The Lies and Distortions

 

1. Mr Irving brought the action in England because he is English and Lipstadt sought to profit from peddling her lies in the U.K. Libel actions are notoriously difficult to bring in the U.K., since the litigants can not claim legal Aid.
2. Evans has only recently come into this field. Evans's expertise was in Nineteenth Century German social history. His knowledge of vernacular German is pitiable. Mr Irving has studied the Third Reich and its archives since 1960.
3. Court records show that Evans was paid nearly $250,000 by one side alone, in addition to drawing his regular pay as an academic; he has also benefitted indirectly from the Jewish community, being appointed to lucrative positions on Holocaust reparations bodies since the trial.
4. Evans and his team spent twenty man-years going through Mr Irving's entire published works in every edition, looking for possible weak points; they located eighteen "flaws" of varying degrees of triviality e.g. transcribing Himmler's handwritten (Gothic script) word Haben as Juden from a poorly Xeroxed print off a microfilm. Of these eighteen, Judge Grey refused to accept half a dozen in his Judgment as being proved. (Evans writes however: "...In every case"). We shall stablish in the appeal that of the remaining twelve, Mr Irving's version is correct or that the flaw was inconsequential.
5. It is true that Himmler 's lunch appointment with Hitler on Nov 30, 1941 was noted for just after his phone conversation with Heydrich. (We now know this, since Himmler's agenda was found in Moscow last year: but that was eight years after my most recent printed edition of Hitler's War!) Himmler repeatedly saw Hitler on occasions before that, and the phone call was conducted from Hitler's bunker, and to suggest as Evans does that Hitler had no role in it is ludicrous and perverse.
6. "Dozens"?! See paragraph 4 above, to see who is lying now.
7. This is another lie: as audiences around the world, and those who have read my books, know I have described in horrific detail the systematic extermination of the Jews by shooting on the eastern front. Even Evans was not able to prove any order for them from Hitler (except his attempts to halt it).
8. Judge Gray found that Lipstadt had libelled Mr Irving on three specific issues, as Lord Justice Sedley also agrees.