Expert Report by Professor Richard Evans (2000) IRVING VS. (1) LIPSTADT AND (2) PENGUIN BOOKS EXPERT WITNESS REPORT BY RICHARD J. EVANS FBA Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge Warning: This title page does not belong to the original report. The original report starts on the second page which is to be considered page number 1. IRVING VS. (1) LIPSTADT AND (2) PENGUIN BOOKS EXPERT W ITNESS REPORT BY RICHARD J. EVANS FBA Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge Contents 1. Introduction 3 1.1 Purpose of this Report 3 1.2 Material Instructions 4 1.3 Author of the Report 4 1.4 Curriculum vitae 9 1.5 Methods used to draw up this Report 14 1.6 Argument and structure of the Report 19 2. Irving the historian 26 2.1 Publishing career 26 2.2 Qualifications 28 2.3 Professional historians and archival research 29 2.4 Documents and sources 35 2.5 Reputation 41 2.6 Conclusion 64 3. Irving and Holocaust denial66 3.1 Definitions of ‘The Holocaust’ 67 3.2 Holocaust denial 77 3.3 The arguments before the court 87 (a) Lipstadt’s allegations and Irving’s replies 87 (b) The 1977 edition of Hitler’s War 89 (c) The 1991 edition of Hitler’s War 92 (d) Irving’s biography of Hermann Göring 100 (e) Conclusion 103 3.4 Irving and the central tenets of Holocaust denial 106 (a) Numbers of Jews killed 106 (b) Use of gas chambers 126 (c) Systematic nature of the extermination 134 (d) Evidence for the Holocaust 140 (e) Conclusion 173 3.5 Connections with Holocaust deniers 174 (a) The Institute for Historical Review 174 (b) Other Holocaust deniers 190 3.6 Conclusion 200 4. Irving’s writings on Hitler 205 4.1 Admiration 205 4.2 Exculpation 217 4.3 Historical method: case-studies 220 (a) Irving’s ‘chain of documents’ 220 (b) Evidence at Hitler’s trial in 1924 223 (c) ‘Reichskristallnacht’ November 1938 233 (d) The expulsion of Jews from Berlin, 1941 317 (e) The Schlegelberger note, 1942 363 (f) The Goebbels Diary entry of 27 March 1942 395 (g) The Himmler minute of 7 October 1942 428 (h) Hitler’s meetings with Antonescu and Horthy in April 1943 437 (i) The deportation and murder of the Roman Jews in October 1943 456 (j) Ribbentrop’s evidence at Nuremberg 478 5. Irving’s use of evidence 493 5.1 Introduction 493 5.2 The bombing of Dresden 497 (a) Background 497 (b) Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden 499 (c) Misstatement, misrepresentation, misattribution 500 (d) Falsification of statistics 508 (e) Dresden and Holocaust denial 564 a (f) Conclusion 570 5.3 The evidence of Hitler’s adjutants 573 (a) Background 573 (b) Hitler’s entourage and its postwar evidence 589 (c) Individuals in the entourage 617 (d) Hitler’s decision-making process 678 (e) Conclusion 687 5.4 Explaining Nazi antisemitism 691 (a) Introduction 691 (b) Jewish criminality 692 i (c) The boycott of 1 April 1933 698 (d) Chaim Weizmann’s alleged ‘declaration of war’ in 1939 705 (e) The Eichmann memoirs 717 (f) The ‘Kaufman plan’ 718 6. Conclusion 726 1. Introduction 1.1 Purpose of this Report 1.1.1 This Report is prepared pursuant to the Order of Master Trench dated 15 December 1998 directing that each party may adduce expert evidence from historians and po- litical scientists to address relevant issues in the proceedings. It has been written to assist the Court by providing an expert opinion on allegations made in Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, published in 1994 by Penguin Books, about Mr. David Irving. 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. Irving is ‘a discredited figure’ as a historian (p. 180)1. 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 con- verted 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). 2. Irving skews documents and misrepresents data in order to exonerate Hitler. He is ‘an ardent admirer of the Nazi leader’ (p. 161). 3. 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 allega- tion 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 his- torical 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. 1.2 Material instructions 1.2.1 This report has been prepared on the instructions of Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya, the solicitors respectively to the First and Second Defandants. I received both written and oral instructions to provide expert opinion on the historical writ- ings and speeches of David Irving with reference to the allegations made about them by Deborah Lipstadt. I have been given access to the Statement of Claim served on 5 September 1996; the Defences of the First and Second Defendants served on 12 February 1997 and 18 April 1997 respectively; the Reply to both Defences served on 19 April 1997; documents disclosed by the Plaintiff pursuant to his discovery obligatoons, and various documents from the Plaintiff’s various Lists of Documents as referred to in the footnotes to this report. 1.3 Author of the Report 1.3.1 I am a recognized authority on modern German history and have been teaching and researching it for the last thirty years. Since I began researching for my Oxford D.Phil. dissertation in 1969, I have acquired an excellent knowledge of German: I wrote my book Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich: Die Stimmungsberichte der Hamburger Politischen Polizei 1892-1914 (Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989) in German myself, and I have lectured in German at numerous German universities and on various public venues. As a result of my book on the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 (Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the CholeraYears 1830-1910 (Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1987; German edition 1990) I was invited to deliver the principal address in German at the centenary commemoration in Hamburg City Hall in 1992. I have made numerous radio and television broadcasts in German, for North German Ra- dio and other stations as well as for the BBC World Service, and my work on Ham- burg was the subject of a 45-minute television programme, featuring interviews with me in German, in 1989 (Mr. Evans geht durch Hamburg, NDR 3). 1.3.2 Because my research has necessitated lengthy periods of research in German ar- chives and libraries, I have spent a great deal of time in Germany over the last thirty years, including eighteen months as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin in 1970-72, eighteen months as a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Free University of Berlin in 1981, 1985 and 1989, and various periods as a Research Scholar or Senior Scholar of the German Academic Exchange Service. I have also twice been a resident member of the Institute for European History in Mainz. My work has taken me to virtually all major German towns and cities, including Bamberg, Bochum, Bremen, Coburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Erfurt, Essen, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Munich, Potsdam, Schwerin, Stutt- gart, and so on. I am familiar with Germany and the Germans as well as with the German language. 1.3.3 My research has ranged widely over German history in the last three centuries. It has become well known for the thoroughness and comprehensiveness of its use of un- published manuscript material. Much of it has concentrated on the nineteenth cen- tury. Some of my most important work, however, has also dealt with the Second World War. In particular my book Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Ger- many 1600-1987 (Oxford University Press, 1996), based on unpublished manuscripts and typescripts in 26 archives, contains three Chapters (pp. 613-737) on the ‘Third Reich’, of which Chapter 16 (pp. 689-737) deals exclusively on the war years 1939- 45, using particularly files of the Reich Ministry of Justice in the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz. More recently, my current work on the history of German criminology has led me to use material in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich.