Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
Richard J. Evans
Language: English
Pages: 337
ISBN: B00BSZXMB0
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Publish Year note: First published 2001
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In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving, whose libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was tried in April 2000, the High Court in London labeled Irving 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 adviser for the defense, uses this famous trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise.
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Hands dirty. There were hundreds of historians—German, British, American, Israeli, Swiss, French, Dutch, Canadian and so on—who had researched the subjects with which Irving concerned himself.43 The major documentary collections had been generally available to historians for decades. Already in the immediate aftermath of the war, Allied war crimes prosecutors had sifted through tons of captured German documents to prepare their indictments in the Nuremberg Trials. Many of these had been printed.
For the trial. These consist in the first place of David Irving’s 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 Irving’s speeches, various numbered sequences of documents in separate collections, and numbered folders belonging to the original Discovery.
Evidence in any case was highly suspect. Hofmann was a fully paid-up member of the Nazi Party, which, it seemed, he had joined in 1921. As a Nazi supporter in the police service until he left the force on 1 January 1924, he had organized a fast-track system for issuing visas to foreign Nazi sympathizers. Hitler made him head of the political section of the NSDAP’s intelligence unit. Hofmann actually participated in the putsch of 8 and 9 November 1923. According to his own testimony, he.
People were already subjected to massive legal discrimination by the strongly antisemitic Horthy regime. However, the Hungarian government made clear that it was extremely jealous of its sovereign rights over native Hungarian Jews and insisted to the Germans that any ‘solution’ of the Hungarian dimension of the ‘Jewish question’ would have to take the specific circumstances in Hungary into account.69 The meeting between Hitler and Horthy on 16 and 17 April 1943 was in part designed to escalate.
Lipstadt was far from being the first critic of Irving’s work to accuse him of bending the documentary record to suit his arguments. For many years, professional historians had seemed to regard him as an assiduous collector of original documentation, although there was some dispute over quite how important all of it was. But when it came to Irving’s interpretation of the documents, several eminent specialists were harsh, even savage, in their criticisms. Nor was this all. Irving’s writings had.