Journals rejected Bettelheim’s camp paper because the camps seemed unbelievable

Evidence

Unfortunately, for well over a year, this paper was rejected by one after another of the psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals to which I sent it, thinking that they were most likely to be willing to print it. The reasons for rejection varied. Some editors objected because I had not kept written records while in the camps, implicitly revealing that they had not believed a word of what I had written about conditions in the camps. Others refused it because the data were not verifiable, or because the findings could not be replicated. A few came right out and said that both what I claimed were facts and my conclusions were mostly improbable exaggerations. Some addedprobably correctly, as judged by my experience when I tried talking about these matters to professional peoplethat the article would be too unacceptable to their audiences. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1619

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier claim that wartime knowledge of the final solution went widely disbelieved, even by its victims. — connects to: Psychiatric journals rejected early Holocaust testimony because it was unverifiable and unbelievable — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1619; The camps’ economic uselessness made their horrors unbelievable — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 995
• QUESTION: The epistemology of testimony about atrocity — when ‘verifiable data’ and ‘replicable findings’ become the terms by which survivors’ accounts are dismissed — worth pursuing as an article angle.
• SEED: An essay on how empirical-evidence standards functioned as denials of testimony about the camps: the demand for written records, verifiability, and replicability as instruments of disbelief.

Broader Connections

• Psychiatric journals rejected early Holocaust testimony because it was unverifiable and unbelievable #expands (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1619
• The camps’ economic uselessness made their horrors unbelievable #qualifies (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 995