In one ugly passage, Guttenplan writes, "It was hard not to feel queasy listening to Rampton quiz Irving about his attitude to 'intermarriage between the races' -- on behalf of a defendant who has written, 'We know what we fight against: anti-Semitism and assimilation, intermarriage and Israel-bashing'." He goes on to note that Lipstadt "uttered not one word of public protest when her American publisher issued Charles Murray's neo-eugenicist tract 'The Bell Curve'." I've never heard anyone of any race or religion make an argument against intermarriage that didn't strike me as narrow-minded. But does Guttenplan (who's Jewish) think that Lipstadt's allegiance to Jewish identity is the equivalent of Irving's pathetic excuses for Hitler's allegiance to Aryan identity? Or that failing to speak out against Charles Murray's fantasies of black inferiority really constitutes approval?

As a piece of reportage, "The Holocaust on Trial" is concise and compelling, exactly what's needed to make sense of an involved and highly technical trial. As a piece of thinking, it's a disaster -- contradictory and shallow and sometimes lacking in basic common sense. Guttenplan is muddled on nearly every "larger" issue he tackles, and his criticisms sound troublingly similar to some of the woollier thinking to come out of the trial.

At one point Guttenplan dismisses Penguin barrister Richard Rampton's view of British racism as being "devoid of any sense of history." But it's Guttenplan whose sense of history is as shaky as his inability to make distinctions. He claims that "in 1950s America, few besides Communists shouted 'Remember the six million!'" But two pages later he says that one of the things that changed American attitudes toward the Holocaust was Anne Frank's diary -- published in 1952. Did "few besides Communists" read the book, go to the Broadway show, see the movie?

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	Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial By Richard J. Evans Basic Books 318 pages Nonfiction Buy this book
	The Holocaust on Trial By D.D. Guttenplan W.W. Norton 328 pages Nonfiction Buy this book

Guttenplan describes Irving's longing for "Old England" as not "particularly unusual for a man of his age and background" and insists that it was therefore disingenuous of the defense to use it as "a sign of his monstrous character." Even if you accept that some (especially upper-class) Britons thought that a Fascist Europe might be a good thing, how many English of Irving's generation -- especially those whose fathers and brothers and uncles may have fought in World War II -- share Irving's adulation of Hitler? How many of the English soldiers who liberated Belsen are ready to agree with him that the mass extermination there was a hoax, or would adopt Irving's description of camp survivors as "The Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars" or "A.S.S.H.O.L.E.S."?

Even if Guttenplan is, on some level, unwilling to acknowledge the danger Irving represents, the book he has written unwittingly does the job for him. Richard Evans opens "Lying About Hitler" by writing, "This book is about how we can tell the difference between truth and lies in history," implying, obviously, that such a thing is possible. Guttenplan isn't so sure. After outlining the absurdity of the trial -- "Lipstadt's burden lay in having to prove things most of us take for granted: Adolf Hitler's murderous intentions, the horrifying efficiency of the death camps, the fatal consequences for the Jews" -- Guttenplan writes, "But the very act of taking so much for granted conceals precisely those questions which Irving's strategy was designed to provoke: How do we know these things really happened? What is the evidence? Who are the witnesses? How do we know they are telling the truth?"

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"