Talk:The Holocaust

Institutional collaboration

Perhaps there can be a reference to Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens and his call, along with members of the greek academic community, to halt the deportation of Greek Jews from Nazi occupied Greece. Damaskinos formally protested against the deportation, clashed with the german authorities and was threatened to be shot, in an incident documented by "The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation" (http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/general/greek-orthodox-church-academic/).

Apart from that, the greek version of the article about the Archibishop claims that he ordered the priests to supply the Jews with certificates of (orthodox) baptism, in order to rescue them from arrest by the Nazis, but i can't provide any source for that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.49.86.12 (talk) 15:20, 1 October 2011

Grammar/punctuation

In the third paragraph: "Where the Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings." The "the" before Germany is unnecessary.

Additionally, the period preceding citation 10 should be inside the quotation marks.

Institutional collaboration

Perhaps there can be a reference to Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens and his call, along with members of the greek academic community, to halt the deportation of Greek Jews from Nazi occupied Greece. Damaskinos formally protested against the deportation, clashed with the german authorities and was threatened to be shot, in an incident documented by "The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation" (http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/general/greek-orthodox-church-academic/).

Apart from that, the greek version of the article about the Archibishop claims that he ordered the priests to supply the Jews with certificates of (orthodox) baptism, in order to rescue them from arrest by the Nazis, but i can't provide any source for that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.49.86.12 (talk) 15:20, 1 October 2011

Grammar/punctuation

In the third paragraph: "Where the Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings." The "the" before Germany is unnecessary.

Additionally, the period preceding citation 10 should be inside the quotation marks.

Typo in quote from Peter Novick

There is a typo in this quote: "Peter Novick argued: "A moment's reflection makes clear that the notion of uniqueness is quite vacuous . . . [and], in practice, deeply offensive. What else call all of this possibly mean except 'your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary'"

"What else call" should be "what else can."

Please include this in the article

This excerpt is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Bulgaria and roughly summarizes the remarkable act of saving the entire Jewish population in the pre-war territory of Bulgaria. I think this is a very positive example from the dark-years of the war and we should keep examples like this one as a guiding sign that a light can be found even in the darkest times. I copied it from the script section:

During World War II, the Bulgarian Parliament and Tsar Boris III enacted the 1941 Law for the Protection of the Nation, which introduced numerous legal restrictions on Jews in Bulgaria. Specifically, the law prohibited Jews from voting, running for office, working in government positions, serving in the army, marrying or cohabitating with ethnic Bulgarians, using Bulgarian names, or owning rural land. The legislation also established quotas that limited the number of Jews in Bulgarian universities. Not only did Jewish leaders protest the law, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Bulgarian Workers' Party officials, twenty-one writers, and professional organizations also opposed.

Unlike some other Nazi Germany allies or German-occupied countries excluding Denmark and Finland, Bulgaria managed to save its entire 48,000-strong Jewish population during World War II from deportation to concentration camps, with Dimitar Peshev playing a crucial role in preventing the deportations, as well as Bulgarian Church officials and ordinary citizens. The story of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II has been told in "Beyond Hitler's Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews" by Michael Bar-Zohar, an Israeli historian, politician and former Knesset member who was born in Bulgaria. On the subject is also a book by Tzvetan Todorov, a French intellectual born in Bulgaria and the Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.) in Paris. Todorov wrote "The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria's Jews Survived the Holocaust" (published by Princeton Univ. Press), where he uses letters, diaries, government reports and memoirs to reconstruct what happened in Bulgaria during World War II, which led to the preservation of the lives of 50,000 Bulgarian Jews.

On the eve of the planned deportations requested by Nazi Germany, the Bulgarian government asked for a breakdown of the German plans for the eventual deportees, and was told that roughly one-half will be employed in agriculture in Greater Germany and one-fourth, reported to be semi-skilled laborers, will be "allowed to redeem themselves" by "volunteering to work" in the war industries of the Ruhr, while the remaining one-fourth will be transported to the Gouvernement General (German-occupied Poland) for employment in "work directly connected to the war". This information was also distributed to the neutral countries via German diplomatic channels and was reported on March 24, 1943 in the New York Times from Berne, Switzerland, along with the rather cynical statement that "the former death rate in the Jewish colonies of occupied Poland has shown a considerable decrease in the past three months", with the listed reason being that "now many of the male Jews are employed in army work near the fighting zones", and these receive approximately the same rations as German soldiers. Still hesitant to German deportation requests, in late 1942 and early 1943 the Bulgarian government utilized Swiss diplomatic channels to inquire whether possible deportations of the Jews can happen to British-controlled Palestine by ships from the Black Sea rather than to concentration camps in Poland by trains, about which rumors of mistreatment spread, and for which the Germans requested a significant amount of money. However, this attempt was blocked by the British Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden. Following that failure, Bulgarian authorities permitted Germany to deport the majority of the non-Bulgarian Jews in the areas of Bulgarian occupation zone in Greece and Yugoslavia which were under Bulgarian administration during the war. Thus, 4,500 Jews from Greek Thrace and Eastern Macedonia reached Poland, while 7,144 from Bulgarian occupied Vardar Macedonia and Pomoravlje reached Treblinka. None of them survived. Although Bulgaria had effectively controlled the regions immediately beyond its borders, German authorities, who were in charge, recognized only the Bulgarian military administration and not the civil one. Bulgaria granted citizenship both to all ethnic Bulgarians and to others who wished so in those territories, but not to Jews that were already beyond its borders. It is important to note, however, that the territories of Aegean Thrace, Macedonia and other lands controlled by Bulgaria during WW2 were not considered Bulgarian; they were only administered by Bulgaria, but Bulgaria had no say as to the affairs of these lands, following directives from Germany. In contrast with the old Bulgarian territories, where widespread protests against the deportations took place, including petitions to the Sofia government, in Aegean Thrace and Macedonia such organized movements were lacking. As to the Jews in the sovereign state of Bulgaria, deportation to the concentration camps was denied. Furthermore, Bulgaria was officially thanked by the government of Israel despite being an ally of Nazi Germany during the first part of WWII. This story was kept secret by the Soviet Union because the royal Bulgarian government, the King of Bulgaria and the Church were responsible for the huge public outcry at the time, causing the majority of the country to defend its Jewish population. The communist Soviet regime could not countenance credit to be given to the former authorities, the Church or the King, as all three were considered enemies of communism. Thus, the documentation proving the saving of Bulgaria's Jews was suppressed until the end of the Cold War in 1989. Only then did the story come to light. The number of 48 000 Jews was known to Hitler, yet not one was deported or murdered by the Nazis.

The Bulgarian occupational zone included neither Thessaloniki, with its over 55,000 Jews, nor the Western-most part of Macedonia, including the towns of Debar, Struga, and Tetovo, which were part of Italian-occupied Albania. Bulgarian authorities did offer protection to Jews with no Bulgarian nationality, including those who had fled to Bulgaria from Nazi occupation elsewhere.

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:The Holocaust/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Midnightblueowl (talk · contribs) 23:18, 2 February 2013 (UTC) Hello there. I'm no expert in this subject, but I would be interested in undertaking this particular GA review, with the help of others if they are also interested. Midnightblueowl (talk) 23:18, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Checklist

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.	I think that there is a lot of superfluous wording here, alongside other textual issues. For example: * "Etymology and use of the term" could be better titled "Etymology and terminology." * "used in English to denote great massacres" - is "great" really the best term to be using here, considering its multiple meanings ? * "television mini-series Holocaust" - what country was this produced in; in what nations did it introduce the word "Holocaust" too ? I could go on and on...
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.	* The lead does not sufficiently summarize the rest of the article; there is little or no mention, for instance, of the legacy left by the Holocaust, or the original motivation of those who perpetrated it. * The general layout of the article is not as user friendly as it could be, for instance jumping about chronologically between the "Distinctive Features" and "Development and execution" sections. The reader is told about the extermination camps before learning the reasoning behind the genocide. * Why are some subsections in the "Development and execution" section given dates, and others not ? * Whole chunks of text are just quotes from published sources, which is not permitted by Wikipedia policy. * Again, I could go on...
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.	Not all paragraphs are referenced.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	There are sentences, such as that beginning with "The Nazis used a euphemistic phrase..." which are unreferenced. There is also at least one "[citation needed]" notification.
	2c. it contains no original research.	There are sentences, such as that beginning with "The Nazis used a euphemistic phrase..." which are unreferenced; are they therefore original research ?
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.	There is little on the Holocaust's legacy in the world.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).	Some sections go into quite a bit of detail, others go into very little; Wikipedia cannot accept this haphazard manner.
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.	I'm not confident that this page manages to remain neutral on this hugely controversial issue; its use of language consistently betrays a bias towards the belief that the Holocaust was a bad thing. For instance, the term "murder" is regularly employed – I appreciate that this term is itself widely used in the literature on the Holocaust, but it is also a term that carries with it solely negative connotations. Imagine that you were a Nazi, or a Neo-Nazi, who really believed that the Jews were an evil threat to German civilization who had to be eradicated; would you consider the deaths in the Holocaust to constitute "murder" in that instance, or would you instead think of them as justified executions ? Terms like "killings", "deaths" and "genocide" could be used without the same connotations. Furthermore, in a brief section discussing the Nazi motivation for the Holocaust, it remarks "in an attempt to justify the killings", containing the implication that the killings were not succesfully justified; a far more NPOV use would be "as justification for the killings". Furthermore, there seems to be a major emphasis on the genocide of the Jews, not of other communities exterminated by the Nazis; this betrays a bias towards the controversial belief that the "Holocaust" refers only to the extermination of the Jews which can be seen as denigrating the suffering inflicted upon homosexuals, the disabled, Romani etc.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.
	7. Overall assessment.	There's clearly been a lot of great work that's gone on here recently, and the page is in much better shape than when I last checked it out. I'm sad to say however that I cannot award it GA status, for it falls short on far too many of the categories. It really is an important issue, and for this reason has to be really, really good before it can go on to reach GA and then FA. I'm sceptical that continual tinkering will actually bring this article up to GA quality; I think it needs a methodological, systematic improvement campaign, based on heavy use of the established, specialist and primarily academic literature into the subject. Ideally, that needs an expert in the subject. Midnightblueowl (talk) 00:07, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Comments on GA Review

Religious Leaders Definite 'Countervailing' Force Against Antisemitism

I definitely agree on the lack of neutrality in this article, but not for the same reasons sited in the review. The article portrays all German society as devote Nazis and antisemitic. It not only fails to acknowledge dissidents to the Nazi regime, but claims there were none. I have an interest in religious thought especially Lutheran religious leaders such as Bonhoeffer. A comment in the article reads:

"Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews."[22] He writes that some Christian churches declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point. Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because antisemitic policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses, churches, and other vested interests and lobby groups.[22]"

I believe this statement is the complete opinion of the writer, could possibly misrepresent Friedlander (although I have not read Friedlander's work), and is a false statement. The church was most definitely a countervailing force. Religious leaders such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer not only wrote as dissidents to Hitler, but also put their lives on the line (by choice) to stop Hitler. They used every means at their disposal to stop Nazism including plans to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer was tragically killed before the end of the war by the same concentration camps he opposed. I think the article should, at least, be revised to include this alternative point of view and mention of leaders such as Bonhoeffer. The Bonhoeffer article also includes a more in-depth discussion of the church's role including claims of rigged church elections.

This maybe considered a fine point by many, but I think it is an important point underscoring the often overlooked German opposition forces to the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the Nazi party. Willsh10 (talk) 04:49, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

(I posted the below yesterday, but it didn't show up on the watch list. I realize that I don't understand the process that is being used here so would appreciate any correction of what I have done.)

I would have responded earlier but I am traveling, in fact to study certain aspects of the Holocaust. Thank you for the effort and comments above. I most certainly agree that the article is a long way from being a GA, if only because of the conflict between the definition in the first paragraph and the many paras and stats relating to non-Jews. A lot of discussion has taken place about the distinction between the Holocaust and the Nazi mass murders of non-Jews. This distinction, which is made by many prominent scholars of Nazi Germany, is well summed up by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale as follows "The term Holocaust was introduced after the war and, by the 1990s, was generally (although by no means always) understood to mean the mass murder of the Jews by the Germans. In this book the term Holocaust signifies the final version of the Final Solution, the German policy to eliminate the Jews of Europe by murdering them. (Snyder, Timothy (2010-10-12). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Kindle Locations 7591-7594). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.)

I am also rather surprised at the opinion about the use of the word "murder" as reflecting a POV. What is important is that most if not all (I know of none who don't) reliable sources use the word "murder" as a descriptive word. I wouldn't consider a neo-nazi as a reliable source. Perhaps the Nazi leadership would not have used the word murder, but they were certainly convicted of it.

Within the history profession, the proper noun, Holocaust, is no longer controversial. Norman Finkelstein in his important muckraking book, The Holocaust Industry, describes how the capitalization was used by the American Jewish establishment for its own interests and prefers to use the term "Nazi holocaust". But he is really an exception within the history community, an important one non-the-less.

Your overall assessment is well taken. But when a real editing expert, Dianaa, offered to put the article in GA form, her suggestion to remove the list of non-Jewish victims met with resistance from those who do not distinguish Holocaust victims from all Nazi victims. This is an on-going problem and I see no resolution in the near future. In the meantime, there are a lot a good references in the article and for anyone who is willing to drill down there is a lot to learn. The more casual visitor will be rather puzzled.Joel Mc (talk) 07:04, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

point 2a

Reference 112 completely disagrees with the statement it is supposed to support. --Lacek2 (talk) 15:27, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

One should check not only of there are references, but if the references make any sense at all (particularly if they support a highly controversial statement). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lacek2 (talk • contribs) 15:28, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

It does not contradict the text at all, but it's not really a 'reference', but rather more a piece of supplementary information. The statement needs an actual reference. Paul B (talk) 15:55, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

I have added an actual reference, of course there are more...Joel Mc (talk) 17:03, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Why only jews?

I don't understand! What about Romani peopole, homosexualist, communists and other people that were under Nazi extermination same way as jews? Why first sentences only about jews? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.229.172.101 (talk) 13:27, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

Introductory language has varied over the life of this article, see this version from October 15, 2002. I'm sure there is extensive discussion in archived talk pages. User:Fred Bauder Talk 17:53, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

There has in fact been extensive discussion in the past, see just one example at: Talk:The_Holocaust/Archive_17#Consensus_proposal. The Nazis committed a number of different mass murders: Jews, Roma/Sinti, the Polish intelligentsia, Soviet POWs, to name only a few examples. Today, most historians use the proper noun The Holocaust to mean the mass murder of Jews. There are separate WP articles on Nazi mass murders relating to most of those other groups, i.e. Porajmos (Romani), Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs. In addition the Nazis persecuted (as opposed to mass murdering) other groups for example, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, blacks. They also have separate WP articles: Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany, Black people in Nazi Germany. I know of no expert who confuses persecution with an attempt to exterminate.--Joel Mc (talk) 12:35, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Jews were the primary targets of the Nazis. For a broader definition of Holocaust that includes Gypsies, Poles, Slavs in general, and Soviet POWs, see Bohdan Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell (New York: Novak Report, 1980).

• Donald L. Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, p.49 : "Those who offer explicit or implicit arguments for including them among the victims of the Holocaust, such as Bohdan Wytwycky in The Other Holocaust and Christian Streit and Jürgen Forster in The Policies of Genocide, point out that the appallingly high losses among Soviet prisoners of war were racially determined. The Germans did not usually mistreat prisoners from other Allied countries, but in the Nazi view Soviet prisoners were Slavic "subhumans" who had no right to live. ... Those who would include Polish and Soviet civilian losses in the Holocaust include Bohdan Wytwycky in The Other Holocaust, Richard C. Lukas in The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Rule, 1939-1944, and Ihor Kamenetsky in Secret Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe."

• Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, p.412 : "The term Holocaust is sometimes used in two other ways: to mean all German killing policies during the war, or to mean all oppression of Jews by the Nazi regime."

• Timothy D. Snyder: "Yet even this corrected image of the Holocaust conveys an unacceptably incomplete sense of the scope of German mass killing policies in Europe. The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union."[1]

• Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, p.249 : "This practice can be attributed to the gradual brutalization of the war, but closer analysis of how prisoners were fed and treated generally shows that the systematic destruction of Soviet prisoners of war was an integral component of German policy towards the Soviet Union."

• Doris L. Bergen, The Holocaust: A Concise History, p.168 : "Like so much Nazi writing, General Plan East was full of euphemisms. ... Nevertheless its intentions were obvious. It also made clear that German policies toward different population groups were closely connected. Settlement of Germans and ethnic Germans in the east; expulsion, enslavement, and decimation of Slavs; and murder of Jews were all parts of the same plan."

• Jack Fischel, Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust, p.115 : "The term today has stirred controversy because other victims of the Nazi terror, such as the Gypsies, and people of Slavic ancestry from eastern Europe, claim that they were as much victims in the Holocaust as were the Jews. To differentiate between the more inclusive use of the word “Holocaust” and its special meaning within the Jewish community, many Jews have substituted the Hebrew word Shoah or Churban for the Nazi genocide."

• Jack Fischel, The Holocaust, Introduction : "Jews were not the only targets of the Germans. They also killed an estimated 10,547,000 Slavs, which included millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Soviet prisoners of war. Others whom the Nazis marked for death included the gypsies, and about 5,000 homosexuals of an estimated million Himmler believed resided in Germany. These numbers suggest that the Nazi genocide was far-reaching in its preoccupation with the creation of a master race and that although the Jews composed the primary category of people designated by the Nazis for extermination, there were many such categories."

Tobby72 (talk) 11:12, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

The article does mention other racial, ethnic, or sexual groups. Hitler targeted the Jews or any persons he viewed as a threat to the Third Reich. Hitler exterminated and planned to exterminate persons he believed were inferior. Cmguy777 (talk) 17:00, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

The definition here of the Holocaust as solely an action against Jewish people is inconsistent with the Wikipedia “Holocaust Victims” definition, which includes the Nazi murders of over 12M civilian Slavic peoples as well as the Nazi murders of over 6M civilian Jewish people. Shouldn’t “Holocaust Victims” and “Holocaust” entries in Wikipedia use the same definition of Holocaust?--Truthwillneverdie (talk) 15:56, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

20 million killed

It is well known over 20 million were killed in the holocaust. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/9906771/Nazis-may-have-killed-up-to-20m-claims-shocking-new-Holocaust-study.html

The same report is cited in NY Times article. This NYT article is already in the reference list of this wiki article. AadaamS (talk) 10:28, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

The 6 million figure is thinly veiled antisemitism. 70.176.239.63 (talk) 05:59, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

It is rather well known that(asuming) you are talking about the holocaust only refering to jews, then that is a physical impossibility. The 6 million that died of the 9 million in Europe, would mean some secret documents that scholars and researchers all over the world for over 60 years into their research about the holocaust, means they somehow were hidden. we are talking about millions here and we are talking about population numbers. so no there wasnt 20 million jews even alive back then in the ENTIRE WORLD.

perhaps if we talk about russian POW camps since they were the secondary highest murder rate of 3 million inside the camps and mass murdered outside the camps would perhaps count. of the 25 million dead russians in the war, instaed of 22 mil dead outside the camps and 3 mil dead inside the camps, perhaps if the article and source you linked to implies 9 million more dead would constitute 20 mil means that of the 25 mil dead russians its 16 mil dead russians outside camps and instead war deaths as soldiers 9 mil dead russians inside camps thus the normal 11 number thats cited for the holocaust would then euqality too 11+9=20 Orkanosera (talk) 11:55, 7 March 2013 (UTC) Strike comments of banned editor User:WitsBlomstein

Responses to the various people on this thread:

• @OP: It is not "well known". It is a study that just came out this week.
• @IP: Stop trolling.
• @Orkanosera: If you read the link provided, or the reference in the Wikipedia article itself, you will see it is referring to all victims of Nazi persecution in concentration and labour camps during their regime, not just Jewish vicims. In addition, saying it is inaccurate due to earlier studies misses the point. This is a study that was just released this week after additional Nazi records were uncovered. Singularity42 (talk) 12:29, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

after 60 years of research that only recently new nazi records would be discovered considering the time it took to research the original 12 million, would mean it must have been a HUGE coverup for DOUBLE the camps. most logically its a fabrication due to no sourced documents have been released in any source to Verify AND of course, to explain where they(the documents) where hidden all this time. It would be as much evidence as the Iraq weapons of mass destruction.

:::However, if there is any explanation and photographic evidence of these documents and where they were hidden, then yes it would be plausable source. even under 40 years these new HUGE numbers would rather likely come up periodicly wise based on the most massive researched genocide in the world. 9+ MILLION are no small numbers to miss, let alone 20.000 EXTRA facilities somehow went unnoticed in the most reserached genocide in the world that has constant holocaust research not only in studied but in the archives aswell. they , as stated earlier, would come up periodicly wise with more and more camps and thus increase in the death toll.

still, if any source does explain that I have no qualms with itOrkanosera (talk) 16:51, 7 March 2013 (UTC) Strike comments of banned editor User:WitsBlomstein

I have to agree with Singularity42. Considering the volumes of records that the allies gathered from the Nazis, and if anything the Nazis liked to keep voluminous records, I don't find it hard to believe that it took 60 yrs to compile all the information. Rather than leaping to judgement, or making crazy statements about what we "know", how about we allow this new development to play out among the people who are actually experts in the field. Considering even the researchers themselves are in shock of what we found, my guess this isn't the last we'll hear of it. Ckruschke (talk) 20:05, 7 March 2013 (UTC)Ckruschke

The number of Jews in Poland in 1939

There is an error (probably typographical in source) in the number of Jews given when the Germans invaded Poland: The article states 2 million, but the link it sends to actually gives the number as about 3.2 million. This is also the mumber I am acquainted with from other sources. The figure of 2 million could refer to the number of Jews in the area conquered by the Germans in September 1939 - the others being in the Russian occupied area of Poland. If so, then the wording of the sentence needs to be corrected to reflect this difference.In 1941 the Germans conquered the rest of Poland so these Jews too were brought in to the fold, so to speak. Since the article is locked could your official editors please correct the number and the wording appropriately. Thank you Dr Eado Hecht — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.229.150.214 (talk) 12:11, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

"Recent estimates based on figures obtained since the fall of the Soviet Union indicates some ten to eleven million civilians and prisoners of war were intentionally murdered by the Nazi regime."[13][14]

Perhaps because of its location in the overall section, this quote makes it sound like the Nazi's exterminated 10 to 11 million non-Jewish civilians. Yet a reading of the wikipaedia article cited (13, 14 Snyder) makes clear:

1) that the Nazi's were responsible for 2/3 of the approximately 14 million intentional civilian deaths caused by Hitler AND Stalin (in the years 1931-1945 ["The book is about the mass killing of an estimated 14 million non-combatants by the regimes of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany between the years 1933 and 1945...with Nazi Germany being responsible for about two thirds of the total number of deaths."); and

2) that the 5.4 (approx.) murdered Jews of the Holocaust are INCLUDED in this figure. (["Timothy Snyder provided a summary of the 14 million victims.... 5.4 million Jewish victims in the Holocaust"])

In other words, if one is to speak of Nazi non-Jewish "intentional murder" victims (by Snyder's definitions of these), they number about 5 million: 3.1 mil Russian POWs, 1 mil Russian civilians starved during the Leningrad siege, 0.1 mil Polish civilians (1939-1941) and .7 mil Polish & Belarussian civilians (1941-1945). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.81.130.14 (talk) 07:01, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Denial

Hi. Why isn't there a section on the arguments of holocaust deniers? UltimateBoss (talk) 13:44, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

We have an entire article, Holocaust denial. That's sufficient treatment; no reason to honor their delusions and lies by so much as mentioning them in this article. --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 17:15, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

jpgordon is correct; if too much was mentioned; such as a full section herein, then undue weight would be given to WP:Fringe arugments. Kierzek (talk) 18:18, 14 April 2013 (UTC)