The Strange Case of David Irving

This in itself has led to an intriguing subplot, with Richard J. Evans' London publishers abandoning his book, "Lying About Hitler," because of their own pusillanimous fear of a libel suit and with Evans giving Guttenplan a rather dismissive review in a London newspaper. The issue before the court, says Evans, was not whether the Holocaust occurred but whether Irving is a fabricator. Of course that is formally true, but to my mind, Guttenplan rather beautifully shows it to be a distinction without a difference. Justice Gray, presiding, expressed the repeated hope that the case would not involve revisiting Auschwitz, but he had to "go there" all the same before the case was fully heard. It could not have been otherwise. As Raul Hilberg once phrased it, at Auschwitz history was destroyed at the same time that history was made. The question cannot be approached from the standpoint of truth without accepting this contradiction.

As an expert witness at the trial, however, Evans was quite devastating. "Lying About Hitler" is essentially an expanded version of his affidavit, and it redraws the whole terrain of the argument. No longer are we faced merely with the question of Irving's elementary right to speak or be published. We are invited to see if he deserves the title of historian at all. Evans' method is quite a simple one. He shows, first, that there are a number of errors, omissions and unsupported assertions in Irving's work. Now, this might be true of any historian, and there were indeed some distinguished academic practitioners in the witness box who maintained that no narrative is or can be free from error. However, what if, as Evans said under cross-examination:

"There is a difference between, as it were, negligence, which is random in its effects, i.e. if you are a sloppy or bad historian, the mistakes you make will be all over the place. They will not actually support any particular point of view .... On the other hand, if all the mistakes are in the same direction in the support of a particular thesis, then I do not think that is mere negligence. I think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception."