Given Irving's abilities as a researcher and the fact that he spoke German, there could be no doubt that these weren't mistakes but deliberate falsifications of the historical record to, in Evans' words, "give the impression that it supported [Irving's] view that Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews, or, if he did, opposed it." The report that Evans turned in to the court, and that he would testify to at trial, went far beyond calling Irving a Holocaust denier. He concluded that Irving could not be believed on any assertion without an independent examination of the evidence he cited for corroboration. "Irving's deceptions were there from very early on in his career," Evans writes, "and had remained an integral part of his working methods across the decades."

Irving, who acted as his own lawyer, requested that the trial be decided by a judge and not a jury. (Both sides agreed that the material involved was too massive and too complicated for a jury to process.) Guttenplan writes that the presiding judge, Charles Gray, was annoyed when Evans held up the trial by insisting on seeing a copy of any source, text or document Irving referred to.

"Having been through your work," Evans told Irving from the witness box, "I cannot really accept your version of any document, including passages in my own report, without actually having it in front of me." Gradually, Judge Gray came to see the necessity of Evans' seeming pedantry. Evans recounts one instance in which Irving claims to quote from Evans' report, "Irving casts doubt on almost all testimony at the Nuremberg War [Crimes Tribunal]." What Evans had actually written was "Irving casts doubt on almost all testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials or during the prior interrogations if it does not fit his arguments, alleging it was obtained by torture and threats."

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	Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial By Richard J. Evans Basic Books 318 pages Nonfiction Buy this book
	The Holocaust on Trial By D.D. Guttenplan W.W. Norton 328 pages Nonfiction Buy this book

That's just a minor example of the pattern of distortions that Evans demonstrated. But neither this proof nor Gray's sweeping verdict (calling Irving "a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist ... [disposed] where he deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in order to make it conform with his political beliefs") kept historians like John Keegan or Donald Cameron Watt -- both of them subpoenaed by Irving after refusing to testify for him voluntarily -- from continuing to insist that when Irving sticks to the facts he is a formidable historian. How, you long to ask them, can anyone who disputes the fact of the Nazis' systematic extermination of Jews can have any credibility as a historian? How can such a person have any concept of what a fact is?

Evans is at his best providing the answers to these questions. His analysis of the press coverage both during and after the trial cuts through the farrago of misconceptions that surrounded the case. Evans writes as a historian for whom scholarly rigor is sacrosanct, and in his assessments of John Keegan and Donald Cameron Watt there is a thinly disguised wonder at how foolish smart men can be.

Embarrassment is perhaps the most obvious -- and most charitable -- explanation for why, even after the verdict, Keegan and Watt continued to insist that Irving deserved to be regarded as a reputable historian. A more likely reason is that Watt and Keegan -- the latter mercilessly summed up by Guttenplan as a historian of the "maps and chaps" school -- looked at David Irving in his bespoke suit and saw someone they could understand far better than they could Deborah Lipstadt. How else do you account for the tone of schoolboy crush in Keegan's mid-trial dispatch for the Daily Telegraph?: "[Irving] is a large, strong, handsome man, excellently dressed, with the appearance of a leading QC"? And how else do you account for the revulsion toward Lipstadt in these lines from a commentary Keegan wrote following the verdict?: "Prof. Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"