Talk:Responsibility for the Holocaust

Tony Judt highlights...

"Historian Tony Judt highlights how denazification and the subsequent fear of retribution from the Allies likely obscured justice due to some of the perpetrators and camouflaged underlying societal truths.[49]"

- What does this mean?

-who are the perpetrators?, perpetrators of what?

-Shouldn't it be 'perpertrator's' , and then an accompanying 'owned' subject.

- I think this sentence needs to be thoroughly re-written, and cite examined.

This line currently makes no sense, is grammatically incorrect. I think it is not a quote, but rather a very poorly transcribed paraphrase. I think this line is incomprehensible and unintelligible.

Further -

If you then look at the paragraph which this sentence is contained:

During the years 1945 through 1949, polls indicated that a majority of Germans felt that Nazism was a "good idea, badly applied". In a poll conducted in the American German occupation zone, 37% replied that 'the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans'.[47][h] Sarah Ann Gordon in Hitler, Germans, and the Jewish Question notes that the surveys are very difficult to draw conclusions from as respondents were given only three options from which to choose: (1) Hitler was right in his treatment of the Jews, to which 0% agreed; (2) Hitler went too far in his treatment of the Jews, but something had to be done to keep them in bounds - 19% agreed; and (3) The actions against the Jews were in no way justified - 77% agreed. She also noted that another revealing example emerges from the question of whether an Aryan who marries a Jew should be condemned, a question to which 91% of the respondents answered "No". To the question: "All those who ordered the murder of civilians or participated in the murders should be made to stand trial", 94% responded "Yes".[48] Historian Tony Judt highlights how denazification and the subsequent fear of retribution from the Allies likely obscured justice due to some of the perpetrators and camouflaged underlying societal truths.[49]

You can see it is of no relevance to the paragraph. The paragraph is nested within:-

Responsibility for the holocaust ------> German people ------> polling of German people 1949 and potentially misleading results due to poorly designed surveys -------> closing sentence says justice was likely obscured due to not having 94 percent of participants prosecuted.

This is an entirely different topic itself, I would welcome anyone to create a paragraph detailing prosecution rates, and the subjectivity of participation and it's accompanying scenario'd statistics, to see the level/likelihood of prosecution occurring against a war criminal/participant during Nuremburg/post WW2 Germany. And then detailing possible factors that contributes to this miss-match or rather, the definition of "participant' that is best reflected from the prosecution rates.... etc.

This sentence should be removed, it's just so confusing and out of context to the paragraph.

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Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 August 2025 and 30 March 2026. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Aldossary Abdullah (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Antoniacal (talk) 19:30, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Complicity vs. Uniqueness

A recent good-faith addition by Aldossary Abdullah was deleted because it seems very much outside the general scope of this article. To that end, the subject of this article is responsibility and complicity: who bears culpability, in what degree, and through what mechanisms of participation or acquiescence. Arguments about the Holocaust's uniqueness as a historical phenomenon—its distinguishing features relative to other genocides, the scholarly debate over whether it constitutes a categorically distinct crime against humanity, and the historiographical controversies surrounding that question—are not, properly speaking, questions of responsibility at all; they are questions of classification and comparative analysis, and they have a dedicated home at Holocaust uniqueness debate.

As a professional historian, it my opinion that conflating the two risks a category error that weakens both articles. Content establishing why the Holocaust is considered singular belongs in the comparative and historiographical framework that Holocaust uniqueness debate was built to provide; content here should remain anchored to the causal, institutional, and moral questions of who bore responsibility and how that responsibility was distributed across perpetrators, bystanders, collaborators, and institutions. Editors wishing to develop the uniqueness material are encouraged to redirect their contributions accordingly, where that content can be properly contextualized within the existing scholarly debate rather than appended to an article whose analytical scope it exceeds. I'd very much appreciate the thoughts of other editors, particularly those of any of the following on this matter: @Nick-D: @K.e.coffman: @Kierzek: @Pincrete: @GeneralizationsAreBad: @EyeTruth: @Beyond My Ken: @Diannaa: @Peacemaker67: @Nillurcheier: @Xenomorph 001: Obenritter (talk) 15:49, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

Essentially I agree. While Aldossary Abdullah’s observation about the trend in more recent work is quite correct IMHO, it does seem to fit far better in the Holocaust uniqueness debate than here, and if explored here would tend to cause “mission creep” outside the focus of this article. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 21:12, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure that I have the competency or experience in either topic are to advance a very informed opinion, but Obenritter makes a very full and coherent case for how and why the two topics are - necessarily - distinct. Pincrete (talk) 04:32, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree that the material in question here is outside of this article's scope. It's also not especially well written. Nick-D (talk) 10:07, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Concur with Obenritter and others; this was not a suitable addition to the article. --K.e.coffman (talk) 18:04, 13 May 2026 (UTC)