The Journal of Slavic Military Studies

ISSN: 1351-8046 (Print) 1556-3006 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fslv20

The Battle for Wikipedia: The New Age of ‘Lost

Victories’?

David Stahel

To cite this article: David Stahel (2018) The Battle for Wikipedia: The New Age of ‘Lost Victories’?,
The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 31:3, 396-402, DOI: 10.1080/13518046.2018.1487198

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13518046.2018.1487198

Published online: 18 Jul 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 997

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fslv20
JOURNAL OF SLAVIC MILITARY STUDIES
2018, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 396–402
https://doi.org/10.1080/13518046.2018.1487198

The Battle for Wikipedia: The New Age of ‘Lost Victories’?

David Stahel
The University of New South Wales (Canberra)

ABSTRACT
While the myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ has long been
debunked in academic circles, one of the problems in chan-
ging the popular perception has been online representations,
such as Wikipedia. Here many (but by no means all) contribu-
tors to pages about the Wehrmacht tend to divergent from
prevailing trends in current (especially German) historiography.
There is also sometimes a clear lack of historical training in
evaluating sources and understanding the need for contextua-
lization. The article seeks to show why students must always
evaluate the process behind the generation of information and
engage critically with what they read on Wikipedia (or prefer-
ably avoid it in favor of peer-reviewed literature).

In 1958, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Lost Victories appeared in English
for the first time and, in addition to a wave of other German memoirs from
senior commanders, successfully influenced a generation of writing about
Hitler’s war in the East, while at the same time forestalling almost any
discussion of the Wehrmacht’s criminal activity. Initially, Manstein’s memoir
was celebrated by military historians like B. H. Liddell Hart as ‘one of the most
important and illuminating contributions to the history of World War II’, but
even at this time such endorsements completely ignored Manstein’s conviction
for war crimes.1 The myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ was established and would
remain largely unchallenged for decades, until the late 1980s when, in context
of the German Historikerstreit (historians’ argument), a much more critical
engagement with the Wehrmacht’s role in the war began.2
The subsequent deconstruction of the myth was led by a rich and ongoing
scholarship both in English and in German, which has fundamentally recast

CONTACT David Stahel d.stahel@adfa.edu.au The University of New South Wales (Canberra), 6/90 Blacket
Street Downer, Canberra, Australia.
1
E. von Manstein, Lost Victories, Zenith Press, Novato, CA, 1994, quotation on back cover. On the trial see: V. G.
Hébert, Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence,
2010; and M. Melvin, Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2011, chapter 16. For
Manstein’s role in the war of annihliation more generally, see O. von Wrochem, Vernichtungskrieg und
Geschichtspolitik: Erich von Manstein, Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, Germany, 2006.
2
There were a number of pioneering studies that preceded this period, the most outstanding of which being
Christian Streit’s 1978 study Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945,
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich, 1978.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
 THE JOURNAL OF SLAVIC MILITARY STUDIES 397

the role of the Wehrmacht to the point of consensus among serious histor-
ians. With the passing of Germany’s wartime generation of military age,
popular opinion there has, to an increasing extent, tended to follow academic
trends, although the recent rise of right-wing movements like PEGIDA and
Alternative für Deutschland may be somewhat reversing that development.3
The result, if German Wikipedia is any indication, is a more measured and
informed engagement with the Wehrmacht’s role the Second World War. In
the Anglo-American world I would argue that popular perceptions of the
Wehrmacht have also undergone a shift in the past three decades, especially
among younger generations exposed to more recent literature, but the myth
of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht is far from dead, and there is good reason to believe
that its death is not to be expected anytime soon.
There are two major sources fuelling the myth of the Wehrmacht in the
Anglo-American world. The first is the persistent presence of the German
generals’ memoirs, which is not to say they are not potentially useful sources,
but they absolutely cannot be accepted at face value because, as one reviewer
noted, ‘half-truths, lies, omissions, and distortions coexist alongside truth’.4
Exploring the Wehrmacht exclusively through these sources will remain a
problem until new editions are produced with rigorous annotations to the
text or, at the very least, introductory essays are added that make readers
much more aware of the kind of problems they contain.5
The second challenge is Wikipedia, which is perhaps an even more
pervasive problem because many people (and in my experience students)
invest it with a degree of objectivity and trust that, at least on topics related to
the Wehrmacht, can at times be grossly misplaced. In fairness, some studies
have suggested that Wikipedia more generally does reflect a good degree of
reliability,6 but articles on the Wehrmacht (in English Wikipedia) might
struggle to meet this standard. The problem is as much about what is written
as what is left out and sometimes what is removed by editors acting, con-
sciously or unconsciously, to preserve the myth of a ‘clean Wehrmacht’.

3
PEGIDA stands for ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West’ [Patriotische Europäer gegen die
Islamisierung des Abendlandes]. Alternative für Deutschland is a nationalist and populist party founded in 2013.
4
R. Smelser and E. J. Davies II, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, p. 90. As early as 1992 Gerhard Weinberg — G. L. Weinberg, ‘Some
Thoughts on World War II’, The Journal of Military History, 56(4) (1992), pp. 659–660 — noted: ‘The single most
difficult task all those working on World War II in Europe and North Africa face is the need to penetrate the fog of
distortion and confusion generated by the vast German memoir literature, especially that of the generals like
Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein. Long the basic staple on which secondary literature was based, closer
examination of these works with reference to contemporary evidence has shown the memoirs to be almost
invariably inaccurate, distorted, and, in some instances, simply fake… . Scholars in all countries need to liberate
their own minds and their own writings from a preoccupation with an enormous collection of dubious works and
from the influence of an even larger mass of secondary works largely based on those memoirs’.
5
Current editions of Manstein’s memoir include Liddell Hart’s Foreword from 1958 as well as a later essay by Martin
Blumenson added to a 1981 edition, which informs readers: ‘In a magisterial, even noble account of the war from
the German perspective … [Manstein] maintained the highest personal standards of comportment and character
according to the soldiers’ code…’. (E. von Manstein, Lost Victories, p. 11.)
6
https://www.livescience.com/32950-how-accurate-is-wikipedia.html (accessed 18 May 2018).
398 D. STAHEL

Worryingly, these are not maverick editors sniping from the sidelines but
sometimes long-term contributors and ‘coordinators’ of the MILHIST
(Military History) Wikipedia project, which dominates discussion and
forms a caucus of opinion on the Wehrmacht’s pages. Indeed, editors seeking
to balance the information available by evoking more critical scholarship or
standards are often in the minority, and sometimes their input is fervently
rejected. The result is a tit-for-tat process of post and removal, a battle for
Wikipedia, which is reminiscent of scholarly debates now decades out of
date. Yet it is the power of Wikipedia to shape opinion and act, however
undeservingly, as the source of truth that should concern academics and act
as a warning to students.
For the record, I should state that I have never been an editor on Wikipedia
and have only recently learned about this process. I would also add that the level
of devotion among many of the volunteer editors is commendable, especially
having read many of the long and sometimes tiresome debates that rage behind
the scenes. What the casual Wikipedia visitor may not know is that there are
‘Talk’ pages behind every article, where editors debate their differences of
opinion about why any given sentence, paragraph, or source should or should
not be included in the main text of a Wikipedia article. Fortunately, not only are
the previous versions of articles preserved, but every aspect of the discussion
about those pages. To that end, materials charting the battles for control of
Wikipedia are openly available to outsiders and therefore fully verifiable. The
results are sometimes shocking. When one considers the great advances scholar-
ship has made over the past 25 years, too many of Wikipedia’s self-styled
Wehrmacht ‘experts’ are stuck in the 1950s.
The Talk pages reveal that some editors are reluctant to tie any member of the
Wehrmacht — even at times senior commanders — too closely to the Nazi regime
and its criminal activities. An example is the biographical article for Colonel-
General Erich Hoepner, commander of Panzer Group 4 in Operation Barbarossa,
whose close association with Einsatzgruppe A (an element of the SD charged with
the mass murder of Soviet Jews) is well established. Yet the discussion of this
relationship in his biographical article was recently removed from Wikipedia. The
passage cut read:

The staff and detachments 2 and 3 of Einsatzgruppe A, one of the mobile killing squads
following the Wehrmacht into the occupied Soviet Union, were brought up to the Luga
district with assistance from the army. ‘The movement of Einsatzgruppe A — which the
army intended to use in Leningrad — was effected in agreement with Panzer Group 4
and at their express wish’, noted Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of
Einsatzgruppe A. [Footnote: Michael Jones, Leningrad: State of Siege, London, 2008,
p. 35.] Stahlecker described Wehrmacht’s cooperation as ‘generally very good’, and ‘in
certain cases, as for example, with Panzer Group 4 under the command of General
Hoepner, extremely close, one might say even warm’. [Footnote: David Stahel, The
Battle for Moscow, Cambridge, 2015, p. 37.]
 THE JOURNAL OF SLAVIC MILITARY STUDIES 399

The editor going by the name ‘LargelyRecyclable’ who removed this

passage offered the ambiguous explanation: ‘No biographical notability
asserted. What’s the immediate relationship [to Hoepner]?’ The posting
editor responded by pointing out the seemingly obvious fact that Hoepner
headed Panzer Group 4, but this was rejected with the indignant reply:

What all the provided references fail to provide is an actual tie between the
assertion made in the article and Hoepner himself. To connect that many dots is
synthesis on your part. To include the aforementioned sections requires reliable
sources actually making that assertion. To simply lump in Hoepner with broad
brush is not biographically relevant nor appropriate for Wikipedia. The discussion
of on-the-ground cooperation between individuals of the Einsatzgruppe assigned to
the same area of operations of Panzer Group 4 and individual elements of that
Group fails to make a substantive biographical connection. Also, von Leeb is
something I’m going to get back around to, when I have time. Both articles fail
on the same merits. — LargelyRecyclable (talk) 09:49, 21 February 2018 (UTC).7

By this reasoning, LargelyRecyclable appears to be suggesting that

Hoepner himself had nothing to do with the activities of Einsatzgruppe A,
an untenable argument, which has been long since been debunked.8
With only a few exceptions, most of English Wikipedia’s editors do not
read German — the language of both the essential primary material as well as
many of the best studies dealing with aspects of the Wehrmacht’s criminality.
Such obvious limitations do not, however, forestall the most brazen dismis-
sals of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ thesis, and there are more than enough first-
rate English studies available to suggest that this is more than simply
ignorance of the problem.9 An example is provided by two editors seeking
changes (unsuccessfully on this occasion) to the long since problematic
‘Panzer Ace’ page:

It seems to be that the ‘Wehrmacht was very, very bad compared to other armies’
theme runs through many articles on Wikipedia. An article such as ‘Clean
Wehrmacht’ or this current version of ‘Panzer Ace’ do not belong in what purports
to be an encyclopedia. As written, both of these articles (and many more) speci-
fically single out the WW2 German Army as being particularly evil. NOT
NEUTRAL! These belong in popular history magazines with a specific Western

7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Erich_Hoepner#Eastern_Front (accessed 18 May 2018)
8
P. Steinkamp, ‘Die Haltung der Hitlergegner Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb und Generaloberst Erich
Hoepner zur verbrecherischen Kriegführung bei der Heeresgruppe Nord in der Sowjetunion 1941’ in G. R.
Ueberschär (ed.), NS-Verbrechen und der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler, Primus, Darmstadt, 2000,
pp. 47–61. See also J. Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion
1941/42, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich, 2006.
9
For studies in English see: G. P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front 1941,
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2006; H. Heer and K. Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination: The German
Military in World War II 1941–1944, Berghahn Books, NewYork/Oxford, 2006; W. Wette, The Wehrmacht: History,
Myth, Reality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006; A. J. Kay, J. Rutherford, and D. Stahel (eds.), Nazi
Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide and Radicalization, Rochester University Press, Rochester,
NY, 2012.
400 D. STAHEL

Allies POV [point of view], not on Wikipedia. — Makumbe (talk) 22:48,

1 November 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, there have been big problems with this page in the past; I think it’s better
than it was before, but needs more work. It’s a fairly political page unfortunately,
so seems to require a lot of maintenance… . I agree, the tone of the article I think
has leant to the ‘Nazis are evil’ side of things, which is not what this page is about.
It’s about the nature of successful tank commanders, in their tanks, and combat. —
Deathlibrarian (talk) 00:16, 2 November 2017 (UTC)10

What appears to be completely lost in this discussion is that without

context, what these editors seem to dismiss as ‘the “Nazis are evil” side of
things’ would simply be reproducing pages filled with Nazi wartime propa-
ganda. Indeed, the idea that German historiography might be critical of its
own Nazi past strikes some of these editors as odd, with ‘Makumbe’ deter-
mining one leading German military historian to be a ‘self-hater’ and sug-
gesting his scholarship was motivated by making ‘a tidy living for himself’
while ‘talking about how evil the Wehrmacht was’.11
What comes through a lot of the debates is the evaluation of source
material and what constitutes, in Wikipedia shorthand, ‘RS’ (reliable) and
‘non-RS’ (non-reliable) source material. One editor named ‘Nug’ was so
indignant in maintaining his claim that the 36th Estonian Police Battalion
had not participated in the murder of Jews that he deemed the information
provided by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of
Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 to be coming from an unsuitable ‘tertiary
source’ and removed the material in question.12
At the other end of the spectrum, a host of editors debated with a lone
critic who suggested Florian Berger’s The Face of Courage: The 98 Men Who
Received the Knight’s Cross and the Close-Combat Clasp in Gold should not
qualify as RS.13 The fact that the book includes no critical context of Nazi
activities and treats every one of the men as war heroes is seemingly accepted.
In fact, the book was originally published by the notoriously pro-Wehrmacht
J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing, before being reprinted with the (more respect-
able) Stackpole Books. This republishing, in the opinion of most editors,
made the book’s content suddenly entirely acceptable. As the editors argued:
G’day, just to clarify, what is the issue with the Berger work? From the link
provided above ([1]), it doesn’t seem to be self published, as it appears to have
10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Panzer_ace#Turned_out_that_I_wasn’t_a_Sock_Puppeteer- (accessed
18 May 2018).
11
Ibid.
12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:36th_Estonian_Police_Battalion#Novogrudok (accessed 18 May 2018)
13
Florian Berger has self-published a host of hagiographic books in German with titles such as Mit Eichenlaub und
Schwertern: Die höchstdekorierten Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkrieges (2000); Ritterkreuzträger mit Nahkampfspange
in Gold (2004); Ritterkreuzträger aus Österreich und den k.u.k. Kronländern (2006), and Yak, Mustang und Spitfire:
Die erfolgreichensten Alliierten Jagdflieger des zweiten Weltkrieges. Historische Abschussmarkierungen für jeden
Piloten (2002).
 THE JOURNAL OF SLAVIC MILITARY STUDIES 401

been published by J.J Fedorowicz and then reprinted by Stackpole Books, which
appear to be Canadian and US publishers. Am I missing something? Regards,
AustralianRupert (talk) 08:28, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, the fact that the Berger book cited here is self-published is almost irrelevant
since we’ve now seen that he is a published author with a mainstream press. So I
think that Berger just moved from non-RS to RS with the usual caveats. —
Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 15:02, 2 October 2016 (UTC)14

To this another editor took issue, pointing out:

I provided the English-language sample as a means to show that his works are
hagiographic and uncritical accounts of highly decorated German soldiers of
WWII. Both Kurowski and Berger have been published by Fedorowitz and
Stackpole, and that does not make them RS… . — K.e.coffman (talk) 19:03,
2 October 2016 (UTC)15

This may seem obvious enough, but even editors who claim academic qualifi-
cations display a striking level of naïveté about what publishing means, especially
in military history, where the large potential market means that quality varies
hugely. There was also an open rejection of academic qualifications as a form of
expertise, even when the editor in question claimed a great deal of them:
G’day, I’ve got no concerns with removing the work that hasn’t been reprinted by an
independent publishing house (i.e., Mit eichenlaub …) but I do not support the
wholesale removal of the works that have been reprinted independently (e.g.,
Stackpole, etc.) without strong evidence that they are not reliable for the information
cited… . I have written a few book reviews for a peer-reviewed journal myself; does
that make me an authority on the work I reviewed? No, I wrote my opinion. I’m a
professionally published author and have four degrees, but I wouldn’t say that makes
me more qualified than the average person. Also, most works will receive some
criticism in reviews; it doesn’t mean that they do not qualify as reliable sources in a
Wikipedia sense. Remember the term isn’t literal, rather it is a purely Wikipedia
construct… . — AustralianRupert (talk) 03:42, 3 October 2016 (UTC)16

‘AustralianRupert’ was then supported by ‘Auntieruth55’, who is apparently

also a published author, claiming: ‘In general, my attitude toward the Stackpole
republications is that if they publish them, it’s by and large reliable as to fact,
although not necessarily to interpretation’.17 The fact that something appears in
print with a large publishing house does not magically change the text, and since
Stackpole do not peer-review their books and indeed reproduce titles by J.J.
Fedorowicz Publishing, this should be an instant red flag. What these editors fail
to appreciate is that in the military history market some books are produced to
cater purposefully for the niche world of Wehrmacht apologists and enthusiasts.
14
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_article_reassessment/Joachim_Helbig/1#Berger;_related_articles
(accessed 18 May 2018).
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
402 D. STAHEL

The latter group include those who fetishise the ‘Panzer ace’ Michael Wittmann,
whose admirers one historian derisively, but accurately, dubbed the ‘Nazi
fanboys’.18
One could argue that we should not be surprised by what gets written on an
open source platform of the Internet and that this is, after all, not the exclusive
preserve of scholars but precisely intended to welcome everybody to the discussion.
Fine. Maybe that should be the rallying cry for more academics to become actively
involved with Wikipedia, but the authority with which Wikipedia is viewed is more
my concern. I certainly cannot speak about Wikipedia as a whole, but in topics
related to the Wehrmacht, some articles are excellent (such as the current version of
Erich von Manstein’s article), some are questionable, and some are downright
misleading; this is not surprising given the comments made in the Talk pages
behind many of these articles. Ten years ago, the Wikipedia category (a way to
categorize or ‘tag’ topics that fall under a common theme) of ‘Holocaust in Estonia’
was successfully deleted because it was deemed to be ‘part of [an] anti-Estonian
crusade raging on Wikipedia these days’.19 The category has since been restored,
but the nature of the site means that nothing is forever, and too many of the editors
are clearly keen to see articles that reflect their own cherished, or at least uncritical,
view of the Wehrmacht and its collaborators.
A considerable percentage of students have been encouraged during their high
school years to engage uncritically with Wikipedia, treating it as an authoritative
and objective research tool. Yet it seems Wikipedia’s community of editors on the
Wehrmacht have no obligatory qualifications — neither formally in history nor in
terms of the necessary language skills. Beyond qualifications, their motivations for
writing also vary widely, which, while perhaps well-meaning in many cases, may
in some instances reflect extremist views or romantic notions not grounded in the
historiography. There is also a question about reliability on even the best
Wikipedia pages, since there can be no assurance that what I may consider an
excellent page will, in fact, be what readers encounter when they check months
from now. It all underlines the importance of adopting a highly critical engage-
ment with Wikipedia (as with any other source), but the best advice for students is
not to risk Russian roulette on the Internet and instead seek peer-viewed literature
from the library.

Notes on contributor
David Stahel is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales and has written four
books about the Wehrmacht’s operations on the eastern front with Cambridge University
Press. He has also co-edited a number of studies dealing with German policy in the east and
Nazi criminal activity.

18
S. Zaloga, Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of World War II, Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA, 2015, p. 3.
19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_August_10#Category:Holocaust_in_
Estonia (accessed 18 May 2018).