User:K.e.coffman/Email
Wikipedia: Why the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht / Waffen-SS" lives on[edit]
Please see #Explanatory notes below.
Dear X:
I'm contacting you with a proposal of sorts, relating to the representation of the 1939-1945 German war effort on English Wikipedia. For background, when I first started editing Wikipedia in 2015, I was surprised to see so many vestiges of the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht" (and even "clean" Waffen-SS & SS proper). I've collected a veritable cornucopia of such fare on my user page, under Problematic WWII content; two of the representative sections are:
I’ve developed a number of articles that deal with the topic of historical revisionism, such as:
What troubles me is that the view of Nur Soldat ("merely soldier") is so prevalent in the Wikipedia's Military History (MilHist) project. I was not that surprised that Wikipedia's content was often sourced to AchtungPanzer! and other dubious websites. But what continues to perplex me is the concerted opposition from MilHist members and coordinators to correcting issues of bias, hagiography, and historical distortion. Because of my editing, I've been called (pejoratively) a "hard-line anti-Nazi" and "Nazi hunter". Ironically, I've been accused of both harbouring "anti-German" attitudes and of being from "de WP" (Deutsche Wikipedia), because the standards for sourcing are presumably higher there.
I believe that Wikipedia has a large--and detrimental--impact on the popular perception of the World War II history, due to the high rankings in search engines and perceived authoritativeness. As Exhibit A, here's the virtual bookshelf of a contributor who was considered by the project to be one of its "best and most highly regarded editors":
This is who's who in apologist, revisionist, National Socialist, militaria and / or Landser-pulp literature, with some of these sources issued by right-wing and extremist publishers. Yet these sources are acceptable, even in Good & Featured Articles, Wikipedia's rating for best or 'showcase' articles. Several of them included citations to straight up neo-Nazi work Helden Der Wehrmacht. Unsterbliche deutsche Soldaten ("Heroes of the Wehrmacht: Immortal German Soldiers").
In Exhibit B, an editor has removed the coverage of the activities by Einsatzgruppe A (an element of the SD charged with the mass murder of Jews) from the Wilhelm von Leeb article as "redundant and non-biographical material" which is moreover "inappropriately tangential":
In Exhibit C, here’s a discussion with two editors who consider the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos to be an inadequate source not worthy of inclusion, with a helpful link to WP:WPNOTRS:
Yet another editor describes Germany's leading military historian as a "self-hater" and believes that the article on the myth of the clean Wehrmacht should not exist in the encyclopedia: link. These and other editors contribute to articles, participate in internal discussions, and call what I am doing "trolling" and "disruption".
I think it would be fascinating to explore this community further from an academic perspective. Wikipedia is fertile ground for further research into the image of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht in English-language popular culture, especially as contrasted to German Wikipedia. I was wondering if this might be a subject of interest for a journal article. Alternatively, you could perhaps suggest this topic to one of your research associates.
Is this something that might fit with your research or program priorities?
Sincerely,
Explanatory notes[edit]
- For background on the types of historians I contacted, please see the section "Reaching out to outside experts" in the Signpost essay.
- Quoted material has been sourced from on-Wiki discussions. See, for example: [1].
- For the controversy over the use of Helden Der Wehrmacht, see the 2013 MILHIST coordinator discussion: [2].
- I've had further communications with David Stahel and Geoffrey P. Megargee where I asked them to review Talk page discussions at Erich Hoepner. These discussions resulted in the statements linked on the evidence page.