English libel law puts the burden of proof on the defence, meaning that it was up to Lipstadt and her publisher to prove that her claims of Irving's deliberate misrepresentation of evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoints were substantially true.

Upon mutual agreement,[6] the case was argued as a bench trial before Mr. Justice Gray, who produced a written judgment 349 pages long in favour of the defendants, in which he detailed Irving's systematic distortion of the historical record of the Holocaust and Hitler's role therein.

In 1993, Free Press published Professor Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

A man who is convinced that Britain's great decline was accelerated by its decision to go to war with Germany, he is most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to confirm his conclusions.

He demands "absolute documentary proof" when it comes to proving the Germans guilty, but he relies on highly circumstantial evidence to condemn the Allies.

[7][12] Irving also sued Holocaust historian Gitta Sereny for libel for an article she had written about him entitled "Spin Time for Hitler" in The Observer newspaper on 21 April 1996, although the case did not go to court.

As explained by the trial judge, Mr Justice Gray, 4.7 ... the burden of proving the defence of justification rests upon the publishers.

As it is sometimes expressed, what must be proved is the truth of the sting of the defamatory charges made.Irving's decision to file his lawsuit in the English courts gave him the upper hand by shifting the burden of proof.

[28] The lawyers for Lipstadt (Mishcon de Reya) and Penguin (Davenport Lyons) worked closely, for the most part agreeing on the way to deal with the claim.

One minor setback came when Penguin and their lawyers Davenport Lyons were keen that the information provided by the experts they had instructed be incorporated in an amended defence (which Heather Rogers drafted).

Initially Mishcon were unpersuaded but Davenport Lyons were insistent, feeling that the amended document provided a clear statement of the strong evidence against Irving.

The decision was eventually left to Richard Rampton and Heather Rogers as they would be presenting the case and both were in favour of amending; Mishcon relented.

During cross-examination, Irving was unable to undermine either Evans, who had been highly critical of his scholarship, or van Pelt, whose report concentrated on the evidence that contradicted the Holocaust deniers' arguments about Auschwitz Birkenau.

[31][32] Irving later claimed without evidence that Penguin wanted to settle the case (not specifying whether this applied to one of his two "offers" or both of them) and were somehow pressured by Dr. Lipstadt not to; D. D. Guttenplan's book outlined how Penguin dismissed Irving for several reasons, including contempt for him and dismay over the certainty that the publisher would have been called by Lipstadt's lawyers as plaintiff advocates if they had settled the lawsuit.

His conclusions were that Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject.

Every time there is a euphemism, Mr. Irving... or a camouflage piece of statement or language about Madagascar, you want to treat it as the literal truth, because it serves your purpose of trying to exculpate Hitler.

"[40] Longerich testified to the meaning of the often euphemistic language used by German officials during the war regarding the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", and argued that from 1941 onwards, the term "resettlement in the East" was a metaphor for deportation to the death camps.

[41] During his exchanges with Irving, Longerich insisted quite firmly that the term "resettlement" was only a euphemism for extermination and nothing more, and used the Posen speech given by Himmler in October 1943 as a proof of the genocidal policy of the German state.

[44] Browning testified that several leading experts on Nazi Germany believe that there was no written Führer order for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", but no historian doubts the reality of the Holocaust.

[46] Browning testified that the Madagascar Plan of 1940–41 was "fantastic" and "bizarre", but countered Irving's suggestion that this proves the alleged impossibility of the Holocaust by stating: "...I do think they took it seriously.

[48] Likewise, Browning argued that it is possible to become soaked in human blood after shooting people at close range based on his research for his 1992 book Ordinary Men and dismissed Irving's argument that accounts of German personnel being soaked in blood were improbable because it is not possible to have a blood-soaked uniform after shooting people at close range.

Rampton and van Pelt had bonded on a trip to Auschwitz with Rogers and Bateman and they had spent hours talking through Irving's claims.

Van Pelt took the three lawyers and Deborah Lipstadt around Birkenau showing them how Irving's claims were false and the mistake he had made about the physical layout.

[53] In response, Peter Longerich argued that Mayer did not deny the Holocaust in his book, and that he was simply wrong about more Jews dying of "natural" as opposed to "unnatural" causes of death at Auschwitz.

"[66] Ultimately, the judge ruled that the defence succeeded in proving everything they claimed in trial but for two assertions: that Irving had broken an agreement with the Moscow archives and mishandled the glass plates containing Goebbels' diaries, and that he hung a portrait of Hitler above his desk.

"[67] The judge decided this in accordance with section 5 of the Defamation Act 1952, which states that a justification defence can succeed despite the failure to prove minor assertions.

[67] The judge summarised his findings as follows: Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism...[4][68] therefore the defence of justification succeeds...[5] It follows that there must be judgment for the Defendants.

[2][70] In light of the evidence presented at the trial, a number of Irving's works that had previously escaped serious scrutiny were brought to public attention.

[75] Others noted that Justice Gray "indicated that he did not 'regard it as being a part' of his function 'as the trial judge to make findings of fact as to what did and what did not occur during the Nazi regime in Germany', but he then spent hundreds of pages arguing about his position on such issues," claiming that it was the overly-strict libel laws that forced a judge to determine historical fact.

[81] In April 2015, it was reported that Hilary Swank and Tom Wilkinson had signed on to portray Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving in a feature film about the 2000 trial.