Evidently, she failed. In January 2010, I received a flood of personal accusations from an official of the foundation. At the same time, he copied earlier charges to the Oxford authorities. In lieu of the hoped-for apology, he accused me of being not truthful, not proper, not fair, not decent, clandestine, not professional and much more.

Soon afterwards, I approached the chair of the Oxford Committee to Review Donations, Sir Ivor Roberts, to request the opportunity to meet with the committee to express my concerns about this deluge of accusations. Unless I had a full chance to rebut them, it would be impossible for the sub-committee it had set up to consider the Toepfer matter to adjudicate the historical merits fairly in the few minutes I would be permitted to meet with its members.

I also faced the delicate decision of whether or not to make a formal objection against the selection of Professor Richard Evans (Regius Professor of History at Cambridge) as the sole historian on Oxford's sub-committee. Evans had been the main expert witness for the defence in David Irving's libel case against Lipstadt. He was justifiably admired for his systematic and successful criticisms of Irving as well as for his wider work on the Nazi era. At the same time, he had been one of the first post-war beneficiaries of Toepfer's largesse. As a former "Hanseatic Scholar", he had a clear conflict of interest.

A description of the twists and turns in my dealings with the Oxford authorities, of the tangle of personal relationships between some of the players, and of the sheer miscommunications, would be worthy of a C.P. Snow novel. Suffice to report that I refused to meet with the sub-committee while Evans was its historian and submitted my full memorandum to the Oxford Committee to Review Donations only in October 2010, after the sub-committee had disbanded and several months after the publication of my article in Standpoint. Evans never saw, let alone commented on, my formal case presented to Oxford at that time.