Two mistakes in the above.michael mills wrote:There is another way of looking at the figures on the link posted by Roberto (which I will now refer to for brevity as Roberto's figures, since he has defended them).
Roberto claims 2.7 victims for Poland in its pre-war frontiers, and 2.1 victims for the pr-war Soviet Union plus the Baltic States. That makes a total of 4.8 victims.
The claimed total of victims can be deducted from the total pre-war Jewish populations for those countries to arrive at a number of survivors, which can then be assessed as to its probability.
The problem with the above calculation is the estimate for Poland, which is controversial and has never been proved. I will assume a maximum of 3 million for Poland; that is the highest figure given in the 1930 census, and the likelihood is that any natural increase between 1930 and 1939 was offset by emigration.
Accordingly, we have the following estimates:
Poland 3 million
USSR 3 million
Lithuania 0.15 million
Latvia + Estonia 0.1 million
TOTAL 6.25 million
Deducting 4.8 million from 6.25 million leaves 1.45 million survivors.
But the above figure for survivors is manifestly too low. Roberto himself has defended a figure of 2.1 million as the minimum number of survivors in the post-war Soviet Union, not including the 0.2 million Polish Jewish refugees who were repatriated. The discrepancy in the number of survivors is therefore 0.75 million, including the repatriated refugees; that discrepancy can only be explained by an exaggeration in the number of victims by at least that much.
The first is that Robel’s 2.1 million figure, as I said, refers to Jews killed on the territory of the Soviet Union within its pre-war borders plus the Baltic States, independently of where these Jews had lived before 17 October 1939. It would thus be appropriate to add Rumania to this calculation, as a part of the 1.9 million Jews killed on the territory of the Soviet Union within its pre-war borders are likely to have been Jews living in Rumania before the war.
The second is the blunt assumption that the pre-war Jewish population of Poland cannot have exceeded 3 million, which is completely unsupported.
The lower figure (3.3 million) reduces the delta established by Mills to 0.45 million, while the higher one (3.5 million) brings it down to 0.25 million. So if there's any exaggeration/double counting, it would not nearly as significant as Mills claims it to be.John Zimmerman ([i]Holocaust Denial[/i], page 3 wrote:The number of Jews counted in the Polish census of 1931 was 3,113,900. Estimates of the Jewish population in 1939, the year Poland was invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union, place the population between 3.3 and 3.5 million.
Can we see the corresponding wording of the Soviet Jewish Committee’s report, please?michael mills wrote:Yet another way of looking at the figures for the countries concerned is to build up an stimate of the number of victims from contemporary figures.
At the beginning of 1944, the Soviet Jewish Committee estimated that a total of 1.5 million Soviet Jews had perished. That figure related to the expanded Soviet Union, since the population of the annexed areas (Baltic States, East Poland, Bessarabia/Bukovina) had been given Soviet citiznship, and the Jews of those areas were officially regarded as Soviet Jews.
The Korherr Report lists a total of 2,790,000 Jews of former Poland as having come under the domain of Nazi Germany. These are distributed as follows:michael mills wrote:To that 1.5 million, we need to add the victims from the German-occupied parts of Poland. In 1940, the German authorities estimated the Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement (the four original districts, Warsaw, Lublin, Krakow, Radom) at 1.3 million. The highest estimate I have seen for the Jewish population of the areas of West Poland annexed by Germany is 0.6 million. Adding those two figures yields a total of 1.9 million.
630,000 in the newly acquired Eastern territories (i.e. the territories of Western Poland annexed to the Reich);
160,000 in the Bialystok district;
1,300,000 in the General Government at the time of its constitution;
700,000 in the Lemberg district.
According to the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, there were at most 50,000 survivors from among these Jews at the end of the war:
Source of quote:[…]The number of Jews in Poland on Sep. 1, 1939, amounted to about 3,474,000. How many of them are still alive?
The Central Committee of Polish Jews which was organized at Lublin in August, 1944, ordered a registration of the Jews who survived. This registration was carried out by the Jewish Local Committees in different towns and gave the following results:
Up to June 15, 1945, it was found that 55,509 Jews had registered themselves in Poland. To this number must be added 5,446 registered Polish Jews still in camps in Germany, and 13,000 Jews on active service in the Polish Army, together 73,955 persons.
These statistics, do not however, enable us to determine how many Jews were finally saved from destruction during the German occupation. For this a critical analysis and explanation are required.
p.163
The number 55,509 must be reduced, as there were numerous mistakes in registration, caused by the fluctuation and internal migration of Jews in the first months after their recovery of freedom, the same persons being registered twice, or even several times, in different towns through which they passed. How many, it is impossible to check. Moreover, a certain number out of the 55,509 had returned from Soviet Russia.
The number of 13,000 officers and men of the Polish Army does not include such as were saved in German- occupied territory, but is made up for the most part of Jews who were in the U.S.S.R. during the war and voluntarily enlisted in the Polish Army which was organised there.
But the number of 5,446 given for Jews still in camps in Germany is not final, as only an insignificant proportion of the Jews in these camps have sent in their data to be registered by the Central Committee of Polish Jews or to any Local Committee.
Later migratory movements after June 15, 1945, and territorial changes affecting Jews who were living in Poland and Germany are not taken into account, as they are not essential to the problem under discussion.
Of the 40,000-50,000 Polish Jews who are still alive in Poland, about 5,000 are children. (Data of the Chief of the Section of the Children’s Assistance, Dr S. Herszerhorn, quoted from the Bulletin of the J.A.P. of Nov. 12, No 99/109). This is a maximum number and includes those who returned from Western Ukraine, Western White Russia and the Lithuanian Soviet Republic.
It must be borne in mind, however, that a certain number of Jews were saved by escaping abroad in 1939 (mainly to the U.S.S.R.); while in 1941, after the German invasion of Russia, some of the Polish Jews living in the U.S.S.R. saved themselves by fleeing into the interior. Altogether about 250,000 Polish Jews from various European and extra-European
p.164
countries were saved (U.S.S.R., England, Sweden, Switzerland, Roumania, Hungary; Palestine, and the U.S.A.).
From the above it may be deduced that in German-occupied Poland the Jewish population amounted to about 3,200,000 or 3,250,000 persons. Of this number at the end of war only 40,000-50,000 remained alive.[…]
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/gcpol6.htm
Assuming that the Central Commission’s figure for Jews who fell under German rule in Poland is too high and Korherr’s figures are correct, this would mean that more than 2,700,000 Jews were killed by the Germans in the General Government at the time of its constitution, the Lemberg district and the Bialystok district.
Assuming, of course, that the Soviet Jewish Committee’s estimate is correct and includes the areas mentioned by Mills. 2,700,000 Jewish dead in the areas mentioned in the Korherr Report, see above, would leave us with only 700,000 Jews for the Soviet Union in its pre-war borders and the Baltic States. This number is absurdly low, considering that the Einsatzgruppen alone reported a total of well over 500,000 Jews killed until the end of 1941 and a later report of Himmler’s to Hitler mentioned 363,211 Jews executed in Bialystok, Southern Russia and Ukraine in four months of 1942 alone. Hilberg considers a total of 900,000 Jews slain on the territory of the USSR within its pre-war borders plus the Baltic States, but it would be unrealistic to assume that the above mentioned two sources, which roughly add up to this figure, cover more than a part of the death toll during the 2 ½ - 3 years of occupation that the Soviet territories with the largest Jewish population – Belorussia, Ukraine and the Baltic States – were subject to.michael mills wrote:Let us assume that all the Jews of the German-occupied part of Poland perished (which is ahistorical, siince there was a significant number of survivors). Accordingly, the total number of victims would be 1.5 + 1.9 million = 3.4 million.
Mills' ensuing considerations fall accordingly. The fallacy of his reference to Hilberg, who apparently did not have access to the figures of the 1959 Soviet census used by Robel, has already been addressed in my last post. And his often-discussed contention that "furthermore the figure for Hungary is inflated by a good 100,000" is also based on rather unconvincing mental gymnastics.