Interesting article about Wikipedia via the Nazis
 

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/

It's a long article, but very interesting. It centers around a Russian woman that is an editor on WP, and what she saw as disturbing about some of the information/articles surrounding the Nazis and WWII.

To me it's much more of an article about Wikipedia and how even the parts that seem OK could be really out there.

Here's the beginning of the article, but it's much longer.

Wikipedia serves as a useful START point for research. If I am looking up a celebrity, to see how tall they are, or birthday I likely will believe it.

For anything that is even remotely controversial and has "sides" I become skeptical. Many people work hard trying to pervert the history or reporting of events. Just like the article above, there are people that want to remove the atrocities committed by Japan during WW2 and before, from history.

If facts make a country look bad for any event it will receive a Hollywood level spin, and then outright lies to cover it up and deny any such think.

Tienanmen Square is a classic case. The Chinese government just deny it happened.

Wikipedia co-founder says site is now ‘propaganda’ for left-leaning ‘establishment’

https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site-is-now-propaganda-for-left-leaning-establishment/



politifact, factcheck.org all have very real problems. snopes is a clown show behind the scenes.

"I read it on the internet, and lots of smart people post there so that means it's true"
- Homer Simpson

"Coffman navigates over to the Wikipedia article about one of the conspirators—Arthur Nebe, a high-ranking member of the SS. Apart from his role in the plot, Nebe’s main claim to notability is that he came up with the idea of turning vans into mobile gas chambers by piping in exhaust fumes."

-My understanding is that the mobile gas vans were first used in Russia well before that.
-Also, the jet engine was a British invention which was picked up at s tech exchange expo and refined by the Germans for use.

Yep....sure cannot trust Wikipedia for unbiased facts.

Wikipedia is only good for basic information. If you want a good laugh search "The Big Lie".

Good for looking up movies and tv shows. It can be a good place to go as you can go to the list of references and check them out.

Wikipedia does have one very good feature.
The ability to look back at the edits.

If something makes the news, odds are, it entered an edit war.

You can look at what the article was before the subject hit the news.
I've frequently found the edit war started a day or two before the subject made the news.
Almost as if someone connected with the news was wanting wiki-pedia to back them up ahead of coming out with their narrative.
But the edits show what it was for any interested.

The reason for the vans was that bullets are expensive and the men doing the slaughter had a high alcoholism and suicide rate.. In other words they fell apart mentally. Even Himmler became naucesous when he toured a Concentration camp.

The people doing the slaughter were ordinary people...who had a job to do..as legally ordered by the government..

Vell Willy we exceeded our quota heute by 6000 Jews ..

There is not one shred of evidence that Hitler ever ordered or knew about the Holocaust..the only happenstance evidence is that a switchboard operator at the Fuehrer's hdqrts overheard a Death camp commandant tell Hitlers COS Borman that they had murdered so many thousands of Jews...Borman admonished him to never speak about it over the phone again.

they are about as accurate and unbiased as "snopes"

You had better know your history the good and the bad of it...or you can be easily lied to..

It you expunge the truth about your history you are lost...you have to face reality or you become delusional... where the same kind of horrors can and will be repeated.

In life you do have to face unpleasant facts...about yourself.

The thing about Wikipedia is most topics I could go in and edit myself wit any bias I want.
Until someone elsee comes along and edits it to something else.
And all of that would be in the record.
It makes it far more useful than snopes.

Now some topics are "locked down", and depending on the onions of those with the keys there may or may not be a smell.

I don't think I would use a lack of evidence to say that Hitler didn't order it or know about it. I would be comfortable saying "there is no physical evidence" but that's as far as I'd be willing to go.

And apparently, it's contentious among historians.

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/21/world/hitler-s-genocide-order-5-days-after-pearl-harbor.html

Personally I wouldn't trust any company to keep it's own legal records.

There is no doubt that Hitler did order it, most likely in a one on one conversation with Himmler..

I explained in a Post on this Thread that seems to have gone missing?? That Hitler decided on the Final Solution in December of 1940...where he said that the Final Solution was being forced upon him by the Jews running the USA and Britain by prolonging their war against him. Before the war the SS and Zionist's collaborated with each other to have Je emigrate to Palestine..which the Brits who occupied Palestine did everything they could to discourage. And the Nazis even contemplated deporting the Jews to Madagascar.. So the Final Solution as it's title belies was not settled upon beofre 1940.

About this time Hitler called in his generals and told them of his decision to invade Russia and that it was going to be a war of unparalleled brutality.. The Germans were going to remove the peoples who lived in Russia to be repopulated by Germans.. Lebenstrum...living room for the German people so that they could fulfill their destiny. Jews and Communists were the first on the list..to that end they set up 4 Einstatz Gruppen that was to follow behind the army and murder people wholesale. It soon became evident that bullets were expensive and the men pulling the triggers had a high alcoholism and suicide rate..so they developed the Carbon Monoxide vans..

The Death Camps were organized by Reinhardt Heydrich #2 SS guy and laid out at the Wansse Conference in Jan 42. Adolf Eichman was the master of the train schedules. Only one copy of the transcript of that conference survived the war..the one thing Eichman complained about was that his trains coming from France were never full.. it seems that the German occupying France just didn't have their hearts into the endeavor.. and for the most part the Jews on the trains from France were not French Jews but Jewish refugees from other countries..

To that end when the Germans invaded the Baltic countries in 41 they found that the Latvians had more zeal in murdering their Jewish neighbors than the Germans did.

This sounds like a great parf topic.

I tend to agree 110% that the subject of Wiki bending and obdurating history is a political subject. It goes to the heart of the cancel culture and if it is too sensitive it will burn our pretty lil ears... we must be PC and not be offensive...

Unfortunately the world is pretty dam offensive..and cares not about you pretty lil ears getting scorched.

As far as my expo-say it is just a recitation of the facts as they happened. There is nothing political nor religious about it.. it is just the way it was...

I bring into the light the truth exposing ignorant misinformation and misconceptions for what they are..

The defining parameter if it is political or religious is when one is advocating for a particular political point of view.

If for instance one says the Democrats are for the "Build It Back Better Bill" that is a statement of fact and is in no way advocating a political position one way or the other. It is not an open for debate statement. It is reality.

When a person reads into it a political purpose that says more about the readers state of mind than authors intent..it is the reader who bends the purpose for their own purposes. As in it maybe an inconvenient truth that the reader does not want known or wants to deny exists.

Just my humble opinion: There's no way Hitler didn't OK the final solution. What's not known with 100% accuracy - Was it his idea? Although people have argued that he described it in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

Regardless he was the leader of Germany at the time and therefore responsible for what happened at that scale.

Was he responsible for the actions of individual or groups of soldiers in the field?
No but the Holocaust was conducted on a grand scale that could not have been possible without the approval and support of the leadership of the country.

That's very debatable since none of it was discussed in any form of parliament.
And Hitler himself never gave any orders on paper, he typically talked to two underlings who had overlapping authorities and gave em verbal hints as to what he wanted to see done.. And then the underlings guestimated how they could please Hitler and trump the competing underling to become the favorite of Hitler.
The German Command structure was extrelemely vague at times, and the only things we do know is that Hitler had a tendency to overrule generals on strategic military or economical decisions, and was pretty much to blame for many defeats that way.

But as for the finer details of the Holocaust... You'll have a hard time explaining what or who the "govermenent" was that gave these "legal orders" you claim.

The definitition "legally ordered" combined with "by the governement" is very un proven and was the basis for a lot of the defence in Nuremburg trials "I only did as I was told" , uneffectivly might I add, a great many have swung with the noose around their neck, despite that claim of legal orders.

Video removed. Keep it polite, folks.

Read the books by Laurence Rees on the subject of the Holocaust and others on the subject of Japanese atrocities.
They give a great insight on how people rationalized and behaved during those times.
How the public became to hate the Jews and allowed it all to happen..

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B008NA42BC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i3

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B005OYFY3K/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i6

They are quite scary books as they explain how the people who did it, didn't really all follow orders with much resistance.. They wanted to follow those orders, they were convinced those things were the right thing to do.
And if you know it happened then, you'll realize it can happen again, make no mistake.

Most people think looking back at Holocaust and WW2 "I would have been on the good side" "I would have resisted If i was in Germany"
The reality is, most people would have been just as much a part of that history, With the information and world known to them as they were then, they would do the same things.

Not my words, but a Psychology professor said that, don't have his name available now

This is why it is important that the "heroic" pictures that the lady complained about remain.
The National Socialist when some one looks at them in history should not be a caricature of evil super villians.
They should be pictured as they were across their stages.
They positioned themselves as scientific progressives, social justice warriors, and world saviors.
They weren't going around, "join us, we're evil!"

Some of them were tho.
Heidrich, Himmler, they really were evil super villains, in some respect they were worse then Hitler was (but Hitler encouraged them so well there's that).

Those who did the torturing at the Gestapo, the death head SS running the death camps, There's no denying those were men with an absolute talent for evil and willingness to exploit their talents.

But they all operated within a blanket of convenient approval/willful denial of the general public and regular military folk.
simplified example : folks who were fine with the idea that their Jewish neigbor was taken away. as it was convenient to follow Hitlers thinking to blame the jews for all that went wrong.. and it wa equally convenient to just would pretend the problem was solved for them, withouth any need to exercise any critical thinking as to "how" it was solved for them..

I cannot recommend Rees's books enough on that matter.

Heydrich is a most interesting person. Cashiered from the Kriegsmarine in the 20's joins the SS and quickly rises. Himmler was afraid of Heydrich. Heydrich would suggest something, Himmler woud agree and two weeks later would tell heidrich that the Fuhrer nixed it.

Hitler said of Heydrich that he had a heart of stone. Heydrich said of Hitler that if Hitler was dragging Germany down to defeat he would kill Hitler himself. Further Heydrich saved Jewish athletes from harms way..He flew fighter mission over the Russian front, being shot down behind Russian lines and making his way back to German lines, was an accomplished violinist as his relative was the famous composer

Heydrich and not Hitler nor Himmler was the architect of the Nazi police state. He was the driving force that coalesced bureaucratic power into the hands of the SS/Gestapo. Internal party police, national security and criminal police all into one..

"The Order of the Deaths Head" by Heinz Hohne originally published in German in 1962 chronicles the coalescing of that bureaucratic power.

Nurnberg Laws..Sept 1935

Average ordinary people did horrific things..their dark side was given permission to run loose..all in the name of the state.

The NAZI party became the state and the state became the religion..

The parallel to America in the 21st century is frightening when a prominent politician called apx half the people "deplorabes" and now that party has wrapped itself in the flag as defenders of democracy..as if the other party is anti democracy.

None of the Nurnberg laws discuss shooting, gassing and murdering jews or gypsies.
None of those laws made orders to murder people legal.

They were administrative of nature, they only set the tone of things to follow.

If anything the Nurnburg laws simply made it difficult for Jews to make a living, or just live in Germany.. but it did not outlaw them as such.
It did create an economical problem for them, and took away rights to anything within the German State.

There isn't anything in the Nurnburg Race laws, that you can legally connect to an order to "put those old women in the gas chamber" and state that the order to gas them was in fact based on that written law.

The Final Solution, then came about to sort out the problem of all those Jews who were in the country, but not of any use because they were banned from making a living, and thus redundant.
That Final Solution was not voted or written in any kind of law, by any kind of governement.
It was a practical way of dealing with things, and NONE of it was legally backed up by any kind of law or governement.
It was off the books. It was a chore handed out to select people of ruthless nature.. Who took the task, ran with it, with personal goal to please their Fuhrer and personally progress their standing within the regime.
And the civilians they pretended none of it happened (for the most part the problem was taken care off outside of the real Germany).. But in some camps in germany, they simply pretended nothing wrong was happening and stated "We're haben das nicht gewust."

How could anyone pretend not to know, if there had been actual laws to order it? Answer : there were no such laws because that made it easier for all to deny it. ergo, there were no legal orders.

And yes, ordinary people did horrible things.
On all sides might I add, clearly more in Nazi Germany, Japan but it was not exclusive to to the Axis. The USSR but even the Western Allies have seen horrible things done during the war.

NAZI Germany under Hitler was run like a feudal state..where everybody had their own fiefdoms often with overlapping interests. Hitler liked it that way..

Hitler basically did nothing but sit around espousing his ideas which his feudal lords slavishly wrote down as to do lists. He remained the Bohemian Bum of his youth in Vienna..

Correct, I said that in my earlier post.

he typically talked to two underlings who had overlapping authorities and gave em verbal hints as to what he wanted to see done.. And then the underlings guestimated how they could please Hitler and trump the competing underling to become the favorite of Hitler.
The German Command structure was extrelemely vague at times,

He would suggest what some kind of end result ought to be, not how.
and then the underlings would try to outdo one another to get that result

that he wanted rid of the jews was no secret, but he never officially ordered any deathcamps or gas chambers or mass shootings.
He wanted them gone

He did not state how that was to happen, so any order to do anything murderous, did not come from a governement, it came from one of those underlings who figured that was the way to please hitler.

Legal orders don't work that way

The Dutch volunteer legions... Nederlandsche SS

Hitler was a duly elected official who issued executive orders in the excercise of his official authority..

Source for that?

I know some state he was part Jewish himself and Himmler had dirt on him (Himmler had dirt on just about anybody).. And that Heydrich as such was extra ruthless to take all suspicion of his jewish genes out of the picture.

But never read he saved any Jewish athletes at all??

Except nobody has ever seen such an order to gas or murder people based on their race or ethnicity, from Hitler..
He never officially issued such an order. Books have been written , historians have tried to find it, But nobody has been able to accurately timeline or trace orders to Specific people..

Despite all direct action at the bottom, at the top it was all murky ,vague and handled informally. Accountability as such can't be attributed to just Hitler or any governement.. None of it were legal orders that would stand up in a modern court of law.
People did it, because they figured it was necessary.

Obviously his ideas about the outcome were very clear
But that doesn't make any of the practical ways tried to get their outcome legal.

They could just as well have put every unwanted soul on a boat to Africa with a pamflet "we don't want you, good luck abroad".

And for the most part, that would have been fine(to them), if it weren't for the war aspect , the Holocaust for a big part was triggered and accelerated by practical needs of the War.
They didn't have the time or money or room to deal with it in any other way, so in the field, they just "took care of it".. As they would take care of a pest problem. And orders to take care of such a problem did not come from Hitler in fine detail.. He never sent it downstream
The policy of extermination was not on papers. It was handled at lower ranks, then the goverment, as a chore. They weren't ordered to by the governement.,

To clarify, I do not believe in selective choosing of pictures to erase how they posed to the public in their time of power.

Those glamour shots should be included in an article about them.
To reiterate myself; they weren't each posing with a "I'm an evil bad guy" signs for what was spread by the media.

"He's the GOAT"

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So didn't the United States break international law at the time by funding munitions and personnel to Britain. Seize German merchant ships, imprisoned Germans, ect while maintaining neutrality....


United States and Britain refused peace with Germany to fund the munitions that brought the US out of the Great depression.
Peace in 1940 would have lead to the biggest scandal of fraud the United States have seen since well ever.... Yeah let's talk real history folks. Or erase it completely.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say they refused peace just to bring the US out of the Depression with ammo bizniz. They all knew what Hitler was up to and that he had to be stopped.
There's a lot of personal conviction by Roosevelt and others in governement, who were privy to a lot more information then the public knew.


I don't think that pre declaration of war is about breaking international law, but US law.
the US was involved with things , that Roosevelt knew, Hoover even knew, there was cooperation on US soil when Roosevelt could not politically even go public about it till he got reelected and the Japs did their thing.

international law doesn't prohibit anybody doing trade with anyone
hell the Dutch sold to both sides in WW1 as a neutral country, WW1 was good for business , the amsterdam cocaine factory never did better then during WW1.

The only risk is that if you sell to A, that B might at some point declare war against you.. That's not a function of international law but of diplomacy and war objectives.

As for other law and what not
the only thing that made orders legal or illegal is wether or not your side won.
And the only thing that made somebody actually go through with atrocities, is personal integrity and peer pressure.

Most did, would and will give in to that peer pressure since it's all around them and overwhelming.. people will usually fall in line with the group around them.
I won't start naming atrocities and massacres comitted post WW2 since i'm sure you know plenty of those names just as well and I don't want to be accused of something i'm not and PARF this thread up. War is terrible, and in war people do terrible things.

It's way more difficult to take a moral stance in life when you have been indoctrinated in the military and 1 taught how to just follow orders 2 taught how to kill.
That alone isn't the problem, but when things really start to go sideways and it lasts a long time, Fatigue and PTSD get thrown in the mix.. And people will do horrible things that no sane objective person will call acceptible in peacetime.

But that doesn't make the orders they followed ...legal , Not for international law, not even for German law.
If no laws were written to declare Jews and Gypsies subhuman and as such liable to get gassed, then any order that led to Deathcamps would have been illegal.
And despite hte Nurnberg race laws (administrative) nobody has been able to find actual laws that permitted the death camps.

And that's my point, there never was a blue print for how they did should run the deathcamps, or how even that those deathcamps had to be built..
The only thing that came down from the top on those matters was ideology, and a statement that those people were not desired in the Reich. Leaving it up to middle management to figure it out how to get the Reich rid of them.
Did Hitler OK it. off course, but he didn't sign any order for it. Cause he knew damn well it would not be legal.

It's the same with the battles on the east front... Political Commissars were in uniform, technically they were covred by the Geneva protocols, but whenever they were encountred and caught, they were summary executed by the Germans.

Later in the war, SS troopers were in many cases Summary executed by the Allies
None of those orders were legal, but hey, it's a war.. chit happens.
None of those orders came fromt Eisenhouwer either.. But they were issued by some battallion commanders. And they weren't on paper either.

Obviously they were a direct response to SS atrocities on other allied troops, but that doesn't change the legalities.

I think to accurately compare at the time and what was known at the time.... breaking down the argument due to what was known later is deflection.

US provided more than just ammo to Britain... when you're providing pilots while claiming neutral. Seizing assets that the US does not recognize as a valid government. Ect the United States didn't want peace. There's plenty of examples in the literature of Churchill making the comments regarding getting the United States in the war. You even have the recent quid pro quo against Roosevelt trying to get hitler to buy American oil from his friends in Texas in 37.

There's so much misinformation and censorship of the word nazi that you have to ask yourself why. We're a few generations away from comparing nazis to the t-rex and the censorship won't be able to dispute that fact...

International law as recognized at the time did not prohibit Germany (or any nation) for doing as they wished with their own citizens. That is why the Nuremburg trials were restricted to acts committed in other countries to their citizens.