Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust Holocaust And The David Irving Trial

Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust Holocaust And The David Irving Trial
Richard J. Evans | 2001-03-06 00:00:00 | Basic Books | 336 | England
In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving in his libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, last 00/04, the High Court in London labeled him 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 advisor for the defense, uses this pivotal trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise. For instance, don't all historians in the end bring a subjective agenda to bear on their reading of the evidence? Is it possible that Irving lost his case not because of his biased history but because his agenda was unacceptable? The central issue in the trial-as for Evans in this book-was not the past itself, but the way in which historians study the past. In a series of short, sharp chapters, Richard Evans sets David Irving's methods alongside the historical record in order to illuminate the difference between responsible and irresponsible history. The result is a cogent and deeply informed study in the nature of historical interpretation.
Reviews

"Holocaust deniers" ("Holocaust revisionists") are people who either deny that the Holocaust ever happened, or try to minimize the extent and horror of it. In my opinion, calling a writer, a historian, a politician, or anyone at all, a "Holocaust denier" is almost certain to damage his reputation.



Mr. Irving agrees. That's why he took legal action. In his opening statement at the trial, David Irving vs. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Mr. Irving said, "[`Holocaust denier'] has become one of the most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult, replacing the N-word, the F-word, and a whole alphabet of other slurs. If an American politician. . .is branded, even briefly as a Holocaust denier, his career can well be said to be in ruins. If a writer, no matter how well reviewed and received until then, has that phrase stuck to him, then he, too, can regard his career as rumbling off the edge of a precipice."



Dr. Evans demonstrated to the satisfaction of the High Court in London the "falsification and manipulation of historical records" aspect of some of Mr. Irving's writing about history. At the trial, Mr. Irving described the "damage to the reputation" effect of Ms. Lipstadt's book.



I do not read German and cannot comment on Dr. Evans' contention that Mr. Irving played fast and loose with the truth in his writing based on historical documents in German archives. The statement that no document, signed by Hitler, has been found ordering the execution of Jewish people in death camps (order clearly stated, rather than implied) may be true--I don't know. But some statements don't need backing up with archives. The idea, for example, that Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust is absurd.



Beyond this, as other reviewers have been allowed to stray from commentary on Dr. Evans' book in order to discuss Holocaust denial in general, I hope Amazon.com will do the same for me.



In my opinion, Mr. Irving is a talented writer. His books are lively, fascinating, full of fire. His writing reveals a fine sense of humor, too. I do not share his biases, and I often disagree with his views. Still, I have enjoyed reading his work.



Dr. Evans has written an interesting book, and I recommend that you read his Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial--and see what you think.



My impression is that Mr. Irving does not deny that the tragedy took place. In his opening statement at the trial, Mr. Irving said, ". . .no person in full command of his mental faculties, and with even the slightest understanding of what happened in World War Two, can deny that the tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae."



Mr. Irving does deny or revise information about the Holocaust (regarding locations, numbers of people who suffered, numbers of people who suffered and died, scale, blame, who knew what, etc.) that most people believe to be true.



Mr. Irving also said, "[The term `Holocaust denier'] is a poison to which there is virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same: for the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife beater or a pædophile. It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star." He further noted that, "In many countries now where it was considered that the mere verbal labelling was not enough, governments have been prevailed upon to pass the most questionable laws, including some which can only be considered a total infringement of the normal human rights of free speech, free opinion and freedom of assembly."



I agree. Let them speak. Who are we, any of us, to say that other people may not speak?



Holocaust denial is a silly idea. Denying the Holocaust is like saying that World War II never happened, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never bombed, men never landed on the moon, and the Titanic never sank.



No one in his right mind, no one who has even a smattering of knowledge about World War II, can deny that the tragedy we call the Holocaust did, in fact, take place.



Evidence of the Holocaust is overwhelming--testimonies of death camp survivors and Nazi perpetrators, material evidence, as well as documents created and records kept by the Nazis themselves. Many survivors of the camps bore, and continue to bear, witness to the reality of this dark period of 20th century history that Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel calls Night.



Photographs taken in the death camps and published shortly after the end of World War II are, and have been since that time, available for everyone to see.



Rational, educated people all over the world know that the Holocaust happened. Precise statistics can never be known--historians love to quibble about these--but it is known that people, Jewish and non-Jewish, who died in the Holocaust number in the millions.



People who publicly deny the Holocaust also know that the Holocaust did, in fact, happen. And they know how extensive and horrible it was. Holocaust deniers may have their own agendas: some are simply anti-Semitic and like to rail against the Jews; others seek to share the "limelight" with Jewish people who suffered in the Holocaust; and some, by erasing the memory of the Holocaust, hope to clear the way for a repeat performance.



But as an American who values freedom of thought and speech, I view with dismay the legislation some countries have enacted to prevent people from making statements which deny the extent, or even the reality, of the Holocaust.



I don't believe in shutting people up.



I share the view of the late historian Dr. Räul Hilberg, who said, "I do not agree with legislation that makes it illegal to utter pronouncements claiming that there was no Holocaust. I do not want to muzzle any of this because it is a sign of weakness, not of strength, when you try to shut somebody up. Yes, there is always a risk. Nothing in life is without risk, but you have to make rational decisions about everything."



"Revisionists" do bring attention to the Holocaust--a tragedy in history which the world must not forget. As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."





Arlene Sanders
Reviews
This well written book is a memoir of the author's participation as an expert witness in David Irving's libel suit against the historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin. Irving, an independent historian of some repute, sued Lipstadt and Penguin over Lipstadt's statements that Irving was a Holocaust denier and distorter of historical truth. Under English law, the defense in libel actions has the major burden of proof, in this case that Lipstadt's statements were unequivocally correct. Evans, a distinguished historian of modern Germany, was retained to investigate Irving's scholarship. Assisted by 2 of his graduate students, Evans undertook a painstaking analysis of different aspects of Irving's writings. Evans was able to document definitively numerous and serious distortions and falsifications committed by Irving. These included not only Irving's misleading, to say the least, statements about the Holocaust but also Irving's distortion of the casulty toll in the destruction of Dresden. Its important to note that Evans' conclusions were based not only on tracking back Irving's citations and use of documents but also on examination of Irving's own files obtained in the process of pre-trial discovery. Evans' documented not only Irving's dishonesty but also Irving's assertion of conclusions that more than vindicated Lipstadt's statements about Irving.



Some of the text is an interesting lession, though largely a negative one, in historical analysis. Its also a lession in how ideological preoccupations, in Irving's case, rising to the level of delusion, can produce terrible distortions. The persistent strength of such delusions is illustrated by several of the negative reviews of this book posted on this site. Evans uses this case as a point of departure for a mildly interesting discussion of the nature of historical truth, though Irving's misdeeds are hardly a strong challenge to the epistemic status of historical analysis. More interesting are Evans' generally negative and apparently well justified comments on press treatments of the trial and the issues raised by the trial.
Reviews
Excellent book!



Places the Holocaust deniers and minimizers in their deceptive realm.
Reviews
Everybody loves to play the role of iconoclast. Dispelling popular myths and dashing cherished beliefs is sexy. Unfortunately for "Holocaust Analysts", as Irving cutely refers to himself and his anti-historical friends, the evidence doesn't indicate that Hitler was just a "patriot" whose aim was to return Germany to its former glory. Nor does it demonstrate that any of David Irving's other conclusions about Hitler, the Holocaust, or the Dresden Bombing campaign are correct.



Richard J Evans has excoriated the case for Holocaust denial and there is absolutely no way any honest researcher could continue to espouse skepticism over the Nazi's World War II atrocities. None of the arguments advanced by Irving's supporters to defend his theories stand up to the intellectual beating Evan's has served up in Lying about Hitler. Contrary to his cheerleaders' claims, Irving is not a great revisionist historian who seeks only to discover the truth about Hitler; he's an ideologue who parades his fallacious arguments continuously--despite the voluminous evidence to the contrary.



This is made obvious by Irving's deceitful attempts to exonerate Hitler of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the late 1930s and 1940s. According to Irving, Hitler was unaware of the slaughter taking place behind the eastern front because other high-ranking Nazis like Himmler and Goebbels intentionally kept him in the dark. Furthermore, according to Irving, Hitler was opposed to the brutality often ascribed to him by most historians. Hitler essentially had no policy of violence aimed at European Jews. The problem with this argument is that Irving had to distort, mistranslate, ignore, or otherwise obfuscate primary sources to make his half-baked theory plausible.



For example, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his personal diary after the Night of the Broken Glass on November 9-10, 1938 that Hitler's views toward the Jews were "totally radical and aggressive" and that Hitler wanted to "take very sharp measures against the Jews." This diary passage alone implicates Hitler in the crimes committed against the Jews in Germany. How did Irving handle this admission from Goebbels? In his 1996 biography of Goebbels, Irving argued that Goebbels was lying! Irving claimed that Goebbels had been acting against Hitler's wishes but attempted to give the opposite impression in his diary! (pg 63)



Irving dealt with incriminating evidence surrounding the slaughter of Jews by the SS in a similar fashion. When confronted with statistics collected by SS officers tallying how many Jews they had machine-gunned, Irving claimed the officers were inflating the numbers to garner favor with Himmler. Irving called these statistics "meaningless" and insisted that these officers didn't "have time to count." (pg 115) Of course, as Evans points out, this is pure speculation on Irving's part.



These examples of Irving's fallacious scholarship go on and on. Evans exposes just about all of Irving's bogus revisions and smashes them to pieces. Lying about Hitler is thoroughly researched, meticulously footnoted, and conclusively damning to Holocaust denialism as a whole and to Irving's arguments especially. Buy it, read it, and become smarter as a result.


Reviews
I have been a big admirer of David Irving's for a long time, and still believe that he is head and shoulders above all other WWII historians when it comes to his writing skills and mastery of the German primary source material. While Anglo-American court historians were content to write books based on the secondary source "research" of other court historians, David Irving learned the German language and went to the primary sources: the Nazi archives in Europe, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and to the surviving members of Hitler's entourage, who had shockingly been ignored by his lazy, and usually monolingual, peers. He has contributed invaluable, original research to his field of study. He has been a free speech martyr on 3 continents and has actually been imprisoned because of his words. My own public library system has a slew of David Irving books that are listed as "missing" because they've been stolen or destroyed by organized Jewish groups who publicly boast of their censorship. I admire him for his work, his sacrifices and because anyone who has such loathsome enemies must be doing something right. However, after reading this book, even I have to conclude, as much as I don't want to, that David Irving lied.



The author, Richard Evans, is a distasteful left-wing academic who obviously has an agenda and who raises a good deal of niggling objections to Irving's work. However, he also proves rather conclusively that Irving has deliberately lied in several of his books, whether through distortion of historical facts or flat-out invention. It might be worth it to detail one example.



When I first read Irving's original 2 volume magnum opus, "Hitler's War", in the mid 90s, the one thing that really caught my attention was Irving's assertion that Hitler had actually ordered Himmler_not_to liquidate the Jews. Irving's thesis was that the SS actually massacred the Jews on their own initiative, contrary to Hitler's direct orders and express wish to simply expel them after the war. In his introduction, Irving writes, "...the incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered on November 30th 1941 that there was to be 'no liquidation' of the Jews." The relevant passage of the books reads:



"On November 30th, he (Himmler) was summoned to the Wolf's lair for a secret conference with Hitler, at which the fate of Berlin's Jews was clearly raised. At 1:30 p.m. Himmler was obligated to telephone from Hitler's bunker to Heydrich the explicit order that Jews were not to be liquidated; and the next day Himmler telephoned SS overall General Oswald Pohl, overall chief of the concentration camp system, with the order: 'Jews are to stay where they are.'"



Needless to say, I sat up and took notice. What a historian! What a discovery! Hitler actually wanted to protect the Jews from his bloodthirsty subordinates! Unfortunately, Irving's account is not at all accurate.



First of all, the relevant phrase in Himmler's notes was, "Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine Liquidierung" which means "Jew transport from Berlin. No Liquidation." It should be obvious to anyone, even without the fluency in German which Mr. Irving has, that the phrase refers to a single, specific transport of Jews from Berlin. Somehow, Irving extrapolated that order into a general prohibition against the liquidation of all Jews. Even more damning to his case, Irving had correctly translated the word "judentransport" as singular in a 1974 letter, so what was the justification for the mistranslation 3 years later?



Such an extrapolation is even more bizarre considering the two lines which preceded the mention of the Jew transport, which Irving chose to completely ignore. They are: "Verhaftung Dr. Jekelius/ Angebl [ich] Sohn Molotows" which mean "Arrest Dr. Jekelius. Presumably Molotov's son." This means that is was believed that one of the prisoners on that transport from Berlin was believed to be Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov's son, who would conceivably be a valuable bargaining chip for the Nazis, and who would have been automatically liquidated on his transport's arrival at its destination, unless some higher-up ordered his removal.



In addition, Himmler made this phone call an hour before he even met with Hitler, so it was misleading to say he was "obligated" by Hitler to spare this trainload of Jews, let alone Jews in general. The next part of this passage was the order that "Jews are to stay where they are." The relevant order says, "Verwaltungsfuhrer des SS haben zu bleiben" which actually means, "Administrative leaders of the SS are to stay where they are". There was no mention of Jews anywhere in Himmler's log that day. Irving says these were mistakes. For an expert in his field, who is fluent in German, these seem like the mistakes of someone who is either deliberately falsifying the historical record or who is so blinded by a desire to exculpate Hitler from all wrongdoing that he can't tell when he is extracting totally baseless interpretations from a document.



Evans looks into several other instances in Irving's work, such as the Dresden death toll, that couldn't have been anything but deliberate lies. I can't judge Irving's motivation. Perhaps he really does want to rehabilitate Hitler. It is a fact that there are more lies about Hitler and WWII that are accepted as common knowledge than there are for any other historical subject. Yet Irving had to have known that he'd be caught eventually. Maybe he did it for purely promotional purposes. Such revelations would surely sell books, but again, he had to know he'd eventually be found out. I don't know, but it's unfortunate that what amount to just a few lines in a man's work can ruin his reputation. However, if you can't trust someone in one area, can you really trust him in others? Those of us who are in favor of "revisionist" (i.e. "true") history have to be able to recognize and expose historical lies, even when they're told by our side. Objective truth has to be the touchstone for our allegiance, not ideological kinship.

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