The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 3)

In Part 2 of this series, we examined Sanning's distortion of a wartime Jewish source. In this third part, we examine his false dating of Nazi demographic data.

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Sanning builds a deliberate deception into Table 6 (p.75-78), which purports to show the populations of major cities in the Soviet Union (including former eastern Poland) immediately prior to the Nazi invasion of June 1941. Sanning’s footnote ‘j’ (p.78) reveals that most of these data are taken from a Nazi document written in January 1943:

j. Zentralblatt des Reichskommissars für die Ukraine, Rowno, 2. Jahrgang, No. 2, 9. January 1943, S. 8-20.

On page 85, Sanning uses this same document to note that the “local population living under German administration in the RK Ukraine numbered 16.91 million as of January 1, 1943.” Sanning must therefore know that the figures in Table 6 should apply to that date, not the date that the Nazis invaded the USSR, yet he still brazenly goes on to claim that reductions in the population of Ukraine between 1939 and January 1, 1943, were due entirely to Soviet action, despite the fact that the Nazis had been in the Ukraine for eighteen months at that point:

…the pre-war population of the Ukraine must have numbered more than 22.5m; however, the Germans found less than 17 million. One-quarter of the population had disappeared.

Sanning has therefore deliberately converted the Jews murdered by the Nazis between June 1941 and January 1943 into Soviet deportees by conflating the two dates and pretending the population data for January 1943 refer to June 1941.

Sanning's distortions concerning the Soviet Union are systematic. For example, Zimmerman has shown how Sanning repeatedly distorts sources relating to Soviet evacuation policy to give the misleading impression that most Jews were evacuated, when in fact those sources state explicitly that most Jews "could not or would not leave."

The date of Sanning’s Nazi source is also revealing because it coincides with that of the Korherr Report, which covered the same time frame as Sanning’s source (i.e. up the end of 1942) but openly admitted that the reductions in population were caused by Nazi policy. For example, at the foot of page 2 of his “short” report (which was specifically produced for Hitler’s attention), Korherr helpfully summarized the results of Nazi killings. Roberto has translated this table as follows:

Region; Time of Taking over of Power; Number of Jews before Taking over of Power; Number of Jews on 31.12.1942

Old Reich and Sudetenland; 30.1.1933 and 29.9.1938; 561,000 and 30,000; 51,327

Ostmark [Austria after annexation, translator’s note]; 13.3.1938; 220,000; 8,102

Bohemia and Moravia; 16.3.1939; 118,000; 15,550

Eastern Territories (with Bialystok); September 1939 (June 1940); 790,000; 233,210

General Government (with Lemberg); September 1939 (June 1940); 2,000,000; 297,914.

Sum Total; - ; 3,719,000; 606,103

Sanning’s failure to discuss this report reveals his discomfort with its contents. For example, Sanning's fraudulent figures are clearly exposed by the transportation data to the Operation Reinhard camps that can be found in the Korherr Report, and also in the Hoefle Telegram and Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. These all tell a similar story. Sanning had claimed that only 857,000 Jews were left in western Poland after the rest fled over the demarcation line, yet Korherr’s figures show that a higher number of Jews than this was transferred to the Reinhard camps and Chelmno:

Number passed through the camp in the general government [of Poland]... 1,274,166 [and] through the camp at Warthegau [Chelmno]…145,301

The Hoefle Telegram repeated the total of 1,274,166, consisting of 24,733 at Majdanek, 434,508 at Belzec, 101,370 at Sobibor and 713,555 at Treblinka.

Arad estimates the total transported at 1.7 million. Furthermore, Arad’s breakdown of transports from specific locations refutes Sanning’s claim that the reductions in population occurred before the Nazi invasion. For example, Sanning (p.42) claims that 50,000 Jewish refugees had been deported from Lvov by the Soviets, but Arad demonstrates that over 70,000 Jews were deported from Lvov to Belzec.