"Police Sergeant Hofmann"
Professor Richard Evans, chief defence expert in the Lipstadt trial, expressed irritation in his expert report and testimony that Mr. Irving gave no page numbers to enable him to cross-check and verify references. There were probably two reasons for this omission:
In 1998, two years before the Lipstadt trial began, a printed and fully indexed edition of the trial transcript was published by German academics, and in 2000 Professor Richard Evans -- or his hired helps -- were able to make use of this handy work, which was of course not available to Mr Irving in 1985, who had to read the microfilm for six days on a viewer.
Evans in his report adopted the far-fetched argument that the reason for Hitler's reprimand was that the officer's unit had removed their Party insignia; and he further alleged that Mr Irving knew, and suppressed, the fact that Hofmann was a Nazi and hence intrinsically unreliable as a witness. (Evans based his conclusion on Hofmann's political loyalties entirely on a stray remark by the 1924 trial judge, who complimented the witness on having spoken up for Hitler: ''Es ist ein schönes Zeichen von Ihnen, wenn Sie zu Gunsten Ihres Führers aussagen.") Evans also attached no importance to Hofmann's further remark (see again the transcript extracts): Hitler hat diese Gewalttätigkeiten und diese einzelnen Ausschreitungen, die vorgekommen sind, ständig verurteilt. ("Hitler consistently condemned these acts of violence and individual excesses that occurred.") This episode became one of Evans's grounds for alleging that Mr Irving was biased and selective in his choice of evidence. The contrary facts, e.g., that Hofmann was a minor police official testifying in court under oath, with nothing obvious to gain by speaking up for Hitler, did not count in the view of either Evans or Mr Justice Gray. At the time of the Lipstadt trial, Mr Irving had no access to his 1985 "Göring" working files. He had donated all his materials to the Irving Collection at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, in Munich, a collection he has been unable to access since the city's Social Democrat authorities banned him from Germany in 1993. (Ironically, Evans and his hired helps were however at liberty to browse in them.) The ancient Xerox 850 word processor on which Mr Irving typed up his original working notes in 1985 went out of business soon after. Preparing for the Lipstadt trial, in November 1999 he sent the original Xerox computer discs to Downloading Ltd in London to have them professionally converted, at great expense, to modern computer format. It was not until early 2001 that these experts were able to salvage and retrieve the discs' contents. These showed that Mr Irving had found no evidence in the transcript that Hofmann was a Nazi, so he could not have "ignored" such evidence either. In 2001 the Court of Appeal refused however to allow the introduction of this evidence or even to give permission to appeal. From Mr Irving's letter to his counsel, sending him the material for the appeal, it is evident that in 1985 he transcribed 17,436 + 17,169 words in German from the trial transcript. In the final Göring biography the events of that night came to just two pages, of which the "police sergeant" episode is less than three lines. The lack of proportion in the weight that Evans attached
to the Police Sergeant Hofmann matter, even if he was
correct, is characteristic of his approach.
|
 to
his fighting fund. |
WRITING
his Hermann Göring 
A MINOR witness whom the defence lawyers produced was a
Bavarian Policeman (Oberwachtmeister) called
Hofmann, who gave an eyewitness account of events
that November 1923 night. Under oath, Hofmann, a few months
later, 