soc.history.war.world-war-ii

Rich wrote:
> But most of those were discarded over the years as not
> being "worthy" of archiving

Yes, one of the nice thing about those archives that had been captured
by the Soviets is that their captors mostly didn't bother to sort them
into "worth keeping" and "let's junk this" piles so they still include
the kind of stuff that people are looking for today but was discarded
by former archivists years ago.

> sloppy record keeping (German staff officers could **not**
> add correctly to save their lives),

You don't know that. Maybe they could and some illiterate SS revisited
the records?

> So could a narrative be doctored? Sure, but the problem is that the
> underpinning documentation is difficult to doctor.

Agreed.

The tactics used are much the same as what is commonly found on Usenet
and on Internet forums i.e. ignore inconvenient information, use
convoluted sentences to try to pretend that the inconvenient
information you can't ignore isn't in fact relevant, focus on the
parts that fit your thesis best, make sweeping statements about hard
to check facts (in this case, the usual tactic is to inflate the
claims of enemy numbers & losses) and voila: you have a stirring
narrative that is largely coherent with the rest of the paper trail
from that particular nation.

Trying to alter administrative data increases the total workload by
several orders of magnitude for only marginally better effect. So why
bother or, more importantly, how to convince the boss that bothering
is worth it?

Ergo, it's unlikely that it happened.



LC