Nick Terry
Illuminator
This misses the point about the Rankean paradigm, which was primarily about research methodology, above all placing archives at the centre of historical research. Social sciences likewise organised themselves to a significant degree around distinctive research methodologies, e.g. ethnography for anthropology, or social surveys for sociologists, or the testing laboratory for psychologists.
It was precisely these social science methods and their influence that led to 20th Century innovations like the systematic gathering of eyewitness accounts and oral histories - the 2,300 oral histories of former slaves gathered in the mid-1930s were some of the first examples of this. The British Mass Observation diary-writing project was another example - mainly revolving around 480 diarists.
What is now 'archived' is vastly more expansive than was the case in Ranke's day, the state was never the only institution to preserve archives, churches always did, but now a plethora of other social groups do this, and they preserve or collect a wide range of materials, from diaries and letters to oral history videos they have conducted themselves. All this goes hand in hand with a growth in the types of history that are written, as well as cross-pollination between them.
The state-worshipping forms of 'Great Man' history typical of Ranke's era are decidedly old-fashioned.
Well, no, it's not a unitary subject, because testimony takes radically different forms and is collected and preserved in different ways, at different times after an event. Criminal lawyers frequently deal with the testimonies of eyewitnesses to singular events, and so the psychological research that exists to support them has been geared towards the questions that concern lawyers, especially the problems of witness identification and 'weapon focus'. Some of this research translates very well to historical questions, but it is relatively useless for the problems confronting many other historians.
Social historians might use life histories recorded orally by interviewers, or they might conduct interviews themselves. Testimony about extended periods of someone's life is different to testimony about the events of a few minutes or hours, as might be the case in court.
I have seen two history PhD students talk about their oral history research this past academic year alone, one working on a social and cultural history of the Sixties in Britain, the other working on anti-apartheid activists in 1980s Soweto. In both cases, gender issues became a significant factor influencing what was said and how the respective memories were constructed 30-50 years later.
In both cases also, the interviews were necessary to get at things which are not preserved in other sources; while contemporary media recorded the broad outline of 'what happened', they don't necessarily tell us how the events were experienced and understood. Anti-apartheid activists were operating in clandestine conditions and wrote little down; what was written down was often seized by the police, and what was seized by the police was destroyed deliberately before the transition to full democracy. Similarly, while many teenagers and some twentysomethings were writing 'dear diary' and sending each other potentially telling letters in 1965, these sources aren't necessarily archived - the authors threw them away when they moved, still hold on to them or have passed them onto relatives who have forgotten them in their attics. Maybe when the next generation is sorting out their grandparents' effects and come across a diary explaining how excited they were to see the Beatles they might think to deposit it in an archive. Or not.
Testimony has a sociology as well as a psychology - who gives a testimony is socially constructed, whether that be the refusal of a witness to testify against a gang that are making threats, or it's the decision of a now retired housewife to accept a request from an Oxford PhD student to talk about her late teens in the mid-1960s.
Cultural differences also come into play; western cultures are used to testifying as individuals in a variety of different contexts even without having been in a court, whereas a number of African societies take a far more collective approach - they will testify to things they did not see themselves because the events were talked about by the whole village or 'street', and not see anything odd about this, as we would.
Collective memory, social memory and cultural memory are therefore all concepts that have to be absorbed to understand testimony in a wide variety of contexts. They then trigger certain methodological corollaries, such as analysing the body of testimonies collectively, rather than singling out one testimony at a time. That is what judges and juries do when weighing up the sum total of testimonies in a particular legal case; this doesn't stop them discounting one witness and believing another.
As for the epistemology of testimony, this is a distinct field within philosophy now, and is decidedly interdisciplinary precisely because history, law and psychology have all developed discipline-specific concerns. C.A.J. Coady's Testimony (1992) is a foundational work and mounts a counteroffensive against reductivist interpretations of testimony. Social epistemologists like Jennifer Lackey now research testimony extensively. Also relevant for this discussion is Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice, specifically testimonial injustice, where the testimony of women and other non-dominant groups is devalued explicitly or implicitly in social or legal settings. Much other philosophy examining testimony does so through a legal prism, e.g. Douglas Walton's Witness Testimony Evidence; Walton is also very good on corroboration and the convergence of evidence. Philosophers of legal evidence and the philosophy of evidence in general all tackle similar themes as well (eg William Twining, David Schum, Susan Haack).
In case you forgot, I am a university historian, and I teach the philosophy of history and historical theory at masters' level; I've used some of these texts in seminars. Teaching legal history in the form of the history of war crimes trials is another context in which this theme is explicitly addressed in class.
But I look around at my colleagues' courses, their fields and the literature that exists for them and I find them using memoirs, oral histories, diaries and other testimonial sources, along with the critical literatures about these source types, so once again, this stuff isn't unique to the history of the Holocaust in the slightest.
The example you give below doesn't follow from this statement at all.
You're referring to Hoettl's affidavit (2738-PS) which was the source cited in the Nuremberg judgement to support an estimate of 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis. This source and the judgement were of course one of the reasons why 'six million' caught on and became the standard number mentioned. So Hoettl's affidavit will always have a historical significance irrespective of what it actually said and whether that single testimony is of probative value.
But the IMT judgement cited it because the tribunal had heard many different sources, from Nazi documents to investigative reports to other testimonies offering statistics and figures for the number of murdered Jews, including one from Dieter Wisliceny reporting a similar hearsay statement of Eichmann about 5 million victims, and another from Rudolf Hoess, also attributed to Eichmann that evidently conflated the total number deported (2.5 million) with the number deported to Auschwitz alone, which Hoess soon enough repudiated and corrected, already while at Nuremberg.
Benz cited Hoettl in the introduction to an edited collection examining the demographics of the Holocaust in individual countries, i.e. by definition the main body of the book did not rely on Hoettl and was examining other sources to produce numbers for France, Germany, etc. In other words, he cited Hoettl (a) because it's the acknowledged source of the post-1945 popular acceptance of 'the six million' and (b) because various idiot deniers have over the years made the rookie mistake, which you are now repeating, of thinking that they can debunk what is in essence a tertiary source of data - hearsay (1) that may or may not have been remembered correctly from Eichmann (2) who may or may not have remembered statistics passing through his office (3) correctly - and make the slightest dent in the sum total of the evidence.
Your understanding of the provenance of the Ereignismeldungen (whose originals are now in the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, by the way; NARA has microfilm copies only) is incorrect.
They were not handed to the US Army by the Soviets; US document teams had captured the larger pile of documents independently, and it took over a year before investigators stumbled across them amidst the enormous pile of paper.
You are correct, there are 11 summary Taetigkeits- und Lageberichte of the Einsatzgruppen compiled on a monthly basis, by editing together verbatim parts of the Ereignismeldungen. Textual comparison proves the link irrefutably.
This is important, because a full set of the TuLBs was found in the Foreign Office records which were, incidentally, originally captured by the British. They are therefore independent sources, and since they mention enough of the big, revisionist-disturbing massacres, refute any attempt to claim that Soviet secret agents manipulated the texts for the Americans to find, which is the only claim that can be justified since the Soviets DID NOT HAND THEM OVER. Got it?
No, they cannot.
I do love it when revisionists reinvent the wheel and confirm what is already known by historians.
Gerd Robel in his chapter on the USSR in the Benz collection you mentioned above already covered this twenty five years ago. The Ereignismeldungen give a number of headline statistics reported by the four Einsatzgruppen by spring 1942. Added up, these come to indeed around 445,000. But the texts of the reports do not identify all of the actions carried out by each group; some actions are known from other sources while others are known from testimonies. It would be a basic fail to assume that the reports are comprehensive and that 'only' 335,000 executions were really being claimed.
The bigger fail is ignoring the contribution of some Sicherheitspolizei commands set up after the Einsatzgruppen passed through, as well as the contributions of the Ordnungspolizei, Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht, Romanian Army, Romanian Gendarmerie, assorted collaborators and pogromchiki, not to mention the rhythm and pacing of the waves of mass murders, since the 'first wave' of Einsatzgruppen murders was followed in 1942 by a 'second wave'.
Nope. The sum total of documents recording mass executions of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union, drawn from western as well as East European archives, not forgetting Romanian sources, quantifies about 75-80% of the 2 million death toll from shootings in the USSR. The remainder are quantified from postwar exhumations and investigations, diaries, underground reports, and eyewitnesses, the sum total being checked against demographics and survivor numbers depending on the republic in question. There are likely further possibilities for hardening up numbers still left in archives and contemporary Axis documents.
Compared to many other outbreaks of mass violence, that's a stunningly high percentage to be attributed to perpetrator sources.
Whereas conventional historians have been publishing steadily on this since 1981...
Then you really should not be a revisionist, because everything of significance regarding the Holocaust is supported by official records one way or another.
The surviving records establish a solid framework that contains gaps and holes on matters of detail, which are then filled in using non-Nazi contemporary sources, some of which are technically just as 'official' as Nazi records, and postwar sources. These sources are then corroborated by the survival of official Nazi documents for analogous cases.
For example, the Korherr report's use of special treatment in the original draft (as proven by a separate document) applied to the three Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka as well as to Chelmno (by inference regarding its use for the Warthegau deportations). In both cases we have further documents referring to special treatment in connection to the Reinhard camps as well as Chelmno. The Nazi governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, repeatedly referred to the destruction of the Jews, which is wholly relevant context for BST. Globocnik's reports on Einsatz Reinhard, while avoiding discussing gassing, killing, destruction or special treatment, confirm what is known from other sources as well, namely that the personnel of these camps were drawn from the T4 euthanasia program. Documents prove the use of gassing in T4. There is finally the explicit report on the use of gas vans at Chelmno.
If there were no surviving witnesses and no contemporary Polish underground reports regarding Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, one would still have to conclude that the most probable fate of Jews deported to those camps was to be gassed, the only thing that would be less clear is the precise method, since the inference from overlap-in-the-Korherr report with Chelmno might suggest gas vans, while the inference from the T4 connection might suggest the use of bottled carbon monoxide. The use of engines to generate carbon monoxide in static gas chambers is not "documented", but that is what the witnesses and contemporary reports agree on, once one has thrown out the hearsay rumours of wilder methods. There are no surviving Nazi documents saying that the Nazis gassed Jews at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, but these are not needed because of the contextual and analogous Nazi documentation, which then corroborates the non-Nazi contemporary and postwar evidence stating the claim.
This conclusion sits inside further Russian dolls of inference constructed from Nazi documents, such as the fact that the deportation documents show transports ending at these camps, or speak of 'intakes' (Zugang, as used in the Hoefle telegram), and the fact that leading Nazis such as Heinrich Himmler spoke explicitly of killing Jewish women and children when discussing Polish Jews, even though they did not feel the need to describe the mechanics of gassing in these statements.
A further inference seals the deal, namely inference to the best explanation, i.e. comparing the interpretation of the sum total of evidence pointing to gassing and mass murder at these camps, with the evidence that might be interpreted to point in another direction, such as 'resettlement' and 'transit'.
The pile of evidence pointing to extermination is colossally larger than for 'resettlement', the quality of the evidence for 'transit' is infinitely worse than for murder - nearly all of it is hearsay - a lot of the sources claimed to support it are demonstrably being misinterpreted out of context by revisionists, and there are far, far more gaps and holes in the 'resettlement' thesis than the other way around, to the point where it cannot stand up on its own independently and be taken seriously.
The evidence for mass murder can be synthesised into a coherent narrative, whereas resettlement cannot - revisonists haven't even tried to do the latter. Moreover, the interpretation of mass murder can explain and incorporate in all the anomalies of supposed resettlement evidence whereas the resettlement interpretation cannot incorporate all the "anomalies" of extermination evidence into its narrative.
Sara Berger's Experten der Vernichtung (2013) is also available on Kindle, albeit for purchase (21.99 euros, £15.99, £21.43). This book factored in many more sources than we included, yet I now know of even more sources that were not used either in our critique back in 2011 or in Berger's book.
A revised and expanded edition of our critique will be out next year.
Because they don't add up to a comprehensive account of the entire phenomenon (knowledge of and reporting of news of mass murder), nor do they establish causative significance to the examples you mention.
The news of the Holocaust did not originate with Ben Hecht, he was about six steps removed from the fugitives reporting what was happening in the death camps
Utter BS. The Nazis identified *real* transit camps in their documents and they also identified from where people had originated if they were evacuated, expelled, resettled or deported. There are plenty of documents specifying Drancy-Auschwitz as a journey, there are also documents specifying that Jews, Poles or Russians originating from district abc had been moved to district xyz.
1. There aren't any documents mentioning resettled Jews in large numbers anywhere in Eastern Europe
2. There aren't any documents mentioning Jews resettled from Warsaw in large numbers anywhere in Eastern Europe
3. There aren't any documents mentioning Jews resettled from Treblinka in large numbers to anywhere else in Eastern Europe
Take your pick; the sources you need simply don't exist. You can clutch at straws and claim they were destroyed, lost or some other get-out clause, but they don't exist. Ergo you cannot say anything historical about this subject.
Remember, your own epistemology emphasises documents, yet you don't have any!
And the nearly five years of blog posts since the critique.
The historical record is never "ideal". As I said before: historians have managed to prove all manner of economic, political, social, military and genocidal developments across the ages and around the world without always disposing of name lists.
But since you want names, here's a link to the digitised archive of the Lodz ghetto Jewish council, with name lists for deportees in 1942 and 1944, as well as masses of other granular material - 700,000 pages worth, in all.
As you should know, Chelmno was the first death camp to be set up, so it would only be fair to ask that revisionists can debunk it first (properly - as in proving an alternative), and if they cannot, then they might consider shutting up and getting a life.
I know your hero Mattogno has written a slim booklet on the camp, and I'd enjoy discussing the sources for Lodz and Chelmno, as a change from other camps.
