Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
Richard J. Evans
Language: English
Pages: 337
ISBN: B00BSZXMB0
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Publish Year note: First published 2001
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In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving, whose libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was tried in April 2000, the High Court in London labeled Irving a falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge, would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did. Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief adviser for the defense, uses this famous trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise.
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the literary world in the future. So this was not just a moral stand on Penguin’s part, it was a commercial decision too.64 In any case, Penguin’s withdrawal would still have left Lipstadt in the firing line. Irving was never likely to make an acceptable offer of settlement to Deborah Lipstadt. For she, rather than her publisher, was the real object of his venom, and there was no way he was going to settle with her. For Irving, Lipstadt was the pointed end of the conspiracy he believed had been
that it came from Hitler. So conclusive was the new documentary evidence that even Irving had to admit that a key link in his ‘chain of documents’ supposedly proving Hitler’s opposition to the extermination of the Jews, was completely without substance. Yet, extraordinarily enough, while Irving admitted that information received on 17 May 1998 suggested that he had been wrong to claim that Hitler had ordered Himmler to call Heydrich on 30 November 1941, he still continued to support his earlier
presumed meeting with Lammers, the Ministry of Justice issued a directive to all chief state prosecutors in Germany stating that the Ministry supported the ‘evacuation’ to the East of the Jewish inmates of all German penal institutions. The same principle was applied to Jewish prisoners awaiting trial on remand, “unless,” the Ministry added in a revealing phrase, “it is expected that they will be sentenced to death,” showing that judicial officials probably understood that evacuation was a
the ‘Final Solution.’ In one such passage, Irving wrote: The ghastly secrets of Auschwitz and Treblinka were well kept. Goebbels wrote a frank summary of them in his diary on March 27, 1942, but evidently held his tongue when he met Hitler two days later, for he quotes only Hitler’s remark: “The Jews must get out of Europe. If need be, we must resort to the most brutal methods.”55 By this stage in my investigations, I had come to regard all of Irving’s references to the Goebbels diaries with a
edition of his Dresden book, Irving admitted he had made a mistake on this point in 1966, and conceded that to add to the long-term dislocation the RAF dropped “millions of fake ration cards.” He quoted the Final Report of March 1945, which recorded that such cards had been dropped “in large masses.”115 Yet this openly admitted mistake did not prevent Irving from continuing to claim that Dresden had been packed with immense numbers of refugees in early February 1945, swelling the city’s
