Conspiracy to Falsify Facts About the Holocaust by Polish Editors for Wikipedia Being Investigated by Top Brass    

Edited by: Fern Sidman

When a pair of professors earlier this month published a paper accusing a group of Wikipedia editors from Poland of revising articles to distort the history of the Holocaust, their research went viral, the JTA recently reported.

In this age of rapidly escalating global anti-Semitism, it now appears that the well documented historical facts about the Holocaust and the heinous atrocities that were committed against Jews have been hijacked by a group of editors at Wikipedia. The agenda of these editors from Poland, who are clearly right-wing nationals, include the presentation of a mendacious portrait of Poles who bear no responsibility whatsoever for their collaboration with the Nazi regime during the nightmarish Holocaust years of World War II.

Moreover, the Poland based editors at Wikipedia are promulgating a dangerously false and highly spurious narrative that claims that the Poles were not culpable in helping to build Nazi concentration camps on Polish soil, nor did they wage deadly pogroms against Jews when the Nazis occupied Poland and prior to that. Rather, they present Jews as Communist agitators and falsely claim that the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves.

In early 2018, Poland’s Senate has approved a controversial bill making it illegal to accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in the Nazi Holocaust. The bill sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term as punishment. President Andrzej Duda said that his country has the right “to defend historical truth”.

The bill says that “whoever accuses, publicly and against the facts, the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years”. But it adds the caveat that a person “is not committing a crime if he or she commits such an act as part of artistic or scientific activities”.

The bill has outraged Israeli MPs, who are now seeking to strengthen their own Holocaust denial laws.

In March 2021, The New Yorker magazine reported that two Polish historians of the Holocaust, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, were in the midst of fighting a court ruling that pronounced them guilty of defaming a long-deceased Polish village official. Grabowski and Engelking are the editors of “Dalej Jest Noc. Losy Żydów w Wybranych Powiatach Okupowanej Polski” (“Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland”).

The New Yorker reported that it was published in 2018, to significant academic acclaim and surprisingly brisk sales for a two-volume, seventeen-hundred-page scholarly title. One chapter, written by Engelking, mentioned Edward Malinowski, the prewar mayor of a small village called Malinowo. According to testimony uncovered by Engelking, Malinowski led the Nazis to Jews who were hiding in the forest outside the village; twenty-two people were killed. Several years ago, a Warsaw district court found that this passage of “Night Without End” defamed Malinowski, and ordered Grabowski and Engelking to apologize in print. Grabowski and Engelking have appealed the ruling.

The two historians’ legal troubles stem from the Polish government’s ongoing effort to exonerate Poland of any role in the deaths of three million Jews in Poland during the Nazi occupation, as was reported by The New Yorker. When facts get in the way of this revisionist effort, historians pay the price.

The New Yorkers also reported that in 2016, Polish authorities began investigating the Polish-American historian Jan Tomasz Gross, the author of the groundbreaking book “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.” The New Yorker report indicated that he was accused of insulting the Polish people for his observation that Poles killed more Jews than Germans during the Second World War.

The case dragged on for three years, with Gross subjected to hours of police interrogations; the government also threatened to strip Gross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, a state honor he had received in 1996. (The state dropped the investigation after Gross retired from his job at Princeton.) Over 2019 and 2020, Dariusz Stola, the head of Warsaw’s acclaimed museum of Polish Jewry, found himself slowly squeezed out of his job, again by the Polish government.

Most academic articles are seen by dozens or hundreds of people at best. This one, published by Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein in The Journal of Holocaust Research, hit more than 27,000 pageviews within weeks, the JTA reported.

The paper’s reach was fueled by its analysis, unprecedented in the academic literature on Wikipedia, and its finding that a dedicated group has for some 15 years manipulated a source of information used by millions in ways that lay blame for the Holocaust on Jews and absolve Poland of almost any responsibility for its record of anti-Semitism as was previously mentioned in this article.

The paper caught the eye of not just scholars and journalists but of the people in charge of resolving disputes over editing on crowd-sourced Wikipedia, the seventh-most popular website on the internet and one that is seen as the last bastion of shared truth in an ever-fracturing online environment, as was reported by the JTA.

Typically, disputes among Wikipedia editors are resolved through community consensus mechanisms, but occasionally those mechanisms fail and allegations are brought to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, a panel of elected editors known as Wikipedia’s Supreme Court.

“Wikipedia is not exactly democratic but anarchistic in a way that actively discourages any sort of an authority coming to solve a dispute,” said Joe Roe, a veteran Wikipedia editor who served on the committee in 2019 and 2020, according to the JTA report. “The Arbitration Committee is a very limited exception.”

In this case, something especially unusual happened. The Arbitration Committee, or ArbCom, decided to look into the allegations without receiving a formal request to do so, the JTA reported.  No one could recall the committee taking such a step in its nearly two decades of existence.

“A myopic decision here could result in untold numbers of people being fed a distorted view of Jewish/WWII history, which could have very real consequences given the recent amplification of violently antisemitic rhetoric by mainstream public figures,” wrote a user named SamX in a public post about the case, as was reported by the JTA. “ArbCom needs to get this right.”

The article that triggered the opening of the case was published under the title, “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust.” It accused 11 current and former editors of intentional distortions to numerous articles relating to the Holocaust in Poland. The JTA also reported that the paper referred to the editors by their usernames but also provided their real names if they had publicly identified themselves on Wikipedia message boards.

“Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish anti-Semitism, 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,” wrote co-authors Jan Grabowski, a historian at the University of Ottawa, and Shira Klein of the history department at Chapman University in Orange, California, according to the JTA report.

Normally, mistakes on Wikipedia, whether intentional or not, can be quickly fixed by experienced editors who deploy a set of rules regarding sourcing and style. The JTA reported that in this case, the alleged distortionists know Wikipedia’s mechanisms well enough to at least appear to follow the rules and are willing to spend time arguing with other editors who step in to intervene. It becomes harder to get to the truth because they work to discredit established historians and prop up fringe voices to create the semblance of a real-world debate over historical events, according to the Grabowski and Klein article.

In one of the dozens of examples documented in the study, the alleged distortionists have tried to pass the self-published work of an anti-Semitic Polish writer named Ewa Kurek as a reliable source. The JTA reported that Kurek has said that COVID-19 is a cover for an attempt by Jews to take over Europe and that Jews enjoyed life in Nazi ghettos. An editor named Volunteer Marek argued in a backstage conversation among editors that Kurek should be cited as any “mainstream scholar” would be. And another editor, working on an article about a 1941 massacre of Jews in Poland, added Kurek’s claim that minimized the number of Jewish victims and exonerated the Polish perpetrators, as was reported by the JTA.

“We’ve been very careful not to make any assumptions on what drives them or what their politics are,” Klein said, according to the JTA report. “Instead, we’ve tried to focus just on what they’ve done, which is in the written record. And as we say in the article, we don’t see any evidence of them being tied to a government or being in the service of anyone else.”