As a profession. Im curious about when being critical about someone elses work actually became something that people looked into.

I visited the Buchenwald concentration camp last week and in the exhibition they had a fairly big part dedicated to the administration of the camp, along with its bureaucratic procedures.

I asked our tour guide about it and he explained that in the context of the concentration camps having a big administration was useful so tasks could be split up easily and responsibility was loaded on many different shoulders. For example that SS soldiers were "only" responsible for registering prisoners' names and taking their personal belongings while they had no responsibility with bringing them to work or other tasks.

This was supposed to also be a tool to keep up the SS soldiers' attitude so that they were only responsible for one part of the cruelty but not all of the cruelty that was brought upon the prisoners.

That made me wonder, in what other ways the Nazis used their bureaucratic system to maintain stability and keep everybody in line and also if the horrors of the 3rd Reich would have been equally possible with a less sophisticated administrative system?

And as a follow up question maybe:

Did many SS soldiers and other Nazi officials refer to the administrative system as a form of excuse for their involvement in the crimes of the war and Holocaust afterwards?

The Warring States, the Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties, what time of China's history was it fragmented? Was it more than half its history?

I'm sorry for such an open question, but I've come up against such a total lack of information that ANYTHING would be really useful. I'm wondering especially about passing and/or transitioning, if that was even possible.

Elagabalus, for example, apparently attempted to have gender affirming surgery (even though it's possible that was a rumour, it still indicates such surgery's unavailability). But that's a completely different society, with different technology and medicine and social constructs. I'm wondering if anything like that exists for the Ancient Near East. I'm especially interested in Assyria, but I'll take what I can get. Thank you!

I'm a novice entering Byzantine history, and finding quickly that the term means what it does in modern days for a reason! Maurice's reign is utterly fascinating me, and I'm wondering if there's any sources on one of his commanders, Philippicus, that my google-fu missed, in the print world.

As an aside, Maurice seems to be a real pivotal figure in Western history who is basically not talked about, obviously from my layperson's viewpoint. Amazing reading!

People always talk about the dream of achieving world peace and living in a world without conflict. But has there ever been a period of time, even a couple weeks, where the world was actually at peace?

There was an ELI5 post about this a couple weeks ago, but I was thinking it'd be great to get a historian's perspective. Thanks in advance!

Why does Y exist if I does all of the same things in English words? Or vice-versa for whichever came first. I know English is a lot of needless complexity, but this seems entirely superfluous since they seems the same.

What language did they write laws in? What language did Congress debate in? What language did the average person speak in day-to-day life? Today they speak English but they used to be a part of Mexico, so did they suddenly decide to speak English and forget Spanish at some point?

Were they viewed as Aryans, or as less than Aryans but not worthy of extermination like the slavic peoples?

Sorry if this has been asked before but I could not find it via a search. I'm interested in what the Confederate States plans were for their future if they had won, particularly if they had an idea for reconciliation with the north and did they feel their version of government with slavery a key aspect to be sustainable?

Why care about one person's POV when you already got away with marrying Anne Boleyn anyway? It just seems petty - then again, maybe I don't understand the proud mindset of a King. Was there some sort of social repercussion I don't understand?

Incidentally, what did the Egyptians call their language?

Is it just something we see in fiction? A little bit of searching suggests otherwise, but I can't find any concrete info.

I'm watching A Knight's Tale, and the whole idea of taking another man's identity seems like it would be an easy feat.