Talk:The Holocaust/Archive 32

Archive 25

←

Archive 30

Archive 31

Archive 32

Archive 33

Archive 34

Archive 35

Shanghai without citations

So sorry!

1. I pasted the wrong post without citations, and I have to find the correct one, because I have always posted with citation (temperature here was 105!).

I am looking in my comuter for the posting on Shanghai with citations, as I have done it in the past.

2. I did ask to discuss with me comments, before reverting my post.

3. Frankly, I have every reason to feel harassed, when I have shown that I am actively listening, and reading wiki rules: a. I have politely asked editor Carole, to "talk" to me only in Talk of the article. But, she continues to post messages in my user talk. b. She was the first one to immediately revert my good faith contribution, posted without citation, instead of contacting me via Talk of the article: Henia, can you please add citations?

4. I am also making the effort to read as much as possible material in wiki. And I found that: "Reverting a contribution may be appropriate. However, reverting good-faith actions of other editors can also be disruptive and may lead to the reverter being temporarily blocked from editing."

Thank you for your kind attention, and I welcome constructive comments from all editors. Henia Perlman (talk) 16:14, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Good faith only goes so far, though. It also isn't others job to follow around and clean up after other editors. I would have reverted your addition not only for the for the lack of citations, but also the formatting issues and the tone of the addition. We cannot call someone a butcher without a source. Nor is calling someone that encyclopedic tone. Nor do we need a paragraph on the Shanghai situation in an overview article on the entire Holocaust, so it had WP:UNDUE issues. And it made no sense, because it said that Meisinger went to Japan and forced the Japanese ruler to put the refugees into a ghetto, but the next sentencece contradicted the previous sentence and said he Japanese Ruler ignored the Nazis. Which was itt - was he forced or did he ignore? This is the sort of problems that keep recurring ... Ealdgyth - Talk 16:37, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

I have asked you to work with me regarding making sure that the content is "article ready" due to your history of edits and the fact that you have received so many warnings about your edits. I am trying to keep you from being blocked.

Would you please post what you want to add here, rather than posting it to the article and I will work on getting it ready? Please.–CaroleHenson (talk) 16:39, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Carole for your help! I just reposted before I read the two above messages. Here your message for your kind formatting:

In Shanghai, there were about 20,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, because they could emigrate there without a visa. After the Wannsee conference, Hitler’s Germany sent SS-Colonel Joseph Meisinger, the “Butcher of Warsaw to Shanghai, Norman Goda The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews, 1918 – 1945 Pearson, 2013 p. 267

But, the Japanese government ignored the Nazis, and didn’t murder the Jews, Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust 89

who left Shanghai after 1945. http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206019.pdf

2. Shanghai is not undue weight and sources mention it even in overview

Thank you Carole! Henia Perlman (talk) 17:06, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Henia, I have been offering to format your citations for quite some time. You pushed ahead after the final warning and the messages here on the talk page. As you likely saw on your talk page, I have submitted a request to block your account.–CaroleHenson (talk) 17:11, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Henia Perlman: Please add things with the references in place; formatting can be fixed, but uncited material, especially if it appears defamatory, is reverted. Yes, this did happen and should be mentioned in this article, but briefly. We have coverage of it at for example Abraham Kaufman, Jewish settlement in the Japanese Empire, and Josef Albert Meisinger, and yes he was nicknamed the 'Butcher of Warsaw' (note that you need to close your quote marks). My knowledge comes from an acquaintance who was a Jewish survivor of Manchuria, rather thatn from study; in your opinion do we have it adequately covered at Josef Albert Meisinger#Activities in Shanghai and Japan? Yngvadottir (talk) 17:16, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Status of artcle

This article is generally on my watch list, but I took it off recently, due to the on-going disputes. However, if editors here need a 3rd party opinion on a specific point, please feel free to ping me. K.e.coffman (talk) 17:16, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

New Holocaust definition

I changed the definition of Holocaust, to one which looks more relevant and appropriate to its cultural background.

I also changed a sentence in the next paragraph as follow: From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in a genocide, which was part of a larger event including the persecution and murder of other peoples in Europe. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in both the logistics and the carrying out of the mass murder. Killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies, OR in the sphere of Nazi influence.

I welcome your comments, and I am ready to actively listen to them.

Thank you. Henia Perlman (talk) 13:41, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

You added (in the lead) a definition that is distinctly fringe and directly contradicts what's in the article body. You added it without any source. You added it with a number of grammatical mistakes. You added it with content (including the clergy and Christians as a group) that is nowhere supported in the text of the article body and is not supported by any definition I've ever seen except on the very fringe of scholarship. This leaves aside that you're supposed to be working on figuring which options would allow you to avoid being blocked. At this point, I'm beginning to lose paitence with the idea that you are really listening to what others are telling you. Others are telling you that your bold edits need to stop for a while so you can learn more about Wikipedia culture and norms. Instead, you continue adding information without sources and with formatting and grammar errors to a very very high profile article. (This ignores the POV pushing of a definition not embraced by most scholars.) With all of those problems (and that's just scratching the surface), I've reverted you. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:46, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Regarding Christians and clery, a note about why might be in order. I would not say it is fringe, I think usually the Catholics are counted as "ethnic Poles" - but this depends on who you ask, whether they feel "Pole" or "Catholic" — there is a technical, definition-based reason why Christians are usually not counted as a group, but the sources do mention "Christians are not counted as a group because..." my intuition is there will be at least some debate about Catholics. The general scholarly view at this time is that Christians, as a group, were targetted selectively according to come sources (including the Columbia source, I can pull it out again if necessary.) But whether or not they are counted depends on whether by Holocaust you mean the Final Solution, or the broader campaign of violence and war crimes on the Eastern front. Nothing I have read is especially clear about this and defining the Holocaust is not easy at all - any edits should be made very carefully.Seraphim System ^(talk) 15:14, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

We should not be putting the broadest definition as the very first sentence in the lead - that is giving too much weight to a viewpoint among scholars that is not shared by all of them. To be quite frank, the lead is the LAST thing we need to worry about - since it needs to reflect the body of the article, it needs to wait for final polishing until the whole article is pretty well polished and finalized. There is plenty of work to do, but the lead right now I think reflects at least something we can live with until the whole article is in better shape. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:26, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

I definitely agree, the lede should follow the body. As a note, I don't think its that much different then what we have now which is the broad defintion. There seem to be two meanings of the word which are fairly widely accepted - under the first definition, the Holocaust begins in 1933 with the Nuremberg Laws and includes everything that we would consider to be part of the genocide against the Jewish nation. So, it is another word for the Nazi genocide against the Jews. The other, which is slightly fuzzier, mainly turns around who should be counted in the Holocaust figure—here, scholars are reluctant to discount other groups and individuals who suffered the same atrocities, especially on the Eastern front where the worst atrocities happened. The 11 million figure is pretty widely accepted at this point, there are even higher figures which remain fringe. But the article should come first, connecting historical Christian theological anti-semitism to the racial ideology of the Nazis for example is WP:OR, and it's not supported by most scholarly sources, the section heading Anti-semitism and Racism is itself problematic. The issue of the Catholic Church and the Holocaust is quite complex, but only discussed in passing in this article. This sentence is pretty low-level for a Wikipedia article: Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for rejecting and killing Jesus. Seraphim System ^(talk) 16:16, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Preserving here so we can find a source...

"According to Otto Ohlendorf the "Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, Gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger security. In practice, their victims were nearly all defenseless Jewish civilians and not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations." - need a source for this... parking this here until we find one. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:42, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Ealdgyth reverted Henia's posting of Holocaust definition

Here the definition which I think better fit the body of the article, and was used by the US Senate, the ushmm, Elie Wiesel, Niewyk’s The Holocaust, 2003 (quite similar), Merriam-Webster dictionary:

The Holocaust, was the ideological persecution of millions of Jews, Christians, and other Undesirables (blacks, the Romani, physically and mentally disabled, some of the Slavic people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, and others), who were targeted by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, between the years of 1933-1945, for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons. The primary target/victims were the Jews, wherever Nazi Germany and its collaborators could find them in the world. By war’s end, approximately six million Jews (two thirds of European Jewry - one-third of the Jewish people), and millions of others had perished in the Holocaust. Hundreds of Jewish communities in Europe disappeared forever in the Holocaust of the Jewish people, also referred to as the the Shoah,. A narrower definition of Holocaust includes only the Jews as victims of Nazi ideology: The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of six million Jews by Hitler’s Germany and its collaborators, and the near destruction of European Jewry.

I welcome your comments.

I was told that one person shouldn't single-hand edit the whole article without listening to comments. Ealdgyth is doing that.

I did mention, that I would like to add the citations that Ealdgyth couldn't find. I asked Carole to help me format the citations and the relevant modifications. But, it seems to me that her offer is changing.

Some of you may know that Carole made a request to block me, just following my posting about Shanghai Jews without citations.

Thank you for your kind attention. Henia Perlman (talk) 15:03, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

References

(edit conflict)

I posted this message at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.–CaroleHenson (talk) 15:06, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Henia - the correct procedure is to address the comments I made above. Not to start a new section on the talk page and ignore the issues I pointed out with your edit. This is not listening to others when they engage with you, but rather trying to find someone else and ignoring the concerns brought up. Please take the time to engage with the issues I raised, because why should I bother to keep pointing out why you got reverted when you just ignore the reasons given? I stand by my comments above. I do see that you removed "clergy" but there are still other problems with your edit, and it reflects a definition embraced by a very small proportion of the scholarship. We cannot just present one definition as there are many different ones. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:13, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

We had again an edit conflict, as I was writing a note addressing your issues. I am slow, and it took time for me to write them. :::Here they are:

Discussing Ealdgyth's arguments to revert the new definition of Holocaust

1. "You added (in the lead) a definition that is distinctly fringe and directly contradicts what's in the article body."

Fact - Other sources use it: the ushmm, and is quite similar to the one in Niewyk’s The Holocaust, 2003.

It is also similar to definitions by the US Senate, Merriam-Webster dictionary.

I have never seen a definition such the one in the article.

I think that it is the current definition that "contradicts what's in the article body".

3. The current definition also has no sources. I think that you took them out.

4. I didn’t write it.

5. I took the clergy out, since it is not in the article body.

I am ready to actively listen to comments from other editors, besides Ealdgyth, Carole and some others.

I have admitted when I have been wrong.

Thank you for your kind attention. Henia Perlman (talk) 15:20, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that Elie Wiesel, za"l, used the definition of Holocaust inclusive of Jews and other undesirables.

Please, your comments, but not too fast, as I have to go.

Thank you. Henia Perlman (talk) 15:24, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

Henia, I have debated whether it makes sense to respond to these comments, but for clarity, here goes:

To your comment: I was told that one person shouldn't single-hand edit the whole article without listening to comments. Ealdgyth is doing that. Ealdgyth is absolutely not doing that. You are continuing to make controversial and improper edits without discussing it on the talk page first.

Regarding your comment I did mention, that I would like to add the citations that Ealdgyth couldn't find. I asked Carole to help me format the citations and the relevant modifications. But, it seems to me that her offer is changing. My offer did not change, it was always in the context of one of the two options proposed at the ANI where you would request edits to the article on the talk page - my offer was to help get the edits "article ready" for this talk page. You haven't wanted to discuss the changes first, so I recommended the second option to work on other articles first with another user until you got the hang of the guidelines.–CaroleHenson (talk) 15:29, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

At this point, let's please await the feedback at the Administrator's noticeboard.–CaroleHenson (talk) 15:30, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

(ec) The lead does not NEED sources. The definition is described in the section of the article titled "Definition". That's where the sources are. That's where the lead draws its information from for the definition. This is basic Wikipedia 101. There ARE sources in the article body - yes, I took the sources out of the lead because ... we avoid putting citations in the lead. When I put in the definition section - I copied the whole section in the lead that was about the definition into the definition section. So, no, the current lead definition does not contradict what's in the body since the body text was built off the lead text. Please ... this is what makes things so difficult and frustrating ... you are trying to do things when you don't know how we do things in Wikipedia. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:31, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Agree with that. The order & way the two alternative broad & narrow definitions are put in the existing (Ealdgyth) version seems more typical to me. Johnbod (talk) 16:14, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

I'm avoiding commenting on Henia's edits except to say that Ealdgyth did the right thing by reverting them. I really just wanted to chime in concerning sources in the lead. I fully support the guidelines about the lead, and used to believe that no lead ever needed sources because in a properly constructed article material in the lead would only summarize information already sourced in the body. While I still believe this, in fact the word "need" is kind of the crux here, because I used to think the guideline militated against sources in the lead, but it doesn't, really. Here's what WP:CITELEAD says: Because the lead will usually repeat information that is in the body, editors should balance the desire to avoid redundant citations in the lead with the desire to aid readers in locating sources for challengeable material. Given the ability of this topic to attract controversy (not to mention disruption) I think this is one article which probably should have sources in the lead. I believe that any refs in the lead should should be invocations of named references defined later in the body. That is, all lead refs should contain only <ref name="refname" /> and no other content. This is on purpose so that no source in the lead can be uniquely there, and if anyone removes the full, named ref later in the body at some later point, the ref in the lead will immediately go red with an H:CERNT error to call attention to it. In addition, since the lead is a summary, lead refs should reuse the named body ref for the same reason the body did. I suppose I should really put all that on the Talk page of the WP:LEAD guideline, because all this is just my opinion and you don't have to follow it, but this is my new feeling about sources in the lead, although I used to be against them universally, I no longer am for articles like this one, which I think would benefit from them, if done in a careful way so that nothing new is introduced and all ref usage reflects their usage in the body. Mathglot (talk) 18:29, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

I'm fine with having refs after we work through the rest of the article. I'll point out though, that we're using Template:Sfn, so we don't do named refs. But the principle is the same. I just think we should put off any refs until after we get the article into shape so that we have a chance at a stable version to be putting refs on. I'll add that I can really only see the need for refs on the most challengeable information - death totals and the like. Given the complexity of the topic, the lead is going to take a while to get right (although I do think the current lead (which is largely the result of the editors who came before me, I've done only tweaks) isn't that awful.) Ealdgyth - Talk 18:38, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Not to change meaning of source information

I completely agree with Ealdgyth to only state "what the source says", and not to "change the meaning of sourced information". Henia Perlman (talk) 14:30, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Are you referring to one of the threads above, like "copy rights. Information from memory", or some other discussion from some other page? It´s hard to understand the context when you start a new section like this. Consider continuing the discussion in the relevant thread, with proper WP:INDENT, to help other editors follow the discussion. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:47, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Ideology and scale-section

Shouldn´t this section also mention the number of murdered jews in Nazi-Germany itself? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:03, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

The enumeration of the victims is down lower in the article - the "ideology and scale" section is part of distinctive features section, so we are just trying to point out with broad brushes the extreme scale of the situation, to explicate why the scale was one distinctive feature of this genocide versus others. Ealdgyth - Talk 19:06, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Good enough, thanks. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:24, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Ealdgyth, can you please mention the source that states that "the scale was one distinctive feature of this genocide versus others"?Rachelle Perlman (talk) 14:04, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

We don't say that in the article though. I don't need a source for a statement I make on the talk page. And can you please stick to one account, please? Ealdgyth - Talk 14:07, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

So sorry, it's Henia; Serious problems with laptop and connection issues.

And we had a conflict when I wanted to explain the issue

So, you mean to say that you added the number, because you think it is "one distinctive feature of this genocide versus others"? I have now to take care of my grandchildren, and I will read you later. Thank you.Rachelle Perlman (talk) 14:28, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Actually, the section and information was already in the article when I started (although I may have changed the wording some when I sourced it). I just added a source. At this point, we're still mainly going through and adding sources for information in the article, as well as doing preliminary additions of information that is lacking (such as rounding out the extermination camps section so it didn't focus exclusively on Auschwitz). Reworking an article on such a big topic is a long long process. I'm sure there will continue to be research and work on finding connecting information for months to come. I've done work like this on other articles in the past, so I am familiar with the process and know to be paitent and just keep plugging away at the work. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:38, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Paragraph from "Jewish resistance"

Parking this paragraph here as it's going to be very difficult to source, since it reads much like a personal essay.

For the great majority of Jews, resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis encouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves. Germans held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leadership so deeply in compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. The historical conditioning of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end. Uprisings in the ghettoes only took place when the Jewish population had been greatly reduced and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible. The Jewish communities were also systematically deceived about German intentions, and were cut off from most sources of news from the outside world. The Germans told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps – euphemistically calling it "resettlement in the East" – and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed.

Will work on reintegrating it with sources and less essayish-tone later. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:26, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

• Possible WP:COPYVIO from Allah and Space (2010), page 185, by Anwar El-Shahawy: three paragraphs from Google Books combined into one. You're welcomed to investigate. — 75.156.65.213 (talk) 15:56, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

• I think it's more likely that the book is copied from Wikipedia - see the "chapter" headings here. Its published by Xlibris, which is a print on demand place. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:09, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Bibliography and further reading sections

Where's the line between these two? Is there a good reason not to merge them? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:49, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

The bibliography should actually be "references" or "sources" since bibliography is supposed to be reserved for books/ etc written by the subject of the article. The sources/references section is only for works used as sources in the article. Further reading is reserved for works not used as sources but which would go further into detail not covered in an encyclopedia article. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:57, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

So if I understand you correctly, Everything in Bibliography is used as citations in the article? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:30, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

It should be. If I missed removing one, there should be no objections to people fixing. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:35, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

Sorry for cutting the thread, still learning

Henia is reading wikipedia content - is asking clarifications

I will appreciate Ealdgyth's clarifications:

1. I noticed a statement about Jews of Shanghai was added. I think that I didn't see a summary for this edit.

2. Section "Ideology and scale" - Why did you keep/change/add

a. "Close to 3 million Jews … b. "Discussions at the Wannsee ...

3. Why did you revert my change in the second paragraph of the lead: "Killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies." I added "under sphere of German/Nazi influence" (I think).

4. Your objections to my proposal for a new lead –

-"a definition that is distinctly fringe". Can you please tell me specifically the names of the sources you consider as fringe, and those that are not.

-" too much weight to a viewpoint among scholars that is not shared by all of them." – Clarify, please.

-"a definition not embraced by most scholars." Please, specify their names

- "directly contradicts what's in the article body" Can you please specify how, where, and why?

- "the lead right now I think reflects at least something we can live with." Can you please specify the "something we can live with"?

Thank you. Henia Perlman Henia Perlman (talk) 15:02, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

1. Diff please. And I'll point out that there isn't really an requirement for edit summaries, so the occasional edit without an edit summary isn't exactly something that is going to break the wiki. Is the information on Shanghai not sourced (hint, it is)?

2. I do not understand the problem here. Were not close to 3 million Jews in Poland killed? Did the Wannsee Conference not make it clear that the target was ALL the Jews in Europe (and the whole world)?

3. There was an objection that the phrasing was too close to one historian's work, so I paraphrased and condensed.

4. The lead that was inserted said that the Holocaust "was the ideological persecution of millions of Jews, Christians, and other Undesirables (blacks, the Romani, physically and mentally disabled, some of the Slavic people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, members of the clergy, political dissidents, and others), who were targeted by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, between the years of 1933-1945, for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons." You changed the definition - by removing "genocide", which is the mainstream definition. The Christians in the Roman Empire were persecuted. The Holocaust is much much more than a "persecution", it is a genocide. Most scholars call it a genocide. It contradicts the definition section where it is defined as a genocide. I can't think of a serious scholar who defines the Holocaust NOT as a genocide but as a "persecution". And most scholars do not include political dissidents or ALL Christians as part of the Holocaust. (When something says "millions of Jews, Christians..." it means ALL Christians) Yes, most ethnic Poles are Catholic, but they were killed by the Germans for their ethnicity not their religion. There was some persecution of the various Christian churches in Germany and other countries, but the reason many Polish clergy were killed was because they were Poles and they were part of the Polish leadership - the fact that they were clergy was just an extra bonus.

Of course, the addition also had grammar issues, and since it was not repeating information from the body of the article, the fact that it was unsourced was another issue. So I can't "tell me specifically the names of the sources you consider as fringe, and those that are not" because the additon did not use any sources. Nor can I specify the names of the scholars, because the addition didn't use any sources. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:57, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

More parking...

"Because the significant majority of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were speakers of Yiddish, the Holocaust had a profound and permanent effect on the fate of the Yiddish language and culture. On the eve of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world. The Holocaust led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, because the Jewish communities that used it in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Of the remaining non-Yiddish speaking population, the Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) speaking Jewish communities of Greece and the Balkans were also destroyed, which contributed to the near-extinction of this language."

Ealdgyth - Talk 17:44, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

The Jacobs source on Yiddish isn't of any use? Robby.is.on (talk) 17:52, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

I haven't been able to lay my hands on it. ILL hit a brick wall. Given the number of times I checked a source and it did not support the information given, I'm concerned this one may not also. Will keep poking to find a source for this. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:07, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Ah. For what it's worth Google Books has page 3 which was the one that was used and it would seem to me that it does support the sentence in question. :-) Robby.is.on (talk) 20:08, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

While we're at it: The library of my university has Salomo Birnbaum's "Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache" in its fifth edition which is even newer than the one from the citation (4th). If you'd like me to, I can scan some pages and send them to you: Robby.is.on (talk) 20:11, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

If it's in English - if it's in German, just go ahead and update the information as needed. I (badly) read Latin and that's it for foreign languages. Ealdgyth - Talk 20:13, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Okay, I'll give it a shot. Robby.is.on (talk) 21:01, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Restored the bits that can be sourced to Jacobs... Ealdgyth - Talk 20:20, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Yay! :-) Robby.is.on (talk) 21:01, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Correction to bibliography...

@Henia Perlman: I'm sorry that I did not understand that you saw an error in the bibliography - it got buried in a pile of other information. Sometimes if something is a simple fix... it's best to make a small post with only the one issue in it so it doesn't get lost in the rest of the post. Anyway, it is now fixed and thank you for spotting that. Ealdgyth - Talk 19:20, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for letting me know - I truly want to collaborate with you.Henia Perlman (talk) 19:20, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

Definition solely in terms of Jewish victims?

I'm sure this has already been debated endlessly but why does the definition refer solely to one class of victims? Of course if you're going to say "...also referred to as the Shoah..." this makes sense but it seems like circular reasoning in that case, yes later on it says "a broader definition..." but that's not the one a lot of people will see/read and internalize as the "real" one methinks. Historian932 (talk) 11:26, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

we go by the sources. The most common usage is for the Holocaust to refer to the genocide of Jews. Yes, there are broader definitions, but the most common among scholars AND non-scholars is the more limited one. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:24, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Jews escaping from Nazi Europe to Britain

I see that this article needs work and I thought that there might be a merge opportunity with a related article. But, I have been unable to find an article at all that is an overview about Jewish refugees during World War II, particularly regarding the rate at which people immigrated to other countries (like in Britain) and the various country immigration policies during WWII.

Is anyone aware of an overview article regarding Jewish refugees during World War II... or specific to Britain... that I am missing?–CaroleHenson (talk) 16:03, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Can't find a complete article on that subject CaroleHenson, but I did find this->History of the Jews in England#Before and during World War II and this->Kindertransport. Shearonink (talk) 23:13, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for checking that out! I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

It seems so strange that this hasn't been explored more fully. Since it seems like this article is warranted, I'm working on improving it and will likely add Jews escaping from Nazi Europe as an overview article (currently the link redirects to the article specific to Britain). In the meantime, I have added links to Jews escaping from Nazi Europe to Britain to the articles that you have mentioned. Your input is much appreciated!–CaroleHenson (talk) 23:30, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Glad to see mention of Kindertransport, and Carole agreeing to its importance.

In fact, from my academic Holocaust experience, this project is always mentioned just before the section on World War II, in a special section: "Responses." All major Holocaust scholars agree that the interaction/response or lack of it, between anti-Jewish measures and the responses of the world/bystanders emboldened the Nazi regime to go on with their actions. As Gobbels (I think it's him) stated after the Evian conference: "Nobody wants the scum." (sorry, it's in the quote)

Thus, I propose to your consideration, a short small section, just before WWI: Responses, which will include Olympic games of 1936, Evian, Kindertransport, and the Saint Louis (I think there was a photo of its passengers in the article. Here 3 sources:

Leni Yahi. Olympic: 73. "Closed Doors": 93; Evian: 94. Kindertransports: p. 118-119. Saint Louis:119.

Doris Bergen, 2009. Olympic Games, 1936 in Berlin, 74, 76, 90. Kindertransports: 142-43.

Doris Bergen, 2016. Evian 124 (I mentioned to Doris stuff that she missed in her edition of 2009).

Deborah Dwork, Robert Jan Pelt, Robert Jan Van Pelt. Holocaust: A History. 2002. Olympic Games of 1936, 93. Evian, 124-25. Kindertransports: pp. 128-29. St. Louis, 129-30.

Weitzman, first president of Israel, stated that the world was divided between countries that wanted to get rid of the Jews, and those that didn't want them. Some scholars call that: "Entrapment". The reader of the article would better understand why the Jews couldn't leave Germany.

I hope I convinced editors of the necessity to add a short section: Responses.

I welcome your comments.

Thank you.

Cordially.Henia Perlman (talk) 15:45, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Henia Perlman. You've made some helpful comments here that I think I will use in the Jews escaping from Nazi Europe to Britain article. I'm working on a list of potential sources for that article and a general article: Jews escaping from Nazi Europe, so I will copy your sources to Talk:Jews escaping from Nazi Europe to Britain as well.

I think that there should be more under "Allied Response" in the {{The Holocaust sidebar}} and thought the general article about Jews escaping from Nazi Europe might be a good addition - likely piped to say something like "Allied immigration policies". It does seem that more is needed on the topic of responses by the Allied forces. But, I'm taking it one step at a time. Great input and much appreciated!–CaroleHenson (talk) 16:01, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

By the way, here are the formatted versions of the sources and a link to more info:

• Leni Yahil (1991). "Closed Doors". The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. Oxford University Press. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-19-504523-9. -- also see if the pages match up for: Evian: 94. Kindertransports: p. 118-119. Saint Louis: 119.
• Doris L. Bergen (2009). The Holocaust: A Concise History. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 74. ISBN 978-0-7425-5714-7. -- Olympic Games, 1936 in Berlin, 74, 76, 90. Kindertransports: 142-43.
• Doris L. Bergen (10 March 2016). War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 124. ISBN 978-1-4422-4229-6. -- Evian 124
• Deborah Dwork; Robert Jan Pelt; Robert Jan Van Pelt (2003). Holocaust: A History. W.W. Norton. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-393-32524-9. -- Page numbers for 2002 edition, so may be slightly off: Olympic Games of 1936, 93. Evian, 124-25. Kindertransports: pp. 128-29. St. Louis, 129-30.
• Find sources for: Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, stated that the world was divided between countries that wanted to get rid of the Jews, and those that didn't want them. (See "Weizmann argued for increased Jewish immigration to Palestine because they were unwanted all over the world"...) Some scholars call that: "Entrapment". The reader of the article would better understand why the Jews couldn't leave Germany.–CaroleHenson (talk) 16:58, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

The two Bergen's are actually different editions with different titles on either side of the Atlantic. We are currently using the second edition right now in the article (mainly because I can't get the third through ILL and I managed to pick up the second at a used bookstore). Remember we are aiming for summary style here - we don't need to go into great detail here in this article - the various articles on the events should give details. The Olympics really didn't play much into the Holocaust except much of the "Jews not wanted" signs were taken down for the event. We're at about 13,000 words, and we still need to cover rescues during the war, jews in hiding, memorials afterwards, confiscations of property in the occupied territories, the Sonderkommando 1005, holocaust denial, and the changing historiography of the event (plus probably about 20 other things). We can't get bogged down in details. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:18, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Ealdgyth, regarding the Bergen books. I see the issue with using those in this article, because you are already using two other editions... but there shouldn't be any issue with me using them for Jews escaping from Nazi Europe to Britain, I'm guessing. Is that right?–CaroleHenson (talk) 18:41, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Actually not really a problem using it here either - I have the second (2009) edition and eventually I'll get the third and update everything to those. Keep in mind that you really should get the entire book and not rely on google snippets and page views ... they can be misleading, because you won't always get the full picture, even with a full page view. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:44, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Ok, thanks.

I won't be using google snippets. I'm a little confused about not being able to get the full picture, even with full page view. I sometimes use google books for books I have on site because I can do searches by specific words and it's sometimes easier than holding the book open while working... and I've not seen a difference yet between the hard copy and google books. Google books is one of the search items in {{Find sources}}.–CaroleHenson (talk) 19:12, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Say what you've found on google books is at the bottom of the page or the top. It's quite possible that the preceeding or following page won't be shown, and you may miss some of the reasoning for something. It's also possible to have the summation of something be three or more pages later and not shown in the google preview, so you don't get the full reasoning for something. It's usually not a problem for a simple fact, but it becomes more of an issue with seeing the full discussion of facts and with any conclusions the author may be drawing from them. Ealdgyth - Talk 19:20, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

I replied to your follow-up post on my talk page: here.–CaroleHenson (talk) 19:46, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

How the world learned

Missing from the Aftermath section, or perhaps a new section on Historiography (an entire article could easily be written about this) is how the world came to learn about the Holocaust: first, among academics, and second (quite a separate question) among the general public. A subpart of this question is how it came to be known as a genocide.

Remember that it was always an integral part of the Nazi plan to hide knowledge of the Holocaust from future generations entirely. Himmler said as much in his meeting with Nazi officials in Posen in 1943, where he said, "This is a glorious page of our history which will never be written." (The article page, in section Climax, quotes Himmler from this very speech and alludes to this point in quoting the part about "taking the secret to the grave" without however explicitly mentioning the plans to cover up the history of it.) There were also contingency plans in place during the war for the destruction of all records of the Holocaust in case of defeat, and in fact this plan was carried out as best they could in war circumstances and was successful in large measure in obscuring what had happened.

Commander-in-Chief of all Allied Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, witnesses the corpses found at Ohrdruf concentration camp in May 1945.

The fact that General Eisenhower toured the death camps with General Patton at liberation and was appalled enough at what he had seen to have Congressmen flown over to view them, and to have the camps filmed for public newsreels (where the camps were first referred to as "murder mills"), did not mean that people had any inkling of the scale of what happened, or even that anything unusual had happened at all, as this was seen at the time in the context of all wars, where death, destruction, maltreatment, malnutrition, displacement, and misery reigned. The public, and even academics, did not suddenly realize that a genocide had been carried out on a massive scale; this was for historians to laboriously piece together, and even when they did, it was not accepted at first by many others through sheer disbelief that something like this could have happened. Although the word genocide existed already by then, historian Léon Poliakov did not use the word genocide in his 1951 Harvest of Hate, the first major work about the Holocaust because such a word was considered unfit for publication of serious scholarship in 1951.

Knowledge of The Holocaust probably would have emerged sooner or later in some form, but much of the credit for preserving records and fomenting scholarly and public knowledge of it has to go to Isaac Schneersohn, who presciently saw the need for gathering and preserving documentation of what was happening while the war was still going on, and in 1943 gathered a group of people in Grenoble to found what was to become the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC). Their records, carefully accumulated (sometimes stolen) and preserved, became crucial as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials, and later for the Eichmann and Barbie trials as well. The Eichmann trial, in particular, was responsible for much of the first awareness on the part of the general public of the events of the Holocaust, as it was broadcast almost in its entirety on television, including on a one-day-delay basis in the United States by a "film airlift" nightly from Israel to New York, as live international broadcast did not exist in 1961. The whole approach of the prosecution, including the availability of press and television, was very much a part, perhaps the central part (next to establishing Eichmann's guilt) of the whole trial. Although scholars knew by this time the extent of the Holocaust, the public did not, and the broadcast of the trial was a huge revelation, and caused an international sensation, and profoundly influenced press and media coverage of, and public interest in, The Holocaust. This then subsequently drove a renewed interest in scholarship, including writing histories for schools, with profound effects in Germany, Israel, and the United States especially, but also around the world. France is an interesting special case, with a kind of national amnesia about The Holocaust and very little scholarship, or rather, scholarship aimed at pointing the finger outside the borders of the country, until struck by the tsunami of Paxton's book in 1972, resulting in the "Paxtonian revolution" in French historiography about The Holocaust, but that's another story, and every country has their own national quirks concerning how the knowledge of the Holocaust was assimilated by scholars, the public, and textbooks for school.

The gradual awareness of scholars, and then the public, of the knowledge of the events of The Holocaust deserves a serious section in the article (or perhaps a whole new article, plus a summary here). After all, had it not been for this awareness, this article might still be a stub, or a backwater, low-volume article like some massacre of some former War of which there are countless examples.

I'm mostly busy on other things right now and don't plan to edit this article, so Carole if this interests you or others, I'd appreciate it if you took whatever you liked from this and figured out some way to incorporate it into the article. So feel free to add whatever needs adding, and skip the rest. Even though this is a longish comment, the story is actually much bigger than I've sketched above, and I'm happy to discuss here if needed; ping me. Mathglot (talk) 20:33, 2 July 2017 (UTC) updated at 21:15, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

How the world learned - references

References

Hi Mathglot,

That definitely sounds like it could be an entire article in itself. I have a tendency these days to get easily overwhelmed and this at the moment is overwhelming to me. And, I am interested in the Jewish refugee article I am working on... with another broader article about the topic to follow. Perhaps later?–CaroleHenson (talk) 20:53, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Hi Carole,

No worries. Now that it's out here, maybe someone else will pick up on it. And the more I think about it, the more I think it could easily be a whole, 'nother article. In that case, it would make sense to have just a summary section here with a {{main}} link to the new article.

If we did it backwards, and started with the summary first, we could just import some of the comment above into the article to begin with. It would need some cleanup, as on the Talk page I was writing half in an exhortatory style addressing editors here, so not appropriate for an article, and other times in a way that would probably be okay for the article. If that doesn't get any nibbles in a week or so, maybe I'll try to clean it up and put it in the article somewhere.

Thinking about it now, it seems like the Eisenhower stuff, which was quite important about spreading the word early, could go into section Aftermath since it precedes Nuremberg, and then use those two points as a segue to a new section to come right after Aftermath, about how the world learned about the Holocaust. After that's done, someone could write the new article using that as a kernel.

Or, we could go the other way round, and use the comment as a basis for a new article stub, and then summarize it here later. Not sure which approach is better. Also, we'd need a title for the section, and the new article. Any ideas? Mathglot (talk) 21:29, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Mathglot, My two cents: I would start with a new article first. It could start out as a stub... your points for starting it from your comments make sense. As has been said many times, this article is already quite long, so having perhaps a sentence -- or the {{main}} template seem like a good way to go. It sounds like it would be an interesting article!–CaroleHenson (talk) 21:37, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Carole, You're right, it is long. Haven't really had this article on my radar until recently. Your suggestion makes sense, I'll probably take you up on it. Maybe once I have an article skeleton in place and some of that content copied over, others can expand and tidy it up, with a {{main}} link from here. On a related topic: being that long, maybe it's time to fork off a bit of it with a size split. I've done that before, and it can be daunting, but it's usually helpful all around once completed.

Oh, by the way: if I'm going to create a new article, I still need a name for it. There's certainly precedent for descriptive titles but "How the world learned about the Holocaust" is way too folksy; okay for a TP section name, maybe, but not for an article title. If it were just about the scholars, then Holocaust Historiography would work (although, that would extend the time scale of the article past the "learning about..." phase) but that title would exclude how the public came to learn about it, which is at least half the story. Any ideas? Mathglot (talk) 22:04, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Mathglot, I was trying different titles on for size... and googling them to see what came up... and there's an article International response to the Holocaust. Is it possible that your content would fit within that article?

Yes, I have done a size split, too. That may be the ticket. There would need to be a proposal for this talk page about how it would be split to see what folks think, right?–CaroleHenson (talk) 22:15, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

The Holocaust in post-World War II public awareness. The Holocaust and post war society 1945-2017 Irondome (talk) 22:25, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Good, how about a little tweak: The Holocaust and post war society? — Preceding unsigned comment added by CaroleHenson (talk • contribs) 22:53, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Fine. Is it too wooly though? This would be a highly ambitious article, but there is nothing that addresses this area on WP at the moment apart from International response to the Holocaust, which tails off and says nothing about later impacts and development in the public sphere. Holocaust Education post war is another area. Irondome (talk) 23:04, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Hmmm. I was just wondering why the years were necessary. I definitely don't have anything better... I was thinking along the lines of Perceptions of the Holocaust.–CaroleHenson (talk) 23:13, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Carole, It might possibly fit over at International response to the Holocaust, although I worry about that article becoming {{Unfocused}} as a result. The first sentence and paragraph set the tone of the article as being about the criticisms or "failures" of governments and others "to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews" and others who were targeted. I'm not sure how well that fits with material about preservation of recrods, early historiography and the reaction to it, and growing public awareness and education, but I might see what people over there think, before moving forward with it.

Regarding size split here: oh definitely you should do a proposal, especially in a controversial area like this one. The problem is, the article is already pretty much organized into a hub-and-spokes approach, where this article is the central hub, and several dozen {{Main}} links to the spoke articles, which is a good thing, but makes further size reduction somewhat difficult. Maybe a few sections that don't currently have spokes could be handled that way, or some of the ones that already do but have a very long summary could be tightened up a bit. Or maybe, it's just one of those articles that will have to remain long due to its complexity. Anyway, I probably shouldn't have raised the split topic here as a new talk section should be opened up about that if desired, so we can keep this section on topic. Probably a couple of sentences here in a small subsection of Aftermath and a {{Main}} link to a new article would be enough.

Irondome Just saw your post after the {{ec}}, and so far, I like your first suggestion best (as I agree about the wooly comment), but I'm keeping an open mind. Mathglot (talk) 23:18, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Am thinking 'post-war' could be gotten rid of, as there was virtually zero awareness before that. What about, Historiography and public education about the Holocaust? or Holocaust historiography and public education? Or even, Holocaust historiography and public awareness (or, flipping it around, Historiography and public awareness of the Holocaust)? Or even, since TV and film had a lot to do with it: Historiography, the media, and public awareness of the Holocaust? Mathglot (talk) 23:33, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)The flipped title looks excellent. We may need two articles! Another covering The Holocaust in the media and arts. Irondome (talk) 23:35, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Very possibly; there's already List of Holocaust films, but little content other than long table detail. P.S. Took the liberty of unscrambling the "ec" token and the indent colons; hope that's all right. Mathglot (talk) 00:30, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

As far a size, we're not sitting too bad now. We have about 4000 words or so of play before we get into the "way too big" pile. Middle Ages, which is the same sort of huge scope article, is an FA and it's 14400 words and it's not even nearly the largest FA. Yes, I'm aiming for FA with this at some point, but that'll probably be a year long process. I listed above the minimum sections I'd like to see added - holocaust denial, memorials and museums, historiography, information on the Righteous Among the Nations, information on the rescue of Jews during the war, information on Jews in hiding, more information on Jewish resistance, information on confiscations throughout Europe, information on neutral countries, information on the DPs and Jewish reactions after the end of the war, Sonderkommando 1005, plus we need to cover more on the gypsies and the T4 programme. I'm also thinking there is more to be dug up on the situation in the ghettos, and we don't really cover the mass shootings well either. There really isn't a good way to split this more - we just have to make good use of summary style and the various pointers to the subsidiary articles. It can be done - hell, I've done it before with MA, so nothing is impossible. It just takes time... and I figured to let this article "settle" for a bit, make sure previous editors have a chance to get comfortable with the sourcing. I've still got some books on order and will be doing some re-reading as well as reading a few new works. Ealdgyth - Talk 01:05, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Check out History of Poland (1945–1989) - which is FA and 17000+ words. Ealdgyth - Talk 01:15, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Ok. I was thinking back to statements you have made, like this one made today: We're at about 13,000 words, and we still need to cover rescues during the war, jews in hiding, memorials afterwards, confiscations of property in the occupied territories, the Sonderkommando 1005, holocaust denial, and the changing historiography of the event (plus probably about 20 other things). We can't get bogged down in details. I won't say anything anymore about the article being too long.

There's no question it is much better since you began working on it! (Going from 300k to about 186k bytes now.)–CaroleHenson (talk) 02:19, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Other German-occupied countries

1. I just posted a contribution about the Jews in Shanghai.

I welcome your comments, and I am ready to discuss your proposals for changes in content and style.

2. I will also appreciate help in putting template for links (this time I couldn't do it!): In Shanghai, there were about 20,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, because they could emigrate there without a visa. https://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Shanghai_Jewish_Refugees_Museum

After the Wannsee conference, Hitler’s Germany sent SS-Colonel Joseph Meisinger, the “Butcher of Warsaw to Shanghai, and forced the Japanese ruler, an ally of the Third Reich, to put all the Jews in a ghetto, to be called the Hongkew ghetto. https://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Shanghai_Ghetto

3. Following Ealdgyth's suggestion, I would like to discuss the changement of the subtitle to "Other countries" as the current section is presenting a narrative about Jews living in Nazi occupied countries and countries that are allies. Besides, we must present all relevant history.

Thank you.

Looking forward for your input. Henia Perlman (talk) 14:53, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

I reverted the edit where you added uncited content. You know that content is supposed to be cited and I offered to format citation information for you. I am not posting a request to block you because you have continued to ignore wikipedia guidelines, regardless of the warnings you have received.–CaroleHenson (talk) 15:40, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Edit "not".–CaroleHenson (talk) 15:13, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Query

Indeed, the Holocaust article is much better since Ealdgth began working on it. Still, as she mentioned, other "editors should be given a chance to get comfortable with the sourcing," for the sake of Wikipedia's reliability as a reference source.

I would like to share here, as per Wikipedia rules, what's seems to me a quote/source, that seems questionable. It is in the section "Etymology and alternate names". Here it is:

"The word shoah (שואה; also transliterated sho'ah and shoa), meaning "calamity" became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel.[7]" Here the source (7): "The biblical word Shoah (which has been used to mean “destruction” since the Middle Ages) became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of European Jewry as early as the early 1940s. End of quote. It is very clear that there is no mention or reference to Holocaust, Europe and Israel. Ealdgyth, and others, I will appreciate your comments. Thank you. Henia Perlman (talk) 13:08, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Well, the source is an article titled "Holocaust" from Yad Vashem here. The very next sentence after the one quoted above says "The word Holocaust, which came into use in the 1950s as the corresponding term, originally meant a sacrifice burnt entirely on the altar." So the source is saying that "Holocaust"="corresponding term" to Shoah, i.e. they are both referring to the same event, just in different languages. So, I think we've got the Holocaust part covered here and the part that Shoah is the standard Hebrew term for the English term Holocaust. We summarize sources so we take the source as a whole, not just one sentence from it. It's all part of the paraphrasing and summarizing part of editing Wikipedia. We can cut the "especially in Europe and Isreal" if you'd like, that's not a problem, although I'd point out that the main country that uses Hebrew as a language IS Isreal, so it's not that much of a stretch to figure out that if Shoah is the standard Hebrew term, it's probably the standard term in Isreal. Keep in mind I was trying to preserve as much as possible of previous editors work, at least a broad sense of information. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:21, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Ealdgyth for your helpful comments, which caused me to ask additional input:

1. I think that "Holocaust" should be taken from "the standard Hebrew term for Holocaust as early as the 1940s" because the next sentence clearly states that "Holocaust" was used in the 1950s by historians." So, "The word shoah" couldn't become "the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust," because there is an issue of anachronism.

My proposal:

The word shoah (שואה; also transliterated sho'ah and shoa), meaning "calamity" is now the standard Hebrew term for "Holocaust" in Israel and France (I have sources for that, but not for "Europe", and also because Germany is an exception)

Thus, we also "preserve as much as possible of previous editors work."

2. My proposal/additions/deletion for section "Definition":

The restrictive definition of the Holocaust is that it was a genocide of Jews by the Nazis,[14][15][e] and the Nazi attempt of the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish people, wherever it could, from 1933 till 1945, when World War II ended.(source:

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/video/hevt_whatis.asp). Timothy Snyder wrote: "The term Holocaust is sometimes used in two other ways: to mean all German killing policies during the war, or to mean all oppression of Jews by the Nazi regime."[24] In the United States, the term Holocaust has gradually evolved to refer to the genocide of six million Jews and millions of others, by Hitler's Germany, and Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum clearly stated that "Now, 'Holocaust' is used to refer generally to Nazi atrocities during World War II." (source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/the-word-holocaust-history-and-meaning_n_1229043.html) The United Nations created an International Day of Commemoration in 2006, declaring, “the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one-third of the Jewish people along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.” (source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/the-word-holocaust-history-and-meaning_n_1229043.html . http://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/ )

Please, delete all statements relevant to The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, because it is outdated (wiki rule) and U/W.

2. You wrote: "We summarize sources so we take the source as a whole, not just one sentence from it. It's all part of the paraphrasing and summarizing part of editing Wikipedia." Thus, I am proposing to change your edit relevant to Shanghai, which is very vague, as Jews there could be the Jews who are not refugees, and have been living in Shanghai long before Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, and those Jews (not from Europe) could have been confined to jail/their rooms.

My proposal: About 19,000 European Jewish refugees in Shanghai were confined in a ghetto (put the wiki links and citations that I posted in Carole Hensen's user talk five or ten minutes after she put a request to block me), but despite German pressure, they were not killed, because Japan didn't want to be involved in in the "Final Solution."[132]

The note "132" supports the last sentence, as p. 141 also states: Japan also proved unwilling to implement German pressure for participation in the "Final Solution."

Please, let me know if somebody needs more sources or mention of wiki rules (that I have been reading) to support my proposals. I am done for today with using computer.

Thank you.

Cordially. Henia Perlman (talk) 15:15, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Argghh. Henia Perlman, instead of continuing to complain about me throughout Wikipedia, if you want to talk about the circumstances surrounding the block, would you please respond to User talk:Henia Perlman#The block and/or User talk:Henia Perlman#An offer... or go directly to Wikipedia talk:Administrators' noticeboard yourself and ask there if you have a case against me worth opening an incident. It is inappropriate for you to ignore those posts, but continue to complain across Wikipedia without dealing with the issue head-on.–CaroleHenson (talk) 15:39, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

there is no wiki rule that the Columbia Guide to the Holocaust is outdated. It is an excellent source because it is summarizing the statute of scholarship, and gives more than one viewpoint. The Shanghai edit is too much detail...we don't need that much detail on an periojheral event that should be detailed in the relevant article. Detail can be useful when it illustrates something anout the main narrative, but the refugees in shanghai are not part of the main narrative. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:09, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Peripheral? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:04, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, typing on a tablet while travelling in a car is tricky...Ealdgyth - Talk 14:36, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

and if you want the sources over here, you should bring them over yourself. Not my job to go dig something out of another talk page when you are wanting to add it. And you really need to either take your complaints about Carole to the proper venue or drop it. It's not relevant on this talk page.Ealdgyth - Talk 16:12, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

there are more than one definition of Holocaust and for the fiftieth time, we reflect all the views. We discuss all definitions in use, we don't remove other views that conflict with what some scholars and the UN use. This is what encyclopedias do. Teachers and scholars choose one definition, we do not. There are a ton of works cited in one of the explanatory footnotes that use the restrictive definition, we cannot ignore that viewpoint. Please get this internalized so We can move past it. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:16, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Shocking media

I was wondering which kind of useful information one gets by watching so many shocking media. I can't barely read the text. João Pimentel Ferreira (talk) 12:11, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

History is full of appalling things. The Holocaust was one of the worst things. That said, this talk page is for article improvement, it is not a forum. Dbrodbeck (talk) 12:55, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Help:Options to hide an image Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:37, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

João Pimentel Ferreira, in light of your difficulty with the text, do you have any concrete ideas for improving it? As Dbrodbeck noted, this is the place to present them. Scaleshombre (talk) 13:47, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 18 August 2017

Under Ghettos. Please remove the word Polish from the sentence: "The Warsaw Ghetto contained 380,000 people and was the largest Polish ghetto;"

You must know that the ghettos were not Polish. 94.192.103.183 (talk) 14:10, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit semi-protected}} template. Warsaw is in Poland, which makes this statement the case. jd22292 (Jalen D. Folf) (talk) 15:41, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

@Jd22292: I think that what the objector means is that the ghetto was not set up by the Polish government, it was set up by the occupying power. The objection is to "Polish" as a possessive term, rather than a location term. I think a better construction is "The Warsaw Ghetto contained 380,000 people and was the largest ghetto in Poland;" Akld guy (talk) 19:55, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Done jd22292 (Jalen D. Folf) (talk) 19:58, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Why only Jews?

Hello and sorry about my english. I can not understand why you only write about the Jews. Who says that the term holocaust refers only to Jews?Homosexuals and gypsies were not part of the holocaust? I think it is racist against tother people. Den iparxi vasilias tis ellados (talk) 10:43, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

I don't see how you would get that impression. The different definitions of the the Holocaust are mentioned both in lede of the article and in the "Definition" section. One of those definitions includes homosexuals and Romani, this is also in the article. Robby.is.on (talk) 10:53, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Why i have that impression. Why the title The holocaust only for jews and no for all the others? category THE HOLOCAUST = jews and holocaust for the others. Bad question? Den iparxi vasilias tis ellados (talk) 12:49, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm afraid I can't make sense of what you wrote. Robby.is.on (talk) 12:56, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

I don't understand what's being asked either. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:53, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

@Den iparxi vasilias tis ellados: There is no title saying that the Holocaust is only for Jews, there is no category saying "THE HOLOCAUST = jews." If you are using machine translation to read the article, the translation service you are using is making mistakes. The problem is not the article, the problem is your ability to understand it. Ian.thomson (talk) 16:16, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

I agree, the summary of the article is centered on the Jewish population. It's a bit of an outdated point of view. ziMBRicchio 07:32, 5 August 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zimbricchio (talk • contribs)

Can it be that there is a little trolling here? To repeat again: historians generally use the proper noun "the Holocaust" to mean the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, not as a synonym for mass murder in general. Joel Mc (talk) 09:18, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

I think it needs to be underscored that the plan for mass extermination included other categories that in percentage were affected in similar amounts, EG: the Romani population. I wrote my remark because I was looking for some information about the extermination of the Romani population and to my surprise I found that the wording seems to suggest that it's a subject of secondary importance. And I am surprised also of the bad quality of the summary of such an important article. I don't have proposals for change but I really had to give a sign. --ziMBRicchio 14:26, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

The third sentence of the lead points out the Romani genocide. There is also an entire article on that genocide - Porajmos. It generally helps if you read more than the first sentence of an article if you're looking for information. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:47, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Good question. The current wording in the lede seems exactly right in the weight it assigns to the groups of victims. Unless someone has a much more cogent argument to make—and can back it up with a concrete proposal for what wording to use—I really think we might mark this resolved. Rivertorch^FIRE_WATER 15:31, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

@Zimbricchio: Read the WP:DUE and the rest of the introduction. You do understand that the majority of the victims were Jews, right? Ian.thomson (talk) 16:16, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

1. If this is the case why does the total killed in the info box not make it clear that 11 million is for the broader categorization?Slatersteven (talk) 10:08, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Because the 11,000,000 figure is one that isn't supported by the sources. I've clarified the numbers in the infobox, but to be quite frank, I've been concentrating on making sure the text is supported by reliable sources. I worry about leads and infoboxes after the article is sourced and more settled. Ealdgyth - Talk 11:52, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Fair enough, this reads better and is more reflective of the tone of the article (and the rest of the info box).Slatersteven (talk) 09:26, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

I understand but why not Christians? Jtriodo (talk) 20:58, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Parking these here...

• USHMM totals.
• 11 million figure from Simon Wiesenthal
• Lipstadt on Wiesenthal's made up 5 million figure

Ealdgyth - Talk 13:02, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Not helpful
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Yet another Jewish supremacist trivializing goyim death. We care about scholarly sources, and in particular, a scholarly consensus. Informal editorials (as opposed to published scholarship) from merely two scholars is insufficient to entirely change the viewpoint here. Just like Bernard Lewis denying the Armenian genocide is insufficient to change our opinion on that. As a homosexual Romani man, I feel personally insulted. CompactSpacez (talk) 22:53, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 28 August 2017

There were no "Polish ghettos". Please correct the 2 mistakes. Principe similar to the camps, the ghettos were a German creation. 188.222.97.195 (talk) 14:06, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

I get that the subject is touchy for Poles, but they were in Poland ... using "Polish ghettos" isn't a mistake at all. It is a description of the location. Just as people won't think that the ghettos were full of ethnic Poles, please assume that most readers will understand that by using "Polish ghettos" occasionally ... it does not imply that the Poles created the ghettos - especially as the article itself makes it clear that the ghettos were created by the Germans. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:17, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

It's easy enough to do and I've done it. Akld guy (talk) 14:36, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

The thing is... the scholarship we rely on does not shy from using "Polish ghettos" ... so in some respects we're not reflecting the scholarship when we worry about this. We assume that our readers are stupid and can't read and understand simple facts. But, whatever. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:38, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Yad Vashem

I have added an additional sentence to the quote from Yad Vashem about the total Jewish death toll, to remove the possible misreading that Yad Vashem claims only three million Jews were killed. TheWhangdepootenawah (talk) 00:03, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Regarding the lead - Do not trivialize the death of Goyim. They are people too.

Regardless of what should or shouldn't be done about the lede, this is not how it's done.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Second sentence of the lead: "The victims included 1.5 million children, and constituted about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had previously resided in Continental Europe." Okay, why is it necessary to include the 1.5 million children in the lead? And the proportion of that the Jewish dead constituted compared to all the Jews who had resided in Europe? These are important details, no doubt, but why in the lead? Discuss the broader definition of the Holocaust, which includes non-Jews, immediately in the second sentence rather than these details. Again, the second sentence in the lead, as it stands right now, is not necessary. Jewish supremacist editors have convinced Wikipedia to ignore the five million non-Jews who died. They weren't Jews, so therefore we shouldn't commemorate their deaths. Fine. It's clear that we goyim have lost that battle. But please, at the very least, have the dignity to mention them in the second sentence, before giving relatively minor details like the number of children who died which really should not be in the lead. CompactSpacez (talk) 22:46, 26 August 2017 (UTC) I might have had some sympathy for this view except for the whole bit about "Jewish supremacist" editors. I'm the very farthest thing from a Jewish editor, actually. I'm not even of an Abrahamic faith nor do I have any Jewish ancestry... so your argument might have worked better had it not accused everyone of being "Jewish supremacists". Ealdgyth - Talk 22:57, 26 August 2017 (UTC) How exactly does using the term "Jewish supremacist" undermine my argument? I'm a homosexual Romani man. As a gay and a Romani, I feel disgusted that non-Jewish victims are being entirely neglected in this article. Nonetheless, I've resigned myself to the fact that the first sentence will not mention non-Jews. Fine. All I ask for is the second sentence. Is that so unreasonable? CompactSpacez (talk) 23:02, 26 August 2017 (UTC) YOu may want to read WP:NPA. You can make your point without calling other editors names or ascribing motivations to them. I strongly suggest that you read that carefully and understand it before attempting to discuss this article. Ealdgyth - Talk 23:09, 26 August 2017 (UTC) CompactSpacez I find your comments deeply disturbing. Now I do not give a flying fuck whether you are a gay Romani or a disabled Enuit. Your comments constitute hate speech, studded with classic anti-Semetic tropes. Now, I would strongly suggest that you refrain from such repellant discourse, or your tenure on WP I suspect will be short. Over and out. Irondome (talk) 00:25, 27 August 2017 (UTC) No, I'm not anti-Semetic. There's a difference between hating Jews and calling out the small subset of Jews who are bigots, just as there's a difference between hating white people and calling out white bigots. Your accusation is slanderous. I am merely espousing the "radical" view that goyim are people too. Furthermore, the usage of profanity is uncivil, and is therefore also unacceptable by Wikipedia standards (irony). My grandmother was murdered by the Nazis. You don't have to give a "f—" about that. You are not obligated to. But don't pretend as though you're so "f—ing" morally righteous. "Over and out". CompactSpacez (talk) 00:31, 27 August 2017 (UTC) Of course this section title does not help your cause either..Actually I am morally righteous, and would not dream of smearing repellent slurs against even a "subset" of Roma, on an article T/P concerning them, or any other ethnic/religious group. But you could not resist it seems. "We Goyim have lost this battle"? What reasonable reader would make of that comment? I repeat, do not use such language again on WP. Over and out indeed. Please do not communicate further. Irondome (talk) 00:45, 27 August 2017 (UTC) Regardless of how he communicated his point you have done nothing to justify the omission. You evidently don't understand what "goyim" means if you think that it is an anti-semetic slur; the word has nothing to due with the Jewish people and refers to the non-Jews. Even if he presented his argument in a derogatory manner it does not invalidate his point and you are still responsible to offer a rationale for why there exists an omission. Administrative duties do not imply a hierarchy where their edits may have preference over any other user without explanation. SwegWrestlur (talk) 09:14, 4 September 2017 (UTC) Overtly antisemitic edits like this one [1] make it very difficult to presume that CompactSpacez is acting in good faith, rather than simply trolling this talk page by posing as an offended gay Romani. As such, I have restored the hat. TheWhangdepootenawah (talk) 11:01, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Jewish Telegraphic Agency on inflated victim tally in January 2017

regarding this Ron Kampeas piece:

• Kampeas, Ron (31 January 2017). "'Remember the 11 million'? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians". jta.org. It's a statement that shows up regularly in declarations about the Nazi era. It was implied in a Facebook post by the Israel Defense Forces' spokesperson's unit last week marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it was asserted in an article shared by the Trump White House in defense of its controversial Holocaust statement the same day omitting references to the 6 million Jewish victims. It is, however, a number without any scholarly basis. Indeed, say those close to the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, its progenitor, it is a number that was intended to increase sympathy for Jewish suffering but which now is more often used to obscure it.

Where would be an appropriate place to cover this information? Besides Trump the article also mentions:

President Jimmy Carter, issuing the executive order that would establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, referred to the “11 million victims of the Holocaust.”

If this has been repeated by at least two widely-spaced presidential administrations it seems like a notable Holocaust-related statement to talk about somewhere.

If this 5 million is incorrect or made-up then I am not entirely sure what to call it. Inflating victim tallies doesn't seem like holocaust denial, I would think that would be DEflating victim tallies.

Yehuda Bauer is quoted here:

The number 5 million also adheres to no known understanding of the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis: While as many as 35 million people were killed overall because of Nazi aggression, the number of non-Jews who died in the concentration camps is no more than half a million, Bauer said.

I guess there are two ways the 5 million could be interpreted as denial:

• 35 million reduced to 5 million: denial of non-Jewish overall victims
• Jewish % of concentration camp deaths reduced from 6/6.5 (12/13 over 92%) to 6/11 (less than 55%): denial of predominant Jewish victimization in camps

Given that Kampeas attributes the 5 mil claim to Simon Wiesenthal (whom Kampeas describes as a Nazi hunter) it just feels wrong calling something he did to get people to care more about the holocaust as "denial" though. Holocaust-denying Nazi-hunter just sounds oxymoronic.

So what would be the better term to describe the 5 mill / 11 mill claim which the Whitehouse has repeated decades apart and which is now being disputed by the JTA? Using Kampeas' "inflated victim tally" phrasing a logical derivative of this would seem to be victim tally inflation.

Are there any other historical events which have VTA allegations for comparison? I am not sure if this is something to discuss on a main article or if it is something which belongs on a separate article with a wider scope including other events. ScratchMarshall (talk) 20:02, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Death marches

• Prisoners were evacuted, both Jews and non-Jews.
• Massacre of Palmnicken Yantarny, Kaliningrad Oblast was a part of Stutthof evacuation.Xx236 (talk) 09:48, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

My revert

Explaining my revert: I see a few problems creeping in. First, this is an overview of the whole Holocaust, so we have to bear that in mind before going into detail about particular aspects. Second, I think we should discuss what counts as an RS and how to format citations. The edit I reverted was sourced to www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org:

"The Iasi Death Trains. Holocaust in Romania (chpt. 5)" (PDF), Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Yad Vashem, November 11, 2004, pp.20–22, 22 of chpt. 5, Final Report (consisting of 19 PDF files)

This isn't how citations are normally written. It says Yad Vashem is the publisher, so why not take it from the Yad Vashem website? (But looking around, it seems the publisher isn't Yad Vashem either. It's the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania.) The chapter title in the source doesn't include the words "The Iasi Death Trains". It says "The Holocaust in Romania", which shouldn't be italicized because it's a chapter title.

There were also some problems yesterday with the summary of the Auschwitz museum source. I would say it's best to avoid the camp museums' websites as sources, especially when the text has no byline and doesn't cite its sources. SarahSV ^(talk) 20:08, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

• The 'author' of the 400-page report, presented to the President of Romania on November 11, 2004, is the 'International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania' established on October 22, 2003 (according to Foreword). The online version of the Report is offered simultaneously by three major portals the JewishVirtualLibrary.org (linked above) as well as the USHMM.org (here), and the Yad Vashem website at http://www.yadvashem.org/docs/international-commission-on-romania-holocaust — I don't know who the publisher is, because there's no one page in this entire Report library with the Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication data. "The Iasi Death Trains" is a section title on page 20 in the PDF file featuring chapter 5 (linked above). Poeticbent talk 21:31, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

The publisher is the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, and as you say several websites host it. Several offer page numbers, so it would be better to choose one of them. The reason I reverted is that I want to avoid the situation that developed at other articles, where citations were unclear and in some cases took a long time to sort out. This article needs a high degree of precision, in citations and in the way sources are summarized. Also I think we should gain consensus about whether to use the camp museum sites. I would say we shouldn't, because in the case of something that is supported by a reliable source, we can cite that source directly. And if they don't cite reliable (or any) sources, we shouldn't be using them anyway. SarahSV ^(talk) 21:50, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

• Correcting what I wrote above, the publisher is Polirom. I tracked down the full citation: Friling, Tuvia; Ioanid, Radu; Ionesc, Mihail E., eds. (2004). Final Report, International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (pdf). Iași: Polirom. pp. 120–126. ISBN 973-681-989-2. SarahSV ^(talk) 23:19, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

The other thing to avoid is inserting a reference into the middle of a paragraph (where the source is at the end) so that everything before the new reference is left detached from its source. SarahSV ^(talk) 22:24, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Citations

Ealdgyth, I want to check the citation style that you prefer to make sure I follow it. For books and book chapters, you're using {{sfn}} for short cites, with long cites in the References section.

What's your preference for everything else (journal articles, news articles, websites)? For example, I've just added the following to the body. Are you okay with having long citations in the body, and is this formatting okay for you?

Lustigman, Marsha and Lustigman, Michael M. (1994). "Bibliographic Classification of Documents Dealing with the Subject "Holocaust", Alexandria, VA: 5th ASIS SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, 111–120. doi:10.7152/acro.v5i1.1378

SarahSV ^(talk) 17:44, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Generally, I've used sfn for journals and news articles. The websites are still in a bit of flux. If the citation is just used once, it's fine to leave it like that for now, I'll either convert it later to sfn or at least put it into a template, but I know you detest those, so it's not a big rush. At least I can see what the citation is to and it's easy to format into something else later! Ealdgyth - Talk 17:47, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

I've actually been using {{sfn}} in a few articles recently, so I've had to learn to use the templates for long citations. So you would prefer {{sfn|Lustigman|Lustigman|1994}} plus page number, and move the long cite to the References? I don't mind doing that, though I may do several at once, rather than stopping whatever I'm doing to format.

By the way, please feel free to revert anything I add that doesn't fit the way you see the article shaping up (e.g. if it's too detailed or goes off track). SarahSV ^(talk) 19:29, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

42,000 facilties -

The cite for that figure is currently in explanatory footnote x "There were over 42,000 camps and other facilities identified. Even in Berlin there were 3,000 camps of various functions." sourced to Lichtblau 2013. The over 200,000 perpetrators is sourced to Stone 2010 p. 109 - it's the last sentence in the second paragraph of Ideology "Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators." (footnote 41 right now). Ealdgyth - Talk 23:50, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. Lichtblau 2013 (NYT) isn't an RS for that figure (42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps), but he refers to the USHMM, so if we can track down that article we can use it directly. Stone 2010, p. 109, attributes the 200,000 figure to Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl 2008, p. 10. I'd like to see what they say. SarahSV ^(talk) 00:37, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

the source for the 42,000 s the research the USHMM did for their Encyclopedia of Camps work. I'm on my tablet, or I'd link to our article on it. Stones well respected, it appears, so I'm inclined to trust his reporting. Ealdgyth - Talk 01:14, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I've added USHHM for over 42,000, and Stone, citing the other source, for the 2,000. We can trust that he's reporting accurately what the other source says, but the question is whether the other source makes sense and whether it's a mainstream view. I'd like to see how they arrived at that figure.

Re: the templates, I've tried to add Stone, citing X, using sfn, and it has worked except that there seems to be a problem with the template and brackets, as described on the sfn page, so I'll have to ask for help. If you look at the cite, you'll see what I mean. SarahSV ^(talk) 01:25, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Wannsee Conference

A huge amount has been cut from this section. I agree that it was too long, but we now lack the background, how it came about, who was there, etc. I'm minded to restore some, though it may take a while because I want to read the sources again. SarahSV ^(talk) 18:02, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Structure

I think the Distinctive features section and parts of the Origins section should be combined. Looking through the article, there's a lot of repetition. Perhaps we should discuss how to structure it. SarahSV ^(talk) 17:20, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

My work was mainly getting it sourced and removing things that were too much detail. I deliberately did not change the basic structure of the article because I didn't want to tramp rough-shod over the previous editors' work. I'm not wedded to the current structure. I do want to point out that I think we need to cover at the least the following: holocaust denial, rescue efforts and efforts to hide victims, memorials, confiscations of property (both before the war and during), what happened in the neutral countries, and historiography a bit more. We also probably need more on the mass killings and the cover up effort by the Germans towards the end of the war. There are probably things I'm missing also in that list. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:57, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I didn't mean to imply you had done it. I haven't looked through the history to see who has done what, so my comments are general observations. The structure seems to be very repetitive, so that we keep going over the same issues. It might save time to decide on a structure soonish. Otherwise we're spending time editing and checking repetitive text that perhaps should be removed. I don't have time today to suggest a structure, but I'll try to find time next week. SarahSV ^(talk) 18:11, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

• Noting here that I've combined the first two sub-sections into one, Terminology, which deals with the etymology, early uses, Snyder's three definitions, and the Columbia four. It would be good to expand current footnote e to give examples of historians who use each of the definitions. I think we should call this section "Holocaust historiography", with two sub-sections (a) terminology and (c) a very brief sub-section on intentionalism v functionalism to frame what follows; otherwise sections like the Wannsee Conference will make less sense. SarahSV ^(talk) 21:18, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Bauer quote

What happened to the Yehuda Bauer quote where he said that the Holocaust was unique in that it was based on complete fantasy while being carried out via entirely rational and systematic means (paraphrasing)? I see now it's been replaced by this short sentence, where it's treated as just another argument:

Historian Yehuda Bauer argues that the Holocaust was based on ideology and myths rather than on practical considerations.[36]

Was its removal really necessary? In my opinion, that quote is powerful and moving and really added to the article and the sense of enormity of the event.--Beneficii (talk) 01:22, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

It's still there, top of Ideology and scale. I'm not keen on it, because as written it doesn't really say anything, in the sense that it could not possibly have been based on practical considerations. But perhaps Bauer expresses it differently. SarahSV ^(talk) 01:28, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Oh, I see what you're saying, namely that there was a better quote there before. Sorry, I misunderstood. No idea what happened to it. SarahSV ^(talk) 01:52, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Found it, Bauer 2002, p. 48: "[T]he basic motivation was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology—which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means." SarahSV ^(talk) 01:57, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

@Beneficii: I've restored it. SarahSV ^(talk) 02:04, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

@SlimVirgin: Thanks. :) --Beneficii (talk) 02:50, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

we should avoid quotes for a couple of reasons. One,they make the prose harder to read. Two, we should summarize what secondary historians say. Three, if we quote someone, we're giving that viewpoint more prominence over opposing viewpoints. In this case, why should we give Bauer's views this much prominence not just by quoting but by putting it in a block quote? If we're going to do big quotes for "effect", which seems to be the main argument for quoting directly, we should probably quote from eyewitness accounts. I just don't see why we should be using quotes from single historians just for effect. Ealdgyth - Talk 10:50, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I find prose easier to read with some blockquotes, so long as there aren't many. Otherwise we have a wall of text. Perhaps it could be placed in a quote box instead? Bauer is an excellent writer and hard to summarize without losing the power of what he's saying. One thing this article fails to capture is the madness. SarahSV ^(talk) 17:19, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't object to quotes from eyewitnesses ... that would help convey the madness, as you say, without risking prioritizing one viewpoint among historians over another. Is there a good quote from someone contemporary to the events - Shirer or similar. - that might work well here? I think if we put it in a quote box (unless it's to the side) we're giving it even more prominent than just the plain block quote. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:23, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Bauer is a preeminent Holocaust historian, an excellent writer, and the view expressed by this quote isn't contentious, so I can't see a problem with it. It introduces that section well, I would have thought. We do prioritize the Columbia Guide to the Holocaust right at the start (and I'm not sure that what they say is quite correct about the restrictive definition being only the genocide of the Jews and not the other mistreatment). Inevitably the views of certain academics will be prioritized here and there. SarahSV ^(talk) 18:07, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Ealdgyth, re: your edit summary here, the source says "might recognize", and says it would be linguistically awkward, which is why I wrote it that way. You changed it to "A second definition recognizes separate Holocausts for each group ..." If we want to say that this second definition is in use, we should offer examples of historians who use it. That might be a good idea for all the definitions actually. SarahSV ^(talk) 19:06, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

• The quote is completely out of line. The "illusionary world of Nazi imagination" is a poetic expression. It is not a usable piece of historical background for a summary article about the destruction of European Jews. The Holocaust occurred in the context of war. Butcher & Goldsmith write in Economic Aspects of Genocides, Other Mass Atrocities, and Their Prevention by Anderton & Brauer (ed.): the "economic discrimination against an ethnic, religious, or communal group prior to the onset of armed conflict makes it more likely that the group will be targeted with genocidal policies." ^{[p. 582]} Poeticbent talk 20:36, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

• Or the war occurred in the context of the Holocaust. SarahSV ^(talk) 21:23, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Changing Nazi to German

I have a problem with the apparently mechanical replacement by Narcissus14 of “Nazis" by “Germans". In some places it makes sense, but there other places where it doesn’t and the references make that clear. I don’t have time to go through the whole article, but one of the early cases relates to the euphemism “the final solution”. This was a term used mainly by the Nazis. The reference is to Berenbaum who writes “The Nazis called the murder of the Jews ‘The Final Solution…’ There are other examples. I suggest that we revert all the changes and start over after some discussion. Does any other editor feel the same way or offer an alternative solution? Joel Mc (talk) 10:01, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't have an issue, but I'm actually supposed to be asleep, or I would. I'm not seeing a talk page discussion that was referred to, but I might have missed it. Ealdgyth - Talk 10:05, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Definitely not mechanical - judicious based on the criteria mentioned in discussion below. I would like to quote myself from the discussion of this topic 5 years ago (also linked below): "Who committed the Nanking_Massacre, 'Imperial Japan' or 'Japan'? Who dropped the A-bomb, 'Democratic America' or 'America'? By labeling actions of the German state 'Nazi Germany' the article seems to break the standard parlance of wikipedia; it limits the scope of Germany's state actions and therefore violates NPOV"Narc (talk) 17:35, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't believe that there has been a talk page discussion, but that there should be to make such changes.Joel Mc (talk) 10:34, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

. As I mentioned below, this was discussed a few years ago: here - please read that to the end, I argue there that the great majority of scholarly books cited by the article themselves use "Germany" rather than "Nazi". Anyway, back then (5 years ago), I initiated the discussion and waited for a week or so after my last comment before making any changes. There were no further comments, so I proceeded to make judicious changes from "Nazi" to "German" according to what seemed to be a reasonable standard. As I wrote below, I encourage renewed or continued discussion on this, but please do not revert before reviewing that entire discussion and justifying yourself here, first. That would be the appropriate approach. Narc (talk) 17:26, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

I saw no discussion and was tempted to revert the edit, but there were some good features that would be lost in a "throw out the baby with the bath water" reversion. This is a common problem when an editor makes a huge number of changes, some good, some bad, in a single edit. [my mistake, I was thinking of another edit elsewhere] There are many places where Nazi was appropriate and others where the change to German is appropriate. Akld guy (talk) 10:55, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

User:Narcissus14 began changing Nazi to German/Germany in The Holocaust article five years ago on 29 July 2012 with their first edit summary stating: (When state action, should be "Germany", when ideology, should be "Nazi".) – On the same day Narcissus14 left their first message on this talk page with somewhat relevant question about German civilian awareness to which Joel Mc responded agreeably. – Narcissus14 continues to change Nazi to German in this article ever since. Personally I don't have an issue with that. Please exercise your own discretion. Poeticbent talk 11:12, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I think this diff is probably not a good change, as it deals with the beginnings of the regime and how it was Nazi policies, not really German. This one could be either way - since we refer to Austrian Nazis in the next sentence. We could also change Nazi/German to something like "institutional" or "state-sponsored" there too. This one is mostly good (except for the typo of GErman) except for the change of "Some Nazis began discussing the idea in 1938..." to "Some Germans began discussing the idea in 1938..." as Germans in this context is too general. We could either go back to Nazis or we could go to something more specific - bureaucrats or officials perhaps. Here is again, mostly good but I think the last one changing "Nazi propaganda" to "German propaganda" is probably better with the original, as it really was the Nazi ideology driving the propaganda. Here it can be argued that "Nazi-occupied" is helpful to make it clear which regime was in charge during the occupation. One option might be to use "Nazi-occupied" on the second occurrence just to vary the wording choices some. Here I would probably keep "Nazi planners decided against a genocide of ethnic Poles" partly to vary the wording and partly to make it clear that Nazi ideology was behind the drive to exterminate the Poles. Here I'd probably lose either descriptor - and leave it just "Holocaust" but if we must have the descriptor, I'd say "Nazi Holocaust" is better and more common in the literature than "German Holocaust" (which I've usually only seen used by fringe publications pushing the idea that the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe after WWII is a genocide).

Here I'd change back "includes non-Jewish victims of other German crimes" to "includes non-Jewish victims of other Nazi crimes", "Starting in 1933 the Germans built a network of" to "Starting in 1933 the Nazis built a network of", "specifically the genocide of the Jews under the Germans." to "specifically the genocide of the Jews under the Nazis.", "The Germans used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" to refer" to "The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" to refer", "died as a result of mistreatment due to German racial policies" to "died as a result of mistreatment due to Nazi racial policies", and "clear that the Nazi "final solution of the Jewish question" included" to "clear that the "final solution of the Jewish question" included". For the first, while, yes, the Germans in general took part in the crimes, the driving force was Nazi ideology and it's better to make that clearer in the infobox. For the second, it was really the Nazi party/members/leaders who drove the building and creating of the early concentration camps, not the general German population, so it is more accurate to say "Nazi" in this context. For the third - the context here is the leadership/regime/party in charge, which was the Nazis (and it also allows a bit of variety in the wording in the paragraph. For the fourth, Joel mentioned this one and it's quite true - the Nazis used the phrase first and drove the usage of it. For the fifth, again, it was the Nazi ideology that drove the racial policies, so the distinction here is useful (and helps vary the wording a bit too to avoid overuse of German). The last one just removes the qualifier which really isn't needed there.

Here I'd change "turning the Germany into what one Holocaust scholar" back to "turning the Thrid Reich into what one Holocaust scholar". This diff pretty clearly shows that it's a rather mechanical "change" because "turning the Germany" is grammatically wrong. And here "innovated the use" is clunky and just plain jargon. The previous version read better and was clearer. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:16, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

User:Narcissus14 here. The talk discussion I was referring to was several years ago, it has apparently been archived. I think it's probably healthy to rehash it again, why not. It seems to me we should agree on a standard, rather than taking each case at each editor's whim, that's no way forward. My distinction is what we agreed upon in this space several years ago - anything that was done by the German state is Germany. Think of the current USA today - when historians write about Vietnam, they don't say "Democratic policy in Vietnam in 1967" they say "American policy in Vietnam in 1967" - even though that policy may be a reflection of the positions or views of the party in power and not of a majority of people. The nation-state acts as a state and gets credit or blame for what it does as a state. Therefore, for example, I disagree with User:Ealdgyth's suggestion that "changing 'Nazi propaganda' to 'German propaganda' is probably better with the original, as it really was the Nazi ideology driving the propaganda" - it is true, but the propaganda was created by, funded by, promoted by the state, not a single party. Similarly, "Starting in 1933 the Germans built a network of" is accurate and needs no reversion. The whole point of this global correction that I did is because when the article attributes the actions of the German state to the Nazi party, it white-washes the facts. The fact is, as the article itself says, that the entire country became focused on the Final Solution. The German Holocaust was not the action of a minority of rogue elements who happened to seize power - it was the collective action of an entire country, with a minority of resistors. Choosing to use "Nazi" when referring to state action is a white-wash. Narc (talk) 17:13, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

• One other option we have is to use The Third Reich when appropriate. Redirects don't always give out the most adequate results. The phrase "Nazi crimes" does not mean German specifically, but also the war crimes committed by thousands of Nazi collaborators with Adolf Hitler. While the "German-occupied Poland" is probably more appropriate, many changes specified by User:Ealdgyth (above) are not helpful. Poeticbent talk 12:39, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

• I disagree with changing all instances of Nazi to German and vice versa. Often German will be most appropriate (e.g. German-occupied Poland), but sometimes it's appropriate to highlight the administration or ideology. It all depends on the sentence. SarahSV ^(talk) 20:29, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

That's exactly the proposal. Couldn't agree with you more. Narc (talk) 16:19, 2 October 2017 (UTC)