Lipstadt and Penguin Books that publisher after publisher had turned away from him. His income from writing had vanished, he said, "as assuredly as if I had been employed by one of those companies taken over by the late Mr Robert Maxwell".
Mr Irving said that the phrase "Holocaust denier" had become "one of the most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult".
"The word `denier' is particularly evil: because no person in full command of his mental faculties, and with even the slightest understanding of what happened in World War Two, can deny that the tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae."
He continued: "Yet, meaningless though it is, the phrase has become a part of the English language. It is a poison to which there is virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same: for the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife-beater or a paedophile.
Two hours later, when Mr Irving had finished reading his opening remarks, Mr Richard Rampton QC, for Prof Lipstadt and Penguin Books, opened his case with a strong attack on the historian's reputation.
Mr Irving was not a historian at all, he said. "To put it bluntly, he is a liar. Lies may take various forms and may as often consist of suppression or omission as of direct falsehood or invention, but in the end all forms of lying converge into a single definition: wilful, deliberate misstatement of the facts."
Counsel continued: "Mr Irving has used many different means to falsify history: invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion, manipulation and not least mistranslation.
"But all these techniques have the same ultimate effect: falsification of the truth."
Mr Irving's views on the Holocaust had undergone a "sea-change" between the publication of the first edition of Hitler's War in 1977 and the second edition in 1991. In the first edition he accepted the historical truth of the Holocaust but by 1991 all trace of it had disappeared from the book. Mr Irving, he said, had become convinced by a researcher's bogus report on Auschwitz that it was nothing more than a slave-labour camp.