User:François Robere/sandbox/KL Warschau

How Wikipedia promoted alternative Holocaust history for 15 years
Adapted and submitted to The Signpost by from work by.





In May 2019, a piece was published by Christian Davies of the London Review of Books titled Under the Railway Line. The piece describes a conspiracy theory, first advanced by Polish judge Maria Trzcińska, that states that 200,000 Poles were killed in the Warsaw concentration camp using a giant gas chamber built into a road tunnel. The theory, which gained considerable following in the years since it was published, now serves as the basis for several commemoration sites and memorials; Davies even describes a memorial procession at one of Warsaw's churches, complete with a priest sprinkling holy water and two soldiers. According to Davies, this theory fits within a "Polocaust" narrative used by some right-wing activists "resentful of the international attention the Holocaust receives to claim a parity of suffering", part of a "standard trope on the Polish nationalist right that Jews have exaggerated their victimhood in order to extort money from the Poles and obtain global power and influence". Needless to say, Davies states that this "nationalist fever dream" has no support among scholars, which doesn't stop its followers:



Naturally, after reading such a provocative piece one might turn to Wikipedia for an broader outlook; but what might one find there? This entry, describing a large camp with a capacity of 40,000 prisoners - an order of magnitude more than that accepted by historians - complete with gas chambers and crematoria, where "the first gassing there took place on October 17, 1943, killing at least 150 Poles... and about 20 Belgian Jews". Earlier versions of the articles - before a large cleanup by in May 2019 - were even worse: this English Wikipedia stated for a fact that the camp had 400,000 inmates, and that its existence was "debated secretly" and hidden by the post-war Communist regime, that wished to inflate the Warsaw Uprising casualty numbers (for what reason, it didn't say). And this is just a selection - the whole article consisted of such details, advanced not by reliable sources but by conspiracy theorists.

What do reputable sources say? According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 this was a medium-sized camp, with 8,000-9,000 inmates and (by the end of the war) some 4,000-5,000 fatalities. The camp only operated for one year between July 1943-July 1944, part of it as a sub-camp of Majdanek. Inmates were mostly Jews from other parts of the Nazi empire - many Greek and Hungarian, along with some Czech, Dutch, and Slovakian - chosen for their unfamiliarity with the Polish language and Polish geography, which would've minimized their chances escape. They were brought to the camp to salvage construction materials from the destroyed Warsaw Ghetto, and were not expected to survive. Most of those who survived the were taken on a series of death marches starting in July 1944, with a 4,500-strong march to Kutno, some 120 km away. Others were executed in the ghetto ruins, bringing the number of the dead to as much as 20,000. As for the push to commemorate KL Warsaw in the version imagined by Trzcińska, Prof. Jelena Subotic of Georgia State University writes that:

Reviewing the article's history, one can see it was always in "conspiracy theory" turf, despite hundreds of edits by over 150 editors. Back in August 2004, when it was created, the article stated in WikiVoice that "Among those grouped in Warsaw the majority was either shot to death or gassed in a provisional gas chambers", with another paragraph giving a daily death count of 400 victims over a period of 22 months, or about 264,000 victims - more than more well-known extermination camps like Sobibór and Majdanek. And despite concerns raised by an IP and an editor two years later, which were mostly ignored by other editors, the story was live in main space for 15 years. Seeing the extent of false information in the article, there was no choice but re-write the article from scratch based on mainstream sources.

Unfortunately, Warsaw concentration camp' wasn't the only article affected - this conspiracy theory propagated to several higher-tier articles:
 * German camps in occupied Poland during World War II (2006 - 2019): "...up to 200,000 at KL Warschau". An article with 5,562 average monthly views, had this story live for 13 years.
 * War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II (2006 - 2019): Early on it presented the "tunnel chamber" as fact; later that was removed, but the article still described the camp as an extermination camp alongside Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and Majdanek. Trzcińska is treated as a bona-fide historian; a 2003 investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) is cited for background details, and to support that statement that "[Trzcińska's] claim is considered controversial"; "controversial" would seem an understatement: the IPN investigation found no evidence whatsoever to support the theory. And yet, the story was live for 13 years.
 * Nazi crimes against the Polish nation (2006 - 2019): Similar details to the main article. Trzcińska is cited as a historian, and the sole item of dispute is the "enormous gas chamber in a railway tunnel" (the other supposed gas chambers are presented as historical fact). Story was live for 13 years.
 * Pabst Plan (2009 - 2019): "From autumn of 1942 next step of extermination of Warsaw’s population was launched..." Tagged since February 2011 with more footnotes; eight years later, the article still has only two references and four bibliography items.
 * Extermination camp (2007 - 2019): Much of the time in unqualified WikiVoice, e.g. "similar camps existed at Warsaw and Janowska" (2011). An article with 36,137 average monthly views, had this story live for 12 years.
 * List of Nazi concentration camps (2004 - 2019). Back in 2004 this entry listed 40,000 inmates and 200,000 victims; by the time it was removed the number of inmates rose to 400,000, while the number of victims dropped to 20,000–35,000. Both revisions give a wrong operation period. Story was live for 15 years.

As of September 2019, the article is present in 12 different Wikipedias, but is notably absent from the Hebrew one, which tends to have good coverage of Holocaust-related subjects (it is mentioned fairly accurately in the Aftermath section of the Warsaw Ghetto entry). Most of the other entries are either apparent - though not always credited - translations of the English, German, or Polish Wikis from some past date; or stubs (which themselves seem to be a copy of a cross-wiki lead) - with relatively few edits following their creation, and about the same "conspiratorial status" as their origin article at their time of creation. The dynamics between the English, German, and Polish Wikis are interesting:
 * English: Created with conspiratorial content on 25 August 2004 and remained as such until August 2019.
 * Polish: Created on 6 February 2005; treats the gas chambers as both fact and controversy in successive paragraphs, while noting a dispute on the exact number of inmates, and the lack of support by IPN. The article remained in "fringe territory" for several years (2012 - Jan 2016), with a lengthy discussion of the conspiracy theory along with statements on its controversiality and the IPN's conclusions. In Jan 2016 the article was rewritten by Dreamcatcher25 using reliable sources (primarily Bogusław Kopka's Konzentrationslager Warschau: historia i następstwa (2007)) and passed as a GA. The fringe aspects of the subject were further marginalized in edits like this one from 10 October 2017.
 * German: Created on 15 February 2005 and was fairly accurate, until a January 2006 edit that replaced what the editor saw as "old historical inconsistencies" with a "better article from English", inadvertently propagating the conspiracy theory from the English to the German. A proposal for deletion & renewal was posted on the talk page on 13 December 2007, citing this scathing book review of Trzcinska (published in June 2003, about a month after the IPN report), and on January 2009 the page was completely rewritten, including a mention of Trzcińska's claims' "fringe" status ("not scientifically serious and criticized by historians").

The USHMM's encyclopedia notes that "the existence of the Warschau concentration camp is hardly mentioned in standard accounts of the Holocaust"; another source refers to it as "admittedly apocryphal"; and yet on Wikipedia it became a full length article with translations or cross-Wiki links in a dozen languages, surviving "in the wild" for anywhere from 3-15 years.

Why didn't English Wikipedia editors notice this conspiracy theory before? Why wasn't the article as much as tagged for 15 years? One can only speculate. Perhaps once some parts were verified - the name or the general location, for example - editors were not inclined to delve deeper. Perhaps they did not notice the odd engineering details, or the telltale signs of an urban legend. Perhaps they didn't realize that the numbers didn't add up. Perhaps the fact that this wasn't a major camp, but a relatively unknown - almost obscure - location played a part as well: Wikipedia has a long tail of short articles on esoteric subjects, which uninvolved editors are often hesitant to touch; or perhaps it was the aggressive editorial dynamics within the topic area - dynamics that deter even seasons admins from getting involved - that pushed editors away. But whatever the reason may be, the result is the same: the KL Warschau Extermination Camp conspiracy theory propagated through Wikipedia for fifteen years; and if not for chance, it might've persisted for fifteen more - an unacceptable result by any standard.

Epilogue
On October 3, 2019 the story broke on Israeli newspaper Haaretz, with an English version being published the next day: "The Fake Nazi Death Camp: Wikipedia's Longest Hoax, Exposed". Quoted in the article were leading experts Jan Grabowski and Havi Dreifuss:

"Everything that is related to negative treatment of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust is now being distorted and manipulated – with the goal of promoting a false narrative and sowing confusion on English Wikipedia."

"Holocaust revisionism in Wikipedia deserves to be studied in its own right."

This is the challenge faced by the Wikipedia community: to re-assert itself as a reliable, dependable source on world history. Will it rise up?