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HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017036

House Oversight Committee
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secondary sources. Because Adolf Hitler is only one of many names, the list as a whole nevertheless exhibits strong evidence of suppression, especially because the measure we retained (median usage) is robust to such outliers.

3) Degenerate artists

The list of degenerate artists was taken directly from the catalog of a recent exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which endeavored to reconstruct the original ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition (Ref $15).

4) People with recorded ties to Nazis

The list of Nazi party members was generated in a manner consistent with the occupation categories in section 7. We included the following Wikipedia categories: Nazis_from_outside_Germany, Nazi_leaders, SS_officers, Holocaust_perpetrators, Officials_of_Nazi_Germany, Nazis_convicted_of_war_crimes, together with all of their subcategories, with the exception of Nazis_from_outside_Germany. In addition, the three categories German_Nazi_politicians, Nazi_physicians, Nazis were included without their respective subcategories.

III.9B. De Novo Identification of Censored and Suppressed Individuals

We began with the list of 56,500 people, comprising the 500 most famous individuals born in each year from 1800 — 1913. This list was derived from the analysis of all biographies in Wikipedia described in section 7. We removed all individuals whose mean frequency in the German language corpus was less than 5 x 10™ during the period from 1925 — 1933; because their frequency is low, a statistical assessment of the effect of censorship and suppression on these individuals is more susceptible to noise.

The suppression index is computed for the remaining individuals using an observed/expected measure. The expected fame for a given year is computed by taking the mean frequency of the individual in the German language from 1925-1933, and the mean frequency of the individual from 1955-1965. These two values are assigned to 1929 and 1960, respectively; linear interpolation is then performed in order to compute an expected fame value in 1939. This expected value is compared to the observed mean frequency in the German language during the period from 1933-1945. The ratio of these two numbers is the suppression index s. The complete list of names and suppression indices is included as supplemental data. The distribution of s was plotted for using a logarithmic binning strategy, with 100 bins between 10° and 10°. Three specific individuals who received scores indicating suppression in German are indicated on the plot by arrows (Walter Gropius, Pablo Picasso, and Hermann Maas).

As a point of comparison, the entire analysis was repeated for English; these results are shown on the plot.

III.9C. Validation by an expert annotator

We wanted to see whether the findings of this high-throughput, quantitative approach were consistent with the conclusions of an expert annotator using traditional, qualitative methods. We created a list of 100 individuals at the extremes of our distribution, including the names of the fifty people with the largest s value and of the fifty people with the smallest s value. We hired a guide at Yad Vashem with advanced degrees in German and Jewish literature to manually annotate these 100 names based on her assessment of which people were suppressed by the Nazis (S), which people would have benefited from the Nazi regime (B), and lastly, which people would not obviously be affected in either direction (N). All 100 names were presented to the annotator in a single, alphabetized list; the annotator did not have access to any of our methods, data, or conclusions. Thus the annotators assessment is wholly independent of our own.

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HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017036