April
29, 2000 (Saturday)
London (England)
Varsity [the Cambridge University
newspaper] asks me to comment on points made by
Prof Richard Evans in an interview:
HERE
are some limited responses, bearing in mind that I
proceed from here to an appeal. I formed a low impression
of Evans' abilities. He appeared clearly motivated by
malice from the outset, although he denied this; the
malice was evident to every person in the public gallery,
and many commented on it to me. I was astonished by his
ignorance of Third Reich personalities, terminology and
events; asked a relatively easy question, as the
transcripts show -- I have posted them in full at
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/transcripts.html
he usually refused to answer from his own knowledge,
but insisted on referring to his written report. He did
this so often that the Court realised that the report had
evidently been written for him by others, or by him so
long ago that he had forgotten meanwhile what he had
written. I.e., the knowledge was not properly imbibed. He
ducked and dodged every significant direct question,
reading out instead pages of the sludge of which his
dreary report consisted. Small wonder that his was the
only report on which even the Judge passed a negative
comment in his findings.
My advisers advised me to go less easy on this
professor of history, and to expose his total ignorance
of both the language and the history more ruthlessly:
e.g., not to inform him that Albert Speer was
Hitler's munitions minister, but to ask him if he knew
what Speer was; I thought at that time he probably knew
the answers, but when I tested him on a really easy name
-- "You are aware who Otto Abetz was, are you
not?" he came back with the answer that the lawyers had
no doubt rehearsed for such emergencies: namely, "You
will have to remind me." (Abetz was Hitler's ambassador
to Paris throughout the war occupation years; yet Evans
did not even know that). I then regretted that I had not
shown up his ignorance earlier.
To my astonishment, from the first moment he showed
the utmost discourtesy to me (and the Court) by standing,
a little dumpy scowling Welshman, with both hands thrust
deep into his trouser pockets fumbling with something --
I imagine counting his cash -- throughout the days he was
in the witness stand, and on occasion turning his back to
both me as cross-examiner and the judge as he spoke to
us. I attach some of my diary entries: (you can read most
of them all on the website, go e.g. to
http://www.fpp.co.uk/trial
and scroll down to near the bottom):
Evans was paid £70,181 for his report. You will
find all the payments listed on
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/experts/payments.html
I hear he also intends to publish his magnum opus in a
Penguin edition (which I have instructed my solicitors to
enjoin, among other reasons being that its libels will no
longer covered by court privilege). I will not embarrass
him by stating how many hours he actually billed for
(certainly not the "two years" you write of; and most of
the legwork was done by teams of researchers, who were
also funded by Spielberg et al.) By way of
comparison: I worked for eight years writing my biography
GOEBBELS.
MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH, for which I
obtained the Goebbels diaries from the Moscow archives,
and transcribed them first (and made them immediately
available to all other historians). For those eight
years' work the US publisher St
Martins Press contracted to pay $25,000; but then
they came under blackmail threats and pressure, violence,
etc., from the "free speech lovers" Deborah
Lipstadt and her cohorts the ADL,
and in April 1996 they and Doubleday (who had nominated
it Book of the Month for May 1996) withdrew from
publication. So I got nothing.
I disapprove of witnesses being paid, particularly
such obscenely large amounts, and particularly if they
are already drawing a full salary as an academic: or did
Evans take an unpaid sabbatical from Cambridge while
working those "two years" on this case?
He must have found it hard to keep a straight face
when he signed the notice at the end of his witness-report
confirming that he had remained neutral as between the
parties in the action, despite the fact that one party
(the defendants) had paid him over £70,000;
remaining neutral must have been a truly Herculean
struggle.
One wonders too what all the academics whose
reputations he so carelessly trashed under cross
examination for manifesting negligence and ignorance
(e.g. Trevor Roper, Gordon Craig, John
Charmley, etc etc) think about him now; indeed, one
wonders what Dr John Casey, who invited me some
time back to speak at Caius, thinks of him. I wonder if,
two years from now, Evans will think it was worth the
£70,000.
[Question:
He says he now has a very low opinion of your
historical work and your motives for producing it. What
do you think of his?]
Answer: I don't want to get into a
prick-comparison contest, particularly when one of us is
such a bigger prick than the other. The truth is, as I
stated in the transcripts, when Lipstadt nominated him as
one expert, I had never heard of him; I put out an appeal
on the Internet for anybody who could identify him, and
none of the historians I commune with had heard of him
either. 
Then
I found his book sitting on my desk, unopened, where it
had been stacked for six months after somebody sent me a
free copy. I confess too that I tried to read it, but
rather like Mein Kampf I gave up after less than a
dozen pages; scarcely a page-turner of a book,
anyway.
[Question:
I see that your website says you have only needed to
correct one mistake as a result of the case. But will
people take you seriously in future?]
Answer: Time will tell. I have inserted the
July 2, 1941 Heydrich document, found in the
Moscow archives, as having relevance; I have ignored the
Müller document of August 1, 1941, as its
content shows quite clearly it had everything to do with
the non-homicidal work of the Einsatzgruppen, and nothing
to do with the liquidations. I have corrected the date of
the Horthy conference
from April 16 to 17, 1943 (to which Evans et al attached
such importance that the word "Big" as used by Barclays'
hardly seems big enough).
[Question:
Evans says that he was fighting on the side of free
speech: that in his experience, 'real' historians do not
sue each other even over clearly libellous claims, and
that if somebody had been suing you, rather than the
other way around, he would have been much more reluctant
to appear against you. What do you make of
this?]
Answer:
Evans has clearly followed none of the conspiracy origins
of the attempt by Lipstadt et al to destroy my publishing
base. She was the only one of the gang I could get at, as
she was peddling her lies within the jurisdiction while
the others are careful to remain outside. I don't
remember Evans protesting when I was being deported from
Canada (November
13, 1992) in manacles on the basis of fake documents
planted in Canadian government files by Lipstadt's
friends. See photo at:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/pictures/IrvinginCuffs.GIF
or is that kind of thing okay, because Evans
disapproved of the views I was lecturing on anyway . .
.which rather answers the point, does it not?
I would be happy to return to Cambridge to debate
Evans or any other so called historian; but with no crib
sheets allowed -- answers coming straight off our
respective expertises. Incidentally I spoke to a full
house of the Fabian Society in 1977: chairman was
Robert Harris, and we have remained good friends
since then. I am a great admirer of him, and his politics
do not bother me one jot. 
Richard
Evans' response to some of his critics
Richard Evans was one of the expert witnesses chosen by
Prof Deborah Lipstadt for her defence of David
Irving's libel action
write to David Irving