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Was the Mercedes dark green or black? Do we trust the eyewitnesses who might have been mistaken, or Binet, who may have been presented with a forged historical artifact?

Can we accept Naujocks's first-hand recollection of Heydrich's words (in Chapter 102), or does Binet have a point that "Heydrich would have wanted to rip his balls off"?

Do you think Binet adequately captures this dialectic between what really happened and human interpretations of the same?

Hm. Actually, my re-posted comment about the recollections of a child soldier would fit as well here as where I did post them.

To paraphrase, normal people in normal situations will remember key things differently, down to who said something or what colour a car was.

When we remember even a simple, short, recent incident, our memories are rarely all we think they are. Memory is bound to take some twists and turns from what a video camera on the scene might have captured.

When you tell a story (and an important one is usually told many times), you literally re-create the story. We often, when re-creating stories, think to ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, 'how did that part happen? oh, it must have been like... that, maybe', and then convince ourselves after repeated tellings that that's exactly how it was, no question. We make a narrative that makes sense out of events that may not really have made much sense at the time.

So we can't accept anyone's account in the sense that we believe it to have absolute fidelity with what happened.

I do think Binet captures this well. He consistently includes qualifications about facts, such as according to whom, or what somebody 'must have' felt rather than did. He contradicts himself, and others, and highlights the fact.

It's like he's putting together a collage of what happened from photos from hundreds of different cameras, except that each fragment is even less reliable than a photograph (and even photographs, in all senses but the purely technical, can lie).

But the result, rather than being weaker than an internally consistent account, comes off as stronger. By acknowledging its fallibility, it somehow moves closer to the facts. By admitting it is not real, it opens the door for us to imagine what was.

Terry wrote: "By admitting it is not real, it opens the door for us to imagine what was."

Absolutely. And I would add that Binet introduces us to a very liberating experience in that regard.

I really admire what seems to be Binet's candour.