User talk:Paul Siebert

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Welcome! Hello, Paul Siebert, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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A barnstar for your efforts

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Disambiguation link notification for March 26

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Allies of WWII

Hello Paul Siebert

You reverted my edit to this article with the explanation "by allies we do not mean those that signed a military alliance with UK." What then is the definition the article uses for an allied power? The first sentence states that the Allies "were an international military coalition" and a "military coalition is defined as " a group that temporarily agrees to work together in order to achieve a common goal." You can't have a military coalition without some form of formal agreement and the agreement that formally attached the Soviet Union to the other allied powers was the Anglo-Soviet agreement (given that the UK was the only major power formally at war with the Axis at that time). The Soviet Union didn't automatically "join" the allies the moment it was attacked by Germany, it joined them when a formal military agreement was signed with the leading allied power at the time. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 23:44, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Actually, that is tricky. If we are too focused on formal alliances, we face an obvious problem: there were no Allies after the fall of France till 22th of June, 1941, because the United Kingdom was fighting alone (I write "United Kingdom, not "Great Britain", which is important in this case). Furthermore, the coalition that was fighting with the Axis from September 1939 till June 1940 was the remnant of Entente cordiale, former Triple Entente (the WWI time formation). It ceased to exist after fall of France, and a new alliance formalized after 22th of June, 1941 and then extended after 7th of December, 1941.

Therefore, if we will be too formal, we should speak about different alliances during different periods of WWII.

Therefore, the most logical solution would be to focus on real military activity: who declared war on whom. If two states declared was on the same opponent, they should be considered de facto allies. The war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany started in June 1941, which means it became the Ally in June. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:35, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I see your point and agree that it's not straightforward, but this article and other articles on WWI and WWII focus on formal alliances and we should strive for consistency within articles. The Allies continued to exist as a formal grouping after the defeat of France in 1940. The first inter-allied war conference was in early June 1941 and included the UK, its Dominions, and the governments-in-exile of Poland and other nations. So there was a formal grouping of allies which the Soviet Union joined in July 1941. Remember also that China was at war with Japan for several years before it formally joined the allies in January 1942. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 01:22, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Scope of Evidence

Hi Paul. I wanted to note that I removed the section "Highly misleading edit summaries and wrong pretext for removal" as it is out of scope for the case. The scope of this case is Conduct of named parties in the topic areas of World War II history of Poland and the history of the Jews in Poland, broadly construed. Please let me know if you have any questions. Barkeep49 (talk) 16:20, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Barkeep49:.

I respectfully disagree. The scope on the case is Holocaust in Poland. If we consider the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact illegal (and the majority of scholars agree with that), the territory of modern Ukraine that belonged to Poland before WWII is considered as a part of Poland at least until 1945 (when an agreement about new borders in Europe was achieved). Taking into account that Ukrainian nationalists were active mostly in the territory that belonged to Poland before WWII, it would be correct to include the discussion of their activity into this case: we are discussing not "Jews and Poles", but "Jews in Poland", and such cities as Lwow or Stanislav should be considered as Polish cities until 1945.

Actually, many authors include the Holocaust victims in Western Ukraine and Western Belogussia into the Holocaust in Poland death (now Holocaust in the USSR), so it would be utterly incorrect to exclude them from the scope of the current case.

Paul Siebert (talk) 20:21, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

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WW2 rapes

Hi, thanks for your edit. A few years ago I came across a Youtube video about rapes during the war. To be honest, until then I thought rapes were almost exclusively perpetrated by Soviet soldiers in Germany as revenge. However, I was shocked to learn that the Germans actually raped more women in the occupied territories than the Soviets did. Later I found out about an old Russian film called "Come and See", where it shows women raped by the Germans in Belarus. Until today I have no idea about rapes committed by Western Allies, so I won't comment on that. I don't think Wikipedia should reinforce false conceptions by presenting only Soviet rapes without mentioning, at least briefly, all the German rapes. Trying to be balanced here. This is about proper WP:DUE and presenting the reader with historical facts, not 'whataboutism' and apologism on either side.--Melvin Jansen (talk) 17:07, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Actually, before 2000 it was believed that the rapes in the Western occupation zone were committed mostly by Moroccan French and black Americans, which perfectly fits into the racist stereotype about "White gentlemen vs hordes of Asian-African-Negro rapists". It was implicitly or explicitly assumed that any sexual contact between a white woman and Black (of Soviet, which was pretty much the same) could not be anything but a rape.

In reality, as I found in of article, the difference between American and Russian solder was that the former was giving some food to a German woman, and they went to a bed, whereas in the case of the Russian solder, the sequence was the opposite.

Or course, the cases of brutal gang rapes were quite common in the East, partially because Soviet solders had witnessed the things that American solders were even unable to imagine. However, as many sources note, the sexual contacts between German woman and Soviet men covered the broad spectrum, from brutal rapes to a pure prostitution (the latter was necessary because German woman just needed to eat something). And, to get abortion, they had to explain a reason, and according to German regulations (actually, according to the Goebbels racial law, which, surprisingly, was still active in the occupied Germany) a legitimate reason was a rape by an untermensch. Therefore, virtually every woman who needed an abortion had to declare that she was raped by a Mongol (or Negro, depending on whether it was in the East of West). And the statistics of "Russian" children born in post-war Germany allowed one German statistician to obtain a figure of up to 2 million rapes.

These figures are compared with the statistics of reported cases in the Western occupation zone. And this comparison of appleas and oranges lead scholars to a conclusion that all rapes occurred mostly in the Soviet zone.

The rapes in the Western zone was a totally ignored topic: neither scholars nor journalists studied them. However, during the last decade, some authors made a detailed study of the rapes in the West. First, Miriam Gebhardt. Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), applied the same approach as that used previously to study the rapes in the Eastern zone to the West Germany, and she found the following. The Western Allies committed several hundreds thousands rapes.

Furthermore, Thomas J. Kehoe and E. James Kehoe (Crimes Committed by U.S. Soldiers in Europe, 1945-1946. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Summer 2016), pp. 53-84) analyzed the large set of statistical data, and they came to essentially the same conclusions, although they believe some figures obtained by Gebhardt were, to some degree, exaggerated.

However, in general, the conclusions made by these authors are pretty much the same.

Even before that, majority of authors who wrote about Soviet rapes strongly criticized the attempts to deconextualise those events, and, according to them, the proper context was the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities in the occupied Eastern Europe. Every good scholarly study always provides a needed context (in contrast to many popular articles or films).

WRT "Come and see", Elem Klimov in one of his interviews about that film said that the film doesn't tell truth. He said that they told just a part of truth, for real truth was too terrible. By the way, some of the actors who played in that movies were local people who survived actual German atrocities during the war (they were young kids during the war).

German rapes in Eastern Europe is a "dark matter" for several reasons. First, because it was a lesser evil (as compared to everything else, so the victims preferred not to remember it). Second, the number of survived victims or witness is low (usually, the victims, especially Jewish, were murdered after the rape). Third, this information was officially suppressed by Soviet authorities for many reasons. Finally, for decades, the West was seeing the Eastern Front history mostly through German perspective: due to the Iron Curtain, the information from the East was scarce, whereas German memoirs and documents were pretty available, and, taking into account that the post-war Germany was actively pushing the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth, it is not a surprie that people in the West know nothing about that. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:39, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

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Allies of WWII info box

Hello Paul Siebert

You probably won't believe this, but my reversion of the info box to the July date for the Soviet Union was accidental. I meant to revert it to the stable version before the RfC. My apologies for this. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 22:42, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

I have no reason not to trust you. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:57, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

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