RICHARD J. EVANS - Lying About Hitler

T his book is about how we can tell the difference between truth and lies in history. It uses as an example the libel case brought before the High Court in London in the spring of 2000 by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books. It concentrates on the issue of the falsification of the historical record which Lipstadt accused Irving of having committed and which was the subject of the investigations that I was asked to present to the court as an expert witness. The first chapter explains how I became involved in the case, sets out the background, and provides a context. The next four chapters present the results of my investigations. is an account of the trial itself, explaining how Irving dealt with the findings presented in my report. The final chapter looks at the aftermath of the trial and discusses some of the wider issues it raised. All of this, I hope, will provide concrete illustrations of the general questions of problems of historical objectivity and historical knowledge that I raised in my earlier book, InDefense of History, published in England in 1997 and in the USA two years later.

This is not, therefore, intended to be a rounded or comprehensive account of the whole case. Others will be attempting that. Some of the aspects of the case that received a great deal of media attention at the time, such as the debate over the mass gassing facilities at the Auschwitz concentration camp or the nature and extent of Irvings connections with the German far right, are also the subject of other books, by the experts who dealt with them in court, and they are only alluded to in this book briefly, if at all. The central issue in the following pages, as I believe it was in the case as a whole, is the falsification and manipulation of the historical record that Lipstadt alleged Irving had committed. Although discussion of this issue took up more time during the trial than anything else, it was barely mentioned in press reports of the proceedings, and as a result the general impression of the trial purveyed by the international news media was a rather distorted one, since they devoted the lions share of their attention to Irvings racism and antisemitism. One of the aims of this book is to set the record straight in this respect.

Inevitably, even within this limited compass, my treatment of these issues cannot hope to be comprehensive. In chapters I offer a series of significant examples. Much has had to be omitted for the sake of clarity and readability and to keep this book to a reasonable length. The original expert report that forms the basis for these central chapters was 740 pages long, and in many places it was more suited for a court of law than for a reader with a more general interest in these matters. However, the most important issues treated in the report and upheld in the corresponding parts of the judgment are included, even if only in a slimmed-down form.

Aside from the usual archival and printed sources, this book rests in particular on materials compiled for the trial. These consist in the first place of David Irvings published books and articles and the documents that entered the public domain through the process of Discovery in the court case, and their citation in court in the expert reports, the defense statements, and the judgment. They include consecutively numbered videotapes and audiocassettes of Irvings speeches, various numbered sequences of documents in separate collections, and numbered folders belonging to the original Discovery list and the supplementary Discovery lists. In addition, a series of documents was submitted to the court during the trial by both sides in the case.

All of this material was initially collected and collated by Mishcon de Reya, the solicitors for the second defendant. The verbatim record of the trial was made available from stenographic notes supplied on a daily basis by Harry Counsel and Company, Cliffords Inn, Fetter Lane, London EC4. Basic legal documents included Irvings Writ and Statement of Claim, the Defense of the Second Defendant (i.e., Deborah Lipstadt), Irvings Reply to the Defense of the Second Defendant, and the defenses Restatement of Case. The court was also supplied with copies of the Opening and Closing Statements by both parties; in both cases, the typed version of the Closing Statement was considerably longer than the version read out in court. The defense also issued written questions to Irving, and Irving issued written questions to me, to which I supplied lengthy written responses. The researchers and experts supplied the court with a large quantity of photocopied original documents from German archives, and Irving also presented a number of similar documents to the court. Irvings website coverage of the trial and additional relevant material were also downloaded on a regular basis. All of this material is referenced in the notes at the appropriate junctures.