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I'm grateful to Lee Kelly for his interesting criticism and hope I may be allowed to reply at this late date, as I have only now seen his post. Mr. Kelly notes, following Popper, that there are verifiable statements the negations of which are not verifiable. "There is a black swan" is verifable, but "No black swans exist" is
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Mr. Redford should have another look at the speech by Hitler to which he rightly calls attention. The bulk of the text is devoted to Hitler's claim that the Poles rejected his terms on Danzig and the Polish Corridor and refused to negotiate. I know of no serious diplomatic historian of the period who places primary emphasis on the Gleiwitz incident
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Mr. Redford evidently thinks that if historians do not embrace the Bahar-Kugel book, it must be because they are unfamiliar with it. Perhaps they have consulted the Goebbels diary and other relevant evidence and find the book unconvincing. Does Mr. Redford think that all of the border incidents were German "false flag" operations? Clashes
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I'm grateful to James Redford for his informative post on the Bahar and Kugel book, but the views in that book have been rejected by most experts on the period. See, e.g, Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin, 2004) and Ian Kershaw, Hitler (Norton, 2008). The Goebbels diary shows that the top Nazi leadership was surprised by the