Telling Lies About Hitler

THIS book is about the libel case brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in the year 2000. The basis for the case was Lipstadt's published claims that Irving had falsified the historical record consistent with a far-rightwing political agenda. The defence team therefore had to justify its claims in court. On page 197 Richard Evans suggests that the fundamental issue at stake in the trial was ‘historical research at the most detailed and basic level, about the very creation of historical knowledge from the remains the past has left behind’. This was not apparent to the casual observer at the time of the trial, when the sensationalist media feeding-frenzy repeatedly focused on Irving's more extravagant claims and more extreme views at the expense of the real substance of the daily proceedings. Nor does it describe the perceptions of some of those Holocaust survivors who attended the courtroom and who, in Neal Ascherson's words, were hoping for ‘a sort of Last Judgment, the breaking of the Seventh Seal to reward the righteous and drown the wicked, and flood the Earth with truth too blinding to deny’ (p. 205). Nor would it find a precise echo in the writings of another chronicler of what should more accurately but less appropriately be called the Lipstadt/Penguin trial, the journalist D. D. Guttenplan: in his lesser book, The Holocaust on Trial, Guttenplan characterises Evans, as a result of the latter's approach and demeanour as expert witness in the case, as a ‘pedant's pedant’. Nor, of course, would the interpretation please Irving himself. Yet none of this need detain us here; Evans is correct

Art history · Casual · Hoax · Political science · Politics · Sensationalism · The Holocaust · Witness · History · Law · Law in Society and Culture