On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) is highlighting the important work of the Holocaust Denial on Trial project. The Holocaust Denial on Trial project website (H-DOT) was created by Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt in collaboration with Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. The creation of H-DOT centered on preserving the trial materials related to the case of David Irving v. Penguin Books UK and Deborah Lipstadt, a landmark case where the antisemitic claim that the Holocaust did not happen was directly tried in a British court in 2000.
With transparency and openness at the heart of the project, the H-DOT website preserves access to the trial materials, evidence, and judgements of this important case. One of the individuals in Professor Lipstadt’s 1993 work Denying the Holocaust, David Irving, brought a libel case against both Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books UK, arguing that he had been unfairly accused of being a Holocaust denier. Judge Charles Gray, who presided over the trial, ruled against Irving’s libel claim, arguing that Irving had “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” The judgment was presented as a win not only for those who seek to preserve the historical truth of the Holocaust in WWII, but also for the profession of history; as reported in The Times of London: “History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.”
Emory Center for Digital Scholarship was integral in helping to build the H-DOT website, as detailed in this ECDS blog post from 2016. Emory graduate students, under the leadership of Karen McCarthy, processed all of the transcripts from the trial to create a digitized table of contents and internal navigation system pertaining to each day of the trial, enabling ease of access for website visitors. ECDS’s collaboration helped to create a searchable database for the trial’s materials, ranging from witness statements to trial transcripts to the judge’s ruling and the subsequent unsuccessful appeal by Irving.
The theme of this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day is “Bridging Generations,” which is framed as a “call-to-action” encouraging “us all to engage actively with the past—to listen, to learn, and to carry those lessons forward.” In the spirit of that call to action, we urge you to spend a small part of your day exploring the H-DOT database, reading about the case, and learning about why Holocaust denial is a dangerous falsification of the historical record.