In his attempted rebuttal of my article, Evans denies that Toepfer's wealth after the war derived "from the supply of poison gas to Auschwitz, the employment of slave labour or anything similar". He thereby reflects the contention of the chief executive of the foundation that "according to the current state of historical research, Toepfer overall did not benefit economically [...]from WWII or the Holocaust." The problem here is that this appears to fly in the face of the financial statistics supplied in a chapter of the official history itself, which show the wartime profits of Toepfer's operation in Poznan (Posen). This was the city from which Toepfer's company traded with the German administration of the Lodz ghetto.

Evans goes far out of his way in his article to minimise the implications of Toepfer's wartime trade in Jewish suffering. He makes the improbable argument that Toepfer did not necessarily know what his manager in Poznan, Wilhelm Hochgrassl, was up to. Since Toepfer ran a family firm of which the Poznan branch was one of the most important parts during the Second World War and since the foundation's surviving archives contain records of meetings between Toepfer and Hochgrassl, it is not credible that Toepfer was unaware of the trade with the Lodz ghetto. In reply to my questions following his THE article, Evans clarified that Toepfer "and his business certainly did profit from wartime activities, e.g. in Posen [Poznan]." I am grateful to him for this answer. It is a pity he did not write this in his THE article.

Some of the most important evidence about the Toepfer firm's ghetto trade were supplied by a researcher at the Wannsee Institute in Berlin to Dr Christian Gerlach, then a junior academic employed by the Toepfer Foundation. It was by this route that Gerlach discovered and insisted on publishing that part of the trade consisted of the supply of caustic lime. Evans is correct in pointing out that this substance was not used exclusively to cover cadavers; it was used as well for building purposes. Similarly, Zyklon B had uses other than the gassing of Jews. However, Evans is unjustified in concluding that this uncertainty exonerates Toepfer. Assuming that the caustic lime and other materials supplied by Toepfer's firm to the SS administration in Lodz were all of a non-lethal character, this still leaves the undisputed fact that the firm participated in a criminal enterprise which was a cruel and integral part of the Holocaust.

The attempt by the Toepfer Foundation and by Pogge von Strandmann to deny that Toepfer was a Holocaust perpetrator entails the improper argument that the "Extermination Through Work" of the Jews and gypsies in the Lodz ghetto, the second largest in Poland, was no part of the Holocaust.

As if all this were not enough, Evans resorts to euphemism, dubious interpretation, and misquotation. Verbal cleansing is a potentially dangerous feature of historical discourse on the Holocaust. When Evans refers to Toepfer's post-war employee, SS Brigadier Edmund Veesenmayer, only as "a former senior German official in Hungary", he thereby fails to mention that he was Nazi plenipotentiary in Budapest during the deportation of more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews, almost all to Auschwitz. He was Eichmann's superior, though his private secretary, Barbara Hacke, attempted to deny this to the investigators at Nuremberg. Hacke then became Toepfer's private secretary for a number of years. Evans's bland reference to Veesenmayer in THE contrasts with the language he uses to describe Veesenmayer's brutal record in a subsequent review article in a German academic journal.

Coming on to dubious interpretation, Evans states that the charges of tax evasion, on the basis of which Toepfer was arrested in 1937, were trumped up and were, in reality, an indication of his opposition to the Nazi regime. This conflicts with the conclusion of Zimmermann, one of the foundation's sponsored historians and the author of the 42-page analysis of my Standpoint article which has already been mentioned. In that analysis, Zimmermann criticises me on the ground that my article presents the finding that Toepfer really was arrested mainly for tax evasion as if it were new. After the official history was published in 2000, writes Zimmermann, "it was clear that Toepfer was arrested above all for breaching currency exchange control regulations and not for political reasons. This was stressed recently in [Zimmermann's biography of 2008] p 78f."