Expert Report: Professor Richard Evans — Introduction

1. Introduction

1.1 Purpose of this Report

1.1.1 This Report is prepared pursuant to the Order of Master Trench dated 15 December 1998 directing that each party may adduce expert evidence from historians and political scientists to address relevant issues in the proceedings. It has been written to assist the Court by providing an expert opinion on allegations made in Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, published in 1994 by Penguin Books, about Mr. David Irving.

1.1.2 The book makes a variety of claims about Irving and his work, to which Irving has objected in his libel writ; only those which fall within the scope of my expertise as a professional historian will be considered. These claims can be summarised under four headings. They are as follows (references are to the page of the book on which they occur):

1.1.3 Irving is ‘a discredited figure’ as a historian (p. 180)

The sources and methods used in this report to assess these claims will be outlined later in this Introduction.

1.2 Material instructions

1.2.1 This report has been prepared on the instructions of Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya, the solicitors respectively to the First and Second Defandants. I received both written and oral instructions to provide expert opinion on the historical writings and speeches of David Irving with reference to the allegations made about them by Deborah Lipstadt.

I have been given access to the Statement of Claim served on 5 September 1996; the Defences of the First and Second Defendants served on 12 February 1997 and 18 April 1997 respectively; the Reply to both Defences served on 19 April 1997; documents disclosed by the Plaintiff pursuant to his discovery obligatoons, and various documents from the Plaintiff’s various Lists of Documents as referred to in the footnotes to this report.

1.3 Author of the Report

1.3.1 I am a recognized authority on modern German history and have been teaching and researching it for the last thirty years.

Since I began researching for my Oxford D.Phil. dissertation in 1969, I have acquired an excellent knowledge of German: I wrote my book Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich: Die Stimmungsberichte der Hamburger Politischen Polizei 1892-1914 (Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989) in German myself, and I have lectured in German at numerous German universities and on various public venues.

As a result of my book on the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 (Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910 (Oxford University Press, 1987; German edition 1990) I was invited to deliver the principal address in German at the centenary commemoration in Hamburg City Hall in 1992.

I have made numerous radio and television broadcasts in German, for North German Radio and other stations as well as for the BBC World Service, and my work on Hamburg was the subject of a 45-minute television programme, featuring interviews with me in German, in 1989 (Mr. Evans geht durch Hamburg, NDR 3).

1.3.2 Because my research has necessitated lengthy periods of research in German archives and libraries, I have spent a great deal of time in Germany over the last thirty years, including eighteen months as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin in 1970-72, eighteen months as a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Free University of Berlin in 1981, 1985 and 1989, and various periods as a Research Scholar or Senior Scholar of the German Academic Exchange Service.

I have also twice been a resident member of the Institute for European History in Mainz. My work has taken me to virtually all major German towns and cities, including Bamberg, Bochum, Bremen, Coburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Erfurt, Essen, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Munich, Potsdam, Schwerin, Stuttgart, and so on. I am familiar with Germany and the Germans as well as with the German language.

1.3.3 My research has ranged widely over German history in the last three centuries. It has become well known for the thoroughness and comprehensiveness of its use of unpublished manuscript material. Much of it has concentrated on the nineteenth century. Some of my most important work, however, has also dealt with the Second World War.

In particular my book Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987 (Oxford University Press, 1996), based on unpublished manuscripts and typescripts in 26 archives, contains three Chapters (pp. 613-737) on the ‘Third Reich’, of which Chapter 16 (pp. 689-737) deals exclusively on the war years 1939-45, using particularly files of the Reich Ministry of Justice in the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz.

More recently, my current work on the history of German criminology has led me to use material in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich.

1.3.4 I am also familiar with the printed and published documentation of the ‘Third Reich’, which is extremely voluminous. I have used some of it in my published work, but I have also made use of it in my teaching: since 1972 I have been teaching a document-based Special Subject on the ‘Third Reich’, first at the University of East Anglia, then at Birkbeck College, University of London, and from the year 2000 in the History Faculty at Cambridge University.

1.3.5 I am internationally recognized as an authority on modern German history, including the history of Germany during the Second World War: six of my books have been published in German, and my work has also been translated into French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, and other languages.

I have given over two hundred lectures and conference or seminar papers at universities and other venues in many countries, including Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the USA.

1.3.6 I am also recognized as an authority on historiography, that is, on historical theory and method. In particular, my book In Defence of History, published by Granta Books in 1997, has attracted widespread praise. It has been described by Bernard Crick as ‘a rare intellectual achievement, speaking lucidly to both historians and to the general reader’, and according to Sir Keith Thomas (President of the British Academy) ‘deserves to be essential reading for coming generations’.

It was praised in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Financial Times and other newspapers as a strong defence of the idea of objectivity in history. It was published in a revised edition by W. W. Norton & Co., New York, in 1999, has been translated into German (Fakten und Fiktionen: Über die Grundlagen historischer Erkenntnis, Campus Verlag, 1998) and Korean, and is contracted to appear in translated editions in Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish.

1.3.7 My books have not only been widely translated, they are also widely read in comparison to most academic texts. Death in Hamburg in particular has sold an estimated 13,000 copies in the German edition and 8,000 in English. In Defence of History went through three editions in hardback before its publication in paperback and has sold over 10,000 copies. Rituals of Retribution has been published in a paperback edition by Penguin Books.

Three of my books in German have been produced by a commercial publishing house (Rowohlt Verlag) and published as trade paperbacks. I have always made a point of trying to appeal to a wide readership.

1.3.8 My work has won a number of prizes and awards in Britain, Germany and the USA, including the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History, the Hamburger Medaille für Kunst und Wissenschaft, the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Wolfson Literary Award for History. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1993.

1.3.9 My reputation as a recognized authority on Germany, German history and the theory and practice of history has led to frequent invitations to broadcast on the BBC, in particular Radio 3 and Radio 4, on programmes including Kaleidoscope, Front Row, Start the Week, In Our Time, Nightwaves, and Today.

1.4 Curriculum vitae

1.5 Methods used to draw up this Report

1.5.1 I have never met, spoken to, or corresponded with David Irving. I have not previously concerned myself with his work in any way. The only references to him in any of my books come on pages 38 and 76 of In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989), in the context, not of a detailed examination of Irving’s work itself, but of a discussion of the work of other historians, namely Ernst Nolte and Hans Mommsen.

Irving is mentioned on these two pages briefly, and in passing.

1.5.2 I had leafed through the 1977 edition of Hitler’s War and because of its style and content considered it a work of journalism rather than of professional history. Like the overwhelming majority of professional historians, I rejected its argument that Hitler did not order the extermination of the Jews.

However, I was also aware of the widespread assumption amongst professional historians that Irving’s work (like that of a number of other journalists who have written historical work) reached generally acceptable standards of historical scholarship. I also knew of Irving’s reputation as someone who had a good knowledge of the archival and other sources for the history of the ‘Third Reich’ and had discovered previously unknown material on this subject.

1.5.3 I had never met, corresponded or had any dealings with Deborah Lipstadt, but I had read Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust and quoted it on pages 239-41 of my book In Defence of History in the context of a discussion of the implications of postmodernist theories of knowledge for historical scholarship, especially on the history of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Lipstadt’s treatment of Irving in the book was a matter of completely marginal interest to me.

In general, my view of the book was that it was a solidly researched and strongly but rationally argued work of scholarship.

However, Denying the Holocaust does not deal in any detail with Irving’s historical arguments, so that on being asked to write this Report, I had no difficulty in approaching Lipstadt’s account of Irving’s writings in an open and critical spirit, the same spirit, in fact, as that in which I approach Irving’s work, the vast majority of which was completely unfamiliar to me.

1.5.4 The material on which this Report is based consists in the first place of Irving’s published books. These have gone through numerous editions, and many of them are available both in English and in German in different versions.

They are available in libraries in Britain and Germany, though some are rather hard to track down, and I was startled to find that the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War can only be read at the desk in the Rare Books Room of the British Library that is reserved for literature deemed by the Library to be pornographic.

Secondly, Irving has published a number of articles, mainly in The Journal of Historical Review, which are also available for public inspection in institutions such as the Wiener Library. Thirdly, Irving maintains a very extensive website on the Internet () on which the text of various speeches by Irving is posted, together with a large quantity of other material revealing of his views on the history of the ‘Third Reich’. 1

1.5.5 Fourthly, the legal process of Discovery has provided a large amount of further material of relevance to the issues at the centre of the case. As Irving remarked in 1991,

The first thing that happens in a libel action is this: only a few weeks after you’ve served a writ on a gentleman there comes a very expensive stage for both parties known as Discovery. The word ‘Discovery’ written with a capital ‘D’, just like the word ‘Holocaust’ written with a capital ‘H’. Only this time the word is on my side.

Because Discovery is an ugly phase, for plaintiff and defendant, when you face each other across a lawyer’s table, at the choosing of the Plaintiff, and you say, “I want to see your documents and you can see mine”. And at that stage usually all the defendants crack up and cop out.2

The first thing that happens in a libel action is this: only a few weeks after you’ve served a writ on a gentleman there comes a very expensive stage for both parties known as Discovery. The word ‘Discovery’ written with a capital ‘D’, just like the word ‘Holocaust’ written with a capital ‘H’. Only this time the word is on my side.

Because Discovery is an ugly phase, for plaintiff and defendant, when you face each other across a lawyer’s table, at the choosing of the Plaintiff, and you say, “I want to see your documents and you can see mine”. And at that stage usually all the defendants crack up and cop out.2

1.5.6 In the present case, however, no-one has wanted to ‘cop out’, and Irving has been obliged to disclose an enormous mass of material in addition to the list of documents he initially agreed to supply.

I have had access to many videotapes and audiocassettes of Irving’s speeches, tens of thousands of pages of documents, his complete private diaries, thousands of letters and a great deal of other material, much of it from the huge private archive in which he records his various activities and in which he stores the materials for his historical work

1.5.7 It soon became apparent that the amount of material available was too vast for me to master in the relatively short space of time I had to compile this Report, especially given my other commitments such as my regular academic work.

I was fortunate therefore to obtain the research assistance of two of my PhD students, Nikolaus Wachsmann, who is now Junior Research Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and Thomas Skelton-Robinson, who is now researching for a PhD at Churchill College, Cambridge.

Both had first-class honours degrees in History (from the London School of Economics and from Glasgow University respectively), both had a first-rate knowledge of German (Wachsmann is a native speaker, Skelton-Robinson lived in Germany for five years after graduating), and both had a good knowledge of twentieth-century German history.

1.5.8 The two researchers compiled transcripts of the salient parts of the audiocassettes and videotapes and went through the material supplied by Irving during the process of Discovery, taking extensive notes. It was of course impossible to cover the whole of Irving’s oeuvre with complete thoroughness, and some principle of selectivity had to be applied.

We decided that I would cover Irving’s general reputation as a historian, Irving’s attitude to Hitler, and the central issue of whether or not Irving was a Holocaust denier. On the equally important matter of whether or not Irving distorted and falsified history, we decided to concentrate on the ‘chain of documents’ which Irving on various occasions had claimed proved Hitler’s ignorance and disapproval of the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews.

Each document was assigned to one or other of the research assistants for preliminary analysis. In this way we covered the entire documentary basis for Irving’s controversial claim.

1.5.9 In addition, we decided to sample a number of other important issues on which Lipstadt’s allegations of manipulation and falsification could be tested. These were the bombing of Dresden by the Allies early in 1945, a subject on which Irving had written the book which established his reputation; Irving’s use of the evidence of Hitler’s adjutants; and the explanations offered by Irving for such antisemitic actions by the Nazis as he was prepared to concede were actually carried out.

Here again preliminary analysis was carried out by my research assistants. During the period January 1998 to April 1999, we met frequently, exchanged drafts, and carried out numerous revisions to what we had written. In addition, my research assistants undertook research in German archives and libraries. The compilation, structure and writing of this Report as a whole was undertaken by myself, and I alone bear the final responsibility for what it contains.

I am satisfied that the amount of material we have examined, and the number of issues in Irving’s writings which we have addressed, constitute a thoroughly representative sample of his work, and that any further investigation on our part would simply have replicated the conclusions we reached on the basis of the sample we looked at.

1.5.10 On all the issues concerned, this Report examines carefully and in detail Irving’s writings and speeches over the whole of his career, from the 1960s to the present. Its method has been to identify what Irving wrote or said, and to note whether he changed his views over time, and if so, how and in what respects. The Report is written from the point of view, and with the expertise, of a professional historian.

That is, it is not concerned with the issue of whether or not ‘Holocaust denial’ is morally wrong, or whether what Irving has written and said is politically or morally objectionable. Throughout, it bears in mind the pleaded issues in the case, but its method is not to subject them to any kind of forensic criteria or legal scrutiny, but rather to treat them as matters of historical and historiographical investigation.

1.5.11 Thus in examining each of the key ‘chain of documents’ which Irving claims prove Hitler neither knew or nor approved the antisemitic policies of the ‘Third Reich’, this Report is not concerned to demonstrate conclusively that Hitler did know or did approve of these policies: that is not the issue at hand. The issue is whether or not Irving distorts and manipulates the historical record in trying to prove that Hitler did not know and approve of these policies.

In dealing with this issue, the Report takes each document in turn, examines Irving’s translation of it (all the documents in question were originally written in German), scrutinises his interpretation of it, and brings as many other relevant documents to bear on this interpretation as it has been possible to research in the time available, in accordance with the standard method of historical research, in which every original document used has to be set in a wider documentary context in order

to elucidate its historical significance.

1.5.12 Many of these documents are well known to historians, some less so; many of them would appear at first sight to support the view that Hitler did know about antisemitic policies and actions in the ‘Third Reich’, and it has been necessary in the course of this Report to point this out.

Historians who are advancing a particular argument have to take all relevant documentary evidence into account, and where documents appear to go against their argument, they have to explain them; failing to mention them at all constitutes suppression of relevant evidence and is not acceptable in a reputable historian.

Citing these documents, as is done extensively in this Report, should not be seen as an attempt to prove conclusively that Hitler knew about the extermination of the Jews and other antisemitic actions during the ‘Third Reich’, only as evidence which has to be taken into account by anyone who, such as Irving, wishes to prove the contrary.

1.5.13 Very few historians have actually gone to the trouble of subjecting any of Irving’s work to a detailed analysis by taking his historical statements and claims and tracing them back to the original and other sources on which Irving says they rest. This is because doing so is an extremely time-consuming exercise, and most historians have better things to do with their time than undertaking a minute analysis of other people’s historical writings.

It is also because historians generally assume that the work of fellow-historians, or those who purport to be fellow-historians, is generally reliable in its footnoting, in its translations and summaries of documents, and in its treatment of the evidence at a basic level.

That is, historians may make mistakes and errors of fact, but they do not generally deliberately manipulate and distort documents, suppress evidence that runs counter to their interpretations, wilfully mistranslate documents in a foreign language, consciously use unreliable or discredited testimony when it suits their purpose, falsify historical statistics, or apply one standard of criticism to sources which undermine their views and another to those which support them.

1.6 Argument and structure of the Report

1.6.1 Very soon after we had begun our examination of Irving’s work along the lines sketched out above, it became clear that Irving did all of these things. Penetrating beneath the confident surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation in every issue we tackled that was so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up many more words than had been devoted to it in Irving’s original account.

Unpicking the eleven-page narrative of the anti-Jewish pogrom of the so-called Reichskristallnacht in Irving’s book Goebbels: Mastermind of the ‘Third Reich’ and tracing back every part of it to the documentation on which it purports to rest takes up over seventy pages of the present Report. A similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations became evident in every single instance which we examined.

We have not suppressed any occasion on which Irving has used accepted and legitimate methods of historical research, exposition and interpretation: there were none.

1.6.2 The discovery of the extent of Irving’s disregard for the proper methods of historical scholarship was not only surprising but also deeply shocking. As this Report will show, it goes well beyond what Lipstadt alleges. I was not prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in Irving’s treatment of the historical sources, nor for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken output.

It is as all-pervasive in his early work as it is in his later publications. In this respect the change of view which, as this Report will note, he underwent in 1988 with respect to the Nazi extermination of the Jews, has done no more than emphasise an already existing pattern.

It is clear from all the investigations which I and my research assistants have undertaken that Irving’s claim to have a very good and thorough knowledge of the evidence on the basis of which the history of Nazi Germany has to be written is completely justified. His numerous mistakes and egregious errors are not, therefore, due to mere ignorance or sloppiness; on the contrary, it is obvious that they are calculated and deliberate. That is precisely why they are so shocking.

Irving has relied in the past, and continues to rely in the present, on the fact that his readers and listeners, reviewers and interviewers lack either the time, or the expertise, to probe deeply enough into the sources he uses for his work to uncover the distortions, suppressions and manipulations to which he has subjected them. The late Martin Broszat and the American historian Charles W.

Sydnor, Jr., whose work is referred to below, are virtually the only previous historians to have gone some way down this road; this Report, however, is the first full-length investigation of Irving’s work on a large scale.

1.6.3 Because of the scope of what we have uncovered, this Report cannot confine itself simply to the allegations made by Lipstadt, though it does deal fully with each one. The detailed analyses in this Report are all illustrative of the points made at the beginning of this Introduction, but inevitably in some cases they also go beyond them.

It should be noted that this Report deals both with Irving’s writings and speeches before the publication of Lipstadt’s book in Britain in 1994, and in the years since then, up to 1998. As will become apparent, Irving’s methods have not changed substantially since Lipstadt completed her book; indeed, however much his views have changed over the years, his methods have remained substantially the same. It is these methods which form the main object of scrutiny in this Report.

The fundamental question to which Irving’s historical writings and speeches will be subjected is this: do they conform to generally accepted standards of historical scholarship?

1.6.4 That is, in other words, does Irving give a reasonably accurate account of the documents he uses; does he translate them in a reasonably accurate and unbiased manner; does he take into account as many other relevant documents as any professional historian could reasonably be expected to read and cite when he is using one particular source to substantiate an argument; does he apply consistent criteria of source-criticism to all the original material he uses, examining it for its internal

consistency, its consistency with other documents, its provenance, the motives of those who were responsible for it, and the audience for which it was intended; are his arguments, his statistics and his accounts of historical events consistent across time and based on reliable historical evidence; does he take account of the arguments and interpretations of other historians who have examined the same documents; does he, in other words, advance his arguments and interpretations in a reasonably

objective and unbiased manner?

1.6.5 Historians, of course, notoriously disagree on many aspects of the interpretation of the past. It is seldom, if ever, the case that one particular interpretation of a past event or a process is irrefutably right and all the others wrong. The records left to us by the past are fragmentary and incomplete and susceptible of a variety of interpretations.

Historians have to take all kinds of evidence into account: immediate sources written at the time, eyewitness accounts written down shortly after the event in question, interviews and testimony from long afterwards – all these have their problems, and although historians generally give a greater weight to a source the nearer it is to the event with which it deals, this means neither that such proximate sources are entirely unproblematical, nor that more distant sources are to be dismissed out

of hand. That is why gathering as many sources as possible relating to an event, whatever their nature, and comparing them with one another, is the basis of the historian’s reconstruction of the past.

1.6.6 Historians may disagree with one another for a variety of reasons, and such disagreements are the stock-in-trade of historical controversy. However, such differences of opinion are generally confined within the limits set by the evidence: the number of possible interpretations of an event is not limitless, and historical controversy usually reveals some to fit more closely with the historical evidence than others.

Thus for example there has long been a considerable difference of opinion amongst historians as to when the Nazis reached a decision to undertake a systematic extermination of all the Jews in Europe; some, though not many, have put the decision early in 1941; rather more have argued for a date in late July or early August 1941; some have favoured October 1941; more recently one younger German scholar has argued for December 1941 and another for late March or early April 1942.

All these estimations have their merits and demerits, and the argument continues, based on a detailed examination and comparison of the documentary record. However, the position can broadly be summed up by saying that there is a general consensus that a decision was taken at the highest level some time between the beginning of 1941 and the Spring of 1942, and most probably between June 1941 and April 1942.

The limits set by the available evidence do not allow of a date, say, in January 1933, or January 1943.

The view that, for example, no decision was ever taken, or that the Nazis did not undertake the systematic extermination of the Jews at all, or that very few Jews were in fact killed, lies wholly outside the limits of what it is reasonable for a professional historian to argue in the light of the available evidence.3 Scholarly disagreements often involve accusations of misreading or neglecting sources, or stretching interpretations beyond what the evidence seems to allow; but although there is

sometimes room for a certain amount of disagreement at the margins, reasonable historians do not find it difficult to distinguish between interpretation and fantasy, argument and tendentiousness, imaginative readings of the sources and outright manipulations of them, minor errors of fact and deliberate distortions of the documents, or the accidental omission of relevant material and the deliberate suppression of inconvenient evidence.

In this Report, these differences will be spelled out repeatedly and in very considerable detail in the course of subjecting Irving’s historical work to critical scrutiny.

1.6.7 This task is, in a sense, made easier by Irving’s repeated insistence that he is not putting forward an argument for debate, but simply telling the truth. His philosophy of history, such as it is, was revealed in a press conference held in Brisbane, Australia, on 20 March 1986:

Journalist: It could be argued, couldn’t it, that history is always subjective, and your view of history too.

Irving: Oh yes. Look at the life of Rommel here, the life of Rommel, The Trail of the Fox. In writing that, I used two thousand letters that he wrote to his wife over his entire life….Well, two thousand letters, that manuscript was probably six hundred pages long when it was finally (completed), you’re doing a lot of condensing, you’re condensing an entire man’s life into six hundred pages of typescript, and that process of condensing it is the nice way of saying, “but of course you’re

selecting, you’re selecting how to present this man.” And that is undoubtedly a subjective operation.

And this is why I hope that the readers look at the overall image presented of David Irving by the media and they think to themselves: “Well, on balance we can probably trust him better than we can trust Professor Hillgruber, or Professor Jacobsen, or any of the other historians who write on the same kind of period.”4 Journalist: Surely the same argument that you’re putting up against the bulk of historians could be levelled at you.

Irving: Ah, but then, you see, but this is the difference: they can’t prove their points, they can’t prove their points. I can prove all my points because I’ve got all the documents and the evidence on my side, but they can’t find even one page of evidence to attack me, and that is why they’re beginning to rant and rave instead.5

Journalist: It could be argued, couldn’t it, that history is always subjective, and your view of history too.

Irving: Oh yes. Look at the life of Rommel here, the life of Rommel, The Trail of the Fox. In writing that, I used two thousand letters that he wrote to his wife over his entire life….Well, two thousand letters, that manuscript was probably six hundred pages long when it was finally (completed), you’re doing a lot of condensing, you’re condensing an entire man’s life into six hundred pages of typescript, and that process of condensing it is the nice way of saying, “but of course you’re

selecting, you’re selecting how to present this man.” And that is undoubtedly a subjective operation. And this is why I hope that the readers look at the overall image presented of David Irving by the media and they think to themselves: “Well, on balance we can probably trust him better than we can trust Professor Hillgruber, or Professor Jacobsen, or any of the other historians who write on the same kind of period.”4

Journalist: Surely the same argument that you’re putting up against the bulk of historians could be levelled at you.

Irving: Ah, but then, you see, but this is the difference: they can’t prove their points, they can’t prove their points. I can prove all my points because I’ve got all the documents and the evidence on my side, but they can’t find even one page of evidence to attack me, and that is why they’re beginning to rant and rave instead.5

1.6.8 In other words, Irving admits a degree of aesthetic subjectivity in condensing and organizing his material, but concedes none at all in formulating his arguments (or, as he would put it, proving his points).

This Report takes him at his word and asks whether there is indeed any evidence available to disprove his points, or in other words, to demonstrate that his arguments are specious and arrived at not through an accumulation of documents and evidence but by manipulation, falsification, suppression, distortion, mistranslation, misinterpretation and other wilful violations of the basic methods of the professional historian in dealing with the sources on which historical reconstruction and

interpretation are based.

1.6.9 The first part of the Report following this Introduction examines Irving’s output as a historian, his reputation amongst professional historians, and his relations with the historical profession in general. In the course of the discussion, this section deals on a general level with Irving’s use of historical evidence and the criteria to which he subjects it. The second part of the Report then turns to the question of whether Irving is, or is not, a Holocaust denier.

This requires an outline of what is the generally accepted definition of the Holocaust and what Irving’s attitude is to that definition. This part of the Report goes on via a survey of the literature on Holocaust denial to establish four criteria by which, it is argued, it is reasonable to judge whether or not someone denies the Holocaust, and then applies each of these criteria to Irving’s work as a whole.

1.6.10 A third and longest part of the Report takes the ‘chain of documents’ on the basis of which Irving has sought to dissociate Hitler from the antisemitic policies of the ‘Third Reich’, and subjects each of them to an extremely detailed and rigorous examination in terms of Irving’s treatment of the document or documents in question and in the light of the other documentation which is relevant to the issue under discussion.

The purpose of this third part is to demonstrate at length, and as exhaustively as possible, Irving’s admiration for Hitler and his determination to manipulate the available historical evidence in the service of this admiration.

In case it might be thought that Irving’s manipulations of the historical record in this respect are an exceptional aspect of an otherwise reliable historical oeuvre, the product of a peculiar bee in the bonnet of a generally honest and competent professional historian, the fourth part of the book turns to three other aspects of Irving’s work and uncovers a similar story of lies and deceptions in Irving’s presentation of past history.

It begins by comparing all the available versions of Irving’s account of the Allied bombing of Dresden early in 1945 with the evidence on which they rest and the researches carried out by competent and reasonably objective British and German historians of this event. It moves on to illustrate Irving’s method by studying a sample of the members of Hitler’s entourage on whose testimony, often elicited in personal interviews with Irving himself, he so frequently relies.

And it concludes by taking some examples of Irving’s explanation of those aspects of Nazi antisemitism which he is prepared to admit actually existed.

1.6.11 Once again, it should be emphasised that these topics, numerous though they are, were not chosen as particularly egregious examples of Irving’s disregard of proper historical method. On the contrary, his account of the bombing of Dresden was selected for scrutiny because his book on the subject has been reprinted many times and did much to establish his reputation.

His use of the evidence of Hitler’s adjutants was chosen for examination because his access to their private papers, and his use of exclusive interview material generated in his meetings with them, have been presented as strengths of Irving’s research not just by himself but by others as well.

And finally, his analysis of the reasons for Nazi antisemitism was singled out for investigation because it seemed on the face of it that this might cast light on, or in some way modify or relativise, his insistence that Hitler was not involved in it. In every case, however, as this Report will demonstrate, Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all.