re: #104 The Ghost of the Vanishing Commissar

This gets esp. tough when a historian has to base his research on testimonies because everything else has been destroyed. I’m reminded of Christopher Browning’s great little book Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, where he explains the problems that are involved in this type of historiography but also offers some solutions. It boils down to the basic “the more witnesses you have, the better”. (He also offered a couple of curious examples of false memories.)