The Strange Case of David Irving

Evans' knowledge, both of the period and of the German language, are of an order to rival Irving's. He has little difficulty in showing that there are suspicious mistranslations, suggestive ellipses and, worst of all, some tampering with figures: in other words, that Irving knowingly inflates the death toll in the Allied bombing of Dresden while deflating it in the camps and pits to the East. And, yes, all the "mistakes" have the same tendency. In a crucial moment, Irving "forgot" what he had said about Nazi Gen. Walter Bruns, who had confessed to witnessing mass killing of Jews and had been taped by British intelligence while doing so. When it suited Irving to claim that Bruns didn't know he was being recorded, he claimed as much. When it didn't, he suggested that Bruns was trying to please his hearers. Having listened myself to Irving discuss this fascinating episode, I mentally closed the book when I reached this stage in it. It was a QED.

Irving has long been notorious for his view that Hitler never gave any order for the Final Solution and that there is no irrefutable document authorizing it. In court, he was unpardonably flippant on this point, saying airily that perhaps, like some of Richard Nixon's subordinates, a few of the rougher types imagined they knew what would please the boss. This argument has always struck me as absurd on its face in both cases, but Evans simply reduces it to powder. It's not too much to say that by the end of the trial, the core evidence for the Holocaust had been tested and found to be solid. The matter of Irving's reputation as scholar and researcher--which was the ostensible subject of the hearing--was so much "collateral damage."

It would be tempting to summarize this as a near morality tale, in which the truth emerges as the stainless winner over bigotry and falsification. However, the conflict is not conducted in quite such hygienic conditions. Irving did not publish a series of books on the Nazi era that were exposed as propaganda by a magisterial review from Evans. That's the way things are supposed to happen but rarely do. Instead, the efforts of a few obsessive outsiders have sharpened the orthodox debate between intentionalists and functionalists and also provoked a grand crisis in the "Holocaust denial" milieu, which now subdivides yet again between those who see Irving as a martyr and those who see him as a conscious, dedicated agent of Zionism who let down the team.