How [many] Jews were killed for real?

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nickterry
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Soviet Jews and some final reflections

#136

Post by nickterry » 10 Feb 2006, 04:39

It would appear that a possible discrepancy of 14 million would reveal itself in the census. How would this impact the pre-war estimate of the jewish population of the Soviet Union? How would this impact the holocaust survivor estimates?

Mind you, I present a quote and a question, not an interpretation.
It wouldn't per se, because the source you are citing is a memoir from 1981 written no doubt without the benefit of access to archival sources. The style is written in such a way as to maximise the deficit in population, for unsurprising politically motivated reasons - the Soviet Union sucked, and it was quite good in the 1930s at starving many of its citizens to death.

Re: 1937 and 1939 censuses

By contrast, Stephen Wheatcroft and R.W. Davies, two of the genuine experts on Soviet population statistics, state that the 1937 census, which indeed ended with an embarrassingly lower figure than was expected, because of the famines of 1932/33, came in at:

162 million

expected: 180.7 million, never published as the memoir rightly says.

Recent statistical work has raised the 1937 census to 162.7 million.

Whereas the 1939 census was massaged upwards to 170.1 million by an arbitrary increase of 2.82 million:
- 1.14 million to account for people away from home at the time of the census (not an unknown problem even today)
- 1.68 (1%) surcharge to allow for undercounting

actual 1939 figure
167.3 million

- 159.1 million civilians
- 2.3 million in outlying regions (special census required)
- 2.1 million military
- 3.7 million 'special contingent' of the NKVD ie GULag and 'special resettlers' not in GULag.

The difference amounts to 98/100.

Wheatcroft and Davies base their chapter on a full consideration of the pre- and post-1991 literature, census materials, methods and also incidentally address the entire question of the population deficit stemming both from 'excess mortality' as well as unborn children.

I therefore trust them considerably more than a memoir of a former senior Party member. (N.B. Robert Conquest got fried when he relied on Mikoyan's son's reminiscences before 1991, and then the archives opened and better data became available.)

Re: Jewish population,

It is my understanding that Mordecai Altshuler, who compiled the 1939 Jewish population into a separate publication used by all specialists in this field, worked with the post-1991 archival released data and thus from figures corresponding to the 167.3 million total.

Moreover it would have to be investigated more closely whether Jews were more or less likely to suffer in the 1930s, as a largely urban population, whereas the major population deficits came in rural Ukraine and Kazakhstan. From data on the Terror, Jews were victimised almost exactly at the national average, neither more nor less. Poles were the nationality who got it in the neck during the Terror of 1937-8 the worst in absolute and relative terms, though some smaller national minorities suffered proportionately even harder.

The Jewish population of the 1939 borders Soviet Union was 3.02 million, up from 2.68 million in 1926.

Within this, the Jewish population of the Ukraine fell from 1.547 million in 1926 to 1.533 million in 1939 (= 4.9% of total pop.)

And the Jewish population of the Belorussian SSR fell from 407,000 to 375,000 1926 > 1939. Ie from 8.2 to 6.7% of total population.

Migration to the RSFSR was the cause. The Jewish population of the RSFSR and more distant republics in the Caucasus etc was 1.112 million in 1939.

Does this affect the Holocaust?

No. The first reason being the most important factor in preventing Jewish deaths in German occupied Soviet territory was the number who were evacuated or who fled.

The second reason being the continued uncertainties over the information about dividing the data for Poland vs Soviet Union as debated between myself and Michael Mills. Until the compilation by-region is complete for that, there isn't much basis for further discussion about how to divide Poland and the Soviet Union.

However, I would like to take the opportunity of illustrating the kinds of research, calculations, analysis and sources used by myself and other historians of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union like Altman, Smilovitsky and Gerlach, to arrive at the 'harder' numbers I have previously cited further up the thread.

Perhaps this way one can illustrate on the one hand where uncertainties lie, and on the other why the numbers offered in the more recent research are not 'flaccid' and made-up.

Some Examples from Central Russia and Belorussia

To refer back to the post-1991 research on the number of Holocaust victims in the RSFSR - Altman calculates 144-170,000, in my view it should be lower than higher, thus the 'working round number' I would go for would be 150,000.

(All my earlier efforts were to arrive at 'working round numbers', by the way.)

I couldn't easily give you a figure for the total Jewish population of all territories of the RSFSR which were occupied by the Germans, though if you check up on Altshuler you can easily arrive at one. Nonetheless it is clear that for Russia proper, only a fraction of the pre-war Jewish population was caught up under the German occupation.

For the Russian provinces I have researched:

Bryansk Oblast 17,000 victims out of 32,655 pop (1939) = 52%
Smolensk Oblast 17-21,000 victims out of 33,020 pop (1939) = 51 to 63%

Figures from Altman and cross-checked by me, i.e. I have seen all his sources for these provinces and more of my own that he has not seen.

I would opt for the lower total for Smolensk since the higher total is created by incidents which are not as well sourced as the rest. (That, my friend, is how historians work: going through all bloody forty districts of a tiny shitty little province and researching the hell out of them. No magic formula can avoid this kind of effort.)

Given that one can document considerable numbers of refugees from Belorussian SSR who fled east but were overtaken by the invasion, landing in ghettos in the west of these Russian provinces, evidently the majority of the local Jewish population succeeded in fleeing or being selected for evacuation by the authorities. Perhaps 60% of the original native Jewish population fled or were evacuated from these two Russian provinces, leaving 40% behind, but 10-12% were replaced by 'westerners', refugees who just weren't lucky enough to escape all the way to Moscow or beyond.

Note I am not positing a general 'surcharge' of refugees, I am working backwards from eyewitness-proven and mostly German-documented massacres and comparing them with prewar population figures. The uncertainties come from those instances where eyewitnesses contradict each other.

The proportion caught up in the occupation was of course significantly higher in both Belorussia and the Ukraine. It was also significantly higher in the provincial towns than in the big cities. In Belorussia, the Ukraine and western Russia, however, probably the majority of the Jewish population lived in provincial towns = the shtetls, often well away from the main roads and not possessing juicy new factories whose machine tools and workforces the Soviet authorities would have wanted to evacuate.

To take two big cities (100,000+ prewar total population of all ethnicities) in Belorussia:

In Gomel, on the very eastern edge of Belorussia, no more than 3,000 Jews were caught, briefly ghettoised and then mass-murdered out of a pre-war Jewish population of 40,880 (7%). The rest had time to flee; many factories were also evacuated from the city, which was briefly the republic capital in late July after the fall of Minsk. Gomel fell at the start of August 1941.

In Bobruisk, somewhat further west, around 13,000 Jews died in no fewer than four separate actions, out of a 1939 Jewish population of 26,703 (ca. 50%). Bobruisk fell mid-July 1941.

A number of towns have been noted where there were more Jewish victims in a locality than there was 1939 Jewish population. This applies exclusively to the smaller towns, not to the larger cities like e.g. Vitebsk, Borisov, Bobruisk, Gomel.

Where such instances exist, it is the German sources which indicate a higher total. They are then cross-confirmed from eyewitness accounts and local investigations plus exhumations, gathered 18-24 months before the German Ereignismeldungen were discovered after the war. So there is no question of fakery with the German documents, no attempt to fudge them to agree with each other. (Where discrepancies exist I opt for the lower figure as a matter of principle, i.e. caution.)

This indicates the extent of the flight from western Belorussia, ie eastern Poland, to eastern Belorussia and to the RSFSR was very large. It also indicates the extent of the flight from the big cities to 'safer' rural areas, which was a pattern of general applicability to all inhabitants of the larger cities - most large urban populations were cut clean in half by the invasion. The cities were recently expanded in the 1920s and 1930s, so many people had relatives in villages or smaller towns. That was the then contemporary social reality for Belorussians, Russians and Jews alike.

The cases of towns with larger Jewish populations than before the war exist primarily, for Belorussia, in a band of territory just east of Minsk. One need only travel a few districts to the east, and the numbers drop off like a stone, to well below the 1939 population level. The pattern happens to correspond with the shape of the frontline in July-August 1941.

In some cases, there is also evidence that there were local concentrations of rural Jews into the ghettos in the district capitals, i.e. the Germans forced Jews in the countryside into the towns. But the main pattern is the mass flight from west to east.


Again, these patterns, both of being overtaken by the German advance, leaving cities for provincial towns, and local resettlements, are backed up by eyewitness accounts from survivors.

Thus the fate of Soviet Jews can not only be documented, but also varied in accordance with comprehensible human behaviour patterns and responses which flowed from the specific circumstances of the invasion, its tempo, geography and violence.


The Current State of the Art

My work is naturally able to build on that of Altman, Smilovitsky and Kruglov for central Russia and Belorussia and parts of the Ukraine. All three use German sources to some extent but mainly the Soviet postwar reports; they are pretty scrupulous in contrasting overlapping data and pointing to discrepancies. As indicated above, I disagree with Altman in a very few places and no doubt when I finish the ongoing project, I might find disagreements with Smilovitsky and Kruglov. If so, I will be gladly publicising them since us academics like to revise and correct each other's work. It's what makes history a science.

As I have just indicated, my analysis of my research data is ongoing; I cannot and would not in any case present the full details here on an internet forum. It's valuable work, not financially, but in terms of my academic work.

So for the moment, having gone through the same sources as the above named historians, I see no reason to disagree grossly with their totals, which I have presented before. I have indicated ways in which the numbers of Jews who died at German hands in these regions varied according to the specific local circumstances. The numbers are not pulled out of thin air.

Nor, ultimately, is there any way 'through the back door' to arrive at a better number at this time through statistical projections which rest on generalisations about prewar populations, evacuations, refugee flight, etc.

I regard the figures for the RSFSR, Belorussia, Ukraine, etc as 'working round numbers' with the margin of error fairly small. Further research will harden up the numbers, most probably by reducing them slightly. By how much, remains to be seen.


Do The Numbers Matter?

I'm not a statistician - I'm a historian. I can only offer you a historical and historiographical explanation for why the numbers are the way they are. Ultimately, no one should accept any kind of 'numbers game' with this era, they should actually explore the history, both through the eyes of individuals (which means the eyewitnesses, who bring it home to one on a human level) as well as communities (towns).

The problem is, it's very tempting for some to engage in 'revisionism', which is invariably based on what the Germans call Zahlenspielerei - numbers games. That disrespects the historical circumstances considerably, as well as the individuals who fell victim. I'm not saying anyone has necessarily engaged in 'revisionism' on this thread, just pointing to the problem with engaging in purely statistical calculations.

It's for this reason that the numbers do matter, and for this reason that one has to be careful with them. Out of respect for the victims, hundreds of historians across Europe and elsewhere, as well as community groups, lawyers, governments, and survivors, have been attempting to document ever more precisely the numbers and where possible the names of the victims. I've cited quite a few such efforts both from books and websites. Similar efforts are underway for non-Jewish victims of KZs, and for victims of the Stalinist purges. War memorials across much of Europe exist for both world wars alongside innumerable memorial books dedicated to particular regiments. Yes, some of this effort is a bit morbid, but it's quite a universal characteristic of 20th Century European History.

In most cases, the professional, amateur, local and government historians went to all that trouble for quite parochial reasons, in order to honour a particular community, or to answer a specific case. I don't believe that the community associations formed by emigres and survivors who had once lived in Polish shtetls were engaged in a collective conspiracy to inflate the numbers of their war dead; they were concerned only with their neighbours and friends when they wrote their memorial books.

Does it ultimately matter then whether one goes for this or that total number of victims of the Holocaust? David Thompson drew the comparison with a serial killer whose victims might number 45, 51, 60 or 62. A serial killer is still a serial killer under those circumstances, and genocide is still genocide whether it invoved 4.5 million or 6.2 million. Or indeed the numbers one could mention from Armenia, the Ukrainian famine, Rwanda, Cambodia or other horrors.

Nonetheless.

Yes, I would argue, it does matter. Not because there is a sacred total that must be obeyed. I am not Jewish, and I despise Ariel Sharon for inflating the number of Holocaust victims from Hungary, as he did in a political speech over a year before he went into a coma this past month.

It matters, firstly, because to opt for an older number (such as Reitlinger, or worse still something from 1945) ignores and disrespects the work of those several thousand individuals who have put in considerable effort in the past fifty years to be more precise. Secondly, lack of precision disrespects the victims.

The Holocaust in Western, Central and Southern Europe is not only well-documented, but well-understood and well-presented in the books. The numbers are generally accepted. Those victims are somehow more like us anyway; they shaved, they wore suits and dresses, and did not write in incomprehensible Yiddish or Cyrillic alphabets. They were, for want of a better term, more 'American' than the Ostjuden who formed the overwhelming majority of victims of the Holocaust.

It is somewhat different for the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. As people will have followed through this thread and the debates, there is still much room for uncertainty, especially regarding how one reconciles prewar Poland and prewar Soviet Union, given the border changes during 1939-41 and in 1945. Even I can't get my head round all of them.

In my view, it is telling that more Jews can be proven to have died in two provinces of Russia, Bryansk and Smolensk, than did Belgian Jews. It highlights the fact that one cannot simply take the bird's eye view with gigantic countries like Russia and Poland, whose Jewish populations were enormous, but must instead look regionally. That is precisely what historians have been and are doing, and why research is trending in a more comprehensive and precise direction.

The Eastern Europe of 1939-45 might seem like a fantasy la-la land to some, where 'millions' perish anonymously, but there are now plenty of books, memoirs, accounts, sources and archives open to all to make it quite concrete and human. It's no longer possible, as 'revisionists' have been wont to do, to argue that all those deported to Treblinka were 'resettled' to the east, whereupon they promptly disappeared 'behind the Iron Curtain'. Nor is is possible to say, 'we don't know and we can't find out', about what transpired in Chislavichi, Sumy, Volkovysk or Debica.

Yet the work of finding out is still somewhat ongoing. The last time anyone attempted to arrive at a precise calculation, Franz Golczewski and Gerd Robel came up with a calculation which totalled 4.8 million for Poland and the Soviet Union. That was 15 years ago. Since then we have had an avalanche of new research, especially on the Soviet Union but also on Poland. A recalculation is most definitely in order. It will not, however, inflate the number of 4.8 million higher. In my view, it will discover that it was lower. But not drastically lower. Without re-engaging in the numbers game, I think it safe to say that the number of Polish and Soviet Jews who died was of the order of at least 4 million. The number of Western, Southern and Central European Jews was well over a million.

Until the latest wave of research is synthesised more precisely, the best that one can say is that the number of European Jews who died in the Holocaust was more than 5 million, and less than 6.2 million.

Most people who have any understanding of the Holocaust tend to say that between 5 and 6 million died. They are right to do so. To claim less than 5 million died in discussions today, in 2006, is in my view wrong. Not morally wrong, not politically wrong, not religiously wrong, but factually wrong.

Quellen:

Far too many archival sources to name.

Altshuler, Mordecai (ed), Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939. Jerusalem, 1993

Wheatcroft S.G. and Davies, R.W., ‘Population’ in: R.W. Davies, Mark Harrison and S.G. Wheatcroft (eds); The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union 1913-1945, Cambridge, 1994

Gerlach, Christian, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg, 1999

Smilovitsky, Leonid, Katastrofa Evreev Belorussii 1941-1944. Tel Aviv, 2000 - in English online at http://www.jewishgen.org

Altman, Ilya, Zhertvy nenavisti. Kholokost v SSSR 1941-1945 gg. Moscow, 2002

Eshelony idut na vostok. Sbornik statei i vospominaniya. Moscow, 1966

Aleksievich, Svetlana, Poslednie sviditelni. Moscow, 2004 - eyewitness accounts, also in German as Die letzten Zeugen.

and many, many more works, including many already cited further back down this thread.

I have written enough on this subject for the moment; thank you for all who have helped out, chipped in, and argued back, especially iwh and Michael Mills, even if I disagree with you sometimes... 8O

Right now I don't have anything more to say on the matter. I have said my piece.

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#137

Post by michael mills » 10 Feb 2006, 06:07

Just a quick question.

It is clear that there exist quite precise estimates of the number of Jewish victims in individual localities, based both on the statistics given in german documents and on investigations carried out by the Soviet authorities immediately after the end of the German occupation.

Is the total of 2.8 million Soviet Jewish victims that has been quoted in this thread exclusively the result of adding up those fairly precise estimates for all the localities at one time under German occupation, or does it contain some element of demographic projection (eg consisting partly of an addition of fairly precise estimates for individual localities where those estimates exist, and some sort of projection covering other areas where such estimates are not available)?

If the former, then the total must be pretty exact. The only reason why it would not be would be if some of the estimates for individual localities had been "padded" for one reason or another.

If the latter, then there is a potential for error (of greater or lesser magnitude), depending on the assumptions made in the projections.


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#138

Post by David Thompson » 10 Feb 2006, 13:32

Thanks, nickterry, for a very interesting and thoughtful analysis of an oft-discussed and rarely explained subject..

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#139

Post by Tero » 10 Feb 2006, 14:46

But the main pattern is the mass flight from west to east.
How have you been able to determine the actual extent or existence of this "mass flight" by the numbers alone ?

I ask this because the Soviets did not by and large actively evacuate "non-essential" civilian personel (Jewish or Gentile) even when they could have done so. I'm just wondering how these "vagrants" would have been received in the new districts as front line desertion was dealt with harshly and AFAIK the civilians in the occupied territories were for all intents and purposes deemed to be support troops for the partisans and collaboration was punished even when the occupation was still going on.

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#140

Post by nickterry » 10 Feb 2006, 15:44

michael mills wrote:Just a quick question.

It is clear that there exist quite precise estimates of the number of Jewish victims in individual localities, based both on the statistics given in german documents and on investigations carried out by the Soviet authorities immediately after the end of the German occupation.

Is the total of 2.8 million Soviet Jewish victims that has been quoted in this thread exclusively the result of adding up those fairly precise estimates for all the localities at one time under German occupation, or does it contain some element of demographic projection (eg consisting partly of an addition of fairly precise estimates for individual localities where those estimates exist, and some sort of projection covering other areas where such estimates are not available)?

If the former, then the total must be pretty exact. The only reason why it would not be would be if some of the estimates for individual localities had been "padded" for one reason or another.

If the latter, then there is a potential for error (of greater or lesser magnitude), depending on the assumptions made in the projections.
the quick answer: recent research (Altman, Kruglov etc) is based on aggregated local data exclusively. No demographics are involved.

Individual massacres (for Galicia and Bialystok also deportations) are identified German/Romanian reports plus Soviet investigations. Uncertainties stem from localities where one only has Soviet investigations, but there are also regional aggregates for many districts from German and Romanian reports, ie 'we have this many Jews left alive, what are we going to do with them?' Thus one can cross-check on a regional as well as often a local level.


Altman and Kruglov on the Ukraine


Galicia
Drogobych 87,000
Lvov 215,000
Ternopol 132,000
Ivano-Frankovsk 132,000 = 566,000

Romanian Occupation (small parts to RK Ukraine) = 'Bukovina' and 'Transnistria'
Chernovtsy 11,000
Izmail 2,000
Zakarpatya 100,000
Odessa 125,000 = 238,000

RK Ukraine
Volyn 109,000 (Altman 102,500)
Rovno 95,000 (Altman 98,000)
Kherson 18,000 (Altman 13,400)
Khmelnitsky 115,000 (Altman 106,500)
Vinnitsa 160,000 (pts under Romanians - Altman says 87,600 in RKU)
Zhitomir 55,000 (Altman 49,800)
Kiev city 40,000
Kievskaya 37,000
Kirovograd 10,000 (Altman 9,700)
Denprpetrovsk 35,000 (pts under military admin - Altman says 10,300 in RKU)
Nikolayev 23,000 (same)

= 697,000
(Altman: 514,000 - boundary considerations. He also forgot Kiev town and province in his table....)

Military Occupation
Donetsk 16,000
Zaporozhe 10,000 (Altman 8500)
Crimea 25,000
Poltava 11,500
Khar'kov 12,500
Sumy 3,000 (rounded down: Altman + Kruglov 3250)
Chernigov 3,500 (Altman 3000)
Lugansk 2,000 (= Voroshilovgrad)
= 83,500

Kruglov totals 1.58 million, Altman 1.43 million, but he subtracts the Crimea and Zakarpata oblast to other territories (RSFSR and I don't know where he put Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia), thus his comparable total is 1.55 million.

In demographic terms, because of border changes, the easiest comparison is Ukraine + modern Moldovan territory:

1939 Ukrainian Jewish population 1.533 million
annexed Western Ukraine (Galicia) up to 600,000
annexed North Bukovina and Bessarabia 270,000
total Ukraine and modern Moldova, 22.6.41 ca. 2.4 million

Altman - Ukraine 1.43 million killed
Altman - Moldova 130,000 killed

(Because Altman covers the broader area, I use his figures here)

Thus, 1.56 million out of 2.4 million Jewish inhabitants of modern-day Moldova and Ukraine were killed by German and Romanian occupation forces, with some assistance from Polish and Ukrainian collaborators. (But that is another debate.)

This amounts to 65%; thus a full third could save themselves or be saved, by fleeing, going underground, being evacuated, joining the partisans, or simply by sheer luck surviving in camps. More than 800,000.



As you can see above, Altman offers differing figures for many provinces. They trend the total slightly down in many oblasts, slightly up elsewhere.

The difference for example between 102,500 killed in Volyn oblast (Altman) and 109,000 killed in Volyn oblast (Kruglov) is much like the difference in older figures over how many French or Dutch Jews died.

Further research will trend these figures slightly further down, eliminating grey areas and remaining uncertainties, but they are the basis for any further discussion.

Tero, the flight of refugees was extensive, but less so from the annexed eastern Polish territories. Women and children would not necessarily be stopped, except where defense lines were being constructed (e.g. Vyazma from July 1941 onwards, 100,000 workers digging trenches). Men out of uniform would not be shot for desertion but instead turned around and sent to replacement units to be called up. Men in uniform would also mostly be turned around, the manpower was usually too valuable in 1941. Naturally some executions occurred but proportionate to the number who became stragglers this was low. Only in mid-1942 did Stalin issue Order 227, 'Not a Step Back'. The partisans were not a mass movement in the summer of 1941.



I will post a more complete survey of Poland, the Soviet Union and Romania in due course, but for now, I have to get on with my real work. So I won't be posting on this thread for at least a week.

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Thanks.

#141

Post by gaussianum » 10 Feb 2006, 20:30

Thanks for the answer. I appreciate it.

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#142

Post by michael mills » 11 Feb 2006, 16:33

I had previously calculated Reitlinger's estimate of the number of Jewish victims in the Soviet Union in its post-1945 borders, based on his high figure for Poland (in its 1939 borders) of 2.7 million, plus an upward adjustment of 200,000 to cover the Baltic States which I think he may have mistakenly omitted.

Subtracting Kruglov's figure of 1.58 million Jewish victims in the territory of present-day Ukraine and Moldova from the figure of 2.335 million derived from Reitlinger's estimates yields 0.755 million to cover the victims in the territory of present-day Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the Russian federation.

Subtracting the 200,000 I allowed for the victims in the Baltic States leaves 0.555 million as Reitlinger's estimate for the number of victims in the present-day territory of Belarus and the Russian Federation.

Given that a sizable proportion of the Jewish population of East Belarus appears to have escaped or been evacuated into the Soviet interior, as indicated by the statistics from cities in that region, and that the Jewish population of the extended Belorussian SSR of 1941 was under one million if I remember correctly, Reitlinger's estimate does not appear to be egregiously low.

My conclusion appears to be supported by Dr Smilovitsy's review of the book "Black Book with Red Pages", found here:

http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/newsle ... Review.htm

Smilovitsky writes:
A final reservation concerns the authors' estimates of Jewish victims (pp. 90-94). Their total -- 700,390 for 157 locations --appears to be too high. As noted earlier, they fail to provide sources for this figure. The head of the partisan division of the Belarus State Museum of the Great Patriotic War cites a figure of 376,851 victims in 103 locations (14). A higher figure, 455,100 for 139 locations, is given by Vladimir Adamushko, chairman of the committee on archives and files of Belarus (15). However, the figures given by the latter two archival experts need adjustment. They do not include several categories of Jewish victims: those killed in jails and POW camps, Jewish partisans and underground resistance members, those killed in forests and rural areas, and those who succeeded in concealing their identity but were killed nevertheless. Finally, their estimates do not include Belorussian Jews killed during service in the Red Army.

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#143

Post by nickterry » 11 Feb 2006, 19:46

Michael,

some figures for you to chew over. I'm going to post things from time to time with little further analysis until due course.

I can say re: Altman's total for (western and eastern) Belorussia that it's probably too high.

Update: I think I puzzled out why. Altman seems to be using Emanuil Ioffe to confirm his overall number.

Ioffe, Emanuil, Belorusskie evrei: Tragediia i geroizm 1941-1945. Minsk, 2003
claims 925,914 Jews killed on wartime territory of Belorussian SSR over 448 localities
- 113,600 in now Polish territories (Polish parts of Bialystok - lower than other estimates)
- 812,314 in contemporary Belarus borders over 397 localities

sorry, got confused briefly. Of the 812,314, 75,522 were killed outside the borders of Belarus, meaning deportations from the present day Belorussian portions of Distrikt Bialystok to Polish death camps.

Supposedly, an additional 55,000 foreign (Reich) Jews were killed on Belorussian soil.

I think these figures are too high.






More data:


Gomel province: (from a Smilovitsky paper)
Jewish victims: 32,633 out of 67,758 1939 census population = 48%
most of the escapees (35,125) would have been from Gomel.

total of 53,360 recorded as killed in all Extraordinary Commission investigations of the province (Jewish proportion = 61%)


Gomel was the last area to be given up, everywhere else had been overrun weeks before.

1939 Eastern Belorussian census - Jewish population
Minsk 117,615 9%
Mogilev 79,739 5.7%
Vitebsk 77,173 6%
Gomel 67,578 7.5%
Polesie 32,987 4.9%
Total 375,092 6.7%
(Altshuler cited by Martin Dean; Smilovitsky has strangely variant figures which however total the same).



another set of interesting figures

Report of Belorussian SSR, NKVD Chief Tsanava, 5 February 1940 on numbers of refugees from German-occupied Poland as of that date.

Western Belorussia (annexed territories) - provinces = oblast
Bialystok 39,648 37,853 Jews
Brest 10,676 7,916 Jews
Vileika 550 398 Jews
Baranovichi 5,546 4,868 Jews
Pinsk 2,533 1,963 Jews
58,953 refugees 52,998 Jews

Eastern Belorussia (old Soviet territory) = by oblast
Minsk 3,314 3,174 Jews
Vitebsk 4,108 3,820 Jews
Mogilev 4,104 3,570 Jews
Gomel 1,480 1,391 Jews
Polesie 940 843 Jews
13,946 12,798 Jews

together total refugees 72,899, given as 72,896 elsewhere in document, 65,796 Jews

Ioffe, Emanuil and Selemenev, Viacheslav (intr.), ‘Jewish Refugees from Poland in Belorussia, 1939-1940’, Jews in Eastern Europe, Spring 1997, pp.45-50


arrests from Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, 1939-February 1941:
Western Belorussia
21,449 Poles
19,982 Ukrainians
12,695 Jews
178 Belorussians
54,304 arrests

19,610 Poles
882 Ukrainians
10,333 Jews
7,371 Belorussians
38,196 arrests

= 92,500 arrests

from A.E. Gurianov (ed), Repressii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan. Moscow, 1997 (memorial.org.)

am currently working on digging out more accurate data for western Belorussia for article purposes.... one thing that seems clear is the balance of eastern Poland is biased to the western Ukraine.

more anon.

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#144

Post by michael mills » 12 Feb 2006, 12:49

The figures of arrests in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine between late 1939 and February 1941 are interesting.

They show only 23,028 Jews arrested.

All the histories that I have read before now suggest that all the Jewish refugees from the German-occupied zone, to the number of 300,000, were rounded up and shipped to the interior of the Soviet Union in 1940, when they elected not to accept Soviet citizenship in the exercise known as "passportisation".

During the war itself, there were some quite large estimates of the number of Polish Jews (= former citizens of the Polish state) in the Soviet interior, up to 600,000. That suggests that quite a large number of Polish Jews (even if not as many as the highest wartime estimates) had been moved east at some time. Presumably the bulk of that movement can only have taken place after February 1941, possibly in the last deportations shortly before the German invasion.

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The Soviets in Eastern Poland

#145

Post by nickterry » 12 Feb 2006, 16:06

michael mills wrote:The figures of arrests in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine between late 1939 and February 1941 are interesting.

They show only 23,028 Jews arrested.

All the histories that I have read before now suggest that all the Jewish refugees from the German-occupied zone, to the number of 300,000, were rounded up and shipped to the interior of the Soviet Union in 1940, when they elected not to accept Soviet citizenship in the exercise known as "passportisation".

During the war itself, there were some quite large estimates of the number of Polish Jews (= former citizens of the Polish state) in the Soviet interior, up to 600,000. That suggests that quite a large number of Polish Jews (even if not as many as the highest wartime estimates) had been moved east at some time. Presumably the bulk of that movement can only have taken place after February 1941, possibly in the last deportations shortly before the German invasion.

You're in luck. (Or not, as the case may be.) Work on an article has gone further along the direction of what happened in eastern Poland/western Belorussia....

I'm just going to present Gurianov's summary data, the workings can be found on memorial.org.

Gurianov calculates 320,000 deportations from annexed eastern Poland during 1939-41 as a whole:

140-141,000 special resettlers - Polish colonists (no Jews)
78-79,000 special-resettlers - refugees (82-84% Jews - thus cited)
61,000 administrative deportees from arrests (25% Jews)
37-42,000 exile settlers from arrests (25% Jews)

Latter percentages apply the sourced ethnic breakdowns and extrapolate to the unsourced (there are loads more tables, e.g. for arrests January-May 1941, with more breakdowns, trending in same direction or indeed less biased).

thus, around 24,000-25,500 Jews native to eastern Poland would have been deported, out of 1.2 (+/-) million existing local population.

While 65-66,000 were deported out of estimates of 250-300,000 Jewish refugees from western Poland.

The final wave of deportations in May-June 1941 from western Belorussia and western Ukraine (31 transports with 35,359 deportees) are included in the 320,000 figure, as far as I can determine. This makes sense since not all arrestees during 1939-41 were deported, some were released, shot or held in local prisons briefly.

Data from Pinsk oblast indicates that 27% of this last wave were Jews, not much different to previous arrest waves. Thus, the final wave might have contained 9,500 Jews, this number included in the 24-25,000 already cited.

Thus, approximately 90,000 Jews from pre-September 17 1939 Poland were removed from that territory by the Soviets before 22.6.41. A 10% margin of error would trend towards a maximum possible total of no more than 100,000.

All this suggests many of the previous estimates (e.g. Ainsztein) are three or four times too high, as indeed are most of the pre-1991 estimates from Polish writers for the number of Poles deported.

The Soviets seem to have made only a partial dent in the refugees from western Poland - thus many areas in Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine were swollen by the influx, after subtracting deportees, perhaps 200,000 Jews were thereby added to those territories of eastern Poland. In Pinsk oblast - most were forcibly resettled out of Pinsk itself to Stolin and Luninets raiony, only 965 refugees were deported vs 5400 recorded in July 1940. Only around 1/3 were passportised as of the latter date, so a connection with the passportisation campaign is likely. But by no means all refugees were deported.

Pinsk oblast information taken from Rozenblat, E.S. and Elenskaia, I.E., Pinskie evrei: 1939-1944 gg. Brest, 1997, using secondary references based on post-91 archival sources, as well as local archival materials from Brest Oblast Archive.

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#146

Post by michael mills » 14 Feb 2006, 08:41

The underlying issue is not the total number of Polish Jews arrested and deported by the Soviet security organs in the period between 17 September 1939 and 22 June 1941, but rather the total number of Polish Jews relocated by the Soviet authorities from the parts of POland annexed by the Soviet Union into the Soviet interior.

That number must have been more than the 100,000 arrested and deported by the security organs, since the number of Polish Jewish refugees who returned to Poland from the Soviet Union after the war was greatly in excess of 100,000.

According to the article by Yosef Litvak, "Polish-Jewish Refugees Repatriated from the Soviet Union to Poland at the End of the Second World War and Afterwards" (in "Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939-46", eds. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky, 1991), the number of Jewish returnees who had been registered by the Central Committee of Polish Jewry as at the end of June 1946 was 157,420.

Again according to Litvak, by the end of the 1940s about 230,700 Polish Jews had returned to Poland.

Many Jews also left Poland and proceeded westward. According to Litvak, in September 1947, the number of Jews who had left Poland and were living in DP camps in Germany, Austria and italy was about 180,000. At that point in time, many thousands of Jews had already left the DP camps as "ma'afilim", ie illegal emigrants to Palestine.

The level of illegal Jewish movement from Poland into the British Occupation Zone was also very high. The British authorities were well aware of the clandestine movement and tried to halt it, but in vain. Jewish infiltrees captured by the British all claimed to be German Jews returning from deportation to the Soviet Union, but the British knew that that was a cover story. The infiltrees were found in possession of forged identity documents issued by the Soviet administration in Berlin, showing that the illegal movement from Poland to Germany was organised by the Soviet Union.

Most of the above illegal movement occurred in the period from mid-1945 to early 1942, at a time when the return of the Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union was only just getting underway. Many of the infiltrees must therefore have been Jews who had survived in Poland itself, ie had been liberated from camps, or came out of hiding.

For details of the above clandestine movement of Polish Jews into the British Occupation Zone, see this book:

"Belsen : The Liberation of a Concentration Camp" by Joanne Reilly (London ; New York : Routledge, 1998).

In the years after the end of the war, part of the former Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp was used as a DP camp for Jews. Large numbers of the Jewish infiltrees from Poland were "laundered" through that camp, the infiltrees taking on the identities of registered DPs who had already secretly left the camp as "ma'afilim".

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#147

Post by nickterry » 14 Feb 2006, 12:27

Michael,

thanks for the figures. You should try and disaggregate them a bit.

Jews of eastern Poland on Soviet side of border after 17.9.39:

- those deported in 1939-22.6.41
- those evacuated after 22.6.41
- those surviving German occupation in eastern Poland by 1945
- Polish-Jewish soldiers captured by the Soviets who served with the Soviet-sponsored Polish forces (e.g. the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman), who were demobilised after 1945 into postwar Poland

form the basis for the potential pool of those repatriated after 1945.

The first three groups are evidently sizeable - plus or minus 100,000 as an absolute minimum.

Pavel Polian has given slightly different figures about refugees deported in 1939-41, he gives 77,000 or citing the highest recent estimate 90,000. I haven't seen his sources. Altshuler goes with the figure of 65,000 refugees deported.


minus, of course

- those who died in the east of the Soviet Union, 1939-45
- Polish-Jewish soldiers killed in action or dying in Soviet captivity, 1939-45
- Polish-Jewish soldiers who left via Iran with the Anders Army after 1941
- those who opted to remain in the east of the Soviet Union (presumably few) after 1945
- those who opted to remain in former Polish territories annexed to the Soviet Union after 1945

If you have the Polonsky/Davies collection perhaps you could post some more details from it - there's an article in there on the Anders Army, for example.


Then you should look at how many Jews were recorded as in postwar Poland after 1945, plus emigration, registered and unregistered.

Some figures cited by Golczewski:

early 1945, at least 100,000 Jews on postwar Polish territory

late 1945 10,000 demobilised Polish-Jewish soldiers plus 3,000 still in active service with Polish forces. This category would overlap with the POW, evacuee and deportee groups, since plenty were called up from the latter two.

July 1946 rose to 246,000, including those repatriated from Soviet Union - 157,420 plus unregistered - another estimate says 170,000

1945 emigration west - 50,000



DPs:

are made up of
- Polish Jews who survived the evacuations of KZs into Germany proper, i.e. the 'original' DPs
- those arriving from postwar Poland (western Poland)
- those transiting western Poland from eastern Poland
- from summer 1946 onwards, the fruits of the evidently gigantic baby boom among survivors. :wink:

The danger of double- or even treble-counting is accordingly very great.

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#148

Post by michael mills » 15 Feb 2006, 01:35

- those who opted to remain in former Polish territories annexed to the Soviet Union after 1945
The number of Jewish refugees who returned to the annexed Polish territories (and to the Baltic States) and remained there must have been appreciable, since the later Soviet Zionist activists and emigrants of the 1970s and 1980s were said to have come primarily from either Georgia or the territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939-40, ie areas where Jewish identity was still strong, rather than from the Old Soviet Union, where Jews had largely assimilated and Jewish identity was relatively weak.
If you have the Polonsky/Davies collection perhaps you could post some more details from it - there's an article in there on the Anders Army, for example.
I went to the University library yesterday and looked it up. I do not have the book with me at present.
- from summer 1946 onwards, the fruits of the evidently gigantic baby boom among survivors.
Not surprising, since the survivors were overwhelmingly in their late teens, twenties or early thirties. Nearly all the Jews younger or older than those age groups had perished (of those who had survived under German rule).

The refugees in the Soviet interior were also predominantly young, although all age groups were represented, unlike the situation among those who had survived German imprisonment.

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#149

Post by nickterry » 15 Feb 2006, 01:57

The number of Jewish refugees who returned to the annexed Polish territories (and to the Baltic States) and remained there must have been appreciable, since the later Soviet Zionist activists and emigrants of the 1970s and 1980s were said to have come primarily from either Georgia or the territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939-40, ie areas where Jewish identity was still strong, rather than from the Old Soviet Union, where Jews had largely assimilated and Jewish identity was relatively weak.
Smilovitsky cites comparative data from the 1959 census, a ways after the war of course. The repopulation of old-Soviet territories went a little faster, since more could be evacuated from the eastern regions as previously discussed. There would have been a certain amount of 'circulation' of population through postings to this or that job/administrative position, which would have spread the survivors around more. You'd have to look up the late 20th Century demographics to be sure of where the emigration wave of the 1980s onwards came from, and of course factor out all the Russian spouses.
I went to the University library yesterday and looked it up. I do not have the book with me at present.
It was just a thought. Jewish men in the various militaries is an often under-estimated demographic factor in all of these discussions. I've read contradictory things about whether the Soviets conscripted in the annexed territories during 1940-41. The firmest and best documented group are Polish Army POWs who become the Anders Army.
Not surprising, since the survivors were overwhelmingly in their late teens, twenties or early thirties. Nearly all the Jews younger or older than those age groups had perished (of those who had survived under German rule). The refugees in the Soviet interior were also predominantly young, although all age groups were represented, unlike the situation among those who had survived German imprisonment.
I've heard people who do research on DPs discuss this at seminars. I can't remember the numbers, but they were noticeable and therefore would increasingly have to be factored in the further one leaves May 1945 behind in time.

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#150

Post by snookie » 16 Feb 2006, 18:59

wolfangel wrote:
iwh wrote: Why the morbid fascination of exactly how many died?Is it any less evil that 5.8 million died,or 4.7 million,or 6.2 million?
Any less evil, probably not...more accurate definately.

Why WOULDN'T we want to know the truth, and/or the most accurate numbers?

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