The job is also to assert no conclusion when appropriate. That has not happened here.

I also know what the history books and the state says, namely that no such thing happened.

In fact this happened in essentially every town, all but the smallest, in Northwest Europe. There were local differences. In some cities kids got executed because of who their parents were. Sometimes the Nazi soldiers were gone, people in hiding came out, and the local government turned out to have internalized Nazi ideology ... and executed them. Mostly the government never looked at it's own role in what happened, and CERTAINLY never did anything to return possessions of deported people, mostly but certainly not exclusively Jews. Sometimes opportunists used the opportunity to execute local rich families or rival farmers and confiscate their possessions. In another relatively famous story, the local police commander knew that civil servants and things like notaries, but also some youth services related clergy, were cooperating with the Nazi government ... and executed them. In some places it even came to a battle between pro- and anti-Nazi forces (yes, after liberation).

You will find some reference to some of what happened in history books about the South Part of the Netherlands, but this happened everywhere. The government denies it happened in my hometown, and in fact denies it happened anywhere in the country. A general amnesty was declared by the Americans some months later, mostly out of total desperation that they were losing everyone, and that it needed to stop and instead they'd do the Nuremberg trials, which were limited to the worst of the worst, and exclusively people from the actual Nazi party.

Of course, all the European governments did all decide they were never going to repay or return anything that was stolen, not to Jews, not to those rich families, not to the Church, nothing. War pensions were awarded to survivors of the camps, the same or similar to what was awarded to soldiers.

Western European Governments just wanted control, and let murders happen, provided official documents "confirming" possessions of goods stolen through massacres, if only they were allowed to stay in power.

This included falsifying birth certificates for a LOT of children where, shall we say, parental responsibilities were redistributed. This practice would continue for decades after the war ended.

That sort of evidence isn’t nothing, but _in itself_ you probably need to be very careful with it.

So? Historic stories and tales from a time when those things weren't written down but handed orally from generation to generation are generally far removed from the truth.

After all, even in an age where almost everything is written down we still battle to separate baseless accusations from substantiated facts.

Especially because the stakes are so much lower. Ancient Carthage really does not matter. The ancient world is full of compelling stories, but ultimately they are just that. Whether Carthaginians sacrificed babies does not matter to the modern world at all.

"As the relationships between scientific practice and social, archaeological and historical interpretations continue to be debated in the discipline at large (McGovern 1995; Jones 2001; Knapp 2002), it should perhaps not come as a surprise that we insist that it is critical that all types or ‘genres’ of evidence be taken into account in relation to the tophets as both a historical phenomenon and a series of archaeological contexts. We all have to work within the limits of our own expertise, whether as scientists, archaeologists, philologists or epigraphers, but we should also strive in the humanities as much as in the sciences to apply the highest standards of academic rigour, without preconceptions, in order to formulate falsifiable hypotheses and interpretations that take into account the full range of available sources—however strange we may find the results..."

I don't know, that sounds like a pretty good "understanding of the scientific process". (Admittedly, I'm just an astrophysicist, so maybe I don't understand "the scientific process".)

Honestly this is a thin critique indeed. Social sciences are difficult precisely because they focus on phenomena with multi-factorial causes. Simple, high confidence, predictive theories are rare in psychology, sociology, anthropology etc, not because social scientists are committing a 'hoax'. In part because the factors impacting individual and collective behaviour are profoundly complex. And also because experimentalism in the social world is ethically, practically and epistemically fraught. We can't easily experiment on people or societies, and we can't stand as independent observers of phenomena of which we are part. We can develop hypotheses, develop experiments which attempt to falsify our null hypothesis, triangulate evidence from different observations and so on. We can model, observe, and infer. Over time we can develop frameworks that are measurably useful - from CBT to behavioural economics. But none of this is easy or definitive.

I note how common this perspective - that social science is some kind of conspiracy of faux expertise - is becoming on Hackernews. And how ironic it is, given that it's rooted in a lack of expertise or even familiarity with the topics critiqued.

This is just one forum in which the growing social skepticism of expertise in general, and science in particular is being articulated.