Template:Did you know nominations/Operation Harvest Festival

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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:31, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Operation Harvest Festival

Trenches at Majdanek where victims were shot
Trenches at Majdanek where victims were shot
  • ... that Operation Harvest Festival (site pictured) was the largest single massacre by German forces during the Holocaust? Source: Browning 2017, p. 230.

Improved to Good Article status by Buidhe (talk). Self-nominated at 06:35, 14 March 2020 (UTC).

  • This is a grim topic, thanks for working on it. Article is long enough, and was promoted within the requisite timeframe. Earwig's tool seems to be down, but I performed spot-checks for copyvios and found nothing of concern. I have a slight issue with the use of the section title "cleanup", which I appreciate might be military history jargon, but sounds a tiny bit crass to me (I don't think this reflects on the nominator at all, it's just a word choice issue). I might suggest something like "coverup" as the title, and using a longer explanation of what was going on in the text, ie "Removing all traces of the killing was a priority..." Also, minor concern with the hook; a google search suggests this was indeed the largest single killing of this nature, but I don't know if that specifically includes atrocities committed at death camps. As such I wonder if we should make that explicit, or at the very least, I wonder what the sources say about it. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:53, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
  • @Vanamonde93: I changed the article as suggested, thanks for your review!
  • Specific claims differ: USHMM says that "The killing at Majdanek was the largest single-day, single-location massacre during the Holocaust." Browning states "... in the great “harvest festival” (Erntefest) massacre, the single largest German killing operation against Jews in the entire war. With a victim total of 42,000 Jews in the Lublin district, Erntefest surpassed even the notorious Babi Yar massacre of more than 33,000 Jews outside Kiev. It was exceeded only by the Rumanian massacre of more than 50,000 Odessan Jews in October 1941." (original research suggests that he may have been wrong about Odessa because 34,000 is the figure for the largest individual massacre in Odessa [1]).
  • In comparison, the maximum number of Jews killed each day at Auschwitz was 12,000 [2], this paper suggests that 20,000 people may have been killed some days at Treblinka [3]. buidhe 22:23, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
  • @Buidhe: Looks good; sourcing, too; but perhaps we ought to say "largest single massacre", so as to distinguish from the broader events? Vanamonde (Talk) 02:44, 16 March 2020 (UTC)