Since receiving the book Lying About Hitler by Richard J Evans for Christmas I have begun rereading and I have found my interest area for the project.
Evans refers to the strategy that the defense took as “three-pronged”, each corresponding with a different claim about Irving made by Lipstadt in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Lipstadt wrote that Irving “declared that Hitler repeatedly reached out to help the Jews”, and so the first action taken by the defense was to commission professional historians to provide expert reports proving that the Nazi’s developed policy to exterminate the Jews, that these exterminations did occur and that Hitler was involved in this operation.
Lipstadt also referred to Irving as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial” with “neofascist” and “denial connections”, who was “an ardent admirer of the Nazi leader”. So the defense commissioned experts to document Irving’s political views and connections to the far-right and extremist political organizations.
The third “prong” of the case of the defense was justify the claim by Lipstadt that Holocaust deniers “mistate, 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.” And it is this third claim made by Lipstadt, and the action taken by her lawyers to prove it to be so, with which Evans played a role, and with which I will be most interested for my project.
Irving’s misuse of history slots very nicely into the History Extension course, as it comes under the umbrellas of a historical debate or controversy, a historian’s work (and I use that term sparingly in regards to Irving), contrasting approaches to a historical personality, issue or event and the use and misuse of history.
So I am pretty much set on what I want my historical investigation to be about, although I need to develop this idea further. I need to make sure I don’t fall into the trap of just regurgitating the secondary sources I read, thus begging the question, what primary sources should I look at? Is it worth reading Hitler’s War, or should I just read the excerpts I find in my secondary sources? Definitely need some guidance in that regard Mr Wright.
My dad is able to retrieve the legal documents from the trial from his work, so I will get those and use those as primary sources.
I am still on the hunt for The Irving Judgement, which was actually published by Penguin, it’s on Amazon, does anybody use that site, is it good? I have found some really good websites, including Holocaust Denial On Trial (http://www.hdot.org). I have also been on David Irving’s very bizarre website, I was particularly confused by the gallery he has on there of his old secretaries, including a photo of each, and stating their ethnicity, what an odd man!
I will keep reading and blogging and hopefully develop my idea further.
