Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2013 February 7

= February 7 =

NFL and MLB "interstate commerce"
Regarding U.S. antitrust law and professional sports: I was reading the article about the USFL suit against the NFL, and the article about the Federal_Baseball_Club_v._National_League lawsuit against the MLB. Apparently the MLB is not considered to be interstate commerce and thus not subject to antitrust law. Did the court in the NFL case give any reasoning why football is interstate but baseball is not, or was that defense not raised? RudolfRed (talk) 03:09, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * The Supreme Court has given professional baseball a specific antitrust exemption, as a result of a 1922 decision which has not been overturned... AnonMoos (talk) 04:37, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Toolson v. New York Yankees, Federal Baseball Club v. National League, etc. AnonMoos (talk) 04:45, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * It should also be noted that the NFL lost its case against the USFL, but the USFL was given a nominal $1 in damages (trebled to $3 by statute), which is the U.S. court system's way of saying "Don't fuck with the NFL". -- Jayron  32  04:48, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Of note here may be the fact that the NCAA was sued under antitrust law and lost; see NCAA v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Oklahoma. Ks0stm  (T•C•G•E) 14:40, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Most valuable professional sports trophy by raw material content?
In case there is any doubt, I am thinking of trophies like the World Cup, Stanley Cup, any of the tennis "Major" trophies, etc. By valuable I mean strictly considering their raw materials - not what it would get at auction, not the sentimental value. If you melted down the World Cup trophy, or the Davis Cup, or the Stanley Cup etc. and sold at market rate for component materials ... what professional sports trophy is the most valuable? The Masked Booby (talk) 03:16, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I dimly remember a diamond-encrusted racket available in tennis for some competition or other in the 80s. That'd have to be a contender. Can anyone fill in the gaps? --Dweller (talk) 10:58, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * There was one for ECC Antwerp which had a value of $1,000,000. However, in 2008 the Proximus Diamond Games had a diamond/gold racket as a prize valued at 1,500,000 Euros or US$2,035,500. And there is the The Tennis Channel Kwiat Million Dollar Diamond Swinger. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 13:10, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

joseph conrad's short story " Il Conde"
Good Morning, how is the story of ill conde is imperfectly perfect. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 111.68.103.22 (talk) 04:39, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure you are in the correct forum. 1) This sounds like a homework question, and no one here is going to do your homework for you and 2) Even if it isn't, this is a request for opinion, which is also something we don't do here.  Sorry.  -- Jayron  32  04:50, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Edwin Black Birth Date
Does anyone know when Edwin Black (the author who wrote that book about IBM and the Holocaust) was born? Thank you very much. Futurist110 (talk) 06:37, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The article you link states that he was 12 in 1943. So that would make it sometime around 1931.  -- Jayron  32  07:14, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * His mom was 12 in 1943, not Edwin Black himself. Here's the exact quote from that article -- "His mother Edjya, from Białystok, had only managed to survive the Holocaust when as a 12-year old in August 1943 she was pushed to safety by her mother and other prisoners through the vent of a boxcar en route to the Treblinka extermination camp." Futurist110 (talk) 07:20, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah. Then he'd be considerably younger than that.  -- Jayron  32  07:24, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Ya think? :)  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  07:33, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * His VIAF entry has one record suggesting born 1950, though as there's no birthdate listed for the others this may be an anomaly or an error. Andrew Gray (talk) 09:46, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Source, please? Futurist110 (talk) 09:00, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It's linked at the bottom of the article - . Andrew Gray (talk) 10:25, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Fallacy
Hi guys,

What's the name of the fallacy you can quote when people say something like "why are you wasting your time researching squirrels when people are dying of cancer?". The fallacy I'm thinking of goes something like, we can't all work on the most important problems in the world, or trivial problems would become the most important problems.

Cheers,

Aaadddaaammm (talk) 09:34, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's actually a fallacy per se, sometimes it can be a valid concern as people need to get their priorities right. Also, many trivial problems will never become the most important problems, no matter how neglected they are. - Lindert (talk) 09:51, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Why are you asking this when you could be researching squirrels? Paul B (talk) 09:57, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * We hear this from politicians all the time. Rather than address the substance of whatever the issue is, they'll cry rhetorically "Why is the government wasting time on this matter when there are so many more important things to be getting on with?" - as if the government of a nation is a linear and sequential thing, with only ever one thing at a time being considered.  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  10:05, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Whether or not the fallacy has a name is irrelevant. Our list of fallacies is mostly unreferenced dog-Latin. The question you should ask is: Is this argument fallacious? If so, you should be able to demonstrate that it is, which is a much better refutation than simply providing the name of an alleged error. AlexTiefling (talk) 10:39, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * All fallacies are non-sequiturs. Many non-sequiturs don't have names, although you can invent one if you like (the most recent one I've come across being coined is reductio ad Hitlerum). All arguments that attempt to go from a set of facts, to conclusions about what ought to be done, must confront the is-ought problem, first articulated by David Hume. They are all, in a sense, non-sequiturs, because they attempt to bridge the gap between what is true and what should be done, and this is more or less impossible. However, in practice, when debating with such people, you are really having a pointless and empty discussion. My solution is to read a book instead, or do some productive work. IBE (talk) 10:56, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * How about reductio ad rodentia? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:54, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Not bad. More prosaically, you could in fact try "reductio ad amplitudinem" - reducing it to a size issue. Point of order: it would be reductio ad rodentiam, or if you are looking for the actual Latin word, I think that would be rodentem. Of course this is a ridiculous nitpick on a non-serious comment, but that is why you study Latin in the first place ;). Actually, it might be fun to try some comment like this on someone - they try a silly argument along the lines of what the OP has been hearing, and you hit back with a meaningless dog Latin phrase - and make it sound convincing. Then act surprised when they don't know what you are talking about. IBE (talk) 14:08, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Funny that you say "must confront" with a straight face in the same sentence you treat Hume's is-ought problem as if it were valid. μηδείς (talk) 01:40, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Very clever. But you should see how crooked my face is at the best of times ;). Seriously, fwiw, I think I can talk my way out of this one. There is a classic paradox in philosophy that runs like this: "If you kicked a goal, you can't have missed. But you could have missed. Therefore you can never kick a goal." The paradox turns on the different uses of "can't", one based on possibility, another based on logic. The imperative sense is a third one. It is similar with "must", as in, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." This is, I think, the logical deduction that the various ladies are making about Darcy - it is not a moral requirement. I claim (this might be rather tenuous) that I am doing much the same thing. Nice try, but you simply must not try to argue words with a master of b-s- ;) IBE (talk) 13:22, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Interesting quote about the single man and the occasional ambiguities of English. It reminds me of a quote attributed to Zsa Zsa Gabor: "A man is incomplete without a wife. Once he gets married, then he is finished." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:13, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't see this as being a fallacious argument, it's a valid argument from utilitarianism (whether it is right or not is another question). If you do one thing (say, squirrel research) you cannot do something else (say, rocket science), or cannot do as much of the other thing. If some other thing (rocket science) is more valuable than what you are choosing to do (squirrels) then the case can be made that you are making a bad decision and should instead maximise the time on the more valuable action (rocket science). 46.30.55.66 (talk) 17:28, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * That is only true if the choice is between squirrel research and rocket science. In most cases, the choice is actually between squirrel research and no research at all (i.e. flipping burgers), because a biologist is unlikely to have the motivation or skills needed to be a good rocket scientist.  --140.180.247.198 (talk) 18:01, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * In that vein, false dilemma could apply to the original question. --BDD (talk) 21:32, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * While not a fallacy, the phrase think globally, act locally, sort of expresses a related idea. Bus stop (talk) 03:49, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

46.30.55.66 illustrates this best: "If some other thing (rocket science) is more valuable than what you are choosing to do (squirrels) then the case can be made that you are making a bad decision and should instead maximise the time on the more valuable action (rocket science)." By his argument, we should all spend our entire lives on rocket science, which is obviously wrong, and potentially even logically wrong. Do any philosophers worry themselves about this argument? Aaadddaaammm (talk) 09:12, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm a dilettante in philosophy from way back, and I can assure you I've never come across it before. I haven't read deeply, but I have read reasonably broadly for a layperson. It just isn't the sort of thing philosophers concern themselves with, unless it requires naming a particularly pernicious fallacy. They focus on funny little dissections of ideas, stuff that's way over my head. There's a story about a philosopher on a plane flight who sat next to a nice, pleasant, chatty person, who asked him what he did for a living. When he told her, she said "Oh - so what are some of your sayings then?" In reality, when asked to name their favourite philosopher, many professional philosophers name someone no one has ever heard of, and who few people understand, for example Donald Davidson. That is closer to the mark of what philosophers go on about, than either nifty sayings, or spotting everyday fallacies. You are concerning yourself with what is really an economic debate, or even a political one. You might like to check out political philosophy, since that is where you will most likely turn up something along the lines of what you are looking for. IBE (talk) 14:29, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

In response to the OP, red herring fallacy and appeal to hypocrisy might work here. Futurist110 (talk) 20:37, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * TV Tropes calls this Appeal to worse problems.--Pacostein (talk) 20:44, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Origin of social conservatism, sex-negativity, and modesty
It has always fascinated me exactly at which point in history or prehistory, modern society's sex-negativity and social conservative attitude originated. Most ancient civilizations such as Roman Empire had a sex-positive culture. My questions are: (all the following questions are related to prehistory and ancient history, not medieval and modern history)


 * What factors contributed to the change from a sex-positive culture to sex-negative cultural environment during the ancient or early medieval era?
 * Exactly at which point in history did this change occur? Did it happen in ancient era or early medieval era? Does it have something to do with the rise of organized religions?
 * When did the concepts of modesty and indecent exposure originate? Since clothing originated long before recorded history and the Neanderthals used clothing, is it possible to know whether the concept of modesty existed among other species in the genus Homo? Did paleolithic hunter-gathering bands have the concept of modesty? --PlanetEditor (talk) 11:24, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * PlanetEditor -- the pre-Hellenistic Greeks wore clothes most of the time, but they had very different ideas of bodily modesty than modern Western societies. Men would think nothing about going naked for specific purposes (athletic competition, swimming etc.) even in public.  Women were a little more reticent (outside the Spartan foot-race), but see the Doric chiton for a garment which is constructed with ideas of bodily modesty which were very different from modern ones... AnonMoos (talk) 13:46, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately I would say the premise is false. This varies wildly even in "modern society". I would also say that the Romans were certainly not sex-positive in the sense that you mean it, at least not all of them and not all the time. (If you don't like modern American neoconservativism, you definitely wouldn't like classical Rome...) Adam Bishop (talk) 12:16, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Are you saying sex negativity originated before the advent of civilizations, during the paleolithic era? --PlanetEditor (talk) 12:32, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It's a reasonable bet that it had to do with survival and protection. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:48, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

PlanetEditor -- I would be skeptical that many (or any) ancient peoples were indiscriminately "sex-positive" in any modern sense. However, a major turning point was in the early centuries A.D., when many currents of spiritual "seeking" in the Mediterranean area ran in ascetic channels which ended up influencing people far beyond a few wilderness hermits and itinerant holy men. One conspicuous manifestation of this was many forms of Gnosticism (though there were actually currents of both ascetic Gnosticism and "antinomian" Gnosticism, and the Gnostics weren't the only philosophical ascetics of the period). Gnostic influence on the doctrinal theology of Christianity turned out to be extremely slight, but Gnosticism did play an important role in determining the cultural climate of opinion out of which negative early Christian teachings about sexuality emerged (Origen had himself castrated, Jerome exalted perpetual virginity as being far better than marriage, etc.). AnonMoos (talk) 13:31, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * P.S. What Wikipedia has on this seems to be rather scattered in small dribs and drabs, but see Acts of Thomas for one text which strongly advocated for sexless marriage... AnonMoos (talk) 13:55, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the explanation. But I'm still interested in knowing how did the concept of modesty originate. The Sentinelese people, for example, are pre-Neolithic tribes and uncontacted people . They don't have a culture of clothing, but they do cover their genitals. The Bushmen are also paleolithic tribes and they also have a culture of covering only the genitals. This means paleolithic people did develop a cultural taboo of genitals. How and why did it originate? While this taboo is nonexistent among other Hominids, why did humans, better to say certain species among the genus Homo, develop it? Is there any explanation from the perspective of evolutionary biology or neurobiology? --PlanetEditor (talk) 14:29, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * That aspect of the question is purely anthropological, so I wonder why you bothered to mention the Roman empire in the first place... I think it's fairly safe to say that various anthropological cultures differ very widely on what needs to be concealed/covered and what doesn't, and under which circumstances -- but even those in which very little is required to be concealed do uphold the requirements that they have.  As for the origins of modesty, since the early decades of the 20th century anthropologists have been rather skeptical of trying to reconstruct historical "origins" for most cultural customs where little or no direct historical evidence is available.  Leading 19th-century anthropologists often seemed to be more interested in speculating on the remote origins of things than in understanding how they fit in to the contemporary cultures for which they had direct evidence available, and the 19th-century anthropologists constructed highly-dubious historical hypotheses (such as rigid inflexible unilineal social evolution).  Freud may have helped along the discrediting of this particular style of anthropology when he wrote some books (such as Totem and Taboo) which were either ridiculously awful or awfully ridiculous, but had no value whatsoever other than revealing aspects of Freud's own mentality.
 * The modern approach to anthropological origin problems is to avoid nineteenth-century style speculating, and base everything on empirical observations and reasonably solidly-grounded theories of evolutionary psychology etc. AnonMoos (talk) 17:50, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Don't forget that many societies celebrate and encourage sex for some groups, highly discourage it for others. No Sex Please, We're British was just a comedy play. To label societies as "sex-negative" or "sex-positive" is simplistic. Michel Foucault said that the Victorians, far from being anti-sex were obsessed with investigating and defining it, and I think he had a point. Perhaps it's hypocrisy that is the human universal. Itsmejudith (talk) 18:22, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * One of the classic works of anthropology is the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on kinship systems and the incest taboo, which is one of the cornerstones of all human cultures. The centrality of sex to social relations is confirmed by the sociobiological work of primatologists.  Probably the most important mechanism of social control is the social regulation of sexuality, given, on the one hand, the individual's instinctive drive to seek sex and the great physical pleasure it offers to the individual, and, on the other hand, the centrality of sexual relations to family relationships, which are the closest and most basic human social relations.  So it is really simplistic to classify societies as sex-negative and sex-positive.  It is only during the past century or so, when capitalism, urbanization, and geographic mobility combined to make relations of kinship less essential to the social order, that there has been anything like a positive cultural attitude toward, say, heterosexual relations outside of marriage.  Certain past societies were more tolerant toward homosexual relations outside of (but usually not in place of) marriage, but mainly because those homosexual relations fostered some other value of the culture in question. Even in classical times, sexual norms were highly circumscribed.  The supposed sexual abandon of certain Roman emperors and aristocrats is usually reported by writers whose goal was to denigrate those emperors and aristocrats for their immorality.  On the other hand, sexual relations between adult men and adolescent boys were considered normal in ancient Greece and Rome not because of modern sexual liberalism but because those relations (really only among members of the elite) were believed to perpetuate the system of patriarchy in those societies. In other societies, homosexuality and other forms of extramarital sex were permitted only with individuals who had a religious or ritual role, such as, for example Two-Spirits or sacred prostitution. Societies with these kinds of institutions were not more "sex positive" than those without; they just drew different kinds of limits around sexuality.  Marco polo (talk) 19:54, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Note that the incest taboo is one which exists in many other species, as well. Even the free-love bonobos don't endorse mother-son sex, for example.  Another example is if a male outside the group attempts to have sex with females in the group.  This will cause a violent reaction from the resident male(s), in a number of species, such as lions.  So, "sex-negative" attitudes not only predate civilization, they predate hominids.   The same could probably be said of modesty, where an interested female might "present", while a disinterested female will hide her genitals from the sight of the male.  StuRat (talk) 05:50, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * It's also a question of perspective. Practices and attitudes in one context described as "sex positive" could be seen in subtly different contexts as "objectifying of women".  Merely because a society has more public attitudes towards sex doesn't mean it's a particularly positive attitude towards sex.  Being out in the open isn't the be-all-and-end-all of positivity.  One can be publicly oppressive, and one can be discreetly egalitarian.  -- Jayron  32  01:10, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Holocaust revisionism
Please note, I'm not disputing the validity of the Holocaust as an historical event, I do believe that many millions of people were murdered.

My question refers more to the way that historians have reported the Holocaust as an event which took place sequentially without any long-term vision for the fate of European Jews. In my opinion, if you analyze Nazi policy the outcome which was the Final Solution seems quite easy to envision. In the years 1933-1938 (perhaps even until 1940) the legislation which the Nazi party passed to discriminate and isolate the Jewish people is commonly thought to encourage their emigration abroad. However, the way I see it, the Nazi policy of expanding their Lebensraum makes this inherently untenable; Germany had 500,000 Jews, encouraging them to emigrate might have been feasible. However, after the Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenland and the invasion of Poland, German Jewish populations increased exponentially. My theory is that the legislation passed against the Jewish people, in addition to the decrees designed to humiliate, identify or economically cripple them, were designed not to encourage immigration; I put forth the theory that they were designed to affect German attitudes towards their Jewish neighbours. The more the Nazis made it visible to the German people that the Jews were Untermenschen, anti-German and not worth of living in Germany, the more indifferent Germans would be come and, consequently, the less likely they would be to question why the Jews were disappearing and not being seen again. Does anybody else recognize this as a credible theory or have I missed something. Basically, I think the final solution was known about at the time of coming to power, or very soon after, and that it was litmus tested by the Nazi party to see how long it would take to transform German attitudes to the Jewish people to the extent that their extermination would be passively accepted. Sorry the question was so wordy, and thanks for taking the time to answer it --Andrew 13:16, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * As I understand it, and I'm happy to be corrected, there's no evidence for a Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews prior to the 1942 Wannsee Conference. But I think we can go further than that in response to your theory. Remember, at the time of the Nuremberg Laws, Germany controlled just a small proportion of Europe and so a very small proportion of European Jewry. Unless you'd like to argue that in 1935, Hitler (who, remember, had only just reached power and was hardly even a runaway electoral success at home) already had a grand scheme for conquering all the way to Moscow (and beyond?), it's hard to support your thoughts. And I don't think that's a likely scenario. It's far more likely that the laws were as they appear to be at face value: popularist and ideological racist measures. --Dweller (talk) 14:00, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Our Mein Kampf article says "a retrospective review of the text reveals the crystallisation of Hitler's goal to completely exterminate the Jewish presence in Europe." That's from a 1925 publication, published when the Nazi party had virtually no political power. &mdash; Lomn 14:55, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * That sentence, which I've just tagged for being uncited, is directly contradicted by the following, cited, sentence, which reads, "While historians diverge on the exact date Hitler decided to exterminate the Jewish people, few place the decision before the mid 1930s". Interestingly, the cited sentence implies that some historians would go as far as saying that Hitler had plans to exterminate the Jews around the time of the Nuremberg Laws, which would mean that there may be room for the OP's opinion, after all. Though it still seems very unlikely. Hitler was very practical and planning to wipe out people who live a long way outside of one's borders is not a practical plan. --Dweller (talk) 15:03, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * To me the OP seems quite reasonable. Of course the Nazis could only expect to exterminate the German Jews in 1933, but this seems to have been a (possibly subconscious) goal from the start: E.g. to Sebastian Haffner it was clear already in 1933 that the Nazis wanted to eventually kill all the Jews, acc. to his "autobiography" ("Geschichte eines Deutschen", written in 1939). The Jews were actually prevented from emigrating with one of the 1933 laws. --Roentgenium111 (talk) 17:21, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The OP is also supported by Daniel Goldhagen: "The elimination of the Jews was Hitler's aim from the beginning. It already began in 1933 by excluding the Jews from society." („Die Eliminierung der Juden war von Anfang an Hitlers Ziel. Es begann schon 1933 mit dem Ausschluss von Juden aus der Gesellschaft.“ Spiegel-Gespräch: „Mörder dürfen ermordet werden“, in: DER SPIEGEL, Nr. 41/2009, S. 134-140, as stated in .) Roentgenium111 (talk) 17:35, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Does Goldhagen give any evidence for his claim, aside from merely asserting it? Are you sure that by "elimination", he meant genocide and not exclusion from society (which the second sentence seems to imply)?
 * The OP's theory fails Occam's razor. There is no evidence that Hitler planned to exterminate the Jews before 1942.  It is far from clear, even with 70 years of hindsight and complete access to information, that persecuting Jews would decrease instead of increase public sympathy for them.  By contrast, the theory that Hitler's policies were initially intended to encourage emigration is simple, obvious, logical, and supported by all contemporary documents and all contemporary policies.  --140.180.247.198 (talk) 17:50, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * We have a whole article on this: Functionalism versus intentionalism. That Hitler wanted to eliminate, in the sense of "get rid of", Jews from Germany is undisputed as far as I know. That's not the same as saying that he had a long-established master-plan of some sort to murder them all. I can't see how that could have been even envisaged in practical terms before 1941. Paul B (talk) 18:37, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Agreed. If extermination had been the plan all along, it's difficult to see why emigration was allowed in 1937-38 or why he didn't make a start earlier. Alansplodge (talk) 12:16, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, 1937-38 Hitler never had the pretense and chaos of open warfare to stop people asking questions. And prior to the war Hitler couldn't have anticipated the public reaction to such a policy, so better to do it covertly on disputed territory? --Andrew 13:48, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * OK, but Poland was occupied in 1939. so the why delay? The conventional view is that the "success" (in Nazi terms) of the Action T4 euthanasia programme proved to the leadership that the "final solution" was possible. Alansplodge (talk) 15:00, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I think though that when you factor in other things late 1939 to 1941 is quite a short time frame. First of all the Germans had to consolidate their position in Poland and create the General Government; then of course there's the administrative element involved of establishing which 3 million people out of a total of 35 million were Jewish; then of course the process of Aryanization and then walling them off in the Ghetto's while the extermination camps were being built or until the Einsatzgruppen arrived. I don't know I think to have pulled all that off within about 18 months was done with typical German efficiency --Andrew 18:10, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

It would be worth consulting some of the many books published on this topic rather than speculating. I believe that Saul Friedländer's book Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is currently considered to be the best single-volume work on the topic. Richard E. Evans' recent three volume history of Nazi Germany is also superb. Nick-D (talk) 23:58, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * For those readers who are already accustomed with the basics, I can heartily recommend the book Rethinking the Holocaust by Yehuda Bauer. Gabbe (talk) 09:38, 9 February 2013 (UTC)