I wish to use this opportunity to make clear my respect for Evans's distinguished work while at the same time listing some of his many factual errors regarding this particular matter. There may be a simple explanation for his seeming lack of grasp of the facts. Evans agreed to act as a member of the sub-committee appointed by Oxford and Cambridge in 2009 to look into my concerns about Toepfer's money as a matter of duty — he has intimated it was not altogether a welcome chore. His commitments have restricted the time he has been able to spend on the subject. He has informed me that he has been unable to carry out full checks on documents and sources in reply to my queries. In lieu, he appears to have relied on summaries prepared by the Toepfer Foundation and its sponsored academics as well as documents on the Foundation's website. Some of these materials are misleading and selective.

1. Evans disputes my contention that many of the key findings of the Toepfer Foundation's sponsored scholars were already in the public domain: "Hardly anything in the commission's 600-page report [of 2000] goes over ground already covered by anybody." His conclusion has not been researched. He states in a recent email: "I don't have the time to go over all the documentation again." About the alleged "shock" to the family caused by the publication (which Evans cites as evidence for the critical character of the 2000 book), he acknowledges in correspondence that he has no direct evidence for this "shock". He was relying on the Toepfer Foundation's version. In view of previous  warnings given in February 1997 by the PR agency, Goerres & Partner, employed by the Foundation before the "Independent Academic Commission" had even been established, the contention that the family was "shocked" by its relatively mild findings is implausible and self-serving.

2. Evans is unjustified in making light of the previous publications on Toepfer by a "group of scholars" in Alsace-Lorraine by suggesting they were the product of a single person, Lionel Boissou. Apart from Evans's  needlessly uncomplimentary personal comments on Boissou, the authors of "Ombres et lumières sur les fondations Toepfer" published in Saisons d'Alsace in 1995 and 1996 also included five academics at the universities of Strasbourg and Metz (Ayçoberry, Bischoff,  Breton, Strauss, and Wahl). The University of Strasbourg evidently took their findings seriously and in 1996 broke its links with the Toepfer Foundation. The ongoing researches of the German historian Karl-Heinz Roth provided supportive evidence and increased the concerns of the Toepfer Foundation's PR agency as shown in its report (included in the Foundation's dossier to Oxford submitted in June 2010). It is significant that Roth's 1999 article "Alfred Toepfer: Grosskaufmann, Kulturimperialist und Kriegstreiber", was a subject of discussion within the Foundation and within the Independent Academic Commission (as shown in the Toepfer archives) but was ignored in the text of the 2000 book and in Zimmermann's 2008 biography of Toepfer.

3. According to Evans, "The 42-page analysis of Mr Pinto-Duschinsky's first Standpoint article by Toepfer's biographer Jan Zimmermann did not admit that the Foundation had known about but suppressed the facts he, Pinto-Duschinsky, had uncovered." Yes it did — on point after point. (See, for example,  notes  I, XLV and XLIV,  http://toepfer-fvs.de/aktuelle-debatten.html under "Analyse".)

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