Over 17 years ago Jonathan Harisson finished his series The Crazy World of Walter Sanning criticizing The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, the 1980s "revisionist" attempt of study of Jewish demography.
Sanning is still taken seriously by many Holocaust deniers. Deanna Spingola heavily refered to The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry in The Ruling Elite: Death, Destruction, and Domination published in 2014. Don't forget about Ryan Faulk. Or X Nazi star Karl Radl.
In the first part of the book Sanning tried to explain fate of Soviet Jewry. He argued 5,337,000 Jews lived in the USSR on the eve of Operation Barbarossa and out of them 1,030,000 lost their lives during the war - 700,000 in Siberia, 200,000 serving in the Red Army and 130,000 Jewish civilians in front-line and German-occupied territory (Sanning, Dissolution, p. 106).
For comparison, Mark Kupovetsky concluded non-Holocaust losses of Soviet Jewry were following - 170,000 Soviet-Jewish soldiers and partisans, 60,000 Soviet-Jewish civilians in front-line areas, 50,000 in Soviet hinterland and 15,000 in GULAG - totally less than 300,000. According to Kupovetsky not less than 2.5 million Soviet Jews died in the Holocaust (Mark Kupovetsky, 'Jewish Population Losses during World War II within the Prewar and Postwar Borders of the USSR', in: Alfred Kokh and Pavel Polian (eds.), Denial of the Denial, or the Battle of Auschwitz, pp. 166-167).
Notice Sanning exaggerated Jewish deaths in Soviet interior by 635,000! He claimed 600,000 Polish-Jewish refugees perished in Siberia - calculating this figure by subtracing 157,500 Jews repatriated to Poland after the war from his grotesquely inflated number of Polish Jews deported by Soviet authorities (Sanning, Dissolution, p. 103).
Sanning paid special attention to Polish Jewry. He suggested that after 1933 annually 100,000 Jews left Poland and refered to Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (Ibid., p. 30-31). This contradicts official Polish statistics, which recorded 109,716 Jewish emigrants in 1931-1937 (Pavel Polian, 'The Demography and Statistics of the Holocaust', in: Kokh/Polian (eds.), Denial of the Denial, p. 240).
The study published by Institute for Contemporary History that Sanning relied upon was Hermann Graml's "Die Auswanderung der Juden aus Deutschland zwischen 1933 und 1939". The only Graml's source was Mark Wischnitzer's "Die Juden an der Welt" from 1935, whose very year of publication speaks to its irrelevance. Wischnizer talks about the 1920s, and Graml, perhaps, did not quite understand him. (Ibid., p. 272).
Jewish emigration from Poland during the 1930s decade was really low despite certain Polish groups wanted to make it much larger:
„The Budget Committee of the Polish Sejm discussed the issue of Jewish emigration from Poland. The rapporteur on this matter Walewski stated that between 1926 and 1936 18,000 Jews emigrated from Poland per a year, barely 60 percent of the natural increase of Polish Jewish population. If this issue is to be resolved definitively, then at least 100,000 Jews must emigrate from Poland annually.“
(Lidove noviny, 22nd January 1938, p. 4)
Sanning believed most of the alleged 100,000s unrecorded Polish-Jewish emigrants went to the USA. American Jewish population rose from 4,228,000 in 1927 to 5,199,200 in 1943, by 971,200. Sanning insisted such growth can't be explained by 220,000 officially recorded Jewish immigrants and natural increase (Sanning, Dissolution, pp. 156-158).
Total excess of births over deaths 751,200 per 16 years with initial population 4,228,000 and terminal population 5,199,200 means natural increase just under 1 percent per a year. This is actually plausible. In New York in 1932 Jewish annual natural increase averaged 0.9 percent, as Dr. Julius Mahler observed (Arthur Ruppin, The Jewish Fate and Future, p. 79).
American immigration statistics reveal 6,300 Polish Jews entered the USA in 1935-1939 and 8,600 in 1930-1934 (part of them obviously before the 1931 Polish census).
Sanning, too, quoted a statement made in 1943 by Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long that a majority of the 580,000 refuges who entered the United States since 1933 were Jews. The problem is that Long would later correct himself by saying that 580,000 visas had been issued, but less than half were utilized because the victims could not reach the United States.
After the invasion of Poland according to Sanning 850,000 Polish Jews fled German zone to the Soviet zone or Romania and at most 757,000 Polish Jews got under German control (Sanning, Dissolution, p. 42).
Well, only in Warsaw and Lodz ghetto 392,911 and 156,402 Jewish prisoners respectively were counted in 1940, totally 549,313, not including 10,000s transfered there later (Isaiah Trunk, Lodz Ghetto, pp. 96-97; Isaiah Trunk, 'Epidemics and Mortality in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1939-1942', in: Michael R. Marrus (ed.),The Nazi Holocaust. Part 6: The Victims of the Holocaust. Volume 1, p. 8).
Himmler’s statistician Richard Korherr reported that out of estimated 2,790,000 Jews who lived before the war in territories of the General Government and annexed Polish areas 1,496,000 were „evacuated“ by the end of 1942 and 530,000 remained at the beginning of 1943. Korherr still covered neither horrifying mortality rate in ghettoes nor mass killing operations outside extermination camps.
One Holocaust denier named Stephen Challen tried to bring Korherr report into accord with alleged flight of most of Polish Jewry from Nazi rule and came up with absurd hypothesis that Korherr on Himmler’s order exagerrated number of evacuated Polish Jews by 1 million (Stephen Challen, Richard Korherr and His Reports, p. 43).
It should be noted that Challen’s pamphlet was published several years before discovery of the Hoefle telegram.
This introduction already exposed serious errors in Sanning’s work. But we have just started.

