Ksenia was moved to act in 2015 when she read a Wikipedia article about the “20 July Plot,” an unsuccessful 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler that was hatched by a group of senior Nazi officers who were concerned that Germany’s two-front fighting against both the USA and Britain and the Soviet Union was doomed to end in Germany’s military defeat. I want to be on the side of the victims: they didn’t get to survive and didn’t get to write self-serving memoirs like all these German generals who wrote about how upstanding they were.” Taking Action
I was picking up on these Holocaust distortions and obfuscations. “In a Wiki article about the SS functionary who set up the Riga Ghetto,” Ksenia recalls, referencing the rabid Nazi Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, “I read that he was a ‘prominent dentist’ and that he merely ‘resided in Riga’ during World War II. Ksenia found statements that seemed to be whitewashing Nazi history.Īs she read Wikipedia’s many articles on subjects related to the Holocaust, Ksenia found that some contained strange statements or terms that seemed to be whitewashing Nazi history. Anyone can become a Wikipedia contributor or editor and help build and shape the site’s information. Founded in 2001 by bond trader Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the internet, functioning as an encyclopedia using an “open-source” team of volunteer contributors and editors whose work is overseen by a not-for-profit group called Wikimedia Foundation. Like many of us, Ksenia occasionally turned to Wikipedia for information to elucidate some points. “I took a crash course in Holocaust history (through intense reading) because I realized there was such a gap in my knowledge.” Whitewashing Nazi History Ksenia began reading everything she could about the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews and others. “It was only as a young adult that I learned about the Holocaust.” Ksenia credits the 2002 movie The Pianist, which portrays a fictionalized account of the real-life Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, with opening her eyes to the intense horror of the Holocaust. In the Soviet Union, the Holocaust was not taught in depth. The book was a turning point in her understanding of World War II. Ksenia realized that her knowledge about it was superficial at best. The battle helped turn the tide of the war in favor of the Allies. One day fifteen years ago, she was visiting relatives and noticed a book about the Battle of Stalingrad, the intensely bloody conflict between German and Soviet forces at the Russian industrial city of Stalingrad during World War II. Ksenia grew up in the Soviet Union where she recalls that her history education “was very fragmentary and there were a lot of omissions.” She studied computational linguistics, then won a scholarship to attend business school in the Bay Area in California, and settled in the US. In a recent interview, Ksenia explained how she embarked on this monumental task and what still needs to be done. The Silicon Valley history buff has spent years correcting thousands of articles on Wikipedia that showed a pro-Nazi bias or soften accounts of Nazi atrocities during World War II. If you’ve ever consulted Wikipedia for topics related to World War II, it’s likely that you’ve read some of her work. Ksenia Coffman might be one of the most influential historians you’ve never heard of.