Wikipedia Editors Deliberately Distorted Holocaust Articles

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March 19, 2023

6 min read

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For over a decade, a group of nefarious editors has been distorting Holocaust entries.

If you’ve used Wikipedia to research the Holocaust, you may be a victim of a group of self-appointed “editors” who have been deliberately warping Wikipedia’s Holocaust articles for years.

For the last ten years, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia whitewashing the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolstering stereotypes about Jews,” explains Shira Klein, an associate professor of history at Chapman University in California, who’s tracked this gang’s insidious activities.

Due to this group’s zealous handiwork,” explains University of Ottawa professor Jan Grabowski, who collaborated with Dr. Klein, “Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles, blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis.”

Drs. Klein and Grabowski spent many months pouring over Wikipedia articles, checking facts, and scrutinizing editors’ work and the sources they used. They published their shocking conclusions in an article titled “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust” in The Journal of Holocaust Research. Their article went viral, garnering tens of thousands of views in an academic field in which that sort of exposure is unheard of.

In an unprecedented move, Wikipedia has initiated an internal review

Wikipedia itself stepped in. In an unprecedented move, the website’s Arbitration Committee, known internally as ArbCom, has initiated an internal review; they’ve announced their intention to publish their findings within weeks.

Fifth-Most Popular Website in the World

Wikipedia is the world’s fifth most popular website. It describes itself as a “multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers.” Anyone can become an editor, contributing to articles or helping fact-check or edit existing entries. A complex system of rules ensures that in most cases, obvious distortions or inaccuracies are noticed by the website’s many editors and can be corrected.

In the case of numerous Holocaust-related articles, it seems that a dedicated group of 11 editors deliberately circumvented Wikipedia’s system of checks, vigorously arguing their case against editors who tried to change their anti-Jewish distortions.

When distorting the past, the editors involved cite unreliable sources such as popular websites, self-published work, or academic work that has been widely discredited,” Drs. Klein and Grabowski note in their paper. “At times (these biased editors) cite scholarship but misrepresent it to support their agenda. The same group of Wikipedians also wage a war of legitimacy on Holocaust historians themselves, inserting scathing critiques into Wikipedia biographies of mainstream scholars, and idealizing the biographies of fringe academics.”

Four Types of Distortions

The editors warped Wikipedia in four main ways.

First, countless Wikipedia entries were altered to send the message that Jewish suffering and Polish suffering were equivalent during the Holocaust, ignoring the fact that while many Poles suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis, it was Jews who were specifically and most viciously targeted by the Nazi regime.

Second, the editors edited numerous entries to promote the idea that Poles did not harbor antisemitic feelings and to exaggerate the role that Poles played in saving Jews.

Third, the editors introduced hateful and false anti-Jewish ideas into countless Wikipedia entries, including that most Jews conspired with Communists to undermine Poland; that greedy and duplicitous Jews have controlled Poland historically and continue to do so today; that Nazi Jew-hatred was sparked by Jews themselves.

Fourth, these editors manipulated many Wikipedia entries to falsely assert that much of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry was done with the cooperation, instigation, and/or help of Jewish groups.

In just one example out of dozens that Drs. Klein and Grabowski documented, editors promoted the work of Dr. Ewa Kurek, a notorious antisemite. (Dr. Kurek has claimed that Covid-19 was a ruse used by Jews to take control of Europe; Yad Vashem historian Dr. Havi Dreifuss has accused Dr. Kurek of “using the Holocaust and using Jewish history and Polish history in order to spread hate.”)

A Wikipedia editor using the name Volunteer Marek championed Dr. Kurek’s odious work in editors’ forums, arguing with other editors who objected. Marek insisted on treating Dr. Kurek as a “mainstream scholar” on the site. Another editor inserted Dr. Kurek’s outlandish claims that fewer Jews than commonly believed were murdered during one 1941 massacre in a separate Wikipedia entry.

In another example of distortions, Drs. Klein and Grabowski discuss the Wikipedia entry titled Rescue of Jews by Poles During the Holocaust.  “Nearly everything is wrong here,” they note, citing a series of serious factual errors and deliberate distortions throughout the entry.

Growing Holocaust Ignorance

These revelations about Wikipedia’s Holocaust coverage come in the context of growing ignorance about the Holocaust around the world. One recent survey found that 63% of Americans do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. (Over a third believe the number to be “two million or fewer Jews.”) Nearly half of all Americans cannot name a single Nazi concentration camp or ghetto, despite the fact there were over 40,000 camps and ghettos. In New York State alone, nearly 20% of Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe that Jews caused the Holocaust.  Similar results were found in other countries.

Poland’s Holocaust Law

Drs. Klein and Grabowski have not speculated about what may have motivated these editors. However, their actions coincide with Poland’s 2018 “Holocaust Law,” which makes it a crime to claim that Poles were “responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich,” or to claim that Poland was to blame for any Nazi-related crimes. The law has had a chilling effect on Holocaust discourse overall, though it’s important to note that Drs. Klein and Grabowski have found no evidence of the Wikipedia editors they critique acting on behalf of any country or organization.

The editors in question have fought back. “I have not engaged in any ‘Holocaust distortion,’ on Wikipedia or anywhere else,” Marek wrote on a Wikipedia message board after the allegations against him were published: “All of these accusations are ridiculous and absurd. They are particularly disgusting and vile since they go against everything I believe in….”  Drs. Klein and Grabowski stand by their fact-finding work.

What You Can Do

Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee is still evaluating the many distortions highlighted by Drs. Klein and Grabowski. In the meantime, there are a few things you can do to help battle Holocaust misinformation and ignorance.

Get educated. Read credible books about the Holocaust. Sign up for an online history class with a reputable organization, or check out your local library for high-quality books about the topic. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and remembrance center, is a great resource for information; the online Holocaust Encyclopedia maintained by the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial is another https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/; and aish.com has a comprehensive Holocaust studies section

Push back against misinformation. When you notice people minimizing the Holocaust, question where they’re getting their information from. On behalf of the six million Jews who were murdered - and millions of the Nazis’ other victims – don’t allow their memories to become forgotten or distorted.

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