In the 1970s, in one of the last of the trials of a German officer for crimes committed during WWII a German judge dismissed all eyewitness testimony introduced by the prosecution, describing it as “the most unreliable kind of evidence.” However, Christopher Browning suggests in Remembering Survival that what may be unacceptable in the eyes of the judge and the jury, is an extremely valuable source for the historian. Browning seeks to show how these eyewitness accounts of the survivors of the Starachowice factory slave-labor camp deepen and shift our understanding of the holocaust. Even if factually unreliable, he argues, eyewitness testimony can create a more nuanced understanding of individual agency, of the mechanisms of racial oppression and genocide, of the categories of perpetrator or victim, of the role of gender and of class in the holocaust. Write an essay discussing the strengths and weaknesses of eyewitness testimony in writing the history of the holocaust. Give detailed examples from the book to explain and support your argument.
