actual Jewish population of Poland in 1939

[uberjude]

But there it is. The data I cite may very well be wrong, but at least I'm citing actual data and not just expressing my desire.

[Piotr Kapuscinski]

and yet the 1939 estimate is that there were about 3.3 million Jews in Poland. Is this number correct?

According to "Prawo wyznaniowe" by Michał Pietrzak, after the Invasion of Poland III Reich occupied 189,000 square km of Poland with over 22 million inhabitants - including ca. 18,5 million Poles, 2,2 million Jews, 0,6 million Germans, 0,5 million Ukrainians, while the USSR occupied circa 200,000 square km of Poland with over 13 million inhabitants, including over 5 million Poles, ca. 5 million Ukrainians, ca. 2 million Belarusians and over 1 million Jews.

This results in 3,2 million Jews in Poland in 1939 (or 3,2 million +), but only 2,2 million under German occupation.

Source: page 137, chapter V: "Sytuacja związków wyznaniowych w okresie drugiej wojny światowej"

If the Jewish population of the area that became the Generalgouvernment had been 1.3 million in 1931, then a population of 1.7 million in 1940 would have represented an increase of 30% in only 9 years.

You forgot about massive deportations carried out by Germans since 1939 - deportations of Polish (with the exception of Poles judged as "acceptable racial material") and Jewish population from the areas of Poland annexed by Germany to the so called Generalgouvernment, which was part of the planned extermination of Jewish and Polish nations and at the same time part of the planned Germanization of Polish territories which were annexed by III Reich in 1939.

Polish territories annexed by III Reich on 08.10.1939 were:

- Pomorze
- Poznańskie Voivodeship
- part of Łódzkie Voivodeship with the city of Łódź
- Upper Silesia
- Dąbrowskie Industrial Area
- western poviats of Krakowskie Voivodeship
- several poviats of Warszawskie Voivodeship

[Piotr Kapuscinski]

Here an article about deportations from Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreussen (which was only part of annexed territories):

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 01946.html

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 01947.html

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 01948.html

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 01949.html

Since 1939 until 1943 between 121,765 and 170,000 Polish and Jewish people were deported from Pomorze (Pomerelia) alone, of them at least 91,533 to the Generalgouvernment and at least 30,232 deported during the process of so called "internal deportations", mainly to compulsory work camps. During the same period at least 130,000 Germans came to Pomorze (the family of Erika Steinbach was among them), including at least 57,000 Germans from Eastern Europe.

These Germans settled in property stolen from Polish and Jewish people who were deported or murdered.

[michael mills]

Since 1939 until 1943 between 121,765 and 170,000 Polish and Jewish people were deported from Pomorze (Pomerelia) alone, of them at least 91,533 to the Generalgouvernment and at least 30,232 deported during the process of so called "internal deportations", mainly to compulsory work camps.

The problem with these statistics is that they do not distinguish between Jewish and Polish deportees.

It is reasonable to assume that almost all of these deportees were ethnic Poles, since there were very few Jews living in the area that became Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreussen in 1939.

The Jews who had lived in the German provinces that were ceded to Poland after the First World War (West Prussia, Posen province, East Upper Silesia) were German citizens, and nearly all of them chose to move to Germany rather than remain to live under Polish rule.

Any Jews living in Pomerelia in 1939 were persons from former Russian Poland who had moved to the former German territories after 1918, like the Poles who moved to the new city of Gdynia. In fact, the entire Polish population of Gdynia was expelled toward the end of 1939 (a Swedish journalist reported that the city was empty), so it is likely that a large part of the up to 170,000 persons expelled from Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreussen consisted of the population of Gdynia.

The Reichsgau Wartheland had a much larger Jewish population (over 300,000) because in addition to the former German Posen Province it also included former Russian Polish territory around Lodz, so the number of Jews expelled into the Generalgouvernment from that area was probably larger than the number expelled from Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreussen.

As I previously wrote, German documents show that there had been plans to expel 400,000 Jews from the annexed territories into the Generalgouvernment, but that expulsion never eventuated in full since Himmler forbade the movement of Jews early in 1940, in response to Frank's protests.

[michael mills]

Uberjude wrote on 30 November last year:

But since you seem to have a certain respect for German efficiency, I'll offer the Korherr Report, which, though it was produced in 1943, presents the estimates for what the Jewish population of Poland was in 1937. Apparently, Korherr didn't get the memo from Poland, because he gives a figure of 3.3 million, in 1937.

I have now found some interesting statistics darwn from the Korherr report, in the recent book by the anti-Zionist leftist Anglo-Jewish historian Mark Mazower, "Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe" (Allen Lane, 2008).

The statistics occur in a table with the title "The Decline of the Jewish Population in Central Europe", at the top of page 390 in the chapter "The Final Solution: The Jewish Question". The figures are derived from the Korherr Report.

According to that table, there was substantial emigration from the Annexed Eastern Territory (Danzig-Westpreussen, Wartheland, Ostoberschlesien, Bialystok) since September 1939, and from the Generalgouvernement since September 1939 in the case of the original four districts and since June 1940 in the case of the lemberg District conquered from the Soviet Union.

The figures given are 335,000 from the Annexed Eastern Territory and 428,000 from the Generalgouvernement, making a total of 763,000 emigrants since the beginning of the war. Where did these emigrants go, after the outbreak of hostilities? Some fled south to Slovakia and Hungary, but by far the main movement was eastwards, across the demarcation line into the Soviet Zone of Occupation, and from there depp into the Soviet interior, particularly to the tashkent area. A small number made across Siberia and reached Japan, Shanghai, and some eventually the United States and other destinations.

The number of 763,000 emigrants seems very high, however. The normal estimate for the number of jews who fled east into the Soviet Zone of Occupation is normally given at around 300,000. It seems impossible that an additional 400,000 could have fled to Slovakia and Hungary.

The answer I think lies in the way Korherr most probably derived the number, which was by subtracting known figures from an assumed total. Those known figures were the number of Jews "evacuated", ie taken to an extermination centre and killed there, and the number remaining in camps and ghettos; both these figures are known to have been sourced by Korherr from various German offices on location.

The figures given by Korherr for "evacuation" until the end of 1942 are:

Annexed Eastern Territory:...................................222,000
Generalgouvernement:.....................................1,274,000

Total:.........................................................1,496,000

His figures for Jews remaining in camps and ghettos in Poland as at the end of 1942 are:

Annexed Eastern Territory:...............................233,000
Generalgouvernement:....................................298,000

Total:......................................................531,000

Total "evacuated" and remaining, as at end 1942:....2,027,000

It is most likely that Korherr simply took that total of "evacuated" and remaining Jews, which was a "hard" figure derived from counts made by the German authorities of the number of Jews they had sent to extermination centres and the numbers remaining in camps and ghettos, and subtracted it from a "soft" figure, ie an assumed total of the number of Jews living in 1939 in the areas that became the Generalgouvernement and the Annexed Eastern Territory, to arrive at an estimate of the number of emigrants, another "soft" figure.

Adding 2,027,000 and 763,000 yields 2,790,000, which must be Korherr's estimate of the number of Jews who lived in the areas that became the Generalgouvernement and the Annexed Eastern Territory. Subtracting that figure from the 3.3 million which Korherr assumed was the total number of Jews living in Poland yields 510,000 as the number of Jews living in the eastern areas of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 which did not become part of the Generalgouvernement after 1941, ie Volhynia, Polesie,the Vilna region; that figure actually corresponds quite well to the figures for those areas given in the 1931 census.

That in turn leads to an explanation of the strangely high figures of 763,000 "emigrants" between september 1939 and the end of 1942; of Korherr's assumed total of 3.3 million Jews in Poland in 1939 is inflated, then the total number of "emigrants" is inflated by the same amount.

Let us assume that the total number of Jews living in Poland in 1939 was just on three million, not the 3.3 million assumed by Korherr. That means that the estimated number of "emigrants" would have to be reduced by 0.3 million, from 763,000 to 463,000, which is far more likely to be correct, and closer to the generally accepted number of Polish Jews who got away to the East. Of the 463,000 "emigrants", or more truly refugees, 300,000 would be the Jews who fled from the German-occupied Zone into the Soviet-occupied zone in the last months of 1939, and were subsequently evacuated by the Soviet authorities to the Soviet interior; a further 100,000 could be Jews from East Galicia who were evacuated to the Soviet interior by the Soviet authorities immediately after the German invasion, or just before it; and the remaining 63,000 could be Jews who fled to Slovakia, Hungary or other places.

Thus, Korherr's statistics actually support the assumption that the Jewish population of Poland in 1939 was no more than three million, and not the higher figures that are often postulated.

Korherr's figures also give us the ability to estimate the total number of Polish Jews who perished as a result of german actions between 1939 amd 1944.

According to Korherr, by the end of 1942, a total of 1.496 million Jews had been "evacuated" from the Annexed Eastern Territory and the Generalgouvernement, and 533,000 remained in those areas.

If we assume that almost all the Jews who remained as at end 1942 perished before the end of German occupation, say 500,000, that would a total of almost two million dead from the Generalgouvernement and the Occupied Eastern Territories, leaving 33,000 survivors living in hiding or as prisoners in the concentration camps. To that figure needs to be added the dead from the 510,000 inhabiting the remaining areas of Poland; if we assume that nearly of them perished, say 500,000, then that would raise the total of dead to 2.5 million.

However, the true figure is likely to be somewhat less than that, since

1. A fairly large number of the Jews living in Volhynia, Polesie and the Vilna area managed to get away to the east after the German invasion, perhaps as many as 100,000, although the true figure is unknown.

2. The number of Jews who remained in the Generalgouvernement and the Occupied Eastern Territories as at end 1942, and who survived until the end of the war in hiding or in German captivity, was probably greater than the 33,000 I have assumed. For example, Reitlinger gives a figure of 110,000 Polish Jewish DPs in Europe at the end of the war, before the return of refugees from the Soviet Union.

Reitlinger estimated the number of Polish Jews who perished as a result of German action at between 2.2 and 2.6 million. The figure I have arrived at, about 2.4 million, is mid-way between Reitlinger's high and low estimates, and is credible.

It is a substantial figure, but significantly less than the three million dead usually assumed.

[uberjude]

Reitlinger's arrived at his numbers a long time ago, and virtually all subsequent research considers them too low.

I don't need to accept Korherr's statistics as gospel at any rate--he was simply offered as German confirmation of the Polish statistics.

More importantly, I think you're making a fairly critical error, albeit one which, depending on how the table was reproduced, is hardly your fault. The Korherr Report doesn't give a figure of 427,920 emigrated from the GG and - 334,673 emigrated from the Eastern territories--those numbers are for emigrations, and "excess mortality."

Please see the reproduction of Korherr's table, which makes this clear:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/klarsf ... T204.shtml

and in German

http://www.ns-archiv.de/verfolgung/korh ... r-kurz.php

I don't know what the "excess mortality" was of these regions, but, considering disease, starvation, poor hygiene, lack of medical care, high mortality among infants and the elderly, regular mortality (because what defines excess), I don't think there's any reason to doubt that the "excess mortality" numbered in the hundred of thousands, which explains the figures which are much higher than those customarily given for emigration.

Indeed, accepting, as you seem to, the usual figure of 300-400,000 for emigration to the USSR, Slovakia, Hungary, etc, during this period, the numbers you provide would seem to provide evidence to help fill the gap between the numbers "evacuated" and the usual number given for the number of Polish Jews killed. Even to your low number of 2.4 million, we can tack on 450,000 or so "excess mortality" deaths, plus additional deaths of those who fled and didn't get deported to Siberia or Tashkent. It looks like we're back up to about 3 million.

Whatever the numbers, Korherr's figures, with that big "excessive mortality" category, hardly provides much support for your claims, since for those "excess deaths" to have occurred, those Jews must have been living in Poland in the first place, and from Korherr, we have no hard numbers as to how many of those 760,000 or so were emigres (an untold number of whom would have ended up in the Nazi net anyway), and how many were "excess mortality."

[michael mills]

"Excess mortality" mortality is a demographic term meaning that in a given population over a given period of time, the total number of deaths exceeds the total number of births, leading to a decrease in the total population over that time period.

It is demographically an abnormal situation, since in a population with a normal age structure, the total number of births at least equals the number of deaths over a given time period, leading to a stable or growing population. Excess mortality may occur in a population with an abnormally large number of individuals in the higher age brackets, resulting in a high death rate from old age, and a depressed birth rate; that situation is a fairly modern phenomenon, and was marked among the urbanised Jews of 1930s germany, as Korherr noted.

Historically, excess mortality has usually occurred in disaster situations, when death rates increased dramatically due to disease or famine; in such cases it was usually the children and the older people who died in numbers much greater than normal.

The Jewish population of Poland was certainly in a crisis situation from the time it came under German rule in Sptember 1939 (or June 1941 in the case of the areas formerly under Soviet occupation), and there was both an increase in mortality among the young and the old and a rapid decrease in the number of births, leading to deaths exceeding births over the period commencing with the start of the German occupation. The problem is to quantify the degree by which deaths exceeded births, and the cumulative total of excess deaths over the period of Korherr's study.

The fact that Korherr lumped together "emigration" and "excess mortality" in his statistics for the Generalgouvernement and the Occupied Eastern Territory suggests to me that he did not have any hard data on which to make a calculation of "excess mortality", ie he did not have statistics of Jewish births and deaths in the G-G and Occupied Eastern Territories over the period of his study, which would not have been surprising under the circumstances. I still think it likely that he calculated the number in the category "emigration and excess mortality" in the manner that I suggested, that is, he added up the number of Jews "evacuated" and Jews remaining, both "hard" figures he obtained from the relevant German authorities, and subtracted that total from an assumed total of the number of Jews living in thsoe areas in 1939, based on the assumed total of 3.3 million for Poland as a whole, and arrived at a number of "missing", which he explained as either "emigrated' or "excess mortality".

We do not know how many of the 763,000 "missing" had actually died. The Jews of Poland had not been subjected to any of the events that usually cause a hugely elevated death rate, such as a virulent epidemic like bubonic plague or a mass famine. There was certainly widespread malnutrition among the Polish Jews, and diseases resulting therefrom, due to a drastic reduction in the food supply, but that supply was supplemented by food aid from the United States (until the US entry into the war), of which 14% was earmarked for the Jewish population, with the result that there was not widespread starvation, although there were pockets of it, eg among the beggars in the warsaw Ghetto. Nor were there any outbreaks of disease of epidemnic proportions.

It is possible to have a stab at reaching a ballpark figure for accumulated 'excess mortality" among the Jews of the two areas under discussion over the period of Korherr's study. Let us assume that the normal death among Polish Jews was of the order of 1.5% annually, which is a fairly normal sort of rate. Under normal conditions, that death rate would have been equalled or exceeded by the birth rate, meaning no excess of deaths over births.

If the Jewish population of Poland was of the order of three million in 1939, a death rate of 1.5% would mean that 45,000 Jews died each year. If after the commencement of the German occupation the death rate doubled, then 90,000 would have died each year, or a total of 270,000 during the three years covered by Korherr's study (until end 1942).

If over the same period of time the birth rate fell to a low level, say 0.5%, that would mean that only 15,000 persons were born each year, or 45,000 over the three-year period, yielding a total excess mortality of 225,000. Subtracti ng that figure from the 763,000 "missing" leaves 538,000 "emigrants", which is still too high.

If 300,000 Jews escaped to the east from the German-occupied part of Poland, that would mean that Korherr's assumed total of 3.3 million Jews was too high by 238,000.

I might point out that I consider that I have erred on the high side in calculating the "excess mortality' of the Polish Jews. A doubling of the death rate may not sound all that much, but in terms of population dynamics it is a very significant increase, particularly if sustained over a period of some years. Furthermore, the birth rate would not have collapsed immediately at the start of the German occupation, since all the Jewish women who were pregnant at that point would still have given birth over the following year.

So it seems to me that the assumed total Jewish population of 3.3 million, is too high, and that the total was closer to 3.0 - 3.1 million. On that basis, the total number of deaths of Polish Jews due to German action is still around the 2.5 million mark.

Of course there was evlevated mortality among the Polish Jews who managed to escape into the Soviet interior, due to the widespread malnutrition in the non-occupied Soviet Union, but those deaths, whatever their number, are not attributable to German action.

[uberjude]

It's not really relevant what your, or my estimates are of the excess mortality rate of Jews in Poland, nor what "excess mortality" means in normal circumstances. While there might not have been bubonic plague, according to this, the typhus rate in Poland in 1941 was 30 times higher than it was in 1939, and it's reasonable to conclude that in densely packed Jewish ghettoes, it was higher still. Sounds somewhat epidemic to me. Also, "excess mortality" for a people living under a brutal occupation can mean different things--were Jews killed in the bombing of Warsaw calculated? How about Jews murdered by German soldiers--they weren't part of the "evacuation" process, but they were still dead. Starvation, poor medical care, etc--when you have a skyrocketing typhus epidemic and a breakdown in medical service, what happens? Ultimately, the point is that Korherr's figure here gives us nothing of real value about the number of emigrants versus death in this period, and can't used to challenge the 3.3 million figure (which, it should be noted, Korherr himself agrees with).

[michael mills]

Actually, Korherr's assumption of a total Polish Jewish population of 3.3 million as at 1939 is open to question on the basis of his own figures.

Adding his figures for the Generalgouvernement and the Occupied Eastern Territories ("Emigration and Excess Mortality" + "evacuation" + "remaining", = 763,000 = 1,496,000 = 531,000) yields an assumed total of 2,790,000 Jews living in those areas in 1939.

If we divide the 763,000 figure equally between "emigrants" and "excess mortality", that gives an excess mortality of 381,000, meaning that deaths during the period covered by Korherr's analysis, from September 1939 to end 1942, exceeded births by that amount.

That presumed excess mortality is equal to 13.65% of the 1939 of the two areas concerned, meaning over 14% of that population died in the course of three years (bearing in mind that total deaths consisted of the excess mortality plus the total number of births). If the birth rate in the years 1940 to 1942 had fallen to a low figure of 5 per thousand, that means that a total of 49,500 children would have been born during those three years; therefore excess mortality of 381,000 would have meant total deaths of 439,500, or 15.75% of the 1939 population.

A loss of 15.75% of a population over three years, 5% per year, is an incredibly high death rate in the absence of an organised program of mass killing, which was the case until the beginning of 1942. If you want to claim that that death rate occurred, you have to show the causes of it, not simply assume them.

Yes, Germans did shoot a lot of Jews before the organised extermination began at the beginning of 1942, but the total of those shot was in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands. Yes, there was widespread malnutrition which led to an above-normal death rate, but large numbers of the malnourished were still alive when the extermination began; certainly hundreds of thousands did not starve.

Yes, the incidence of typhus cases may have increased by a factor of 30, but how much that contributed to the overall death rate would depend on what the normal incidence had been. If in any year 500 Jews contracted typhus in the areas concerned, or 1500 over three years, then a 30-fold increase would lead to a total of 45,000 cases over three years, not all of whom would have died by any means.

A more convincing explanation is that the excess-mortality figure of 381,000 arose from an overestimate of the Jewish population of Poland in 1939. If that assumed total of 3.3 million is reduced to 3.0 million, then the assumed excess mortality is reduced to 81,000, representing 3.25% of a reduced population of 2.49 million, or 1% annually, a far more realistic figure. Remember that we are talking about excess mortality before the start of mass extermination.

[uberjude]

I accept wholeheartedly your argument.

"If you want to claim that that death rate occurred, you have to show the causes of it, not simply assume them."

If you want to make claims about something, you need to show it, not simply assume it. You made an assumption that Korherr reported an emigration of 760,000. When that was shown to be incorrect, because it includes excess mortality, rather than accepting that we couldn't derive precise data, you made a whole series of conjectural assumptions about those figures, without offering any proof. We can all make up formulas. You can say

"Let us assume that the normal death among Polish Jews was of the order of 1.5% annually, which is a fairly normal sort of rate."

Is that true? For whom is it normal? Is it normal in Australia in 2009? Normal in modern, first world states? You then completely made up statistics for the Jewish mortality rate in poland during the war.

That's not evidence, it's conjecture. If you can produce some actual numbers, then do so. As for your current allegations, as Raul Hilberg points out in The Destruction of the Jews (page 1310), the figures provided by Korherr for Poland don't include all of 1939 Poland, since other territories were formed, such as the Reichskomissariat of the Ukraine, which included another 550,000 Jews, which, when added to Korherr's Polish figures, produce a nice figure of about 3.3 million.
So again, we have Korherr agreeing that there were 3.3. million Jews, and providing numbers that support that claim

Incidentally, Hilberg also discusses the Korherr numbers for emigration/evacuation, and discusses excess mortality as well (noting that this included mass shootings in places like Bialystok region and Galicia in 1941). He notes in a footnote on page 1310, that Warsaw and Lodz" "lost about 19% of their combined cumulative populations under ghettoization." which, if extrapolated nationwide, would result in about 600,000 excess mortality deaths. He notes that number is too high, because not all ghettos were that bad, but given that figure, there's no reason to assume--as you did-- that the figures for excess mortality couldn't easily number 400,000+.
source: http://books.google.com/books?id=7DMqxD ... q=&f=false

If you want to check HIlberg's sources for his numbers, be my guest; I'm content with his figures, as I'm content with the Polish census of '31 for which there's no evidence that Jews were overcounted, and Korherr's claims of 3.3 million Jews, and his specific numbers which, when added with the other provinces, equal 3.3 million Jews. As far as the combined emigration/excess mortality figures, if you can find some evidence--not just your made up formulas based on what's "Normal," but, you know, actual historical data--happy to consider it. Until then, there seem to be a whole lot of numbers to support me.

[michael mills]

The book "Poland, 1918-1945: An Interpretive and Documentary History of the Second Republic", by Peter Stachura (Routledge, 2004) contains on page 157 the text of an official memorandum to the United Nations on the plight of the Jews in Poland from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in London, 10 December 1942.

That memorandum contains this statement:

Of 3,100,000 Jews in Poland before the start of the war, over a third have died during the past three years.

Here we have an official statment of the Polish Government-in-Exile giving a total of 3.1 million as the number of jews in Poland in 1939. I see no reason to accept any higher figure.

Since Korherr was working on the assumption of a Jewish population of 3.3 million, I suggest that his figure for population losses from the Generalgouvernement and the Annexed Eastern Territories from "emigration" and "excess mortality" (764,000) should be reduced by at least 200,000, to a maximum of 564,000. Since at least 300,000 are believed to have "emigrated" after September 1939, then the maximum figure for "excess mortality" would be 264,000.

A detailed study of the components of "excess mortality" would have to be doen to determine whether that figure is credible. As you correctly point out, the victims of the mass shootings in Bialystok and East Galicia in the course of Barbarossa must be buried in the figure for "excess mortality" (unless Korherr mistakenly included them in the figues for "evacuation" from Soviet territory, and perhaps counted them twice), but I think the number of those vicitms was in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands.

[uberjude]

I'll take a page from your book and make some unsubstantiated, but I think, reasonable assumptions--the last official Polish statistics of the Jewish population was the 3.1 million from the 1931 census. So some foreign ministry official, in wartime, when any further data would be unattainable, when making a statement about wartime losses--not a statistical analysis--simply took that last official number, and used it (and it's amusing to me to point out how far you've come in accepting 3.1 million--you began all of this by asserting

a maximum of 3 million Jews in Poland in 1939; the figure could indeed have been lower.

Keep in mind, this is the Foreign Ministry, not the Interior Ministry or whoever was in charge of the census. All they had to do in preparing their report was check the census data, and use that number. And indeed, the fact that in an, as you put it "official" memorandum, the figure they use is the last "official" statistic on Polish Jewry, hardly seems coincidental. I haven't seen the memo in question, but based on your description, it doesn't purport to be a statistical analysis or based on any research--all things considered, this isn't a real shattering revelation.

At any rate, while I certainly recognize my theory is just that, it is as reasonable for me to assume that this Polish official was simply using the 3.1 million figure without basing it on anything other than the '31 census data, as it is for you to assume that Korherr was simply embracing the 3.3 million estimate without any statistics to support it. At least this time, however, you've presented some actual numbers, though I still think I'll keep mine. Let's summarize.

On your side: A line in a memo on another subject, compiled in wartime, without any pretense of having been the result of new research.

On my side: The 1931 census of 3.1 million, for which, as has as been demonstrated, there is no evidence of tampering as regards the Jewish population.

The 1943 Korherr Report, which, despite your completely unsubstantiated claims that it simply took a Polish estimate of 3.3 million (an estimate made, incidentally, at the same time that you state the Poles were only claiming a Jewish pop. of 3.1) and embraced it. But Korherr gives plenty of specifics and details for all the sections of Poland. He doesn't just claim "3.3 million," he breaks that number down pretty specifically. Keep in mind, for example, that when giving figures for emigration and excess mortality in "the Eastern territories," he doesn't write "335,000," he writes "334,673." A statistician providing numbers down to the ones can't be accused of simply accepting figures without question.

so on my side, a census and a detailed analysis--within the framework of wartime confusion--of Jewish population, on your side, a line in a memo (also within the framework of wartime confusion) produced by an official in a gov't in exile.

[uberjude]

Actually, all this raises a question--when and where exactly does that "3.3 million" figure come from? I've seen lots of phrases like "official estimate" and so forth thrown around, but when was this estimate made? Was it an estimate that Korherr would have even been aware of?