- The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more categories. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
- The result of the discussion was: Listify to List of companies involved in the Holocaust
(The target name is merely incidental to this closure, due to the target being in mainspace.)
What most comes out of this discussion is that this category may violate WP:CAT in several ways. (If not obvious, read the first two subsections of that page.)
There is an intent to include this information, but a question of how it should be presented. And since a key indicator of category inclusion criteria is often it's name, not being able to agree upon what the name should be, simply due to questions of accuracy and verifiability (and possibly even WP:BLP concerns), suggest that we should default to articlespace first, and then, if such a list can be presented in WP:NPOV manner, and referenced with verifiable reliable sources, then potential creation of such a category may be re-examined.
Due to the controversy of the topic, I suggest that, should the list be eventually found to be acceptable, that the re-creation of the category be nominated here at "Categories for discussion" first so that consensus can be determined for its creation. - jc37 22:40, 23 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Propose renaming Category:Companies linked to Holocaust to Category:Companies linked to the Holocaust or Category:OTHER or delete
- Nominator's rationale: Rename to something (or delete for vagueneses). As a minimum, the category needs to be renamed to add the word "the". I'm unsure if this is the best name we can come up with for the category, though, since "linked" is a relatively ambiguous and flexible standard. As it currently stands, I'm not sure of the degree of the required "link" for a company to be in this category. Any suggested renames are welcome. If there's nothing workable, then it could be deleted for vagueness reasons. (I'm loath to suggest a particular name lest someone disagree with the suggestion and I be accused of possible anti-Semitism but likely ignorance, Holocaust denialism, Holocaust revisionism, gross insensitivity, disgusting trivializations, despicable rationalizations, and loving pedophiles and all that they stand for. Happy days.) Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:25, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Keep, Perhaps Companies that profited from the Holocaust might be more accurate.Historicist (talk) 00:50, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Why is this notable? Is it notable if the company was aware of this? What if they were not? Can this be populated without POV issues? Vegaswikian (talk) 00:57, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Notability is established by the large amount of liteature published on the subject. Dobumentation is not an issue because all of the companies listed ( and a large number of additional firms not yet listed) have been sued and the legal/court documentation is extensive. The corporations on the list, moreover, have the information already included in their Wikipedia articles. It is a useful cagetory because anyone happening upon this issue in conneciton with one of these corporatins, can access parallel cases.Historicist (talk) 01:12, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Yeah, I'm not sure if that name is going to work, mainly for the reasons Vegaswikian sets out. Also, we run into a bizarre temporal problem: there are many media corporations that have "profited" from the Holocaust by creating, marketing, and selling Holocaust films, books, etc. So does Universal Pictures get included for making a profit from Schindler's List? A silly example, but you begin to see some of the problems. Good Ol’factory (talk) 01:16, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- The category at present sconsists of companies in existence during the War, that are still in existence today, and that are well-documented to have profited directly form such activities as manufacturing death camp components aor using slave labors (the slave labor camps are understood by scholars as slow-death camps in which the prisoners were underfed and treated as an expendable resource.) In other words, as it stands now, the gorup of companies included is narrowly circumscribed. Do you see a problem that cannot be solved by defining the category in this way?Historicist (talk) 01:22, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Do you mean renaming it to Category:Companies that existed during World War II that are still in existence today that directly profited from the Holocaust? Of course, we wouldn't name the category that, but even if not named that but just defined using that language, it seems like an awful lot of caveats. Why does it exclude defunct companies? And how direct does the profit-making have to have been? Does the company have to have been aware of the Holocaust or how it was profiting from it? If so, to what degree? Who in the company needs to have known? Or is negligence or wilful blindness enough? Who decides these issues? Seems like a POV trap. Good Ol’factory (talk) 01:28, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Keep or consider rename to other options. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben rather directly supports one of the entries and this is a defining characteristic for these firms. It is sickening to see that disturbing Holocaust insensitivity in previous nominations is deemed a worthy subject for a joke in the nomination, and as it is irrelevant to the nomination it should be removed. Alansohn (talk) 04:49, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Rename to Category:Companies that directly profited from the Holocaust. There is no problem of definition, as per comments above. There is no reason to exclude companies now defunct, if they are still thought notable enough to have an article - e.g., Topf u. Söhne - and in fact the word "directly" excludes post-war profiteering from the subject. HeartofaDog (talk) 13:20, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I concur with User:HeartofaDog. In fact, yesterday I wrote this definition into the category page.Historicist (talk) 15:59, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm not comfortable with this unless we can come up with something that wouldn't imply guilt by association. It might as well be Category:Companies whose employees are post-facto accomplices to genocide, which would very rarely be mitigated as very few people employed by Acme GmbH in the 30s and 40s would still be alive, much less still on the payroll, so this would mostly cast a company's current workers in an unduly negative light. While I agree that one should do their homework before accepting a job with just any old company, the spirit of BLP should to at least extent apply to the executives and corporate personhood of businesses which still exist. There are also some parallels to be drawn between this and the Category:Descendants of slave traders debate above, because even when provably true it involves smearing people for atrocities before their time and over which they had no control. I'm willing to hold my peace of nobody else shares my concerns about this, but I'd like to know whether it be acceptable to categorize Brown & Root as having directly profited from every armed conflict involving the U.S. from World War II onward (or would that be a transparent case of sour grapes?). Convince me. — CharlotteWebb 16:16, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Note: I will agree there is no reason to exclude defunct companies if this is kept. — CharlotteWebb 16:20, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- After reading this a number of times I still have no idea if User:CharlotteWebb actually intends it to be taken seriously, or if it is some sort of adolescent humour. User:Historicist has made plain what definitions apply here; what sort of companies are involved in this cat; what the activities were that qualify them to be included; and on what basis of evidence; further, that their wartime record is already recorded in the respective articles. What purpose can it serve not to group them in a cat for ease of reference? No present employee of any of these companies, where they still exist, can be under any illusions about the history of their employers, and the idea that present employees of, e.g., ThyssenKrupp might suffer in some way because of a cat that grouped Krupp with other companies who also, beyond any doubt, directly profited from Nazi practices during the war 60+ years ago, is bizarre. What this is suggesting, possibly for want of careful reading of the foregoing, is a particularly silly and pointless whitewashing exercise - I regret that I am struggling to assume Good Faith here. HeartofaDog (talk) 17:26, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Ah well, there must be a thousand ways to call somebody a troll. No, I'm not trying to whitewash anything, or deny the holocaust or whatever you might be implying, and I'm not arguing that any information should be removed from the articles themselves. For hall-of-shame categories of this sort I think the context afforded by a "list of" article would be better (in fact I'll help create it). This would also offer readers a more nuanced perspective of each companies' involvement, without painting everybody with the same brush when this category expands beyond the actual killings, beyond the slave labor, beyond the production of cyanide, to include every company that knowingly profited whether they built the death trains or the punch-card readers, all the way to the Swiss banks. Even today as long as there are collectors willing to pay 3× for K98's bearing the infamous "bnz" stamp, people will unfortunately still profiting from it. Don't you think a list article would be a better approach? — CharlotteWebb 18:06, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Actually, I think a list prob has a lot to offer, as long as the list is set up before the cat is zapped - but it will still have the problem of where exactly the boundaries are set. I still think that if properly defined there is a role for the cat as well, and that it should be strictly confined to those companies with the greatest Holocaust, as opposed to merely war, involvement. For the rest, I just found your tone extremely puzzling - cultural wires crossing, probably: sorry for over-reacting. HeartofaDog (talk) 21:05, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment -- I am unhappy about this as it is potentially an attack category. Certainly there are existing German companies, which in an earlier period used (and profited from) conscripted slave labour during the WWII. However the actively anti-Nazis in Germany were few in number. Almost any German company operating during WWII was almost inevitably complicit in the Nazi totalitatian regime; they had little choice. However, I think a distinction needs to be drawn between the employers of slave labour, and those directly implicit in mass-murder. If we have a category of this kind at all (and I think it might be better if we did not), I think it should be narrowly focused on those directly linked to mass-murder. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:52, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- The wikipedia pages on these companies, like responsible histories of the era, do distinguish between producing gas chambers and employing slave labor. What User:Peterkingiron and everyone in this discussion needs to understand is that the distinction is between very, very dark shades of grey. The slave laborers in question were not slaves in thr Greco/Roman sense - who might look forward to freedom, they were not even slaves of the sense of the raceist, slave holding pre-Civil War American south, where the lives of slave were valued by their empoyers as breeding livestock are valued. These Unternmenschen were intended to be used up until they wore out and died - creating Lebensraum for the Aryan race. It was, in other words, a part of the intended genocide of all of the inferoir races of Europe. It is true that some races were slated for immediate genocide, others for slow-replacement genocide, but all of the slave laborers were form categories of people intended for extinction. The fact that some Germans at all times and some of the Nazi power holders realized late in the war that they could not win without keeping more slave laborers alive longer, and could not hold the Empire (The Third Reich) without keeping some large part fo the Slavic population alive as laborers until they could give birth to and rear sufficient Aryans to replace them, does not alter the fact that the design of the slave labor program was calculated to put the muscle mass of healthy, young members of the inferior races into the service of the Reich, but feed them just enough to keep them alive while useful, and feed them even less where more young, strong Slavs, Jews, Roma, etc. were available to take their places.Historicist (talk) 18:33, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Courtesy break
[edit]
- Keep as is. I am the proposer of the category. The articles themselves make the link between the companies and the Holocaust. Disputes over the historicity the articles should be taken up on a case by case basis. There is no question that large numbers of companies, many of which are still in existence today, used concentration camp labor during World War II. This is a simple historical fact and the existence of a category to reflect this fact is well within the bounds of a reasonable historical approach. To do otherwise would distort history by implying there were no companies linked to the Holocaust, clearly NOT the case. "Linked" is neutral enough language, especially for I.G. Farben, manufacturer of Zyklon-B and Todt and sons, crematoria suppliers to Auschwitz inter alia.Mtsmallwood (talk) 22:01, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- So, you oppose even adding the word "the", as proposed? Good Ol’factory (talk) 23:07, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Well, we have Category:Holocaust in Norway, Category:Holocaust in Poland, and Category:Holocaust perpetrators but we also have Category:The Holocaust in France, Category:The Holocaust in Denmark, etc. I have tried to stick with the "the" convention, but this is perhaps a matter of style. Where the word "Holocaust" is capitalized in mid-sentence, I think there can be no confusion about what is referred to, whether or not the word is preceded by "the", and inclusion of unnecessary "the" may lead to increased redlinks, redirects, etc. Add "the" if you wish, these are only my small thoughts, and I can't say that I've always consistently followed them..Mtsmallwood (talk) 23:49, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- When "Holocaust" occurs at the end of the category name, as opposed to the beginning, as with those you cited, I think there's little doubt that the "the" is needed. In English it's a word that is preceded by an article, whether it be "the", "a", or some other one. Different considerations apply for categories that start with "Holocaust" as the subject, since in English the article "the" or "a" is sometimes omitted when the noun it normally precedes is the start of a title (or in this case, a category name). Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:16, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Agreed.Mtsmallwood (talk) 00:33, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Regarding use of "the": it's not about the position in a sentence. It's whether Holocaust is being used in the usual sense, as a noun, which always requires "the" -- or as an adjectival, in which case it should not be used. It's no accident that both the main article, "The Holocaust", and the parent cat, Category:The Holocaust, use the definite article . The underlying issue is that as a generic term, "holocaust" isn't even capitalized, and is used like any other ordinary noun. But when referring to the World War II Holocaust -- the Shoah -- the definite article is required as an integral part of the term. Cgingold (talk) 12:45, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Btw, some of those sub-cats are improperly named -- so I'll comb through the parent cat and round them up for a group renaming. Cgingold (talk) 12:53, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- But does that mean it should be The Holocaust survivors instead of Holocaust survivors? I'm not so sure that the "the" is appropriate if leading the category name. Good Ol’factory (talk) 21:04, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- No, I certainly wouldn't insert a "the" there -- it's an adjectival usage just as it is in "Holocaust books" or "Holocaust films" (though I can see how that one seems slightly different, but it still functions as a descriptive modifier of "survivors"). Cgingold (talk) 21:38, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- A couple suggestions: 1) place the companies directly in Category:Holocaust perpetrators (why a specific category for companies separate from people?), or rename to Category:Companies that participated in the Holocaust. "Linked to" is far too vague, and "profited from" is prone to an absurd slippery slope as noted above if taken literally (as categories ultimately always are in practice). At a minimum though, I agree that "the" should be added when "Holocaust" is not the first word. Postdlf (talk) 00:34, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment -- I am criticised above. My concern was that we should not have a category for those who may be regarded as guilty by association, which can lead to the inclusion of some very nebulous links. How about Category:German companies of the Holocaust? I presume they will all be German. If necessary the limited scope of the category can be deined by a short headnote on the category page. Peterkingiron (talk) 12:37, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Actually, as and when more are added, some may well turn out to be Austrian or based in other modern countries formerly part of the Third Reich (or even - controversially - Swiss, if a strong enough case can be made) - the Third Reich was bigger than Germany; and "Third Reich companies of the Holocaust" is absurd. How about Category:Companies of the Third Reich, for those in the right place and period but less directly implicated in extermination-related practices, with a subcat Category:Companies of the Holocaust, as per User:Carlossuarez46 above, for those where such involvement is beyond doubt?HeartofaDog (talk) 14:10, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Delete - even if changed to any of the above suggestions, the inclusion standard is overly broad and vague. If one wanted to be exacting about it, any American company that made money during WW2, from defense contractors down to the Mom & Pop grocery, could arguably be said to have "profited" from the Holocaust or be "linked" to it. The problem with a category is that there is no way to explain how a company "profited from" or is "linked to" the Holocaust. "Companies of the Holocaust" is simply absurd. Companies did not perpetrate the Holocaust. Otto4711 (talk) 23:20, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Even if a firm definition needs work to thrash out, there is a wide and meaningful difference, as has been pointed out several times, between companies (a) such as Krupp and IG Farben, who made a huge profit directly from the exploitation of slave labour on a vast scale, or (b) such as the manufacturers of the crematorium ovens, who thus contributed very directly to the extermination programmes - ie, "Holocaust", not "World War II" - as opposed to the masses of other companies who made some money out of the fact that there was a war going on - ie, "World War II" but not "Holocaust". (I have no problem at all with the idea of including American companies if their demonstrable involvement is on a level with IG Farben, etc). If you don't like Companies of the Holocaust, fine; perhaps Companies directly contributing to the implementation of the Holocaust is better? In any event, I don't doubt that there is some form of words that WILL do the business - but the cat remains useful, and there is no reason why a proper definition can't be reached.HeartofaDog (talk) 01:15, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Listify and Delete. I have read this and don't see a consensus developing. I think the opposing points are that we need to keep the information and that the category has problems. A listify here may provide a point of compromise. We keep the information and can add the qualifications that are needed and can't be adequately covered in the category or its introduction. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:30, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment - I finally found the time & energy to give this a close and thorough reading -- and needless to say, there's no easy answer. I was mulling over the possibility of suggesting "Companies involved in the Holocaust" as an alternate proposal, and wondering if there was a slightly stronger term that might be used, when I remembered that Postdlf has already suggested "Companies that participated in the Holocaust". I think "participated in" may be preferable as it denotes a more active form of involvement. But either of these would be a real improvement over the current name, as "linked to" is clearly far too broad a term. (I'm sure Kevin Bacon can be "linked to the Holocaust" in some way...)
- Another, somewhat different approach would be to use a more restrictive name that builds on the fact that many of these companies have been sued over their direct involvement/participation in the Holocaust, with abundant documentation of their activities. (According to Historicist, "all of the companies listed ...have been sued".) This sort of category would be analagous to Category:People indicted for war crimes. Perhaps "Companies sued for their involvement in the Holocaust"?? (No doubt that can be improved upon.)
- To recap, I'm suggesting three possible options (or some variant) for consideration:
- I would not support placing these articles directly in Category:Holocaust perpetrators;
I would, though, suggest making this category (however named) a sub-cat of Category:Holocaust perpetrators. Cgingold (talk) 13:35, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Thoughts. The close link between private companies and the concentration camp system is well established in historical literature. Please review Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp for a well-written article about how this worked. In the Mauthausen-Gusen system, there were a 150 satellite camps, generally located close to the private enterprise that was contracting with the SS to use the inmates as labor. I think the SS got some kind of cut for shopping out the labor of their prisoners. And Mauthausen-Gusen was just part of a much broader pattern of course.
- My way of coming at the problem was by setting up Category:Companies linked to Holocaust. Now it may be that a broader approach such as Category:Economics of the Holocaust might be a better approach, with subcategories such as Category:War contractors using slave labor (that would be the Mauthausen-Gusen outfits for example, and category:Companies involved in concentration camp construction would cover I.G. Farben and Topf & Sons, etc..
- I would not be concerned about abuse of Category:Companies linked to Holocaust. Abuse and vandalism is possible with every category. Currently there are about 10 or 12 companies in Category:Companies linked to Holocaust. I don't see anyone making any objections to that categorization, particularly since most of these have been listed for some time at Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
- I don't like placing this category as a subcategory of Category:Holocaust perpetrators. To my mind, Holocaust perpetrators are individuals who have either been convicted of Holocaust-related conduct, or for whom extremely strong evidence exists of their involvement. I would only include organizations or companies if it were virtually certain that everyone, or at least a very great majority, of the employees or participants could also be deemed Holocaust perpetrators. An example of this would be Category:Nazi concentration camp personnel. There also needs to be some fairness to existing companies, such as Bayer and Siemens, and I think "linked to Holocaust" somewhat less perjorative than "Holocaust perpetrator". To my knowledge there is not a single private company which has been classified as a Holocaust perpetrator, so it would be something of a change to starting bringing in whole companies. On the other hand, individuals who worked for private companies, such as Bruno Tesch (chemist), the Zyklon B proponent, were tried and, in Tesch's case, even hung for their role in the Holocaust, and these people are of course properly categorized as Category:Holocaust perpetrators.
- I like the idea of Category:Companies sued for Holocaust role or something like that, again, possibly with an umbrella category of Category:Economics of the Holocaust. Mtsmallwood (talk) 21:46, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I have reconsidered & struck through my suggestion re Category:Holocaust perpetrators -- a ((CatRel)) link would be more appropriate. As for the further sub-divisions that you've suggested, my sense is that we are probably better off with a broader category, so I would rather focus on that for the time being. I would like to know what you think of the first two name options that I suggested, as there is a clear concensus that "linked to" is not suitable. Cgingold (talk) 00:36, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Note to closing admin: This should be relisted rather than closing as "no concensus". Cgingold (talk) 04:38, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Listify to List of companies involved in the Holocaust; if no consensus to listify, then delete. Unlike categories, lists can provide sourced information to explain why a particular case belongs. In this type of situation, where inclusion is controversial—and, if done carelessly, potentially libelous—and none of the category titles suggested so far are without problems (admittedly, some proposed titles, such as Companies involved in The Holocaust, are less problematic than others, such as Companies that profited from The Holocaust), it is crucial to explain a claim at the same time and place that it is made.
- Also, I do not think any form of Companies sued for X is a good scope for a category. Practically anyone can sue any company for any reason, so there is a high probability that this inclusion criterion will be non-defining for companies across various subjects. Conviction, not just accusation, should be the threshold for categorisation. –Black Falcon (Talk) 05:56, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Delete per otto, or if absolutely necessary, listify. --Kbdank71 17:53, 6 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Recap (keep) : I cannot agree with deletion of this category. There has been no dispute as to whether any of the companies currently in the category should be in the category. The historical record is replete with evidence of private profiteering from the Holocaust. While it may be unfortunate for Siemens, Bayer and so forth to have this history, it remains a part of history which cannot be expunged by pretending it didn't happen. Please note a major portion of the fine article Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp covers many of the companies described in this category and clearly establishes that the profit motive was a major factor in the Holocaust. If linked is still too broad, then I would agree with Category:Companies supplying murder and body disposal equipment for the Holocaust and Category:Companies using concentration camp slave labor, that would certainly solve any question of precision.Mtsmallwood (talk) 06:25, 9 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Having or not having a category has no effect on the existence or lack of the real-world connection of these firms w.r.t. to the Holocaust. The entire point of the nomination is not to suggest that the "linkage" does not exist, but rather to suggest that a WP category is not the ideal way to explain and illustrate what the connections were. This discussion has amply demonstrated the problems with trying to pack into a category name the details that really should be explained in a list article or in the articles about the firms themselves. Good Ol’factory (talk) 09:44, 9 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- The above is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.