R.
J. Evans, Telling Lies about
Hitler: The Holocaust, History
and the David Irving Trial,
(Verso, 2002)
David
Renton
RICHARD Evans was an expert witness
for the defence in the libel action
brought by David Irving against
Deborah Lipstadt. In her book,
Denying the Holocaust (Penguin,
1994), Lipstadt had named Irving as a
Holocaust denier. Irving sued, and took
the action to the High Court.
In April 2000, the judge ruled
against the action, branding Irving a
Holocaust denier and a falsifier of
history. Richard Evans' book,
Telling Lies about Hitler, is
made up of two sections. The middle is
a condensed version of Evans' 740-page
witness report.
David Irving comments: SMALL wonder that Evans
earns an uncritical review
from his fellow Socialist
historians. Far from being the
politically neutral expert
that the courts require, he
admitted under
cross-examination (Day
18): "I am a member of the
Labour party and, broadly
speaking, I take the Labour
Party's point of view on
current affairs
. . . I would not
describe myself as an
expert." FOR the ludicrous debate in
Court on the misreading of
Heinrich Himmler's handwritten
note of Dec 1, 1941, read
and enjoy the Trial Transcript
of Days 1,
3,
22,
and 23.
In the 1960s
I was the first historian to
take the trouble to decipher
Himmler's handwritten notes,
and inevitably I made
misreadings: the copy before
me was faint, and in Gothic
handwriting. It was very easy
to misread the phrase haben
zu bleiben as Juden zu
bleiben, and in the 1960s
I did. [See the note's
right-hand column, third line
up]
The error
was inconsequential; as I
pointed out to the Court, if
the whole sentence was removed
from the 1977 edition of
Hitler's
War it did not affect the
paragraph 's meaning one whit.
I gave copies of all the
facsimiles and my typed
transcripts to the Institut
für Zeitgeschichte in the
1960s, even before the book
was published -- hardly the
work of a deliberate
falisifier. In later editions
the misreading was corrected.
 |
If this is the substance, then it must
be placed in context, and the beginning
and final chapters serve that role. The
last chapters include an account of how
Irving responded to the evidence in
court. At first Irving denying
everything, then he sought to
filibuster, seizing on the most
inconsequential points, while
neglecting the main ones.Ultimately, Irving was forced to
accept the claim (which mattered most
to Evans) that he had consistently
lied, falsifying documents, in order to
try and shield Adolf Hitler from
responsibility for the Holocaust.
The examples of deceit which Evans
gives include mistranslating the
sentence "SS leaders must stay" to "the
Jews must stay" (in a document
[see panel
on right] which did not
mention the killings), or claiming that
a "stop"
order (placed on one train-load of
Jews being sent from Berlin to Riga)
proved that Hitler opposed all killings
from the start.
Evans demonstrates that such
deliberate
mistakes are legion in Irving's
work, serving always to legitimise the
regime.
Some of the most angry pages of this
book are those in which Evans
criticises those journalists who were
arrogant enough to interview Irving,
and to think that they could knock him
down -- without doing even the most
basic research -- and therefore allowed
this fraud to outwit them. 
Similar criticisms are also applied
to a number of
right-wing
historians, operating on the cusp of
journalism and the historical
profession, who made the same mistake,
Conor Cruise O'Brien, Stuart
Nicholson, John Erickson, Donald
Cameron Watt, John Keegan.
All of them wrote as if Irving was
"one of us" and Lipstadt was not.
Throughout this book, Richard Evans
adopts the patient, deliberate tone of
a man with an overwhelming case who
asks only for the time to be heard. It
becomes clear from his account that the
defeat of David Irving in court was
also a victory.
It was a triumph for the accurate
memory of the Holocaust, against people
who wanted to use the action to throw
doubt on one of the most important
events in twentieth-century history. It
was also a success for the standards of
professionalism, accuracy and rigour in
the historical field. This impressive
book deserves the widest possible
readership.
write to David
Irving