a fruitful epistemological examination about the current state of knowledge about the Third Reich. The Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs in his book The Hitler of History (1997) has labelled Irving an apologist for Hitler who consistently mishandled historical evidence in Hitler's favour. Lukacs maintains that over the years, Irving's treatment of Hitler has gone from a barely concealed admiration to a Great Man treatment. Lukacs argues that Irving's picture of Hitler is defective because of his tendency to confuse asserting that Hitler was a great warlord as being the same thing as proving Hitler was a military genius, which leads to a total neglect of the crucial question of why Hitler took particular decisions at particular times. Lukacs condemned Irving as a historical writer for his "twisting" of evidence (i.e. labelling Adolf Eichmann's statement before an Israeli court in 1961 that he heard from Himmler that Hitler had given a verbal order for the Holocaust as mere "hearsay"). Lukacs described Irving in the 1997 American edition of The Hitler of History as the most influential of Hitler's apologists, and found it "regrettable" that many professional historians "relied on some of Irving's researches" and praised Irving. Lukacs called Irving's historical opinions objectionable and inexcusable, and complained that too many of Irving's opinions were supported by footnotes that referred either to sources that did not exist or said something different from what Irving wrote. Some of the examples Lukacs cited in support of his claim was Irving's contemptuous statement mocking the Polish cavalry for charging German tanks (a legend discredited even in the 1970s when Irving wrote Hitler's War), asserting with no source that Hitler refused a lavish banquet prepared for him in Warsaw in 1939 out of the desire to eat the same rations as the ordinary German soldier, for crediting — again with no source — a statement to Hitler in August 1940 that he would let Churchill live in peace after defeating Britain, for falsely claiming Operation Typhoon, the German drive onto Moscow in 1941, was forced on him by his General Staff, and for putting his own words in a speech of Hitler in September 1943 implying Churchill was a decadent homosexual (not something that was in Hitler's speech). Lukacs asserted too many of the crucial statements by Irving in Hitler's War — such as his claim that Hitler foresaw Operation Uranus, the Soviet counter-offensive at the Battle