User:Ealdgyth/Extermination camp audit

Extermination camp:


 * 1) War History Online - not a reliable source
 * 2) Jewish Virtual Library is not reliable
 * 3) "The camps designed specifically for the mass gassings of Jews were established in the months following the Wannsee Conference chaired by Reinhard Heydrich in January 1942 in which the principle was made clear that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. Responsibility for the logistics was to be handled by the programme administrator, Adolf Eichmann." is sourced to this copy of the Wannsee Protocols. Two issues - one - much of the article text is drawing conclusions/making statements that aren't supported by the Protocols text. Second - the protocols are a primary document.
 * 4) this source is from a consulting firm and relies on three sources - a 1944 source, a 1963 source, and a 1985 source (they state this in the introduction). We should not be using these older sources ... given the opening of archives after the fall of the Soviet Union, generally, all statistics from before then should not be relied on.
 * 5) Jewish Virtual Library again
 * 6) Conditions... deadlinks - and appears to be a professor's page?
 * 7) "The mass killing facilities were developed at about the same time inside the Auschwitz II-Birkenau subcamp of a forced labour complex" is sourced to Grossman's original reporting on Treblinka/etc from 1946 and is a primary source.
 * 8) "In most other camps prisoners were selected for slave labor first; they were kept alive on starvation rations and made available to work as required. Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Jasenovac were retrofitted with Zyklon-B gas chambers and crematoria buildings as the time went on, remaining operational until war's end in 1945." is sourced to "M. Lifshitz, "Zionism" (משה ליפשיץ, "ציונות") p. 304. Compare with H. Abraham, "History of Israel and the nations in the era of Holocaust and uprising (חדד אברהם, "תולדות ישראל והעמים בתקופת השואה והתקומה")"" which is unverifiable. see here where an IP introduced it. It does not exist on Operation Reinhart at that date so ... it's a lost cause ...
 * 9) "Heinrich Himmler visited the outskirts of Minsk in 1941 to witness a mass shooting. He was told by the commanding officer there that the shootings were proving psychologically damaging to those being asked to pull the triggers. Thus Himmler knew another method of mass killing was required." and "The Nazis had first used gassing with carbon monoxide cylinders to murder 70,000 disabled people in Germany in what they called a 'euthanasia programme' to disguise that mass murder was taking place. Despite the lethal effects of carbon monoxide, this was seen as unsuitable for use in the East due to the cost of transporting the carbon monoxide in cylinders." are sourced to ""Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution" Yesterday television channel, 18:00, 18 November 2013" not verifiable
 * 10) FOUR paragraphs on the killing process are sourced to Hoss' memoirs. Primary source, and it's quite well known that HOss' memoirs are very self-serving and need careful handling to use as historical sources
 * 11) And much of the information on corpse disposal is also sourced to Hoss. Still a primary and problematic source
 * 12) "After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the secret Aktion T4 euthanasia programme – the systematic murder of German, Austrian and Polish hospital patients with mental or physical disabilities authorized by Hitler – was initiated by the SS in order to eliminate "life unworthy of life" (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), a Nazi designation for people who they considered to have no right to life." is sourced to this reliable source Death and Deliverance but lacks a page number, and to this source which is not really an academic source at all. The website does NOT support anything it's attached to. Without a page number, I can't easily verify if Burleigh Death and Deliverance supports the information. And in any case, the SS was not involved in Aktion T4. This information was added to the article with Special:Diff/645241196 this 2015 edit by Poeticbent. Please note that this edit had no source at all attached to it.
 * 13) "In 1941, the experience gained in the secretive killing of these hospital patients led to the creation of extermination camps for the implementation of the Final Solution. By then, the Jews were already confined to new ghettos and interned in Nazi concentration camps along with other targeted groups, including Roma, and the Soviet POWs. The Nazi's so-called "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", based on the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by gassing, began during Operation Reinhard," is sourced to this Yad Vashem source which does not support the "the experience gained in the secretive killing of these hospital patients led to the creation of extermination camps for the implementation of the Final Solution" (which has other issues as this implies that the T4 program was the impetus to the extermination camps, where it was more that the T4 personnel became available for use in Operation Reinhard but the search for ways to murder Jews besides shooting had already begun before the T4 input came into the process) nor " interned in Nazi concentration camps along with other targeted groups, including Roma, and the Soviet POWs." most Jews/Roma/POWs were not interned in concentration camps before Reinhard - so the juxtipostion here is misleading. NOr is  "The Nazi's so-called "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", based on the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by gassing" supported by the YV source. The Final Solution was not only gassing - there's the millions killed by shooting in Eastern Europe - so this is also misleading. This was added in Special:Diff/681187167 this 2015 edit by Poeticbent.
 * 14) "On 13 October 1941, the SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik stationed in Lublin received an oral order from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler – anticipating the fall of Moscow – to start immediate construction work on the killing centre at Bełżec in the General Government territory of occupied Poland. Notably, the order preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months," is sourced to this source (which I accessed with google translate) but the source does NOT support this information - the statement in the source is "The decision on Operation Reinhardt, and thus the construction of the camp, was most likely made at a conference on October 13, 1941 at Hitler's headquarters in the "Wolf's Lair" near Kętrzyn in East Prussia. In addition to Heinrich Himmler, senior SS and Police commanders in the General Government took part in it, including Odilo Globocnik, commander of the SS and Police in the Lublin district, whose jurisdiction the camp in Bełżec was to be subordinate." This information was added to the article with [Special:Diff/681187167 this 2015 edit] by Poeticbent.
 * 15) "but the gassings at Chełmno north of Łódź using gas vans began already in December, under Sturmbannführer Herbert Lange." is sourced to Christopher Browning Remembering Survival pp. 54, 65. This is not quite what Browning has to say. On page 54, he says "the itinerant 'euthanasia' Sonderkommando (special commando) under Herber Lange, on loan from Poznan. (This was the unit that susequently founded the Chelmno death camp near Lodz)" and on p. 65 "By November [1941], a fleet of thirty gas vans was on order, and construction of death camps was underway at Chelmno in the Warthegau (near Lodz) and Belzec in the Lublin district of the General Government." I can't say that Browning supports the article text - it's close, but not there. This was added in Special:Diff/681213547 this edit from 2015 by Poeticbent.
 * 16) "The camp at Bełżec was operational by March 1942, with leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organisation Todt (OT)." is sourced to this page (again, google translate for the win) which does support the first phrase, but does not the second. It was added to the article Special:Diff/681187167 in this 2015 edit by Poeticbent.
 * 17) "Auschwitz concentration camp was fitted with brand new gas chambers in March 1942." is sourced to Rees' Auschwitz: A New History pp. 96-97 but Rees actually states "The intention was to site the new crematorium in a far corner near a small cottage. This cottage was to be converted quickly into a makeshift killing installation by bricking up the existing doors and windows, gutting the inside, and creating two sealed spaces that could be used as gas chambers." which is a sorta support. Rees makes it clear that these were not "brand new" as in "purpose built from scratch" gas chambers. This was added Special:Diff/681198657 in this 2015 edit by Poeticbent, where instead of "brand new gas chambers", the addition was actually "brand new gassing bunkers" .. which is even more misleading as the cottage was not a bunker at all.
 * 18) "Majdanek had them built in September." is sourced to this source (which only lists Majdanek in five places - this is the only one that is even close to this information) which does not support the information it gives. And why are we sourcing details of Majdanek's construction to a book that google books describes as "In The Healing Wound Sereny presents a vital historical account of Germany in the twentieth century, exploring the guilt which is in many ways the legacy of Nazism. She argues that despite the remarkable achievements of Germany since 1945, the awareness of the horrors committed in their name remains in the minds of Germans to this day -- an open wound of historical culpability. The Healing Wound combines political statement with the haunting personal memories of one of the twentieth century's most relentless witnesses" This was added in Special:Diff/681198657 this 2015 edit by Poeticbent.
 * 19) "The Nazis distinguished between extermination and concentration camps. The terms extermination camp (Vernichtungslager) and death camp (Todeslager) were interchangeable in the Nazi system, each referring to camps whose primary function was genocide. Six camps meet this definition, though extermination of people happened at every sort of concentration camp or transit camp; the use of the term extermination camp with its exclusive purpose is carried over from Nazi terminology. The six camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz (also called Auschwitz-Birkenau)." is sourced to this Yad Vashem source and this US Holocaust Museum source. "The Nazis distinguished between extermination and concentration camps. The terms extermination camp (Vernichtungslager) and death camp (Todeslager) were interchangeable in the Nazi system, each referring to" and "though extermination of people happened at every sort of concentration camp or transit camp; the use of the term extermination camp with its exclusive purpose is carried over from Nazi terminology." are not supported by either source. Who exactly put this in is a bit difficult to figure out - some of it appears to date back to 2006 or earlier. Bits and pieces of the article text were added by different people.
 * 20) "Death camps were designed specifically for the systematic killing of people delivered en masse by the Holocaust trains. Deportees were normally murdered within a few hours of arrival at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka." is sourced to this source which does not support the first sentence. The second is not quite correctly supported as the source names all the extermination camps, not just Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. This second sentence is another sentence that it's impossible to detangle who is responsible for it - too many folks have fiddled with the wording to make it easy to figure out.
 * 21) "The Reinhard extermination camps were under Globocnik's direct command; each of them was run by 20 to 35 men from the SS-Totenkopfverbände branch of the Schutzstaffel, augmented by about one hundred Trawnikis – auxiliaries mostly from Soviet Ukraine, and up to one thousand Sonderkommando slave labourers each." is sourced to this source which does not support any of this except for the "auxiliaries mostly from Soviet Ukraine" ... sorta. Much of this came in Special:Diff/703695959 this 2016 edit by Poeticbent, but not all of it.
 * 22) "The Jewish men, women and children were delivered from the ghettos for "special treatment" in an atmosphere of terror by uniformed police battalions from both Orpo and Schupo." is sourced to this source p. 101 which, leaving aside the decidely non-academic publishing company, does not support the information given. This was added with Special:Diff/703695959 this edit in 2016 by Poeticbent.
 * 23) "Death camps differed from concentration camps located in Germany proper, such as Bergen-Belsen, Oranienburg, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen, which were prison camps set up prior to World War II for people defined as 'undesirable'. From March 1936, all Nazi concentration camps were managed by the SS-Totenkopfverbände (the Skull Units, SS-TV), who operated extermination camps from 1941 as well." is sourced to this source p. 9, 20-33 but it does not support the information (for instance Oranienburg is only mentioned in the book on page 244 according to the index) as the pages given discuss the Verfugungstruppe, not the Tottenkofverbande. Much of this was added in Special:Diff/684602494 this 2015 edit by Poeticbent (which added this source to previously unsourced information)
 * 24) "The distinction was evident during the Nuremberg trials, when Dieter Wisliceny (a deputy to Adolf Eichmann) was asked to name the extermination camps, and he identified Auschwitz and Majdanek as such. Then, when asked, "How do you classify the camps Mauthausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald?", he replied, "They were normal concentration camps, from the point of view of the department of Eichmann."" is sourced to this source pp. 356-357 which is a correct transcription of Wisliceny's testimony, but does not support the "The distinction was evident during the Nuremberg trials" as this is making a conclusion from the primary source, i.e. WP:OR. Special:Diff/380115651 this edit from 2010 by Mhazard9 and Special:Diff/52655458 this 2006 edit by Squiddy seem to be the edits that basically introduced this information.
 * 25) "Irrespective of round-ups for extermination camps, the Nazis abducted millions of foreigners for slave labour in other types of camps," and "Prisoners represented about a quarter of the total workforce of the Reich, with mortality rates exceeding 75 percent due to starvation, disease, exhaustion, executions, and physical brutality." are sourced to the introduction of the "Introduction" in this source. I discussed the source itself above, but there are a couple of other issues - the citation says "Introduction" but the quotation in the citation is from later in the source and the actual article text is only supported (partially) from later in teh source, not in the introduction. Also - on p. 3, the source says "At the peak of the war, one of every five workers in the economy of the Third Reich was a forced laborer." ... which is not "a quarter". Nor does the source truly support "abducted" (although this did happen sometimes in the conscription of forced labor, it wasn't the case all the time that laborers were actually abducted off the streets). Nor does the report supprot the "Irrespective of round-ups for extermination camps" nor "due to starvation, disease, exhaustion, executions, and physical brutality." The majority of this was added in Special:Diff/684602494 this 2015 edit by Poeticbent.
 * 26) "which provided perfect cover for the extermination programme" is sourced to this extracted source from Ulrich Herbert Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich ... but I'm not seeing where the source supports this argument/conclusion stated in wikivoice. This statement was added Special:Diff/684602494 with this 2015 edit by Poeticbent.
 * 27) "On top of that, the new death camps outside of Germany's prewar borders could be kept secret from the German civil populace." is sourced to this source which going by this is this book which is authored by Ellen Land-Weber and is a collection of survivor stories. The part we're referencing is an introduction to one section of the book, presumably written by Land-Weber, but hardly a great quality source for this information. But this doesn't actually support the "On top of that, the new death camps outside of Germany's pre-war borders could be kept secret from the German civil populace." The source was originally attached to the basics of this information with Special:Diff/197650886 this 2008 edit by Jacurek.
 * 28) "During the initial phase of the Final Solution, gas vans producing poisonous exhaust fumes were developed in the occupied Soviet Union (USSR) and at the Chełmno extermination camp in occupied Poland, before being used elsewhere. The killing method was based on experience gained by the SS during the secretive Aktion T4 programme of involuntary euthanasia. There were two types of death chambers operating during the Holocaust." is sourced to this Yad Vashem source which, once more, does not support the "experience gained by the SS during the secretive Aktion T4 programme" as the SS was not involved in the T4 euthanasia program (although a few individuals who were in the SS were involved, this does not equate to the SS itself being involved or running it). Nor is the "During the initial phase of the Final Solution, gas vans producing poisonous exhaust fumes were developed in the occupied Soviet Union (USSR) and at the Chełmno extermination camp in occupied Poland, before being used elsewhere" or the "There were two types of death chambers operating during the Holocaust." This is another set of sentences where it's impossible to tangle out exactly who added the source to the information or who did the intial distortion/misuse of sources
 * 29) "Unlike at Auschwitz, where cyanide-based Zyklon B was used to exterminate trainloads of prisoners under the guise of "relocation", the camps at Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór, built during Operation Reinhard (October 1941 – November 1943), used lethal exhaust fumes produced by large internal combustion engines. The three killing centres of Einsatz Reinhard were constructed predominantly for the extermination of Poland's Jews trapped in the Nazi ghettos." is sourced to this US Holocaust Museum page. which only supports the fact that Poland's Jews were exterminated in killing centers... but the source does not specify that they were the Operation Reinhard camps, nor any of the other information sourced to it. This information and its "source" were added in Special:Diff/733130166 this 2016 edit by Poeticbent.
 * 30) "The Nazis deceived the victims upon their arrival, telling them that they were at a temporary transit stop, and would soon continue to German Arbeitslagers (work camps) farther to the east." is sourced to this source which does not support the information. This information with the given source was added in Special:Diff/733130166 this 2016 edit by Poeticbent - where the information being attached to the source is more extensive but still not supported: "Selected able-bodied prisoners delivered to death camps were not immediately killed, but pressed into labor units called Sonderkommandos to help with the extermination process by removing corpses from the gas chambers and burning them. The extermination camps were physically small (only several hundred metres long and wide) and equipped with minimal housing and support installations, not meant for the railway transports. The Nazis deceived the victims upon their arrival, telling them that they were at a temporary transit stop, and soon would continue to German Arbeitslagers (work camps) farther east."
 * 31) "At the camps of Operation Reinhard, including Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, trainloads of prisoners were murdered immediately after arrival in gas chambers designed exclusively for that purpose." is sourced to this Yad Vashem source which only supports that Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were the Operation Reinhard camps (and as a small quibble - the article text "At the camps of Operation Reinhard, including..." the "including" implies that there were other OR camps, but there weren't ... but that's a minor quibble). Most of this was added in Special:Diff/644007339 this 2016 edit by Poeticbent.
 * 32) "The mass killing facilities were developed at about the same time inside the Auschwitz II-Birkenau subcamp of a forced labour complex," has the citation as "Grossman, Vasily (1946). The Treblinka Hell [Треблинский ад] (PDF). Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. (online version). Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 October 2014. Retrieved 5 October 2014. Originally published as Повести, рассказы, очерки [Stories, Journalism, and Essays], Moscow: Voenizdat], 1958." which I believe means "The Treblinka Hell", a 1944 article by Vasily Grossman about Treblinka that's justly famous, but is still not a good source nor can it possibly be used for information about Auschwitz, which hadn't even been liberated at the time Grossman wrote the article.
 * 33) "and at the Majdanek concentration camp." is sourced to this Yad Vashem source which only mentions Majdanek as part of the Operation Harvest Festival, and does not support that the killing facilities at Majdanek were developed at about the same time as Aushchwitz's and the OR camps
 * 34) "At Auschwitz, the corpses were incinerated in crematoria and the ashes either buried, scattered, or dumped in the river. At Sobibór, Treblinka, Bełżec, and Chełmno, the corpses were incinerated on pyres. The efficiency of industrialised murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau led to the construction of three buildings with crematoria designed by specialists from the firm J. A. Topf & Söhne. They burned bodies 24 hours a day, and yet the death rate was at times so high that corpses also needed to be burned in open-air pits." is sourced to this book p. 199 but it does not support most of the information it's supposed to be supporting. The only thing it supports is "crematoria designed by specialists from the firm J. A. Topf & Söhne".
 * 35) "The estimated total number of people who were murdered in the six Nazi extermination camps is 2.7 million, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum." but the source here says "nearly 2,700,000" which while a quibble, is still important - it's also not clear if they are including Majdanek and the euthanasia centers of T4 in this total, so I'm not sure we should be using this to source "six Nazi extermination camps" either.
 * 36) The table of deaths should not rely on only one source for the death totals - some estimates put Treblinka's death toll up to 900,000 - there are a range of possible totals and our article should reflect that.
 * 37) "The Nazis attempted to either partially or completely dismantle the extermination camps in order to hide any evidence that people had been murdered there. This was an attempt to conceal not only the extermination process but also the buried remains. As a result of the secretive Sonderaktion 1005, the camps were dismantled by commandos of condemned prisoners, their records were destroyed, and the mass graves were dug up. Some extermination camps that remained uncleared of evidence were liberated by Soviet troops, who followed different standards of documentation and openness than the Western allies did." is sourced to this Yad Vashem Studies article by Yitzhak Arad but our article text is ... misleading. The implication is that Sonderaktion 1005 dismantled the camps, but Arad's article makes it clear that the 1005 commando was formed to get rid of evidence of the mass shootings as well as the bodies buried at the extermination camps. They were not in charge of dismantling the camps or destroying the evidence of the camps. It also leaves out the two revolts in Sobibor and Treblinka that took place towards the end of both camps' existence. And the "Soviet troops, who followed different standards of documentation and openness than the Western allies did" is pure POV and shouldn't be in wikivoice (and is certainly NOT supported by Arad's article!) The other source attached to this is Davies' Europe: A History but lacks a page number so it's not easy to verify