Croatian Wikipedia Removes ‘Polish Genocide of Germans’ Claim

German tanks near the city of Bydgoszcz, during the invasion of Poland, September 1939. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/German Federal Archives.

Croatian Wikipedia has amended its entry on the history of the Polish city of Gdansk after daily newspaper Jutarnji list reported on its false claims about a ‘Polish genocide of Germans’.

Jutarnji list reported on Tuesday that the unattributed claim – with no supporting literature or sources cited – was made in a section about the cause of Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, which triggered World War II.

Before it was amended, the Croatian Wikipedia entry claimed that the Hitler demanded that Gdansk and the nearby city of Gdynia be handed over to Germany, and the war started when Warsaw refused.

“But this was preceded by the ethnic cleansing of Germans by Poland and its allies, with some estimates of around 58,000 killed and missing. Such genocide and terror against the German population continued in other Polish cities, which was the real cause of Hitler’s attack on Poland,” Jutarnji list quoted the unamended Croatian Wikipedia entry as saying.

These two sentences were then removed from the Croatian Wikipedia entry on Tuesday evening by an unknown user, only to be put back up within a few hours by a another user named Mateo K 01.

The two sentences were then removed again by an administrator using the name Kubura.

Kubura also removed a sentence saying that the majority of Jews left Gdansk before the attack, but that the Germans arrested and deported a number of Poles.

The two controversial sentences were first added to the entry in May 2017.

BIRN reported on Monday that historians do not consider Croatian Wikipedia a reliable and accurate source of information, particularly when it comes to events from World War II.

One of its most problematic entries is about the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp, which was run by the Croatian fascist Ustasa movement.

After BIRN’s report, the Jasenovac entry on Croatian Wikipedia was amended several times.

User Ivan Djordjevic added in the first paragraph of the entry on Jasenovac a claim that the camp “was known for its barbarity and a big number of victims”, citing War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration, a book by Croatian-born historian Jozo Tomasevich.

The same user also added a photo of what are claimed to be Serb prisoners in the camp in 1942.

A user called Zeljko then removed all Djordjevic’s changes on Wednesday evening.

Djordjevic restored the changes later the same evening, then user Mateo K 01 removed them all, as well a line about a former camp official who admitted to a Zagreb court in 1948 that 63 children were murdered using Zyklon B gas.

Djordjevic put back the part on the use of gas, and added a section entitled “Methods and means of mass destruction of people in Jasenovac”. Mateo K 01 then removed the section but left the sentence on Zyklon B.