Essay Questions

Why does Deborah's team what to prevent her from testifying? Why does she think they want to prevent her from testifying?

Deborah feels at the start of the proceedings that her team are trying to silence her. There is pressure from the British Jewish community to settle the lawsuit out of court and avoid all the attention that it is getting, and Deborah feels that her team are in some way representing the community more than they are representing her. She feels like an outsider in her own lawsuit, which is a discomforting feeling for her.

The team actually want her to refrain from taking the stand because they want the trial to be about Irving and not about her. He is known to be an exceptionally manipulative man and will doubtless try to use Deborah's time on the stand to further his own Nazi agenda. By making sure that he is the only one questioned, they are able to show that his claims are false, and that he knows this, but is trying to discredit Holocaust survivors and scholars because he is a supporter of the Nazi regime and therefore wants to defend it.

What is a Holocaust denier and what is the historical background for such deniers?

A Holocaust denier is someone who insists that the Holocaust never happened. They cannot entirely argue against the existence of the camps where millions of Jews, and others, died, but they insist that they were work camps, or prison camps, rather than extermination camps. One of Irving's most insistent claims is that the gas chambers did not exist because the buildings at the camps where this extermination took place had no holes in the roof, through which gas could be introduced. The deniers usually share the same political beliefs as Adolf Hitler and the Germans who were governed by him, and want to discredit survivors and relatives of those who were exterminated by going to great lengths to find ways to disprove their narratives and histories.