Dan wrote:
No, but she ranks lower than Irving in mine, so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. You see, three lies in 5 pages trumps 17 lies in 30 books.
Just by way of explanation, I think there is possibly some confusion over the Evans Report as evidence in the Irving/Lipstadt libel trial.
Apparently, there seems to be a consensus, done by some accountant "bean-counting", that in the
sum total of the professional life of David Irving, including books, articles, letters, his journal, etc., that "17 lies" were found.
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Evans Report. This was a report commissioned specifically for the defense of this case, and in no way represents a thorough in-depth accounting of everything Irving has ever written.
This is the introduction, by Evans, to his Report:
1.5.8 The two researchers compiled transcripts of the salient parts of the audiocassettes and videotapes and went through the material supplied by Irving during the process of Discovery, taking extensive notes. It was of course impossible to cover the whole of Irving’s oeuvre with complete thoroughness, and some principle of selectivity had to be applied. We decided that I would cover Irving’s general reputation as a historian, Irving’s attitude to Hitler, and the central issue of whether or not Irving was a Holocaust denier. On the equally important matter of whether or not Irving distorted and falsified history, we decided to concentrate on the ‘chain of documents’ which Irving on various occasions had claimed proved Hitler’s ignorance and disapproval of the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews. Each document was assigned to one or other of the research assistants for preliminary analysis. In this way we covered the entire documentary basis for Irving’s controversial claim.
http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/
(Look under the "Evidence" section and the Evans Report)
Irving contends that there is a "chain of documents" that support his claim that Hitler was not the instrument of the Jews destruction, and in fact has even stated that Hitler was the "biggest friend" the Jews had in the Third Reich. Obviously, part of the problem Irving has with Jewish groups is such a statement. However, Irving argues that events such as the Horthy-Hitler meeting, as one (of nine) of his "chain of documents" prove his contention.
Evans analyzed this "chain of documents", along with other topics in his Report.
The meat of his report, though, and the pillars of the defense case against Irving, are two sets of case studies. The first examines the nine links in Irving's "chain of documents." The second set, which takes up over 200 pages of the report, looks at Irving's use of evidence at three different stages of his career: his first book on the firebombing of Dresden, his treatment of the testimony of Hitler's adjutants in his book _Hitler's War_, and the explanation Irving gives for Nazi anti-semitism, mostly taken from his Goebbels biography.
D. D. Guttenplan, _The Holocaust on Trial_, ISBN 0-393-02044-4, 2001, p. 225
It is, in my opinion, an error to believe that all Evans found in the prodigious output of Irving's career is "17 lies" or whatever number. For example, on the Dresden book:
_The Destruction of Dresden_ launched Irving's career; first published in 1963, it is still probably the most most widely read of his books, and certainly the most widely admired. Yet Evans reveals that Irving
(1) fabricated a strafing attack on German civilians and refugees by British and American pilots, rearranging dates and misattributing testimony to bolster his account,
(2) knowingly took an account of a bombing run on Prague and pretended the events happened over Dresden,
(3) derived his own initial estimate of 135,000 dead from the testimony of a lone source who supplied no documentary evidence of any kind to back up his figure,
(4) raised the count to 202,040 on the basis of a typed copy of a document which later turned out to be a forgery,
(5) refused to modify the figure even when the man who supplied the document wrote to Irving to complain that he had been wrongly identified as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer when he was merely a urologist at the local hospital and "only heard of the numbers third-hand",
(6) suppressed internal evidence suggesting that the document was a fake, and
(7) also suppressed testimony--a letter to Irving--from a man whose job had been to tally the dead, and who put the number at just over 30,000,
(8) grudgingly acknowledged the discovery of an official "Final Report" that estimated the death toll at 25,000, but later discounted it, and finally
(9) ignored the discovery of the genuine document whose forged copy was referred to in (4) above.
The authentic total was 20,204--the forgers had simply added an extra zero!
Evans's dissection of _The Destruction of Dresden_ runs to over sixty pages; his analysis of the way Irving "uncrticially accepts the the testimony of Hitler's entourage when it is suitable to his arguments, but ignores it, suppresses it, manipulates it, or attempts to discredit it when it is not" goes on for more than a hundred pages.Neither gets more than a glancing mention at the trial. [Emphasis mine]
_The Holocaust on Trial_, D. D. Guttenplan, 2001, ISBN 0-393-02044-4, pp. 225-6
The Evans Report is over 700 pages. It was specifically designed and written for use by the defendants (Penguin Books and Lipstadt) to prove that what Lipstadt said about Irving was justifiable. To make the claim that Evans found "17 lies" in all of Irving's work is simply inaccurate.
Mark
