Plagiarism is theft: A last note on Tolzmann

My post from last week about the Tolzmann affair churned up a set of comments on Joe's original post on the topic from April (here), and an email from Tolzmann that circulated quite widely and brought some traffic to this blog. (The email came to me very indirectly.)

So, this affair ended with a whimper and not a bang: Charges dropped, job kept, etc. Publishing a huge chunk of a book under your own name almost verbatim without attribution and getting away with it. I guess what holds for Scooter Libby and Alberto Gonzales holds for littler folks too.

Tolzmann can continue his life's work of raising public awareness of how the historical “persecution and victimization of German-Americans” represented "one of the most brutal inquisitions in American history”.*

*Actual quotes, from here: Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, ed. 1995. Vol. I: The Anti-German Hysteria of World War I; vol. II: The World War on [sic] Experience. München: K.G. Saur.