Moreover, they fail to make the best possible use of some types of source such as personal narratives. My systematic review of the historians’ methodologies reveals that many either distort the evidence they cite or put forward arguments that go well beyond what the evidence warrants, perhaps because of pre-conceived theories which shape their approaches to the evidence. Rather, this is a technical exercise to examine how well the historians have done history in this particular area. I do not attempt to make any claims about what happened between Jewish Germans and their non-Jewish compatriots nor do I make a moral assessment of behaviours and attitudes among the ‘ordinary’ people of Germany under the Third Reich. I have taken relations between Jewish Germans and non-Jewish Germans as a case study because of the enormous quantity of primary source material and because so many historians have commented on the issue. The chief interest of this dissertation is how historians select their sources and how they use the evidence they find in their sources. Therefore, it is logical to assume that this is where we see history done at its best. Of all fields of historical enquiry, Germany’s Third Reich is perhaps the richest in sources and historiography.
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