Who needs proof?

The Third Reich: How Close Was Hitler to the A-Bomb?
By Klaus Wiegrefe, DER SPIEGEL 11/2005 - March 14, 2005
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,346293,00.html

Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch claims that the Nazis conducted three nuclear weapons tests in 1944 and 1945. But he has no proof to back up his theories.


How close was Hitler to an atomic bomb? A German historian claims he was much closer than previously believed.
The United States needed 125,000 people, including six future Nobel Prize winners, to develop the atomic bombs that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The uranium enrichment facility alone, including its security zone, was the size of the western German city of Frankfurt. Dubbed the Manhattan project, the quest ultimately cost the equivalent of about $30 billion.

In his new book, "Hitler's Bomb," Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch claims Nazi Germany almost achieved similar results with only a handful of physicists and a fraction of the budget. The author writes that German physicists and members of the military conducted three nuclear weapons tests shortly before the end of World War II, one on the German island of Ruegen in the fall of 1944 and two in the eastern German state of Thuringia in March 1945. The tests, writes Karlsch, claimed up to 700 lives.

If these theories were accurate, history would have to be rewritten. Ever since the Allies occupied the Third Reich's laboratories and interrogated Germany's top physicists working with wunderkind physicist Werner Heisenberg and his colleague Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, it's been considered certain that Hitler's scientists were a long way from completing a nuclear weapon.

Karlsch's publisher, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, is already issuing brazen claims about the "sensational results of the latest historic research." The Third Reich, says the publishing house, was "on the verge of winning the race to acquire the first functioning nuclear weapon." Even before the book was published, the generally reserved publishing house sent press kits to the media, in which it claimed that the author had solved "one of the great mysteries of the Third Reich."

The book is being presented Monday at an elaborately staged press conference. Karlsch, an unaffiliated academic, plans an extensive author's tour.

The only problem with all the hype is that the historian has no real proof to back up his spectacular theories.
( Read More )

Huh, "Knowledge of history important," you say?

Discovery Phase: Now, at long last, we're getting acquainted with the new anti-evolutionists. And they seem very familiar
By Chris Mooney, American Prospect Online

It's official. With recent news of lawsuits over the teaching of evolution in both Georgia and Pennsylvania, even Time magazine now considers the fight over Charles Darwin's theory a live issue again. The New York Times and The Washington Post have both come out against the new anti-evolutionism, while on FOX News, a braying Bill O'Reilly recently announced that "there are a lot of very brilliant scholars who believe the reason we have incomplete science on evolution is that there is a higher power involved in this." O'Reilly then proceeded to call the American Civil Liberties Union "the Taliban" for opposing the teaching of anti-evolutionist perspectives in public-school science classes.

President Bush's re-election and the growing political strength of religious conservatives have done a lot to put evolution back on the radar. But in fact, this battle never ended -- and The American Prospect covered it back in 2002. Today's journalists, however, are on a steep learning curve, laboring to understand a struggle that groups like the National Center for Science Education, in Oakland, California, have monitored ceaselessly for years with or without major media attention.

There are few issues where a knowledge of history matters more than the debate over the teaching of evolution. ( Read More )

Plagarism and the Historical Profession

Crimes of History
by David J. Garrow

PAST IMPERFECT:
Facts, Fictions, Fraud—American History from Bancroft and
Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin.
By Peter Charles Hoffer. PublicAffairs. 287 pp. $26

Reviewed by David J. Garrow

In 2001 and early 2002, a cascade of professional misconduct charges shook the history profession. The well-known popular historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin both were accused of serial plagiarism. Another highly visible historian, Joseph Ellis, the author of Founding Brothers (2000), admitted telling his students at Mount Holyoke College grandiose falsehoods about being involved in the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. A much-heralded book claiming that colonial-era Americans owned relatively few firearms, written by Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles, was exposed as containing mythical data about nonexistent records.
( Read More )