The blurb issued by UK publisher Verso for the UK edition of the book by Prof Richard Evans

TELLING LIES ABOUT HITLER

RICHARD EVANS

In April 2000 a High Court judge branded the writer David Irving a racist, an antisemite, a Holocaust denier, and a falsifier of history. Irving's attempt to silence his critics by means of a libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was decisively rejected in a judgement later confirmed by the Court of Appeal. Faced with mountainous costs to pay, Irving was declared bankrupt on 5 March 2002. None of this has stopped him continuing to try to prevent the publication of books that expose him as a manipulator of historical documents and a Holocaust denier.

The key expert witness against Irving was the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, a specialist on modern German history and author of In Defence of History. Although Evans's report was upheld in all its major points by the High Court, Irving's threats of legal action have intimidated a series of publishers.

Now Verso brings you the book in full. Evans describes how he came to be involved in the case, and reflects on the interaction of historical and legal rules of evidence. He recounts his discovery of how Irving falsified the documentary evidence on the Second World War, and demonstrates his con-nections with far-right HoIocaust deniers in the United States.

Evans argues that the trial does for the twenty-first century what the Eichmann trial did for the second half of the twenti-eth. It vindicated history's ability to come to reasoned conclusions on the basis of a careful examination of the evidence, even when eyewitnesses and survivors are no longer around to tell the tale.

Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His many books include Death in Hamburg, In Hitler's Shadow, Rituals of Retribution and In Defence of History. He was the principal expert witness in the High Court libel action brought by David Irving against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt in 2000. He is currentlywnting a history of the Third Reich.

 

September 2002

History/Holocaust Studies

400 pages

6 x 9 inches

Translation rights: wylie

Paperback 1 85984 407 0 £14 UK, Commonwealth, non-exclusive Europe only