such an event. Another study in German social history was Tales from the German Underworld (1998), where Evans traced the life stories of four German criminals in the late 19th century, namely a homeless woman, a forger, a prostitute and a conman. In Rituals of Retribution, Evans traced the history of capital punishment in Germany, and using the ideas of Michel Foucault, Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias as his guide argued that opposition to the death penalty was strongest when liberalism was in the ascendancy, and support for capital punishment coincided when the right was in the ascendancy. Thus, in Evans' view, capital punishment in Germany was never a mere matter of law being disinterestedly applied but was rather a form of state power being exercised. In addition, Evans examined such subjects as belief in witchcraft, torture, the last words of the executed, the psychology of mobs, varying forms of execution from the Thirty Years War to the 1980s, profiles of executioners, cruelty, and changing views towards the death penalty. In the 1980s, Evans was a conspicuous figure in the Historikerstreit, a controversy surrounding the historical work and theories of German historians Ernst Nolte, Joachim Fest, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Hagen Schulze, Imanuel Geiss and Klaus Hildebrand, all of whom Evans considered German apologists attempting to white-wash the German past. Evans' views on the Historikerstreit were set forth in his 1989 book, In Hitler's Shadow. In that book, Evans took issue with Nolte's acceptance of the Commissar Order as a legitimate military order; with Nolte's argument that the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Ukrainian Jews were a justifiable "preventive security" response to Soviet partisan attacks; his description (citing Viktor Suvorov) of Operation Barbarossa as a "preventative war" forced on Hitler by an impending Soviet attack; and his complaints that much scholarship on the Shoah expressed the views of "biased" Jewish historians. Evans characterized Nolte's statements as crossing the line into Holocaust denial and he singled out Nolte's rationalization that since the victors write history, the only reason why the Third Reich is seen as evil is because it lost the war. Evans also denounced, as an attempt to justify the Holocaust, Nolte's claim that Chaim Weizmann's letter of 3 September 1939 to Neville Chamberlain, promising that the Jewish Agency would support the war effort constituted "Jewish declaration of war" on Germany that justified the pre-emptive internment of Jews in concentration camps. In