Talk:The Holocaust/Archive 40

Archive 35

←

Archive 38

Archive 39

Archive 40

Archive 41

Relevant content recently removed (Other victims of Nazi persecution)

I think this content ("Other victims of Nazi persecution" section) was highly relevant and should be restored. The article is weirdly unbalanced in the current version, a search for "Soviet prisoners" shows the death of that group is mentioned in five places; the lead also mentions "Soviet urban residents targeted for mass starvation, rural civilians killed as part of anti-partisan warfare, the mentally and physically disabled, and Romani people". Compare to the previous lead, stable for many years, which stated "the European Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era (1933–1945), in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of others, including ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, the Roma, the disabled, political and religious dissidents, and gay men.". Why the article is minimizing the related suffering of other groups (Poles and gays, for example? The linked section also mentioned "Afro-Germans"; linking to Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany - this is just another example of relevant content removed from the article, alongside Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:58, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

It wasn't removed. Relevant content was shifted to other parts of the article where relevant, and the sections on non-Jewish victims were adjusted according to the weight of coverage in reliable sources. For example, the persecution of homosexuals probably cost around 3,000 lives, which is terrible, but it is dwarfed by other murders such as that of Soviet prisoners of war (3+million) and not significantly covered in sources on the Holocaust, so it gets only a brief mention in this article. The various victim groups mentioned follow Kay 2021 (and Gerlach, Longerich, and Cesarani to a lesser extent). Kay's book covers the groups collectively targeted for mass killing with at least tens of thousands dead. (t · c) buidhe 03:13, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Which parts of the article discuss the persecutions of these groups now? Can you quote them here? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:17, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Take a look at paragraph 1 of "Rise of Nazi Germany", paragraphs 1 and 3 of "Start of World War II", paragraphs 1-4 of "Invasion of the Soviet Union", paragraph 3 of "forced labor", paragraph 2 of "Death marches and liberation", and paragraph 2 of "Death toll". There are a few mentions elsewhere in the article, for example of Romani victims of mass shootings and extermination camps. (t · c) buidhe 03:31, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

As you can see the amount of content was reduced in some cases (for example, persecution of homosexuals or Afro-Germans—who made up a small minority of prewar sterilization victims), but expanded in others (for example, anti-partisan warfare and non-Jewish forced laborers). This is based on the coverage in reliable sources relating to the Holocaust. (t · c) buidhe 04:53, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Mhm. I think there is some lack of blance in the lead, which mentions Soviet groups twice, but does not mentions Poles. The The_Holocaust#Death_toll is more balanced, mentioning Soviet and Polish groups twice each. Could you modify the lead to mention Poles and Soviet once each? Also, that section numbers seem off compared to the table we have in the lead of Holocaust victims. Right now that section death toll suggests Polish civilian losses were <300,000, where per that table and numerous other sources, they were in the range of 1.8–3 million (not counting Polish Jews, of course). Shouldn't we restructure that section / mention in the lead to correspond to that table there? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:19, 27 May 2023 (UTC) PS. I don't understand why you reverted this edit by User:Jayen466? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:24, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I do not think that all war-related civilian deaths are counted as part of a mass killing program. Indeed, there are millions of Soviet civilian deaths that Kay does not classify as mass killing. It is misleading to single out Poles when other groups (such as Belarusians) actually suffered proportionally worse losses. The other problem with the edit was the sources cited. For example, USHMM gives the war-related casualties, but does not attempt to estimate how many of these can be considered mass killing. The insertion suggests that all of them were. As for the rationale for listing certain groups in the list, I simply picked out the largest groups per Kay, page 294 (here he classifies the Warsaw uprising casualties as part of resistance/partisan-related killings). Poles also made up some of the victims of Nazi murder of the disabled, Romani people, and anti-partisan warfare excluding the Warsaw uprising. A mention of the smallest group, "Polish ruling classes and elites" could also be added. Are there other sources that look at all Nazi mass killing practices that calculate them differently? (t · c) buidhe 08:06, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Considering that the concept of mass killings is not that common (at least based on what I see in that article), I think we should just summarize what is in Holocaust victims. The lead of that article is well referenced and sports a likewise well referenced table, and it is much better than what have in the death toll section. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:36, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

In total, Nazi mass killing claimed the lives of around 13 million people, including Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet urban residents targeted for mass starvation, rural civilians killed as part of anti-partisan warfare, the mentally and physically disabled, and Romani people.

This is ugly. Other than the Jews, who were Latvian, Lithuanian, Byelorusian, Ukrainian, politically, the only group singled out for an ethnic denomination are the Romani people. To define the 'rest' in terms of the political status imposed on them briefly by farcical elections ('Soviets'), and not in terms of their ethnic or national roots, as we do with Jews and Romani, is not only extremely pointy, but unaccountably descriminatory. Why not just write:

In total, Nazi mass killing claimed the lives of around 11-13 million people through outright murder, concentration camp killings, deliberate mass starvation and anti-partisan warfare. The victims included Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and Byelorusians, together with homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled and Romani people. Nishidani (talk) 09:19, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

@Nishidani: Thank you, I think that would read much better. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:37, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I prefer Nishidani's version as well. --Andreas JN466 11:36, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

@Nishidani Can you reword the lead per your suggestion? I'll also add, to your point about Soviets, that indeed the persecution was more related to ethnicity (Jews, Slavs, etc.) than politics (Soviets/communists). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:46, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I think we shouldn't rush this. I have a good deal of respect for the quality of Buidhe's editing and judgment though we have disagreed at times (thank goodness), and would like to hear back on this. And of course, on an article like this, a noticeable lead tweak should reflect a talk page consensus, and were several more established editors who have so far commented on the issue on other pages to chip it, better still. Nishidani (talk) 11:52, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

The rewording seems good to me, though waiting for further responses seems wise. AndyTheGrump (talk) 12:06, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

The issue with the proposed text is that cited sources in the article do recognize that the Nazis killed many Russians, Poles, Belarusians, etc., however they do not support that these people were killed for belonging to these ethnic groups but for more specific reasons. The proposed text is also not a good summary of what the article says about non-Jews targeted by the Nazis as it stands, thus violating MOS:LEAD. If changes are necessary, they should start with close examination of scholarly sources about the Holocaust and change the article content, before we consider changing the lead. Personally, I prefer not to dumb down the article content and instead specifically identify which population groups were targeted and for what reasons. (t · c) buidhe 15:47, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, as you may be aware one trend in genocide studies is to recognize the targeted groups not by their own self-perception but rather as a group defined by the perpetrators. Indeed, the entire article is based on this premise because people are counted as part of the Holocaust death toll if they were targeted as Jews even if they identified as Christians. I don't think that this is pointy or discriminatory, it simply recognizes the reality that genocides and mass killing policies are not created by their victims but rather their perpetrators.

Anyway, I appreciate the suggestion for the lead, but as it is it does not correspond with the body text. What revisions are you proposing to the body, not just the death toll section, and what Holocaust related scholarship have I overlooked that such edits should be based on? (t · c) buidhe 16:13, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

@Buidhe: The other day I found this summary of UK school kids' skewed perceptions of the Holocaust, from holocausteducation.org.uk – the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, part of IOE, University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society. The UCL is a very highly regarded institution, currently ranked number one in the QS World University Rankings, ahead of Harvard. They say:

While Jews, Roma and Sinti, gay men and the disabled were all mentioned by large numbers of students as victims of the Nazis, some other groups were rarely mentioned. We can only speculate on why these groups appear to have all but ‘disappeared from view’, but it seems likely that they are considered somehow less ‘relevant’ to contemporary social issues. Many schools are rightly concerned with homophobia, for example, or the attitudes of society today towards disabled people; perhaps other groups persecuted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators have less ‘purchase’ on many teachers’ and students’ concerns with modern British society. Whatever the reason, the outcome is that the murder of up to 15,000 gay men appears to receive a lot of attention in the school classroom, whereas the murder of 3.3 million Soviet POWs seems to be forgotten, and the Nazi genocide of Poles (in which at least 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles were murdered) is barely mentioned. The persecution of political opponents also appears largely overlooked, even though the first concentration camps targeted these victims, and an understanding of this initial period of terror is important in understanding the later development of Nazi violence and genocide. It may be that an over-emphasis on the ‘lessons of the Holocaust’, leads to a particular focus on groups that feel ‘relevant’ to today’s issues, but that this leads – unwittingly – to both a distortion of the past and the forgetting of millions of victims.

Would you please keep that in mind and help make sure that Wikipedia's coverage does not further exacerbate the precise problem they are indicating? Any reader of the current version of the Death toll section is left with the impression that about 285,000 Poles perished, rather than "at least 1.8 million". Regards, Andreas JN466 11:59, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

We should avoid the tendency to lump too many different things together. The Holocaust is described in (at least) a majority of reliable sources as being exclusively the genocide of the European Jews. We can mention the other mass murders (eg Poles, Slavs, disabled) for context, but they should each be covered thoroughly their own articles. Jehochman ^Talk 15:08, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

The point is that the summary and numbers given here should be consistent with scholarship and what we say in these fuller article(s). This article presents the reader with a figure of 285,000 Poles killed, while it is 1.8–3 million in Holocaust victims. The latter range is closer to the ballpark, both according to the auhoritative UK source cited above, and according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website which says: Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. It is estimated that the Germans killed between 1.8 and 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II. In addition, the Germans murdered at least 3 million Jewish citizens of Poland. (USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, article "Polish victims".) Andreas JN466 15:33, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I think you are misunderstanding what the article says. The number of non-Jewish Poles counted in the victims of "mass killing" is significantly higher than you have said, because as I wrote above, there were also Poles targeted for being Romani, for their disability, and during rural anti-partisan warfare.

The approach of the article is in keeping with the cited sources. Peer reviewed books and scholarship is generally going to be more reliable than museums or websites, especially those aimed at a general public. For example, Longerich discusses fairly extensively the mass murder of Polish intellectuals and expulsions from Western Poland, however, he neither gives a figure for the total number of war-related deaths among non-Jewish Poles nor suggests that they were targeted for mass killing as a group, as Jews were. (t · c) buidhe 15:41, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

You're not engaging with the argument, as presented above by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education.

Could you explain what your objection is to including this widely quoted figure of at least 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish dead in this article, given that both the USHMM and the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education consider it an important part of their remit to communicate this figure? Andreas JN466 16:21, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

My position is that the article should be based on peer-reviewed scholarship, rather than educational websites. (t · c) buidhe 16:28, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

You surely are aware that these national-level educational websites are based on peer-reviewed scholarship and are surely not arguing that there is no peer-reviewed scholarship available to source that 1.8–1.9 million figure for non-Jewish Poles.

So, please explain why this widely quoted (including in Wikipedia) figure should be absent from this article, and why Wikipedia should do exactly the opposite of what highly regarded educators in the US and the UK do and recommend with regard to this matter. Andreas JN466 16:38, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

And which peer review sources justify including so much content about Soviet people in the lead, and nothing about the Poles, Serbs, Slavs in general, homosexuals or African Germans? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 17:07, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Well to start with 1) the sources cited in the article and 2) the emphasis in the sources might be related to the fact that the non-Jewish Soviet civilian death might be something on the order of 15 million compared to around 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, around 500,000–600,000 total Yugoslov civilian deaths, and a few thousand German homosexual men?

Soviet POWs were systematically killed, Polish POWs captured in 1939 were not. Soviet cities like Leningrad were systematically starved, that was considered for Polish cities but not implemented to the same extent. Instead the Germans chose Operation Reinhard to reduce the number of people they had to feed. As Gerlach points out the Czechs were also a Slavic people and there was no racial basis for considering them different from other Slavs (p. 165), yet the occupation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was much less deadly. (edited) (t · c) buidhe 17:16, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

And while all of this seems relevant to the topic of mass killings, I think this is just not relevant to the lead of this article. How about solving this gordian knot by limiting the lead to discussing Jewish casualties only? Particularly since in your rewrite you significantly reduced the body of this article which used to discuss the non-Jewish casualties (by ~90% or so...)? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 17:20, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I would not object to that solution. (t · c) buidhe 17:22, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Done. I do think we should include a sentence saying that the 6 millions of Jewish deaths in The Holocaust represent a part of x millions of... what? Mass killings or civilian casualties of WWII? And are all Jewish deaths in The Holocuast part of mass killings? Do we include deaths from starvation, for example, in mass killings? Maybe we should include both numbers? Something like "6 millions of Jewish deaths in The Holocaust represent a significant part of the x millions of civilians who were subject to mass killings by the Nazis, and the overal number of y millions of civilian fatalities caused by the Nazis"? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:36, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Look at the previous two sentences before what you added in the death toll section. Is that adequate? Although there are a range of figures given for non-Jewish Polish population losses, my understanding is that most accepted estimates agree with Gerlach and put it lower than the number of Polish Jews. The issue with your suggestion wrt WWII civilian casualties is that most estimates don't separate out the deaths caused by a particular warring party. So one could not look at the amount of Italian civilian casualties and assume they were all inflicted by German agents. As long as one is specific about what the estimate is actually of there is less of an issue. (t · c) buidhe 02:57, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Frankly, I am not sure what are the most recent and accepted estimates - I need to do more research on this. See Talk:World_War_II_casualties_of_Poland#3.0_million_ethnic_Poles_and_3.0_million_Jews. To quote Andreas: "But statistics for Polish World War II casualties are still unsettled", which is why referring to a (broad) range might be best. I'll once again suggest that if we cannot agree on things, less is more - so wrt your recent rewrite of the Death toll section (which I think was a step in the right direction), in the sentence "In some countries such as Poland, Hungary, Belgium, and Czechia, Jews were a majority of the total non-combat war deaths" I suggest removing the mention of Poland, as I don't think that sentence properly represented this complex issue, and to create a parity between civlian casualties (and proportions) in Poland and Belgium, for example, doesn't seem fair. We can either discuss the case of Poland in more detail later (in a dedicated paragraph?) or not at all. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:08, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

'a majority of reliable sources' (Jehochman). 'in keeping with the cited sources' (Buidhe) I don't know what you are referring to. Holocaust scholarship of a high order runs into thousands of monographs. Are you referring to those used on the page 'so far'? One of the foundational postwar texts on the holocaust is Léon Poliakov's 1951 Bréviaire de la haine: Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs, and he mentions Generalplan Ost's intention of wiping out on the same racial grounds as were applied to Jews some 50 million Slavic people (p.39 from memory). Please read Generalplan Ost (which could be greatly improved since editors don't seem to be interested in it)Nishidani (talk) 16:43, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Comment: this was already discussed in #Talk:The_Holocaust#Article_scope_redux; I don't think that the consensus has changed. In re: the USHMM article on Polish victims, the article does not mention that they were murdered in the Holocaust, but describes the general Nazi policies towards Poland: "...the Germans ruthlessly suppressed the Poles by murdering thousands of civilians, establishing massive forced-labor programs, and relocating hundreds of thousands." ("Polish victims"). -- K.e.coffman (talk) 15:42, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

See here some small sample of the available documentation concerning why 560 academics (in good part Jewish specialists) think the USHMM's long-standing refusal to engage with Polish and other victims of genocide in order to preserve the 'uniqueness' of the holocaust intolerable. That institution, with its known political take on this, notwithstanding the great merits of its work otherwise, cannot form the default benchmark for what can and cannot be said of the holocaust. Academia does not accept that a concept has a monopoly tyrademark or requires a Vatican-like ex-cathedra blessing.Nishidani (talk) 16:00, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't agree that we should treat the USHMM as the end-all. In fact, the article barely cites the USHMM at all. However, it should be based on the best quality scholarship available. Your proposed lead, for example, is not currently in concordance with what the body of the article says. Specifically, what Holocaust-related sources have I overlooked that would justify the revisions to make this a reasonable summary of the article text about non-Jewish victims? (edit: I see you mention above Generalplan Ost, which is indeed mentioned in the article. However, this plan was never implemented and the sources understandably focus on what the Nazis actually did rather than what they planned to do). (t · c) buidhe 16:15, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Well i.e. WP:MOS which suggests you are okay with editors writing a separate section on the page dealing with this (also by connecting the disiecta membra of scattered remarks touching on this aspect in the article already), which has significant (inclusivist) RS to be done, in order to justify changing the lead along the lines suggested?

'this plan was never implemented'. No, wrong. Again, we are picking from a small number of sources to make vast generalizations. The Vad Yashem site says the Generalplan Ost though not fully implemented, inflected many Nazi activities in the war. Since they are highly synthetic, one could add one, at least, well-documented case in which Generalplan Ost was implemented, by Odilo Globocnik in the The Zamość district (See Hugo Service, Germans to Poles Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing After the Second World War, Cambridge University Press 2013 ISBN 978-1-107-67148-5p.31. This experiment, as similar ones in the Ukraine and the Crimea, failed because of intense partisan attacks and was abandoned for logistical reasons - it would have required far more forces needed directly on the battelefront to maintain than was possible. Nishidani (talk) 16:39, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

But, as predictable, this sensible suggestion will fall flat, and exclusivism will prevail as it has for two decades. I'll drop commenting and leave it to third parties to examine this further, otherwise the thread will get clogged and the cogency of each position will be blurred into WP:TLDR, as is often the case when sensitive, ethnically-inflected, issues are raised.Nishidani (talk) 16:43, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani, I wrote the article as best I could based on the most reliable sources I could find and access. As for GPO not being implemented, perhaps I could have been more nuanced. For example, Bartov 2023 states that the mass murder of Jews was the only part of the GPO that was "successful", Longerich says (page 217) that it "had more or less failed", and Gerlach says, "the impact of settlement policy on overall German occupation policies was limited, and the link between settlement policy and the persecution of Jews was weak.". I'm not familiar with this Service book but it doesn't seem like its stated topic is the Holocaust, so it may be more relevant to cite in other articles. (t · c) buidhe 17:03, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

'Bartov 2023 states that the mass murder of Jews was the only part of the GPO'. The Shoah wasn't part of the GPO. What do your sources make of the fact that the holocaust was implemented later than the GPO? Overall Nazi planning had, aside from the overriding priority of securing a military victory, several plans, of which the Final Solution/Holocaust was one, and the Generalplan Ost another. The former regarded the Jews only, and was planned to be executed on the conclusion of the war. That was why, at the beginning, ghettoization of Jews – rather than immediate extermination – prevailed. Those who survived were to be, by war’s end, exterminated. The latter, Generalplan Ost was actually implement from the outset. Auschwitz’s first victims were Poles, not Jews. Before the actual holocaust begin, in a mirroring genocidal connivance in targeting Poles the two adversaries, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, between 1939 and 1941 murdered 200,000 Polish citizens In the logistics of war, it proved impossible to implement however and failed and its execution was delayed until war’s end. War conditions radically altered and reformulated these twin aims. Almost two years into the war, the Final Solution was reassessed and ordered to be implemented, not at war’s end, but immediately. Both formed part of the overall war aims of Nazism, and the difference lay in the inversion of the scheduled priorities.Nishidani (talk) 21:38, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

K.e.coffman: The point I am making is that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education both communicate that number, and we do not; and that the UCL specifically points out that it is very important to communicate that number, as otherwise our kids receive a deficient Holocaust education. We're doing well in this article with regard to the 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war (they weren't murdered in the Holocaust, narrowly conceived, either), so I am absolutely mystified why there is so much resistance here on this talk page to the idea of doing the same for Polish victims of the Nazis. Andreas JN466 17:24, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

If there are reliable sources, I don’t see why we wouldn’t mention the number killed for other groups, stopping at some reasonable threshold. This is important context and we should link to the relevant articles. While not strictly part of the Holocaust, such deaths show that the Holocaust was part of a larger wave of Nazi genocides and atrocities. Jehochman ^Talk 17:54, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. There are many academic sources; see World War II casualties of Poland.

One advantage of high-quality tertiary sources like the USHMM or the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education is that they look at all the different estimates published at various times and come up with what we may hope is a sensible number.

Here is another such UK source, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust: It is estimated that the Nazis killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War Two.

This site is roughly the UK equivalent of the USHMM. (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) is the charity established and funded by the UK Government to promote and support Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in the UK.)

These three tertiary sources (USHMM, UCL, HMD) are in fairly good agreement. I believe this is a better way of proceeding than a couple of editors here deciding which paper's number to share with readers.

For Polish government historians' estimates, see World War II casualties of Poland#Institute of National Remembrance. If I'm reading the table correctly, then their estimate of civilian deaths is a little higher, at 2.2 million. Note that well over one million of those are "deaths in prisons and camps". See also [1], pp. 178–179. Andreas JN466 20:18, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Civilian deaths are not synonymous with killing, however. The imprecise language often used in sources aimed at a popular audience is another reason to cite scholarly sources that are expected to state clearly where the figures come from. (t · c) buidhe 20:29, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

It seems there is one serious misconception here. Many users implicitly assume that "The Holocaust" = "Murder of certain groups of people by Nazi and their collaborators". According to this logic, if Nazi were killing Poles, then murder of Poles should be considered as a part of the Holocaust.

As far as I know, uniqueness of the Holocaust is a pretty broadly discussed concept. In contrast to "an ordinary" genocide, it had some specific features, and should be treated as such.

Besides uniqueness of the Holocaust, there is another reason why we should separate the Holocaust from Nazi genocide in general. A general public, especially in the West, believe that murder of Jews was a major Nazi crime. In reality, it was not: the number of civilians killed as a result of Nazi/Wehrmacht activity was much higher than 6 million. If we add only Polish civilians and Soviet POWs that were de facto murdered by starvation or exposure to the elements, we get almost 5 million. However, besides that, one quarter of pre-war Belorussian population was killed during the war, a significant fraction of Ukrainian population or the population of occupied territories of Russia were the victims of Nazi policy. Starvation of the huge city of Leningrad was also a result of a brutal Nazi policy. And so on, and so forth.

We cannot, and we should not add those victims to this article for several reasons. First, we dilute the topic (extermination of Jews by Nazi), which leads to the Holocaust trivialization.

Second, we implicitly create some hierarchy of victims (Jews as "true" victims vs "others").

A correct approach would be to clearly say that (i) the Holocaust was an extermination of Jews by Nazi; (ii) during the war, Nazi killed much more civilians, and the Holocaust was not the only genocide perpetrated by Nazi. and these deaths are discussed in other articles. In connection to that, it probably makes sense to create a mother article for this one. The tentative name of that article could be Mass killings under the Nazi rule, and it should cover the genocide of Poles, killing of Soviet POWs, Belorussians, Ukrainians, etc, AND the Holocaust. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:19, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

If you examine the actual literature on the 'uniqueness of the Holocaust' you will get detailed histories of how this odd notion arose (Elie Wiesel played a key publicitarian role, and it has been shown to via him, derive from a particular religio-mystical narrative within a sector of Judaism) and secondly, that it is effectively useless/incoherent as an analytical concept (Stannard, A.Dirk Moses and many others, though distinguished scholars like Saul Friedländer and Yehuda Bauer associated their authoritative names to it. I will eventually document all this on my page dealing with this issue) The mother article you suggest below is, on the other hand, very sensible.Nishidani (talk) 21:27, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

In any event, we can either keep a redirect "Mass killings by Nazi Germany -> The Holocaust" and endlessly argue which mass killings should be included into this article, and how should they fit into it, or to make "The Holocaust" the daughter article of "Mass killings by Nazi Germany", and combine all mass killings there.

In other words, we can either decide that all mass killings by Nazi regime were a part of the Holocaust (a very questionable idea, imo), or we assume (quite correctly) that the Holocaust was just a subset of genocides perpetrated by Nazi. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:40, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

'all mass killings by Nazi regime were a part of the Holocaust (a very questionable idea, imo).' Given the standard definiton, this cannot but read as a 'non-sequitur' If the holocaust refers only to the 5 million plus Jews, then all other mass killings in the same period, by the same means, of 5 million non-Jews can't be part of that 'holocaust' . That is the cleverness of the restricted, ethnocentric definition, which would have sounded nonsensical from 1945 to the mid 1970s. One ineludible consequence of this 'uniqueness' definition is, technically, that the said holocaust cannot be explained in (multi-) causal terms. The only possible 'cause' is antisemitism. I.e. the holocaust occurred only to Jews because the Christian world finally mechanized its millennial ontological hatred of Jews to 'solve' the 'Jewish question'. The stupidity of this popular meme is self-evident.Nishidani (talk) 05:12, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Death toll section

Perhaps some of the disagreement above could be resolved by structuring the death toll section more nationally (especially since most of Kay's listed victim groups are also covered elsewhere in the article? How about a few sentences like the following:

"Historian Christian Gerlach estimates that 6–8 million non-Jews were killed by Germany and its allies. In some countries such as Poland, Hungary, Belgium, and Czechia, Jews were a majority of the total non-combat war deaths, while elsewhere such as the Soviet Union, France, and Greece, they were a minority."

Source:

In many European countries the number of non-Jewish victims of German and Axis violence – even putting military losses aside – far surpassed that of Jews who were murdered. In the Soviet Union (as constituted by its borders of May 1941), about 30% of all German-induced loss of human life outside of battle were Jews; in France , 40%; in Greece , 20–22% and in Italy and Yugoslavia 6% each. Among Germans, about a third of the victims of Nazism were Jews. 4 In Poland , Belgium (38%) and the Czech lands (32%), non-Jews were a sizable minority of the victims. In Hungary the civilian dead were mostly Jewish. 5 During World War II, Germans (and people from other powers) killed not only 6 million Jews but also 6–8 million other non-combatants. The largest among these non-Jewish victim groups were Soviet POWs – of whom 3 million died. (gerlach p.3)

(t · c) buidhe 17:31, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

" German and Axis violence" ≠ "The Holocaust". I think the solution should be to create a mother article for this one (something like " German and Axis violence against civilians", and to discuss all victims there. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:35, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, this was also my suggestion but it was vetoed above and the article I started, Mass killings by Nazi Germany, was redirected. (t · c) buidhe 20:37, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Actually, German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of war alone was so significant mass killing that makes it impossible to fit into this article. This topic and the Holocaust have significant common features (the Untermensch concept). Let's make a draft on your or my talk page (sandbox), and then let's convert the "Mass killings by Nazi Germany" redirect into the full scale summary style article. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:44, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

This mother article should include:

• The Nazi ideology (Mein Kampf"), the Untermensch concept, according to which some ethnic groups were deemed unworthy to live (and completely exterminated), whereas others were supposed to be decimated (literally) and converted to slaves.
• Implementation of this concept, including
  • The Holocaust (main article The Holocaust),
  • Mass killing of Poles,
  • Mass killings of Sotiet POWs
  • etc
• A discussion of a total number of the Nazi genocide victims.

It should be clear from that new article that it is cannot be reduced just to the Holocaust.

I propose to return to this discussion when the draft is ready. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:15, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I'd support restoring that article. I converted it into a disambig for now, but that's not as good as writing an article on this issue. Although mass killings ≠ (<) violence against civilians. Ping User:Aquillion who redirected it citing "per my comments on the main page and to avoid the risk of a WP:POVFORK;" (sorry, what "main page" is meant here? a POVFORK to what?). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:49, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I support this idea. I think it will benefit the reader to learn the full scope of Nazi attrocities. If we do a good job of covering the topic with references to reliable sources, many of these other questions will dissipate. Jehochman ^Talk 00:32, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

There certainly seem to be merits to this suggestion. An overview article avoids possible issues of undue emphasis. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:44, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

It makes sense, but the proverbial devil lies in the details. See World War II casualties of Poland, and Talk:World_War_II_casualties_of_Poland#3.0_million_ethnic_Poles_and_3.0_million_Jews. Some of this is wording; the estimate of 3 millions (or a bit below) of Polish deaths arguably includes ~1 million of non-ethnic Polish minorities, according to some breakdowns (also, the upper range includes losses from the Soviet regime, Katyn massacre and like). Estimating Polish non-Jewish fatalities (even from Nazis alone) is difficult (and arguably controversial), I note that the Holocaust victims table has a range of 1.8-3 millions for Poles, which is very broad, but I think shows the correct spectrum present in academic discourses. I've added a sentence to the death toll on this, but it's a complex issue. Btw, thanks for the quote from Gerlach: "In Poland , Belgium (38%) and the Czech lands (32%), non-Jews were a sizable minority of the victims. " He does not provide a percentage there for Poland? Perhaps this is for the reasons I explain (I wonder if the number would be ~45%?). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:45, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

If the number of Polish victims is uncertain or debated, we can say that and say what the different estimates are. The parent article would have space for such nuanced explanations. Jehochman ^Talk 09:41, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

PS. Since we mention "nationality", in addition to the issues with Polish casualties including significant number of non-ethnic Poles, it is also worth noting that the concept of Soviet casualties is problematic. Recent Russian propaganda has consciously pushed this erasure of the difference between Soviet and Russian to appropriate the suffering and contribution of non-Russians (Ukrainians in particular) in WW2 (from what I read, very large portion of “Soviet” POWs and Red Army in general were Ukrainians and other non-Russians...). Also, World War II casualties of Poland mentions in the lead that "contemporary Russian sources include Poland's losses in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union with Soviet war dead". I did say this is a difficult topic... I am not sure if we can get a good subsection discussing losses of other ethnic groups/nationalities before first spending much effort cleaning up articles on topics of WWII casualties in general :( --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:56, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the article suggests that Soviet = Russian or that Soviet war casualties all supported the Soviet state. We don't currently even include a figure for overall Soviet war losses. (t · c) buidhe 03:06, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

A discussion regarding the scope of the Holocaust has been opened at the Fringe Theories Noticeboard

That discussion may be found here. Interested editors are encouraged to join the discussion. -Ad Orientem (talk) 02:01, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

The discussion is now closed. -Ad Orientem (talk) 14:08, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Scope of the Holocaust

Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard#Scope_of_the_Holocaust has been closed with the note that "Most commenters agree that this isn't a WP:FRINGE issue, as the idea that the Holocaust encompasses more than just Jews is not a fringe view, but nor is it the consensus either.". That idea does not seem to be mentioned in this article? A short paragraph discussing this minority viewpoint would likely be due. Pl wiki does that at pl:Zagłada_Żydów#Szersze_znaczenia. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:59, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

It's mentioned in the terminology section. (t · c) buidhe 03:07, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

You mean "The term Holocaust in popular use may also refer to other groups that the Nazis targeted"? Half a sentence is I think to little. (And what is "in popular use"? Academics use this term too - Japan_and_the_Holocaust#cite_note-6, The Forgotten Holocaust, Poland's Holocaust, etc.). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:12, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think that this article is about the word "Holocaust" and the various ways that it can be used. After all before "the Holocaust" it just meant any disaster. (t · c) buidhe 03:52, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

The Holocaust as perpetrated by the Nazis is defined differently by different scholars. There are scholars that advocate a more inclusive definition. These views should be mentioned in the article.

I drew your attention to The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (which itself chooses to adopt a non-exclusive definition) in the earlier noticeboard discussion. It gives examples of academic secondary sources. Andreas JN466 16:30, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Image removal

Murder of Soviet civilians in 1941

The image at right was removed from the article. It most likely depicts the execution of Soviet Jews, since most civilian victims who were killed in the way depicted in the Soviet Union in 1941 were indeed Soviet Jews (see the sources cited in the article). Even if it did not, this scene is identical to one of the most popular execution techniques used to execute Soviet Jews (see here). It has one of the most solid licensing claims that I can find for Holocaust executions in progress. Unfortunately, the exact identity of the victims is not verifiable. (t · c) buidhe 06:15, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I'd be fine restoring it, if your analysis can be added to the caption, with reliable sources. I am surprised we cannot find a better image, where the identity of the victims (Jews) is verifiable? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:19, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

• The image is authentic and is discussed in a publication directly on the topic: "Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust by Bullets—Bottom-Up Forces", in the paragraph that starts with "The fring squads’ accuracy had to be improved. But to do so the shooters had to move closer to the civilians..." (pp. 135 - 136). So it's appropriate to include it in this article. --K.e.coffman (talk) 23:39, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Invasion of the Soviet Union - relevance?

That section (425 words) seems significantly off-topic (up to the 'Mass shootings of Jews' subsection, which is fine). The first paragraph doesn't mention Jews at all; the second doesn't until second to last sentence. What is the purpose of this section? Instaed of summarizing some facts related to the invasion of USSR, surely, we can use that space (words) to describe, well, The Holocaust? I've shortened that section, removing content that I think was off topic (i.e. about Soviet citizens and soldiers in general, not Jews in particular). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:17, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Because all or most of that information is considered essential to understanding the mass murder of Soviet Jews, according to the cited sources which have chosen to include it. I'm ok with the removal of information on war aims, but I'm curious why the disregard for the laws and customs of war, for instance, is not relevant. The cited sources mention this specifically for the invasion of the Soviet Union, obviously many war crimes were committed in 1939 but on a smaller scale. (t · c) buidhe 06:40, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

The phrase "complete disregard for the laws and customs of war" is something that applies to the Eastern Front as early as 1939 (invasion of Poland). Aktion T4 begun in 1939, as did Intelligenzaktion. Numerous exceutions of Polish prisoners of war took place in September 1939 (Ciepielów massacre and others, I should write an overview article for this... there is none at pl wiki, just a category we don't have yet: pl:Kategoria:Zbrodnie oddziałów Wehrmachtu na polskich jeńcach wojennych). Was this disregard a factor in the murder of Soviet Jews but not Polish Jews? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:39, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

The cited sources make a distinction, apply the characterization of unlimited warfare to the 1941 invasion, connecting it to such elements as were absent in 1939 such as the criminal orders (Nazi Germany), Hunger Plan, and especially the Barbarossa decree. Indeed, the "first truly systematic murder of European Jews" did not occur in Germany or Poland but the Soviet Union (Beorn 2018, p. 128) (t · c) buidhe 14:08, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, how do your sources take Hitler's Obersalzberg Speech ( 22 August 1939) which is a mandate for 'unlimited warfare' against Poles? To quote from my page

Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilization asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I will shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so, for the present only in the East, I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians? Nishidani (talk) 16:34, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

References

last time I checked, Adolf Hitler was not a historian. It is most definitely not our job to interpret the meaning of what he said. Jehochman ^Talk 18:31, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

C'mon. That's a fatuous crack. The secondary sources I cited 'interpret the meaning of what' Hitler said there and take that as bearing historical significance, since it mentions an explicit order given over a month before the outbreak of war, that the purpose was to smash to smithereens the Poles, mercilessly and genocidally. There was no mention of Jews, and perhaps for that reason, the programmed murder of the other 5 million can be treated as 'irrelevant' (for they didn't undergo a 'Holocaust', they just died exactly in the same way as Jews). Hitler was commander-in-chief, and oversaw everything and explicitly likened his first priority was to repeat a genocide comparable to that of the Turks who killed 60% of the Armenian population. The holocaust had to wait for more than a year, while Poles filled Auschwitz and were murdered en masse. But, we can't cite secondary sources on this, because we know that WW2 is to be remembered basically as about antisemitism, with huge resources devoted to that end, and the other half are just a minor dissonant note in the imposed narrative. Hitler at least here was gifted with forresight. The elision of Poles and other Slavs from the dominant public narrative more or less confirms what we see today, a wiping of the known historic record concerning one half of the victims because they have second class victim status. I don't get upset at this. I just shake my head at the conceptual obtusity of ethnocentric historiography. Nishidani (talk) 19:19, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani, as I hope you are aware that version of the speech is disputed. Maybe it's what he actually said but we'llF never know. Also, it is hard to follow the reasoning why noting the real differences between the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union, based on reliable sources, is engaging in ethnocentric history. While Auschwitz was generally more deadly than other nazi concentration camps the death rate and prisoner population spiked in 1942 as it did across the camp system.For an accurate and RS based treatment both continuity and discontinuity between different phases and targets of Nazi persecution are essential to include. (t · c) buidhe 19:40, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

We'll never know by the same token if Hitler ordered the Holocaust, but he did of course. That kind of selective scepticism is the game denialists always play.

The art of history consists in evaluating as often as not divergences or conflicts in primary reportage. It's not that because versions exist in an infinite number of cases of historical evidence assessment, doubt rises ergo Pyrrhonic scepticism must impose silence on the issue because we do not know 'exactly'. There are at least 7 different accounts of what occurred, what sparse words were exchanged, if any, when Proust and Joyce met on 18 May 1922. All versions are disputed because there are discrepancies as to the precise gestures and language, but historians generally look at them all and make a call on the probabilities, in this and in an infinite range of other cases. They don't pass over in silence the attested fact of something on a given date because they must wait until a video or audio turns up. That Hitler made a speech or even two speeches on that day at Salzberg is not disputed. The issue is whether the Lockner version (of the three existing) is reliable. Lochner was head of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press for 15 years, had first rate contacts inside the Nazi hierarchy. His journalism was admired sufficiently to earn him a Pulizer prize in 1939. It was Göring's lawyers at Nuremberg who challenged his reliability, and, in more recent times, that scepticism has been shared by the government of Turkey. In this take, Lochner must have either invented the bit about the Armenian genocide, since the other two transcripts from notes taken on the day lack it, or his source leaking it mischievously tinkered with the transcript, adding an item the great powers had known about in 1915 and covered up as a favour to Turkey. But the speech, whatever one thinks of the Armenian analogy, took place, announcing the onslaught on Poland and the Poles. Lochner didn't make it up. That seems assured. Lochner's source was probably Canaris, who was present on the occasion, via an intermediary. So did Canaris make it up. Did he have to? Hitler elsewhere mentions the Armenian genocide as relevant to Germany history. Well, I've well overstretched my boredom threshold here. I think it's about time I sat down and wrote a full-length wiki article. Just throwing books at a talk page and finding instant repartee and vague opinions shielding them off before they do damage is intensely exasperating, because while it takes an interlocutor a few seconds to make such comments, sedulous attention to the objection can devour an hour. Good luck. The Poles are pole-axed once more. As the USHMM intimated, their 2 million dead are simply not in our class of suffering. Nishidani (talk) 21:24, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

We are not here to evaluate primary sources as per WP:NOR. Could you be less melodramatic? Comparing the suffering of nations is extremely tasteless. The article is about "the Holocaust" (with capital initial and with the), and this term's primary meaning is the genocide of European Jews. For instance, OED defines its historical meaning as "The systematic mass killing of Jews under the German Nazi regime in Nazi-controlled areas of Europe between 1941 and 1945. Later also in extended use with reference to other victims of Nazi genocide, such as Romani people, gay people, or people with disabilities." Borsoka (talk) 02:51, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Comparing the suffering of nations is extremely tasteless

Congratulations. That is precisely the criticism made of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlines (2010) by Amir Weiner (Cahiers du monde russe, 2012 53, 4)

Falling back on Vasily Grossman’s oft-quoted insights into the similarities between the Soviets and the Nazis does not absolve the historian from probing the fundamental differences between the two regimes, especially those that accounted for the one being nihilistic and genocidal, and the other not. Long on promises and short on delivery, replete with equations that are often baseless and at times tasteless, Bloodlands ends up as a bloody nose to history

I.e. if scholars challenge the paradigmatic orthodoxy, which has almost governmental sanction, here, that the Holocaust stands alone and must not suffer comparison, they are being 'tasteless'.

It would be healthier in the future if editors tried to glean knowledge not from quick checks on other wiki articles and then citing them in rebuttal of fresh scholarship an editor might happen to introduce, but by actually familiarizing themselves with the immense world of secondary scholarship (If you check early bibliographies on the Holocaust, you can see that 'new' books and detailed articles on it came out twice a week for the period 1991-1995, a rate that continues to this day. Any wiki article never gets beyond a sampling of perhaps 20-30 books picked out from thousands) To some, doing the latter constitutes WP:NOR, and is taken to mean that if you read up on contemporary research, rather than citing wikipedia's often dated and adventitious précis of stuff editors have noticed over decades in desultory googling for the most part, then you are undermining wikipedia, rather than attempting to improve the often lamentable selectiveness underwriting their partial compositional status.Nishidani (talk) 11:57, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I was unclear: your comparison of suffering of peoples was extremly tasteless. I might be wrong but you have not referred to a single reliable source. You have so far shared your thoughts about Hitler's speech, recent scholarship and other editors with us. This is what is called OR in our community. Could you refer to a fresh dictionary entry verifying that "the Holocaust" does not primarily mean the systematic mass killing of Jews under the German Nazi regime? Borsoka (talk) 13:29, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

If you can't understand WP:OR, don't speak of 'our' community. Any view I mention here is in the scholarship on my page, which I know some here read, with laxatives to ease the constipation my type of research summaries generally produce.

It is 'tasteless' in the extreme to think or argue that when 11 million people are murdered by the same executioners, those who are Jews must be set apart as special victims, and the other half swept into a minor gloss or one liner about 'others', as we do on this page, ignoring a small but high quality number of sources that have no ideological hostility to mentioning Poles or Russians etc.

It is tasteless in the extreme to make this, as does the USHMM, a principle of commemoratory distinction. It is shameful to think that because only 2 million Poles were murdered, as opposed to 5 million+ Jews, that the quantitative gap constitutes a qualitative difference, aside from being in historical terms, a seedbed for conceptual muddling. Try thinking of a Western mediatic world where ethnicity was the dominant criterion for reportage, that when something like the 9/11 attacks occurred, the 'Caucasian' ethnicity of the majority of the 2,996 victims would be prioritized, while the rest of Afro-Americans, Spanish, Jews. etc-etc would be bundled into 'others'. I know we live in an increasingly toxically ethnicizing identitarian world as classical social structures crumble, so I am not surprised. Blame my parents: they thought racism in any form, even at the level of conceptual discriminations, was repugnant.Nishidani (talk) 16:56, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

You might be interested in this paper. There is no inherent contradiction between holding to a position of "commemorative equality" while recognizing different factual specificities. I don't know what the ethnicity of 9/11 victims has anything to do with it. Unlike the 9/11 attackers the Nazis didn't (just) kill random people in occupied countries they also systematically targeted specific groups in distinct ways. (t · c) buidhe 00:41, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

• Nobody suggested that Jews are special. They are one group among several. We have a separate article about each group, because the circumstances and history of each group is distinctive. Buidhe proposed to create a parent article that would summarize the killings of all these groups. I would hope that you would support that. I believe that this is the best way to cover the Holocaust and related history and follows the way that these topics are covered by serious academics. Jehochman ^Talk 00:02, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

  This (t · c) buidhe 00:38, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I am really glad that your parents taught you that racism in any form was repugnant but we are not here to discuss the details of your or my education or your or my thoughts about USHMM. Perhaps, references to reliable sources could help me to understand your concerns. Borsoka (talk) 03:11, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't read talk pages much. Because my experience is that most comments come from people who read (parts of) an article, and the talk page to draw an opinion. They do not familiarize themselves with the scholarship on the problem, which often means backgrounding one's opinions by reading through the scholarship for months if not years, and much of that scholarship fails to make it into the relevant wiki articles (I see zero evidence here of an awareness of books like Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, for example, to cite one of dozens that should be kept in mind in discussing this article). Much of the above illustrates this divergence which leads to pointless chat. Buidhe's mention of an article on commemoration (thanks B) is congruent with what I am saying. I'm not impressed by the awkward conceptual framework but it happens to allude to points I, drawing on scholarship we don't use, often makes. I.e.

'In other words, the key question is: if one mass murder resulted in 4,000,000 deaths and another resulted in 3,500,000 deaths, what practical measures could be taken to implement the commemorative prioritization of the numerically larger event which the numerically smaller event would not deserve? Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago, in the context of the dual installation at the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystrica of two separate plaques commemorating the Holocaust and the Porrajmos, describe for us how such undignified arguments may go in practice'

Apparently, some voices behind the scenes demanded that the plaque to the Holocaust of Jewish victims be more conspicuous—perhaps bigger than the one devoted to the Roma. But then, quantity could become quality—why should the plaque to the Roma victims be smaller in size than the Jewish one? Should it be smaller in mathematical terms? If six million victims deserve a plaque of a certain size, should the Roma one be proportionally smaller? Or relative to the overall numbers of victims, or to the proportion of victims among that particular group, Jews or Roma? Or perhaps the size of the plaques should reflect the percentage of Jewish losses in Slovakia as compared to losses among the Roma? (Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago, The Politics of Memory Jews and Roma Commemorate Their Persecution in Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago, The Roma: A Minority in Europe: Historical, Political and Social Perspectives, Central European University Press 2007 ‎ ISBN 978-9-637-32686-8 pp. 117-133).

This is the repulsive my-dick's.bigger-than-yours gambit in tragedy commemoration when, from time to time, rivalries emerge among victim communities, where memoralization succumbs to crass pressures towards ethnic priorization according to lobbying which uses a criterion based on numbers to assert a qualitative distinction, ergo to hog more attention. One could footnote this paper by extensive secondary sources which note the same abuse in Holocaust studies and commemoration. But, I'm busy and, who cares? Nishidani (talk) 07:50, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I fully agree with you: this article is not the place where the numbers of victims could be compared. Consequently, I suggest neither of us should refer to numbers in this discussion because they have nothing to do with the article's scope. However, I maintain that the article should cover the primary meaning of the term "the Holocaust". Borsoka (talk) 09:57, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Actually no, but, look., if you understand what I write as saying something diametrically opposed to nwhat I wrote, you are under no obligation to write back. Just ignore me, and my rather plethorically complex prose.Nishidani (talk) 14:21, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I agree that we should not engage in “misery Olympics.” When the parent article lists the various sub-articles it could do so alphabetically, or temporally, or by recognized victim count, or by victims as a percent of the group population. We should have a discussion about the best way to list the sub articles. Maybe we have a table with sortable columns and the user can organize the list according to their need. This is not about choosing who was more victimized. That’s not our job. Jehochman ^Talk 11:41, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

'Misery Olympics' is an unfortunate choice giving a decade-long campaign to make the Munich killing of Israeli athletes a fixture of all future Olympic ceremonies. Another example of the politicking of memory. As Paul Siebert rightly noted, the master concept sequence is WW2/Nazi genocides, and the subset of this includes things like the Holocaust/Porajmos holocaust., etc. The literature however does not recognize this, by insisting on the holocaust as sui generis. Nonetheless, it follows logically from the theory of classes and their subdivisions that a subclass, here holocaust, should, in being written up, refer to the generic master theme, i.e. nazi genocide. The refusal to do this in one line in the lead, underwrites the USHMM's ideological iniststence that Jewish suffering stand in a class apart ergo, the gold medallist in genocidal suffering. As several scholars remark, one can draw no universal moral lesson from such exceptionalism, - it only breeds further fatuous grievance-rivalry and tragedy-mongering in a by now default politics of ressentiment (Nietzsche and Max Scheler, fast becoming one of the hallmarks of post-modernity) and yet 'drawing a moral lesson' is what Holocaust commemorations always assert is the point of memorialization.Nishidani (talk) 14:21, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

This is all brilliant, and original, but we have a much simpler job: to provide a concise and organized summary of whatever the quality secondary sources say (warts and all). I encourage you to publish your original ideas. No matter how people decide to structure history, there will be disagreements, but it is not our job to take sides in scholarly disputes. To the extent reliable sources tell an alternative story of history, we can summarize what they say in proportion. Jehochman ^Talk 18:51, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Nothing I have written here comes out of 'my original ideas', Jehochman. Every point reflects precise sources bearing on this which I have read over the last half century. Though I read Scheler on resentment in 1978 (Nietzsche apropos much earlier) , and it naturally has influenced my reading on this topic, Some time back, examining the Arbcom-G&K hullabaloo 's background, I read Ireneusz Krzeminski's, Have Only Jews Suffered? Holocaust Remembrance and Polish National Resentment,' Polish Sociological Review 2015 vol. 190, issue 2 pp.207–222, which mentions Nietzsche and Scheler, in regard to holocaust envy which, as anyone can see on my page (if one consults the refs in the specific sources there), is the subject of many studies. So it is neither 'brilliant' nor'original'. It simply sums up without the burden of footnotes points made in the relevant scholarship. Editors ideally must be a transmission belt for scholarship, which reminds me that what Charlie Chaplin did on one is not unlike how I feel more often than not on wikipedia. The goods are produced elsewhere.Nishidani (talk) 20:59, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I live among many Holocaust survivors and their children. I'm aware of all the politicking around the topic. Did you know that there's a pecking order (or was) among the camp survivors? Depending on which camp you went to you might be "more" of a victim than somebody who went to a different camp. I forget where the people who spent three years hiding in a kindly neighbor's closet rank. I must forgive any pretentiousness considering what these people went through. But I agree with you that we shouldn't let (what's the right word?) nostalgia, pride, or victim envy, infiltrate our articles. We just want to relate the facts, as succinctly as we can, while encouraging the reader to learn more about the topic and related topics. Jehochman ^Talk 23:29, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I've heard ofthe pecking order. Your environment is anomalous, but you are fortunate in having direct contact with these realities, rather than by hearsay. Fortunate in the sense that statistically, Holocaust survivors and their offspring are very rare in the US (and Australia) even in terms of their percentage of Jewish communities. I learnt from close observation at school of the sons of immigrant families, that a good number were culturally antisemitic. Far more antisemites (not perpetrators) found sanctuary in the West than did Jewish survivors.Nishidani (talk) 11:15, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

It was Piotrus that removed non-Jewish killings from the lead, I have added it back again if it going to be a point of dispute. (t · c) buidhe 19:13, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I am fine with the current version of the lead, which just mentions a total number of " non-Jews were killed by the Nazi regime and its allies", without trying to break them down into possibly controversial categories of victims. But currently the number (6-8 million) is not cited; and I note that our article on Holocaust victims gives the range of 11-13 million (in the table), and in the lead cites a figure of 11 million, linking to a (broken) USHMM page (archive has a table that roughly adds up to 11 million). Per USHMM, I suggest clarifying "non-Jews were killed" to "non-Jewish civilians and unarmed soldiers were killed", and it seems the 6-8 million range cited in the lead may need upward revision. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:02, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

It is cited, from the very next citation in the text (Gerlach p. 3). This is in the range of Kay (13 million, of which 6 million Jews, 7 million others) and various other estimates. I've never seen an estimate of USHMM for 11 million non-Jewish victims. The 11 million figure often cited is for 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews. This estimate was originally propagated by Simon Wiesenthal, who made it up. (t · c) buidhe 06:22, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

The odd thing is, from Lipstadt and the later article you cite, is that while Wiesenthal's figure was exposed as fictional by his own admission, scholarship has consistently shown in the last two decades that it actually falls short of the real figure of non-Jewish victims. So the rebuttal of Wiesenthal is now a meme for the 5 million, frequently recited whenever a political figure rehashes it, with however no additional note that Wiesenthal's figure turns out to be an underestimate. The whole point of repeatedly citing the rebuttal by Yehuda Bauer (while dutifully ignoring later research) is to maintain the non-equivalence. I find it particularly shocking that Lipstadt thinks something has gone wrong when Jewish families light 11 candles (six of us, five of them). God bless them.Nishidani (talk) 08:30, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

7 millions covers just the Soviet civilians, according to the USHMM. I've linked the USHMM estimate above (here's a working link for the current version of the page, with the same table). The title of that USHMM page is "DOCUMENTING NUMBERS OF VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST AND NAZI PERSECUTION". And the table "Number of Deaths" lists, after "Jews (6 million)": "Soviet civilians - around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figure for Jews)". Then there are Soviet POWs ("around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers)"), "Non-Jewish Polish civilians (around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites)", "Serb civilians (312,000)", "People with disabilities living in institutions (up to 250,000)", "Roma (Gypsies) (196,000–220,000)", "Jehovah's Witnesses (around 1,900), "Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials (at least 70,000)", "German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory (undetermined)" and finally, "Homosexuals (hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials noted above))". If we substract the Jewish numbers from that groip we get 5.7m+3m+1.8m+300k+250k+~200k+~2k+70k+70k=~11.3m. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:53, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, if that's the figure you are using I cannot support it for a number of reasons:

1. No total is provided at the cited source. How do we know if it is intended to be exhaustive?
2. If the figures for Soviet and Polish deaths are derived from total civilian losses, they explain the methodological flaws with this approach later in the same article
3. There is no source for any of these figures, I cannot figure out where they come from
4. It is not peer reviewed scholarship and should receive much less WP:WEIGHT than Gerlach and Kay for example
5. It's not clear why Polish, Soviet, and Serb civilian losses are all included (if this is the source of the numbers) but not for any other European country.

If your point is that estimates can vary, one could just sum up non-Jewish deaths as "millions" or state that it is higher than the figure of Jewish losses if truly reliable sources don't agree on how many there were. (t · c) buidhe 14:18, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I support Buidhe on this. There is, across sources, quite a bit of messiness and conflict on these figures even in scholarly sources, due to different analytic premises and, as before, I don't think USHMM much of a reliable site for such details. It's worthwhile mulling Snyder's remarks on numbers in Bloodlands (2010) pp.409ff. Nishidani (talk) 14:31, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

The table is introduced by the words "What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and captured soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators." And it is clear from the preceding paragraphs on the page that the aim was to produce a comprehensive estimate.

One option we have is to attribute the figure to the USHMM and phrasing it as "no less than 17 million civilians and captured soldiers", or "6 million Jews and over 11 million non-Jewish civilians and captured soldiers". --Andreas JN466 16:39, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I still think, given that the article strives to establish the narrative in terms of 13 scholarly books and 20 articles (a very short RS base, but it is the approach to take), that we ought to hew to scholarly sources. The USHMM does draw on that scholarship, but the scholarship itself breaks down these figures (the picture is very complex) in different ways. An interim mediating solution would be to put this detail in a footnote, as a placeholder with a better citation needed tag added, to alert future editors that we prefer a direct source from the academic specialists. I'm fairly sure somewhere out there in the enormous quantity of monographs produced on this topic, there must be firm updated material on this Nishidani (talk) 17:13, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Estimates vary, which is why providing a range seems fine. Short range in the lead, longer in the 'death toll' section and/or a footnote. The solution you provide above seems reasonable as well, particularly for the lead ("state that it is higher than the figure of Jewish losses if truly reliable sources don't agree on how many there were") until, as you rightly note, we can judge the consensus (if any) in recent reliable sources on this. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:29, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I support using an estimated figure and having a footnote to say where the estimate came from, what methodology was used to produce it, and what the potential range of uncertainty may be. A number isn't truth--it depends upon a methodology and is subject to uncertainty. Providing those details is the best we can do for the reader. If subsequent scholarship comes up with a better estimate, we can obviously update this fact. Further, numbers are most useful with context.

We should state 6 million Jews killed out of how many European Jews, and also 6 million Jews killed out of how many civilians killed of all nationalities. Jehochman ^Talk 17:22, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

On something like this, i.e. estimates for overall deaths of non-Jewish civilians and POWs, a figure reported by a highly visible, academically curated source like the USHMM is more likely to reflect a broad, widely accepted scholarly consensus, and less likely to be an outlier, than a paper by an individual scholar. --Andreas JN466 21:05, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

This webpage does not have most of the hallmarks of a reliable source. Yes it's on the USHMM website, which I doubt is actually "academically curated", but there is no source cited, no named author, and overall it cannot be assumed to represent any kind of consensus. (t · c) buidhe 02:05, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

So, USHMM is not good enough for Wikipedia's The Holocaust article? That would make for an interesting RSN discussion, which I'd encourage you to start. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:17, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think this is an issue for RSN but I don't think we should be giving much weight to numbers from a website which does not state where the numbers come from. I don't think USHMM is not an RS but I think it is generally inferior to scholarly publications. I'd prefer if we stuck to estimates from peer-reviewed, scholarly sources. I also do not think that this is the article to go into detail about European population losses. (t · c) buidhe 04:20, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

@Buidhe: This precise, single page on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, titled "Documenting numbers of victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution", dated 2020, has, as far as I can see, 116 citations and mentions in Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=106&q="Documenting+numbers+of+victims+of+the+Holocaust+and+Nazi+persecution"+ushmm&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

This is close to the 139 citations and mentions Gerlach's entire book on The Extermination of the European Jews (2016) has in Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=130&q=gerlach+"The+extermination+of+the+European+Jews"&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&lookup=0

If we are happy for Wikipedia's article to cite Gerlach's book 128 times, surely we can cite this widely noted USHMM page once.

We can do so safe in the knowledge that we are following the judgment of all the published scholars out there who have chosen to cite the page before us. Surely that is how Wikipedia is supposed to work. Regards, Andreas JN466 16:13, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

You mean published scholars like this Texas university undergraduate?

I'm missing where this webpage is cited by historians known for their work on the history of Nazi crimes and European population losses. (t · c) buidhe 16:23, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

The webpage is cited by published scholars [2] [3] [4] and found this being cited in a history book [5].Dan white 76 (talk) 16:46, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

None of these citations are from Holocaust scholars.

There are many factors that affect the number of Google Scholar citations, including accessibility bias. Not all works indexed on Google Scholar are reliable sources in general, or for specific claims that one might make in this article. And from my estimation the quality of the works that are showing up in the Google Scholar search are even less than usual, probably because those doing more in-depth and methodologically rigorous studies of the Holocaust are not citing a museum website. (t · c) buidhe 17:04, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

What if we say something like. According to Yehuda Bauer 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. That way its showing everybody [6] Dan white 76 (talk) 17:33, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Dan white, I can see the logic of noting the total figure of civilian casualties in German occupied Europe as it is the logical limit for the number of deaths that could possibly be counted. Yet I still think the approach based on scholarly sources is preferable (see section "Prominent estimates of total victims of Nazi killings") (t · c) buidhe 18:21, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

what if we do that then add the total figure of civilian casualties in German occupied Europe then we note how many of the 35 million people that were killed overall because of Nazi aggression were murdered? what do you think @Jayen466:? Dan white 76 (talk) 06:06, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Revert in Terminology and scope section

I made an addition to the "Terminology and scope" section yesterday. Diff. This added the following text:

Even so, various scholars have advocated the view that mass killings perpetrated by the Nazis against other groups such as the Gypsies, the mentally and physically handicapped, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, political prisoners, religious dissenters and homosexuals should also be considered an aspect of the Holocaust.

This text cites and summarises the section on "Defining the Holocaust" in the Columbia Guide to the Holocaust by Francis R. Nicosia and Donald L. Niewyk (Columbia University Press, 2000).

The addition has since been reverted by Buidhe, edit summary: "[...] Also remove unnecessary addition to the terminology section; those who use "Holocaust" more broadly are in no agreement as to which events are covered by it, see here".

Now, we all agree that there are various definitions of the Holocaust about (the Columbia Guide distinguishes four). Per WP:NPOV, All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic. So mention of the fact that there are varying definitions is due, and the "Terminology and scope" section should at least give an overview of the various groups that are sometimes included in the varying definitions. Agreed? Andreas JN466 15:06, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Makes sense. The lack of agreement about the use of a term as explicitly noted in reliable sources is something that should be documented in an encyclopaedic article, rather than used as a justification to exclude mention of some such usages. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:18, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

One or a few sources may use a broader definition, but a vast number of sources say that current usage of the term Holocaust refers to Jews. Wikipedia should follow common usage. If other usages exist, and are not fringe, they should be mentioned. I think the text was potentially okay, but might need a little editing to be perfectly accurate. Also we need to study the sources and cite the most prominent. Jehochman ^Talk 15:31, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

@Jehochman: The source is available in Google Books and has Preview enabled. The chapter is "Defining the Holocaust" (it has a "Conclusion" summary at the end, beginning with the words "Broadly speaking"). Have a look; if you can think of a better summary, do please suggest one. Andreas JN466 17:54, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I disagree. The varying other groups that are covered by some other definitions of "Holocaust" are already mentioned in this article; covering them here is simply redundant.

In addition, phrases like "some historians" are vague and one could validly place cleanup tags on them, eg. Some historians Many Wikipedia editors recommend naming specific proponents of minority views. It's certainly the case that, while the vast majority of historians do not use the word "Holocaust" this way, one could find notable proponents, ie. "Henry Friedlander advocated including all groups that the Nazis defined biologically, such as Jews, Roma, and the disabled". But you would find that there are a wide variety of definitions in use and certainly no more than one sentence would be WP:DUE given that this is very much a minority view in WP:RS.

(I've seen it argued above that the article cherry-picks sources with a narrower definition. Well, this is easy to disprove. What are the academic monographs that state their topic is "the Holocaust" without adjectives or qualifiers and mean something else? How many are these in comparison with those whose stated topic is "the Holocaust" and refer to the persecution and/or mass murder of Jews?) (t · c) buidhe 15:50, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

You say, no more than one sentence would be WP:DUE given that this is very much a minority view in WP:RS – what I wrote above is one sentence.

To be clear, I think it is entirely appropriate for this article to concentrate primarily on Jews in the way it is doing. But that one sentence is due, given how much debate there has been over this issue in recent decades. It's not as though the Columbia Guide were unusual here; it's a topic that comes up time and again in the scholarly literature. To give some further examples,

Dan Michman noted (1998) that the term 'Holocaust' has recently come to be applied, in a growing manner, to non-Jewish group persecuted by the Nazi regime, such as Gypsies and homosexuals.

The Jewish Virtual Library has a page titled "The Holocaust: Non-Jewish Victims".

Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the Holocaust, acknowledges that the term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the Nazis, while arguing that (my emphasis) strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six million victims of the Holocaust.

Peck and Berenbaum (2002) comment on the issue as follows: One of the most divisive and persistent academic debates over the past fifteen years has centered around the question of who the victims of the Holocaust were and then go on to list much the same groups as are listed in the Columbia Guide.

You on the other hand say that there is no debate, and that scholars are all agreed on how the Holocaust should be defined. This does not match what scholars say about the issue. If scholarly sources acknowledge the debate, we should too. Andreas JN466 17:47, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I didn't say "there is no debate". I said that the vast majority of sources that would be suitable to cite in this article define their topic as the persecution and/or mass murder of Jews. I invited you to disprove this assertion, which you have declined to do. Citing the JVL is a joke and Michman is a well known defender of restrictive definitions of Holocaust. Furthermore, in a more recent paper (2014) he states, in recent years, mainly because of the proliferation and growing influence of comparative genocide studies, which are often based on sociological models, ‘The Holocaust’ has been increasingly equated in fact with judeocide, the act of the mass murder of the Jews (t · c) buidhe 17:56, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

It would be a fool's errand for me to try to disprove your assertion, or start counting sources. Scholars have said there is a prominent and important debate and you insist there isn't one. --Andreas JN466 18:06, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

As did our community when asked for comment (see #Scope of the Holocaust), which concluded it is a DUE view... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:02, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Absent objections by anyone other than Buidhe I will reinstate the sentence. I'll avoid the phrase "various scholars" and instead say something like there have been "scholarly debates". Andreas JN466 09:59, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Another partial revert by Buidhe, edit summary: "fix incorrect edit to lead (as many as half of these were Soviet POWs, thus not civilians), more accurate and concise summarization based on recent source (for example, what prominent historian deals with people persecuted as Homosexuals as part of the Holocaust? Where is the "significant debate" on this, which I did not encounter when researching the FA article"

While I can live with the current wording as it stands, I would like to highlight a couple of things here.

1. Buidhe's edit changed "The Nazi regime and its allies also killed millions of non-Jewish civilians" to "The Nazi regime and its allies also killed millions of non-Jews" and described the previous version as "incorrect". Buidhe, could you say what is "incorrect" about the assertion that the Nazis and their allies killed millions of non-Jewish civilians?
2. When books by university presses, co-authored or co-edited by scholars like Michael Berenbaum and Francis R. Nicosia (both cited: [7][8]), testify to the existence of academic debates, then we do not require confirmation from a Wikipedian that they have encountered these debates to believe that there have been such debates. --Andreas JN466 13:42, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

1. As stated in the edit summary, Soviet prisoners of war were a significant part of the non-Jewish mass killing committed by the Nazi regime, and they were not civilians. Now I understand that you mean that excluding the POWs the Nazis killed millions of civilians, but the sources don't really collate the deaths this way. It's more common to see it listed as something like "deaths outside battle" if it is necessary to specify. I personally prefer mass killing, following Kay, but I understand Piotrus doesn't like that term.
2. If it is a significant minority view that homosexuals are included by Holocaust scholars in the definition of Holocaust you should be able to name prominent adherents per wp:NPOV. Other sources contradict some of the assertions made in the sources you cite. For example, Beorn 2018 states (I believe correctly) that alternate meanings of Holocaust are mainly found in popular rather than academic discourse.

(t · c) buidhe 16:58, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

1. the sources don't really collate the deaths this way. Please.

Between 1939 and 1945 the Germans killed many millions of non-Jewish civilians in Germany itself, and in every occupied country, often in massive reprisal actions or after prolonged torture. The shooting down in cold blood of unarmed, defenceless Greeks, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Russians, and men, women and children of a dozen other nationalities, all of them civilians who had taken no part in military action, was a feature of Nazi rule throughout Europe.

— Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Human Tragedy (2014)

2. The works I cited give examples of authors for each of the categories they discuss. Even if we were to decide that Beorn is correct and Berenbaum, Nicosia et al., despite their qualifications, do not know what they are talking about, Wikipedia actually covers and describes popular as well as scholarly discourse. Andreas JN466 21:08, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Given that Buidhe seems to be in the minority position regarding what contributors have said during this discussion, I see no reason why their latest reverts [9] should go uncontested. I'm detecting more than a hint of WP:OWN here. AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:15, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

• I'm not convinced that a 25-yo source is sufficient to imply that there's an ongoing "divisive and persistent" academic debate, as was present in this edit; Source: The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. The source refers to it as having occurred "in the past 15 years" [as of 1998].

A more recent source, Waitman Wade Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (2018), p. 4, states, for example: "In popular usage, the term has come to be interpreted more broadly, including non-Jewish victims as well". We have the link to the Holocaust uniqueness debate article and this is sufficient. --K.e.coffman (talk) 17:43, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

That link is present only in the 'Remembrance and historiography' section, whereas arguably this is something that should be discussed at 'Terminology and scope'. Interestingly, what you wrote is not the same as what the article states ("The tendency to see the Holocaust as a unique or incomprehensible event continues to be popular among the broader public after being largely rejected by historians.") The setences are not contradictory, but they concern slightly different dimensions of this phenomena, and the one you mention (quote above about "In popular usage") does not seem to be reflected in our current article. Lastly the phrasing "Holocaust as a unique or incomprehensible event" is problematic, given that the Holocaust uniqueness debate article about uniqueness, not incomprehensibleness. This entire sentence may need copyediting for clarity and to reduce WP:SYNTH, and I think this should be done by expanding it into a paragraph at minimum. Right now I think our article is glossing over what is a very important topic. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:34, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

The Holocaust uniqueness argument is usually associated with the claim that no other genocides in history compare to the Jewish Holocaust, in particular the assertion that no other group can claim to have been slated for total extermination and targeted for no rational reason. While it is the case that proponents don't support additional groups being added into the definition of Holocaust, but the same is true of most scholarly critics of uniqueness.

As the linked article states it is also related to claims that the Holocaust is "beyond human understanding", i.e. incomprehensible. (t · c) buidhe 14:24, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

It is probably true that debates in the US about the meaning of the word "Holocaust" were particularly intense and divisive in the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting the work then being done to establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and attendant arguments over its proposed scope.

In Europe, meanwhile, the Council of Europe honoured "Roma Holocaust victims" in 2019: “The horrors of the Roma Holocaust are an undeniable part of our history, but for a long time Europe has turned a blind eye on to what had happened,” Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland says in a message for a commemorative ceremony held on 2 August at Auschwitz. Cf. also this Council of Europe book (2017 edition), for example, which routinely speaks of the Roma genocide as the Holocaust (e.g. "The Holocaust was something that was done to the Roma").

There are first-class scholarly sources about the Romani Holocaust as well. See e.g. Rain of Ash by Ari Joskowicz ([10] [11]) (Princeton University Press, 2023).

So this is not a question of the word "Holocaust" only being applied to non-Jewish victims in "popular" usage. It is also scholarly and official usage. Andreas JN466 23:44, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's a good argument. Even those who talk about a "Polish Holocaust", "Romani Holocaust", etc. introduce an adjective so that readers know that they are not using the standard meaning of "the Holocaust". There are also books about an "Armenian Holocaust" but no one is claiming that is part of this event.

I do not believe that Wikipedia should follow a political body like the Council of Europe or any government to determine how we cover historical events. (t · c) buidhe 00:43, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm merely presenting more recent evidence that debates about who should be included in "The Holocaust" (without adjective) are ongoing, as posts above suggested these debates might have stopped around the year 2000.

Here is a quote from Joskowicz's book, published just a few weeks ago. Despite the fact that Jews played an outsized role in the struggle to recognize and conserve stories of Romani suffering during the war, most Jews, including Jewish Holocaust survivors such as my grandparents, expressed little interest in the topic. The same can be said of my other communities, scholars of the Jewish past and of the Holocaust. While historians of the Holocaust have started to deal with the Romani genocide, they have mostly studied the actions of the perpetrators, rather than the lives of their Romani victims. This largely comes down to a problem of expertise and method, as I have experienced myself. Wading in the filed of Romani history has thrust me into the position of student once again. In the process, my background as a Jew and a scholar of Jewish history has been both an opportunity and an obstacle. Over the years, many Jewish scholars have written books about the Holocaust based on the lives of their ancestors. This is not one of them. My grandparents will not appear again in the following pages because this is a book about the stories they never told. Andreas JN466 09:34, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't get the same read. The quoted passage does not mention an academic debate or that it's ongoing, but merely suggests (to me) that the Romani genocide is an adjacent topic and is thus being studied by Holocaust scholars, among others. --K.e.coffman (talk) 09:50, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I see the book itself as part of that ongoing debate, and an example of a scholarly – not popular – work applying the term "Holocaust" to non-Jews. That's how I read passages like the ones at the top of this page, which speak of "the Jewish Holocaust" to distinguish it from "the Romani Holocaust", and "the Holocaust's Romani victims". The very publisher's blurb says, Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe’s Roma went largely ignored. ... Unforgettably moving and sweeping in scope, Rain of Ash is a revelatory account of the unequal yet necessary entanglement of Jewish and Romani quests for historical justice and self-representation that challenges us to radically rethink the way we remember the Holocaust. So Joskovicz does not present the Romani as an "adjacent topic", but as an integral part of "The Holocaust", just like the Columbia Guide to the Holocaust does.

Frankly, we are arguing over a wording (persistent debates) that is not even in the article any more. We are currently simply saying that the term Holocaust is sometimes also applied to other groups, and I would hope we can all agree that that is true. Regards, Andreas JN466 13:11, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Prominent estimates of total victims of Nazi killings

• Dieter Pohl, Verfolgung und Massenmord in der NS-Zeit 1933–1945 (2003) apparently around 13 million—although I cannot check this source directly
• Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (2010)—10 million deaths attributed to Nazi Germany in the bloodlands, it would be close to the other figures if adding in the Jews who lived further west
• Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews Cambridge UP (2016), 6-8 million non-Jews, "nearly 6 million Jews" for a total of around 12-14 million
• Kriegführung und Hunger 1939-1945: Zum Verhältnis von militärischen, wirtschaftlichen und politischen Interessen Christoph Dieckmann (historian), Babette Quinkert, Wallstein Verlag, 2015 p. 9 13 million "Opfer" of "deutsche Massengewalt" (victims of German mass violence), citing Pohl and this paper
• Alex J. Kay, Empire of Destruction Yale UP (2021) around 13 million deaths from mass killing, approaching 14 million including individual killings (see the conclusion, especially page 282)
• Nationalsozialistische Verbrechen 1939–1945 (2022) by Pohl, worth checking but I'm not sure it makes a total estimate because reviews don't mention it.
• Also worth mentioning is the point of view that the act of lumping the victims together and combining them is methodologically questionable and unfair to each group of victims, as articulated here by Swedish historian Stéphane Bruchfeld, who does not have an enwiki article but did write a bestselling book on the Holocaust.

To be clear, I do not think this article is the right place to go into detail about different estimates for this number. So, my proposal is to keep the lead as it is now and cite, attributing, one or two of the above estimates in the death toll section. I cannot find any historian of comparable prominence to the above who has done the research and gotten a higher number than 14 million. As expected it is our poorly sourced, delisted-former-GA article (I refer to Holocaust victims) that is not following the scholarship. (t · c) buidhe 04:30, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Pohl says 12 to 14 million (including 5.6 to 5.7 million Jews).

The text reads: Nach momentanem Kenntnisstand kann man davon ausgehen, dass 5,6 – 5,7 Millionen Menschen wegen ihrer jüdischen Herkunft ihr Leben lassen mussten, daneben mindestens 100 000 Sinti und Roma. Knapp drei Millionen in Kriegsgefangenschaft geratene Einwohner der Sowjetunion starben, die meisten, weil man ihnen die notwendige Versorgung verweigerte, mindestens 150 000 von ihnen aber wurden erschossen. Besonders hoch waren die Opfer unter der Bevölkerung Osteuropas, die in Lagern, bei „Bandenkampfaktionen“ oder bei anderen Morden umkamen. Jeweils weit über eine Million Zivilisten starben in Polen und den besetzten sowjetischen Gebieten bei Massenmorden, mehrere Hunderttausend in Jugoslawien, jeweils jüdische Opfer nicht mitgerechnet. Weitgehend unbekannt sind die Opfer der selektiven Hungerpolitik im Osten, vermutlich weit über eine Million Zivilisten mussten sie mit dem Leben bezahlen. Auch wenn die Ermittlung einer Gesamtzahl weiteren aufwendigen Berechnungen vorbehalten bleiben muss, so dürfte die Größenordnung der unter deutscher Herrschaft ermordeten Menschen bei 12 bis 14 Millionen liegen.

The main difference between the USHMM page and Pohl is that the former includes 5.7 million Soviet civilians (in addition to the 3 million Soviet POWs) while Pohl only speaks of "weit über eine Million", i.e. "well over a million". Total Soviet civilian deaths were around 14 million, so it all depends on how many millions you choose to include or exclude. :/ Andreas JN466 10:47, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Here is Martin Gilbert: As well as the six million Jews who were murdered, more than ten million other non-combatants were killed by the Nazis. --Andreas JN466 00:03, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

A book first published in 1987. Needless to say, a great deal of demographics has been revised since the opening of the eastern bloc archives. I searched in Gilbert's more recent book Never Again (2000), but could not find the claim there. (t · c) buidhe 03:39, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Here is the page on non-Jews in Never again. It gives some numbers for individual groups that may be of interest to us, but no total. Andreas JN466 12:49, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

• Donald Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2000) gives a figure of 17 million if the other non-combatant victim groups like Soviet POWs, Soviet and Polish civilians, Roma, and the disabled are included. Cited e.g. by Amos N. Guiora, Tolerating Intolerance, Oxford University Press. Andreas JN466 18:54, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

  Worth noting that, if you check the footnote, the authors did not do their own calculations and the two sources cited for non-Jewish deaths are dated 1982 and 1990. In the footnote they give a range of 5 to 11 million non-Jewish deaths, thus 17 million is the highest number. I don't know which is from which source. (t · c) buidhe 00:40, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

  You are looking at Guiora, not at The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2000) that Guiora is citing.

  The Columbia Guide says that including non-Jews would require acknowledging as many as 17,000,000 victims.

  Guiora (2014) reproduces this figure, citing the Columbia Guide, and then gives ancillary citations in the footnote, including the ones you mention.

  The Columbia Guide lists about two dozen sources for "non-Jewish victims" at the end of the book, with publication dates ranging up to 2000. We can take the Columbia Guide, Gilbert and USHMM to RS/N, if you like. Andreas JN466 11:44, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

  And the fact that a source is newer does not meet it is more correct. A newer source providing a different estimate is just that - another point for a range to cite. Unless the older sources are very old or unreliable, which I don't think is the case here. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:21, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: over 17 million Andreas JN466 19:10, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Well, I'd say where I'm coming from on this is that I believe every article should aspire to be FA, and for FA it is often expected that you will cite not just reliable sources, but the best ones that are available. If you put these sources in and went to FAC, and if I were an uninvolved editor doing a source review, I would be skeptical. I would wonder why you are citing 20 year old tertiary sources for this information. I wouldn't pass it unless you had convincing answers to questions like, why is this one of the best quality sources on the topic? What is the author's expertise on demographics? Especially since another editor has already listed several more recent, scholarly sources that could be cited instead if editors believe including two estimates is beneficial for the reader. (t · c) buidhe 03:46, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

When looking at the upper bound, I'd survey WP:RS that cite the upper bound. We can certainly look at any sources they cite to ensure we are not listening to a cacophony of rumour; but other than that, we cannot engage in speculation about the whys and wherefores of reliable sources. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Gilbert's The Holocaust: The Human Tragedy, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are all reliable sources for the 17 million victim count. Use it. XavierItzm (talk) 12:04, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Sources_on_Holocaust_death_toll --Andreas JN466 12:07, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Name change?

It appears that there is a dispute as to whether the term, and therefore the article "Holocaust", covers only the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany, or all the genocidal activities of the Third Reich (and therefore the genocide of the Roma, Poles, Soviet people, etc.). In view of this, shouldn't the simplest solution be to change the name of the article to something more precise, e.g. Extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany? Or Shoah, as the term is more precise? Marcelus (talk) 21:36, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

• The article's name is "The Holocaust" (not Holocaust) and this term primarily covers "The systematic mass killing of Jews under the German Nazi regime in Nazi-controlled areas of Europe between 1941 and 1945", according to the OED. Borsoka (talk) 03:03, 11 June 2023 (UTC)Comment

  While dictionaries do vary (see below), the main emphasis of the definitions is on Jews. So the same should be the case in our article on The Holocaust. Others should be (and are) mentioned of course. Andreas JN466 08:13, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I think per WP:COMMONNAME, the current name is fine. Unlike in Poland, where recently the term has become less common I think than zagłada Żydów (lit. the destruction of the Jews). Ping User:Dreamcatcher25 in case they'd like to comment on the Polish name. On a sidenote, it may be worth mentioning the Polish term in the article, and probably the explanation of the term Shoah could be expanded from the half-sentence or so it currently has. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:36, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Dictionaries do vary.

Merriam-Webster:

a : usually the Holocaust : the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II

b : a mass slaughter of people

especially : GENOCIDE

Longman

the Holocaust

the killing of millions of Jews and other people by the Nazis during the Second World War → genocide

Britannica dictionary:

1 the Holocaust : the killing of millions of Jews and other people by the Nazis during World War II

2 [count] : an event or situation in which many people are killed and many things are destroyed especially by fire

Collins:

The Holocaust is used to refer to the killing by the Nazis of millions of Jews during the Second World War.

Cambridge Dictionary:

the Holocaust

the killing of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis before and during the Second World War

Andreas JN466 07:58, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany. Based on your suggestion, we should exclude people incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps who actually managed to survive World War II? Because I was under the impression that the "victims" were not limited to the casualties, but included several tortured and traumatized prisoners. Dimadick (talk) 09:18, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

No, we should not. Marcelus (talk) 11:58, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Based on the sample above, 3 to 1 of dictionaries include the killing of non-Jewish civilians during WWII in the definition of "holocaust", the sole outlier being the Collins dictionary. Wikipedia should not be ruled my minority outliers such as Collins. Therefore this article quite properly must include all such victims. XavierItzm (talk) 01:00, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

It's a good thing that Wikipedia does not rely exclusively on generalized dictionaries to tell us what the scope of our articles should be. (t · c) buidhe 02:41, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

• Dictionaries are not reliable sources. -- K.e.coffman (talk) 04:23, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

• Dictionaries are reliable sources for establishing the most common meaning of a term. The above entries prove that the term "the Holocaust" primarily covers the genocide against Jewish people during WWII: all entries name only the Jews specifically. The article's scope is fully in line with the above entries: it describes the extermination of Jews in details and also refers to other victims of persecution in Nazi Germany. Borsoka (talk) 04:46, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  I agree that dictionaries are reliable sources for establishing the most common meaning of a term. Let's not diss dictionaries here: they are the products of scholarship conducted for precisely that purpose.

  I also agree with Borsoka's conclusion: the article's main focus should be on Jews, but the fate of other groups must be covered.

  We could do better in that latter regard: at the time of writing, others are not mentioned in the infobox at all, and they are barely mentioned in the lede.

  I also think we say too little about the Romani (Roma and Sinti); a reader of this article would get away with the impression that "5,000 Romani people from Austria were deported", that Roma along with Jews were the "worst-treated groups" of forced labourers, and that "Thousands of Romani people were also murdered in the extermination camps". Nowhere does the reader learn that 250,000 to 500,000 Romani perished in the Holocaust. Andreas JN466 20:35, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  See the "Mass shootings of Jews" section. In purely numerical terms, the number of Romani people killed is comparable to Jews from Radom District of the General Governorate, and Romani people currently get more coverage. (t · c) buidhe 20:54, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  The point is that the reader is given no inkling from reading the article how many Romani died. It's not about devoting more words to the topic, it's about mentioning what is important.

  What is more important: that 5,000 Romani were deported from Austria, or that the Nazis killed a quarter million or even half a million of them? Andreas JN466 22:53, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  The article already states that "as many as 225,000 Roma" were shot. (t · c) buidhe 23:04, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  I missed this passage; mea culpa. :(

  Even so, the article lacks a total (250,000–500,000 is the USHMM estimate). Andreas JN466 23:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Auschwitz I relevance

In 1940 a roughly equivalent number of Poles were imprisoned at Auschwitz I and Gusen, which I hope you agree is not relevant to this article. "Auschwitz played no part in the planning for the murder of the European Jews in 1941". Only in 1942 would Auschwitz II become significant to the Holocaust, and it only became central in 1943, after most Holocaust victims were already dead. Initially the SS planned to install the crematoria at Mogilev, but the location was changed. These details, more relevant than the date of establishment of Auschwitz I, are not really currently covered in the article for space reasons. If another camp / ghetto should be mentioned in this article, it would probably be Janowska concentration camp or Theresienstadt, both of which were more significant to the Holocaust than Auschwitz I. (t · c) buidhe 23:44, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Auschwitz II was a separate camp for only about a year, from 22 November 1943 to 25 November 1944. Even then, all the camps were closely interconnected, with the Auschwitz I commandant acting as commander of the Auschwitz garrison and being the senior commandant. Marcelus (talk) 08:23, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Auschwitz was the first concentration camp the Nazis set up in occupied Poland. It was the place where the first gassings took place (of Soviet and Polish prisoners, in August or September 1941). As such, I think the sentence mentioning its creation is worthwhile. Auschwitz initially held mainly non-Jewish Poles, but there were Polish Jews among its prisoners from the beginning. Andreas JN466 09:10, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

References

Gerlach attributed too much?

I see Christian Gerlach is attributed in text 4 times. Is this corresponding to his position in the field of Holocaust studies? Perhaps someone could count how many other scholars are named in our article? I'd expect we may need to name some others and balance things out... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:34, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Well, he is being cited for statistical information and the main reason is that Gerlach's book is quite broad—for example, I've seen other estimates for the number of Jews surviving in hiding in particular countries, but not across Europe—and also he sees value in statistics to a greater degree than other historians (see the introduction to his book around page 15).

Specifically, the statements attributed to Gerlach are:

1. "According to historian Christian Gerlach, non-Germans "not under German command" caused 5 to 6 percent of the Jewish deaths, and their involvement was crucial in other ways"
2. "Gerlach estimates that 200,000 Jews survived in hiding across Europe"
3. "Gerlach argues that hundreds of thousands of Jews may have died because of rumors or denunciations, and many others never attempted to escape because of a belief it was hopeless"
4. "A similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs—estimated by Gerlach at 6 to 8 million—were killed by Germany and its allies."

Do you have other estimates that could be used instead? (Alternate figures very similar to Gerlach's are provided for the fourth one above; as stated, I would not object to citing Kay instead). Alternatively, do you propose removing some of these figures? (t · c) buidhe 17:02, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Piotrus? (t · c) buidhe 08:23, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes? I am not removing the attributions, which in general I support on principle. Please note that my concern is not what Gerlach said, but rather, was and is whether we should count which scholars are attributed and consider whether such mentions are due (in other words, I wonder if our article is not suggesting that some scholars are more impactful in this field than others, by virtue of citing some and not said others). As suc, I wonder if maybe we should add more attributions to some others scholars? (For example, our article mentions the term modernity, but does not mention Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust at all). Or maybe everything is ok as it is, and the lack of other editors commenting here seems to suggest this is not a problem. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:29, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Gerlach is very prominent in the article. I definitely wouldn't mind if the article mentioned some other notable scholars as well. Andreas JN466 09:40, 13 June 2023 (UTC)