Hitler's Historian. - Review - book review

National Review, April 2, 2001 by Jacob Heilbrunn

Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, by Richard J. Evans (Basic, 318 pp., $27)

National character may have more to do with historical writing than some historians would care to admit. Consider England. English historians have always regarded it as their duty to shock and astonish their readers-whether it was A. J. P. Taylor declaring that Hitler blundered into the Second World War, or, more recently, Niall Ferguson contending that Britain should never have battled Wilhelmine Germany. Tory and Marxist camps ensure that idiosyncratic and ideologically driven history is the rule, not the exception, and it sometimes even shapes government policy. Top-flight conservative historians such as Ferguson, Michael Burleigh, Andrew Roberts, and others ensure that history is fun and fractious. The conservative clique at Cambridge's Peterhouse College was even the subject of a television sitcom in England. Can anyone imagine an American sitcom based on the Harvard history department?

Perhaps it shouldn't be altogether surprising, then, that the English Holocaust denier David Irving has positioned himself as the bad boy of World War II historians, one whose skill at ferreting out documents makes him impossible to ignore. Couple that with the fact that few historical interpretations are set in stone and that historians are understandably reluctant to condemn someone for expressing unpopular views, and you have a fairly open field for the likes of Irving. Irving has won praise from big historical guns like Gordon Craig, who observed that "such people . . . have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise." Even after Irving's failed libel suit last year against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, who singled him out in her book Denying the Holocaust, the military historian John Keegan lauded him, as has Donald Cameron Watt (formerly of the London School of Economics). The idea seems to linger on that, whatever his failings and excesses, Irving is a serious historian.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth, as Richard J. Evans shows in his superb Lying About Hitler. A professor of history at Cambridge, Evans has written a number of books on Germany and served as a key defense witness for Lipstadt. Evans is a man of the Left, but he has produced substantial works of history, and attacked trendy postmodernist relativists in his recent In Defense of History. Indeed, to Evans, Irving's libel suit seemed the perfect opportunity to explore the boundary between justified historical reinterpretation and outright falsehood. And though Evans does not say so, the sheer theatrics of the trial itself must also have proved irresistible. With Irving as the accuser, the American Jewish historian Lipstadt as the defendant, and Princess Diana's former lawyer, Anthony Julius, as her attorney, the trial could have been made in Hollywood, which it perhaps will be.

Evans's book, based on a 700-page report for the defense, is never less than absorbing. A sure-footed writer, he allows the story to tell itself, eschewing rhetorical flourishes in favor of a clinical dissection of Irving's works and statements. He begins by explaining the stakes of the trial, then moves on to Irving's depiction of Hitler's role in the Holocaust, which Irving believes was negligible. He examines Irving's first book, a 1963 volume on the Allied bombing of Dresden, in order to show that his elastic understanding of historical truth was apparent from the outset. In perhaps his most exciting chapter, Evans describes the atmospherics of the trial itself, before concluding with a discussion of Irving's British defenders.

As Evans reminds us at the outset, Lipstadt's victory was anything but a foregone conclusion. In contrast to the United States, British libel law favors the plaintiff, who has only to show that the defendant published statements damaging to his or her reputation. Only three possible lines of defense existed for Lipstadt. The first was to dispute the meaning of the statements to which the defendant objected. The second was to admit their meaning, but deny that they were defamatory. The third was to show that Lipstadt's contentions were, in fact, true. The last is what Lipstadt and her attorney chose to prove.

Thus, Evans, with the assistance of several researchers, sifted through the large corpus of Irving's writings in order to establish that he had indeed systematically denied not only Hitler's responsibility for the murder of the Jews but the existence of the Holocaust itself. Evans starts by showing how closely Irving identified with Hitler, arguing that Irving's goal was to normalize Hitler, to portray him as an ordinary human being. In his 1977 book Hitler's War, Irving deemed Hitler a "patriot" who had tried to lead Germany to deserved greatness. Indeed, Evans quotes a statement of Irving's in which he declared that destiny had selected him to be the Fuhrer's biographer. As Evans observes, "Irving . . . saw himself in the end not as a neutral, objective historian but as Hitler's representative in the world after his death, as the historian chosen, as it were, by the Fuhrer himself."