David Irving
comments:
Writing
in Issue No.33 (2001) of Kleio, the
journal of the Department of History at the
University of South Africa, the South African
historian R L Cope, of the notoriously
leftwing "Wits" (University of Witwatersrand),
attempts the first outsider's view of the
Lipstadt trial.
He has subsumed so completely the views of
the chief 
expert
witness hired by the Defence, the entirely
neutral Professor
Richard Evans, (right, "witness fee"
£250,000 and counting), that we assumed for
a while that it might be Evans writing under a
nom-de-plume, except that Cope has condensed
into 27 pages material that Evans would have
spread over acres of ignorant print and turgid
prose.
In fact Cope has based this paper ninety
percent on the Expert Report which Evans
submitted, and he has paid very little attention
to the detailed rebuttal
of its salient points, as far as was possible in
the very limited time available even in a 32 day
trial.
Since Cope's paper is posted in pdf form, it
is not possible to offer a hyperlinked
commentary.
By way of evaluation, however, I would draw
readers' attention to only three of the more
egregious faiblesses:
- Cope dismisses the Schlegelberger
Document as unimportant (coupled with the
snide and untrue remark that other historians
had found it and used it before I did) -- he
even buys into Evans' argument that the
document's provenance is uncertain, although
few documents can have a more well documented
pedigree, as an authentic, high-level Reich
Justice Ministry document, than this. No
archivist has ever suggested that it is
anything but genuine: that escape-route is
chosen only by the despairing historian who
cannot waffle his way around the
Schlegelberger Document otherwise.
- Not having the original document in front
of him, Cope totally misconstrues the
difficulties that led to the mistranscription
of Himmler's handwritten haben
zu bleiben phrase.
- Cope uncritically swallows Evans' bald
statement that my Dresden
deaht-roll figure was based on a document
[namely "Tagesbefehl No.47"] that I
knew to be a forgery. There is no evidence of
this in any edition of The
Destruction of Dresden; in fact I gave a
wide range of possible casualties, and
selected as the best on the available
evidence the 135,000 figure that was
suggested to me by Hanns Voigt, who
headed the Deathroll Division of the bureau
of missing persons after the Dresden air raid
and who lived in West Germany as a
schoolteacher in the 1960s. When other
documents became available, after my book
appeared, I was the first to publish them in
a
letter to The Times (what other historian
would act that way!) The notorious
Tagesbefehl No. 47 on which Evans and the
Court lingered for so long played no part
whatever in my assessment of the death roll,
as readers of my book know.
It is fortunate that, as Cope ruefully
remarks in his second footnote, I am gradually
placing all the documents on the trial on this
website: because the verbatim transcripts, the
arguments, the evidence, and the
cross-examination of the so-called "experts"
will reveal to future generations of historians
what the truth about all these matters
was.
(220K)
R
L Cope: "Irving versus Lipstadt: a[n] historian's
view of the case," in Kleio, No.33, 2001 (University
of South Africa)