"A
liar comprehensively exposed; Not one
sentence that David Irving said or
wrote can be taken as accurate."
R.
J. Evans, Telling Lies about Hitler:
The Holocaust, History and the David
Irving Trial, (Verso, 2002)
by James
Grieve
WITHIN Hitler studies, there is a
small sub-genre composed of essential
masterpieces whose titles all contain
the monster's name preceded by a
participle: Defying Hitler, by
Sebastian Haffner, Selling
Hitler, by Robert Harris,
Plotting Hitler's Death, by
Joachim Fest. This sub-genre is
now enriched by Richard
Evans's (left) quietly
brilliant Telling Lies About Hitler.
Time was when the word 'denier' was
silky and sexy, a measure of the
fineness of fabrics glamorised and
eroticised by its association with
nylons. An insidious and
well-publicised mode of French
anti-Semitism has in recent years
perverted all that; and the first
meaning of the word 'denier' which now
comes to many minds is that of a
disingenuous pseudo-historian who
claims that the Nazis never planned or
carried out a Final Solution, that
there were no gas chambers at
Auschwitz-Birkenau, that millions of
Jews were not murdered and that, even
if some Jews happened to die,
Hitler never knew of any such
thing, or if he happened to hear of it,
then with stern soldierly morality he
disapproved it.
David Irving wrote
this Letter to the Editor of
The Canberra Times on the same
day the article was published.
I HAVE glanced briefly at
the review published in your
newspaper (Oct.12) of the book
Telling Lies about Hitler by
Prof Richard Evans who was
paid a small fortune by the
defendants to express his
neutral views about my worth
as an historian. The
defamations in the book that
he was secretly writing all
that time may yet deprive him
of that. Your reviewer quotes Evans
as writing: "A liar
comprehensively exposed; Not
one sentence that David Irving
said or wrote can be taken as
accurate." An unbiasssed author -- one
not paid a quarter of a
million pounds by the
defendants -- might have added
the words
of the Judge in the Lipstadt
libel action himself, Sir
Charles Gray: "As a military historian,
Irving has much to commend
him. For his works of military
history Irving has undertaken
thorough and painstaking
research into the archives. He
has discovered and disclosed
to historians and others many
documents which, but for his
efforts, might have remained
unnoticed for years. It was
plain from the way in which he
conducted his case and dealt
with a sustained and
penetrating cross-examination
that his knowledge of World
War 2 is unparalleled. His
mastery of the detail of the
historical documents is
remarkable. He is beyond
question able and intelligent.
He was invariably quick to
spot the significance of
documents which he had not
previously seen. Moreover he
writes his military history in
a clear and vivid style. I
accept the favourable
assessment by Professor Watt
and Sir John Keegan of the
calibre of Irving's military
history and reject as too
sweeping the negative
assessment of Evans." Which of us is the liar,
one might ask?  |
Originating in France soon after the
end of Hitler's war, a strain of this
poisonous falsehood was spread to the
United States, where dwell millions who
will believe anything as long as it is
unbelievable, and from there throughout
the English-speaking world. In our part
of that world, one of the best known
among the vectors of this monstrous
untruth is a British writer of
anti-British diatribes on historical
subjects, David Irving.As its sub-title, The Holocaust,
History and the David Irving Trial,
shows, this present book is a
by-product of the court
action taken two years ago by
Irving against Penguin Books and
Deborah Lipstadt, an American
historian. According to Irving, the
latter had defamed him in a few pages
of her book Denying the
Holocaust (1993), by saying that he
distorted evidence, falsified data,
manipulated and misrepresented
documents.
The fact that this
court case can be called 'the David
Irving trial' is itself indicative of
the upside-down world that Irving
creates and inhabits, for it was not
Irving who was on trial.
No, Irving was the plaintiff and
Penguin Books and Lipstadt were the
defendants. However, as the case
proceeded, it was more and more the
evil ideas of Irving and his ways of
putting them about that became, and
properly so, the focus of the
hearings.
UNLIKE Irving, the writer of this
book, Richard Evans, is a real
historian. He was chosen by the defence
to compile an expert report on the
minutiae of Irving's presentation of
the history of the Nazi period. Much of
the book is adapted from the 700 pages
Evans eventually wrote for the defence
lawyers to use against Irving in court.
Under British defamation law, strongly
biased in favour of plaintiffs, the
only reasonable defence to offer in
this case was to prove that what
Lipstadt had said about Irving was
true.
And the only way to find the proof
was to read as much of Irving's
voluminous production as possible,
30-odd books, many speeches, articles,
videos and huge amounts of other
material that the plaintiff was obliged
to divulge, including his complete
private diaries. With two research
assistants, Evans worked on this
immense task for 18 months. And it was
largely the damning evidence he
compiled and enabled the lawyers to
adduce in court that destroyed forever
any claim Irving might make to be
considered a genuine historian. The
judgment,
which found Lipstadt's claims to be
true, was itself a triumph of
truth.
Only the last two of the book's
seven chapters deal with proceedings in
court. Earlier chapters present the
evidence and demonstrate how Evans
infallibly and relentlessly documented
Lipstadt's claims against Irving.
Indeed, these chapters do more than
that. Lipstadt was not the first
historian to make such statements about
Irving. But until Evans's expert
report, its use in court and now this
book, no-one had ever realised or shown
with such attention to detail, so much
chapter and verse, such painstaking
detection, such indisputable authority,
the magnitude of the deceptions and
malpractice carried out by Irving:
misquotation, selective amputation and
suppression of quotations,
using forged
documents, trumping up
implausible interpretations to 'prove'
the opposite of what the evidence says,
exaggerations, apparently wilful
mistranslations, invention of
statements for which there is no
evidence. Irving has followed this
methodology from his very first
publications, which is why Evans can
say that
'not one of
his books, speeches or articles, not
one paragraph, not one sentence in
any of them, can be taken on trust
as an accurate representation of its
historical subject'.
Thanks to Evans, at least one of
those deniers whom a French historian
has called 'the murderers of memory'
now stands revealed for what some had
always maintained he was: a falsifier
of history, a pedlar of vile and
obscene fantasies in the guise of
truth.
Irving's come-uppance shows that, as
liars are always in need of a truth to
traduce, truth has no less need of
defenders. And we are fortunate to have
a defender such as Evans. His book
reads like a thriller. I couldn't put
it down; I cheered as he uncovered one
after another the culprit's multiple
deceits, many of them secreted by
Irving in unobtrusive footnotes. The
book also makes a subtle and necessary
defence of the calling of the true
historian and gives an acute and
invaluable discussion of what it is
that distinguishes Irvingesque fictions
from objective historiography's search
for truth. No writer or reader of
history will read this book without
reward and gratitude.
If this is the substance, then it
must be placed in context, and the
beginning and final chapters serve that
role. The last chapters include an
account of how Irving responded to the
evidence in court. At first Irving
denying everything, then he sought to
filibuster, seizing on the most
inconsequential points, while
neglecting the main ones.
Ultimately, Irving was forced to
accept the claim (which mattered most
to Evans) that he had consistently
lied, falsifying documents, in order to
try and shield Adolf Hitler from
responsibility for the Holocaust.
The examples of deceit which Evans
gives include mistranslating the
sentence "SS leaders must stay" to "the
Jews must stay" (in a document
[see panel
on right] which did not
mention the killings), or claiming that
a "stop"
order (placed on one train-load of
Jews being sent from Berlin to Riga)
proved that Hitler opposed all killings
from the start.
Evans demonstrates that such
deliberate
mistakes are legion in Irving's
work, serving always to legitimise the
regime.
Some of the most angry pages of this
book are those in which Evans
criticises those journalists who were
arrogant enough to interview Irving,
and to think that they could knock him
down -- without doing even the most
basic research -- and therefore allowed
this fraud to outwit them.
Similar criticisms are also applied
to a number of
right-wing
historians, operating on the cusp of
journalism and the historical
profession, who made the same mistake,
Conor Cruise O'Brien, Stuart
Nicholson, John Erickson, Donald
Cameron Watt, John Keegan.
All of them wrote as if Irving was
"one of us" and Lipstadt was not.
Throughout this book, Richard Evans
adopts the patient, deliberate tone of
a man with an overwhelming case who
asks only for the time to be heard. It
becomes clear from his account that the
defeat of David Irving in court was
also a victory.
It was a triumph for the accurate
memory of the Holocaust, against people
who wanted to use the action to throw
doubt on one of the most important
events in twentieth-century history. It
was also a success for the standards of
professionalism, accuracy and rigour in
the historical field. This impressive
book deserves the widest possible
readership.
write to David
Irving