soc.history.war.world-war-ii

Andrew Clark wrote:

> You are happy to pontificate at length in this forum about German archival
> sources and yet you haven't even got a working knowledge of the academics
> specialising in the provenance and nature of those same archival records or
> the themes currently being discussed in that academic community?

I'm sorry, but Rich doesn't "pontificate at length in this forum about
German archival sources", what he does is provide primary source
material as well as a mention of what the source is supposed to be
reporting and what it says. Which is the proper way to quote a source,
actually, and far more useful than vague allusions to Bartov writing
an unspecified article in an un-named publication. Particularly when
Bartov is a noted scholar and has published a great many things, so
using his name in a search engine isn't very helpful.

I don't see that Rich or anyone else here ever claimed to being an
archivist. And what "academic community" exactly is it? There are so
many of them...

> I asked a question which any real archival specialist would have understood
> immediately. I'm not interested in pursuing the matter further with someone
> who clearly hasn't got the first inkling.

You asked a question, got an answer, mentioned a source and never
provided the reference. This is beginning to look like a pattern.

> > All **what** archives?
>
> I never used the word 'all'. This is mere strawman blustering, your usual
> tactic when you move out of your narrow comfort zone of knowledge

Since I'm not a "real archival specialist" myself and don't have an
inkling of "the themes currently being discussed in that academic
community" I can only fall back on something that a lowly user like
myself can do: look up previous posts in a thread.

Here is the one you wrote and that Rich was replying to:
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.war.world-war-ii/msg/4dff456c7c8367f5

The sentence that Rich was replying to - and that he quoted in his
reply, making your claim never to have used the word 'all' a very bold
rearranging of reality - was the following: "The fact that much of the
content of all these archives ended up behind the Iron Curtain and is
even now still uncatalogued or available hasn't helped this process."

In your sentence, it is not clear what "these archives" refer to, they
could be "SS records relating to the Holocaust", or "the
Heeresarchiv."

So Rich's question was legitimate: what were you refering to?

> Your statements again prove that you haven't the faintest idea what the
> Germans got up to in their own archives.

So perhaps that if you provided the reference to the article by Bartov
which you mentioned before, others might gain that faintest of ideas?

(snip)

> If you want a real
> debate involving sharing information and you actually learning something
> new, try asking the questions before you try your usual bluster.

The problem with asking questions is that you rarely reply.

Here's a question that has been asked before and that I'm asking
again, in the hope of "actually learning something new" (can anyone
actually learn something not new BTW?): what is the reference of the
article you mentioned?


LC