Wikipedia had an entry for more than 15 years on its English-language website about a death camp in Warsaw that did not exist in real life, Haaretz reported on Friday.
The entry for the camp, also known as "Konzentrationslager Warschau," said that the gas chamber there killed "well above 212,000, mainly Poles and several thousand of non-Polish."
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There is no historical evidence of German gas chambers ever existing in Warsaw, making the entry arguably the longest-running hoax ever uncovered on the online encyclopedia. Even the Wikipedia entry for extermination camps had KL Warschau listed alongside Auschwitz for over 12 years.
The page was written in August 2004 by late Wikipedia editor Krzysztof Machocki, a spokesperson for the Polish branch of Wikimedia, and was completely rewritten this August. The hoax was discovered by an Israeli editor with the username Icewhiz who rewrote the article to reflect the truth.
The false facts pertaining to the death-camp hoax included real facts associated with concentration camps.
Haaretz said that Icewhiz's claims reveal the existence of what seems to be "a systematic effort by Polish nationalists to whitewash hundreds of Wikipedia articles relating to Poland and the Holocaust."
According to Professor Havi Dreifuss, head of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum, "This baseless story … is sadly gaining traction today as part of a wider attempt in Poland to distort the history of the Holocaust. By pulling another 200,000 victims out of thin air, they're trying to equate what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust to what happened to Poles during the Holocaust."
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.
