How do you deal with bias of the authors and propaganda when looking at WW2 era material?

by VERTIKAL19

Especially considering how much vested interested there is in reception of these events to this day? Is it simply too soon after this conflict?

I know this isn't the kind of question that here are here usually, but it is something that I have encountered myself quite a bit (for example the different spins you get sometimes looking at english and german accounts).

I hope this is fine regardless and I am just curious how the professionals deal with is issue!

locksymania

I'm not a historian so mods, please can this if it's breaking rules. I work in research and one of the things we learn to do early on in our careers is to critically appraise our sources - seriously; there's checklists for everything, particularly anything to do with clinical trials. Oftentimes, it's not about getting rid of bias but in understanding it and allowing for it. This might mean you chuck a source entirely but more commonly, you make use of it with good awareness of the biases inherent (we still use, say, Xenophon as a source, even while being aware of the factors that might have influenced him - seriously; all that talking about himself in the 3rd person...). I can't imagine that a professional historian and an economist would differ all that much in the basics of how one might go about this.

  • Do the authors have a clear aim in their work?
  • Who are the authors citing? (If, say, you wanted to write a piece on the experiences of Jews in Germany during WWII and you're not mentioning someone like Viktor Klemperer then why is that so?)
  • Are they citing their sources faithfully? This can be tricky to know if you're not familiar with the source material.
  • Are they discussing all important perspectives? (To continue with the WWII theme, if the authors are talking about Western amphibious landings in Europe are they going beyond just D-Day? Are they discussing Dieppe? Anzio? Salerno? If not, why not?)
  • Are they drawing strong conclusions from thin evidence? namely, do the "results" support the conclusion?
  • What do other scholars of the period say? How does it differ from what the authors are saying? Why?
  • Are they using standard methods? If not, why not? - an example here could be taking a Narrative History approach - which might be fine or not depending on the purpose of the work; the research question as it were.

I'm linking to this; which seems quite similar to how I'd evaluate a paper, but oriented towards historical writing. One that I really liked was the notion of underlying philosophy. That's really quite important. I really like Timothy Snyder's writing and Anne Applebaum's too but in both cases their underlying philosopy needs to be borne in mind when parsing their work.

I hope this helps and mods, I hope it's OK?