Richard J. Evans - Role As An Expert Witness in Irving V. Lipstadt

Role As An Expert Witness in Irving V. Lipstadt

Evans is probably best known to the general public in the role of an expert witness for the defence in the high profile libel case of David Irving against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, Irving v. Lipstadt. Lipstadt was sued for libel by Irving, after she referred to him as a "holocaust denier" and "an ardent follower of Adolf Hitler" in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. Lipstadt further accused Irving of "distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes... skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, particularly those that exonerate Hitler."

Evans acted as an expert witness for the defence in the case. His role was to investigate Irving's books, speeches, and other publications to determine whether Irving was, in fact, a Holocaust denier who had manipulated documents to serve his own political interests. Starting in the autumn of 1997, Evans, along with Thomas Skelton-Robinson and Nik Wachsmann, two of his PhD students, closely examined Irving's work. They found several instances in which he had used forged documents, disregarded contrary evidence, selectively quoted historical documents out of context, and mis-cited historical records. Evans concluded that Irving was a Holocaust denier who had twisted and distorted the historical record in order to further his own political ideals; the court accepted this view. Evans proved to be a powerful witness in Lipstadt's ultimately successful defence, and he later wrote a book about his experience, titled Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial based on his expert report to the court.

The cross-examination of Evans by Irving was noted for the high degree of personal dislike between the two men. Such was the degree of dislike that Irving challenged Evans on very minor points, such as Evans doubting the fairness of a 1938 German plebiscite in which the Nazi regime received 98.8% of the vote. A subject that much engaged Irving and Evans in a debate was a memo by the Chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers to the Reich Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger in which Lammers wrote that Hitler ordered him to put the "Jewish Question" on the "back-burner" until after the war. Evans chose to accept the interpretation of the memo put forward by Eberhard Jäckel in the 1970s; Irving chose to interpret the memo literally and taunted Evans by saying, "It is a terrible problem, is it not that we are faced with this tantalizing plate of crumbs and morsels of what should have provided the final smoking gun, and nowhere the whole way through the archives do we find even one item that we do not have to interpret or read between the lines of, but we do have in the same chain of evidence documents which...quite clearly specifically show Hitler intervening in the other sense?" In response, Evans stated "No, I do not accept that at all. It is because you want to interpret euphemisims as being literal and that is what the whole problem is. Every time there is an euphemism, Mr. Irving … or a camouflage piece of statement or language about Madagascar, you want to treat it as the literal truth, because it serves your purpose of trying to exculpate Hitler. That is part of … the way you manipulate and distort the documents."

In a 2001 interview, Evans described to the Canadian columnist Robert Fulford his impression of Irving after being cross-examined by him as: "He was a bit like a dim student who didn't listen. If he didn't get the answer he wanted, he just repeated the question." His findings and his account of the trial were published in his 2001 book Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, And The David Irving Trial, which was published as Telling Lies About Hitler in the United States in 2002. The High Court rejected Irving’s libel suit and awarded costs to the defence.