Holocaust Denial on Trial
The trial arose out of the publication of Lipstadt's important book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1986), in which she described the activities of numerous Holocaust deniers, among whom she listed David Irving. In Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt identified David Irving as a "Hitler Partisan wearing blinkers" who, according to Lipstadt, "was a denier, Hitler partisan, and right-wing ideologue" and who sought to argue against the historical reality of the Holocaust by means of distortions of evidence, manipulations of documents, and misrepresentation of data.
Taking advantage of a procedural aspect of the English order, the historian denialism David Irving sued Dr. Deborah Lipstadt for libel, for some statements in the book "in which Lipstadt called him" one of the most dangerous spokesmen for denial. " , according to English law, those who are sued for defamation find themselves in the unfavorable procedural position of having to prove the truthfulness of the statements deemed defamatory by the party that claims to be injured, therefore in the trial (started in January 2000), despite the judge's efforts Gray, to keep the historical context of the Holocaust out of the classroom, soon the drama of the Nazi massacre breaks through the walls of the court, and the defense of Lipstadt finds itself having to prove, procedurally, therefore with incontrovertible evidence, that the holocaust has occurred.
And it turns out to be anything but simple:
Lipstadt and her defense team spent four years preparing for the ten-month trial that took place in the winter of 2000.
Lipstadt and Penguin won the case using the justification defence, namely by demonstrating in court that Lipstadt's accusations against Irving were substantially true and therefore not libelous. The case was argued as a bench trial, is a trial by judge, as opposed to a trial by jury.
A central role in the process was given by Professor Sir Richard J Evans, hired by the defense, who with two of his doctoral students, studied all the speeches, statements and books of David Irving for over 2 years.
Report by Professor Sir Richard J Evans
1.1.2 The book makes a variety of claims about Irving and his work, to which Irving has objected in his libel writ; only those which fall within the scope of my expertise as a professional historian will be considered. These claims can be summarised under four headings. They are as follows (references are to the page of the book on which they occur):
1.1.3 Irving is 'a discredited figure' as a historian (p. 180)
Irving has become a Holocaust denier (p. 111). He had 'long equated the actions of Hitler and Allied leaders, an equivalence that was made easier by his claims that the Final Solution took place without Hitler's knowledge' (p. 162). In 1988, Irving, 'who had long hovered at the edge of Holocaust denial' (p. 162), was converted to the idea that the gas chambers were a myth (p. 179). 'Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial' (p. 181). He has connections with Holocaust deniers (p. 181).
Irving skews documents and misrepresents data in order to exonerate Hitler. He is 'an ardent admirer of the Nazi leader' (p. 161).
Holocaust deniers 'misstate, misquote, falsify statistics, and falsely attribute conclusions to reliable sources. They rely on books that directly contradict their arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the authors' objectives' (p. 111). Since this statement comes immediately after the allegation that Irving has become a Holocaust denier, the implication that he does all these things too is unmistakable. Indeed, Lipstadt also claims that scholars 'have accused him of distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes' and of 'skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions' (p. 161). 'Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda...he is most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to confirm his conclusions' (p. 181).
The sources and methods used in this report to assess these claims will be outlined later in this Introduction.
1.5 Methods used to draw up this Report
1.5.1 I have never met, spoken to, or corresponded with David Irving. I have not previously concerned myself with his work in any way. The only references to him in any of my books come on pages 38 and 76 of In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989), in the context, not of a detailed examination of Irving's work itself, but of a discussion of the work of other historians, namely Ernst Nolte and Hans Mommsen. Irving is mentioned on these two pages briefly, and in passing.
1.5.2 I had leafed through the 1977 edition of Hitler's War and because of its style and content considered it a work of journalism rather than of professional history. Like the overwhelming majority of professional historians, I rejected its argument that Hitler did not order the extermination of the Jews. However, I was also aware of the widespread assumption amongst professional historians that Irving's work (like that of a number of other journalists who have written historical work) reached generally acceptable standards of historical scholarship. I also knew of Irving's reputation as someone who had a good knowledge of the archival and other sources for the history of the 'Third Reich' and had discovered previously unknown material on this subject.
1.5.3 I had never met, corresponded or had any dealings with Deborah Lipstadt, but I had read Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust and quoted it on pages 239-41 of my book In Defence of History in the context of a discussion of the implications of postmodernist theories of knowledge for historical scholarship, especially on the history of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Lipstadt's treatment of Irving in the book was a matter of completely marginal interest to me. In general, my view of the book was that it was a solidly researched and strongly but rationally argued work of scholarship. However, Denying the Holocaust does not deal in any detail with Irving's historical arguments, so that on being asked to write this Report, I had no difficulty in approaching Lipstadt's account of Irving's writings in an open and critical spirit, the same spirit, in fact, as that in which I approach Irving's work, the vast majority of which was completely unfamiliar to me.
1.5.4 The material on which this Report is based consists in the first place of Irving's published books. These have gone through numerous editions, and many of them are available both in English and in German in different versions. They are available in libraries in Britain and Germany, though some are rather hard to track down, and I was startled to find that the 1991 edition of Hitler's War can only be read at the desk in the Rare Books Room of the British Library that is reserved for literature deemed by the Library to be pornographic. Secondly, Irving has published a number of articles, mainly in The Journal of Historical Review, which are also available for public inspection in institutions such as the Wiener Library. Thirdly, Irving maintains a very extensive website on the Internet (http://fpp.co.uk) on which the text of various speeches by Irving is posted, together with a large quantity of other material revealing of his views on the history of the 'Third Reich'.
1.5.5 Fourthly, the legal process of Discovery has provided a large amount of further material of relevance to the issues at the centre of the case. As Irving remarked in 1991,
The first thing that happens in a libel action is this: only a few weeks after you've served a writ on a gentleman there comes a very expensive stage for both parties known as Discovery. The word 'Discovery' written with a capital 'D', just like the word 'Holocaust' written with a capital 'H'. Only this time the word is on my side. Because Discovery is an ugly phase, for plaintiff and defendant, when you face each other across a lawyer's table, at the choosing of the Plaintiff, and you say, "I want to see your documents and you can see mine". And at that stage usually all the defendants crack up and cop out.
1.5.6 In the present case, however, no-one has wanted to 'cop out', and Irving has been obliged to disclose an enormous mass of material in addition to the list of documents he initially agreed to supply. I have had access to many videotapes and audiocassettes of Irving's speeches, tens of thousands of pages of documents, his complete private diaries, thousands of letters and a great deal of other material, much of it from the huge private archive in which he records his various activities and in which he stores the materials for his historical work.
1.5.7 It soon became apparent that the amount of material available was too vast for me to master in the relatively short space of time I had to compile this Report, especially given my other commitments such as my regular academic work. I was fortunate therefore to obtain the research assistance of two of my PhD students, Nikolaus Wachsmann, who is now Junior Research Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and Thomas Skelton-Robinson, who is now researching for a PhD at Churchill College, Cambridge. Both had first-class honours degrees in History (from the London School of Economics and from Glasgow University respectively), both had a first-rate knowledge of German (Wachsmann is a native speaker, Skelton-Robinson lived in Germany for five years after graduating), and both had a good knowlogde of twentieth-century German history.
1.5.8 The two researchers compiled transcripts of the salient parts of the audiocassettes and videotapes and went through the material supplied by Irving during the process of Discovery, taking extensive notes. It was of course impossible to cover the whole of Irving's oeuvre with complete thoroughness, and some principle of selectivity had to be applied. We decided that I would cover Irving's general reputation as a historian, Irving's attitude to Hitler, and the central issue of whether or not Irving was a Holocaust denier. On the equally important matter of whether or not Irving distorted and falsified history, we decided to concentrate on the 'chain of documents' which Irving on various occasions had claimed proved Hitler's ignorance and disapproval of the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews. Each document was assigned to one or other of the research assistants for preliminary analysis. In this way we covered the entire documentary basis for Irving's controversial claim.
1.5.9 In addition, we decided to sample a number of other important issues on which Lipstadt's allegations of manipulation and falsification could be tested. These were the bombing of Dresden by the Allies early in 1945, a subject on which Irving had written the book which established his reputation; Irving's use of the evidence of Hitler's adjutants; and the explanations offered by Irving for such antisemitic actions by the Nazis as he was prepared to concede were actually carried out. Here again preliminary analysis was carried out by my research assistants. During the period January 1998 to April 1999, we met frequently, exchanged drafts, and carried out numerous revisions to what we had written. In addition, my research assistants undertook research in German archives and libraries. The compilation, structure and writing of this Report as a whole was undertaken by myself, and I alone bear the final responsibility for what it contains. I am satisfied that the amount of material we have examined, and the number of issues in Irving's writings which we have addressed, constitute a thoroughly representative sample of his work, and that any further investigation on our part would simply have replicated the conclusions we reached on the basis of the sample we looked at.
1.5.10 On all the issues concerned, this Report examines carefully and in detail Irving's writings and speeches over the whole of his career, from the 1960s to the present. Its method has been to identify what Irving wrote or said, and to note whether he changed his views over time, and if so, how and in what respects. The Report is written from the point of view, and with the expertise, of a professional historian. That is, it is not concerned with the issue of whether or not 'Holocaust denial' is morally wrong, or whether what Irving has written and said is politically or morally objectionable. Throughout, it bears in mind the pleaded issues in the case, but its method is not to subject them to any kind of forensic criteria or legal scrutiny, but rather to treat them as matters of historical and historiographical investigation.
1.5.11 Thus in examining each of the key 'chain of documents' which Irving claims prove Hitler neither knew or nor approved the antisemitic policies of the 'Third Reich', this Report is not concerned to demonstrate conclusively that Hitler did know or did approve of these policies: that is not the issue at hand. The issue is whether or not Irving distorts and manipulates the historical record in trying to prove that Hitler did not know and approve of these policies. In dealing with this issue, the Report takes each document in turn, examines Irving's translation of it (all the documents in question were originally written in German), scrutinises his interpretation of it, and brings as many other relevant documents to bear on this interpretation as it has been possible to research in the time available, in accordance with the standard method of historical research, in which every original document used has to be set in a wider documentary context in order to elucidate its historical significance.
1.5.12 Many of these documents are well known to historians, some less so; many of them would appear at first sight to support the view that Hitler did know about antisemitic policies and actions in the 'Third Reich', and it has been necessary in the course of this Report to point this out. Historians who are advancing a particular argument have to take all relevant documentary evidence into account, and where documents appear to go against their argument, they have to explain them; failing to mention them at all constitutes suppression of relevant evidence and is not acceptable in a reputable historian. Citing these documents, as is done extensively in this Report, should not be seen as an attempt to prove conclusively that Hitler knew about the extermination of the Jews and other antisemitic actions during the 'Third Reich', only as evidence which has to be taken into account by anyone who, such as Irving, wishes to prove the contrary.
1.5.13 Very few historians have actually gone to the trouble of subjecting any of Irving's work to a detailed analysis by taking his historical statements and claims and tracing them back to the original and other sources on which Irving says they rest. This is because doing so is an extremely time-consuming exercise, and most historians have better things to do with their time than undertaking a minute analysis of other people's historical writings. It is also because historians generally assume that the work of fellow-historians, or those who purport to be fellow-historians, is generally reliable in its footnoting, in its translations and summaries of documents, and in its treatment of the evidence at a basic level. That is, historians may make mistakes and errors of fact, but they do not generally deliberately manipulate and distort documents, suppress evidence that runs counter to their interpretations, wilfully mistranslate documents in a foreign language, consciously use unreliable or discredited testimony when it suits their purpose, falsify historical statistics, or apply one standard of criticism to sources which undermine their views and another to those which support them.
1.6 Argument and structure of the Report
1.6.1 Very soon after we had begun our examination of Irving's work along the lines sketched out above, it became clear that Irving did all of these things. Penetrating beneath the confident surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation in every issue we tackled that was so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up many more words than had been devoted to it in Irving's original account. Unpicking the eleven-page narrative of the anti-Jewish pogrom of the so-called Reichskristallnacht in Irving's book Goebbels: Mastermind of the 'Third Reich' and tracing back every part of it to the documentation on which it purports to rest takes up over seventy pages of the present Report. A similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations became evident in every single instance which we examined. We have not suppressed any occasion on which Irving has used accepted and legitimate methods of historical research, exposition and interpretation: there were none.
1.6.2 The discovery of the extent of Irving's disregard for the proper methods of historical scholarship was not only surprising but also deeply shocking. As this Report will show, it goes well beyond what Lipstadt alleges. I was not prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in Irving's treatment of the historical sources, nor for the way in which this dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken output. It is as all-pervasive in his early work as it is in his later publications. In this respect the change of view which, as this Report will note, he underwent in 1988 with respect to the Nazi extermination of the Jews, has done no more than emphasise an already existing pattern. It is clear from all the investigations which I and my research assistants have undertaken that Irving's claim to have a very good and thorough knowledge of the evidence on the basis of which the history of Nazi Germany has to be written is completely justified. His numerous mistakes and egregious errors are not, therefore, due to mere ignorance or sloppiness; on the contrary, it is obvious that they are calculated and deliberate. That is precisely why they are so shocking. Irving has relied in the past, and continues to rely in the present, on the fact that his readers and listeners, reviewers and interviewers lack either the time, or the expertise, to probe deeply enough into the sources he uses for his work to uncover the distortions, suppressions and manipulations to which he has subjected them. The late Martin Broszat and the American historian Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., whose work is referred to below, are virtually the only previous historians to have gone some way down this road; this Report, however, is the first full-length investigation of Irving's work on a large scale.
1.6.3 Because of the scope of what we have uncovered, this Report cannot confine itself simply to the allegations made by Lipstadt, though it does deal fully with each one. The detailed analyses in this Report are all illustrative of the points made at the beginning of this Introduction, but inevitably in some cases they also go beyond them. It should be noted that this Report deals both with Irving's writings and speeches before the publication of Lipstadt's book in Britain in 1994, and in the years since then, up to 1998. As will become apparent, Irving's methods have not changed substantially since Lipstadt completed her book; indeed, however much his views have changed over the years, his methods have remained substantially the same. It is these methods which form the main object of scrutiny in this Report. The fundamental question to which Irving's historical writings and speeches will be subjected is this: do they conform to generally accepted standards of historical scholarship?
1.6.4 That is, in other words, does Irving give a reasonably accurate account of the documents he uses; does he translate them in a reasonably accurate and unbiased manner; does he take into account as many other relevant documents as any professional historian could reasonably be expected to read and cite when he is using one particular source to substantiate an argument; does he apply consistent criteria of source-criticism to all the original material he uses, examining it for its internal consistency, its consistency with other documents, its provenance, the motives of those who were responsible for it, and the audience for which it was intended; are his arguments, his statistics and his accounts of historical events consistent across time and based on reliable historical evidence; does he take account of the arguments and interpretations of other historians who have examined the same documents; does he, in other words, advance his arguments and interpretations in a reasonably objective and unbiased manner?
1.6.5 Historians, of course, notoriously disagree on many aspects of the interpretation of the past. It is seldom, if ever, the case that one particular interpretation of a past event or a process is irrefutably right and all the others wrong. The records left to us by the past are fragmentary and incomplete and susceptible of a variety of interpretations. Historians have to take all kinds of evidence into account: immediate sources written at the time, eyewitness accounts written down shortly after the event in question, interviews and testimony from long afterwards - all these have their problems, and although historians generally give a greater weight to a source the nearer it is to the event with which it deals, this means neither that such proximate sources are entirely unproblematical, nor that more distant sources are to be dismissed out of hand. That is why gathering as many sources as possible relating to an event, whatever their nature, and comparing them with one another, is the basis of the historian's reconstruction of the past.
1.6.6 Historians may disagree with one another for a variety of reasons, and such disagreements are the stock-in-trade of historical controversy. However, such differences of opinion are generally confined within the limits set by the evidence: the number of possible interpretations of an event is not limitless, and historical controversy usually reveals some to fit more closely with the historical evidence than others. Thus for example there has long been a considerable difference of opinion amongst historians as to when the Nazis reached a decision to undertake a systematic extermination of all the Jews in Europe; some, though not many, have put the decision early in 1941; rather more have argued for a date in late July or early August 1941; some have favoured October 1941; more recently one younger German scholar has argued for December 1941 and another for late March or early April 1942. All these estimations have their merits and demerits, and the argument continues, based on a detailed examination and comparison of the documentary record. However, the position can broadly be summed up by saying that there is a general consensus that a decision was taken at the highest level some time between the beginning of 1941 and the Spring of 1942, and most probably between June 1941 and April 1942. The limits set by the available evidence do not allow of a date, say, in January 1933, or January 1943. The view that, for example, no decision was ever taken, or that the Nazis did not undertake the systematic extermination of the Jews at all, or that very few Jews were in fact killed, lies wholly outside the limits of what it is reasonable for a professional historian to argue in the light of the available evidence.3 Scholarly disagreements often involve accusations of misreading or neglecting sources, or stretching interpretations beyond what the evidence seems to allow; but although there is sometimes room for a certain amount of disagreement at the margins, reasonable historians do not find it difficult to distinguish between interpretation and fantasy, argument and tendentiousness, imaginative readings of the sources and outright manipulations of them, minor errors of fact and deliberate distortions of the documents, or the accidental omission of relevant material and the deliberate suppression of inconvenient evidence. In this Report, these differences will be spelled out repeatedly and in very considerable detail in the course of subjecting Irving's historical work to critical scrutiny.
1.6.7 This task is, in a sense, made easier by Irving's repeated insistence that he is not putting forward an argument for debate, but simply telling the truth. His philosophy of history, such as it is, was revealed in a press conference held in Brisbane, Australia, on 20 March 1986:
Journalist: It could be argued, couldn't it, that history is always subjective, and your view of history too.
Irving: Oh yes. Look at the life of Rommel here, the life of Rommel, The Trail of the Fox. In writing that, I used two thousand letters that he wrote to his wife over his entire life....Well, two thousand letters, that manuscript was probably six hundred pages long when it was finally (completed), you're doing a lot of condensing, you're condensing an entire man's life into six hundred pages of typescript, and that process of condensing it is the nice way of saying, "but of course you're selecting, you're selecting how to present this man." And that is undoubtedly a subjective operation. And this is why I hope that the readers look at the overall image presented of David Irving by the media and they think to themselves: "Well, on balance we can probably trust him better than we can trust Professor Hillgruber, or Professor Jacobsen, or any of the other historians who write on the same kind of period."
Journalist: Surely the same argument that you're putting up against the bulk of historians could be levelled at you.
Irving: Ah, but then, you see, but this is the difference: they can't prove their points, they can't prove their points. I can prove all my points because I've got all the documents and the evidence on my side, but they can't find even one page of evidence to attack me, and that is why they're beginning to rant and rave instead.
1.6.8 In other words, Irving admits a degree of aesthetic subjectivity in condensing and organizing his material, but concedes none at all in formulating his arguments (or, as he would put it, proving his points). This Report takes him at his word and asks whether there is indeed any evidence available to disprove his points, or in other words, to demonstrate that his arguments are specious and arrived at not through an accumulation of documents and evidence but by manipulation, falsification, suppression, distortion, mistranslation, misinterpretation and other wilful violations of the basic methods of the professional historian in dealing with the sources on which historical reconstruction and interpretation are based.
1.6.9 The first part of the Report following this Introduction examines Irving's output as a historian, his reputation amongst professional historians, and his relations with the historical profession in general. In the course of the discussion, this section deals on a general level with Irving's use of historical evidence and the criteria to which he subjects it. The second part of the Report then turns to the question of whether Irving is, or is not, a Holocaust denier. This requires an outline of what is the generally accepted definition of the Holocaust and what Irving's attitude is to that definition. This part of the Report goes on via a survey of the literature on Holocaust denial to establish four criteria by which, it is argued, it is reasonable to judge whether or not someone denies the Holocaust, and then applies each of these criteria to Irving's work as a whole.
1.6.10 A third and longest part of the Report takes the 'chain of documents' on the basis of which Irving has sought to dissociate Hitler from the antisemitic policies of the 'Third Reich', and subjects each of them to an extremely detailed and rigorous examination in terms of Irving's treatment of the document or documents in question and in the light of the other documentation which is relevant to the issue under discussion. The purpose of this third part is to demonstrate at length, and as exhaustively as possible, Irving's admiration for Hitler and his determination to manipulate the available historical evidence in the service of this admiration. In case it might be thought that Irving's manipulations of the historical record in this respect are an exceptional aspect of an otherwise reliable historical oeuvre, the product of a peculiar bee in the bonnet of a generally honest and competent professional historian, the fourth part of the book turns to three other aspects of Irving's work and uncovers a similar story of lies and deceptions in Irving's presentation of past history. It begins by comparing all the available versions of Irving's account of the Allied bombing of Dresden early in 1945 with the evidence on which they rest and the researches carried out by competent and reasonably objective British and German historians of this event. It moves on to illustrate Irving's method by studying a sample of the members of Hitler's entourage on whose testimony, often elicited in personal interviews with Irving himself, he so frequently relies. And it concludes by taking some examples of Irving's explanation of those aspects of Nazi antisemitism which he is prepared to admit actually existed.
1.6.11 Once again, it should be emphasised that these topics, numerous though they are, were not chosen as particularly egregious examples of Irving's disregard of proper historical method. On the contrary, his account of the bombing of Dresden was selected for scrutiny because his book on the subject has been reprinted many times and did much to establish his reputation. His use of the evidence of Hitler's adjutants was chosen for examination because his access to their private papers, and his use of exclusive interview material generated in his meetings with them, have been presented as strengths of Irving's research not just by himself but by others as well. And finally, his analysis of the reasons for Nazi antisemitism was singled out for investigation because it seemed on the face of it that this might cast light on, or in some way modify or relativise, his insistence that Hitler was not involved in it. In every case, however, as this Report will demonstrate, Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all.……………….
2. Irving the historian
………….
Hitler's War
2.1.3 With the publication of his massive study of Hitler's War in 1977, Irving stirred up fresh debate. In this book, he argued that far from ordering it himself, Hitler had not known about the extermination of the Jews until late in 1943, and both before and after that had done his best to mitigate the worst antisemitic excesses of his subordinates. Irving heightened the controversy by publicly offering a financial reward to anyone who could come up with a document proving him wrong.
2.1.4 The furor completely overshadowed his publication of a biography of the German general Manfred Rommel in the same year, under the title The Trail of the Fox. The following year, Irving brought out a 'prequel' to his book on Hitler and the Second World War, entitled The War Path. In 1981 he published two more books, one, The War Between the Generals, devoted to exposing differences of opinion between the commanders of Hitler's army during the Second World War, the other, Uprising!, arguing, to quote Irving himself, 'that the Uprising of 1956 in Hungary was primarily an anti-Jewish uprising', because the Communist regime was run by Jews.
……………..
2.3.3 He listed a whole series of diaries and other sources they refer to - without any reference to his safety, however - previous historians have relied, and that he himself had exposed as falsifications. All these falsifications, he claimed, were a disadvantage of Hitler. Yet his "idle predecessors" in writing about Hitler failed to locate them. "Every successive biographer" of Hitler, he declared in 1977, "repeated or absorbed the legends created by his predecessors, or rather of the cases consulted only the most easily available reference works". The surviving relatives of the leading Nazis never looked around to look for other material. And they never bother to consult the basic documentation. In a 1978 meeting in the German city of Aschaffenburg, Irving attacked administration historians for allegedly simply copying each other's books, while he was the only Hitler specialist who consulted the original sources.
2.3.7 The main documentary collections have generally been available to historians for decades. Already in the immediate post-war period, allied war crimes prosecutors have scoured tons of captured German documents to prepare their charges in the Nuremberg trials. Many of these were printed in the published record of evidence. The possible return of the original documents, many times larger than the printed selection, to the German Federal Archives has provided the stimulus for a massive new research effort, led by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History), described in the Thanks to the 1977 edition of Irving's Hitler's War as "specimen".
2.4 Documents and sources
2.4.1 Historians normally distinguish between primary sources, which were produced at the time of the events to which they refer, and secondary sources, which were produced later and based on the memory or work of other historians. Clearly, the primary sources are considered prima facie more reliable, although they must be critically evaluated with regard to their authenticity, their paternity and their purpose. As far as secondary sources are concerned, the longer the temporal distance with respect to the events to which they refer, the more critically they must be examined.
2.4.3 In describing his critical approach to sources for the history of Nazi Germany, Irving stated that he rejects all "evidence of the post-war oral trial" because those who gave it had an ax of some kind from grind. If they were charged in a war crimes trial, then they would distort the truth to save themselves.…….
……..
2.4.4 Furthermore, as this Report will show, when it suits his argument, Irving makes an exception and actually uses oral testimony from war crimes trials. In any case, Irving does not automatically disqualify memory based oral testimonials. On the contrary, it makes extensive use of oral testimonies: in particular, over the years it has interviewed a large number of former helpers of Hitler and other important former Nazis, and places, as this Report will repeatedly demonstrate a faith in the reliability of their testimony that is almost completely uncritical. If they were talking to him, after all, they must have told the truth!
2.4.5 There is no reason to suppose that the story they told Irving in this regard would have been different from the story they told everyone else. If they had had an incentive to avoid implying themselves before a court, they had a reason to persuade Irving to be their spokesman in continuing their personal search for public scrutiny at a later date.
2.4.6 Irving plays a lot with his claim to be the historian who first revealed "Hitler's diaries" as fakes. 22 In 1983 - the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's appointment as chancellor of the Reich - the respected German weekly Stern reported extracts of what his reporters claimed to be diaries written by Hitler and recently made available by East German sources.
...........
2.4.8 Furthermore, what Irving does not mention is that he changed his mind a couple of days after the press conference. According to Robert Harris, he did it because he was uncomfortable being aligned with the majority, respectable historical opinion, because he was impressed by the size of the diaries - sixty volumes - that seemed almost beyond the capacity of any individual to forge, and because having finally seen the journals for themselves, they seemed more convincing than he had expected. 'Finally,' adds Harris, 'there was the fact that the journals did not contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust .'......... Soon it was on the front page in the Times to declare his faith in their authenticity. When the forensic tests shortly afterwards revealed them definitively as false, Irving made a statement accepting the result but drawing attention to the fact that he had been the first person to unmask them as false. "Yes," a Times reporter said when he was read, "and the last person who declared them authentic."
……….
“Every historian must be selective; If I write a biography on Adolf Hitler, then the archives have about ten tons of documents on Adolf Hitler and you have to select which documents to present. And if you are a Jewish historian, present the facts in a way, because they have a program to present. I don't have any kind of political agenda, and in fact, it's rather defamatory for people to suggest that I have an agenda. The agenda that I have, I suppose, is, okay, I admit, I like to see other historians with the egg in their face. And they're getting lots of eggs in their faces now, because I'm challenging them to produce evidence for what they've been saying for fifty years.”
2.5.5……..
It's the real word that scares my opponents, because they've managed to get away with their Madison Avenue, their Hollywood versions of history, their television versions of history for fifty years now. The real story is what we find in the archives, and it scares my adversaries because it takes the boards from under their feet.
2.5.8
Revision of the 1978 war path, R. Hinton Thomas, professor of German at the University of Birmingham, whose knowledge of the social and political context of twentieth-century German literature was both profound and broad, dismissed the book as "non-original" and his "pretensions to novelty" as "mal-based", but he could do nothing but speculate on other possible meanings cited by Irving in his attempt to prove that Hitler urged to curb the pogrom of the Reichskristallnacht in 1938, commenting that "it would be more pertinent to highlight the many of Hitler's poisonous statements about Jews for many years.
2.5.9 Martin Gilbert, at the time in the midst of writing his official Churchill biography, remarked that "Irving fails, and deplorably fails," to provide convincing evidence in Hitler's War to support his claim that Hitler was unaware of the extermination of the Jews. "Much of Irving's argument," he wrote, "is based on speculation". At the same time, he downplayed Hitler's anti-Semitic statements and omitted key passages of this kind from his discussion of documents like Hitler's political testament. Nevertheless, Gilbert concluded by describing how Irving treated this problem as "a serious defect in an otherwise scholarly work, the fruit of a decade of extensive research". Similarly, military historian Michael Howard, later Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, praised the "considerable merits" of The War Path and stated that Irving was "at his best as a professional historian who required documentary evidence for beliefs Howard emphasized that Irving's story of an episode such as the forced resignation of generals Blomberg and Fritsch before the outbreak of World War II was not as original as he claimed and added nothing to the story already told by other historians. " handsome, "he wrote," if Mr. Irving occasionally recognized that other men had been there before him and had done competent work work. "
2.5.11 What Craig meant, however, was that Irving's views, which he called "obtuse" and "discredited" in connection with Auschwitz, had to be considered useful irritating, not in any way plausible or persuasive, and he went on to quote a statement by Raul Hilberg that Holocaust deniers should not be silenced because they have led people who have done serious research on the subject "to review what we might consider obvious". 38 Craig found Irving's attempt to exonerate Hitler from responsibility for the extermination of "non-persuasive" Jews
2.5.12 However, Craig did a first-hand archival research on the history of Nazi Germany; and is known as a generous reviewer. Recently, for example, he was hired for his favorable examination of a controversial book by young political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, a book that argued in a crude and dogmatic way that practically all Germans had been anti-Semitic assassins since Middle Ages, he wanted to exterminate the Jews for decades before Hitler came to power and actively participated in the extermination when he started. The book was then exposed as a fabric of misrepresentation and misinterpretation, written in shocking ignorance of the enormous historical literature on the subject and which has committed numerous elementary errors in its interpretation of the documents.
Mr. Irving is ready and willing to change the rules that govern his use of evidence whenever it suits him; and when one of his characters (and in particular Hitler) does something that even Irving finds reprehensible, his whole position in the story is set to shift responsibility. When, on the other hand, he is doing something that Mr. Irving is openly prepared to approve, his central responsibility is fully, and even extravagant, declared.
2.5.14 As AJP Taylor had pointed out, Irving believed that Churchill could be proven guilty of killing General Sikorski even though there was no direct documentary evidence of an order from him to do so, but at the same time he insisted that Hitler was not guilty of kill Jews because no document was found in which he signed an order to do so.
2.5.18 After doubting the quality of Irving's scholarship, Trevor-Roper stated that Irving's portrait of Hitler was in many ways far less original than he seemed to think, and in the area where it was truly original, namely his Hitler's denial of knowledge or responsibility for the extermination of the Jews was extremely unlikely.
2.5.19 Emphasizes that Irving omitted key passages from excerpts quoted from Goebbels's diary and that Himmler's telephone record of November 30, 1941, which Irving mentioned four times in the book, clearly did not refer, as Irving stated, to "liquidation" of Jews in general, but only for a particular load of Jews from Berlin. "Generally
speaking," Trevor-Roper noted, "we do not veto an action unless we think it might otherwise occur." He continued:
Mr. Irving's argument about the Jews represents his greatest weakness as a historian. Here, as in the Sikorski affair, he captures a small and questionable particle of "evidence"; builds on it, by private interpretation, a great general conclusion; and then neglects or reinterprets the most substantial evidence and probabilities against it. Because this flawed method is invariably used to excuse Hitler or the Nazis and to harm their opponents, we can reasonably speak of a consistent bias, unconsciously distorting the evidence.
Thus, according to Trevor-Roper, Irving's thesis of being a scrupulous and objective historian was completely false.
2.5.20 The same opinion was taken by Martin Broszat, director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich and one of the world's greatest historians of Nazi Germany. Broszat began his criticism of Hitler's war by criticizing the Irving's much vaunted list of archival discoveries ... he did little to broaden our knowledge of the important military and political decisions taken by Hitler, and therefore were not up to the claims Irving had made to him. Broszat has delved into the details of the documentary evidence presented by Irving in his book. He stressed, as Trevor-Roper, that Irving misinterpreted a specific ban ordered by Himmler to execute a particular load of Jews deported on November 30, 1941 as a general ban on all these executions, and that Irving's idea of having done this after talking to Hitler was absolutely debatable. He went on to show how Irving had not mentioned a passage in Goebbels' diary that referred to Hitler's champion of a radical "solution" to the struggle between life and death between Aryan race and the Hebrew bacillus ", and indeed in the way of quoting and commenting on the rest of the passage transformed it into the opposite of what he said……..Irving's double standards in dealing with the evidence were particularly clear in his extensive use of Hitler's entourage post-war declarations and at the same time failed to use, or dismiss as useless, post-war declarations by people who actually took part in the killing. of the Jews. In fact, Broszat continued: "Irving does not avoid manipulating documents" in order to make his thesis plausible. Thus, for example, relegated to a footnote by Hitler to the Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy, he put them in a misleading context, and reversed their chronology, in order to draw attention to the fact that Hitler was personally and openly stating here that the numbers of the Jews would have been great. All these detailed critical points will be taken up and extended below. The point here is that as early as 1977, Irving's work was clearly recognized by one of the highest authorities in Nazi Germany as partial, factually incorrect and based on the manipulation and falsification of documentary evidence.
2.5.23. When specialists with first-hand knowledge of World War II history sources came to consider the 1977 edition of Hitler's War, they found much more to criticize. The most critical of all was the American Charles W. Sydnor, Jr. who at the time of writing his review had just completed a long study on Soldiers of Destruction: The Division of the Death of the SS, 1933-1945, published by Princeton University Press. The thirty-page demolition of Irving's book by Sydnor deserves a long reflection because it is one of the few reviews of one of Irving's books for which the reviewer has manifestly undertaken a significant amount of original research. Hitler, not Himmler and Heydrich, began the campaign of terror and mass murder in Poland, as shown in the records of Hitler's speech to his generals on August 22, 1939. The Einsatzgruppen used in Poland no longer managed the fields of extermination in the east (p.12), but conducted mobile extermination operations in Russia. There were in fact two separate categories of Einsatzgruppen in Poland in 1939, none of which was directly subordinate to the army generals, and neither was commanded by the SS general Udo von Woyrsch, who directed only a single Einsatzgruppe (p.13 ). One group, consisting of three Einsatzgruppen SD and two regiments of the head of the death of SS, was subordinated to Heydrich as head of the security police and SD, while the other, composed of the regiment of the head of the death SS "Brandenburg" and SD EinsatzgruppeIII, operated under the command of Theodor Eicke, the pre-war leader of the concentration camp system of the SS. Significantly, Eicke issued orders to his units through General SS Günther Pancke from the train of Hitler's "Amerika" headquarters in the entire Polish countryside. In addition, there were at least six thousand SS soldiers and police and SD personnel active in Poland in place of Mr. Irving's "one hundred Waffen SS officials" attached to each body (there was no "Waffen SS" uniform) "during the Polish campaign, since there were no Waffen SS.) Their primary functions were not intelligence gathering, seizure of documents and counter-insurgency operations (page 13), but the liquidation of leaders, intellectuals, Polish professionals, priests and Jews, begin in October due to the British refusal of Hitler's peace offer (pp. 14, 37-38, 70), but were well advanced by the end of September, as the data of one of these Einsatzgruppe.
2.5.25 Sydnor continued to identify several other "gaffes" in Irving's book. These ranged from Irving's erroneous identification of the Tyrolean peasant chief of the early nineteenth century Andreas Hofer as a German nationalist fired by the French in the Ruhr in 1923 (page 315) and by his erroneous description of the Nazi film Kolberg as confronting the Seven Years' War (page 764: in fact, he dealt with the Napoleonic War) to his erroneous assumption that the Treblinka extermination camp was already operational in March 1942 (page 392) and his "assertion without documents". "that the surviving Jews in the Warsaw ghetto prepared their revolt in 1943 with weapons sold to them by Hitler's allies as they fled west through the city (p.509: in fact, Sydnor pointed out, there was no evidence that anyone was fleeing through Warsaw at this time, nor that the resistance movement in the Ghetto ever obtained weapons directly from any of Hitler's allies).
2.5.26 Sydnor identified many other minor errors in Irving's work. But he continued, "The inaccuracy becomes a distortion in the way Mr. Irving treats Hitler's fundamental racial and ideological goals." Thus, wrote Sydnor, Irving's narrative presentation of the Hitler invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 as a "preventive" war launched as a response to Stalin's aggressive plans against the West, resulted in a possible "contortion of facts" only based on ignorance of the exhaustively documented academic literature on the subject. Irving's report of the Wannsee Conference, Sydnor wrote, was "short, incomplete and completely misleading", omitting key passages from the relevant documentation and drastically underestimating its importance.
2.5.27 Sydnor continued: "The most disturbing technique that Mr. Irving employs in the effort to exonerate Hitler is the incorrect translation of the German language to misinterpret the meaning of Nazi terminology for the destruction of European Jews". For example, Alfred Rosenberg, minister of the Reich for the eastern occupied territories, observed that in a conversation with Hitler of December 14, 1941, "I would be on the point of view, not to mention the extermination of the Jews". Hitler, he reported, agreed with this, adding that the Jews had caused the war and therefore it was not surprising that they would suffer the consequences. Irving leaves out the next part of the report, relegates the first part to a footnote and translates the key phrase as "I felt I should not mention the killing of Judaism". This is not an accurate translation of the German original, as Sydnor pointed out. In the phrase Ich stände auf dem Standpunkt von der Ausrottung des Judentums nicht zu sprechen, the word Ausrottung means extermination and Judentum means Jewish race. Sydnor noted that when the terms Ausrottung and Ausrotten were used by people other than Hitler, such as Himmler's helper Rudolf Brandt and Himmler himself (on pages 867 and 575-6 of the book), Irving translates them unequivocally as "extermination" and 'exterminate'.
2.5.28 Sydnor continued to make some devastating criticisms of Irving's use of contemporary witnesses. He pointed out that (for example) Karl Wolff, Himmler's personal chief of staff and liaison officer at Hitler's headquarters, that Irving had told him that Himmler had conducted the "Final Solution" without the knowledge of Hitler and that he himself he had been ignorant of the killings, had been exposed as a liar when evidence of visits he had paid to Auschwitz and Lublin in the summer of 1942 and a letter he had received in April 1942 describing the killing of Serbian Jews emerged in mobile gas vans. A similar proof of Heydrich's successor as head of the Security Service, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was equally spotted and equally implausible. As for Heydrich himself, Sydnor demonstrated in a long demolition of Irving's account of the circumstances surrounding his murder that almost everything Irving wrote about the subject was obviously wrong and completely undocumented. Moreover, Irving omitted to mention in his story that Hitler himself had ordered the first ten thousand Czechs to be executed in retaliation for the murder, then the destruction of the village of Lidice, which Irving presented without evidence for hosting the killers.
2.5.29 When Irving reached the conspiracy to kill Hitler that culminated in the July 20, 1944 bomb plot, Sydnor notes that "the further persists in the story, the more difficult it becomes to untangle what Hitler said about the conspirators from how Mr. Irving feels on them. "Irving uncritically trusted of conspiratorial Gestapo descriptions and invents incidents that never occurred, especially the champagne party at the home of conspirator General Olbricht after the conspirators thought their plot was successful , when the General was known elsewhere. In his efforts to present Hitler in a human light, Irving, Sydnor wrote, manipulated the sources, invented incidents (such as Hitler's alleged reproach of the judge at the conspiratorial trial, Roland Freisler) and once again, as often, failed to give adequate documentary references. "The technique of devising harmful statements and uncritically relying on doubtful sources and witnesses," Sydnor concluded, "deepens the impression that an inflexible prejudice is the shaky foundation of Irving's revisionist building." 62 This extended in particular to his presentation of Hitler's political testament, whose virulent anti-Semitism has minimally minimized. And Irving's last-minute description of Hitler followed the first edition of HR Trevor-Roper 'so closely, paragraph by paragraph, that he also repeated small errors that Trevor-Roper corrected in later editions of his book, though not he never mentioned Trevor-Roper in his notes, but only the sources that Trevor-Roper had used, thus giving the unwary to read the impression he had made himself. 63 In this regard, as in others, Sydnor considered Irving pride in having given the best of all other Hitler scholars in the depth and completeness of his quest to be 'pretentious nonsense'.
2.5.30 Peter Hoffmann, the world's leading authority on the conservative resistance of Hitler and the individuals and groups behind the July 20, 1944 bomb plot, and a profound student of the German archival record of the war years, was highly critical of Irving . biography of Hermann Göring: Irving's constant references to archives, diaries and letters and the overwhelming amount of details of his work suggest objectivity. In fact they set up a screen behind which a very different agenda is treated ... Mr. Irving is a great obfuscator .... The distortions influence every important aspect of this book to the point of being blurred ... It is a unfortunate that Mr. Irving wastes his extraordinary talents as a researcher and writer to trivialize the greatest crimes of German history, on the manipulation of historical sources and on highlighting the theatricality of the Nazi era.
2.5.31 Hoffmann commented that while the 1977 edition of Hitler's War had "usefully provoked historians by raising the issue of the smoking gun: if an order could be found by Hitler to perpetrate a holocaust against the Jews", twenty-two years later, so much research has been conducted in this area by historians that, although he repeated it to Göring, "it is no longer possible to consider Irving's thesis as a useful provocation". Irving, he accused, misrepresented the course of events and misinterpreted key documents.
Similarly, John Lukács, an American historian who wrote extensively about the Second World War, declared in 1981 with respect to The War Between the General: Mr Irving's real mistakes are incredible. He says that "forty percent of prisoners in southern France turned out to be Russians who had volunteered to fight for Germany against Stalin". Irving writes about the "famous region of Lower Saxony tanks" (there is no such thing), and that in April 1945 "the German resistance was becoming increasingly determined" (in an era when the Germans had started to surrender in droves) He writes that the battle of Verdun "wiped out hundreds of thousands of young British, French and Germans. An Austrian corporal of eighteen named Adolf Hitler was wounded there." There were no British troops in Verdun, Adolf Hitler had never fought in Verdun, in 1916 he was 27, not 18 ... Irving's methods are not simply bad; they are abominable
2.5.33 Lukács recently renewed his criticisms of Irving in a general survey of historical writings on Hitler. Here he noted that Irving had picked up a "daunting amount of cards" and met "many survivors of the Third Reich hierarchy", especially men and women of the narrow circle of Hitler, particularly those who were sympathetic to Irving's opinions. 67 "Few critics and critics of Irving's books," Lukacs complained, not without justification, "took the trouble to examine them carefully. If they did, they would find that many of Irving's references and citations are not verifiable. "
2.5.34 So the Hitler War contained many errors in names and dates; more important, unverifiable and unconvincing statements abound. "There are references to the archives 'without dates, places or file or page numbers.'" Many of the archival references in Irving's notes ... were inaccurate and were not shown or shown. also refer to the relevant statements in Irving's text ". Lukács has found many instances of Irving's manipulations, attributing at least some false meanings to some documents or, in other cases, printing references to irrelevant ones."Often "a single document, or fragment of a document, was enough for Irving to construct a very debatable thesis on its contents or lack of it". "While some of Irving's" finds "cannot be ignored," Lukács continued, "their interpretation ... is, most of the time, compromised and even seriously imperfect." He condemned Irving for "frequent" twists "of documentary sources" and urged "considerable caution" in their use by other historians.
2.5.35 Similar conclusions were reached by Professor David Cannadine, currently director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, when he came to consider the first (and so far the only) volume of Irving's book on Churchill. In putting what Cannadine describes as the case for the prosecution, Irving observes, consistently applies a double probative standard, requiring absolute documentary evidence to convict the Germans (such as when he tried to prove that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust), while relying on circumstantial evidence to condemn the British (as in his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden) ... Every fault and failure of Churchillian ... is amplified a thousand times, while every virtue and victory is neglected, denigrated or only to reluctantly admitted. ' As a result of Churchill's highly antagonistic account of Irving, Cannadine observes, the editors who commissioned the book (Michael Joseph in London and Doubelday in New York) lowered the manuscript and had to be published by an unknown Australian company. "He has received almost no attention from historians or reviewers" and, Cannadine adds, "it is easy to see why".
2.5.36 According to Cannadine, Irving plays Churchill in this book as drunk, embittered, spiteful, excessively belligerent, prone to personal progress, and the tool of a corrupt union of predominantly Jewish financiers. He deliberately provoked Hitler in bombing London and voluntarily rejected Hitler's peace openings. All this and much more, Cannadine's accusations, are "based on ignorance, exaggeration and quite inadequate evidence". Irving's method is full of "excesses, inconsistencies and omissions". Even Irving admits that the sources on which it is based are "sparse", "scurrilous" and "should be treated with the reservation that all clandestine writings deserve". Many of them are taken from the archives of "disillusioned and disappointed Churchill critics". Irving, says Cannadine, "seems to be completely unaware of the recent work on the subject", which is not surprising considering that, as we have seen, he refuses to read the work of other historians, dismissing them as useless. It is not just that the arguments in this book are so perversely tendentious and irresponsibly sensationalist. It is also written in a tone that, at best, is casually journalistic and at worst quite exceptionally offensive. The text is full of errors from beginning to end. Churchill was given the wrong government job in 1922, the title of Lord Willingdon as Viceroy of India is not correct, and names like Montgomery-Massingberd, Lord Cranborne and Lord Cork and Orrery have consistently failed. De Gaulle is described as "power-hungry" and "amoral", Roosevelt as "crafty" and "cynical", Sinclair as "weak and disgusting", Dalton as "disgusting" and Brendan Bracken as the "carrot catch" of Winston. Churchill himself is depicted as a "plump politician", with a "swollen belly" and "soft rolls of meat", which "leper", "eat", "loaf" and "sponges". And when we are told that an official followed Churchill after visiting Paris, "like a sweeper after a cavalry parade", with "bucket and shovel in hand, cleaning", we have reached the language of the gutter, not only metaphorically , but also literally. Even in Cannadine's judgment, therefore, Irving is far from being the accurate and impartial historian he claims to be.
2.5.37 Another indication of factual inaccuracy and unreliability of Irving's writings is provided by the extent to which they got him into trouble with the law. He was sued for defamation by a retired naval officer who considered the remarks about him in The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17 defamatory, and was forced to pay a compensation of £ 40,000, confirmed by the refusal of Irving's appeal. His accusation in the introduction to the German edition of Hitler's War and the diary of Ann Frank was a fake, his editor was forced to pay damages. In 1968 he was sued for libel by Jillian Page, author of a newspaper article about him, following his claim that the article was the result of his "fertile brain"; Irving apologized to the High Court and paid the costs as a condition of Page agreeing that the action should be withdrawn. He was also forced to pay the costs in an unsuccessful libel action against Colin Smythe, publisher of a book (The Assassination of Winston Churchill) that attacked Irving's views on the death of General Sikorski.
2.5.38 Furthermore, during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Irving's books were published by a variety of mainstream publishers, including Penguin Books, which published the paperback edition of the first version of Hitler's War and the his associated volume in the years 1933-39, The War Path, Macmillan, under whose imprint the successive editions of Hitler's War appeared until around 1992; Hodder and Stoughton, who published the original paperboard; HarperCollins, whose pocket footprint Grafton Books published an edition of the biography of Irving's Göring in 1991; and pocket Corgi, which produced more than one of several editions of The Destruction of Dresden. By the end of the 1980s, however, it was no longer published by big houses, but it published all its books under its footprint, Focal Point. "If I write a bad book," he said in 1986, "or if I write two or three bad books, with the tits in it that the newspapers choose, which I am ashamed to admit they are probably right, so naturally the moment arrives when the editors turn their backs on me. "72 That wasn't why he did it when the editors actually turned his back on him a few years later. Furthermore, while dealing with the law at various points in his career, particularly in his arrest and deportation from Austria in 1983, his difficulties in this regard have considerably increased in the 1990s, with his condemnation for the Holocaust denial in Germany in 1992 and its ban on entering that country, in Canada and Australia, all in 1992-93. None of this would be expected from a reputable historian, and indeed it is impossible to think of any historian of any position who has been subjected to so many unfavorable legal judgments, or who has initiated so many defamation actions himself.
2.5.39 Recently Irving published on his website a letter from Hans Mommsen asking him to withdraw the visa shown there, an endorsement on which Mommsen evidently had not been consulted and of which he knew nothing until recently. Like other historians who have supported the "functionalist" vision of the "Third Reich", according to which Hitler provided the ideological context and implicitly or explicitly ratified the decisions that emerge from below, but did not personally or individually direct the policies, including the extermination of the Jews, Mommsen felt a certain understanding of Irving's opinions in the 1970s. Even Broszat, despite all his criticisms, thought that Irving had at least moved away from the previous omnipotent concentration on Hitler as the generator of everything that happened in the "Third Reich" . But these are only a small minority and, as we have seen, even a historian like Charmley has harsh words to say about the quality of Irving's scholarship. This reflects Irving's generally low reputation among professional historians since the late 1980s, and at all times among those with direct research experience in the areas he deals with. In an interview with the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum in the mid-1990s, in fact, Irving himself confessed that his reputation among historians was "down to the top", even though "it has not yet passed for Street"
2.6 Conclusion
2.6.1 In light of the above, it seems reasonable to conclude the following:Irving's claim that other historians copy each other and only that he addresses the original sources is false. Contrary to what he falsely claims in his rigorous methods of assessing the reliability of historical evidence, Irving arbitrarily declares sources such as Hitler's diaries or the oral testimonies of World War II survivors to be reliable or unreliable depending on whether you think you can use them for support its arguments. Irving has long been known for his factual inaccuracy among historians with real expertise in the subjects he writes about.The fact that he has had legal rulings and orders for government exclusion against him in several countries, and that he no longer finds reliable publishers for his work, also indicates that he is not a reputable historian. He himself admits that his reputation among professional historians is extremely low.
2.6.2 The following pages will document in great detail the reasons for Irving's poor reputation as a researcher and interpreter of the history of Nazism and the Second World War and a Hitler biographer.
________________________________________________
The number of books, magazines, and documentaries dedicated to Nazism in its thousand faces is impressive, and "Trial to the Holocaust" would appear to be just another brick in the cyclopean wall that depicts one of the greatest shame of the last century. And yet it is precisely the monumentality of the Nazi phenomenon that brings out this book as a true singularity.
The Holocaust denial movement began with Nazi officials and continues today. The term revisionism rather than denial is used by the movement's proponents. They do not deny the Holocaust, but are skeptical of the claims of six million dead, gas chambers, and an extermination policy.
________________________________________________
"People now believe with all their hearts that there are two parts to each story," he said in an interview.
"There are no two sides to any story. There are certain things that have happened and certain things that never happened."
Deborah E. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.
published books:
- Beyond Belief: The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945 1993
- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory 1994 (first edition1986)
- “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier” 2006
- “The Eichmann Trial” 2011
- “ Holocaust: An American Understanding” 2016
- “Antisemitism: here and now 2019
__________________________________________________________________
Commenti
Posta un commento