User:Ealdgyth/2023 Arb Com evidence test bed

First set

First, a note of warning. I'm up to 28K words documenting inaccuracies that I've found in our articles on the Holocaust (not just in Poland, but also some of the more general topics) (and still working on it - I've only gotten about halfway through Treblinka extermination camp where I'm comparing much of the article to the sources and discovering that much doesn't support things - I've also done a lighter look at Extermination camp, Judenrat, and Warsaw Ghetto Uprising). Much of it is source-integrity issues and in a lot of cases, it's almost impossible to figure out who originally added the problem because so much reverting has gone on over the years as well as shuffling of text around without making sure the source citations stayed with things. So some of my evidence will be of a generalized nature - just showing how skewed or inaccurate our articles are without necessarily trying to "pin blame". I'll try to keep the evidence to the worst cases - rather than drive you all as insane as I'm feeling with discovering this massive problem. (Yes, I'm keeping a list of all the errors I'm finding and will fix them as the case concludes)

The Holocaust in Poland:

1. "Given the severity of the German measures designed to prevent this occurrence, the survival rate among the Jewish fugitives was relatively high and by far, the individuals who circumvented deportation were the most successful." has issues with much of it being unsupported by the sources as well as not conveying all nuance of the sources

   Details: This is sourced to two sources - One is: this article by Paulsson which does not support the first phrase "Given the severity of the German measures designed to prevent this occurrence". (We're going to ignore the issues with this information not making sense within the larger framework of the paragraph its in). The second source is Lukas 1989 (2013 edition) p. 13. I've got access to the 1989 edition through internet archive here which is problematic for a number of reasons - Lukas' numbers are not generally accepted. He admits as much right here "Recent research suggest that a million Poles were involved, but some estimates go as high as three million. My own research puts the figure much higher than is customarily accepted." The conclusion "given the severity of the German measures... the survival rate among the Jewish fugitives was relatively high and by far, the individuals who circumvented deportation were the most successful." seems unsupported also - nothing in either source says anything about circumventing deportation or the other. This information was restored with Special:Diff/1003491753 in Jan 2021 by Volunteer Marek (talk · contribs), of Special:Diff/1003309879 a removal by Buidhe (talk · contribs)

2. "Historian Richard C. Lukas(source for the 3 million figure is here) gives an estimate as high as three million Polish helpers; an estimate similar to those cited by other authors." The "estimate similar..." section is not supported by the sources and is a definitely an outlier in the research, which our article cherrypicks without making this clear. The edit was added with Special:Diff/826962453 in 2018 by Nihil novi (talk · contribs)

   Details: The part from "an estimate similar to those cited by other authors." gives two sources - handily the first gives a quote from the source also. The first is Smith's Moral Geographies ... and the quote is "It has been estimated that a million or more Poles were involved in helping Jews" which flatly contradicts the "three million helpers" statement. The second source given is Lukas again... which can't support the "given by other authors" part of the statement. The original edit also gave this survival story introduction, this book that was self-published (Xlibris is a self-publishing outfit), the Moral Geographies book from above (which isn't by a historian of the Holocaust - it's topics are given as "social justice, human geography, enviromental ethics" etc) which still only says "Nevertheless, it has been estimated that a million or more Poles were invovled in helping Jews" (gives Polanski 1989: 240 and Lukas 1997: 150 as the sources) which does not support the 3 million figure, and Lukas 1989. Using Lukas here is obviously NOT a "cited by other authors" thing.

3. "In December 1939 around 100 Jews were shot by Wehrmacht soldiers and gendarmes at Kolo" is sourced to this source which is just a primary account of the shooting and is greatly undue here. It was added in June 2019 by Chumchum7 (talk · contribs) with Special:Diff/900372922

   Details: One - why is this shooting highlighted? And it is not clear who the gendarmes were - the article text seems to imply that they were part of the Wehrmacht but one of the witness statements implies that the gendarmes were local - it isn't clear if they were Polish or Volksdeutsch or something else. It's also not clear who did the supplementary text here - who's saying the Wehrmacht was involved? Is this some subject matter expert? The entry for Kolo in the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos doesn't mention any shooting in 1939...we should be using secondary sources, not primary sources for this information.

4. "Between 1942 and 1944, the most extreme measure of the Holocaust, the extermination of millions of Jews from Poland and all over Europe was carried out in six extermination camps. There were no Polish guards at any of the Reinhard camps, despite the sometimes used misnomer Polish death camps. All killing centres were designed and operated by the Nazis in strict secrecy, aided by the Ukrainian Trawnikis." The second and third sentences are not supported by the sources or are flatly contradicted by other sources and minimizes Polish contributions to the killing of Jews - there were Polish guards at Belzec and the Trawnikis were not just Ukrainian but other Soviet nationalities. It was added in Special:Diff/791174510 in 2017 by Poeticbent (talk · contribs).

   Details: This is sourced to Rethinking Poles and Jews which is a problem, because the one bit that might support it - "there were no Polish guards at the camps" is pulled out (you can tell because the google books snippet is from a search for the phrase "There were no Polish guards at any of the camps") but the context is missing. The phrase is in a paragraph that is discussing how Polish accounts of the Holocaust differ from non-Polish accounts. So the phrase "there were no Polish guards in the camps" is what the partisan Polish accounts state, not a fact that can be stated in wikipedia. And the rest of the information given in these sentences cannot be supported at all by the source given. I'll also point out that this US Holocaust Museum article on Belzec specifically mentions that some of the guards at Belzec were "However, the bulk of the guard unit, between 90 and 120 men, were either former Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) of various nationalities or Ukrainian and Polish civilians selected or recruited for this purpose." which would seem to contradict the statement our article makes that there were no Polish guards in any of the Reinhard camps (for those not aware, Belzec/Sobibor/Treblinka are collectively known as the Reinhard camps - for Operation Reinhard which operated those three death camps).

Judenrat

1. "The Judenräte are notorious today for their collaboration with the Nazi regime..." this is ... quite the POV framing here, it should be attributed and is not the historical consensus (there are some historians who would not consider all members of the councils as collaborators) This was added to the lead(!) of the article with Special:Diff/1115124934 in Oct 2022 by Drevolt (talk · contribs). I hope I don't have to explain why "notorious" is an incredibly loaded phrasing that needs careful sourcing and attribution
2. "While some scholars have described the institution of the Judenrats as a collaborationist one," is not supported by the sources and is a vast oversimplification of the research - many scholars qualify their views of the Jewish Councils with a great deal of nuance and do not feel that a broad brush "collaborationist" or "not-collaborationist" view is helpful. It was added in Special:Diff/964872329 in June 2020 by Piotrus (talk · contribs)

   Details: Tis is cited to two sources. One is The Holocaust and the Historians p. 135 which does not quite support this - it discusses that early works often charged the councils with collaboration but then discusses Arendt's Eichman in Jerusalem charge of collaboration and dismisses Arendt's charge. And the second is a specialized monograph on one particular council, not them as a whole. The original edit also had an additional source to Trunk's work on the Judenrats which did not support the information either

3. As a whole, this article is woefully inadequate in summarizing the literature and research that has been done. The fact that it gets almost 7000 views a month shames me that I haven't dug down and fixed it.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

1. This section is more of a "feel of the article" discussion, which would require a LOT of background.
2. Much of the Jewish force discussion is about material and who provided it and opinion about why the ZOB is better covered in works about the Uprising, and does not discuss the organizations that contributed fighters, how many fighters there were, who the leaders were. The focus distinctly feels ... off. A lot is devoted to help that the Jews received from the Poles - and not actually about the Jewish fighting organization.
3. In contrast - the Polish section of the forces discussion is very detailed and describes a number of actions the Polish underground attempted to do... as well as very detailed descriptions of the aid the Polish underground gave. THis section totals 1019 words, compared to 637 words in the Jewish forces section. Comparing this to the coverage of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Rozett and Spector's Encyclopedia of the Holocaust which covers the Polish aid to the Ghetto fighters as "They [the ZOB] made contact with the Polish Home Army, which recognized the new resistance organization and sent it a small number of weapons." and, describing the end of the uprising, "Several dozen fighters managed to escape with the help of ZOB members on the Polish side of the ghetto who led them through the city's sewer system." Longerich, in his Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews covers the Uprising on pp. 377-378 and doesn't mention Poles at all. Cesarani covers the Uprising on pp. 613-617 of his Final Solution. The only mention of aid from the Poles during the revolt is from a letter that Anielewicz sent to Jewish fighters outside the ghetto - Cesarani says that Anielewicz "was thrilled that the AL had conducted a supporting attack". Then on p. 617 Cesarani says that "Polish reactions to the uprising and the liquidation of the ghetto varied from admiration through compassion to glee. The AK and the AL mounted at least eleven supporting attacks on German targets outside and at least one AK unit may even have penetrated the ghetto to fight alongside the ZZW. In a press bulletin the Home Army high command praised the 'courageous, determined armed resistance... the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto should be accorded full respect and support.' Broadcasting from London on 4 May, General Sikorski called on his countrymen to 'give all help and shelter to those being murdered'. He added that 'before all humanity, which has for toolong been silent, I condemn these crimes'. But a Catholic underground paper saw the tragedy as an opportunity for the Jews to convert: 'Their souls will be cleansed and redeemed by the baptism of blood... they can be saved in the face of destruction by baptism and the true faith'." Shmuel Krakowski devotes an entire chapter to the Uprising in The War of the Doomed and very very little is mentioned about Polish forces taking part in his detailed description of events during the uprising. I have no diffs for this as the edit history of the article is a bit of a mess. I welcome someone using "Who Wrote This" detangling the edit history.
4. Along with the above - listed in the infobox as "supporting" the Jewish Uprising are the Home Army and the Gwardia Ludowa, but in light of the historians above, I'm not sure we can really say that historians would agree that their aid was significant and uncontroversial enough to include in the infobox. This was added Special:Diff/1142187963 in March 2023 by Marcelus (talk · contribs)

General Government

1. "Thousands of anti-Semitic posters were distributed in Warsaw." is not supported by the sources attached and was added Special:Diff/842732210 this May 2018 edit by Xx236 (talk · contribs)

   Details: This source the source only discusses anti-semitic propoganda in Germany, nothing about Warsaw. A second source is also given, but that's an abstract of a journal issue - and doesn't support the information either (the article may support it, but the article should be given, not the webpage of the abstract)

Second set

From Extermination camp - my full audit of the article is at User:Ealdgyth/Extermination camp audit. Note that I attempt to try to figure out who originally did the edit, but I do not claim to be an expert on diff excavation and I could be wrong on some of the "who did this" parts. The "this isn't supported"/"this is wrong"/"this isn't a reliable source" stuff though, I am confident of. I hadn't originally planned to introduce evidence relating to Poeticbent, but with the introduction of a long list of Icewhiz socks, I figured banned/retired editors were fair game.

1. "The camps designed specifically for the mass gassings of Jews were established in the months following the Wannsee Conference chaired by Reinhard Heydrich in January 1942 in which the principle was made clear that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. Responsibility for the logistics was to be handled by the programme administrator, Adolf Eichmann." is sourced to this copy of the Wannsee Protocols. Two issues - one - much of the article text is drawing conclusions/making statements that aren't supported by the Protocols text. Second - the protocols are a primary document.
2. this source is from a consulting firm and relies on three sources - a 1944 source, a 1963 source, and a 1985 source (they state this in the introduction). We should not be using these older sources ... given the opening of archives after the fall of the Soviet Union, generally, all statistics from before then should not be relied on.
3. "The mass killing facilities were developed at about the same time inside the Auschwitz II-Birkenau subcamp of a forced labour complex" is sourced to Grossman's original reporting on Treblinka/etc from 1946 and is a primary source.
4. "After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the secret Aktion T4 euthanasia programme – the systematic murder of German, Austrian and Polish hospital patients with mental or physical disabilities authorized by Hitler – was initiated by the SS in order to eliminate "life unworthy of life" (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), a Nazi designation for people who they considered to have no right to life." is sourced to this reliable source Death and Deliverance but lacks a page number, and to this source which is not really an academic source at all. The website does NOT support anything it's attached to. Without a page number, I can't easily verify if Burleigh Death and Deliverance supports the information. And in any case, the SS was not involved in Aktion T4. This information was added to the article with Special:Diff/645241196 this 2015 edit by Poeticbent. Please note that this edit had no source at all attached to it.
5. "In 1941, the experience gained in the secretive killing of these hospital patients led to the creation of extermination camps for the implementation of the Final Solution. By then, the Jews were already confined to new ghettos and interned in Nazi concentration camps along with other targeted groups, including Roma, and the Soviet POWs. The Nazi's so-called "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", based on the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by gassing, began during Operation Reinhard," is sourced to this Yad Vashem source which does not support the "the experience gained in the secretive killing of these hospital patients led to the creation of extermination camps for the implementation of the Final Solution" (which has other issues as this implies that the T4 program was the impetus to the extermination camps, where it was more that the T4 personnel became available for use in Operation Reinhard but the search for ways to murder Jews besides shooting had already begun before the T4 input came into the process) nor " interned in Nazi concentration camps along with other targeted groups, including Roma, and the Soviet POWs." most Jews/Roma/POWs were not interned in concentration camps before Reinhard - so the juxtipostion here is misleading. NOr is "The Nazi's so-called "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", based on the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by gassing" supported by the YV source. The Final Solution was not only gassing - there's the millions killed by shooting in Eastern Europe - so this is also misleading. This was added in Special:Diff/681187167 this 2015 edit by Poeticbent.
6. "On 13 October 1941, the SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik stationed in Lublin received an oral order from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler – anticipating the fall of Moscow – to start immediate construction work on the killing centre at Bełżec in the General Government territory of occupied Poland. Notably, the order preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months," is sourced to this source (which I accessed with google translate) but the source does NOT support this information - the statement in the source is "The decision on Operation Reinhardt, and thus the construction of the camp, was most likely made at a conference on October 13, 1941 at Hitler's headquarters in the "Wolf's Lair" near Kętrzyn in East Prussia. In addition to Heinrich Himmler, senior SS and Police commanders in the General Government took part in it, including Odilo Globocnik, commander of the SS and Police in the Lublin district, whose jurisdiction the camp in Bełżec was to be subordinate." This information was added to the article with [Special:Diff/681187167 this 2015 edit] by Poeticbent.
7. "but the gassings at Chełmno north of Łódź using gas vans began already in December, under Sturmbannführer Herbert Lange." is sourced to Christopher Browning Remembering Survival pp. 54, 65. This is not quite what Browning has to say. On page 54, he says "the itinerant 'euthanasia' Sonderkommando (special commando) under Herber Lange, on loan from Poznan. (This was the unit that susequently founded the Chelmno death camp near Lodz)" and on p. 65 "By November [1941], a fleet of thirty gas vans was on order, and construction of death camps was underway at Chelmno in the Warthegau (near Lodz) and Belzec in the Lublin district of the General Government." I can't say that Browning supports the article text - it's close, but not there. This was added in Special:Diff/681213547 this edit from 2015 by Poeticbent.

Answers from Ealdgyth

Answer to Barkeep

• I haven't written the topic area off - I'd love to fix the problems I see in User:Ealdgyth/Holocaust article audits, but I don't care to be accused of being a sock of IW, or of editing on his behalf, or any of the other ways that editors get attacked in this topic area.
  • For instance - User:Ealdgyth/Treblinka audit - point #6 - "Shirer, William L. (1981). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-62420-2" with my note "outdated and not by a historian - not a good fit for the sourcing reqs".
    • Shirer is used (alongside an affidavit from Hoss) to source After undressing, newly arrived Jews were beaten with whips to drive them towards the gas chambers; hesitant men were treated particularly brutally. Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz, contrasted the practice at Treblinka of deceiving the victims about the showers with his own camp's practice of telling them they had to go through a "delousing" process. and The killing process at Treblinka differed significantly from the method used at Auschwitz and Majdanek, where the poison gas Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) was used. At Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec, the victims were murdered by suffocation and carbon monoxide poisoning from engine exhaust in stationary gas chambers. At Chełmno, they were carried within two specially equipped and engineered trucks, driven at a scientifically calculated speed so as to murder the Jews inside it during the trip, rather than force the drivers and guards to murder them at the destination. After visiting Treblinka on a guided tour, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss concluded that using exhaust gas was inferior to the cyanide used at his extermination camp.
    • It should be easy to replace that sourcing with something newer (or remove the information entirely as we really don't need to privilege Hoss' views given his own serious issues as a Nazi extermination camp commandant!) But, past history in this topic area shows me that something this simple is likely to lead to a long drawn out fight to get it out. Witness the effort that it took to straighten out the Gas van article (and get Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to not be used as a source!) from that article - see Talk:Gas van/Archive 1#Soviet vans and further on that archive. Why should I NOT be worried that something as simple as replacing Shirer and Hoss here might lead me to having to spend months debating/defending/etc just to do what would be self-evident to most other editors (hint - that Shirer's work from 1960 (the 1981 date listed in the Treblinka article references section is misleading - that's the edition that was quoted, but the original work dates from 1960) has long been super-ceded and he wasn't a historian to begin with - so we shouldn't rely on him for anything).
• ArbCom has seen the evidence here - the evidence of how editors in this area behave towards other editors. I don't know how to fix the problem of treating an area like a battleground but that's why ArbCom gets the big bucks, right?
• I'm not suggesting the source restriction be repealed ... I'm saying that it's been gutted because its not being enforced. That AE discussion basically told Buidhe that even though there was a source restriction that said "On articles where "reliable-source consensus required" is in effect, when a source that is not a high quality source (an article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journals, an academically focused book by a reputable publisher, and/or an article published by a reputable institution) is added and subsequently challenged by reversion, no editor may reinstate the source without first obtaining consensus on the talk page of the article in question or consensus about the reliability of the source in a discussion at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard." that when they removed a book published by Xlibris (which is a self-publishing company) and a work by Mark Paul (that had previously been ruled unreliable at RSN), that when these sources were restored, it was up to Buidhe to get consensus AGAIN on the article talk page that those two obviously not reliable sources were unreliable. That decision at AE gutted the source restriction - if those two obviously unreliable sources can be restored ... clearly AGAINST the source restriction (since Paul had already been debated at RSN and I'm pretty sure we can say that anything published by Xlibris is not within the source restriction) then the source restriction means nothing.
• What I want is for the editors to behave better towards each other. Most of the editors involved in this arbcom ARE capable of behaving well towards other editors, but they need to do it all the time - not just with a few editors. Yes, it's hard. I've retyped this paragraph a couple of times, to keep from making it about other specific editors and instead focused on the broad topic of general behavior. I don't know how to make that into something that ArbCom can make a remedy. And of course, when a topic area is a battleground, it's too easy to start seeing everything in terms of "how can I use this situation to my side's advantage".
• I will say this - if you pass a remedy - you need to make sure that you're not undercut by later ArbCom members - that's what really .. undercut that AE ... having a sitting ArbCom member come along and basically say the sourcing restriction was bad. There's something in parenting called "a united front" - that means that if your partner has set out a rule, you BOTH enforce it, even if you personally disagree. If you allow the children to divide you, they will ruthlessly use that division to get their own way. If you pass a remedy, make it stick.
• A fundamental problem in the topic area is that admins and arbcom want to avoid ruling on content. But the basis of the battleground behavior IS the content - there are strains in the historiography of the topic that ARE "fringe" - that aren't supported by most of the historians active in the topic area. And unfortunately, many historians in the topic area think that some of the Polish historians/writers/etc are outside the norms of what the historical sources support. That's the elephant in the room and that problem is what G&K tried to document. I don't always agree with much of their article, but there ARE content issues with our articles on the topic. And, I'll say that after my deep dive into the content, it appears that a good chunk of it can be traced to editors who are not a party to this arbcom. (Poeticbent, Jacurek, Icewhiz, Tatzref, others) So much of what I would have presented was not "relevant" because those editors weren't included in the parties and thus ... a full picture of the problems with the content in the topic area wasn't made clear to ArbCom. And so ... because that wasn't clear and because ArbCom "doesn't rule on content" ... the problems will persist if the behavior in the topic area is allowed to continue. Hell, it's continuing right here in this arbcom - there are editors who engaged in the same battleground behavior right here in this case. If you can figure out how to get that behavior to stop, then the topic area won't be toxic.
• In the end, what needs to happen is good editing behavior. Editors need to:
  • Utilize high quality sources
  • Utilize a broad range of sources
  • Read the full context of the sources, i.e. not do a google search but instead read the entirety of the source
  • Discuss civily and remember that the other editors are human too
  • Stop reverting everything and learn to discuss based on the above
  • Stop discussing the other editors and stay on topic
  • Be prepared to assess their own behavior and try to keep AGFing, even when it is hard
  • (Utopian dreaming here - learn that history is not a science. But that it does have it's own processes and methods and that you need to learn them - I trained as a medievalist and I work as a horse history researcher - so I have some idea of how to "do" history. And I will say that if I'd tried to use sources the way some of our articles use sources, I'd be utterly ashamed and my professors would have ripped me a new one for basic historical research failure)
• I'm hoping that after this case ends, I'll be able to at least fix a few of the problems I've documented. Some of that will be based on how insane my life off wiki gets, but some of it will be based on how much things change. I will say that I am slightly hopeful with the banning of another sockmaster (just as I was encouraged by the banning of Icewhiz) so we'll see what develops. Ealdgyth (talk) 18:02, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

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