oa Een opvallend gebrek aan argumentatie - De kritiek van Evelien Gans en Remco Ensel op ‘Wij weten niets van hun lot.’ Gewone Nederlanders en de Holocaust

My book on Dutch popular opinion towards the persecution of the Jews makes three points: first, that Gentiles were not indifferent, but indignant about it; second, that Jews and Gentiles realized the Germans were intent on exterminating the Jews, but could not imagine the speed with which this would happen; and third, that this is relevant because it was imaginable that, the Germans being on the verge of defeat, deportation would be less dangerous than going into hiding, which helps explain Jews’ and Gentiles’ compliance. In their extensive polemic against the book Evelien Gans and Remco Ensel fail to disprove (or even seriously discuss) any of these conclusions, because they concentrate on exposing a subtext (supposedly ‘equalizing’ victims and bystanders), which takes up so much space that objections are posited without proof. Unsatisfactory as this is, Gans’s and Ensel’s habit of misquoting and misrepresenting the text is even more worrying.