Oh Nick, oh Nick...
I did not dismiss the source. You are a confused. I only made a criticism of the source. The link is still there, anyone is able to read it.
No, doofus, you cherrypicked a couple of paragraphs from the introduction and declared Lifton to be a 'hack writer', which is an obvious attempt to dismiss the work out of hand, since 'hack writers' are not very highly regarded. That's why ANTPogo dismissed Irving as a 'hack writer', and why you copied him in what was a childish example of NO U turnabout.
If you want to criticise a source then you are meant to criticise the
whole of the source, i.e. read the entire book. Twice now you've been recommended a link and then cherrypicked something you dislike from a preface or introduction as if to say, I found the first mistake and now I don't need to read the rest.
Or you criticise on a specific
point, which means, actually addressing
that specific point. Whether or not Lifton got it wrong about Schumann's experiments is not going to be something you can deduce from an introduction.
Lifton's introduction can after all be complete rubbish, and the relevant discussion of a specific point can still be fine. A whole chapter could be rubbish and the next one could be perfectly usable. Or there might only be one chapter in the whole thing which is useful.
That's why Western scholars have never dismissed communist East Bloc scholarship out of hand, despite the fact that vanishingly few people in the West agreed with the brand of Marxist-Leninist verbiage which was inevitably found in the introductions of books by East Bloc scholars.
Anyway, read the introduction of the source is essential. You skip introductions when you read books?
Do you suggest to skip book introductions when lecturing your module "Perspective on Sources" at Exeter University?
Clearly you don't know the difference between consulting a book for reference purposes, extracting information for a discrete task, and reading a book cover to cover. Lifton's book discusses sterilisation experiments at Auschwitz. That's why it was recommended. Interested parties could thus look up the source as if they were using Wikipedia or an encyclopedia, and read the chapter should they care to. They could also choose to read the whole thing cover to cover. Lifton's book has been previously recommended on this thread (by Wroclaw, IIRC) in its entirety. I was recommending it for a specific purpose.
Students of mine have made very good use of Lifton, as it happens, along with Pressac's Natzweiler book. They make varied use of these authors depending on what they were aiming to answer. Some consulted a single chapter for specific points of fact, and others engaged with the introduction and conclusion to consider Lifton's interpretations and discussed those.
They also consulted and discussed among other authors covering similar ground, Paul Weindling, Ulf Schmidt, Michael Bryant, Joachim Neander, Lawrence Douglas, Susan Benedict, Patricia Heberer, Michael Burleigh, Henry Friedlander, Goetz Aly, Michael Kater, Claudia Koonz, Maria Lagerwey, Kenneth Mellanby, Susanne Ost, Sheldon Rubenfeld, Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Daniel Wallace, Leroy Walters, Katrin Weigmann, William Seidelmann, Margit Szollosi-Janze, Francis Nicosia, Jonathan Huener, Larry Thompson, Dan Stone, Robert Gerwarth, and Peter Longerich, to name some of the more frequently-cited authors. Some they consulted and some they discussed. Both methods are valid depending on your aim.
The important thing is the students consult multiple sources, and compare and contrast them, sometimes cross-checking facts or using one source to complement another factually, and sometimes comparing interpretations and arguments.
Why Nazi doctors carried out medical experiments and participated in the euthanasia program is a question that exercised them greatly, and they quickly worked out that one can emphasise Nazi ideology, the influence of eugenics and racial hygiene, continuities with Weimar, careerism, opportunism and many other factors in varying combinations, depending on one's assessment.
My students actually paid an inordinate amount of attention to the defense arguments made by Nazi doctors and their lawyers because the defense claims presented a more complex and nuanced picture, and contained a mixture of brazen lies, denials of responsibility or criminality, and accusations against other Nazis, along with a lot of detail about what they had actually done.
That Nazi doctors carried out medical experiments and participated in the euthanasia program is essentially a non-question, since the Nazi doctors themselves admitted these things consistently and the students could easily locate large numbers of contemporary documents as well as other sources confirming this fact. Reconstructing the events was quite easy for them as a result.
Well done Dr Terry!
You produce the URL direct to the quote you wish to present to support your argument.
I am glad you are learning to improve the URL citation.
Maybe when you have demonstrated that you are capable of digesting a whole book and using it properly, your hilariously misplaced condescension might mean something.
As it seems you don't even know who the relevant authors are on pretty much any topic under discussion on this thread, you're still stuck on the reading-list stage. So until you stop flunking history 101, you'll generally get the tables of contents and the like.
I like that...
"Fact-checking"!
For an unknown reason I read:
Fat-checking!
Your fat posts have an sense of fat-fact-checking.
Bitterness is unbecoming, Snakey. I'm truly sorry that you are such a research klutz that you cannot operate Google effectively and cannot coordinate or assimilate information on the same level as others, but with practice, then maybe one day you can work out how to join in these discussions and not make a complete ass of yourself.
