Wikipedia talk:Nazi affiliation task force

Slave labour and List of companies involved in the Holocaust

I noticed some companies on this list that appear to be included for their use of slave labour alone, and no other criteria. But slave labour was much broader than "just" the Holocaust; a company that used slave labour could have employed non-Jewish Polish people, for example. And sometimes you'll find a source that makes it clear that a company used slave labour, but doesn't say anything else, so you don't really know whether it would belong on this list or not. Rather than leave this open as reasonable grounds to remove a company from this list, what do people think about this two-part solution?

1. renaming the list to "List of companies involved in Nazi war crimes" or similar
2. having a heading "Use of forced labour" or similar, that contains all companies that used forced labour, regardless of whether this is extermination-by-overwork, "employment" of political prisoners, Ostarbeiter, etc. This makes it easy to quickly identify these companies (rather than having to hunt through the whole list), and makes it obviously clear that using forced labour is a criterion for inclusion.

It would also be possible to do #1 but not #2. Or, I suppose, to make #2 as a standalone article, "List of companies that used forced labour in Nazi Germany", but I'm less keen on this option. -- asilvering (talk) 19:06, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

@Asilvering what's an example of a company that employed Nazi forced labour outside of the Holocaust? Forced labour in Germany tended to rely less on Jewish forced labour and more on various degrees of voluntary labour and or forced Ostarbeiter. The examples I know of tended to be complex enterprises that employed all of the above scenarios, to various degrees in various places. I am sympathetic to solution #1 but would like to know what separate examples would only then be included ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 17:43, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Shushugah My guess is that it would be most companies that used forced labour but didn't have factories directly associated with camps. (For what it's worth: that is an educated guess, but not a subject-matter-expert one.) As you say, slave labour in Germany relied heavily on workers like forcibly displaced Polish people, etc. As an example, I added the bit on forced labour to Stihl. My source was the NDB article on Andreas Stihl, which just says "Zwangsarbeiter". Is that Holocaust-related? No idea. So I can't add it to the list without doing further research. If I do that research, and don't find anything conclusive, or somehow manage to find conclusively that no Jewish prisoners were involved, then I can't add it to the list. (Similarly, the items on that list now that only say "forced labour" are open to challenge along these lines.) Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of companies that used forced labour in the Nazi era, where you can see that most are classified as CWC/Zivilarbeiter, which excludes concentration camp inmates by definition: [1] Basically, I brought this up as an attempt to close what looked to me like a loophole in this list criteria, that allows companies to be left or struck off it when I don't really think they should be. -- asilvering (talk) 18:57, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

It seems to me that a navigation template for Nazi forced labour might be useful, regardless of where consensus ends up regarding the List of companies involved in the Holocaust, so I started one to mess with: [2]. It's just a link dump right now, and anyone can feel free to add more links/categories in there if you like. -- asilvering (talk) 20:36, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

To add to further confusion, Companies involved in the Holocaust did not necessarily need to emply exploitive labor/conditions, rather they contributed to the Nazi efforts, so for example even if IBM/Dehomag paid all of their Aryan German/American engineers nice salaries etc.. their tabulation software was used to implement the final solution.

The current entries in List of companies involved in the Holocaust also mention non Jewish forced labour instances. Which either should be removed, or, what I'd prefer, the article description is amended to make this inclusive definition more explicit. It's not my main interest/place to debate inclusion criteria of the Holocaust (does it include homosexuals, Roma and Sinti people, political dissidents etc..?) For those reasons, I'd be happy to rename the article as you suggest in solution one. The ordering of the list should emphasize the major contributors though, whether that's scale/heinous crimes, e.g. Deutsche Bahn/IG Farben were more influential than Stihl. Category tracking would be most useful tho, for improvement of the articles, to assist editors, not to inform readers, so they're complementary but different functions. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:28, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you

Thanks @Shushugah for taking the initiative on this Task Force! A serious ongoing issue I've had to deal with are users trying to minimize / deny / justify / altogether remove unsavoury content from articles on Central and Eastern European "national heroes" who are known or alleged to have been Nazi collaborators / Holocaust perpetrators.

E.g., Adolfas Ramanauskas, Andrei Shkuro, Andrey Vlasov, Draža Mihailović, Herberts Cukurs, Ivan Omelianowicz-Pavlenko, Jonas Noreika, Jonas Žemaitis, Juozas Ambrazevičius, Juozas Lukša, Kazys Škirpa, Pavle Đurišić, Povilas Plechavičius, Pyotr Krasnov, Roman Shukhevych, Stepan Bandera, Symon Petliura, Yaroslav Stetsko

Any help adding information and identifying / monitoring such articles would be most welcome. –Ploni (talk) 00:14, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Ploni Nazi collaboration seems like an incredibly useful category in its own right, along with contentious debates in academic/historic circles. Stepan Bandera is another famous example that comes to mind. I see many of these articles are sorted in Category:Collaborators with Nazi Germany by nationality which would be a good place to go through. Perhaps we could pick one nationality at a time, and collectively do a run through check of them for sourcing/weight/proper categorization etc..? Will add this to the scope page ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 17:48, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Ploni I see you already included Bandera. I did the easy part of adding the Collaboration category tags where existing sources qualified it in all the examples you mentioned except for the following three names:

• Symon Petliura definitely an antisemitic war criminal, but couldn't find direct connection to Nazism
• Jonas Žemaitis Nazi collaboration seems very possible, but needs more sourcing. I don't know what serving in Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force entails, or what's due weight.

A quick search brought up this article and this blog post: "[...] Žemaitis-Vytautas [...] served in the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force, a volunteer militia created with the aim of providing military aid to the Nazis. Contemporaneous reports make it likely Žemaitis may have served in a Lithuanian auxiliary police battalion — one of the Nazi-organized units that were engaged in operations of mass murder of Jews." (Defending History is a great resource run by Dovid Katz, though it is a blog—it could be useful for finding other sources though.) –Ploni (talk) 15:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

• Juozas Lukša also seems likely. Currently reads like WP:WEASEL words..."according to some witnesses" he was involved in a Nazi organized pogrom ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 18:18, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Shushugah: That sounds like a good plan; I'd be on board with that. –Ploni (talk) 15:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Nazi "euthanasia" centers

I note that we have a number of articles with titles like Hartheim Euthanasia Center (German: NS-Tötungsanstalt Hartheim). This seems to be to be unncessarily euphemistic, and following the Nazis' own propaganda line painting their extermination campaign as "euthanasia". The German word Tötungsanstalt literally means "killing center" or "killing institution", without any euphemistic connotation of "euthanasia". Should these articles be moved to more literal titles such as Hartheim Killing Center or Hartheim Killing Facility? -- The Anome (talk) 12:53, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

• I'm with you on this. "Killing Centre" is a more literal translation, anyhow. Alternatively, the French page is simply titled "Hartheim (AktionT4)". –Ploni (talk) 17:44, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

  I don't think "AktionT4" is the right way to solve this, since judging by the museum's website (seemed the most obvious place to look), people were killed there under other programs as well: [3]. That site also has an English version, which makes some very odd choices: it does use "euthanasia centre", but also "murder", "killing", and "victim", which are significantly less euphemistic. Here are some examples where German-language websites are using "euthanasia", but with scare quotes or other words that make it less euphemistic: [4], [5], [6]. And here's what Linguee brings up when you search for "Tötungsanstalt": [7]. The article itself already contains the phrase "involuntary euthanasia", so I don't know that there's any value to be had in keeping that word in the article title, so long as a redirect is left to catch readers who searched for "Hartheim Euthanasia Center". "Hartheim Killing Centre" seems most appropriate, unless anyone knows of a standard translation used in academic work on the subject, that differs from this? The sources on the Hartheim article are all German so that doesn't help. -- asilvering (talk) 18:04, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

The von der Leyen family

There is a draft awaiting review for Draft:Joachim Freiherr von der Leyen. The notability of the article might be met by more discussion of the 'conspiracy theories' linking Ursula von der Leyen to this lineage. From what I understand Heiko von der Leyen is a distant relative to Joachim, and Ursula married into the family. I might worry that would reach WP:UNDUE, but considering Joachim's administrative importance, the article has other reasons to exist. Tule-hog (talk) 21:08, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. The draft seems likely notable, however we should not link to Ursula von der Leyen as that would be undue, unless no information surfaces. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:51, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

References