Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial [Paperback]

The Irving v Lipstadt/Penguin trial in 2000 is a very controversial chapter and I am pretty certain that the issues raised in the trial will not go away.

I have come to this book after reading Deborah Lipstadt's book, "Denying the Holocaust" and also DD Guttenplan's account of the trial, "The Holocaust on Trial" and would say that this book covers very similar ground to the Guttenplan book.

I have never read any books by David Irving himself and it is now difficult to find his books in bookshops. I seem to recall seeing his books on Goering and Goebbels in my local Waterstones and was struck by their sheer physical size. I gather that he was a popular writer on military history and one who had an unashamed admiration for Adolf Hitler. His special talents appeared to be that his writings were based on primary research, that he was unique among historians in that he always went back to the source materials rather than relying on others' research.

The issue of the trial was a very small series of comments made in Lipstadt's book that claimed that Irving was a Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite and a falsifier of history. They make a tiny proportion of the book and I am still at a loss to understand the offence they caused. Irving sued for libel in the High Court.

In libel trials in Britain, the burden of proof rests with the defendent (Lipstadt) rather than the plaintiff (Irving). This meant that Lipstadt's team had to convince the Court that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite and a falsifier of history. If Irving could show that he had simply made mistakes, then the case may have gone his way. Lipstadt would have had to withdraw her book and suffer criminal charges if she repeated her opinions on Irving. Because the burden of proof rested on the defence, it does tend to make the case appear as if it was Irving who had to defend himself rather than Lipstadt.

In order to fight its corner, the defence called Professer Richard Evans (Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University) as an expert witness. As an expert witness, he was in fact required to be objective in his opinions to serve all parties. In theory he might have ended up supporting Irving. He was chosen not only because of his experience and knowledge of the period but also as a non-Jew, someone who would not be seen as identifying too closely with the victims of the Holocaust. He had 2 PhD students to assist him. The one thing I learned from this book is that Irving was not unique in consulting source materials. In point of fact, it is a stock in trade for all history PhD students to go to source materials, i.e. documents and conversations, to form an opinion. Furthermore, you have to form your opinions on what the documents tell you and to be constantly ready to revise those opinions if other documents and information come into your possession.

It was on this point that Evans found that Irving had consistently failed. While it is true that Irving had examined vast quantities of documents, it became clear to Evans that he had falsified history in the following ways:
a) He had given credence to forgeries where they had indicated a view favourable to his prejudices
b) He had ignored documents which were unfavourable to his views
c) He had mistranslated or misconstrued documents in such a way that the meaning became bent to his own beliefs.
While it is true that these could be mistakes, there was a consistency of approach that indicated that all these errors showed an underlying bias and to Evans' mind (and the mind of the judge) indicated a deliberate falsification of history.

Furthermore, the transcripts of audiotapes and videotapes indicated that Irving had made a number of very nasty anti-Semitic comments and had made them to audiences derived from far right/neo-fascist groups. He had also given plenty of credence to reports by known holocaust deniers like Germar Rudolf and Robert Faurrison and appeared to align himself with this persuasion. Again, the judge accepted this view of Irving.

In my reviews of the Lipstadt and Guttenplan books, I mentioned the need to trust the skill and integrity of a writer of a history book. I do not have the resources to check the documents and information for myself. For me as a potential reader, this trial has made me more suspicious of writers like Irving and has got me thinking about a whole range of issues about historical method and political bias.

Goebells famously said if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Which is exactly what Irving has been doing for years. For years Irving has promoted himself as a much more thorough historian than 'mainstream' historians, and has claimed that there is no real evidence that the Holocaust ever happened. Unfortunately when his so-called evidence and methods were criticised by genuine historians, it appeared (superficially) that it was only their word against his - ie as if there was a genuine doubt. So his propaganda was a tool to legitimise holocaust-denial.
Then foolishly he sued one of his critics for libel. Finally this meant that he was put under the spotlight in a court of law. (Where the rules of evidence are in fact very similar to the rules of historical evidence). This book gives a detailed, objective & fascinating account of the trial in which Irving was definitively proven to have deliberately twisted, fabricated or ignored evidence to suit his own agenda. In other words he was exposed for the liar he is. Incredibly he lied throughout the trial too - regularly misquoting the witnesses and reports in his inept attempt to represent himself. And even more incredibly he continued to lie after the trial too, in interviews portraying himself as the victim whose right to free speech had been denied. (Remember it was actually HIM who was trying to silence his critics).
The sad thing is that he & others like him are still telling the same lies.

I read Deborah Lipstadt's excellent account of the court proceedings brought against her by David Irving a while back. Whilst that was a personal account of the case as a whole, this book presents the analysis conducted by Richard Evans, one of the expert witnesses.

At the beginning of the trial it seemed that there was an issue at stake about freedom to challenge 'sacred canon'. However, it is one thing to draw a 'non-mainstream' viewpoint from a body of evidence. It is quite another thing to manipulate, misquote, ignore, and be selective about evidence in order to present an argument espousing your view. As Evans puts it: "Irving's stock-in-trade is taking a small error or inconsistency in evidence and blowing it up out of all proportion so that the most far-reaching conclusions can be drawn from it."

Evans meticulously demolishes Irving's work and practices, for example, in exposing Irving's gross exaggeration of the number of people killed in the Dresden bombing. Along with it, the case is made that, given the extent of the distortions, it would be impossible to trust anything written by Irving without checking all of the original source material.

I found this very readable and informative, despite a more scholarly angle than Lipstadt's book on the subject.