User:Sturmvogel 66/coffman

Evidence presented by Sturmvogel_66
I think it's pretty clear that k.e.coffman has an agenda to clean up Wikipedia from the remnants of the Clean Wehrmacht myth as embodied in older sources dealing with WW2, but it's one that I actually support. Despite heated arguments over sourcing, we have worked together (see Talk:Police Regiment Centre) harmoniously when expanding material related to war crimes committed by the Germans, but much less so when they delete stuff as intricate detail or fancruft that I believe is actually valuable information.

My fundamental problem with their actions and edits mostly relates to questions on sources and their reliability. For just two exceedingly long discussions see Talk:Joachim Helbig and. Taghon's book on Lehrgeschwader 1, published by VDM Heinz Nickel, figures prominently in both discussions as the publisher has published a fair amount of material sympathetic to the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht. This doesn't make it Noontide Press, the publishing arm of the denialist Institute for Historical Review. The company also publishes military aviation history, notably the well-regarded Jet & Prop magazine, as well as magazines aimed at modellers. I believe that it is best categorized as a trade publisher that publishes Landser-pulp literature (to use coffman's term) because that stuff sells well. Much like J.J. Fedorowicz and Schiffer Publishing; the former is much more narrowly focused on WW2 military history while the latter publishes a very wide range of books, including art, photography and crafts among others. Several years ago they published Globocnik’s Men in Italy, 1943-45: Abteilung R and the SS-Wachmannschaften of the Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland, a history of Odilo Globocnik and his staff's activities in northeastern Italy after their successful murder of Polish Jews in Operation Reinhard. Given that it details the participation of SS-Police and their local auxiliaries in several massacres, I submit that this is evidence that Schiffer isn't like Noontide Press and that ilk, which are the types of publishers that I believe that the third bullet of WP:RS is really referring to. I'm also wondering how much coffman and Assayer are influenced by the German Wikipedia's anti-Nazi policies in their actions and whether they have internalized the fact that their policies do not apply here.

I believe that coffman and Assayer are intepreting WP:RS too strictly and are willfully throwing out the baby with the bathwater with a blanket condemnation of the publishers that Smelser and Davies characterize as "Romancer". I believe that they are both failing to think through the applicability of WP:BIAS in these types of situations. So what if a Fedorowicz-published book fails to deal with the Oradour or Malmedy Massacres objectively or generally elides all mention of war crimes in which the division's members participated? WP:BIAS would require that we draw on other, more objective, sources to give an accurate, NPOV, account of the unit's activities.

The main thing that I believe that Arbcom needs to deal with here is that WP:RS lacks a method of resolving reliability claims for hyper-specialized sources that lack outside reviews and are written by non-academic authors. Coffman and Assayer are able to claim that books are not reliable because they're written by museum curators or judges, etc., not academics, despite extensive publications in the same genre or elsewhere. Essentially because these people aren't professional historians, but their definition that only seems to includes academic historians. I'd remind them that Barbara Tuchman never earned a graduate degree in history, nor did she ever have an academic appointment, but she somehow received the Pulitzer Prize for The Guns of August despite these handicaps. Coffman and Assayer are unwilling to understand that we have to use the sources available to us, not only those that they feel meet their definition of RS. WP:NPOV and WP:BIAS are there to govern how we extract the worthwhile information from the dross contained in most books, whoever their publishers and authors might be.

The problem is that professional historians, by their definition, don't often publish on hyper-specialized topics like the combat history of a panzer division or whatever that we here would find useful fodder for an article. And the hyper-specialized nature of the topics mean that they are rarely ever reviewed by reputable journals or websites. Thus none of the established criteria for establishing notability are applicable.

Coffman and Assayer rely heavily on Smelser and Davies when challenging the reliability of an author or publisher, as they must, because they're about the only historians that I'm aware that have analyzed the historiography of the German participation in WW2. But they're just one set of opinions; there's been no discussion of the topic by multiple authors to establish a consensus, AFAIK. I've read their book and, while I think that the first half discussing the books published during the Cold War is quite good, it starts to go off rails discussing the post-Cold War and Internet era. Smelser and Davies lump those authors who chose to focus solely on the military aspects of the German participation in the war in with those who glorified it as "Romancers". They seem to think that wargamers who play the Germans in their games are actually pro-Nazi, or at least sympathetic to their cause, just like those playing Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg are somehow believers in the Lost Cause. While that may be true of some, they're far outnumbered by those who want a chance to do better than the historical leaders, in my experience, which often means turning a historical defeat into a victory.