Cambridge University, May 2000
Evans on
Irving
'It was a Freudian slip. He was in his final speech,
and he just ploughed on as if nothing had happened, but
the court collapsed in total hysteria, because it was so
revealing. It was worth sitting through five hours of his
interminable closing speech just for that. Even the judge
allowed a smile to pass his lips.' Richard Evans
recounts one of the lighter moments of 'Holocaust denier'
David Irving's failed libel trial against
historian Deborah Lipstadt, when Irving
accidentally addressed the judge as 'Mein Fuhrer'. Irving
began the court action
against Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin, after she
wrote that in his work on the archives of Nazi Germany,
he deliberately falsified history.
Evans, Professor of Modern European History and a
fellow of Caius, says the case eventually proved much
more. He has spent the last two and quarter years delving
into archives across Europe, assembling a 740 page report
for the defence to show that Irving is the liar, racist
and falsifier of history Lipstadt had suggested he was.
It culminated in a high-profile week giving evidence at
the High Court in London, when he suggested Irving's work
was so outrageously manipulative that the man could not
properly be called a historian. And as everyone now
knows, the judge, who heard the case alone after both
sides agreed the issues were too complex for a jury to
understand, found damningly against Irving.
'I
know of no historian who has ever sued another historian
for what they've said about him or her. Historians can be
extremely fierce about each other and say all sorts of
terrible things, but nobody sues!', says Evans. 'It's
only because he's a political figure and does not believe
in free speech that he took it to court. . . What Irving
was trying to do was suppress criticism of his own work.
His lawsuit against Lipstadt was undertaken in order to
get her book withdrawn, pulped. He has another
lawsuit going against Gita Sereny and The
Observer, he has threatened
to sue anyone who publishes John Lucaks' book
Hitler and History in this country. Had he won. . . a
great deal of debate about the holocaust would have been
suppressed.'
Irving, naturally, disagrees. His claim is that he is
battling a Jewish 'conspiracy' to prevent him publishing
the truth about the Holocaust. He says the judge
misunderstood the case, and that the defence team was
dishonest, effectively buying
expert testimony for 'obscene' sums of money (Evans
received about £70,000 for his work). On Evans
personally he is vitriolic; a 'little dumpy scowling
Welshman', 'clearly motivated by malice from the outset'
who in court 'ducked and dodged every significant direct
question, reading out instead pages of the sludge of
which his dreary report consisted'. He intends to appeal
against the verdict. But Evans believes Irving, now
facing bankruptcy, is finished. 'I think that the
judgement has discredited him completely as a historian,
and I think that the trial has discredited him amongst
the holocaust deniers and the far right as well, because
when he was under cross-examination he was forced to make
one concession after another when presented with an
overwhelming mass of evidence. . . he's really lost
credibility on all sides'.
It's not quite that simple yet. During and after the
trial, several pieces appeared in the press which
appeared to defend Irving. Evans says that they seriously
missed the point that the case was not so much about
Irving's views as the methods he used to support them.
'The press covered the case very poorly. It is a kind of
spectator sport for the British media. . . they couldn't
really grapple with the detailed instances of the
falsification, which involved reading German handwriting,
translating documents and so on.' He describes a piece
which the military historian John Keegan wrote
in the Telegraph after the verdict as 'scandalous'.
In it Keegan claims Irving has 'much that it interesting
to tell us' and appears to contrast him favourably to
Lipstadt. Evans says even Keegan failed to appreciate
Irving's duplicity: normally 'you assume that a fellow
historian is on the level, that even if you disagree
violently they're not actually giving a deliberately
falsified account of the documents.' This approach, 'very
close [to] tampering with the source material',
combined with restrictive British libel laws, 'a serious
threat to free speech', to make the task of the defence
an extremely difficult one. At present in law 'the cards
are stacked very highly in favour of the plaintiff; the
entire burden of proof rests on the defence'. In common
with the Hamilton and Aitken libel actions
of recent years, he says this case should really never
have been brought. Another problem which Evans' side had
to deal with, less reported in the press, was the claim,
held by a small but vociferous fraction of academics in
the historical community, that notions of historical
truth cannot exist at all. We only discover the past
through second-hand documents; isn't our reading of them
inevitably determined by our political convictions?
Evans
has written in the past against such beliefs - his In
Defence of History is staple
undergraduate reading - did this case not
challenge his views at all? 'There was the inevitable
letter in the Guardian from a postmodernist who said this
is all nonsense because we invent history, or words to
that effect. But I think the trial did vindicate the
possibility of obtaining accurate historical knowledge
approaching the truth about the past, about past events,
and did make it very clear where the line can be
drawn.'
Evans enjoyed his research into Irving's work. He says
that there should be more argument about the Holocaust.
'There's enormous room for debate. It was clear for
example that two of the defence witnesses [in the
Irving trial], Longerich
and Browning,
did actually disagree on some matters of interpretation
on the decision making process which led to the
extermination of the Jews, both in terms of dating and
the mechanics of the reasons for it'. He thinks that the
opening of new archives in Eastern Europe since the
collapse of the USSR will add to that. But he doesn't
accept that the event's fundamental significance has been
overplayed, at least in the UK. In fact, 'I still think
that WWII is seen essentially in terms of British
participation on the Western front; what's very striking
is the small role that the Holocaust has played in
British public memory'. He feels it demands more: 'It has
a universal significance. Because of the way in which
these camps were set up purely in order to put into
action the factory like, machine like processing of human
beings, the killing of human beings. There is no real
parallel to that; it is an extraordinary event which
challenges the historian's imagination.'
It's only because
he's a political figure and does not believe in
free speech that he took it to
court.
-- Prof Evans about David Irving
Richard Evans was one of the expert witnesses hired by
Prof Deborah Lipstadt for her defence of David
Irving's libel action
write to David Irving