Kristallnacht - source related study.

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                GCSE History coursework – Nazi Germany

A)            Both sources ‘A’ and ‘B’ are useful in telling us about Kristallnacht as from these sources we can learn what Kristallnacht was and when it happened. It was the night that Jewish synagogues, shops and houses were ruined and when Jews were attacked. It is debateable which source is more useful for telling us who is responsible because the reliability of both sources comes in to question. Source ‘A’ is a secondary account; however it may be useful because it is based on Fritz Hesse’s conversation that he witnessed between Hitler and Goebbel’s which is a primary source. It is also reliable because Fritz Hesse was a Nazi working for the Nazis and we would expect a man in the Nazi party would not want the blame of Kristallnacht to be directed at the Nazis, so the fact that he is admitting that the Nazis are responsible means that he is not protecting himself which suggests that he is more truthful. The fact that Fritz Hesse wrote this account 16 years after the conversation suggests that his recollection of what he heard may be inaccurate. He is also writing at a time when the Nazi’s were hated and so he may be under pressure when he was writing to give an anti-Nazi account. Also as source ‘A’ is not a primary account and it is a historians summary of Fritz Hesse’s report, it could mean that the historian may have left important bits of the conversation out to argue a certain point of view, so they may have been trying to manipulate the evidence to suit their own opinion, but if it was a good historian they would have researched it thoroughly and portrayed all sides of the story equally. Source ‘B’ was prepared by the Nazi party supreme court so it may be very biased because it is unlikely that the Nazis would accept responsibility for this horrific event. The reliability of this source is also questionable because it calls the attacks “demonstrations” and whilst it mentions damage to property, it does not include details of violence and Jewish fatalities. However the fact that it is a secret report means that it is not meant to be published and so they would be more able to state the truth about the perspective of the incident, but even though it is a secret report they still fail to accept responsibility. This is very ambiguous because the Nazis do not accept responsibility but neither do they deny. Both these sources are useful, but both sources should be dealt with very carefully.

              The problem with the reliability of the sources is that they disagree with each other as source ‘A’ suggests that Goebbel’s was responsible but source ‘B’ suggests that it was a spontaneous event and so they contradict each other, therefore making both source very ambiguous and quite unreliable.            

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 B)           This is an account by David Buffman, the American Consul in Leipzig and he wrote this account from his own experiences at the time. Straight away we are given impressions of violence. Buffman uses words such as “ruins …violence…horror of crowds” to convey his feelings of the Nazi responsibility. We can infer from Source “C” that Buffman disagrees with the Nazis views and that he believes that they are responsible. When Buffman says “no attempts were made to put out the fires” it is implying that the fire brigade have been deliberately told not ...

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