Richard Evans' Lying About Hitler

[Doug Millison]

In his review of the Evans book, DeLong discusses another history 
(A.J.P. Taylor's)  that has been mentioned several times in this 
forum to support the notion that Germany didn't start WWII -- DeLong 
shows how this sort of argumentation relates to the historial 
approach of Holocaust deniers.  Here are some excerpts:

Review of Richard Evans, Lying About Hitler

J. Bradford DeLong
delong at econ.berkeley.edu

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/
May 2001


Richard Evans (2000), Lying About Hitler: History, the Holocaust, and the
David Irving Trial (New York: Basic Books: 0465021522).

Richard Evans (1997), In Defense of History (New York: Norton: 0393319598).

[snip]

Watt argued that the active shaping of one's views and interpretations of
the past by one's present politics did not keep one from being a historian,
and even a great historian: "Edward Gibbon's caricatures of early
Christianity... A.J.P. Taylor," and others clearly "allowed their political
agenda... to influence their professional practice," like Irving. Military
historian John Keegan agreed: Irving had "many of the qualities of the most
creative historians" and "has much that is interesting to tell us." In
Watt's view, "only those who identify with the victims of the Holocaust
disagree" with the proposition that Irving is a reputable historian. And, in
Watt's view, Irving's critics are not primarily concerned with pointing out
flaws in his historical writings but with stoning a heretic: "[f]or them
Irving's views are blasphemous and put him on the same level of sin as
advocates of paedophilia" (Evans, 2000, pp. 244-6).

[snip]

Or consider the examples raised by Donald Cameron Watt: Edward Gibbon and
A.J.P. Taylor. A.J.P. Taylor set out to write the Origins of the Second
World War as if Hitler were an eighteenth-century king who aimed at
reversing the (limited) results of the last (limited) war: a portrait of
Hitler as, as John Lukacs phrase, like the Empress Maria Theresa maneuvering
to recover the lost province of Silesia. All evidence that Hitler was
something else is thrown overboard, or ignored completely.

Now Taylor's history is not history as it really happened. All you have to
do is glance an inch beyond the frame of Taylor's picture--at Nazi domestic
policy and the Night of Broken Glass, or at Hitler's conduct of World War
II--and you find events grossly and totally inconsistent with Taylor's
portrait of an opportunist looking for diplomatic victories on the cheap.
Taylor's Hitler would never have widened the war by attacking the Soviet
Union and declaring war on the United States, or weakened his own military
resources by exterminating six million Jews, four million Russian prisoners
of war, and millions of others rather than putting them to work in the
factories making tanks and ammunition. Nevertheless, you can learn a lot
from Origins...

[snip]

But Evans has a response: that what makes Irving "discredited" is not the
imaginative interpretations he builds on top of the historical evidence he
has found, but instead his--mendacious--handling of the evidence itself. In
his evidence before and at the trial, Evans focused on a very basic
question: Does Irving tell the truth about what his source materials say, or
does he lie about them? Evans's answer was that Irving did not tell the
truth, that he did habitually lie, and so he was not a historian at all.
[snip]

Indeed, Evans found that Irving's misinterpretations were remarkably
obvious, and his embrace of Nazi rhetorical modes remarkably complete.
Irving is a man who refers to Jews as "our traditional enemies." He speaks
of "the Jewish ghettos of Great Britain." He attacks the "odd and ugly and
perverse and greasy and slimy community of "anti-Fascists" that run the very
real risk of making the world fascist respectable by their own appearance!"
He has prophesied that American Jews' "moving in to the same positions of
predominance and influence (media, banking, business, entertainment, and the
more lucrative professions like law, medicine and dentistry) that they held
in Weimar Germany" would lead to a rise of Nazism in America in twenty or
thirty years (Evans, 2000, pp. 136-7).

And near the end of the trial he addressed the presiding judge as "Mein
Fuehrer" (Evans, 2000, page 224).

Evans thus concluded that Irving was not just a bad historian whose mistakes
were due to "negligence... random in its effects," but not a historian at
all: "all the mistakes... in the same direction... deliberate manipulation
and deception" (Evans, 2000, page 205). That was, for Evans, the touchstone.
In Evans's mind historians should not be negligent, and they should not be
biased: "...there have been too many cases in the past of historians
selecting and suppressing evidence." But the one thing they could not do and
remain historians was to deliberately lie about what the historical evidence
said (Evans, 2000, p. 247). His overwhelming fascist sympathies and what he
had done to try to  get people to accept them meant that Irving's work
simply could not be trusted: as Hugh Trevor-Roper put it politely, whenever
Irving was most original he was least reliable.

[snip]

  According to Evans's
categorization--with its stress on being a truthful voice of the documents
and other primary evidence--Irving was not a historian at all, or not a very
good historian. (Of course, it is hard to see how A.J.P. Taylor can maintain
his reputation in Evans's eyes, given the passages on the Hossbach
memorandum in Origins of the Second World War.)

In Evans's view, a historian is a member of and a participant in an ongoing
discourse that grounds itself most firmly in the available primary sources.
Arguments between historians are believable and effective to the extent that
they are rooted in credible and genuine sources. The imaginative structure
of interpretation--the flesh that clothes the primary-source bones--is
important, but energy, ingenuity, and creativity in interpretation cannot
offset a weak base in what the sources actually say.

But is this enough? Don't we actually demand more of a historian? Don't we
demand not just that a historian accurately represent his or her primary
sources, but that the primary sources he or she relies on be the most
important or the most interesting or the most typical ones?

Moreover, doesn't the interpretive structure built on the primary sources
have to be convincing, psychologically plausible, and accessible to the
reader as well? [snip]  And A.J.P. Taylor's Origins of World War II is
ultimately a failure because its psychological picture of Hitler's
motivations and aims is inconsistent with what else we know about Hitler
from primary sources outside the book.

[snip]

  Misquotation and
mistranslation are greater sins against Clio than merely averting one's eyes
from pieces of evidence, or telling history to make a particular point
rather rather than as it really happened. But they are not the only sins.


[snip]
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