The Number of Jews in Europe on the Eve of the Holocaust

Somebody requested in a Holocaust denial forum on my blog article Seriously Now, Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go? that "the issue of these transported Jews" shall be "addressed correctly and precisely" by deniers. Brilliant idea! But also pretty naive - we are not calling that place "the cesspit" for nothing. Readily illustrated by the emoderator "Hannover" with his nervous attempt of damage control. High spam factor, little relevance and zero impact on the issue at the hand.

The deniers Graf, Mattogno and Kues? Already addressed in the same blog posting.

Babi Yar? A well documented Nazi massacre.

Jews in labour camps west of Treblinka and "Jews evacuated to USSR during war" prior Nazi occupation? Does not deal with the fate of unfit Jews "evacuated to the East" during Nazi occupation.

"1,250,000 – 1,500,000 Polish Jews homeless in Europe" (although carelessly attributed to Polish Jews in a letter by Stephen Wise, the figure actually refers to all Jews outside the Soviet Union) and an "Influx of 3,000,000 JEWS" after the war? That's from the same bag of denier's trick and ignores that a figure of 3 - 4 million Jews in Europe after the war is the order of magnitude expected after the decimation of 5-6 million anyway. It does not help to explain away the Jewish losses during the war. But let's have a closer look at this one.

How many Jews had there been on the eve of the mass extermination of Jews in continental Europe (i.e., always without Great-Britain)? Let's start with how many Jews the Nazis estimated had been in Europe. This is complemented by estimations after the war as well a more recent monograph on Holocaust demographics.

Nazi killing methods

How many of Nazi Germany’s murder victims were killed by gassing, how many by shooting, how many by other methods?

And yet another mention of six million …

… can be found in the WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2015:

Tobacco use claimed an estimated 100 million lives worldwide during the 20th century, and remains a serious and growing global health threat (2). With around 6 million lives lost annually, tobacco-related diseases claim more lives than HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Implementing the evidence-based, legally binding provisions of WHO’s FCTC to their fullest extent represents the world’s best chance of reducing this toll.

The WHO must be full of "kabbalists".

Yet another mention of six million Jews from 1942 …

… can be found in the Stellungnahme und Gedanken zum Generalplan Ost des Reichsführers SS ("Opinion and Ideas Regarding the General Plan for the East of the Reichsführer-SS"), dated April 27, 1942 and written by Dr. Erhard Wetzel, the director of the Central Advisory Office on Questions of Racial Policy at the National Socialist Party, which is mentioned here and here.

Readers may ask what Wetzel’s mention of a "5 to 6 million" order of magnitude is supposed to mean.

That would be a good question, and the answer would be: it means that, based on what was known to him, Wetzel assumed there were about 5 to 6 million Jews in the area he was referring to at the time of his writing.

Now ask this question to "Revisionists". In their conspiracy theories, mentions of the number "6 million" prior to the end of World War II apparently mean something more.

6 million

This is about the number of Jews who lost their lives to Nazi persecution and mass murder during World War II, according to the highest estimates. Lower estimates, including those mentioned here, point to a number somewhere between 5 and 6 million, the estimates of Gerald Reitlinger even to a range of numbers somewhat below 5 million.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961 movie)

The 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark and Maximilian Schell, is a fictionalized dramatization of the Nuremberg "Justice Case", officially called "United States of America vs. Josef Altstoetter, et al".

Before I state my opinion about this film, some cautionary remarks about what I consider its weakest part, the presentation of documentary footage about Nazi crimes commented by prosecuting attorney Colonel Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark) after having been sworn in as a witness (1:30:22 to 1:36.07).  

Germs vs. guns, or death from mass violence in perspective

On 30 July 1932, Albert Einstein sent an open letter to Sigmund Freud, addressing the causes of wars and the possible means of putting an end to armed conflict. A translation of the letter is available on this page, together with a translation of Freud’s reply dated September 1932, which included the following considerations:

Ich möchte aber noch eine Frage behandeln, die Sie in Ihrem Schreiben nicht aufwerfen und die mich besonders interessiert. Warum empören wir uns so sehr gegen den Krieg, Sie und ich und so viele andere, warum nehmen wir ihn nicht hin wie eine andere der vielen peinlichen Notlagen des Lebens? Er scheint doch naturgemäß, biologisch wohlbegründet, praktisch kaum vermeidbar.

This was translated as follows:

However, I would like to deal with a question which, though it is not mooted in your letter, interests me greatly. Why do we, you and I and many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life's odious importunities? For it seems a natural thing enough, biologically sound and practically unavoidable.

An interesting question: what is it that makes war less acceptable than other calamities that befall and have befallen mankind? Why does it get more attention, at least by those who speak up against it, than other causes of human suffering? Is it a more voracious or crueler killer and tormentor than those other causes?

Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?

After two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, the question has been solved as concerns numbers, according to a 2011 article in The New York Review of Books by American historian Timothy Snyder.

With 11 million non-combatants deliberately killed plus another one million foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps, Hitler was clearly ahead of Stalin, whose analogous record was approximately six million deliberately killed and nine million if foreseeable deaths among deportees, Gulag prisoners and others are included.

Snyder's figures for Hitler are not much lower than those of German historian Dieter Pohl and mine.

Six Million

[Author clarification Saturday October 29, 2016: The original version of this article was subjected to at least one brainless interpretation. Its intention was to refute the claim by Holocaust Deniers that "6 million" was a Holocaust number fabricated at the end of the war that was based on pre-1939 predictions of Jewish catastrophe. Deniers say 6 million was the dominant figure in Jewish culture before the Holocaust regarding a predicted imminent disaster. This article shows that this was not the case as far as quotes in the press are concerned.]

[See here for a rebuttal of this meme.]

In 1905, the Jewish population of the Russian Empire (including Poland) was counted as 6,060,415. This figure was still being used by American Jewish sources in 1917 (AJC Yearbook, 1916-1917, p. 276). It therefore logically follows that American Jewish organizations seeking aid for their brethren in that region would cite a 6 million figure.

However, the Google News Archive returns these hits for the period 1905-1939:

"Five Million Jews": 42
"Six Million Jews": 44
"Three Million Jews": 57
"Millions of Jews": 1,520


Moreover, stories relating to the imminent starvation, deportation or annihilation of 5 million (not six) can be found here and here and here and here. Similar stories referring to "three million Jews" are here and here. The second article asks for help "so that three million Jews shall not perish from the face of the earth."

A Critique of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands

Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands is all about murder – the murder of about 14 million people by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin in an area comprising "in today’s terms, St. Petersburg, and the western rim of the Russian Federation, most of Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine" (page 384), which the author calls the "bloodlands".

Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder

Today a friend sent me a link to an interview given last week to The Economist by Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, about Snyder’s "controversial" book Bloodlands.

Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (3)

I. Introductions
II. Documents and Numbers
IV. Techno-babble and Conclusions

Before I move to the next part of my comments about Mr. "Dalton"'s response to Andrew Mathis and me following our radio conversation with Kevin Barrett on American Freedom Radio, I shall publish what my fellow interviewee Andrew Mathis has to say about item (4) of said response, which was discussed in my previous blog.

Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (2)

I. Introductions
III. Policy
IV. Techno-babble and Conclusions

II. Documents and Numbers

In his response to Andrew Mathis and me following our radio conversation with Kevin Barrett on American Freedom Radio, "Revisionist" author "Thomas Dalton" writes:

(3) On the Korherr report, it is true that I do not address it in my book Debating the Holocaust. This is because it is, in my estimation, an insignificant and inconclusive matter in the overall debate. The report was not secret, and nothing in it points to mass killing of Jews. It does, however, talk about mass evacuations, which were indeed occurring at that time (early 1943). And there are internal contradictions, in that the conclusions do not follow from the statistics, which suggests either significant error or ulterior motives of some kind. Finally, Korherr himself stated in 1977 that the “special treatment” cited in the report referred to “Jews who were to be resettled,” not killed.

Old Herrings in a New Can: Thomas Dalton’s Debating the Holocaust (1)

They say one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and I agree with that.

Experience also tells me that one shouldn't praise a book after reading its introduction and the first one or two chapters, for what comes later may fall short of what the beginning makes you hope for.

But does one go wrong in dismissing a book as thinly disguised propaganda, written by an author with an obvious un-confessed agenda, when its introduction and first chapter strongly point in this direction already?

5 million non-Jewish victims? (Part 2)

[Updated on 15.05.2013 to replace "Allied requisition policies" with "Axis requisition policies" in the section about Greece]

[Updated on 04.04.2012 to replace broken links to the former RODOH forum.]

Part 1

In the following I shall attempt a country-by country tabulation of non-Jews who perished through criminal violence by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II, i.e. of non-Jews who died at the hands of the Nazi “killing apparatus” as defined in Part 1.

This tabulation, which lays no claim to being scientific and is open to any constructive criticism that may lead to improving its accuracy, is based on data known to me from various sources as well as my own estimates. Where I have no data from other sources at my disposal, I use the very detailed Wikipedia page on World War II casualties and other information provided by Wikipedia.

5 million non-Jewish victims? (Part 1)

[Updated on 04.04.2012 to replace broken links to the former RODOH forum.]

[Update, 25.11.2018: I corrected the information about the time at which Europe-wide genocide was decided upon according to Christopher Browning. Thanks to Sergey Romanov for bringing this to my attention.]

Part 2

When running a Google search for information about non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder, one of the first pages to show up is this one, which is headed “Five Million Forgotten” and links to a site called “Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust • Five Milion Forgotten”, hosted by Terese Pencak Schwartz. This site is also linked to by The Holocaust History Project (link # 22) and referred to there as being “A site focusing on the 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust”.

One might think that …

… the Nazis’ crimes during World War II amounted mainly or exclusively to killing Jews in the gas chambers of a number of extermination camps, especially Auschwitz-Birkenau. For this is what so-called "Revisionists", those crazy folks generally motivated by admiration of the Nazi regime and/or hatred of Jews, predominantly focus on.