During his speech at the German Historical Institute, Evans commented that some of the prominent historians employed by German corporations to write about their wartime behaviour were too busy to do the research themselves or even to check the work of their junior co-authors and research assistants. A similar problem seems to apply to Evans himself. Some of the statements in his attack on me reflect an admitted failure to check sources and documents or a reliance on memory. His error in stating that Toepfer's senior post-war employee Hans-Joachim Riecke had been convicted at Nuremberg stemmed from the fact that he was relying on his memory of a conversation held in the 1970s and had not taken the simple precaution of a check on the internet. His statement in defence of the official Toepfer history that Christian Gerlach's draft chapter had "of course" been published as submitted by the author, as he told me, was not based on an examination of Gerlach's drafts.

According to Evans, the official history of Alfred Toepfer published in 2000 had been "devastating". The historical commission which had produced it included Hans Mommsen, "the leading German specialist on the Third Reich". Apart from a few discoveries of my own, I had merely brought to the attention of a British audience facts that the foundation's sponsored historians had previously revealed.

These are untenable points.

The official history of which Mommsen was one of the listed authors, far from being a devastating critique of the Hamburg millionaire, made relatively minimal concessions. The foundation's "Independent Academic Commission" had been obliged to make them by  previous revelations, mainly published in 1995 by a group of scholars based in Alsace and Lorraine.

The function of the official history was to put as favourable as possible a gloss on the uncomfortable facts revealed by Toepfer's critics, while claiming virtue for admitting that most of the revelations had been correct.  What Evans reports as a "devastating" verdict reads as follows:

"Alfred Toepfer was neither a promoter of the  National Socialists before 1933 nor an enthusiastic adherent of the National Socialist regime in the 12 years that followed. He was never moved to become a member of the NSDAP or any of its affiliates. And he never shared the central objectives of the leading National Socialists; he was far from being a racist or anti-Semite. Demonstrative endorsement of the German Reich's policy towards Jews or even individual joint responsibility for the ‘Holocaust' cannot be imputed to him; he did not enrich himself with ‘Aryanised' Jewish property. This explains why his de-Nazification process ended in the categorisation of ‘not incriminated', particularly since he was  released  as  a  blameless,  free  man  in  1947."

In his laudatio for Toepfer at the 75th anniversary celebration of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Mommsen characterised him as one of the "great Europeans".