HERE: ch. 14-15
14
After some fifteen years of historical research, I have come to the following conclusion: it was in 1943 that National Socialist Germany was accused for the first time of the systematic mass extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers. The author of this first, horrible and infamous accusation was a Polish Jew, a refugee in England and a jurist by profession, by the name of Rafael Lemkin. And, he made that accusation in a book published in London, and in English, in that year, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Am.ed., New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1944). At the time the book did not receive much attention; in October, 1943, when I was arrested by the Gestapo, it was still completely unknown in the best informed circles of the French Resistance, and I only heard of gas chambers for the first time at Dora, toward the middle of 1944. But in 1945-1946, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was the topic of all conversation behind the scenes at the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg, where it was cited by the prosecution in the case of Seyss-Inquart (T. XIX, pp. 70 and 92). And, the view maintained in the book was supported by the Kasztner Report on the tragedy of the Hungarian Jews, a report which was also talked about in the corridors during the trial. But, we must be precise and say that it was only after January 30, 1946, the date when French Prosecutor Dubost made public his discovery of the Gerstein document, that these two pieces of writing took on importance. In fact, it was on that day that, in the world press, the gas chambers mythology began its dance to every tune and diabolical rhythm; that unrestrained saraband full of missteps has not stopped since.
Let us try to reconstruct the facts. Until January 30, 1946, aside from the Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and the Kasztner Report, which were only secondhand testimonies, the prosecution and the judges at Nuremberg had only direct testimonies which, juridically, were not much more authentic, given the way in which they were adduced by their authors. All of these witnesses had been interned at Auschwitz, and, as for gas chambers, either they knew nothing about them, or they only knew about them through their prison comrades who were "trustworthy" and who they generally did not name, or who were already dead, if they did name them. Second hand testimony again. An example of this kind of testimony is provided by Dr. Benedikt Kautski who did not appear at court, but, as we have seen, who wrote a book and had his short hour of fame. Another is that of Madame Vaillant-Couturier who arrived at the Auschwitz camp in January 1943, who was a communist, who, for that reason, was hidden away in the hospital where she was an important personage in the Haeftlingsfuehrung, and who, in answer to the question as to whether the hospital had been open to Jews when they were sick, coldly replied to French Prosecutor Dubost, "No, when we got there the Jews did not have the right to go there; they were taken directly to the gas chamber if they were sick." (T. VI, p. 219.) Now, never was a false witness brought before the bar of a Tribunal with such calm assurance, since in January 1943 there existed -- if indeed, there ever existed -- no gas chamber at Auschwitz, the official word being that they were not installed until the end of February 1943. There is no end to the number of false witnesses of this kind that could be cited. But, for the first time, with the Gerstein document, the prosecution had a first-hand witness. But wasn't Gerstein dead? Yes, but he had written, or, at least, he had signed, a statement -- at least that is what was claimed. Was not this statement about Auschwitz? No, not in so far as it concerned what he had seen; but invoices for Zyklon B that was delivered to that camp were appended. His description of extermination by gas in other camps portrayed the operation in such a degree of horror that the journalists assigned to the trial decided that their emphasis of that theme would be sure to sell newspapers at home. The judges themselves accorded much less importance to the Gerstein allegations, but they allowed the journalists a free hand; even though they did not actually encourage them, they never gave them their true impressions of the Gerstein document, which was presented to public opinion as though it had been admitted into evidence when actually it had been rejected (as was discussed in the preceding chapter).
Dr. Benedikt Kautski's book did not come out until the end of 1946. Therefore, it did not play a part in the trial of the Major War Criminals. As a secondhand testimony on gas chambers it would not have been any great help. To have a description of the gas exterminations at Auschwitz as precise as that of the Gerstein document on Belzec, the prosecution had to wait until 1951 and Medecin a Auchwitz by Miklos Nyiszli, about whom we have also learned what to think in the preceding chapters. Since then, nothing. No other de visu witnesses. The literature of the concentration camps -- the historians like Hans Rothfels, Golo Mann, or Raul Hilberg, the War Crimes Commission of Warsaw, and the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, their propagandists like Leon Poliakov or Hannah Arendt, the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte at Munich, or showmen and film directors like Piscator (producer of Der Stellvertreter by Hochhuth) -- has never been able to bring forth, as far as I know, any more than those two testimonies, both of which I believe I have proved were obviously apocryphal. I shall not belabor the point.
Not having been able to establish the existence of gas extermination any better than that, those championing the genocide indictment did not have much better luck when they wanted to number the losses in human lives. In 1945-1946, during the trial of the Major War Criminals, they found themselves in the following situation: Mr. Rafael Lemkin said simply, "millions;" Dr. Rudolf Kasztner spoke only of Hungarian Jews whose number he estimated to be about 800,000 (page 1 of his Report), and he calculated (page 8) that "500,000 had been deported on the Karchau-Odenberg route between May 15, 1944, and the beginning of July," that is, the 7th, as he makes clear a little farther on; the figures given in the Gerstein document led to results so astronomical that they were useless (it is, perhaps, not useless to recall that all the rest of the material in the document was, at the time, used only by the press because the President of the Tribunal refused even to have it read by the French Prosecutor Dubost); Hoettl and Wisliceny, who, under the circumstances we already know about, spoke in terms of six and five million respectively, estimates that both said came from Eichmann. Finally, Mr. Justice Jackson, as we have seen, added to this confusing state of affairs when he stated in his speech of November 21, 1945, that:
Of the 9,600,000 Jews who were living in Nazi dominated Europe, it is estimated, with full knowledge of the facts, that sixty per cent perished; 5,700,000 Jews are missing from countries where they lived before, and more than 4,000,000 cannot be accounted for, either by a natural death rate, or immigration into other lands. (I.M.T. II, p. 128).
The figure of 4,500,000 exterminated was the claim of the prosecution, and it was, just the beginning. But, it is not easy to see how, between May 8, 1945, and the 21 st of November, Mr. Justice Jackson was able to obtain full knowledge of the facts. Since no official census took place during that period of time -- in any case, how could it have taken place in such a chaos of populations displaced and moving about in every direction? -- it is plainly only a purely conjectural estimate. Be that as it may, it was not sustained in the judgment against the Major War Criminals, and the press sustained Hoettl's estimate. Since then, except for Mr. Gerald Reitlinger, who alone came to a conclusion more or less in accord with Mr. Justice Jackson -- i.e., of 4,200,000 to 4,600,000 exterminated, everything has happened as if, once having laid down the principle that Hoettl's estimate was well founded, all of the other statisticians who have worked on the figures in the same spirit as the Warsaw Commission, the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, or the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte of Munich had never had any other purpose except to prove that the estimates of Hoettl and Wisliceny corresponded with reality. What is noticeable from the very first is that while they have all come to an overall result in the neighborhood of six million, they do not come to it by the same routes, since the allocation in detail by countries of these six million presents considerable disparities. The clearest example of these differences, it seems to me, is Poland, where Mr. Salo Baron, holder of the chair of Jewish History at Columbia University, found that on the arrival of Russian troops in the country 700,000 Jews were still there (according to his statement of April 24, 1961, at the Eichmann Trial); the World Center of Jewish Documentation at Paris gave the figure of 500,000 (communique to the Figaro litteraire of June 4, 1960), the Institute of Jewish Affairs claimed some 400,000 (Eichmann's Confederates and the Third Reich Hierarchy, p. 59), and Mr. Raul Hilberg found only 50,000 (The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 670). The distribution by camp, or sector of destruction, is not the same either, and offers disparities just as glaring, depending upon which one of these statisticians is referred to. For example: about 4,000,000 Jews met their fate at Auschwitz, the rest in other extermination camps, or in the open at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, we are told by Leon Poliakov, Olga Wormser, and Henri Michel, among others. This distribution manifestly takes into account the Warsaw judgment that condemned Hoess to be hanged on the charge of having caused the death at Auschwitz of 2,812,000 persons, 2,500,000 of them Jews, from May 1940 to December 1943; therefore, it is argued that this figure is not so far from the four million figure that is claimed for the whole term of the camp; to round things out, 1,950,000 is claimed for all the other camps, another million at Auschwitz (900,000 as corrected by the Institute of Jewish Affairs), 1,400,000 by the Einsatzgruppen, and the remainder in "Mobile operations" as Mr. Raul Hilberg tells us. We must also point out that the latter does not seem to be very sure of the figures himself since he comes to a total of 5,100,000 on page 767 of The Destruction of the European Jews, while he gets 5,407,500 on page 670. For all extermination camps other than Auschwitz Mr. Raul Hilberg gives us 950,000, but the Warsaw Commission and the Judgment of the Jerusalem Tribunal found "850,000 for only four out of five of them" (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, cp. chap. XXIII, p. 80).
All this shows how serious they are and how much to credit their documentary sources, which, although the same for all the statisticians, speak to each of them in so different a language that the only point of agreement is the total number of Jewish losses between 5 and 6 million human lives, when they all make their additions -- except for the more modest Reitlinger and for Poliakov who says "between 5 and 7 million" (Le Troisieme Reich et les Juifs). However, with regard to Reitlinger and Poliakov, they settle on 6 million, which is the mathematical mean.
The reader will readily understand that, faced with this jumble of contradictory calculations, rather than to take up each of the references one by one and to go over each of the additions, I have preferred, by using statistics all from Jewish sources, to try to reconstitute in detail, country by country, the world Jewish population of 1946, and compare it with what it was when National Socialism came to power in Germany in 1933. Rightly or wrongly, this procedure seems to me to be the best method, as we go along, to show up the shameless falsifications of the Warsaw Commission, the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte of Munich, and all of their supporters, authors, propagandists, journalists, historians, and others. I imagine that the reader will also readily understand that the statistics which follow cannot be considered correct down to a unit. In the matter of population statistics it is never possible to arrive at more than approximate conclusions, since the figures are based purely on interrogations of interested persons whose answers, when they can be gotten, are always unreliable, or they are not to be had at all because of the faultiness, or even the lack, of a civil service in a very great number of countries.
In the matter of the Jewish population, the vague sort of aversion which all Jews, since the days of Herod, have shown toward census taking is another source of errors. It is these two constant reservations which make approximations of all statistics. Nevertheless, as all statisticians concede, the errors will be so slight as to be negligible in the conclusions drawn from a comparison of two or more sets of figures, if they are of the same origin. With that granted, where do we stand in this month of July 1963?
II. Postwar Statistics
In 1951 the World Almanac published statistics from which it was concluded that there were then only 11,303,350 Jews in the world as against 16,643,120 in 1939. This conclusion was given as the result of research on the part of the American Jewish Committee Year Book and the Jewish Statistic Bureau of the Synagogue Council which had spent the years 1949 and 1950 at it.
Presented as they were, there are many reasons for thinking that the World Almanac statistics of 1951 were primarily an answer to a study which appeared on February 22, 1948, in the New York Times on the statistical data given by Hanson W. Baldwin, the Times expert on Jewish population matters. He claimed that in 1947, based on a secret census undertaken by the Jews themselves, there were living in the world between a minimum of 15,000,000 and a maximum of 18,000,000 Jews. He also claimed that between 650,000 and 750,000 of these Jews were living in Palestine and that 500,000 were living in the other countries of the Middle East. In October 1959, the American Mercury (pp. 14 to 17) reviewed all of these figures and brought the controversy up to date. In reply to the American Mercury, the 1960 edition of the World Almanac gave, for the year 1959, a world Jewish population of 12,299,780. Then, another bit of information from a Jewish source, which was widely circulated by the world press, appeared in 1963. The Hamburg daily, Die Welt, of April 1, 1963, for example, reported that:
There are only about 13 million Jews still in the world. In 1939 there were 16,673,000. This information was given out over the weekend by the London Institute of Jewish Affairs. Most of the Jews, about 5,500,000, are today living in the U.S.A. In Israel there are 2,045,000 in the Soviet Union 2,300,000, and in Great Britain 450,000 Jews. (1)
But, in the Israel Almanach (5719 in the Jewish calendar, 1958-1959 in the common calendar, P. 282) a Mr. Eric Peretz tells us that "the Jewish population of the state of Israel represents one eighth of the world Jewish population," and he fixed it at "one million eight hundred thousand." Meanwhile, a Mr. Marc Cohen puts that eighth at "two million." So, in that year, the thirteen million Jews of whom a world census was taken again in 1962 by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of London was either 14,00,000, if one prefers the first estimate, or 16 million, if one chooses the second. Incidentally, the Israel Almanach is published in Jerusalem by the "Youth and Hehabouts Department" of the world Zionist movement.
Only out of concern for accuracy and completeness do I give the puerile statement which Mr. Salo Baron, waving his title of Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, made before the bar of the Jerusalem Tribunal on April 24, 1961; it is herewith summarized from a report that appeared in the Figaro of the next day:
1. "Since 1945 the world Jewish population has increased at the rate of 20%."
2. "In 1939, there were about 16 million of us in the world. We should, therefore, be about 19,000,000 today, and we are only 12 million."
He makes up for his lack of historical knowledge with a very good knowledge of mathematics: 16 million minus 6 million equals 10 million, which, in turn, plus twenty per cent equals 12 million. His conclusion is mathematically indisputable! Now, it only remains for the Professor to establish, first, that the rate of increase of the world Jewish population was indeed 20% in 16 years and, second, that 6 million Jews were indeed exterminated. Well, let us proceed...
Let us proceed with the consideration of one particular element of world Jewry: the Jewish population in the United States. In 1959, the American Jewish Committee Year Book and the Jewish Statistical Bureau of the Synagogue Council estimated the American Jewish population at 5,185,000 for the year of 1949, and in 1959, at 5,260,000 for the year of 1958. From which we can conclude that if the world Jewish population increased by twenty per cent from 1945 to 1961, or 1.25% per year, as Mr. Salo Baron proclaimed at the Jerusalem Tribunal, America, at least, was an exception to the rule where the population was decreasing. And, for Russia, the information from the Institute of Jewish Affairs, which puts the population at 2,300,000 in 1962, hardly seems any more serious, if Mr. Nahum Goldmann is to be believed, who, in a report to the World Jewish Congress on September 12, 1963, said: "From 1948 to 1963 Jews in the USSR increased to about three million, according to five writers since dead, and one almanac and two periodicals." (Le Figaro, Paris, September 13, 1963). In 1961 Mr. Nahum Goldmann had already produced these figures before the World Jewish Congress. Just the same, there is a difference of 700,000 between 2,300,000 and 3 million...
During the whole of 1959, the Jewish population of the United States was the object, in the United States itself, of very strained discussion, after the publication in 1951 of The Iron Curtain Over America, (Dallas: Wilkinson, 1951) in which the author, Mr. John Beaty, complained that the 1924 immigration law was constantly broken and that "since the end of the Second World War the problem of illegal entry has increased tremendously." (p. 45). And, he cited the Jewish immigration from eastern Europe as an example of such illegal immigration. (pp. 36-43). Here again it is the American Mercury which gave emphasis to the discussion. It underlined two things in particular concerning the Jewish immigration:
1. "The principal world Zionist organizations proudly proclaim that two-thirds of the Jews of the world are now living in the United States." And it concluded that if the figures which Hanson W. Baldwin published in the New York Times of February 22, 1948, correspond to reality, it was not of 5,185,000 or 5,260,000 that one should speak, as the statistics from Jewish sources claimed, but of 10,766,666 or 12,800,000 (in 1947!). In any case, Jewish statistics for 1959 claimed that the world Jewish population had risen that year to 12,299,780 persons. If it is true that two-thirds of them were living in the United States, that makes, after all, 8,200,000, or, according to the information of Die Welt (also from a Jewish source) 8,667,000 for the year 1962, and not 5,500,000 as that information claims.
2. The other aspect of the problem was that during the year 1959 the Census Bureau of the United States government decided to conduct a census in 1960 to determine the extent of illegal immigration into the United States. All of the world Zionist organizations immediately protested -- and successfully, the American Mercury pointed out -- when the Census Bureau turned to the churches and to the synagogues with the object of finding out the number of persons who claimed membership within their congregations. The Zionist leaders stated, still according to the American Mercury, that it was "a violation of the principle of the separation of Church and State" -- as set forth in the Constitution of the United States -- for such a census to be taken and even that the proposed action of the census officials would draw down the wrath of God." The true reasons for this opposition can be seen easily; such a census, conducted in that manner, would have brought to light the vast extent of the Jewish immigration into the United States since 1933 and would have forever destroyed the myth of the six million Jewish victims of Nazi "genocide." That none of them at once calculated the Jewish population of the United States at 12 million is not astonishing, particularly if they had read the New York Times article!
Since then, the figure of 12 million has become accepted, more or less, by American public opinion makers, as shown by this excerpt from the National Observer of July 2, 1962:
The nation's major religious groups, representing more than 40 Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Jewish denominations have joined forces to tackle one of the country's thorniest domestic problems: race relations.
They have called the first National Conference on Religion and Race to be held next January in Chicago. About 600 clerical and lay leaders, representing nearly 100,000,000 Americans, are expected to participate. One stated objective of the conference is to demonstrate the concern of religious leaders over racial segregation by a "statement of conscience."
Participating will be the National Council of Churches, an organization of 33 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations with nearly 40,000,000 members; the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the administrative agency of Catholic Bishops (there are 43,000,000 Catholics in the nation); and the Synagogue Council of America, which is representative of Jewish bodies at the national level. (Rabbinic bodies of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism are represented. There are about 12,000,000 Jews in the United States.)
Such are the points of view that confront each other concerning the Jewish population of the United States. We shall see farther on that for Poland, Russia, and, in a general way, for all of Central and Balkan Europe, statistics of Jewish origin pose in no less a brutal fashion the problem of their obvious falsification.
III. Prewar Statistics
In 1932, a Jewish journal that was published in New York, the Menorah Journal, (No. 2, February) printed an analysis of the world Jewish population, the facts for which had been taken from the most noted Jewish statistician of the times, Mr. Arthur Ruppin.(2) The latter, said the Menorah Journal, had classified the Jews of the whole world, by occupation and by country. By occupation, it gave the conclusions just as they had been formulated by the statistician. By countries, it gave, in diminishing order, only those where there were more than 100,000 Jews, being content, for the others, to> A. By occupations
Commerce .......................................... 6,100,000 or 38.6%
Crafts and industries .......................... 5,730,000 or 36.4%
Rentiers .............................................. 2,000,000 or 2.7%
Professions ......................................... 1,000,000 or 6.3%
Agriculture ........................................... 625,000 or 4%
In service, laborers ............................... 325,000 or 2%
Totals .................................................. 15,780,000 100%
B. By countries
United States ........................................... 4,500,000
Poland .................................................. 3,100,000
Russia ................................................... 3,000,000
Rumania .................................................. 900,000
Germany ................................................. 500,000
England ................................................... 330,000
France .................................................... 250,000
Palestine ................................................. 250,000
Argentina ................................................. 240,000
Austria .................................................... 230,000
Canada .................................................... 170,000
Lithuania .................................................. 160,000
Low countries ............................................ 120,000
French Morocco .......................................... 120,000
Iraq ......................................................... 100,000
Other ..................................................... 1,810,000
Total ................................................... 15,780,000
The other countries showed up this way:
1. Countries with between 50,000 and 100,000 Jews:
Latvia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Bulgaria, Algeria, South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt.
2. Countries with between 10,000 and 50,000 Jews:
Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Persia, Syria, Yemen, India, Afghanistan, China, Spanish Morocco, Tripoli, Australia.
3. Countries with fewer than 10,000 Jews:
Danzig, Sweden, Denmark, Esthonia, Ireland, Spain, Rhodes, Memel, Portugal, Norway, Finland, Cuba, Chile, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand.
All of the preceding figures are dated from 1926 to 1928 and represent 0.8% of the population of the world, then calculated at two billion inhabitants.
In 1932, population movements only interested me professionally, that is, in their major lines of force, and, as far as the Jewish population was concerned, at that time these statistics seemed to me to give a good enough picture so that I felt informed on the matter. I remember having noted that from 1877 to 1932 the Jewish population of the United States had risen from 230,000 to 4,500,000, while that of France had increased from 150,000 to 250,000 between 1850 and the same date, and I concluded that the migration of European Jews was in the direction of the United States via Western Europe. From the lands of pogroms to the land of liberty. For me that was the main point. So, in 1934, when Arthur Ruppin's Les Juifs dans le Monde moderne came out in France, I did not read it. But, that was a mistake. Had I read Ruppin's original work, I would surely have noticed that the Menorah Journal had, for instance, failed to mention Hungary and Czechoslavakia. I was wrong again in not foreseeing that later on I would need figures more exact than those that that publication gave for Belgium, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the like. After the war, when I needed all that information, I was not able to put my hands on a copy of Arthur Ruppin's work, which had so mysteriously disappeared from circulation, except after exercising the wiles of a Sioux Indian. In 1960, when I published Ulysse trahi par les siens, I had not yet succeeded, and for Hungary and Czechoslovakia I had to be satisfied with working out, as a note to the figures quoted, the figures of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, leaving it up to the reader to add them to the total which I found for the population of European Jews in countries occupied by Germany, and which came to 8,700,000, but at the same time cautioning the reader that the figures were clearly exaggerated by some 404,000 for Hungary and some 315,000 for Czechoslovakia.
Here now are Mr. Arthur Ruppin's statistics for those countries of Europe occupied by the Germans during World War Two:
Poland........................3,100,000
Russia.........................3,000,000
Rumania....................... 900,000
Germany....................... 500,000
Hungary........................ 320,000
Czechoslovakia............. 260,000
France........................... 250,000
Austria........................... 230,000
Lithuania........................160,000
Low countries................ 120,000
Latvia...............................80,000
Greece..............................75,000
Yugoslavia........................70,000
Belgium............................60,000
Italy..................................50,000
Bulgaria............................50,000
Denmark............................7,000
Esthonia.............................5,000
Norway..............................2,000
Finland...............................2,000
Luxemburg..........................2,000
Total.............................9,243,000
From 1932 to 1939, philo-Semites or anti-Semites, everyone who talked about the European or the world Jewish population referred to Arthur Ruppin. In Europe, the first drew attention to the fact that about 9 million European Jews were menaced by National Socialism; the second made use of his> I should say that in his study Arthur Ruppin warned that because of the difficulties inherent in all population studies, in particular that of Jewish populations, the figures he gave did not have an indisputable and absolute value. With that consideration in mind, I shall concede that the 9,243,000 Jews in Europe occupied by the Germans could just as well be 9 million. In addition, I shall concede that in figuring 9.6 million, Mr. Justice Jackson had not exaggerated so badly; at least, his overestimation was very much less than the postwar statisticians of theWorld Almanac (cp. on p. 103, the estimate of the Jewish population in 1938, as published in the 1948 edition). In fact, one can hardly say that he exaggerated at all. He had not left anyone out, that's all. His great mistake was in not having thought that in 1939 the Jewish population of those countries was not the same as in 1931; in other words, he erred by not taking into account Jewish emigration during the period when they were directly threatened by National Socialism. He should be censured, therefore, for having stated positively, without any proof -- not having and not being able to have "full knowledge of the facts," as he boldly claimed -- that sixty per cent of that population, certainly overestimated by him, were absent from the roll call at the time he pronounced his indictment.
Finally, in parallel columns, on page 302, are the estimates of Jewish losses published by the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Paris (Le Figaro Litteraire, June 4, 1960) and by Mr. Raul Hilberg in 1961 (The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 670).
My first idea had been to put into parallel columns three sets of statistics, the third being those published also in 1961 by the Institute of Jewish Affairs in Eichmann's Confederates and the Third Reich Hierarchy. But that compilation was limited to a list of Jewish losses by country without further reference to their numbers in 1939 other than by percentages.
By stretching Mr. Raul Hilberg's figures for Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia a little, the Institute of Jewish Affairs gives a total of 5,717,000 exterminated, representing, it points out, 68 percent of the Jewish population of those countries in 1939. From which one can conclude that the prewar Jewish population of those countries came to 8,400,000. The discrepancy is significant only with regard to Poland, for which the Institute gives 400,000 survivors, where Mr. Raul Hilberg came up with only 50,000; Mr. Salo Baron got 700,000; and the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation of Paris, found 500,000. Where it found two million survivors in Russia, Mr. Raul Hilberg found 2,600,000. 360,000 Jews are claimed by the Institute to have been living in Czechoslovakia in 1939, while Mr. Raul Hilberg is content with 315,000, and Mr. Arthur Ruppin with 260,000. In addition, there are a few other misuses. Upon reflection, the dose of phantasy which is provided by the statistics which are set forth on page 302 struck me as quiet enough for the time being, and I finally decided to refrain from citing the third set of figures in addition.
| WCJD | Hilberg | |||||
| Country | 1939 | 1946 | Losses | 1939 | 1946 | Losses |
| France | 300,000 | 180,000 | 120,000 | 270,000 | 200,000 | 70,000 |
| Belgium | 90,000 | 50,000 | 40,000 | 140,000 | 20,000 | 120,000 |
| Holland | 150,000 | 60,000 | 90,000 | 140,000 | 20,000 | 120,000 |
| Denmark | 7,000 | 6,500 | 500 | 6,500 | 5,500 | 1,000 |
| Norway | 1,500 | 600 | 900 | 2,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| Esthonia | 5,000 | 1,000 | 4,000 | 4,500 | -- | 4,500 |
| Latvia | 95,000 | 10,000 | 85,000 | 95,000 | -- | 95,000 |
| Lithuania | 150,000 | 15,000 | 135,000 | 145,000 | -- | 145,000 |
| Poland | 3,300,000 | 500,000 | 2,800,000 | 3,350,000 | 50,000 | 3,300,000 |
| Germany | 210,000 | 40,000 | 170,000 | 240,000 | 80,000 | 160,000 |
| Czechoslov. | 315,000 | 55,000 | 260,000 | 315,000 | 44,000 | 271,000 |
| Austria | 60,000 | 20,000 | 40,000 | 60,000 | 7,000 | 53,000 |
| Hungray | 404,000 | 204,000 | 200,000 | 400,000 | 200,000 | 200,000 |
| Yugoslav. | 75,000 | 20,000 | 55,000 | 75,000 | 12,000 | 63,000 |
| Rumania | 850,000 | 425,000 | 425,000 | 800,000 | 430,000 | 370,000 |
| Italy | 57,000 | 42,000 | 15,000 | 50,000 | 33,000 | 17,000 |
| USSR | 2,100,000 | 600,000 | 1,500,000 | 3,020,000 | 2,600,000 | 420,000 |
| Bulgaria | 50,000 | 43,000 | 7,000 | 50,000 | 47,000 | 3,000 |
| Greece | 75,000 | 15,000 | 60,000 | 74,000 | 12,000 | 62,000 |
| Luxemburg | 3,000 | 1,000 | 2,000 | 3,000 | 1,000 | 2,000 |
| TOTALS | 8,297,500 | 2,288,100 | 6,009,400 | 9,190,000 | 3,782,500 | 5,407,500 |
Now, let us have a look at our two sets of statistics. They have the following in common:
- In comparison with the statistics of Mr. Arthur Ruppin they both take into account the Jewish migration between 1933 and 1939, but for Germany and Austria only. With regard to this emigration everyone, including the statistics of Richard Korherr, head of the Population Bureau of the Third Reich, dated April 17, 1943, is in agreement, a most rare occurrence, in estimating the Jewish emigration at 300,000 from Germany, and 180,000 from Austria. The exaggeration of Mr. Raul Hilberg is unimportant because, being of the same magnitude and kind in the two columns, it does not involve the number of exterminated obtained by comparison. It calls for only one comment: one piece of the record with which he was not acquainted.
- The victims are largely accounted for by overestimating the prewar Jewish population and minimizing the postwar Jewish population, a little everywhere, but mainly in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. We notice that these prewar overestimations lie between 50,000 and 100,000 per country, sometimes more (200,000 for Poland!). If they have minimized proportionately the number of survivors, and on the suppositionthat ten out of the twenty countries concerned in these statistics are affected by an exaggeration of this kind (it was obviously not possible everywhere, in Norway or Denmark, for instance), an exaggeration of at least 50,000 per country would account for a million of the total number of those who claimed to have been exterminated, obtained by the difference, and an exaggeration of 100,000 per country, would yield a total of 2 million. But, that is only a gratuitous supposition, and I only make it here to show how a little stream can easily become a great river. Later on we shall see what the actual worth of these two statistics is. Each thing in its own time.
Next, let us examine the divergencies that are presented by comparing the aforementioned statistics:
- The total number of survivors varies by about 1.5 million from one to the other, and of those exterminated by a little more than 600,000. In both cases such a variation is a significant margin;
- Looking at it closely, this divergence derives from the evaluations, respectively, for Russia and Poland. For the first, the figure of 2,100,000 given by theWorld Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Paris does not include the whole of Russia, but only that part which was occupied by German troops. The only persons who know this are those who have readLe Troisieme Reich et les Juifs by Leon Poliakov, from which these statistics are extracted and in which this particular detail is mentioned. If one reintegrates into the two columns the million Jews that Mr. Poliakov very arbitrarily subtracted, the estimate of survivors differs by exactly one million from one to the other for that country, the total number of the exterminated for all countries still differs by a little less than 600,000. Who can say how Mr. Poliakov managed to get the figure, 2,100,000 for the number of Jews living in that part of Russia occupied by German troops; he does not tell us. But, we can be sure that there is no question here of a census evaluation; such a procedure is absolutely impossible on the local level unless that level corresponds to the existing civil administrative districts. Thus, no census could have been made in Russia, because the O.K.W. decided to conquer Russia in accordance with the geographical imperatives of strategy instead of by one administrative district after another. Mr. Poliakov's figure is a purely conjectural evaluation, therefore, and one which seems to assume that the Jews of this region, instead of fleeing before an invasion which they knew was fatal for them, waited nicely in place for the coming of their executioners. Nor can it be said how Mr. Poliakov managed to estimate at 600,000 the number of survivors in 1946, when we can be sure that, with the war over for only a year, order had not been sufficiently reestablished to permit census-taking; obviously, that figure is still another rough estimate! That it showed a loss of 1.5 million was doubtless all that mattered to Mr. Poliakov, and, without doubt, he also worked out ahead of time the result that he was to come to, so that it would harmonize with the legend of the six million. He did not realize that Mr. Raul Hilberg was right behind him!
- On reading Mr. Raul Hilberg's monograph, we see that he has taken into account the flight of the Jews before the advance of the German armies in Russia. But to what extent does his estimate correspond with reality? That is what we shall see farther on. One must concede, in any case, that when he gives 3,020,000 as the number of Jews living in Russia in 1939, he is in agreement with Mr. Arthur Ruppin; and, when he calculates at 2,600,000 those among them who survived, which gives 420,000 lost, he is also in agreement with the Jewish journalist, David Bergelson, who wrote in Die Einheit, on December 5, 1942, that "Thanks to the evacuation, the majority (80%) of the Jews of the Ukraine, White Russia, and Lithuania and Latvia, were saved" (cited from Der Weg, Buenos Aires, January 1953). Where Mr. Raul Hilberg is no longer in agreement is with himself. If, as he says, 2,600,000 Russian Jews were saved, how can he maintain (p. 190) that for Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia only 1.5 million "escaped behind the Russian lines" at the time of the advance of the German troops? And, how can he also maintain, as he does in his own statistics, that not one Latvian Jew survived?
- Poland: Here the statistics are more or less in agreement on the Jewish population in 1939, but not at all on the number of survivors; 500,000 for one, 50,000 for the other, a ratio of 1 to 10 -- compared to the 1 to 14 of Mr. Salo Baron. We do not know how the World Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation came to this conclusion; there is no reference. As for Mr. Raul Hilberg, he is irretrievably lost in the fog of figures that he builds up around himself. Indeed, we have seen that on page 767 of his book he gives 3,000,000 Polish Jewsexterminated, and on page 670, he gives just 50,000 survivors out of 3,350,000; any explanation is superfluous. From what we have seen thus far, we can detect the playing of a little game. These statistics are indiscriminately, and even sometimes simultaneously, supported by theWorld Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and various other Zionist organizations and spokesmen. The reader is free to choose between the two and to put himself in the place of one who might find the Jewish population of 1939 as given by the World Center at Paris and the number of Jewish survivors in 1945 as given by Mr. Raul Hilberg closer to reality. Or the other way around. In this saraband of figures, anything goes. In the first case we get: 8,297,500 minus 3,782,500 or 4,515,000 victims; and in the second case 9,190,000 minus 2,288,100 or 6,901,900 victims. The result yields quite an impressive difference. By pursuing further this comparison of the two statistics we could doubtless find even more striking anomalies, but to what purpose?
I think that the moment has come to talk of more serious matters, namely, of that migration of the European Jews between 1933 and 1945, to which I have only alluded so far. Because this movement has not been studied in any detail by any of the authors who we have been discussing, it is full of question marks and is suspectible to all kinds of manipulation. If it is true, as the American Mercury claims, that the Zionists will not permit a census of world Jewry -- what an admission! -- and that that refusal makes an accurate head count impossible, then they have little ground for complaint if any of my conclusions, which are based upon their own statistics, are wrong; after all, the following study would not have been necessary if there were such a census, since the entire truth would be revealed by it.
IV. The Jewish Migration, or `The Wandering Jew'
In order really to understand the movements of the European Jews from 1933 to 1945, it seems to me that a brief historical survey of Jewish migration is indispensable; in short, a history of the "wandering Jew."
Successively or simultaneously popularized as Cartaphilus, Ahasverus, or Laquedem, depending upon the place and the time, the "wandering Jew" seems to have come into the European tradition in about the thirteenth century. Image and song had characterized him definitely in the eighteenth century in a naive ballad in twenty-four couplets, a "Portrait drawn from nature by the citizens of Brussels, at the time of the last appearance of the Jew, the 22nd of April, 1774," which in its own way gives an account of one of the oldest and earliest of historical realities: the Jewish migration. One of the oldest, the peregrinations of that branch, considered legitimate, of the descendants of Noah by Sem and Abraham (5), it is, in its legendary and mythical form, the substance of the Old Testament, which dates their first steps back to the no less legendary and mythical Flood. The earliest: coming into history at a very uncertain date but very probably contemporary with the invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos (18th c. B.C.), in any case, between the 20th and the 12th centuries before Christ, when all the other human migrations had long since come to an end. Not only is the Jewish migration not ended, but twenty centuries after Christ it is still being described in the same legendary terms, and still has the same motive power. "The commercial bent of the Jewish people," Otto Heller said (La Fin du Judaisme. Paris: Guilde, 1933), "is of long tradition." In fact, from Sumer, which, if one is to believe the Old Testament, was its first objective, to New York, which seems to be its present objective, the Jewish migration has followed, as have all human migrations, the great natural arteries, but not in the same haphazard way. Rather, the Jews have constantly turned toward those points or regions on the globe which have achieved the highest economic development. That is why, instead of going directly from the East toward the West, like all the other human migrations, this one went in a zig-zag fashion in all directions. That it encountered various misadventures, particularly the hostility it attracted in certain areas it had chosen for expansion, is certain. But these accidents scarcely modified the movement with regard to the ever constant aims. Incidentally, this hostility was never, historically speaking, either systematic or permanent, doubtless because, unlike all the other human migrations, it was itself never massive or aggressive; instead, it was characterized by the suppleness of the professional tradesman. However, there are two exceptions to this historical generalization. In its Biblical phase, during the time when first Saul, then David, and then Solomon tried to settle permanently and by force at the place where the two great commercial arterial routes of their times intersected -- routes that connected Europe and Asia to Africa, that is to say in Palestine --with the hope of living there by extracting a tithe of all the trade obliged to make use of this passage. And today, still in Palestine where international Zionism plans to reconstitute, in the form of a State Bank, the Kingdom of Solomon, since Israel finds itself once again on the most important commercial arterial of the modern world, the one going from New York to New York, around the world via London, Paris, Tel-Aviv, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo. In any case, that is what one gets out of a small book, by a certain Kadmi Cohen, a spokesman for international Zionism, which had some fame between the two world wars:L'Etat d'Israel (Paris: Kra, 1930). The theme of this book seems to be, although presented in vague terminology so as not to reveal the cloven hoof, that the international Zionist movement should not aim at assembling all of the Jews of the world in a country the size of the Kingdom of Solomon and at organizing them into a modern nation, but only its outer flank, whose task it would be to make it a home-port for a Diaspora which would rationally apportion the riches of the world at the point where they converge, after, naturally, siphoning off a portion for themselves. But, on the scale of the modern world, that would in a way be a repetition of the operation which was realized in the first century B.C., on the scale of the Roman world, which was described by Cicero in his celebrated speech Pro Flacco, and which was seen in the periodic shipment, on galleys headed for Judea, of all the gold of that world, which had until then, converted on Rome. If, twice, Rome commissioned Titus (70 A.D.) and then Hadrian (135 A.D.) to destroy the Kingdom of Judea and to disperse its people throughout the Empire, among other reasons, it had this one: to get back what she considered to be her gold. Until Titus she had been very benevolent toward the Jews, as shown by the Bernice story.
Today, speaking metaphorically, the aim is the gold of Fort Knox. If the plan should succeed -- and all that is needed is for the American branch of international Zionism to get its hand on Wall Street -- the Israeli home-port of the Diaspora would become not only the commercial home of the Atlantic world, but, since oil is the primary source of energy for its development, and control of that would be totally assured from the Middle East to Texas, it would also become the command post of all of the world's industry. "You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow," the Eternal One said to Adam; and to Eve, "You will give birth in pain,"as he chased the couple from the earthly Paradise he had created for them and for their descendants. The women of Israel would, to be sure, continue to bear their children in pain, but their men would earn their bread and that of their children by the sweat of other's brows. Then, at the very least, it could be said that the designation "Chosen People," which the Jews claim for themselves, would assume it full significance.
The chances for this to succeed? In 1932, Mr. Arthur Ruppin (Les Juifs dans le Monde Moderne, op. cit.) told us that in 1927 in the United States, the 4,500,000 Jews controlled a substantial number of periodical publications; they can be broken down in this way: 9 dailies, 68 weeklies, 18 monthlies, 16 others. Furthermore, he specified that 65 of these publications came out in English, 41 in Yiddish, 3 in Hebrew, 2 in German, and that the most widely read of the dailies, the New York Vorwaerts, had a circulation of 250,000. Here it is a question only of the internal press of Judaism, whose aim was solely to maintain homogeneity. No account was taken of Jewish financial participation in the press at large, which Mr. Arthur Ruppin describes as being very significant. And what of this Jewish control of the "mass media" today? We shall see its effect farther on when we take up the significance of the Jewish population in the United States. As for the importance of the internal press of the Zionist movement, I have not one fact which would allow me to estimate it. But it cannot be less than it was in 1927. And, as for the significance of Jewish financial participation in the public press -- as well as in cinema, radio, television, and book publishing -- it will suffice for me to remark that that press publicizes, with remarkable consistency, and assumes responsibility for all the theses of the American Jewish Committee. That these theses are not always in accord with those of theWorld Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, and of its subsidiaries, whose propaganda is inspired by Mr. Ben Gurion, is to be accounted for in the political dissension between him and Mr. Nahum Goldmann, who is the inspiration for the American Jewish Committee. The discord between these two men and the two organizations lies only in details and is only barely perceptible in shades of meaning. When it comes to essentials they are always in agreement on the general theme.And their respective adherents follow their example; Mr. Raul Hilberg and Madame Hannah Arendt offer us the best illustration. At the service of Mr. Nahum Goldmann, they credit Auschwitz with one million Jews exterminated (nearly three million less than Leon Poliakov, or Olga Wurmser, or Henri Michel of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and its subsidiaries!) and give 950,000 for the five other alleged gas extermination centers (more than one million less than the figure given by the World Center group; in all, a margin of error of nearly four million out of a total of six!) But, when they come to make their additions for the balance sheet of Jewish losses, they still manage to come to a figure near, or at least on the same sort of scale (this is the shade of meaning in the general theme) as the six million of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and its subsidiaries at the service of Mr. Ben Gurion. The same holds true for the analysis of the Jewish losses by countries, where, depending upon whether you follow the contentions of the American Jewish Committee, as expressed by Mr. Raul Hilberg or by Mr. Salo Baron, or those of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, as expressed by the Poliakov group, you get a total for survivors which varies from 50,000 to 700,000 for Poland, from 500,000 to 2,600,000 for Russia, from zero to 85,000 for Latvia, and from zero to several millions for each one of a dozen other countries, without the overall figure for losses for all the countries being noticeably affected. All this means that in the general contention, shared by both, that six million Jews more or less were exterminated, these two theses nullify each other when it comes to the details.
But, let us return to our examination of Jewish migration.
Of the accidental historical circumstances which had an influence on the general direction which the Jewish migration took, the most important seem to have been the Babylonian Captivity (588-536 B.C.), the intervention of Titus (70 A.D.) and of Hadrian (135 A.D.), the reactions of Christianity in the Middle Ages (especially from the 13th to the 16th century), the policy of the Russian Czars in the second half of the 19th century, Bolshevism, the, so to speak, atavistic hostility of the Polish people since the end of the First World War, and finally Hitler from 1933 to 1945. However, there were other significant circumstances which were not hostile: since 1850, the progressive assumption of industrial and commercial world leadership by the United States has been a positive factor which has been decisive in orienting the actual migration of the Jews, and in accelerating the orientation. 'The figures are revealing: 230,000 Jews in the United States in 1877; 475,000 in 1890; 1,775,000 in 1906; 3,300,000 in 1916; 4,081,000 in 1926; 4,461,184 in 1936, according to Mr. John Beaty (The Iron Curtain over America, p. 41), who claims to be citing from various official censuses of the American populations (6). And, that means that during these sixty years the Jewish population of the United States has multiplied more than twenty-fold, a veritable invasion. However, it is true that during these sixty years, it is not only Jews who have been drawn to the United States. In 1936, the date of the last official statistics which are referred to by Mr. John Beaty, out of a total population of 128 million, there were about 115 million whites. Among these 115 million, approximately 33 million were either foreign-born or of the first generation of foreign-born. These sixty years corresponded to what we in Europe call theGold Rush, which was first set in motion in 1848 by the discovery of gold in California and which laid the foundation for the extraordinary development of San Francisco. It was really an "Industrial Rush" in the United States after 1877.
In 1926 the Germans, or descendants of Germans, made up the largest ethnic or national group in the United States with 7,250,000; the English were next with 5 million; then came the Irish with 4 million; and the Italians with 3,500,000. However, with its 4,081,000 individuals, the Jewish group was the one which was, with regard to its world-wide importance, by far the strongest contingent. It must also be noted that while the other groups settled in the United States between 1850 and 1900, the Jews only began to arrive in large numbers about 1900, particularly after 1906, and, as the statistics show, they were mostly Russian and Polish in origin; those who were not were almost all German. It seems that one can associate the beginnings of the massive migration of the Jews to the United States with two events, contemporary with it: (1) the setback of Theodore Herzl (who died in 1904) in his attempt to found a Jewish state in Palestine, which was especially of concern to the Russian and Polish Jews who were victims of periodic pogroms, and (2) the first steps taken by the United States to establish immigration quotas (1917-1924) which, according to the figures cited above, make it clear that the immigration of the Jews was largely clandestine after 1917. One quickly gets an idea of what it has been since that date. No error is risked in saying that the Russian, Polish, and German Jews have lost no ground since the beginning of the century, and that, especially between 1933 and 1945, their immigration was not any the less clandestine in spite of the existence of the National Origins Law of 1924 which, observing how Jews in Europe were being persecuted, was never brought -- to the honor of America -- into effect against them during this period, although in theory this law was never officially repealed.
If every time the Jewish problem has arisen in the world it has been stirred up by Russian, Polish, and German Jews -- at least -- it is due to the shattering intervention of Titus and Hadrian in Palestine, an intervention which displaced what one might call the center of gravity, or nutrient reservoir, of the Jewish migration in the European triangle lying between the mouths of the Volga, the Danube, and the Vistula. Mistreated as they were by Rome, the refugees from the massacres were scarely drawn to Egypt, also Roman, as their fathers had been in the time of Herod; they preferred to work their way beyond the limes, most of them by way of the Caucasus, with the rest going to settle in Babylon, which had earlier been assigned to their ancestors by Nebuchadnezzar during the time of the Captivity (6th c. B.C.). In the tolerant reign of the Arsacides, the latter formed a sort of vassal state which, from the third to the fifth century, intellectually illuminated the entire Jewish world through its theological academies of Sora, Poumbadita and Hahardea. There, and during that epoch, the so-called Babylonian Talmud was codified. But that branch progressively joined with the larger migration and was incorporated within it.
Had their Palestine experience taught them a lesson? Very likely. The fact remains that all the writers who have described or commented upon these events are agreed on this point: the Jews were very well received on the other side of the Caucasus by the autochthonous peoples among whom they appeared as the bearers of a new religion to whose proselytism they yielded. As they made converts among these people so did they mingle with them, and they rapidly swarmed into the area between the mouth of the Danube and that of the Volga; then, clever merchants as they had remained, they were drawn to the Baltic Sea, and they soon occupied a triangle formed with the mouth of the Vistula, through which necessarily passed all the land routes, highways and rivers, which contributed to the trade between continental Europe and Asia, via the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Caracalla did away with the measures taken against them by Titus and Hadrian. Consequently, during the whole of the third century and until Constantine, who persecuted them again (beginning of the fourth century), their commercial progress was favored by the normalization of their relations with their co-religionists who were still in the Empire, and they too appeared as the bearers of a standard of living, until then unknown to the barbarian peoples of those regions, which attracted the native population as much as, if not more then, their religion did. With conversion and intermarriage contributing, the two or three tens of thousands of Jews, who fleeing before the soldiers of Titus and Hadrian had crossed the Caucasus, had become by the Middle Ages hundreds of thousands, living in trading communities closed to the uninitiated, whose synagogues were at the same time the cement and the keystone, but whose ethnic formation was quite different from the original group. On the eve of the war of 1939, there were several million of the Askenazim in world Jewry, as compared to the Sephardim, descendants of those who had gone into western Europe along the shores of the Mediterranean, without mingling with the autochthonous populations of the countries they went through and who had kept their original ethnic type.
I shall take advantage of the opportunity here presented to say that from the Askenazim to the Sephardim, world Jewry of the twentieth century is composed of men and women of an infinity of types, very clearly distinguishable in their somatic characteristics -- there are even yellow and black Jews! -- who are united only by a religion, customs, a way of life, or, to sum it up, a tradition which is the binding element made up of a singleness of viewpoint and a solidarity that survives all strains, but which is not of the kind that defines a race in the biological sense that we give to the word. By giving a racial character to their struggles, both Hitler and Ben Gurion committed the same error: that of the latter in wanting, in the creation of the State of Israel, not only to save men, but to save a type of man who no longer exists, if he ever did; that of the former in wanting to protect from intermarriage by that imaginary man a German society which he labelled the Germanic type, but which racially was no more that than the Israeli society is Jewish. With regard to its population, this is what Mr. Ben Gurion's State of Israel is: a conglomeration of human types from the Yemenite Jew influenced by the Arab, to the German Jew mixed with the German type, and the Russian, Rumanian or Hungarian Jew infiltrated by the Slav; in short, Israel is populated with all of these types which have few or no somatic characteristics in common. The only things that the Zionist movement can hope for from so anomalous a group are, ethnically or racially speaking, the evolution of a new type of Jewish human being, issuing from a long series of mixtures of all these types, insofar as they consent to be mixed, and, politically speaking, the development of a theological state, a community in its most archaic form, which would correspond with the intellectual level of that community, perhaps very high in religious or mystic qualities but certainly very low, or backward, from the philosophical point of view. So, we see that for peoples as primitive as the Yemen Jews -- together with whom it is proposed to merge into one single people all the Jews of the world in the land of their ancestors, a land much less common to them all than they claim -- international Zionism is not held with the same insurmountable aversion which, ever since Theodore Herzl held it over the baptismal fountain, it has experienced among the peoples of the highest European civilizations. It is commonly known with what stubborn indignation international Zionism has constantly rejected the ideas of the greatest Jewish philosopher of all times, Moses Mendelsohn (1729-1786), who, wanting to put an end to Jewish Apartheid, preached the assimilation of the Jews with the peoples among whom they lived. The reason why his ideas are opposed is that, in trying to raise Judaism above the level of religion and racial myths to the level of philosophy, the ideas of Moses Mendelsohn would have meant, if they had been seriously considered, the end of the Rabbinat, a convenient screen behind which was created, and has prospered ever since, the most vast and ambitious commercial enterprise of all time. Threatened with extinction, or, at the least, with a diminution of its profits, by a society greatly enlarged by the assimilation of the Jews with the civilized Europeans, this commercial enterprise runs no risk at all by merging with the Yemenite Jews on Israeli territory. But, one shudders to think what this future Jewish type would be, with Judaism now proliferating among the blacks and Yellows as it has proliferated in Europe.
As seen from the same angle, Hitler's Germany was quite similar: a society of people of an infinity of types, in which the German type, characterized by a blend, in one person, of considerable height, dolichocephalic head, and deficient pigmentation (pale skin, blond hair), represented only a very small minority. "Between 1874 and 1877," Pierre Gaxotte (Histoire de l'Allemagne, Paris, 1963, Vol. I, p. 21) says, " a study made in German schools involving about six million children, showed only 31% were blond. Other studies show that the north Germans, whom tradition calls as the best preserved type, are only 18% dolichocephalic." Let the Germans not be disturbed. A comparable study to determine, for example, the Celtic type in the French population would give the same sort of results. In western Europe, where the population is a millenary brew of all the migrations meeting there and of the killing of each other off, there is no homogeneous people, anthropologically speaking, not even a type of any one of the migrations which could be called representative of any majority, or perfectly preserved. Even granting that it is possible to define the original Jewish type with as much accuracy as the German or Celtic type, it is very probable that if the same sort of studies were made in world-wide Jewish societies, roughly the same results would be obtained. The Sephardim Jews, who are surely the closest to that original type, do not, in any case, represent more than a tiny minority. And, this shows how far both Hitler and Ben Gurion went astray in the battle with a myth, at the racial level, at least. There is no doubt but that twentieth century humanity is faced with a racial problem: the relations that can or should exist between the white race and the colored races. It is a problem that exists both on a physical level and on an intellectual level and that is a little bit more in harmony with the facts of modem anthropological science. But, concerning the Jews especially, it is not a race that today they represent, but a way of life and its aspirations. And, it is not a racial problem that they pose, as the State of Israel proves so well, but aneconomic and social problem, of such dimensions that, under the wing of a tradition that is essentially religious, it envisages the setting up of a mercantile feudal system, which, as we have said, would take in the whole world.
To return to the Jewish migration at its beginning, we must first say that the greatest impact on Western Europe was made by the Askenazim Jews, by far the most numerous, and that is the case today in the United States. >From Constanza via the Danubian artery, which was about their only access to the West until about the eleventh century, and from Warsaw via countries touched by Hanseatic trade (which could not fail to attract them!), which later became a secondary route, they gradually worked their way to the major Rhone-Rhine artery, uniting the North Sea and the Mediterranean. Certainly England interested them at the time of the Hanseatic League, but more especially after the discovery of America. Mention must be made of Spain and the French Midi, regions that attracted their coreligionists who had remained within the Roman Empire after the loss of its western provinces (fourth century) and after the discriminatory measures against them were reintroduced by Constantine, which measures were not imposed in the eastern regions except progressively as those areas were detached from the Empire and, then, definitively upon their fall and conquest by the Turks (fifteenth century). This was the branch of the migration that worked its way to western Europe along the shores of the Mediterranean. At the moment when America was discovered, this spearhead of Judaism -- or rather, what was left of it, since in the meantime the Inquisition had made inroads into it -- found itself on the Madrid-London line where the new commercial centers were relocated, since commerce that was once Euro-Asian now had become global in scope.
In that part of western Europe that was free of the Roman Emperors, it seems that the first violent reactions against the Jews can be dated from the tenth century (7). But it was also in the tenth century that the influence of the Christian church, which was sanctioned by Charlemagne and which the Crusades established as the most important spiritual force, began to be felt a little everywhere. Struck by this coincidence, most historians have perceived these violent reactions as being attributable to Christianity, the word being used in the sense of Christianism. The Inquisition -- and, there is a tendency to forget that it was aimed not only at Jews, but at all heresies, and so it absolutely cannot be said to have been inspired with antisemites or racist feelings -- which was rampant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Spain and the south of France confirmed them in this view. It is true that the Church did not like Jews: against them was held, not their race (because in spite of everything it must be recognized that one of the historic invariables of its doctrine is that even in its most obscurantist undertakings, it was always universalist and never looked at the heresies of men except in relation to dogma), but what it considered the greatest of all crimes, the crucifixion of the Christ. The hostility of the western European peoples toward the Jews was manifested much earlier than the period when the Christian Church exerted its influence on them, and it seems that it had its origins in the nature of the communities that the Jews formed as they worked their way toward the west and in the manner in which, through trade and usury, they drained toward themselves all of the cash wealth of the regions where they settled. Also, for fear of falling into Jewish hands and finding themselves dispossessed, the burgeoning system of Feudalism forbade them, whom they accused of exploiting the people, to become owners of landed wealth. Even before Christianism was talked about, the Roman Patriciate had shown the same defensive reaction against them. Thus, it seems legitimate to me to think that the Christian Church only added religious reasons to those that were essentially economic of Feudalism or of the Roman Patriciate, and not the other way around. If this way of looking at the problem were justified, what I call a confusion on the Part of the historians would not be important except insofar as it determines the original cause of anti-Jewish reactions among Europeans in the Middle Ages. Indeed, it would very well explain things: on the one hand, just when the first of these reactions was noted, the European consciousness was that of being, not European, a politically unknown idea at that time, but Christian, and Christendom stood against paganism, which was synonymous with barbarity; on the other hand, it was the Church, Catholic or Reformed, which led the struggle against the Jews and either claimed this honor in its fight against heretics, or endowed those who imputed "heresy" as a crime with the responsibility of carrying on the struggle. But, that is a problem for Mandarins: whatever the hypothesis, the tangiblereality for the Jews, from the tenth to the sixteenth century, was that in all Christendom they were, in one place or another, periodically stripped of their wealth, which they were reputed to have acquired in a wrongful way, by the princes, the kings, or the emperors, all with the blessing or at the instigation of the Church, which was in on the division of the spoils. The procedure was simple: confiscation of goods together with prison or exile. And, the excuse was always the same: usury, or the profaning of a place or object of piety, or both. One can even cite numerous cases of the bourgeoisie -- since they were very dangerous competitors for them -- accusing the Jews of some profanation or other before the ecclesiastical authorities in order to get them imprisoned, and thus to escape their debts to them.
Doubtless, the worst period for the Jews was during the twelfth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries (8), during which time they surged back to eastern Europe, which remained fairly liberal toward them, since conversions to Judaism were constantly being registered. Indeed, it was only later, as the Orthodox religion gained ground in these regions and as the idea of the Empire of all the Russias was born, that the hostility toward the Jews was born which was to manifest itself in far more terrible forms than in the West -- the word pogrom is from the Russian vocabulary. In the West it was the advent of Humanism that brought the first alleviations in the condition of the Jews, and it was the Encyclopedists who dealt the decisive blow to the hostility against them. The French Revolution made them citizens like everyone else (1791), and this practice spread in Europe: Prussia (1812), the Germanic Confederation (1848), England (I 858), Italy (I 870). But, the era of "pogroms" had begun in "all the Russias". Migration toward the west swelled again, until in the second half of the nineteenth century it brought about the appearance of the wordanti-Semitism in all the dictionaries, and anti-Semitism itself -- however, wrongly, as has been said -- in all national policies.
It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that the first significant numbers of Jews crossed the Atlantic, attracted by the Gold Rush and by the dynamic industrialization of the American economy -- where, deriving mainly from "all the Russias" including Poland, and from Germany, the Jews who had spent more than twenty centuries, according to their own Statistics, growing to a little more than ten million in the rest of the world, needed only sixty years to approach five million in the United States.
In the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution, the general Policy of Poland, especially from the time in 1932 when Colonel Beck began to play a role in it, and finally Hitler hastened the movement of Jews toward the United States, and only those who lacked the means to get there remained behind in Holland, Belgium, England and France. Some of them tried to reach the "Jewish national hearth," created in Palestine by the Balfour Commission (on November 2, 1917), and succeeded in doing so, in spite of the hostility of England, which had fixed entry quotas. But the United States was the attraction par excellence. In 1928, the Policy of Stalinist Russia, while hardly benevolent towards the Jews, still wanted to keep them within the frontiers. These borders, the gates to the exit to the west, were closed to them, as they were closed to all Russians. The area of Birobidjan, located on the borders of Manchuria, was set up and placed at their disposal as an autonomous territory in the heart of the USSR. Stalin very quickly saw that although the number of Jews in the Ukraine and White Russia was diminishing, it was not increasing in Birobidjan, where they were nevertheless making their way, but only to reach a frontier close to China, where with the connivance of the Chinese, who at that time were hostile to the USSR, they were able to flee the Soviet regime. From there, via Hong Kong and Shanghai, they went to the United States, which, with the connivance of those who had gone there before them and who had become politically quite powerful, they were entering clandestinely. Just before the Second World War began no one in Russia, nor in the rest of the world, was talking any more about the Jewish autonomous territory of Birobidjan. During the war the matter was almost brought up again, in circumstances which will be described. For the moment, it is enough to say that in making the Jews take the Siberian route again - "Central Asia" as it was called bythose fresh from Russia -- a significant consistency was given to their migration toward the United States by way of the East.
V. The Movement of the European Jewish Population from 1933 to 1945
In 1933, the staging area for the Jewish migration, or, if you prefer, its supply area, was no longer the triangle marked by the mouths of the Vistula, Danube and Volga. There had been successively added to those Danubian countries in which political instability and trouble following the First World War had stirred them to leave the nations of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. And, since 1917 (Balfour Convention) besides the United States, there was a second destination point: Palestine.
In spite of the confusion that has been systematically created by various leaders of the Zionist movement around the period of this migration, a certain number of facts are positively known and irrefutably established which mark the routes that were made use of by the Jews and which definitely destroy the thesis of the extermination of six million Jews. Furthermore, it is international Zionism itself -- which by its policy with regard to Germany and with regard especially to the numerous trials, that have become almost incalculable, which it unceasingly demands against the Germans to prove again and again that these six million were really exterminated -- that has revealed most of these facts to us (if we did not already know them) or has confirmed their actuality (if we only had suspected their existence). An incalculable number of trials calls for an even more incalculable number of witnesses to give weight to the accusations and of journalists to report the hearings; and, it was fatal that among them should be found blunderers like Mr. Salo Baron (a professor at Columbia University and a witness at the Eichmann trial who, on top of everything else, had actually seen nothing!) or like Hannah Arendt (a journalist assigned to cover the same trial by the New Yorker who will be discussed elsewhere) to give the game away. It was no less fatal that there arrived at the bar of the Tribunal of History, Mr. Raul Hilberg and that he should make use of all of these in such a way that not only was everything that had been said earlier reduced to contradictions, but even that which he said himself. "He who tries too hard to prove..." as the proverb says.
All of these facts which have set us on the path to historical truth, have been made positively known and have been irrefutably established, unfortunately, only by specialists, most of whom, out of indifference or political interest, have suppressed them or have tried -- as we have seen, and as we shall see again, with regard to the facts concerning the international Zionist movement -- to keep them out of sight. I am among those who, out of respect for my profession and submission to the moral imperatives proper to it, attach great importance to their becoming known to the public at large. I am also concerned that this very lack of information might tend to lead societies in their evolution toward impasses and catastrophes. It is because governmental policies are based generally on conjectures, more often than not elaborated in the personal interests of the politicians who proclaim them and not with regard to established truths, that societies are periodically thrown into these impasses and precipitated into these catastrophes. Consequently, there lies the necessity for finding out and for establishing, for the benefit of the mass of honest people, those truths which will permit them to defend themselves against the interested undertakings of the politicians.
Historians tell us that history is learned by tracing its course through time and, then, is verified by tracing it back again. The police, in their jargon, express this idea by saying that it is by "tracing every clue to its source," not by following every clue, that the truth is discovered. Since it is a question of verifying a statistic, therefore an addition, let us borrow the language of the mathematicians who in accounting teach that in order to verify an addition, it must be done from bottom to top, or inversely to the way that it was done in the first place. The top, in this case, is the area where the Jewish migration started. And, Europe, where it took place, is a forest of testimonies giving only partial views of events which are all overlapped and, which in addition, are falsified by the constituent elements of the psychology of the witnesses. It was from the top that the Zionist historians and statisticians began to total their deaths, pretending, because that is the way they wanted it to be, not to see that the sum which they obtained could only be infinitely reduced, just as a landscape would be enlarged to infinity by placing end to end all of the partial photographs taken of it, without first having removed from each all of the overlapping elements figuring in others. The views of the witnesses overlap just as do the photographs, and a landscape in nature is no more the sum of the latter, retouched by topographers, than a historical landscape is the sum of the former uncounted by historians. Until a general accounting is made, everything will remain confused, uncertain, and conjectural, in the very places where the events took place. However, it does not seem as though such an accounting is likely to be done in the near future given the absurd "fifty years' rule," or whatever else suits the politicians. Until that period is passed, if historians are nevertheless tempted to clarify the circumstances of that drama -- and the urgent need for an assault against the historic myth presses them every day -- they will be forced to proceed by successive stages from the established facts. And, it is in that context that this study is inscribed.
At the bottom of the addition are the two destination points of the migration, the United States and Israel, where, on the other hand, almost everything is known, although obscured by what one might call after the title of a recent film, the Night and Fog of Zionist propaganda. To take the advice of the historians and trace history back, or that of the policemen and trace every clue to its source, or that of the mathematician and go over the addition means to take an inventory of the Jewish population of the world, starting with what it is today in the United States and Israel. The method offers the signal advantage of obeying the basic rule of all scientific investigations: to proceed from the known to the unknown and, thereby, to shed light on the unknown by means of the known. I shall begin with a census of Israel first.
In 1926. Mr. Arthur Ruppin tells us that there were 250,000 Jews in Palestine. But the official statistics of the State of Israel as reproduced by Mr. Andre Chouraqui (L'Etat d'Israel, p. 62) tell us that there were only 150,000 in 1927, and 174,610 in 1931, the eve of the coming to power of Beck in Poland and of Hitler in Germany. Since this study attempts to show that, aside from the fact that they do not agree with each other, all statistics of Jewish origin published after the war do not agree with those published by Mr. Arthur Ruppin before the war, and, taken as a base of reference, one must, if one is to make useful comparisons with the latter, first know exactly what the former have to say about the evolution of the Jewish population in Israel. And for the period after 1931 this is what Mr. Andre Chouraqui has to tell them: 1947 -- 629,000; 1952 -- 1,450,000; 1957 -- 1,763,000.
On the level reached in 1962 we have, on the other hand, two bits of information, perhaps contestable but at least in agreement, of which the first is already known to the reader: the communique of March 31, 1963, of the Institute for Jewish Affairs of London, published on April 1 by Die Welt of Hamburg in which it is said that that population had reached 2.045 million;(9) and a speech given on July 17, 1963, before the Knesseth (the Israeli Parliament) by Mr. Levi Eshkol (successor of Mr. Ben Gurion) in which it is said that out of a total of 2.27 million inhabitants in the State of Israel, 2.05 million were Jews. We shall assume that Mr. Levi Eshkol, President of the Council of the State of Israel, is very probably better informed than theInstitute for Jewish Affairs of London, and we shall retain his figure. In any case with a difference of only 5,000 it is without importance.
Here we are presented with four significant dates in the evolution of the Israeli population: 1931 (just before the rise to Power of Beck in Poland and Hitler in Germany); 1947 and 1952 (the eve and the day after the creation of the State of Israel); and finally 1962 (the year in which this study was written).
In order to determine the importance of Jewish immigration into Israel from 1931 to 1962, a third factor is missing, the normal rate of increase of the world Jewish population. Now, Mr. Salo Baron supplied us with one when on April 23, 1961, he came before the bar of the Jerusalem Tribunal to state that in relation to what it had been in 1945 this population had increased by twenty per cent.
However, "one swallow does not make a summer." I categorically refuse to accept such an estimate as being well founded. A normal rate of increase of twenty per cent over sixteen years amounts in fact to an annual increase of about 1.25 per cent, that is, of the world population, which demographers estimate will double every 80 years at its present rate of proliferation. But, this rate is reached only in the eightieth year. What it is in the 16th year does not seem to have been calculated, or if it has, I do not know about it. What is certain is that it is much less. The population of France, which, it seems, proliferates atthe world rate, has, for example, gone from a little less than 42 million to a little more than 46 million during these sixteen years, or at a global rate of increase of 10 per cent, or annually about.62 per cent. During the same period, the Italian population, which proliferates at a faster rate than the world rate, still has not gone from more than a little more than 43 million to a little less than 50 million, or a global rate of 14 per cent, annually about.89 per cent. The United States seem similarly to have gone from 141 million to 186 million, that is a global rate of about 12 per cent, annually about.75 per cent, but there we must reckon with a significant immigration which the legislative measures of 1901 to 1924 failed to block.
And, what about the world Jewish population? First of all, using the demographers' scale of eighty years, and of the century, this is what Professor Salo Baron's estimate produces, facts which most surely cannot be admitted:
16th year...10 million...plus.20%...equal...12 million (+1.25% per year)
32nd year...12 million...plus.20%...equal...14.4 million (+ 1.37% per year)
48th year...14.4 million...plus.20%...equal...17.28 million (+1.51% per year)
64th year...17.28 million...plus.20%...equal...20.76 million (+1.68% per year)
80th year...20.76 million...plus.20%..equal..24.83 million (+1.86% per year)
96th year..4.83 million..plus..20%..equal..29.86 million (+2.06% per year)
Baron's figures show that, more than doubled after the 64th year, the world Jewish population would be more than tripled after the 96th year. This projection is like saying that the Jews are, if not more, at least as prolific as the Chinese, a fact which is not attested to by all their other information on the subject.
In the absence of any verified information concerning the Jews, I examined the normal annual rate of increase, which would be applicable to them, and I arrived at the following conclusions:
a. The world Jewish population is always in a state of migration.
b. Migrating populations increase proportionately less than sedentary populations.
c. A sedentary population which doubles every 80 years reaches an annual rate of about 1 per cent after the 64th year.
d. But we are concerned with the periods between 1931 and 1962, and the calculations cannot include more than 31 years, and should be 16, or 10 or 5 or 4, which means that the 1 per cent annual rate of increase, if used in the calculations, would give the Jews, migrating, a higher rate than sedentary Italians, all things being normal. However, let us retain the 1 per cent, on the principle of the benefit of the doubt.
The method of calculation: the natural growth of a population is the difference between the number of births and the number of deaths. If we are able to determine the natural increase in each of the great waves of the four important dates of Jewish immigration into Israel, it should suffice to subtract that from the Jewish population of the State of Israel in 1962, to add the number of deaths there to the result obtained, and to arrive at the actual number of immigrants for the period 1931 - 1962. In this particular case account must be taken of those who, disappointed in the venture, left again, and their number should be added. An analysis of these factors -- natural growth, immigration, mortality among immigrants, and emigration -- follows:
1.Natural growth: (10)
a. from 1931 to 1962, the 174,610 counted in Palestine in 1931, have grown by 31 % or 54,129 persons.
b. from 1947 to 1962, the 629,000 counted in 1947 have grown by 15% or 94,350 persons.
c. from 1952 to 1962, the 1,450,000 counted in 1952 have grown by 10% or 145, 000 persons.
To this must be added the natural increase of:
a. those 629,000 Jews counted in 1947 who arrived in Israel between 1931 and 1947;
b. those 1,450,000 counted in 1952, who arrived between 1947 and 1952;
c. those 2,050,000 counted in 1962 who arrived between 1952 and 1962.
Here are the results obtained from the second series of calculations, organized along the elementary rules of arithmetic:
a. from 1931 to 1947, the 174,610 Jews counted in 1931 have increased by 16% and have become: (174,610 x 116)/100 = 202,547. It follows that, with their natural increase included, the new arrivals in this period represent 629,000 minus 202,547 or 426,453, and, their natural increase itself; (426,453 x 16)/116 = 58,821.
b. from 1947 to 1952, the 629,000 Jews counted in 1947, grew by 5% and were: ( 629,000 x 105 )/100= 660,450. It follows that, with their natural increase included, the new arrivals during that period represent 1,450,000 minus 660,450 or 789,550, and their natural growth itself (789,550 x 5)/105 = 37,598.
c. from 1952 to 1962, the 1,450,000 Jews counted in 1952 increased by 10%, thus: (1,450,000 x 110 )/100 = 1,595,000. It follows that, including their natural increase, the new arrivals during this period represent 2,050,000 minus 1,595,000 or 455,000, and their natural growth itself 45 5,000 x 10)/110= 41,364.
The preceding figures give a total natural increase of 431,262.
2. Actual number of immigrants during this period (not adjusted for on the spot mortality). To obtain this number one must not only subtract this figure from the Jewish population of the State of Israel in 1962, but also the 174,610 persons counted in 1931, who are included, which gives 2,050,000 minus (431,262 plus 174,610) equal 1,444,128.(11)
3. On the spot mortality among the immigrants. Jewish sources are not very exhaustive on the death rate, and not on the birth rate either, at least to my knowledge. Concerning the latter one finds from time to time data of this sort: "The average number of children per family is 3.8" (L'Etat d'Israel, Andre Chouraqui, p. 77) which is meaningless. As for the death rate, also from time to time, some journalists now and then will give a figure: 13, 14 and sometimes as low as 10 per 1 000. Specialists of Salo Baron's caliber are fascinated by the natural rate of increase only, and they establish it on the level of the world Jewish population, not in terms of the number of births and deaths, but in terms of the representation that they wish to present to the world for the two dates, 1946 and 1962, after having first subtracted the six million exterminated. It is a rate subject to political pressures, and fluctuations, as we have seen. The Israeli Jewish population is a young population; in all migrations, it is the young who leave, and the old who remain. For example, in Buchenwald, where Jews were interned, I do not remember having encountered one who was less than 50 years old. Among the peoples of Western Europe the death rate is about 17 per 1000. That it lies between 13 and 14 in Israel is probable. But, in 1946, 1947, and 1948, there were consequences of the war which raised it a little for the whole period. So, let us say about 14 per thousand, or about 20,504. In any case, if I miscalculate it cannot be by more than a few thousand at most, and I am prepared to make corrections. Thus, with mortality included, the immigration between 1931 and 1962 totaled 1,464,632 persons.
4. Emigration. There were those Jews who were disappointed with the "promised land" and there were also those who thought of Palestine, afterward Israel, as a way station imposed by circumstances, from which to proceed elsewhere. (12) Until 1939, for example, a certain number of Polish, Russian, or German Jews, as well as others, did not have the financial means to proceed further. Some, for that reason, even could not go beyond North Africa, in view of the limitation that England put on immigration to Palestine. Between 1939 and 1945 Palestine became, for those who continued to escape secretly either via Istanboul or Constanza, the only accessible refuge. For those who were pushed across the Urals and the Volga by the German armies, a considerable number who even in 1962 have not all succeeded in getting out of Soviet territory, Israel is still the most accessible refuge, unless they are nearer to China; those nearer to China go through Hong Kong and Shanghai to reach the United States. Well, Mr. Andre Chouraqui tells us that "95 out of every hundred immigrants manage to overcome the difficulties of adapting to the country and found families there, while 5 give up." (op. cit., p. 75). Very few, but we will not argue the point. Therefore, the total immigration between 1931 and 1962 is determined by the following calculation:
(1,464,63 2 x 100)/95 = 1,541,718
And now, a last step before finishing with Israel: to take into consideration those among these 1,541,718 immigrants who came from Europe. Here we are furnished with an estimate by Mr. Andre Chouraqui:
Asia, since 1948, furnished Israel with 258,181 immigrants, representing 28.8% of the total immigration. These 258,181 persons came from Turkey (34,797), Iraq (122,987), Iran (31,274), Yemen (45,887); Syria, Lebanon, Aden, even India and China furnished a contingent of 14,092 souls. Africa is third in line (24.8%) after Europe (43.4%), and Asia (28.8%), and supplied a contingent of 222,806 immigrants representing 24.8% of the recent immigration. North Africa, leading the African contingent, supplied more than 150,000 immigrants originating mainly from Morocco and Tunisia. (op. cit. p. 65.)
The data given in the preceding quotation are dated December 31, 1957. >From this excerpt the following conclusions can be drawn:
First, the nonsensical style in which this information is written throws doubt on the authenticity of the percentage of the immigrants of African origin, presented in one sentence as a proportion of the total immigration, and in the next as a proportion of the "recent immigration." And, so it can be assumed that other percentages are no more authentic or more significant.
Second, the three per cent of the immigrants who are not accounted for in this enumeration, and we don't know whether they are a portion of the total immigration or of the "recent immigration," concern the American and Australian continents. It is, however, exact enough to show that very few Jews came from those two continents.
Third, except for those Jews from Yemen, whose well known odyssey could be the subject of a novel of dark humor, (13) all the other immigrants taken into account by Mr. Andre Chouraqui could be either Jews who left Europe after 1931, or their descendants born in Africa or in Asia. Please note that I say "could be" and not "were." Palestine, for example, is in Asia, and all those who arrived in Israel from the non-Israeli parts after 1948 could be considered as having originated from Asia, in Mr. Andre Chouraqui's data. Such an interpretation is all right for those born there, but what about their parents? Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, are also in Asia, and it is precisely those countries which were before and during the war most accessible to the European Jews. Often, those countries were the only ones. Some got to Africa via France, particularly until 1939, and the same argument could be made about them. Put yourself in the place of the Polish Jew who left his country in 1932 or 1939: he could not get to Israel before 1948 since a country by that name did not exist, and in most cases he got there only after 1948, often very long after, with the children he had meanwhile had, that is, after having spent fifteen or sixteen years or more in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia or Morocco, and, if asked whence he came, there is nothing astonishing if he named the country he last lived in, since cosmopolitanism is one of the characteristics of the Jewish soul. It is a long time since he was Polish, if he even remembers it. For him, Poland where he was born was never a native land, but only a "land of welcome," an expression used by Jews the world over to designate the country in which they live, even if they were born there, when they speak among themselves. To his mind, Poland has become the country which treated him badly, and his true "land of welcome" is where he took refuge when he was obliged to leave Poland. And, the same holds for all those who, between the years 1939 and 1945, succeeded in leaving clandestinely not only Poland but also Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Russia, and who have only arrived in Israel in the last few years. Mr. Andre Chouraqui takes up only immigration into Israel; that factor is all that interests him, and that is his right. That is the subject he treats and he cannot be reproached for limiting himself to his subject. But, it is a very convenient limitation: he can reduce at will the number of European Jews who have immigrated to Israel by having them come from their last residence before 1948 -- pardon, from their last "land of welcome" -- which was Africa or Asia. And, at the same time, he can increase the number of those who were allegedly exterminated. To what extent has that subterfuge been used? The principal element of the answer to that question is given in the following paragraphs.
Finally, Mr. Andre Chouraqui's book is dated 1959, and the things described therein date from 1957, as I said. Now, he tells us, in 1957 "Asia, since 1948, furnished Israel with 258,181 immigrants representing 28.8% of the total immigration" up to December 31, 1957. Hence, a simple calculation yields the following: (258,181 x 100)/28.8 = 896,462. This figure of 896,462, then, represents the total immigration through the end of 1957 -- according to Mr. Andre Chouraqui
But again, the Israeli Jewish population went from 1,763,000 on December 31, 1957 (Andre Chouraqui, op. cit., p. 74, and the official statistics for that year) to 2,050,000 on December 31, 1962, which indicates an increase of 257,000, which, after deducting the natural increase, represents 159,381 new immigrants (l4) during that period of five years. Since there was a total of 1,541,718 immigrants on December 31, 1962, there were 1,382,337 (1,541,718 - 159,381) already there. And, based on his own figures, Mr. Andre Chouraqui's error, I mean the coefficient of minimization, is about 1.54.
Another example of Chouraqui's erroneous analysis is provided by the immigration of Moroccan and Tunisian Jews who, he tells us, rallied to Israel to the number of 150,000. But, let us have a look. In Morocco, Mr. Arthur Ruppin told us, they numbered 120,000 in 1926, and in Tunisia 60,000. Total for both countries is 180,000. In 1948 there must have been 219,600, adjusting for a natural increase in population. If 150,000 of them went over to Israel, there remained at that date 69,600. And, these in 1962 had become 79,344. However, the study by the Jewish Communities of the World instructs us that in 1962 there remained 125,000 Jews in Morocco and 35,000 in Tunisia, which gives a total of 160,000. The Jewish Post Weekly of April 19, 1963, confirms this. Consequently, it appears that 80,656, of the Jews listed as Moroccan and Tunisian by Mr. Andre Chouraqui were not such; rather, they were the ones who had come from Europe earlier and had not been able to proceed farther for personal or other reasons. Therefore, the actual number of Moroccans or Tunisians (which is achieved by subtracting 80,656 from 150,000) was 69,344. Here it is a question of a coefficient of exaggeration (it is the same thing, this manipulation of figures in both ways having no other object than to augment the number of those exterminated in Europe and to diminish the number of those who succeeded in leaving), and it is from 1 to 2.16 exactly.
Another example, as is seen from Chouraqui's treatment of the German Jews. "The German Jews," says Mr. Andre Chouraqui (op. cit,. p. 66), "were almost totally exterminated by the Nazis." Now however, we know, and all the Jewish historians and statisticians agree, including Mr. Andre Chouraqui himself, that out of the 500,000 given by Mr. Arthur Ruppin as living in Germany in 1926, or the 540,000 given by postwar Jewish statistics for the number living there in 1933, about 300,000 left the country between 1933 and 1939, and that 40,000, according to Mr. Poliakov and the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, or 80,000 according to Mr. Raul Hilberg were still alive in 1945. Hence, the total number of survivors is 340,000 or 380,000 depending on whose figures are used. With some 340,000 survivors out of a population of 500,000 or 540,000 a conclusion that German Jewry was "almost totally exterminated" is hardly an example of intellectual honesty. By which it is seen that the nonsensical style that allows one to sow confusion also allows one to develop a sensational effect. As the figure for the total, immigration for December 31, 1957, he gives the figure of 896,462, according to his data, on page 65, and the figure of 896,085, according to the data of others, on page 66. Finally, when he gives it straight from the statistics themselves, it becomes 905,655. The same is true for the total population of the State of Israel which on December 31, 1957, is 1,954,954 at page 64, and which becomes 1,763,600 Jews and 213,000 Christians and Moslems, yielding a total of 1,976,000 at page 74. If it were a question of orders of magnitude one would understand it and overlook it, but in every case these are estimates down to the unit. So it is a test. Mme. Hannah Arendt and Mr. Raul Hilberg, I confess, have not done much better.
There is no end to the examples that could be cited. In short, what I want to say here is that if these coefficients of exaggeration are of the same order -- and why not, since there is no question of error here but of deliberate calculation? -- as far as the percentages are concerned of those European, African, or Asian Jews, who, according to him have immigrated into Israel, it is enough to apply the median coefficient of exaggeration to reestablish them approximately in their actual relationships. The average coefficient is figured as follows: (1.55+2.16)/2 = 1.85. For the Jews of Africa and Asia: (24.8% + 28.8%)/1.85= 29%. And, for the European Jews: 43.4% + (53.6% - 29%)= 68%. Still missing is the "three per cent" which I discussed above in my first conclusion concerning Mr. Andre Chouraqui's data.
Converted into figures, the number of immigrants of European origin then becomes, based on the total immigration (mortality and emigration included), (1,541,718 x 68)/100=1,048,368 and, based on the number who survived and remained, (1,444,128 x 68)/100 = 982,007. So, there it is in mathematical terms, at least the way I learned mathematics. Furthermore, it is reasonable, and for this reason: these figures correspond almost perfectly with those published by the New York Times on February 22, 1948, based on data supplied by its expert, Hanson W. Baldwin. And, to avoid any misunderstanding I cite from the text itself:
There are 650,000 to 700,000 Jews in Palestine. Another 500,000 inhabit other countries in the Middle East.... In these countries the Jews are tied by bonds of religion to the rest of the fifteen to eighteen million Jews of the world.
Among these 1,150,000 to 1,200,000 Jews in Palestine and the other countries of the Middle East in 1947, a deduction drawn from the number a Jewish source said were living there in 1931, there were a few more or a few less than 750,000 immigrants, depending upon whether one bases one's opinion on prewar or postwar Jewish statistics. And, almost all of these immigrants came from Europe for the good and simple reason, almost without exception, that there was no reason for those from other areas to move there en masse. The former had been the first to rejoin Israel, since they were more or less already there. Then they were joined later by 200,000 to 250,000 more European Jews, and to determine the immigration from that origin we get into figures of the kind that result from my calculations.
If I involve Mr. Hanson W. Baldwin in support of my thesis, it is not only because his estimates are credible but for a more solid reason: insofar as the figures for the Palestinian Jewish population are concerned, they have been confirmed by the official Israeli statistics published at the beginning of 1949, for the year 1947, which gave the number as 629,000. They were also given for Palestine by Mr. Ben Gurion himself, who in May 1948 estimated the Jewish population to be 650,000 (Le Peuple et L'Etat d'Israel, Paris 1959, p. 102). Therefore, there is nothing conjectural about them: on this point at least it is a verified estimate. And, it verifies mine.
I shall go further: if Mr. Hanson W. Baldwin was so well informed about the Jewish population in Palestine in 1947, there is no reason to think he was less informed on the world Jewish population, and therefore close to the truth in estimating it between 15 and 18 million on the same date. The New York Times said that the data came from the Jews themselves (in its own words: "from the secret census made by them in every country in the world"), and that explains everything: in one way or another Mr. Hanson W. Baldwin was informed about this " secret census." But it makes no difference. If this "secret census" really took place, and if the leaders of the Zionist movement know so exactly the actual number of Jewish losses, then we have a case of extortion (the payment of indemnity to Israel by West Germany) built up with premeditation -- and much better done than the robbery of the Glasgow-London train by gangsters that everyone is talking about at the moment. I used the words "so exactly," and I wish to call attention to the nuance, because I do not believe in that "secret census."
But, to return to the European Jews who immigrated to Israel between 1931 and 1962, their number is estimated to be 1,048,368, mortality and re-emigration included. Jewish sources admit to 388,901 for the December 31, 1957 date, and in 1963 this figure is still publicized by the world press. And, we already have 659,467 European Jews who were not exterminated by the Nazis, but who all the same figure in the list of exterminated in statistics of Jewish sources. Or, if you prefer, subtract 1,048,368 from the 9,243,000 given by Mr. Arthur Ruppin as living in the European areas which were controlled by the Nazis, in numbers and for various lengths of time between 1933 and 1945, or from the 9,600,000 given at Nuremberg by Justice Jackson. Take your choice.
My estimates are given down to units, too, but that is because if one is making mathematical calculations one cannot escape that servitude, mathematicians not having yet invented any other way of making calculations. I trust that the reader understands that it was a question of rounding off orders of magnitude. All of the elements that have entered into these calculations have been kept at the lowest possible figure so that I may not be accused of error greater than that which fits the contentions of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and all the rest. It is my opinion that in orders of magnitude, these estimates show that 1,100,000 European Jews are to be subtracted from the figure that is given for the European Jewish population prior to the accession to power in Germany of Hitler, and that 700,000 be subtracted from the announced six million, depending on the method preferred. If new data are brought forth to make a revision necessary, there is no doubt in my mind that a raising, and not a lowering of the number to be subtracted will result. And, precisely because, in keeping the figure down to the lowest level within my system, more than once I have found that the level was too low.
| Origin | European | Non-Europ. | Total | In 1931 | ?at.Increase | In 1962 |
| Over-all | 1,048,368 | 493,350 | 1,541,718 | ------- | ---------- | ------- |
| Settled | 982,007 | 462,121 | 1,444,128+ | 174,610+ | 431,262(b)= | 2,050,000 |
| Mortality | 13,943 | 6,561 | 20,504 | ----- | ---- | ----- |
| Emigration | 52,418 | 24,668 | 77,086 | ---- | ------ | ---- |
| Verification | 1,048,368@ | 493,350 | 1,541,718 | (a) |
(a) Levi Eshkol's population estime (cf supra): 2,050,000
(b) I warn the reader who is unfamiliar with demographic studies that if he is tempted to think that the natural increase should correspond to the number of Jews actually living in Israel, less than 31 years of age, he will be committing a grave error; those, for exemple, who left Germany in 1938 in the arms of their parents are today only 24, and figure among the 1,444,128 immigrants. The same for all European children born in North Africa or elsewhere. Among them there are those who arrived in their parents' arms in 1957 or 1958, only 4 or 5 years old in 1962 and still could be included in the natural increase column. They are immigrants just as much as their parents.
Now let us proceed to a study of the Jewish population of the United States. The study of the Jewish Israeli population has so far led us only to the European Jews who succeeded in reaching Palestine, later the State of Israel, and who got there either from the west or by the Danube route via Constanza or Constantinople or both. There is another aspect of the migration of the European Jews between 1933 and 1945, the movement toward the East.
This other aspect is disclosed to us in at least two Jewish sources: Dr. Rudolf Kasztner(Bericht des Komittees zur Rettung der ungarischen Juden) and Alex Weisberg in collaboration with Joel Brand (L'Histoire de Joel Brand, un echange de 10,000 camions contre un million de Juifs). (And, incidentally, it is confirmed by both Mr. Raul Hilberg and Mme. Hannah Arendt, also.) This is what the former says:
Up to March 19, 1944, our chief work concerned the rescue and care of Polish, Slovakian, Yugoslavian refugees. With the German occupation of Hungary our efforts were extended to the defense of the Hungarian Jews... The occupation brought the death sentence to Hungarian Jews, numbering almost 800,000 souls, (op. cit., p. 1, Einleitung)
Hungary, where the Jews were not persecuted by Admiral Horthy's government (a Jew, the banker Stern, was in fact a member of the Council and numerous others were deputies), was actually an asylum for Polish, Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian Jews. This text sets the facts down and shows their significance: 800,000 minus 320,000 (Arthur Ruppin dixit) equal 480,000 Polish, Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian Jews in Hungary on March 19, 1944.
Dr. Kasztner also tells us how the Committee for the Salvation of the Jews of Budapest went about their work, but the Alex Weisberg-Joel Brand team is more precise: it was through emigration via Constanza after supplying them with genuine or false passports. Once at Constanza they were saved because Rumania did not persecute the Jews, except during a very brief period, between 1939 and 1945. To cut the discussion short, let us cite from the two associated authors:
In their haste to get rid of the Jews the Germans cared very little whether they disappeared over the border or into the crematory ovens... Foreign passports were the surest protection... Within a few weeks (after March 19, 1944) there were more nationals of the Republic of San Salvador (in Hungary) than of all the other countries combined... After a protect from the Pope and President Roosevelt, the Swedish and Swiss governments issued thousands of passports, and we added thirty to forty thousand. Possessors of this viaticum were immunized against deportation. (op. cit., pp. 55-56.)
To get "thirty to forty" thousand Swedish and Swiss passports circulated with impunity in a country as well watched over by the German and Hungarian police as Hungary was, Sweden and Switzerland would have had to issue, if not many more, at least that number. And since there were in circulation "more from the Republic of San Salvador than all the other countries combined" there must have been about 200,000 "immunized" against deportation.
But for all that, these "immunized" persons did not have absolute peace of mind about their fate just because of their passports, whether genuine or forged. Most of them got the passports only in order to leave Hungary more easily. There were some who left without a passport. And, that emigration occurred almost with Eichmann's complicity, since, as our authors tell us, Eichmann, "who had before the war worked on the mass deportation of Jews... interrupted when Germany went to war with Russia... had taken the idea up again, as soon as he arrived in Budapest." (op. cit., p. 93.) Further on, they tell us in substance that with or without passports many Jews made it to Constanza, and from there they tried to find ships to take them to Haifa, a thing that was not always easy to do. If they failed in this, they tried at least to get to Constantinople. Nor was it always easy to disembark at Haifa. Those who succeeded could not all remain in Palestine because of the limitation imposed on immigration by England, and, in order to avoid arrest, many were obliged to scatter into the other countries of the Middle East, from whence they tried to get to Hong Kong, and from there to the United States or some other country on the American continent (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, etc.). Similarly, it was difficult for them to disembark at Constantinople.
But, it is Mr. Raul Hilberg, with the information that he unwittingly supplied so well and that he interpreted so poorly -- precisely because he is not aware of it, who makes it possible for us to reconstruct in its breadth and in its entirety the movement of the European Jews toward the American continent via Hong Kong. Really, it would be more accurate to say that his information only confirms the authenticity of the data, because we already have the facts and already had used and published most of them. I speak here of the Polish and Russian Jews who between 1939 and 1945, during the war operations, never found themselves on the German side of the battle line. There was a considerable number of them, and the study of the horrors of the Second World War to which I have devoted myself for a good fifteen years has convinced me that many of them found their way to the American continents, where they are best represented in the United States. The few detours that we shall be led to make in Europe during the course of this study will enable us to settle on the number who were able to get there via the West.
As far as the United States is concerned, our peripheral point of departure, here the obvious lie leaps to the eye right away: it is not true, as the Institute of Jewish Affairs of London claims, that 5.5 million Jews were living there in 1962. In 1926, Mr. Arthur Ruppin gave us a figure of 4,500,000 Jews, and the official U.S. census figure for that year was 4,081,242 (a total which census officials seem to have regarded as being "incomplete"). Curiously, for once almost all of the historians -- and the Jewish statisticians as well -- are in agreement that the best estimates lie close to the Ruppin figure. Nevertheless, we shall give the Institute of Jewish Affairs the benefit of the doubt and shall use the official 1926 census figure, keeping in mind that it is probably too low and that a figure which is closer to that of Mr. Arthur Ruppin is doubtless closer to the truth. Applying the coefficient of natural growth, one per cent annually, to the 1926 census figure, we get an American Jewish population of 5,550,489 persons in 1962 -- i.e., 36 years later. And if we had used the coefficient of Mr. Salo Baron of twenty per cent every sixteen years, we would have gotten 4,897,490 in 1942; 5,876,988 in 1958; and 6,170,837 in 1962. I Could not have asked for a better opportunity than this one to be able to accuse the Institute of Jewish Affairs of London of underestimating the American Jewish population by 670,837 persons instead of by only some 50,489. But, that is not my way of doing things, and I am content to show to what extent the two Jewish authorities are in disagreement between themselves. So, the American Jewish population in 1963 is 5,550,489 persons -- without taking into account the Jewish immigration since 1926, an important consideration.(15) And, also without taking into account the Jewish emigration, but that factor is negligible. In fact, Mr. Andre Chouraqui tells us (op. cit., p. 67) that only 7,232 immigrants came to Israel from the Americas and Oceania between 1933 and 1957. And, it is not easy to imagine what reasons would urge them to go elsewhere.
In any case we are concerned with an examination of the Jewish immigration to the United States. We have already seen how since 1848, but particularly since 1880, immigration to the United States was part of the general movement of European peoples, known, in part, as the "Gold Rush." Between the two wars, in France, which was the best place to observe it since France was an almost obligatory passageway toward the West, the stream was fairly slow until the 1930s. From 1932 on, when Colonel Beck took over the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs in Poland, we began to see Polish Jews arriving in great numbers. And, after 1933, we began seeing the German Jews. The first Polish Jews who arrived in France went into business using methods so at variance with local custom and so unorthodox that they often aroused indignant protests. Then, one fine day they vanished, but it was soon seen that the heads of their businesses had been replaced by other Polish Jews. The German Jews, on the other hand, usually went straight through. At the end of 1937 the Austrian Jews appeared, and this stream was reinforced in 1938 after the Anschluss. And, at the end of 1938 and the beginning of 1939, came the Czechoslovakian Jews. From the end of World War I until 1932, we were aware mainly of the passage or settlement of Russian, Rumanian or Bulgarian Jews, among whom only a few Polish Jews had mixed, all chased from their respective countries by the Bolshevist storm and the instability that followed it. They came in small numbers, I repeat. For the over-all picture, from Jewish as well as government sources, shows that it was not a matter of moving whole populations of them. The Jewish population increased only from 250,000 to 300,000 from 1926 to 1939 (16) (to 270,000, according to Mr. Raul Hilberg) or exactly the natural increase rate, barely more.
How many then went through France, and where did they go? It is easy enough to give the number of German Jews. In 1939 there remained in Germany not more than 210,000, according to the World Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, and 240,000 according to Mr. Raul Hilberg. Official German statistics, in particular those of Mr. Richard Korherr, head of Hitler's population bureau, give a figure within the same range: 220,000. So if it were said that about 300,000 Jews had left Germany before 1939 everyone would agree. But, Mr. Andre Chouraqui (op. cit., p. 66) says, that "120,000 immigrated to Israel between 1933 and 1939," which seems to indicate that at least 180,000 went somewhere else. Here, may I be permitted to bring forth my personal testimony? At Belfort, a city near the Franco-German frontier, and right on the itinerary of the largest number of Jewish refugees, because it is also near the Franco-Swiss border, I was, between 1933 and 1939, the leader of the Socialist Party. Because of that capacity, those German Jews who were Social Democrats and who had managed to cross the frontier, generally knew my address, and, in order to continue on their way, they preferred to turn to me for help rather than to the Jewish community. Most of them told me that their aim was to get to the United States where they had relatives who would make it easy for them to enter the country and to remain there in spite of the quota laws on immigration, which they knew were, under the circumstances, rarely enforced against them. A few of them spoke of Canada for the same reasons. Very few mentioned Brazil or Argentina; in these two countries it was only after the war that Jewish immigration assumed considerable proportions. During the occupation, still at Belfort, but where I then had the greatest responsibility in the most important and judicious Resistance movement (Liberation-Nord), which was the only effective channel for them, the same situation existed except that they first had to go over the border into Switzerland, where, with the help of the Joint Distribution, whose representative was Sally Mayer, they hoped to get a regular passport for the American continent, preferably for the United States or Canada. Not one of them ever, either before or during the war, mentioned England, for which they nourished a staunch hatred.
In 1937-1938, the same phenomenon occurred with the Austria Jews, and in 1938-1939 with the Czechoslovak Jews. We saw no more of the Jews from these countries in France during the war; they went by way of the Danube, the first after the Anschluss, the latter after the settling of the Sudeten affair.
For Austria, the statistics of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and of Mr. Raul Hilberg agree with German sources: before 1939, 180,000 out of 240,000 had succeeded in leaving Austria. And, Mr. Andre Chouraqui finds that the number of Austrian Jews who immigrated into Israel is so insignificant that he doesn't see any need to mention it. Where, then did they go? I can only keep repeating: all those who turned to me, before, as well as during the war, gave the United States as their preference, or, in any case, a country on the American continent.
So, we have a total of 480,000 German and Austrian Jews who managed to leave Europe between 1933 and 1939. In this case, both the World Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation and Mr. Raul Hilberg had the honesty not to include the latter among the number of Jews who they claimed were exterminated. We shall see, in the recapitulation table of the actual number of European emigrants, if they have been included in the number of those who augmented the Jewish population of countries other than Israel, where they must have gone, since they are no longer in France.
On the number of Polish Jews, or those from the Danubian countries, who reached the American continent or Africa via the West, I had no accurate information which would permit me to establish it as other than "appreciable." Happily, my excellent collaborator, Mme. Hannah Arendt, came forth most usefully to complete my documentation. Mr. Raul Hilberg, too, from whom she had taken nearly everything she had said, proved to be quite useful. If I prefer to cite from Madame Hannah Arendt, it is because she expresses herself much more clearly than Mr. Hilberg; she borrows nearly everything from him, but her talent for clarity must be recognized. It is with regard to the French, Luxemburg, Belgian and Dutch Jews that she has so usefully completed my documentation of the Jews of Poland and the Danubian countries who left Europe via the West.
In France, she writes in the New Yorker, March 9, 1963, there were about 300,000 Jews in 1939 (that I knew), and, in February-March 1940, before the events which brought about the occupation of the country, 170,000 foreign Jews had joined them, that figure is what I was not sure about. At the time, all the French papers, as I remember, spoke of some 200,000 foreign Jews who had fled their countries in the face of Nazism, and that it was our duty to help them. But, I had kept no clippings. I was much more occupied in aiding the Jews than in counting them. Among them, were 40,000 Belgians and as many Dutch. What about the others? I have no precise facts. In any case, the total number probably was 170,000; one can be sure that Mme. Hannah Arendt, however, did not overestimate it. Since the government of Marshal Petain refused to turn over the French Jews to the German authorities, and since he made so much trouble for them about the foreign Jews, she goes on, that of this mass of 470,000 Jews, only 52,000, among them 6,000 of French nationality, had been deported at the end of the summer of 1943, that is, in 18 months (massive deportation operations did not begin until March 1942). In April 1944, two months before the Allied landing, there were still 250,000 Jews in France, she says, and no further measures were taken against them. Therefore, they were saved. This fact does not keep Mr. Raul Hilberg from putting only 200,000 in the survivor column in his statistics. And, one must not think that the difference -- 470,000 minus 250,000 equals 220,000 -- were deported. On this difference, outside of her indication that there were "52,000, among them 6,000 of French nationality," at the end of the summer of 1943, Mme. Hannah Arendt gives us no information at all, But, the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation tells us that 120,000 Jews in all were deported from France, without specifying the number of those of French nationality, which does not prevent it, when it comes to tallying the survivors, from stating peremptorily that there were only some 180,000, as we shall see on the chart for France, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg. The World Center simply did not figure in this difference except among the number of those living in France in 1939, without taking the immigration factor into account.
And, here is Mme. Arendt's conclusion for Belgium: the 40,000 Belgium Jews who fled to France before the German invasion, together with 25,000 who were foreign to that country, were, she says, nearly all deported and exterminated. With the 50,000 which the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation said were living there in 1945, we get a figure of 115,000. But, official Jewish statistics give only 90,000 Jews in Belgium in 1939. And, there is another important detail: no Belgian Jew was deported, because -- as Mme. Arendt explains -- in Belgium there was no Jewish Council (Judenrat) to register them and to designate them for deportation. But the foreign Jews, on the other hand, were all deported: they were nearly all Poles or Russians, and their very appearance called them to the attention of the German authorities, as she says.
And, for Holland: the 40,000 Jews who fled to France, plus the 118,000 who were deported (and exterminated naturally), plus the 60,000 that the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation found still living in 1945 yield 218,000. But, according to official Jewish sources, there were only 150,000 Jews living in Holland in 1939.
Finally, for Luxemburg: 3,000 Jews lived there in 1939, minus the 2,000 who were deported gives 1,000 survivors in 1945.
Therefore, if we draw up a recapîtulation table for these four countries in 1945, this is what it looks like:
| 1939 | 1940 (a) | Deported | Actual | Difference | Official | Off. counted as exterminated | |
| France | 300,000 | 470,000 | 120,000 (b) | 350,000 | 50,000 | 180,000 | 120,000 |
| Belgium | 90,000 | 115,000 | 25,000 | 90,000 | 50,000 | 40,000 | |
| Holland | 150,000 | 218,000 | 118,000 | 100,000 | (50,000) | 60,000 | 90,000 |
| Luxemb. | 3,000 | 3,000 | 2,000 | 1,000 | (2,000) | 1,000 | 2,000 |
| TOTALS | 543,000 | 806,000 | 265,000 | 541,000 | (2000) | 291,000 | 252,000 |
(
a) Actually for the year 1940 there should be two columns in this table; one with the data for before the invasion of Holland and Belgium (spring), which is the one, and one with the data for after the invasion, which would take into account the 40,000 Belgian Jews and the 40,000 Dutch Jews who fled to France. It would look like this : 75,000 in Belgium, 178,000 in Holland, and 550,000 in France in July 1940. The general total for the four countries would not have changed, nor the other data, nor the circumstances, so it was not thought useful to tangle up the calculations with figures that ended with the same results.
(b) I repeat that Exhibit No 100 of the Jerusalem Court claimed only 52,000 deportees from France, as of July 21, 1943.
Thus, of the Jews who are claimed to have been arrested in France, in Belgium, in Holland and in Luxemburg during the war, some 265,000 among them are said to have been exterminated in the concentration camps to which they were deported. But, when the war was over there were still in the four aforementioned countries, taken as a whole, 541,000 Jews or 2,000 less than there were living in them in 1939. This conclusion comes from the very figures that Mr. Raul Hilberg, his protege, Mme. Hannah Arendt, and the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation have given us. But, without knowing how, or why, the latter, when it comes to drawing official conclusions from these figures, concludes that there were only 291,000 survivors, and, for the number of exterminated, it finds a figure in the same range: 252,000.
Doubtless to distinguish himself and to demonstrate originality, again without knowing how or why, Mr. Raul Hilberg comes up with 261,000 survivors, and 242,000 exterminated, drawn from the same figures. And, naturally, Mme. Hannah Arendt follows in his footsteps. In Eichmann's Confederates and the Third Reich Hierarchy, the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress finds 261,000 survivors and 292,000 exterminated (p. 59). So, with only shades of difference, the Jewish sources seem to be in agreement.
The mechanism of this operation, which is so crude that it stares you in the face and which is found in all of the figuring of all of these people, is quite simple: in 1945, during the postwar turmoil, the Jewish communities of every country were supposedly invited to state very quickly what their losses had been so that Justice Jackson could take them into account in his speech for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trial where such figures were prefaced with the expression: "it is estimated in full cognizance..."(17) As unscrupulous as we know Justice Jackson to have been, it is certain that, although he does not say what, he must have based his opinion on something. And, that something could only have been information of this sort. This information was assessed, not in the terms of all Jews who were survivors in a given country, but in terms of those who were nationals of that country and who were, then, subtracted from the number of their members who had lived there in 1939. The difference between these two figures was claimed to be the number of Jews who met their deaths in Nazi gas chambers. Itwas up to the Jewish communities in each country to account for Jews of other nationalities among them. But this was not done. In each of the European countries the same practice was followed, and, in the present instance, it developed that some 250,000 Jews were not counted as survivors anywhere, and that this missing 250,000 always turned up in the column of those exterminated in the statistics. It is by this process, multiplied by the number of countries, that the figure of six million exterminated European Jews was arrived at.
Considering only these four countries, the "non-nationals" were not the only ones involved. There were also those who possessed the nationality, but who had not yet returned -- many never returned -- and, therefore, were not present at the time when that fabricated inventory was drawn up. Since they were absent, they were included among the exterminated. However, most of them had emigrated. Although that emigration could not be proven in 1945, it can be today. We know, for example -- even if only through the Arendt-Hilberg team -- that at the moment of the arrival of the German troops in Belgium, no more than 5,000 Jews remained who had Belgian nationality, and that since no Jewish Council denounced them to the Germans, not one of them was arrested (Hannah Arendt, op. cit.). From this fact, the following can be concluded:
a. Since there were 60,000 Jews in the country in 1926 (Arthur Ruppin dixit), and therefore not many less than 70,000 in 1939, including the natural rate of increase, it was not 40,000 who fled to France as Mme. Arendt says, but between 60,000 and 65,000.
b. When the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation puts 40,000 Belgian Jews in the exterminated column, this is a wretched fraud.
And, the same conclusion holds for France where we know that at the end of the summer of 1943 only 6,000 Jews of French nationality had been deported. Here again, the Arendt-Hilberg tandem is in agreement. For the period from the end of summer 1943, to the end of the war, no exact information has been made public, as far as I know. But, Mr. Leon Poliakov (Le Troisieme Reich et les Juifs), Mr. Michel Borwicz ("Les solutions finales a la lumiere d'Auschwitz-Birkenau" in the Revue d'Histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale, October 1956), and Mr. Joseph Billig (Le Dossier Eichmann), all say that it was during the course of 1942 that the greatest number of French Jews was arrested and deported, in order to arrive at the admirably Jesuitical formula that "in all about 120,000 Jews were deported from France." But, if the greatest number of French Jews to be deported was 6,000, there is very little chance, mathematically speaking, that the number could have exceeded 11,999. Since the largest number was 6,000, arithmetically, the smallest number could not be larger than 5,999. The question remains: what became of the other 1 1 0,000 (or, at the least, the other 108,000) who are among the 120,000 French exterminated, when it has been established that they were not even arrested and deported? If I answer that question by saying that they had left France, I do not think that I can be accused of conjecturing. Because if they were not deported, if they were not exterminated, and if they were no longer there, then they must have gone somewhere else.
It was from Holland that the greatest number of national Jews was deported. How many? The contradictory data in the recapitulation table permit two equally contradictory replies, one of which is necessarily without value:
On the one hand, if 40,000 Dutch Jews fled to France, where they were not deported and where they were found again in 1945, and if in 1945, 60,000 were found still surviving in Holland, then, by referring to the statistics for 1939, we subtract 40,000 plus 60,000 from 150,000 and get 50,000 national Jews actually deported who did not return -- at least they had not returned by 1945;
On the other hand, if out of the 543,000 from the statistics for the countries of France, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg considered as a block, who were living there in 1939, only 291,000, who had one or the other of the four nationalities, were found again in 1945, then 252,000 (figured by subtracting 291,000 from 543,000) of the former did not have one or the other nationalities, were strangers there, and had replaced, number for number, 252,000 French, Belgian, Dutch or Luxemburg Jews who were not arrested there, were not deported, and yet were no longer there. Among them, it is known from an assured source, that there were a minimum of 108,000 French and 60,000 Belgians. There were 1,000 Luxemburgers who also were officially there. Therefore, by subtracting 169,000 from252,000 we have a maximum of 83,000 Dutch Jews. In the column of deportees, who had not returned in 1945 there were 67,000, which is determined by taking 83,000 from 105,000. And, that is the only true fact that can be given as being verified by Jewish sources themselves, with regard to the details that they give. What it might be in reality, is another story. And whether these 67,000 Dutch deportees were exterminated is also another story. In any case, it is far from being established as fact, since to do that it would require that no one came back after being deported, and such a contention is untenable. This conclusion holds true not only for Holland but for France and Luxemburg, too. There is no problem with regard to Belgium, since not one Belgian Jew was deported, or at least very nearly so.
Considering France, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg, en bloc, the obvious conclusion is the following: a maximum of 12,000 French Jews, 67,000 Dutch Jews, and 2,000 Luxemburg Jews yields a total of 81,000 Jews who were deported according to the data provided from Jewish sources, and not 252,000 as they claim. (As has been pointed out in the preceding paragraphs, no Jews were deported from Belgium.) Even if not one came back, which is improbable, it would still result in an exaggeration of 171,000 Jews, to be subtracted from the column of exterminated. And, that figure is just for these four countries.
But there are other conclusions to be drawn: With regard to the 252,000 Jews of these four countries who were not exterminated since they had not been deported, and yet were not in one or the other country in 1945, one or two things can be said: either they returned after 1945, in which case they must be included again in the European Jewish population, or else they did not return and they must be included in the population of the country to which they went and in which they remained. It is the second case that must be looked into since no Jewish source lists them as having returned to Europe. The question remains: where are they then? Are they in the United States, in Canada, in Argentina, in South Africa? These questions cannot be answered until we determine the total number of Jews who succeeded in leaving Europe. One way of making this determination is by conducting an investigation into the Jewish population in all the countries where they increased the population, and there is only one for which there is no Jewish source: the United States. In any case, not having officially returned to Europe, these 252,000 -- who could not have left Europe until after 1940 -- must be added to the 300,000 German Jews and the 180,000 Austrian Jews who had left before 1940. In other words, we have a total of 732,000 European Jewish emigrants.
With regard to the 252,000 Jews who did not have the nationality of any of the four countries in question, who replaced number for number the 252,000 Jews who are discussed in the preceding paragraph, and who were found still living in 1945, the following is clear: in the statistics of the countries from which the latter came they are listed in the exterminated column, and, in order to take mathematical count of the living and the dead of those countries, which is the first task to be done, they must be reintegrated among the living. But "to reintegrate them among the living" in the statistics does not mean that they returned to those countries. Officially not one returned, since not one was officially reintegrated into the statistics, nor in actuality either, since, with the exception of western Germany, these countries are on the other side of the Iron Curtain. For the same reason, the same is true for France, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg. The second task to be done will be to reintegrate them into the population statistics of the countries to which they went after their number has been determined. In any case, it is already possible to say that here we have again 252,000 more European Jews who have emigrated, and that figure, when added to the 732,000 figure that is mentioned above, makes a total of 984.000.
Finally, with regard to the 265,000 Jews who were arrested in France, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg, we find that among them, as we have seen, 81,000 were nationals of one or the other of these countries. So it follows that 184,000 were without the nationality of any of these countries. The same logic as above applies here, with the exception that those 184,000 Jews should be reintegrated into the exterminated (it would be more exact to say, people missing in 1945) columns of the countries from which they come.
To correctly reintegrate those 252 000 survivors, who are listed as dead, and those 184,000 who are listed as exterminated, for a total of 436,000 Jews, into the statistics of the countries from which they came, we must know which countries. But, can we determine these exactly? Mme. HannahArendt -- via Mr. Raul Hilberg -- says that they were "Poles, Russians, Germans, etc... However, it is not very clear who that "etc." covers. It is not likely that it covers the Yugoslavs who left Europe by way of Italy, Greece, or Hungary; the Austrians who took the Danube route or went via Switzerland after the Anschluss; or the Czechoslovakians who took the Danube way through Hungary, as Dr. Kasztner specifies. Moreover, the Russians could only leave via Constantinople and the shores of the Caspian or the Birobidjan after the war began. Following the outbreak of hostilities, only the Germans continued to emigrate secretly through Holland and Belgium or Luxemburg for the reason that the Rhine had to be crossed, and it was easier for them to cross it on German territory than where it forms the frontier. Therefore, there were Germans in appreciable numbers, doubtless, but surely not in significant numbers because they were only those who had remained in Germany after 1939. The others, as Mr. Chouraqui has told us, had already left Europe, and 120,000 among them were in Israel. There remain the Poles for whom the truly mass emigration began in the spring of 1939, when the situation between England and Germany was disintegrating, and for whom Belgium, Holland, and France were their escape routes, too. Until the end of August 1939, they could even cross Germany with Polish passports. They constituted almost the whole of those 436,000 Jews who were neither French, Belgian, Dutch, nor Luxemburger, and who were to be found in one or the other of those countries in May 1940 when their emigration route was cut by the German armies during the "Battle of France."
I have no precise information available that would allow me to divide up these 436,000 Jews among the nationalities cited, as should be done, because they can no longer be counted, and to deduct them separately from the statistics of Jewish sources, given for each of them for 1939, or to reintegrate them into the 1945 statistics taking the dead and the living into consideration. Aside from that, any of them who were not Polish or German were the exception; that is, they were a negligible number. The Germans, themselves, were only a small contingent, amounting to 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 perhaps, but no one knows for certain. It is about that, in any case.
After that time, two methods are possible: First, one can study the Jewish population in the aggregate, for all the above-named countries, by deducting as a whole from the start those 436,000 persons from the 1939 statistics, and, in accordance with the calculations, by adding for 1945 the 184,000 who were arrested to the corresponding column. Since we are looking at the European Jews, not Jews by nationality, mathematically and on that level, no error would have been made. But there are two things against it: the division of the Polish Jews between the Russian and the German zones after the German-Russian invasion, and their migration toward Hungary, which, by leaving out so significant a number as 350,000 to 400,000 Polish Jews, could only lead to results whose aberrant character as far as Poland is concerned, would inevitably have had repercussions multiplied on a European scale.
Second, since those 436,000 Jews were in the great majority Polish, they can be considered -- mathematically -- as being all Polish, and they can be integrated into Polish statistics only. In terms of such a calculation, the results were off by no more than 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 of them who were not Polish, but the error did not exceed, on the whole, one or two tens of thousands of persons on the nationality level. And, on the other hand, mathematically, it could be automatically and exactly corrected on the level of the Jewish population of Europe, by an error exactly corresponding, inversely, if I decided not to take into account those 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 in the study of the German Jewish population. It is the second method that I adopted: the solution of a problem by the well-known process of false supposition. Having given this explanation, which is indispensable for an understanding of what follows, we take Poland first.
In Poland, Mr. Arthur Ruppin tells us, there were 3,100,000 Jews in 1926. In 1939 there were 3,300,000, as the World Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation and the Institute of Jewish Affairs of New York tell us. Mr. Raul Hilberg goes even further, with a figure of 3,350,000. But it is nonsense to think that this could be right, since they were constantly, and in numbers, migrating since 1932. Let us say that there were 3,100,000 in the spring of 1939, when mass migration began. We have decided that arithmetically 436,000 were on their way through Holland, Belgium and France, when the invasion of those countries by German troops took place. So, there should have remained in Poland at the moment of invasion 2,664,000. In reality there were less, because the Polish Jewshad also tried to leave by the Danube route: the Kasztner Report, as we have seen, tells us that a certain number of the latter were still in Hungary on March 19, 1944, mixed with Czechs and Hungarians. And since the Nazi invasion of Hungary took place on March 19, 1944, how many Polish Jews fell into German hands?
First, we must determine how many there were in the aggregate for the three nationalities? There had been, as Dr. Kasztner specifies, 800,000 Jews in Hungary, more or less permanently since the beginning of the war. In 1926, Mr. Arthur Ruppin had counted 320,000. With the natural rate of increase these 320,000 had become 361,600 in 1939, and not 404,000 as claimed by the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation. Taken together, the Poles, Czechoslovakians and Yugoslavs, who were living in Hungary, added up to 438,400 persons. And by taking each of these three nationalities separately in detail, we get the following:
1. Czechoslovakians: the statistics drawn up by Mr. Richard Korherr (already cited) for the Wannsee Conference, which was to have taken place on December 9, 1940, but which did not take place until January 20, 1942 (Wannsee Protocol in Eichmann und Komplizen, Robert Kempner, op. cit.) -- that is, before deportation of the Jews was undertaken -- tell us that in Bohemia-Moravia there were still 74,200 of them, the rest having fled to Slovakia, when Czechoslovakia was dismembered (1938-39), and 88,000 in Slovakia. Mr. Arthur Ruppin's statistics for 1926 give 260,000. With the natural increase rate of 1%, which we have used throughout this study, that makes the Jewish population 293,800 in 1939 and not 315,000. And, that means that in Hungary, continuing along the route by which they were fleeing, there could have been 131,600 Czechoslovakian Jews, this figure being determined by subtracting 74,200 plus 88,000 from 293,800.
2. Yugoslavs: Mme Hannah Arendt takes from Mr. Raul Hilberg the fact that when Hermann Krumey arrived in Zagreb at the end of 1943 he found a certain number of Jews in the country and deported 30,000. On this point all Jewish sources are in agreement. The Wannsee Protocol mentions 40,000 at the end of 1941. The rest had fled to Italy and Hungary. In all there were 75,000 Jews in Yugoslavia in 1926, as Mr. Arthur Ruppin says, and this figure is accepted by the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation. It could be that the Yugoslavian Jewish emigration matched the natural increase since that is a country where not only Jews, but all the ethnic groups, and in all periods, were numerically very fluctuating. The difference, or 35,000 could be equally divided between Italy and Hungary, or 17,500, a little more or less for each. The World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation found 20,000 Jews there in 1945, and that would indicate that out of Krumey's 40,000 deportees, 20,000 returned from the concentration camps where they had been sent, and the rest died in the camps.
3. Poles: Without counting those who, with or without genuine or forged passports which were given to them by the Committee for Jewish Safety of Budapest (Joel Brand dixit), had succeeded in leaving Poland for Hungary after 1939, there were approximately 289,300 Poles. This figure is determined by subtracting the 149,100 Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian Jews from 438,400.
On the basis of the preceding discussion, we can conclude that there remained in Poland under German-Russian occupation 2,374,700 Jews, figured by subtracting 289,300 from 2,664,000 and not 3,100,000, 3,300,000 or 3,350,000. Moreover, that number was divided up between the German and the Russian zones.
Now, another question arises: in what proportion were these 2,374,700 Jews divided between the two zones? With the fine want of realization which seems to keep him from making the simplest of accurate calculations, Mr. Raul Hilberg, who found 3,350,000 Polish Jews in 1939, puts 2,100,000 in the German zone and 1,200,000 in the Russian zone. At least, that is the idea one gets. But, it is a worthless estimate; in terms of what has been said, which is as historically as demographically irrefutable, it does not bear examining.
Then, how many were there on each side? In order to answer this question as exactly as possible, two elements must be taken into account: the flight of the Jews before German troops pushing into Poland, and the steps taken against them from July 1940 on.
Like the Dutch and Belgian Jews, the Polish Jews fled before German troops, either toward Hungary, or into that part of Poland destined to be occupied by the Russians. The proportion of the latter cannot be determined, it seems, unless the number of those who did not go in that direction can be determined. A very large number, without doubt, fell into Russian hands, because there was actually for a certain time a German policy of turning over to the Russians Jews encountered in the German area. This is attested to by Zwi Patcher and Yacov Goldfine, two witnesses for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trial, who later testified on May 1, 1 961. The first stated:
All our money and our jewelry were taken from us. Then, in the columns of four, we were conducted toward the East. It was in December. It was cold, rainy and we were shivering. When one of us dropped with fatigue, he was taken aside and a pistol shot put him out of his sufferings. But it was forbidden to turn one's head, or one was shot, too. At the end of three days our group had been greatly decimated. We arrived at the frontier of the Soviet occupation zone in Poland. Our executioners had ordered us to put our hands on our heads and to shout "Vive Stalin." But just the same the Russian sentinels pushed us back into a German area, where we were left to ourselves. During the night, we crossed the frontier to reach a small Jewish village in the Russian zone, where our co-religionists gave us shelter. (Le Figaro, May 2, 1961.)
The second made an analogous statement. Helped, even though so brutally, by the Germans to get into the Russian zone, quite a number of Polish Jews must have made it.
The story of the steps taken against them is more specific. Mme. Mary Berg tells us (Le Ghetto de Varsovie, Paris, 1947), and Mr. Leon Poliakov, who seems to have taken his information from her, confirms it (Le Breviaire de la Haine), that in Poland the Germans were not seriously concerned with the Jews until war operations in the West were over, that is, during July 1940. Until then, the Jews were under surveillance, suffered innumerable persecutions and vexations, but they were not confined to their houses; and, they took advantage of that fact to make a run for Hungary via Slovakia. After the construction of the ghetto in Warsaw was completed (October 16, 1940), escape was possible, but only at great risk. They were all under house-arrest, and the Jew hunt began that was to round them all up there. But, in July 1941, the Jewish population in Warsaw, counted in 1939, had increased from 359,827 to only half a million, all within the ghetto.
Therefore, in all of the German zone, the German police authorities had been able to find only 140,000 to 150,000. To escape the measures to concentrate them, the Jews began to flee toward every remote spot, in the mountains and the forests. When they were found they often were considered to be partisans; consequently there were struggles during which many of them perished. But, even if the Germans who were tracking them all over had succeeded in capturing a quarter or a fifth of them during that period (and, in view of the efficiency of their police at that time, this is a plausible estimation because in France it was about the same when they went after those subject to forced labor), that fact still does not put the Jewish Population of the German zone, the Warsaw ghetto included, at more than about 1,100,000. Thus, out of 2,3 74,700 who made up the total Jewish population of the two zones, 1,274,700, were in the Russian zone. And, even if Mr. Raul Hilberg did not know how to subtract, this figure is not very far from his. Let us congratulate him all the same. We regret at the same time that he did not find so approximate a result for the German zone. We know about the Jews who went behind the Russian lines; the Jewish journalist, David Bergelson, told us (Die Einheit, December 5, 1942, op. cit.) that thanks to evacuation measures 80 per cent of them were saved and were transported to Central Asia by the Soviet authorities. So, the following calculations show the fate of the Polish Jews: (1,274,700 x 20)/100 = 254,940 who fell into German hands and (1,274,700 x 80)/100 = 1,019,760 who did not.
And in the German zone? It seems that only by comparisons of the difference can we find out. On the one hand, here are 1,019,760 survivors found in the Russian zone. On the other, in 1945 Mr. Salo Baron found 700,000 for both zones (according to his testimony at the Jerusalem Tribunal). The total of those not found in 1945 can be figured as follows: 2,374,700 - (1,019,760 + 700,000) = 654,940. And to this 654,940 for the whole of Poland may be added the 182,000 arrested in Holland, Belgium, France and Luxemburg, or 836,940. All of the preceding data, it must be remembered, comes from Jewish sources. We shall not dispute whether or not they were all arrested; but that they were all exterminated we may, just the same, doubt.
So, now we can begin to determine the total number of survivors: first, we must reintegrate into the statistics, the 252,000 who in 1945 were found still alive in Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France. We can do this by adding the 1,019,760 survivors from the Russian zone together with the 700,000 that had been found by Professor Salo Baron and these 252,000. We get a total of 1,971,760, based solely on the total number of Jews remaining in Poland after 1939. Second, we must add in those Jews who had tried to flee westward. Here we shall add 2,374,700 plus 252,000 plus 182,000 to get 2,812,700. The number of Jews who, having fled to Hungary (289,300) were either deported from there or found alive there in 1945, can only be included in the totals made for Hungary itself.
But, we have not finished with Poland yet. Mr. Raul Hilberg found 50,000 survivors there; the Institute for Jewish Affairs of New York found 400,000; the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation found 500,000; and, from the calculations based on Mr. Salo Baron's data, put into its historical context, there were actually a minimum of 1,971,760 survivors out of a population of 2,812,700 Jews (excluding those who succeeded in leaving Europe via Hungary and whose number is unknown because, as we have seen, it has been possible to count in Hungary, only those who remained there). After 1945 it was possible for the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation to make its calculations easily by asking all the Jewish communities for a report of their numbers by nationality, and it is the latter which should have figured in the statistics. It could also have included the Polish Jews deported and then found as survivors in Hungary, which would have saved us all this figuring, if it had honestly given the results of its investigations. Instead of that, for Poland, it gives 500,000 survivors only, or 1,472,760, who are listed as dead in the European statistics, but who are alive and who are not listed as such in any statistics of any country of the other continents. Of those, at the end of our study of the western countries, we had already found 984,000. Here we must add 984,000 to 1,472,760 for a total of 2,456,760 survivors.
The next stage is an examination of Russia. The situation here is not involved: everything is very clear. Mr. Raul Hilberg, who finds 3,020,000 Jews there in 1939, concludes that 420,000 were exterminated, and 1,600,000 survived. Mr. Arthur Ruppin gave 3,000,000 Jews in 1926. Between 1926 and 1939 Jewish emigration probably corresponded to their natural rate of increase because the Russian Jews have always been in an endemic state of migration. And, if we accept David Bergelson's evidence, we can calculate the number of sure survivors as follows: (3,000,000 x 80)/100 = 2,400,000, which leaves 600,000 missing in 1945. Mr. Raul Hilberg gives only 420,000 as exterminated, which can mean only one thing: if 600,000 Russian Jews fell into German hands, 180,000 were not exterminated -- perhaps they were not even arrested and deported, or, if they were, they came back from the camps where they were interned. The percentage of those exterminated in the latter case is seventy per cent (420,000 out of 600,000) and of survivors, thirty per cent. That is still a fearful number. The World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation finds that 1,500,000 were exterminated (in the German zone, none in the Russian zone) which means there were 1,500,000 survivors, but to make it sensational, it gives 600,000 for the German zone in such a way that the reader thinks it applies to both zones. On the same data, the Institute of Jewish Affairs of New York finds 1,000,000 exterminated and 2,000,000 survivors.
But, Mr. Raul Hilberg charges the Institute of Jewish Affairs with an exaggeration of 580,000, figured by subtracting 420,000 from 1,000,000 deportees who it lists as being exterminated in its statistics, and the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation with having made an exaggeration of 1,080,000 (figured by subtracting 420,000 from 1,500,000) in its statistics. It is in the statistics of the latter that we have calculated this exaggeration. Thus, we come to this conclusion: the 1,080,000 Jews who were incorrectly listed in the exterminated column, and who were quite alive in 1945, if they are no longer in Russia, nor elsewhere in Europe, must be living -- with their offspring since 1945 -- in another country on another continent. Our study of the Polish Jewish population brought us to 2,456,760 survivors. To this number we can add 1,080,000 for a total of 3,536,760 survivors.
The case of the Jews of the Baltic countries is as clear as that of the Russian Jews. To my knowledge no one has ever taken into account the number of Finnish Jews exterminated. For the three other countries, Mr. Arthur Ruppin gave the following figures for 1926: Esthonia, 5,000; Latvia, 80,000; Lithuania, 160,000; total, 245,000. By moving 10,000 to 15,000 individuals around from one country to another, the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation comes to the same total, and Mr. Raul Hilberg gets 244,500 for 1939. What about the natural increase from 1926 to 1939? He does not consider this. Perhaps he felt that emigration compensated for it. But we are within 500, so let us call it 245,000. According to David Bergelson, the survivors can be calculated as follows: (245,000 x 80)/100=196,000. And, 196,000 subtracted from 245,000 yields 49,000 missing in 1945. The World Center of C0ntemporary Jewish Documentation finds 219,000 exterminated and 26,000 survivors. As for Mr. Raul Hilberg, he gives us a higher figure: 244,500 exterminated, and no survivors. It is hard to see why, if the Russians evacuated the Jews all along the front lines -- and, Mr. Raul Hilberg subscribes to that fact if not to its significance -- they should have deliberately made an exception in the Baltic countries. Mr. Raul Hilberg claims this, but does not give an explanation. Here once again, 196,000 minus 26,000 (from the official statistics) gives 170,000 Jewish survivors, carried over into the column of exterminated, who, since they are no longer in the Baltic countries, are somewhere else in the world together with their offspring born since 1941-42. The total of survivors at this stage: 3,536,760, plus 170,000 or 3,706,760.
Let us proceed by returning to the West: First, we shall examine Czechoslovakia. We have seen that 260,000 Jews counted in 1926 by Mr. Arthur Ruppin could, at the most, have become 293,800 by 1939 and not 315,000 as is claimed by other Jewish sources. We have also seen that 131,600 among them had surely fled into Hungary through Slovakia, and that when the deportations began, I 62,200 remained in the country, according to the German statistics of Mr. Korrherr who had a tendency to exaggerate what he called the "Jewish danger" rather than to lessen it. (For example, for Europe he gave eleven million Jews in 1941!) The World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation found 55,000 survivors in 1949. Logically, then, 107,200 only could have been deported from Czechoslovakia. Even if one insists on taking "Exhibit 83" of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem seriously, which takes account of the deportation, very much disputed, of 15,000 Jews of the Protectorate of Lodz on October 15, 194 1, that would still give a total or only 122,200 deportees. After October 15, 1941, the Jerusalem court made no further case for any other deportation from the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia except to give an overall total, without any justification whatever of 35,000. And even if one accepts it, the total is still only 142,000. Except for this, all the other Jews of the Protectorate are listed as having been victims of the forced emigration that was organized by Eichmann from Prague before the war. (See, "Exhibit 66" which gives no figures.) It is only for Slovakia that the Jerusalem Court gives an estimate of Jewish losses: for the whole, "more than 70,000 out of 90,000" ("Exhibit 104"); 58,000 up to the end of May 1942, and more than 12,000 from September 1944 to March 1945. If we refer to that Court for an estimate of Jewish losses for all Czechoslovakia, we find 70,000 in Slovakia plus 35,000 in Bohemia-Moravia which gives a total of 105,000. And, that means that, when it claims to have found only 55,000 Jews still alive there in 1945, the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation attempted to promote a truth which the judges of the Jerusalem Tribunal did not admit, since it was on documentation officially supplied by the Center that they based their conviction. But, the significance of this disavowal is seen with regard to the number of Czechoslovakian Jews announced in the general statistics given by this group as having been exterminated since it fixed the number at 260,000, figured by subtracting 55,000 from 315,000. Actually, the balance should be as follows:
1. Czechoslovakian Jewish population in 1939: 293,800
2. Those Jews who crossed into Hungary (where the discount of the deportees and those found again alive are included in the totals resulting from calculations made for Hungary, since it is impossible to do otherwise. (18) ): 131,600
3. Those Jews who remained in Czechoslovakia prior to the deportation program: 293,800 - 131,600=162,200
4. The number of deportees as determined by the Jerusalem Tribunal: 105,000
5. Those Jews who were not deported from Czechoslovakia: 162,200 - 105,00= 57,200
6. The number of those not deported, as determined by the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation: 55,000
57,200 - 55,000=2,200
And, here we have 2,200 European Jews listed among the dead who were quite alive in 1945, and who -- since they are no longer in Europe, officially -- must be on the lists of those living in another country on another continent. In the study of the Jewish population of the Baltic countries we found 3,706,760 for the whole, in the same situation. Now, we have 3,706,760 plus 2,200 or 3,708,960.
Next, we shall study Hungary. There, the Jewish situation was as complicated as in Poland. Mr. Arthur Ruppin had counted 320,000 Jews in 1926, and we have seen that they probably increased to 361,600 by 1939. The World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation gives 404,000 and Mr. Raul Hilberg 400,000 (19), Dr. Kasztner, as we have also seen, gives 800,000 Jews as continuously living there since the beginning of the war (20), including -- according to him -- 205,800 Czechoslovakians, 215,000 Poles, and 17,500 Yugoslavs and, apparently, 361,700 Hungarians. The question is, how many of those 800,000 Jews were arrested and deported? And, here we have a hopeless muddle. It is over the deportation and the fate of the Hungarian Jews that the divergencies in the accounts of the proZionist witnesses and the interpretations given to them by those who, since the end of the war, have made it their business to dramatize the Jewish tragedy, are the most numerous, the most serious, and the most contradictory. Of these divergencies the reader has already had a taste from the analysis made of the Hoess testimony, commandant of the Auschwitz camp, and of Miklos Nyiszli, the pertinence of which my references to the Kasztner Report and the book of Joel Brand have confirmed on all points. These divergencies make the contentions of the Zionist movement so vulnerable, on the whole, that it was on the deportation of the Hungarian Jews -- in the hope of promoting an official truth around which the whole world could be rallied -- that the Jerusalem Tribunal was most precise. It is quite obvious, for example, that the five trains a day containing 4,000 or 5,000 persons was a piece of stupidity which absolutely had to be eliminated, because during the 52 days while the deportation of the Hungarian Jews lasted, that number would yield 260 trains and between 1,040,000 and 1,300,000 deportees from a country in which, at the maximum, there were only 800,000 Jews, of whom, moreover, it has been clearly said that 200,000 were not deported. (21)
The Court of the Jerusalem Tribunal therefore decided that from May 16 to July 7, 1944, "in less than two months, 434,351 persons were deported in 147 freight trains, at about 3,000 persons per train, men, women, and children, or an average of 2 to 3 trains a day" ("Exhibit 112"); that " 12,000 were killed at Kamenetz-Zodolsk during the summer of 1941;" that "45,000 to 50,000 died while working in Galicia and in the Ukraine in 1941-42" ("Exhibit 111"); that " 1,500 in the camp at Kistarzca were deported on July 20, 1944, (" Exhibit 113"); that "50,000 left Budapest on foot for the Austrian frontier (220 km. away) after November 10th " ("Exhibit 115"); and, finally, that "15,000 [were] sent to Austria to the Vienna-Strasshof camp to be kept in the ice-house," ("Exhibit 116"), on a date given without further detail as "after June 30, 1944." That total accounted for varies between 557,851 and 562,851. "Exhibit 115," which mentions the 50,000 Jews who left Budapest on foot, does not say it, but the Report of Dr. Kasztner makes it clear that this march was interrupted on Himmler's orders about the 17th or 18th of November, that 7,500 persons were saved and brought back to Budapest, and that 38,000 only (22) reached Germany. If account is taken of the 200,000 survivors given in the statistics of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, there must have been, in Hungary, 757,851 or 762,861 Jews in all on March 19, 1944. And, likewise, Mr. Raul Hilberg estimated the number to be about 750,000. But, see how our methods and approaches differ: I draw the conclusion that out of the "800,000 souls in the Hungarian Jewish community," ("Exhibit 111"), there were 40,000 to 50,000 that the Jerusalem Court could not account for. As for Mme Hannah Arendt, with her maximum of"476,000 Hungarian victims," (and we shall never know how she got the number) we are struck by the fidelity with which she reports what she sees and hears when she is sent out to write a story. And, we can understand why it is that Mr. Robert W. Kempner has publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with her work. (Die Aufbau, op. cit.).
Now we shall take up the whole business in detail:
1. The number of trains. We may be richly informed about the arrival of these trains at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but we have much less detail about their departure from Hungary. So I shall begin by saying that to gather together 3,000 persons in a station and load them into 40 cars is not a minor undertaking, and, to make it clear to those who are not specialists in transportation, I know of no better way than to cite from my own experience during the departure, from the camp at Compiegne, of the train in which I was deported to Buchenwald.
Camp Royallieu where we were first assembled could hold about 10,000 persons. Every week, at the end of 1943, about 1,500 arrived, and as many left. The transport in which I was included was composed of 1,500 able-bodied persons and about 50 sick.
Awakened at six in the morning, collected on the parade grounds, grouped in fives, and by fives in hundreds, we finally left the camp a little before eight o'clock with the 15 squads of 100 each in the lead and with a truck following slowly behind that carried those who were sick. A procession of 15 squads of 100 persons, marching five abreast, is long; armed soldiers were stationed at the head and in a single line along the sides; a space of 350 to 400 meters was maintained between each squad; and a special guard followed at the rear of the column.
A little before nine o'clock, we found ourselves lined up along the station platform with each group of 100 (23) facing a train car into which it must climb. The train: it was a long line -- it seemed immense to us -- of freight cars. How many? I did not count. Probably, there was a car for each group (making 15) plus a special car for the 50 sick persons. I noticed that on the roof of every third car were soldiers armed with a machine gun and something else which those of us in my squad decided was a floodlight. At the head and at the rear were two passenger cars in which additional guards travelled to reinforce, if necessary en route, the other guards who were stationed among the cars. In addition, there were freight cars which carried supplies. In all, 25 to 30 cars -- 25 at a minimum. And, a train of 25 to 30 cars is very long. Even so, such a train carried fewer than 1,600 prisoners with 100 per car.
A little after 10 o'clock the train seemed to be about ready to depart. No one was left on the platform, we were told by those who could see from the skylights at the head an end of the car. Nevertheless, the train did not move. A railway man explained: a train that is not in the timetables cannot just simply depart; all of the stations along the way have to be notified, and that can only be done at the moment when it is about to start. Another long hour of waiting: a little before noon the train got under way.
In all, our departure took a good half day. And we heard plenty of "Los!" and "Schnell!" On our arrival at Buchenwald, we were unloaded a little faster; but each car was brought to the platform separately, since the unloading platform was not as long as the train. It took at least two good hours to empty all the cars, so they could go to Weimar.
I do not mean to say that what took place at Budapest was exactly the same as Compiegne, but only that, whether here or there, the job was the same in varying degrees. Everywhere, for example, people had to be collected together, the cars loaded, and so forth; all these things took about the same amount of time no matter where they happened.
From reading the Kasztner Report and Joel Brand's book, one gets the impression that there were 200,000 to 250,000 Jews in Budapest, although a more precise estimate, which neither gives, cannot be stated. The organizations of which they were the heads seem, indeed, to have tried to avoid too great a concentration of Jews in the capital and to have tried to spread out over the whole country the 400,000 odd Poles, Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs who were continually arriving in a steady flow. Where they could not avoid this concentration was in the Hungarian and Rumanian frontier regions which they were all trying to reach, and that is why, except for Budapest, one or two centers for these areas (east of the Theiss) were chosen as assembly points for which trains could leave directly for Auschwitz without going through Budapest. At Budapest itself, the Jews seem to have been first directed to an area fairly far from the station, which Dr. Kasztner and Joel Brand designate with the name "brick-works," and where, althoughwe cannot give an exact figure here either since they do not, it can be guessed that at a maximum it was possible to gather together about 10,000 persons. The official thesis: from there to the station, in columns of 3,000 men, women, children and the aged -- and baggage, as mentioned by all the witnesses who claim that the Jews took with them everything they could -- they were marched.
In any case, on this or that side of the Theiss, they had to be collected: by trucks or on foot to the nearest station and by rail from the nearest station to the assembling area. Oddly enough, at Budapest it was not the Jews of the city, for the most part Hungarian, who were rounded up at the "brick-works," but those from other regions who were fetched from 100 to 150 kilometers away. The "brick-works," moreover, could not hold more than 10,000 at a time -- officially deported in batches of 3,000 who were replaced by a similar number. In short, whether at the "brick-works" of Budapest or elsewhere, railcars had to be assembled, and these cars had to be drawn from the lot of 1,000 which, Kasztner tells us, were at the disposal of Eichmann. The two operations took place at the same time, because, at the assembly points, the Jews being deported could only be replaced by an equal number, so if they had to go as far to collect them as to deport them, each operation would have required an equal number of rail cars. But they were deported 500 to 550 kilometers away, at the most 600, and they went only 100 150 or 200 kilometers away to get them.
Therefore, only two-thirds of the cars could have been used for deporting, very few more. Let us say 700. And, we reason as follows: it took four days to get to Auschwitz, four days to get back, and at least half a day to load and unload the 3,000; consequently, each train could not return empty to its point of departure to be ready to take off again, loaded, until the evening of the ninth day after its initial departure. At the rate of three trains of 40 cars each per day, the system must have bogged down after the sixth day, following the departure of the second train. At the rate of two trains a day, the operation would not be stopped for want of additional cars until the ninth day after the departure of the first train; the evening after the return of the first from Auschwitz, the second could leave again. Moreover, the system was able to function only on condition that it worked like a clock. (24)
Indeed, in what he recounted to Willem Sassen, and from whom Life (November 28 and December 12, 1960) drew the abominable stuff that was presented to its readers as authentic memoirs, Eichmann said that he only rarely succeeded in getting two trains per day out of Hungary. Is his statement not to be believed because it was to his interest to minimize? Of course, but to judge by the exhibits that were attached to the verdict which was handed down by the Jerusalem judges, his testimony is to be believed no less than that of the prosecution witnesses who, in the opposite sense, plainly did not deprive themselves of dramatizing it beyond all measure.
2. Number of persons per train. As with almost all facts from Jewish sources, the Court of the Jerusalem Tribunal is in flagrant disagreement with itself: it tells us, in "Exhibit 112," that the Jews were deported from Hungary at the rate of "about 3,000 per train;".in "Exhibit 127" it states that there were no more than "on an average of 2,000 Jews per train." And, on this point, more than one oversight shows up this contention: it is not clear why -- if Eichmann, who was presented as eager to deport the greatest possible number of Jews, was in the habit of crowding together "about 3,000 persons per train" with "70 to 100 persons and even more per car," as is stated in "Exhibits 112 and 154" -- he only put 1,500 as "Exhibit 113" states, in the fully laden train to the camp at Kistarzca.
I recall that at Nuremberg Hoess told Professor Gustave Gilbert that the convoys consisted of 1,500 persons, and, at the bar of the Tribunal, that they averaged 2,000 persons. Moreover, in his confession he spoke of "5 trains of 3,000 persons per day" but also that they "never carried more than 1,000 persons." But, Eichmann, still in what he told Sassen, claimed that he deported in all a maximum of 200,000 Jews from Hungary, but he gives no exact details about the numbers for each convoy. He noted the five trains per day that were mentioned by Hoess, and on that occasion he said that he did not often achieve more than two at the most. He noted also the 3,000 per convoy and protested against that figure no less vehemently. But the 2,000 that Hoess spoke about at Nuremberg did not startle him: he only said that it was quite a lot.
My opinion is, on the contrary, that the transportation of 2,000 persons in a single train of forty cars was quite possible. What is not possible was the transportation of 3,000 persons. How many less, then? Let us think about it a little: it is about 500 kilometers from Budapest to Auschwitz, and the trains took at least four days to cover this distance, at about 124 km per day. There were two reasons for this slow pace: first, they were not scheduled in the timetables -- "off the track" as railroad people say -- and they had to make long stops all along the way to let the regular trains through; second, the war was on, and during the months of May and June 1944, they were frequently halted by air attacks and were threatened also with partisan attacks. They needed to be protected the whole way by both the stationary forces spread out at regular intervals from one end of the route to the other, and guards who had to travel with them. We have seen that to transport fewer than 1,600 persons in 16 cars from Compiegne to Buchenwald no less than 25 cars were necessary. Out of the 40 cars in a train leaving Hungary, it would very well be that a minimum of 10 were needed to carry more than two dozen people each along with their arms and their supplies for eight days. One hundred and fifty armed men for a convoy of 40 cars would be a minimum. In all that I have read about the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, I have never seen the slightest mention of this aspect of the problem. It is, however, well known that no convoy of that sort was ever sent off unescorted on any railway line by the Germans during the war. However resigned the Jews may have been to the fate that was in store for them and however sealed the cars may have been, at a speed of 125 kilometers per day, every unguarded train would have arrived at Auschwitz practically empty. Considering all that they were allowed to take along with them, they surely had whatever was necessary to saw, cut, and tear up all the boards of all the cars. And, that could be done without any risk, if there were no surveillance. But, 147 trains with about 150 guards for surveillance per train means that about 22,050 Hungarian gendarmes must have been employed since Eichmann's Kommando had only 150 men. Never anywhere has it been mentioned that S.S. units, the Wehrmacht or any other German army or police groups were sent to help him with this job.
I repeat my question: how many Jews? The answer: a maximum of 30 cars, loaded with Jews, per train -- 2,400 persons at 80 per car at the most. It is thus only the figure of 80 per car that is questionable. Once again, my personal testimony: I refer to a group of Hungarian Jews whose convoy, originally bound for Auschwitz, had arrived at Dora at the end of May 1944. Of the 1,500 or so people of this convoy, a certain number were sent to satellite camps around Dora as soon as they arrived. How many remained with us, I do not know; maybe they filled an entire block. Because of the racist policies of Nazism, they were to be completely isolated from the other prisoners. That block was surrounded with barbed wire. And from that protected block they went to work like everyone else, but as a separate Kommando. For them, assembly took place within the block, before their leaving for work and on their return. We envied them. Fifteen days after their arrival, if your clogs had been stolen in the night, if you wanted more bread, or if you required some tobacco or something else, you had only to make a quick dash to the Jewish block in the morning between reveille and roll-call, or in the evening before lights out, and, in exchange for something else, you could get just about anything you wanted: it was a regular market. We admired them; at the gate of the camp they had been made to undress completely, and had been sent to be disinfected; they went in completely naked, their contact with other prisoners was limited, and, all the same, they had succeeded in procuring a little of everything that could be gotten in the camp only with the greatest difficulties and at a very high price.
After a little while, the special surveillance over them became hardly more than a facade: once in a while we could exchange a few words with them, and even have short conversations. Thus it was that we learned about their odyssey. They told us about what they had had to leave behind when they came into the camp (25), and, since we were old hands in their eyes, they asked if they would get it back, when, how, and so on. They had been transported from Hungary to Dora, 70 to 80 persons in a car, with all of their baggage. They had made a long periplus of six to seven days before arriving. They had been told when leaving that they were being taken to Auschwitz, and when they learned that it was at Dora that they would be unloaded, they were pleased. They told the most appalling things about Auschwitz. There were neither women nor children among them. The latter had been separated out on departure, and at the moment it did not surprise us since that is what happened to us.
From my personal observation, I have come to the following conclusion: the "70 to 100 persons and even more per car" of which "Exhibit 154" of the Jerusalem Court speaks, meant an average of 80 per car, the dividing up of the Jews having taken place in the cars or on the platform of the departure station on the basis of what they were carrying with them: more in one and fewer in another. With those "3,000 or so persons per train" we have, assuming that all the cars were occupied by Jewish deportees, an average of 75 per car, a fact to which "Exhibit 112" attests.
Not all the trains, however, had the same complement of Jews: the one destined for Kistarzca, which is mentioned in "Exhibit 113," was officially carrying only 1,500. It was probably also a train of 40 cars, with ten or so for surveillance and security, like all the others, or about 50 per car on the average... What is probable on the whole is that the human cargo, in reality, lay between the minimum of 1,500 indicated by Hoess, and the possible maximum of 2,400. So that the average of 75 per car of "Exhibit 112" could be the general average, about 2,200 per train. In any case, that figure is plausible.
If it is true, as it is claimed, that Eichmann managed to deport about 200,000 Hungarian Jews in all, then this figure assumes that 32,000 Jews were deported on foot, and that the remaining 168,000 were deported by rail. About 77 trains would have been required during the 52 days that the deportation of Hungarian Jews lasted. This thesis -- in addition to supporting the 200,000 deportee figure -- has the advantage of being within the realm of technical possibility -- the very limit of what is possible with 1,000 cars. Since Eichmann said that he only rarely succeeded in getting two trains off per day, one could think that this is only the impression of a zealous employee who did not achieve the objective set him and who exaggerates his failure even to himself: 77 trains in 52 days, is still two trains per day, every other day. And, under the circumstances it was a fifty per cent success.
3. General Schedule of the Deportation of the Jews in Hungary:
March 19, 1944:.....................................800,000 Jews
End of November 1944, deported:.........200,000 Jews
Not deported:.......................................600,000 Jews
"Exhibit 111" of Jerusalem Trial refers to 57,000(26) dead in Hungary,
and no others are found in the Judgment:. 57,000 Jews
Survivors among those not deported:....543,000 Jews
The official statistics of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation mention only 200,000 survivors in 1945; the other 343,000, who were alive and who were without any doubt not all Hungarian, are listed in the statistics of those dead either in Hungary or in the other countries from whence they came. For those people not listed anywhere in any statistics of the living in Europe, and who are therefore not in Europe officially at least -- we had arrived at a total figure of 3,708,960, at the end of our study of the Czechoslovakian Jewish population. Hence, we now add the Hungarian Jews: 3,708,960 plus 343,000 gives us 4,051,960 who are living elsewhere -- with their offspring since 1945 -- if they are not in Europe. And of course we should add, as everywhere all those who returned alive from deportation, and are themselves in the same case.
Closely bound to Hungary is Yugoslavia, because of the stream of Jews who came from there, and Rumania, to which they were going. Yugoslavia herself is bound to Italy through the Jews who fled there.
Yugoslavia: we have seen that the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation said there were 75,000 Jews there in 1939, of which only 20,000 were found still living in 1945. In April 1941 Yugoslavia was invaded by German troops and was cut into a number of pieces. Two states were created by the diplomacy of the Rome-Berlin Axis: Croatia was declared independent, and Serbia remained under German occupation. Italy received, besides Slovenia which she occupied, a large part of Croatia, where she systematically counteracted the anti-Jewish policy of the Pavelitch government, which was more Hitlerian than Mussolinian. Toward the East, the region of the upper Vardar, with Skoplje and Monastir, was handed over to Bulgaria. Within this puzzle, this is how the Jerusalem Tribunal ("Exhibits 105 and 106") divided up the Yugoslavian Jews: 30,000 in Croatia and 47,000 in Serbia, or a total of 77,000. No comment: we are accustomed to discrepancies in the Jewish sources. Another discrepancy: the Court of the Jerusalem Tribunal found that, according to "Exhibits 105 and 106," in 1945 there were still living only 1,500 Jews in Croatia and 5,000 in Serbia for a total of 6,500. From the preceding it would appear that the entire Jewish population of Slovenia, where -- because of the proximity of Trieste -- it has always been dense, must have fled into Croatia and into Serbia in order to be either closer to the Germans or right under their fist. After all, the Tribunal apparently found none there in 1945. In addition, it would seem that -- according to the Tribunal -- not one went to Hungary, where Dr. Kasztner found quite a large number of them, enough to note them in his Report. One might even be tempted to believe that 2,000 (the number that the Jerusalem Court found in excess of that number that was noted by the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) came from areas where there were no dangers, in order to be more certain of being exterminated. It has often been commented that the European Jews accepted their fate with great resignation; from the way the Jerusalem Tribunal told it, the Yugoslavian Jews were not only resigned, they were masochists.
Until the Jerusalem trial, Yugoslavia presented an enigma: an official spokesman of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, Mr. Poliakov, explained to us (in Breviaire de la Haine and Le Troisieme Reich et les Juifs) that in Yugoslavia "the Jews took refuge by the thousands;" that in Croatia where Krumey had arrived on October 16, 1943, he did not succeed in deporting more Jews than did his colleague Alois Brunner, who managed to send 10,000 from Nice to the concentration camps (27); and that after the coup d'etat of Badoglio (September 1943) the Jews had followed the Italian troops as they left Croatia. All this does not sit very well, as we see, with "Exhibits 105 and 106" of the Jerusalem judgment. They are in complete contradiction, in any case, both with the way the Jews were divided up among the various zones after the dismemberment, and with the number of deportees in Croatia, which "Exhibit 105" tells us numbered 28,500, all charged to Krumey except for 2,800.
Mr. Poliakov was just about mute on the subject of Serbia as to details: with the stamp of approval of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, he declared, "No deportations in Serbia, all the Jews exterminated right there." He limited himself to stating that there were 20,000 survivors and 55,000 exterminated for the whole of Yugoslavia (Breviaire de la Haine, p. 180). In order to get more precise details, other writers had to be turned to: Michel Borwicz, Joseph Billig, and others... But, unfortunately, in making a total out of all the details picked up, a figure of 30,000 was barely reached. And, hence, I came to the conclusion that the estimates of Mr. Poliakov were without any basis, and therefore pure fantasy. On the other hand, the figure of 30,000 could be supported by plausible proofs. However, Mr. Poliakov was surely correct concerning the Jews in Croatia, and so it was the Jews of Serbia who had paid the heaviest toll in deportation and death. Furthermore, it was logical: the Germans had been hunting them down since 1941, and even if they did not deport them until 1942 they were all set to, the minute the order was given.
By following the events in the order in which they took place, another discovery was made: the statistics drawn up at the end of 1941 for the Wannsee Conference by Mr. Richard Korherr -- therefore before deportation steps were taken in Yugoslavia (28) -- mentioned 40,000 Jews at that time in the whole of Yugoslavia. One could only conclude that 75,000 minus 40,000 or 35,000 had fled to Hungary and Italy since they were no longer there and had not been arrested. And, if we deduce that it was out of those 40,000 that the 30,000 or so mentioned as having been arrested had been taken, it is logical. And, in Serbia -- since, with the exception of about 10,000 -- the Croats had followed the retreating Italian troops since September 1943; that is logical, too.
The World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, then, had no factual basis for putting more than 30,000 Jews in the column of the exterminated -- assuming that they all were, after having been arrested -- in their statistics. They placed the number at 55,000, or 25,000 too many. Given the fact that the number of Yugoslavian Jews who were arrested and who are dead, beyond the justified figure of 30,000, has already been included in the results of the calculations on the Hungarian Jews and that the remainder will be included in the calculations which will be made for Italy, it can be said that here are another 25,000 living European Jews to add to the 4,051,960 Jews who we found to be living at the end of the study of the Hungarian Jewish population: Thus, the total now amounts to 4,076,960.
Italy: Mr. Arthur Ruppin says there were 50,000 Jews there in 1926, and the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation gives 57,000 for 1939. The latter figure is very possible : figuring a natural rate of increase of thirteen per cent, we get 56,500. Let us accept 57,000. We have, however, to add the 16,500 Yugoslavian Jews who fled there, so we have 73,500. In 1945 the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation found 15,000 deportees exterminated and 42,000 living. Logically the Center should have found 58,500 survivors, and the overstatement on the number of deaths should have been 16,500. Actually, the overstatement of deaths was even more significant since even Mr. Rolf Hochhuth, who recently distinguished himself with that fraudulent writing on the theme of the Gerstein Document, Der Stellvertreter, found only 8,000 Jews arrested and deported in Italy and since the judges at Jerusalem found only "7,500 deportees of whom no more than 600 survived" ("Exhibit 109"), or 6,900 exterminated. In this case, the number of survivors should be 73,500 minus 6,900 or 66,600. And, the overstatement of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation is 66,000 minus 42,000 or 24,600. To be added to the total of 4,076,960, whom we found to be still living after we completed the study of the Yugoslavian Jewish population and who are no longer -- at least, officially -- in Europe, is this 24,600 which yields 4,101,560.
Rumania: Mr. Arthur Ruppin counted 900,000 Jews in 1926, and the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation found no more than 850,000 in 1939 (a figure with which the Institute of Jewish Affairs agrees, but for which Mr. Raul Hilberg gives only 800,000). There is nothing unusual in that since the Jewish population has always emigrated from Rumania in large numbers. Concerning the number of deportees exterminated and the number of survivors, the World Center says half and half, the Institute agrees except for 5,000 each, and Hilberg is, naturally, in total disagreement; there were 380,000 survivors and 420,000 exterminated, he says. Another thing that points up how conscientious all these people are: the writer of the statistics for the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation is, as we know, Mr. Poliakov, and, commenting on the figures of his own statistics (Breviaire de la Haine, p. 186), he tells us that in 1939 there were 700,000 Jews in Rumania, and in 1945 only 250,000 (op. cit. P. 188). "Exhibit 110" of the Jerusalem Court summing up the story of the Rumanian Jews is very prudent: "In this way about half of Rumanian Judaism was saved from extermination," it states, basing its decision on the written deposition of Dr. Safran, Chief Rabbi of Rumania, but without any reference to what that deposition contained.
For the rest, if the one who drew up that document was attempting to show that no Rumanian Jew had ever been deported by the Germans, he could not have succeeded better. In fact, only one deportation project for 200,000 Jews is cited, decided upon for the first time on July 26, 1942, to start on the following 16th of September; it was discussed a second time on September 17th; then on the 26th and the 28th of September, the Germans and the Rumanians finally reached agreement on the details of the project. But on the 22nd of October, when the deportations were not yet under way, the Rumanian government changed its mind and told the Germans that it would take charge of the Jewish problem in Rumania by itself.
Until then, the German policy had been precisely that the Rumanians should themselves take charge of their own Jews, and the whole of the diplomatic correspondence between the two governments attests to the fact that the Rumanians had not ceased proposing to the Germans that they turn the Jews over to them, but without success; the Germans did not want them. And, when the time came when they did want them, the Rumanians no longer were willing to turn them over.
The Chief Rabbi of Rumania claims in his deposition -- at least according to the writers of the press reports of the Jerusalem Trial -- that until August 1942 the Rumanians, who did not succeed in getting their Jews accepted by the Germans, exterminated them. He cited massacres of Odessa Jews by the Rumanian army (60,000 victims), pogroms at Bucharest, Ploesti, Jassy, Constanza, and "victims by the tens of thousands," but he gave no other details. On the whole he estimated that from February 1941 to August 1942 ("250,000 to 300,000 Jews were exterminated" by the Rumanians and not by the Germans.
This idea is highly contestable. At Paris during the same period, everyone with whom I was associated and who was familiar with the system of escape lines for European Jews during the war knew -- from the Jews themselves, with whom they were in contact -- that in Rumania, although the government did not show any particular sympathy, they were at least given tourist passports for a fee of $1,000 each with which they could move on. The Chief Rabbi affirms that it was only after October 1942 that this policy was put into practice. This date corresponds precisely with the change of policy of the Antonescu government which, suddenly, after having for so long begged the Germans to take the Jews that they wanted to turn over to them, refused to do so when the Germans were ready to accept. Mme. Hannah Arendt echoes this fact (The New Yorker, March 16, 1963). The information that we in Paris had about this was out of line in only one detail: the price for the passport was, it seems, not $ 1,000, but $1,300.
This contention that half of Rumanian Judaism (or 425,000 out of 850,000) was exterminated due to the deportation by the Germans reveals a difference between "250,000 to 300,000" and 425,000 of some 125,000 to 175,000 Rumanian Jews. It is most questionable for another reason too: the territorial changes that were made in Rumania between 1939 and 1945.
In August 1939, the Russo-German Pact forced Rumania to pay a heavy tribute to the contractants and to their allies, namely to turn over northern Bukovina and Bessarabia to the USSR (June 1940); a significant part of Transylvania to Hungary; and Dobroudja to Bulgaria (August 1940). The movement of the Jewish populations from these areas, when the transfers took place, has never been studied, to my knowledge. The generally held contention is that they stayed where they were or that few moved away. There were, moreover, agreements about moving people which were not all settled when the German-Russian conflict began in June 1941. I refer those readers who are interested in these agreements to the excellent work of the National Institute of Statistics and Economics of Paris, which came out in 1946, , with the title, Les Transferts Internationaux de populations (Presses Universitaires de France).
Naturally, Rumania had been waiting since 1940 for a chance, as the relations between Germany and Russia deteriorated, to get back the territories which she had lost, particularly Bessarabia which was more likely than others to be obtained. In June, 1941, she went into the war against Russia on the side of the Axis, and as a result, she got back not only Bessarabia but was also given an occupation zone which was called Transnistria and which extended out from the 1939 frontier and from the Dniester to the Bug. Germany took for herself the zone beyond, from the Bug to the Dnieper.
Naturally, too, in evacuating Bukovina and Bessarabia, the Russians also evacuated as much of the population as possible, which, of course, was fleeing in all directions before the German troops. At any rate, from the 11th to the 21 st of December 1943, the International Red Cross sent one of its delegates, Mr. Charles Kolb, to Rumania. He stayed there from December 11, 1943, to January 14, 1944. On his return he drew up a report in which he noted that 206,700 Jews were missing in Bessarabia-Transnistria, and 88,600 in Bukovina. Otherwise, he observed nothing abnormal. From this report it is possible to assume that all of these 295,300 Rumanian Jews, now Russian, who found themselves on the Russian lines, had fled before the German troops just as their Polish co-religionists did in 1939 and were saved from deportation at the hands of the Germans. One can assume it, but it cannot be stated with certainty. In any case, Mr. Poliakov, who cites this report (Breviaire de la Haine, p. 371 ) concedes "that just before the German attack, a portion of the Jewish population may have been evacuated by the Russians." Anyway, since this report was based on investigations made in 1943-1944, at a time when the Jews were no longer in any danger in Rumania, and since he does not record one missing elsewhere, it can be assumed with certainty that at that date 800,000 minus 295,300 or 504,700, were still living, and were neither arrested, deported, nor massacred afterwards. One can assume this with all the more assurance since it is more or less supported by "Exhibit 119" of the Jerusalem court, which mentions no deportation of Rumanian Jews by the Germans; even if it had, such a deportation could only have taken place before October 22, 1942, which is to say that it could not have taken place, since until then, the Germans had consistently refused to give in to the pleas of the Rumanian government to take its Jewish population.
It is an odd coincidence that these 295,300 Jews, which Mr. Charles Kolb said were not in Rumania, are numerically within the limits of the "295,000 to 300,000" claimed by the Chief Rabbi to have been exterminated by the Rumanians. One is led to the thought that they are the same, and that in order to hang Antonescu, the Russians who saved them claimed he had exterminated them.
As for Mr. Raul Hilberg, he is even more subtle. After having examined the misdeeds of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia and after having integrated into the statistics on Russia the Jews they allegedly exterminated in cities such as Odessa, Chisinau and Cernauti, he counts those who were missing in Transnistria, which is where Odessa was between 1941 and 1944 and in Bukovina where the other two were, by putting them in with the statistics for Rumania (p. 485-509); that is, he counts them twice.
Conclusion on Rumania: in order to know exactly how many Jews should be reported as missing in 1945, we should know just as exactly how many of the 295,300, counted as missing by Mr. Charles Kolb at the end of December and the beginning of January 1944, were evacuated by the Russians, and how many remained under the yoke of the Germans or Rumanians. However, we do not know this. We should also know how many emigrated, and there must have been quite a number because of all Jews the Rumanian Jews were in the best position, having the least distance to go, with the least effort, to get out of Europe. But, if the Russians had saved half of those counted as missing by Mr. Charles Kolb, and if the other half fallen into the hands of the Rumanians, had been massacred in the pogroms in Odessa, Bucharest, Ploesti, Constanza, and other places, the Rumanian Jewish population of 1939 might be apportioned as follows:
a. massacred:.......................................147,650
b. saved by the Russians:......................147,650
c. emigrated, or found living in 1945
(800,000 - 295,300): ................................ 504,700
d. total number of survivors:................652,350
e. officially found still living by the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation: ........................ 425,000
f. overstatement of those exterminated:..227,350
These 227,350, although still living in 1945, have been improperly added to the column of exterminated by the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation. Consequently, we have 227,350 more European Jews to be added to the 4,101,560, in the same situation, who were found at the end of our study of the Italian Jewish population. At this point of our work, the total should read: 4,328,901.
Bulgaria: The statistics which appear on page 300 mention that the Jewish population of Bulgaria in 1939 was 50,000. And, the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation has accepted this figure as representing the prewar Jewish population. The World Center claims that 7,000 Bulgarian Jews were exterminated during the war. Mr. Raul Hilberg found only some 3,000 missing, and "Exhibit No. 108" of the Jerusalem Tribunal mentions 4,000 deportees from Thrace and 7,000 from Macedonia, for a total of 11,000, but nothing is said about losses. This claim of 11,000 deportees is not supported by any exact facts; it is not known when they were deported or where they were sent. As for Mr. Poliakov, commenting upon the World Center figures of which he is the author, he cannot even cite them correctly: he claimed some 13,000 deportees out of a total Jewish population of 20,000. In addition, he says nothing about survivors. Returning to the statistics of the World Center, there is no problem in determining the number of survivors: 50,000 Jews in 1939 less 7,000 of them who were exterminated leaves a total of 43,000. Giving the World Center the benefit of the doubt and accepting its estimation of losses, there is no exaggeration of casualties to be added to the total that was found at the end of our study of Rumania.
Greece: At one time the official statistics took separate note of Macedonia where some 7,000 Jews were supposedly deported, but there was no mention of how many were there in 1939. Since then, this particular contention has disappeared from the official statistics, and Greece alone remains with 75,000 in 1939, with 60,000 deportees exterminated in 1945, and, therefore, with 15,000 survivors. Mr. Raul Hilberg gives the following figures: 74,000 in 1939, 62,000 exterminated, and 12,000 survivors. "Exhibit 107" of the Jerusalem Tribunal mentions 80,000 in 1939, 70,000 exterminated and 10,000 survivors. Finally, Mr. Arthur Ruppin had already taken a census of 75,000 Jews in Greece in 1926. Could Jewish emigration equal the natural rate of increase? It is possible.
Greece was divided into two zones of occupation: to the north were the Germans, who had their general headquarters in Salonika; to the south were the Italians who had theirs at Athens. The Jews were proportioned like this: 55,000 to 60,000 persons concentrated around Salonika in the German zone and 15,000 to 20,000 in the Italian zone concentrated around Athens. All the Jewish sources are in agreement in saying that the Germans did not do anything about the Greek Jews until July 1942 when they made them wear the yellow star and this only in the German zone. In the Italian zone, nothing changed. It was only in February 1943 that the policy of collecting them into the ghettos of Salonika and the surrounding areas began. These steps were taken by Dr. Max Merten -- administrator of the zone, with the help of two men sent from the R.S.H.A., Wisliceny and Gunther -- from the 15th of January 1943 on. Mr. Poliakov claims (op. cit,. p. 182) that the first deportation began on March 15, 1943, and ended on May 9th; 43,000 Jews in convoys were deported to Auschwitz (with 2,700 persons per convoy, one convoy every 3 or 4 days, means that here, where the Jews were massed, the work of deportation did not go on as fast as in Hungary where the ungrouped Jews were allegedly deported at the rate of 2 to 3 convoys of 3,000 per day). The remainder, or at least about 12,000, were deported from July to August 1943 in three convoys. At that rate, there must have been about 4,000 persons per convoy at the least. The trip from Salonika to Auschwitz lasted an average of 10 days, and, as Mr. Poliakov claims, on arrival the Jews were sent directly in a group to the gas chamber, without any prior selecting out of the able-bodied since they were in so bad a state. This is, in fact, what Wisliceny, taking the theme from Hoess, commandant of the camp, claimed at Nuremberg, but Hoess did not confirm it! "Exhibit 107" of the Jerusalem Tribunal is not in agreement with this aspect of the deportation of Greek Jews: "The 56,000 Jews of the Salonika region were all deported from March 15th to the end of May 1943," it says; therefore, there were no convoys in July-August, but it does not state precisely the number of convoys nor the number of persons per convoy. The attorney, Max Merten (who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1946, but set at liberty almost at once, and who was a witness for the defense at the, Jerusalem Trial) claimed that thanks to Eichmann, and in spite of Wisliceny's efforts to thwart him, about 20,000 Jews escaped deportation. Furthermore, he claimed that between the time that they were forced to wear the yellow star (July 1942), and the beginning of their concentration into ghettos (February 1943), many Jews in the German Zone went over into the Italian zone. He added that, since he was not in harmony with the deportation measures envisaged because the Jews were giving him no trouble, he not only saw no objection but he even helped their flight as much as he could without attracting the attention of Wisliceny and Gunther. That is why, after having been sentenced to 25 years in prison, he was freed almost immediately.
In the Italian zone, the Jews were not alarmed until after Badoglio's coup d'etat in September 1943. Then, deportation operations were assigned to Wisliceny and Gunther. Before the Bratislava Tribunal which sentenced him to death, the former claimed (June 27, 1947) in a written deposition that 8,000 to 10,000 of the Jews in that zone had been deported. For the city of Athens, according to "Exhibit 107" of the Jerusalem Court, a large number were nevertheless warned in time to hide themselves and to flee, so that no more than 12,000 remained." So all the others had to be looked for and gathered together in the first place. In order to deport 8,000 to 10,000 Wisliceny had to apply himself in earnest, and we see that he did not try to mitigate his guilt. Let us accept the figure and reason thusly: we do not know how many Jews succeeded in passing from the German into the Italian zone, but we do know that those in the former zone were deported in 19 convoys, and that after that there were no more. At an average of 2,200 per train of 40 cars, an estimation that was established and used in our calculations for Hungary, we come to a total of 41,800. This means that there were 14,200 who had fled into the Italian zone, figured by subtracting 41,800 from 56,000 (the figure given by the Jerusalem Court for the number deported from the German zone). Consequently, the Jewish population of that zone should have been 33,200 figured by subtracting 56,000 from 75,000 and adding 14,200 to the remainder. If Wisliceny did deport 8,000 to 10,000, there must have been left over 33,200 minus 8,000 to 10,000, or 23,200 to 25,200 survivors for the whole of Greece.
Therefore, the minimum overstatement of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation is 10,200. (This figure allows for the 15,000 Jews who were already in the Italian zone.) And, that only on condition that the 19 trains really did leave Salonika, each carrying about 2,200 persons, which is possible, but not likely. By adding this 10,200 to the total at theend of the study of the Rumanian Jewish population, we get 4,339,110.
The following countries remain to be looked into: Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Norway.
Germany was already mentioned in connection with the Jewish population of Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France. It will be remembered that at the time of the invasion of France by German troops, figures from Jewish sources showed that there were 252,000 foreign Jews in France whose nationality it was impossible to determine, except to say that outside of the thirty or, at the most, forty or so thousand who were German, the rest were all Polish. By looking only at the European survivors, there was no objection in stating that they were all Polish (or all German) because they could not be allotted. But now we must take into account the fact that 40,000 German Jews were already counted, unless we want to count them twice.
So, in 1939, this was the structure of the German Jewish population: 210,000 remained in Germany because 300,000 out of 510,000 emigrated, according to the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation. Mr. Raul Hilberg says: 240,000 remained in Germany and 300,000 out of 540,000 emigrated. Taking account of the natural rate of increase this aught to be closer to the truth, but there is another factor to be considered: from 1926 to 1933, Mr. Poliakov tells us (Breviaire de la Haine, p. 11) that the demographic curve of Jewish communities, worried about their fate in the face of the rise of Hitlerism, was on the decline. Therefore, let us say that there were 210,000 Jews in Germany in 1939. Officially only 40,000 should have been found still living in 1945, which would mean that 170,000 were exterminated.
To the support of the details which he brings forth to justify these 170,000 exterminated and these 40,000 survivors, Mr. Poliakov refers to the statistics compiled at Himmler's request, on April 17, 1943, for the date of December 31, 1942, which he speaks of as having been "prepared with great competence" (Breviaire de la Haine, pp. 383-384). I am of this opinion: the German demographer Korherr seems to have been a competent man and that is why I, too, have come to refer to his data; however, he has a troublesome tendency to see a few too many Jews everywhere. But, except for this, if I accept the picture of German Judaism as he saw it for December 31, 1942, I really do not see how Mr. Poliakov, who also accepts it, has been able to draw from it the conclusions he does. This is what we find in the recapitulative table about the German Jews:
Arrested up to December 31, 1942: ................... 100,516
Not yet arrested: .............................................. 51,327
Total: ............................................................... 151,843
It is true that this total is shown as concerning the "former Reich and the Sudentenland," but that is without significance: on May 17, 1937, there were only 2,649 Jews in the Sudentenland, the rest having fled to Bohemia-Moravia, then to Hungary, or elsewhere. Except for about a thousand, the figure pertains only to Germany. I repeat: Mr. Poliakov accepts these figures. But if there were only 151,843 in Germany on December 31, 1942, (free or in concentration camps) and if they had been able to arrest in all only 100,516, then 210,000 minus 151,843 or 58,157 had been able to emigrate after 1939. That also means that after December 31, 1942, it had not been possible to arrest more than 51,327. The following July 1st, it was finished: the law declaring Germany "Juden frei" (free of Jews) was promulgated, and Mr. Poliakov tells us, "not a single Jew remained at liberty except those married to Aryans," (p. 68) and these, Mr. Richard Korherr tells us in his report, numbered 16,760. We know that later they were in their turn arrested and deported -- officially, at least.
Now let us correct the error which we deliberately made, when the problem had to be solved by the elementary process of the false supposition, in stating that the 40,000 European Jews who were found living in Holland, France, Belgium, and Luxemburg were Polish, although we knew that they were not. It is among the 58,157 Jews who left Germany after 1939 and before December 31, 1943, that they are to be found, and they were included in the study of the Polish Jewish population. If we do not want to have them counted twice, they must be withdrawn from the number of German emigrants, and we must only count among the number of the latter: 58,157 minus 40,000, or 18,157.
Next, we can figure the maximum number of German Jews who were arrested and who were deported and never came back. If out of the 151,843, the World Center of Contemporary Documentation found 40,000 survivors in 1945, then that means that 151,843 minus 40,000, or, 111,843 never returned, or had not returned by 1945. And, since the World Center shows 170,000 Jews in the column of the exterminated, that figure is an overstatement of some 58,157. Consequently, the total number of German Jews who were considered dead, who are no longer officially in Germany, nor in Europe, but who are alive, and who should be included in the column of the living in other countries and in other continents is 76,314. The addition of this 76,314 to the total at the end of the study of the Greek Jewish population gives us 4,415,424, who must be added to the survivor column.
I hope that I shall be excused for having considered the German Jews without any reference to the Jerusalem Trial: Exhibits 56, 57, 75, 77, 83, 90 and 91, which provide the calculations, barely account for 10 to 15 thousand who were allegedly arrested and deported. It would be ridiculous even to take them into consideration (29).
Austria: for 1939 the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation speaks of 60,000 Jews as still being there (with this figure based on an emigration of 180,000 after Hitler came to power in Germany, out of 240,000) and of 20,000 survivors in 1945, or 40,000 exterminated. Mr. Arthur Ruppin counted 230,000 Austrian Jews in 1926 -- the same situation as for the German Jews in relation to the demographic curve and the natural increase.
The Zionist writing concerning the drama of the Austrian Jews is not very abundant. The Austrian Jews were also neglected by the Jerusalem Tribunal. Studied together with the Jews of Germany and Bohemia-Moravia, and in the same Exhibits, this Tribunal said that there were 5,000 arrests and deportations on October 15, 1941, and 3,000 more on the 25th and 28th of November and December 2nd of the same year. In 1943-1944, the Kasztner Report and Joel Brand take note of a clandestine Jewish community, relatively little disturbed. They do not give the number of individuals in this community, but, judging by the way in which it is referred to, it must have been significant. "Exhibit 97" of the Jerusalem Court mentions that, in Austria, arrests and deportations were not within the competence of the R.S.H.A. as everywhere else, but of the Jewish Emigration Center, which was set up in Vienna in 1938 by Eichmann and which existed throughout the war. That certainly explains why they were tracked and persecuted less zealously and with less brutality. Dated December 31, 1942, the statistics of Mr. Korherr say that in all 47,655 Jews were arrested and that 8,102 remained at liberty. As a total, and all during the war, then, there were 55,757 Jews in Austria, which means that there were only 4,243 emigres after 1939. That also means that if only 20,000 out of these 55,757 Jews were found living in 1945, the overstatement of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation would only amount to those 4,243 who emigrated after 1939, but who are incorrectly listed as dead. I emphasize: if only 20,000 were found still living. However, I have already shown that the balance of Jewish losses was determined between May and October 1945 -- Mr. Poliakov says it is dated August (Le Troisieme Reich et les Juifs, p. 196) -- in order to be available to Justice Jackson in time, and, in the jungle of displaced persons which central Europe was then, many Jews who had been deported and who were living had not gotten back to their former domiciles in time to be counted. All these were accounted for as dead, and since then, if they have been found still living in their domiciles or elsewhere (many never went back), no corrections were ever made in the statistics.
My conclusions for Austria are that 4,243 European Jews surely must be reintegrated into the column of living in the statistics for 1945, and must be added to the preceding total, giving a new total of 4,419,667.
And, to finish up, we shall examine Denmark and Norway: There were 7,000 Jews in Denmark and 1,500 in Norway in 1939, according to the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, or a total of 8,500 for the two countries. The same source gives the total number of exterminated as being 500 in Denmark (since in the days just before the day fixed for their arrest, the Danish government, which knew about it, forwarned the national Jewish community), and 900 in Norway for a total of 1,400. The Jerusalem Court gives the losses down to the last person: 737 in Norway and 422 in Denmark, or, 1,159.
The exaggeration of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation is 241. This exaggeration can be attributed to rounding out the figures, and is not intentional. But still it must be added to the preceding total, of which it can be said (with the exception of the 480,000 German and Austrian Jews who emigrated before 1939 and who were accounted for and considered living in 1945) that it is the general total of European Jews improperly inscribed in the column of exterminated in the statistics of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation: 4,419,667 plus 241, or, 4,419,908.
Footnotes
- Die Welt does not say so, but these estimates are taken from a study which was put out a few days before by the Jewish Communities of the World, official organ of the World Jewish Congress. They were published by the Jerusalem Post Weekly on April 19, 1963, and after that on various dates by the entire world press. It may be pointed out that for the year 1962, the World Almanac of 1963 (p. 259) gives the world Jewish population as 12,296,180. In other words, compared to 1959, not only did the world Jewish population not increase, it decreased.
- Arthur Ruppin was in charge of the course in Jewish Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His major work, Les Juifs dans le Monde moderne, from which the Menorah Journal got its figures, was not published in France until 1934.
- Actually in the above statistics, the World Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation had question marks in place of losses for Bulgaria, and had omitted Luxemburg. It was only later that exact information concerning these two countries were given officially, and I was not able to take them into account in Ulysse trahi par les siens.
- They are derived from the statistics on page 670 of his book, but on page 767, they are given as 5,100,000, as has already been noted.
- In that version of the genealogy of peoples, the Arabs, who are also descended from Noah -- like everyone in the world, to be sure! -- but via the relations of Abraham with Agar, servant of his wife Sarah, are considered the illegitimate branch, and we who are only descended from Japhet, as well as those descended from Chanaan, cursed by the Old Man, are considered only as side branches, the last of the line of descendants, degenerated, and in addition forever discredited for having fallen into the heresies. That is the basic justification for the qualification "chosen people," as Israel claims -- thank you, no for us! -- and this is taught as an historical truth in all Hebrew universities on the threshold of the 21 st century!
- [The precise figure which is cited in Religious Bodies, Vol. II, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941) for the American Jewish population in 1926 is 4,081,242 persons.]
- Before this date, the Visigoth King Siebrut had chased them out of Spain (613) along with all who were of oriental origin, and King Dagobert of France (629), had done the same, but these banishments were of short duration.
- They were banished and forced out of England in 1220, from France in 1394, from Spain in 1492.
- The Jerusalem Post Weekly (April 19, 1963) gives 2.3 million. On the other hand, in his book, Le Peuple et I'Etat d'Israel, Mr. Ben Gurion gives 2 million for 1958 (p. 66). If there were only 2.045 or 2.05 million in 1962, it shows that not only was the normal population increase of 1 per cent per year not reached in Israel, but also that immigration had been halted. Perhaps one could even speak of emigration.
- [Here, Professor Rassinier takes the rate of natural population increase of one per cent per year and computes the entire increase over the given term in a single calculation (e.g., the sum of 174,610 is multiplied by 31 per cent to yield the natural growth over a period of thirty-one Years). This method is used throughout the entire study. Although this simplified method produces adequate approximations, the estimation of the natural population growth would be more precise if the one per cent increase for each year were added to the figure for the preceding year with one per cent then taken of the new total, with the procedure being repeated for each year of the given term. For example, the natural growth from 1931 to 1962, as figured in item "a" is 63,091 (or an increase of about 36 per cent) when the latter method is used. Likewise, a natural increase of 101,249 (or 16 per cent) is achieved instead of 94,350 for item "b." Because it is felt that Professor Rassinier's "shorthand" method of calculating population growth resulted in approximations which are of sufficient accuracy for the purpose of this study, his calculations have not been changed.]
- If the figuring were done on the basis of the natural increase rate of 1.25% (or 20% every 16 years) of Professor Salo Baron, the global increase for the period of 1931-1962 would be carried to 523,308 individuals, or an increase of 92,046, and the number of immigrants actually living in the country diminished by as much, or 1,444,128 minus 92,046 equal 1,352,082.
- In a work intended for students of the college for Higher Economic Studies (Principes et tendances de la planification rurale en Israel, Paris, (1963) Professor Albert Meister claims that "one immigrant out of ten in Israel (or 109%) would return into the Diaspora "after a brief sojourn.
- When the airplanes in many trips brought them back to the Promised Land, which they no longer hoped to see, and whose location most of them no longer knew, as Leon Uris just about says in Exodus, they at first thought it was the end of the world as proclaimed in the Scriptures, "The day when men shall fly." And they arrived in Israel to discover such other unsuspected things as a table, a chair or a fork, etc... but at the same time they came with the conviction of being "the Chosen People," destined in the twentieth century to take the future of the world in charge.
- In order to spare the reader, the steps in this calculation do not appear. If he feels the need of verifying it himself, he can make use of the method which appears earlier in this chapter.
- [If Arthur Ruppin's figure of 4,500,000 Jews living in the United States in 1926 had been used instead of the official census figure, a total Jewish population for 1962 -- exclusive of immigration -- of 6,120,000 persons would be had, using the natural growth coefficient of one per cent annually. If Salo Baron's coefficient had been used, the 1962 figure would be 6,804,000 persons, once again exclusive of immigration.]
- However, the World Almanac of 1945 takes note of only 240,000, p. 494.
- It was another one of the machiavellianisms of Nuremberg that every time that the prosecution brought forth an accusation for which they would not or could not give the source they used the expression "in full cognizance" or "from an assured source" -- that was generally the case when the source was Jewish -- and it was up to the accused to prove their innocence. At Nuremberg it was not up to the prosecution to prove guilt since the Allies recognized early that their adherence to the Anglo-American jurisprudential presumption of "innocent until proven guilty" would deny them the "convictions" which they sought.
- The Czechoslovakian Jews who went into Hungary were arrested there together with their Polish and Yugoslav coreligionists without any nationality distinctions being drawn. The survivors and the deportees as listed in the calculations concerning Hungary cannot be distinguished either, since there are no records. This could be significant with regard to losses by nationality, but is not for losses of a general European nature, and that is what we are investigating.
- The Jerusalem Tribunal has 480,000 in its "Exhibit No. 111."
- This figure is confirmed by "Exhibit No. 111" of the Jerusalem Tribunal.
- Dr. Kasztner says 300,000 ("800,000 of which 500,000 were deported," page 1 of his Report.)
- Figure given by Dr. Kasztner as coming to him from Eichmann himself.
- In France and in Germany, freight cars are larger than in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. I learned this by experience when we were evacuated from Dora in April 1945, with 80 per car in a train composed at least half of such cars, we were just as crowded with 80 in a Polish car as we were with 100 in a French car.
- We can see then what would have happened under Joel Brand's system: "Every day" he told the Jews in Constantinople, when he met with them towards the 18th of June, 1944, "12,000 Jews are thrown into the cars." (Histoire de Joel Brand, p. 125). Conclusion: four trains per day, and the system exhausted the supply of empty railroad cars before the evening of the 5th day!
- At Auschwitz, the "baggage" collected in this manner by the administration of the camp was gathered into a corner of the camp which, according to the official plans produced at Nuremberg and other trials, was composed of 30 blocks separate from each other and heavily guarded: "Canada" they were called by the deportees. The official view was that on the approach of the Russian army, the S.S. tried to set fire to them but did not succeed. On their arrival, the Russian troops found in the six blocks set aside for clothing: 348,820 outfits for men, 836,525 outfits for women, but only 5,255 pairs of shoes for men, and 38,000 pairs of shoes for women. There were also 13,694 rugs. (Auschwitz, Official Communication of the Museum of the Auschwitz Commission -- Panstwowe Museum W. Oswiecimiu -- published in Cracow in 1947). That gives an idea of all that the Jews brought with them. Women remained women even in the worst circumstances: compare what was found on them with what was found on the men. Other barracks contained objects of all sorts of value. The commission does not give an enumeration, or an estimate of the market value, but trains and trucks were required to transport it all. All these things must have taken up a great deal of space in the cars "of 70 to 100 persons and even more" mentioned in "Exhibit 154" of the Jerusalem trial. Conclusion: in the cars of the Jews who carried with them the most goods, there were fewer persons, and in the others more than expected.
- Actually, it said: 57,000 to 62,000.
- In the Breviaire de la Haine, he even specified "3,000 deportees in all from Croatia." (p. 181.)
- Deportation of the Jews from Yugoslavia was decided upon on January 19, 1943, for Croatia, but was not seriously begun until after the arrival of Krumey, on October 16, 1943; deportations were begun in March, 1942 in Serbia.
- Still, the method of the judges at Jerusalem must be emphasized: the case of the German Jews is treated in their verdict -- in the aggregate -- together with Austrian Jews and those of Bohemia-Moravia. To cover up the ridiculous aspect of the number of German Jews which they were taking into consideration, and contrary to the system they used for other countries, they did not total them. In order to give the impression that there was a great number, they included among the German Jews, the 55,000 Polish Jews who were in Germany, when on October 7, 1938, the Polish government decided to deprive them of Polish nationality by not renewing their passports. By this act they were depatriated, and the Germans at that time did not want people without passports on their land. Nor, did the Poles, who had depatriated them. Since no other country wanted them either, it was a very bad state of affairs. It was the origin of the assassination of Counsellor vom Rath in Paris on November 7, 1938, by Grynszpan, a son of one of these 55,000 Poles, and of the "Kristallnacht" of November 9th and 10th in Germany.
15
Six Million Exterminated Jews
-- Fact or Fiction
Logic demands that this demographic study end with general statistics which include the following four items for each of the European nations which I have surveyed:
- The number of Jews who were living there just before Beck's accession to power in Poland (1932) and Hitler's accession to power in Germany (I 933);
- The number of Jews among them who, to escape persecution, emigrated between 1932 and 1945;
- The number of Jews who remained in Europe and who were still alive there in 1945;
- The number of Jews who cannot be accounted for and who, hence, are presumed to be dead.
- The numberer of Jews living there before the rise to power in Poland of Beck, and in Germany of Hitler;
- The natural increase in the Jewish population from 1932 to 1962;
- The census of the Jewish population at the end of 1962;
- The number of Jewish immigrants calculated from the difference between the total figures of items 2 and 3. (There is no doubt that this difference comes near the 4,419,908 figure that is mentioned in the preceding section.)
The most insurmountable of these difficulties, and which sums them all up, is the following: if we now know that a minimum of 4,419,908 Jews succeeded in leaving Europe between 1931 and 1945, we are much less well informed on their nationalities. For countries like Denmark, Norway, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and one or two others - the Baltic countries for example, even Greece - there is no problem; they were not on the route of the Jewish migration; the Germans found only national Jews in those countries and everything is clear. But it is not the same in the other countries - Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Hungary, Rumania - which were countries into which to escape, or to go through, before they became occupied by German troops. There, the Jews were arrested and deported pell-mell, and it is impossible for us to determine accurately the nationalities of those who managed not to get arrested as well as those who were. Hungary is the archetype of this difficulty: there, we did succeed in determining that out of the 800,000 Jews who were living there on March 19, 1944, 543,000 had not been deported; that about 200,000 had been deported; that 57,000 had very probably been massacred in police operations; and that 343,000 had managed to emigrate. But, in each of these categories, it was impossible to determine who was Hungarian, who was Yugoslavian, who was Czechoslovakian, and who was Polish. The same questions hold for Rumania, where we found 147,650 massacred, and 652,350 survivors, 227,350 of whom emigrated. The same questions are found again for Holland, for Belgium, for Luxemburg and for France. In France, we found that only 81,000 Jews of one nationality or the other could have been arrested and deported; we know also that there were no Belgians among them, that the number of French was necessarily between 6,000 and 11,999, and that the number of the Luxemburgers was between 0 and 2,000, the others being Dutch. But these are, all the same, figures which are insufficiently exact to be called statistics. In Poland, we know that 729,040 Jews were arrested, either on their national land or on the emigration route toward the west; but of the 289,300 who tried to emigrate by the Danubian route, how many were arrested in Hungary and how many in Rumania? So many questions for which there are no answers and which can equally be applied to the Czechoslovakians who fled to Hungary and the Yugoslavians who fled to Italy.
In the final analysis, rather than to circulate statistics based on nationalities, every datum of which might have been open to question, and to add to the confusion created by the historians and the statisticians who voice the line of international Zionism, I have preferred to draw up these statistics on the only plane where we are sure of ourselves, that is in Europe. Here, no serious debate is possible: we have affirmed that a minimum of 4,419,908 European Jews managed to emigrate early enough to escape arrest and deportation to concentration camps, and we can add them to those that the historians and statisticians who support the Zionist "genocide" fiction, found living in Europe in 1945.
Here then, on information from the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, are our statistics on the European scale in four sections, with the integration, for 1931, of the 300,000 German Jews and the 180,000 Austrian Jews who are admitted to have left Europe to flee from Hitler together with the million Jews who were in the part of the Russia that was never occupied by the German troops.
| Description | 1931 | 1945 | Official Losses | Emigrants Traced | Actual Losses1 |
| Statist. totals from p. 302 | 8,297,500 | 2,288,100 | 6,009,400 | ---- | ---- |
| Known German Emigrants | 300,000 | 300,000 | ---- | ---- | ---- |
| Austrian Emigrants Ackowledged | 180,000 | 180,000 | ---- | ---- | ---- |
| Russian Jews saved by Soviet | 1,000,000 | 1,000,000 | ---- | ---- | ---- |
| Actual totals from WCJD | 9,777,500 | 3,768,100 | 6,009,400 | ---- | ---- |
| Ac. totals as arrived at in this study | 9,777,500 | 3,768,100 | ___ | 4,419,908 | 1,589,492 |
Here again are the same statistics, but this time based on the information of Mr. Raul Hilberg who did not divide Russia into the two zones, but who, too, acknowledged that there were 300,000 German and 180,000 Austrian Jewish emigrants.
| Description | 1931 | 1945 | Official Losses | Emigrants Traced | Actual Losses |
| Totals from p. 302 | 9,190,000 | 3,782,500 | 5,407,000 | --- | ---- |
| Known German Emigrants | 300,000 | 300,000 | ---- | ---- | ---- |
| Austrian Emigrants aknowledged | 180,000 | 180,000 | ----- | ---- | ---- |
| Totals of Mr. Hilberg for 1945 | 9,670,000 | 4,262,500 | 5,407,500 | ---- | ---- |
| totals as arrived at in this study | 9,670,000 | 4,262,500 | ----- | 4,419,908 | 987,592 |
On the basis of the preceding analysis, this is where we stand now: First, out of the study of the statistics of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and from its own data, we find 1,589,492 European Jews dead or missing as a consequence of Nazi persecutions in concentration camps or in some other way. Second, out of the study of Mr. Raul Hilberg's data we find only 987,592 dead or missing Jews.
Twice I took up this problem: first in Ulysse trahi par les siens, published in France in 1960, and, second, in an article for the German review Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (Tubingen, 12, February 1963). Each time that I reviewed the problems, I did it in terms of the data from Jewish sources that had been published at the time. But, the first time, neither the judgment of the Jerusalem Tribunal, nor, more significantly, the study of The Jewish Communities of the World of February 1963 had been brought out. And, in terms of what was already known, my conviction had been that the number of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, in concentration camps or otherwise, should be placed at about 1,000,000, more or less. The second time, I had in my hands the Judgment of the Jerusalem Tribunal, and I had followed day by day the hearings of the Trial, but I still was not acquainted with the study of the Jewish Communities of he World, then not yet published. As a conclusion to my writing for the Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (pp.61, 62) I had claimed that if the number were greater than 1,000,000 it could not by any means exceed 1,655,300 victims. Today, with all the documents at hand which were lacking then, it can be said that, based on data prior to that of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, the number of victims is 1,589,492. On the other hand, the figure is 987,592, based on Mr. Raul Hilberg's data. To achieve greater exactness, we must wait for the new Zionist leaders like Salo Baron, Leon Poliakov, and Michel Borwicz, among others, to give new avowals, or for another trial like the Jerusalem one, to bring us new light on the question. As well as we know these Zionist circles, neither one nor the other of these hypothesis is excluded, but, rather, both are more likely than not to occur. In those circles, indeed, neither talkers without conscience, seeking cheap publicity, nor, alas, judges looking for vengeance, are lacking. I shall bet a good deal on two other things: the latent and continuous dissensions which exist between Mr. Ben Gurion and Mr. Nahum Goldmann, and the fracas between Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung.
For a long time now Mr. Nahum Goldmann has been showing signs of fatigue and impatience with the policies of Mr. Ben Gurion with regard to Germany. For example, he had stated publicly that he was not enthusiastic about the arrest of Eichmann and the trial which followed. Through various indiscretions we learn that he does not place much value on all the trials in Germany, aimed at former members of one or another of the Nazi organizations of Hitler's time. In Israel itself, there is a very serious divergence between his group and that of Mr. Ben Gurion, each time the latter finds a German minister stupid enough to accept an invitation sent him with the sole object of having him publicly insulted in Israel by his partisans, and thus of making an issue that attracts the attention of the whole world to the debt which Germany, because she rallied to Hitler in 1933, assumed with regard to Israel. Everything takes place as if, not daring publicly to take a position in opposition to Mr. Ben Gurion with regard to his policy toward Germany, Mr. Nahum Goldmann were trying behind the scenes, to silence him on his main theme. And, the fact that, with regard to the Jews who were exterminated, the statistics which we have from the American partisans of the Zionist line are generally more moderate than those which come from the European branch (as is illustrated by the figures of Mr. Raul Hilberg compared with those of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) could very well reflect the dissentions between the two men. This would then explain the divergencies and contradictions revealed in the Jewish sources in their statistics.
As for the quarrel between Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung, it could be of consequence in that, along with that of the United States, the Jewish population of Russia is one of the greatest enigmas weighing on the problem. The Institute of Jewish Affairs of London and the Jewish Communities of the World both told us clearly in 1962 that there were 2.3 million Jews in Russia. But Mr. Raul Hilberg revealed to us that there were 2,600,000 in 1946, and that estimate, which can be considered to be confirmed by the journalist, David Bergelson (in Die Einheit, December 5, 1942), can also be considered closer to the truth. In that case, it is not 2.3 million Jews that were in Russia in 1962, but 3,016,000, adjusted for a natural increase at the rate of sixteen per cent. If we take Professor Salo Baron at his word, that figure would be even greater: 3,120,000. But, let us not be tempted. However, we could justify the use of a larger figure, all the less, because in reality there are surely many more than 3,016,000, since the Jewish journalist, David Bergelson, also told us, let us not forget, that eighty per cent of the Baltic Jews, the Poles, and the Rumanians, who found themselves behind the Russian lines as they fled before the German troops in 1941-1942, were saved and sent on their way toward Central Asia by the Soviet authorities. At the end of 1942, Bergelson estimated that there were about 5.2 million Jews on Soviet territory, 3 million of them Russian, and in that he agrees with the statistics of April 17, 1943, of Mr. Richard Korherr, which have already been referred to. Question: what happened to those 2.2 million non-Russian Jews? Answer: some of them managed to escape and reach either the American continent or Israel; the rest of them did not. How many were in each group? We cannot tell. But, we can be sure that as long as Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung were getting along together it surely was not easy for Jews who had been transported to Central Asia during the war, to make it to the American continent via China; those who have been able to manage the trip in the postwar period must have managed it clandestinely. The subsequent quarrel between these two grand men of Bolshevism could result in Mao Tse-tung aiding the Jews to leave Soviet territory, just as the China of Chiang Kai-shek aided them before World War II, and for the same reasons. In that case, it could happen that one day a very significant number of Jews might turn up suddenly in all of the countries of the American continent, and perhaps also in Israel. And, unless it is kept hidden in the dark, a new light will be shed on the statistics of world Jewry. Neither is this hypothesis excluded. And, if the United States should adopt a rational policy toward Russia, the truth would come out very fast.
But to return to the problem as it exists in the data that we actually have: we know that the number of European Jews who died as victims of Nazi persecutions is either 1,589,492 persons, established on the basis of data from the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation compared with the Exhibits of the Tribunal at Jerusalem and the study, The Jewish Communities of the World, which came out in February 1963, or is 987,952 persons, based on the data of Mr. Raul Hilberg compared in the same manner. It still remains to be discovered how the 4,419,908 Jews, who were living in 1945, were divided among the other countries of the world, and who, not being listed as living in the European statistics of Jewish sources, are necessarily thought to have left Europe between 1931 and 1945. That is the problem for the second statistical analysis, which, in my opinion, should present by country the structure of the world Jewish population in 1962. And, as is pointed out in a preceding paragraph, these statistics are impossible to establish at the present time.
We already know one thing which was revealed to us in the study of the Israeli Jewish population, and that is that it includes 1,048,368 European Jews who immigrated to Israel between 1931 and 1962. It remains to be seen how the remaining 3,371,540 European Jews are distributed around the rest of the world.
It is in this latter matter that the Jewish sources are the most secretive. Rarely do we find, for example, in the study of the Jewish Communities of the World and in the World Almanac of 1963, non-European countries where the admitted Jewish population is greater than it would have been by natural increase based upon the statistics of Mr. Arthur Ruppin for the period of 1926-1928. There are some places where even the natural rate of increase has not been reached; that is the case with the United States, where, if we can believe the aforementioned publications, the population has not risen more than from 4,461,184 in 1936 to 5,500,000 in 1962. However, we have seen that at the natural rate of increase of one per cent there cannot be fewer than 5,550,489 Jews in the United States, and that, at the natural rate of increase, which Mr. Salo Baron gives, there should be 6,170,837. The few countries on continents other than Europe, where the Zionists concede that there is a Jewish population greater than what it would have been by natural increase, based on the Ruppin statistics, are the following: Argentina, Canada, Brazil, and South Africa. For these four countries, these are the statistics that can be drawn up:
| Country | 1926 population | Natural increase 36% | 1962 Populat. Natural | 1962 Populat. conceded | Immigration2 |
| Argentina | 240,000 | 86,400 | 326,000 | 450,000 | 123,600 |
| Canada | 170,000 | 61,200 | 231200 | 254,000 | 22,800 |
| Brazil | 40,000 | 14,400 | 54,400 | 140,000 | 85,600 |
| South Africa | 60,000 | 21,600 | 87,600 | 110,000 | 28,400 |
| TOTAL | 510,000 | 183,600 | 693,600 | 954,0003 | 260,400 |
By making an allowance for the natural increase, we get close to 200,000 immigrants of European origin for these four countries, assuming that the figures published in the aforementioned authorities for 1962 are exact, and it would be astonishing if they were. If they are, we still have 3,171,540 European Jews to locate. To do that we would have to be able to draw up figures for all of the countries of the world in the same manner as we did for Argentina, Canada, Brazil, and South Africa. But we cannot, since the latter are the only ones given by the Zionists which concede any immigration.
Still, something must be done, since, if they are not in Europe and not in Israel, these 3,171,540 Jews who were certainly living in 1945 must be somewhere else - together with the additional number that they have accumulated at the natural rate of population expansion. Where? In order to say that with any real certainty we shall have to wait once again for new revelations that the publicity-seeking Zionist movement will not fail one day inadvertently to produce. Until then we can only conjecture, and that is not my method. I shall, therefore, limit myself to stating my basic principles which have defined the direction that my research has taken, and which I continue to pursue.
1. It is not probable, but it is possible - that in August 1945, the date when Mr. Poliakov told us (Le Troisieme Reich et les Juifs, p. 196) that the European Jewish communities had begun to make an inventory of their losses for Justice Jackson and had come up with only 3,768,100 survivors according to the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, or 4,262,500 according to Mr. Raul Hilberg - that they gave figures considerably understated for reasons of propaganda. I say it is possible, for two reasons: there was such a chaos of displaced persons in Europe at that time that any serious census was out of the question; and the method used in the Jewish communities, which everywhere counted only Jews of the nationality of the country, might have distorted the results.
2. Even if the result of this Jewish census of 1945 was not out of line (which is not admitted), it is certain that, if all the Jews who had left Europe between 1931 and 1945 had not returned by 1945, many of them came back later, at least to Western Europe, since we can assume that those who returned to the other side of the Iron Curtain were the exceptions. France, in this case, is typical: 300,000 Jews in 1939 and between 450,000 and 500,000 at the end of 1962, with about 130,000 Algerian Jews and about 20,000 Moroccan and Tunisian Jews who came seeking refuge, after the granting of independence to those three countries. 300,000 to 350,000 French Jewish nationals is a normal figure in relation to the entire French population in 1962. But the statistics of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation continue to claim 180,000 in 1945 plus the natural increase rate of 16 per cent, or 208,000 (216,000 if we use the natural increase rate of Mr. Salo Baron). It is very probable that if one went to the trouble, one could make similar statements for Belgium (where, in addition, 20,000 to 25,000 Jews returned from the Congo), Holland, Austria, and perhaps even Germany. However, all of the Jews who returned to Europe after the month of August 1945, whose number we cannot know exactly as long as the Zionists refuse to give it to us, since official census-taking will "bring down the wrath of God," surely must amount to several hundreds of thousands and must belong with those 3,171,540 which no Jewish source allocates to any place.
3. The problem of the Polish, Baltic and Rumanian Jews, who in the years 1941-1942 were evacuated to Central Asia and who, if one can believe the Jewish journalist, David Bergelson, should have numbered between 2 and 2.2 million in 1942, since there were 3 million Jews in Russian in 1939, and at the end of 1942, there were about 5.2 million. How many of these Jews are still living in "Central Asia" (read, Siberia) with their offspring? How many have succeeded in escaping in the past 16 years? Where have they gone? Everything points to the fact that those who managed to escape secretly from the U.S.S.R. reached the American continent, which was for them the easiest to get to. Concerning that supposition, a hypothesis, for what it is worth, and which I do not offer as a certainty, runs through my mind: in 16 years, it is possible that half of them, at a cost of immeasurable difficulties, managed to leave Central Asia for the American continent. If that is so, and since the Zionist demographers have not located them in Canada, Brazil, or in any other country in the Western Hemisphere, they must be in the United States. Thus, the following statistics could be drawn up for Russia and the United States:
A. Russia
1. Jews found still living by Mr. Raul Hilberg in 1945: 2,600,000
2. Jews still living in Central Asia, according to Mr. David Bergelson: 2,200,000
3. Total Jewish population in Russia in 1945: 4,800,000
4. Jews who succeeded in leaving Central Asia for the united States: 1,100,000
5. Jews who were left in Russia; 3,700,000
6. Jewish natural increase of 16% since 1947: 592,000
7. Total Jewish population in Russia in 1962: 4,292,000
B. United States
1. Jewish population for 1926 (official figure): 4,081,242
2. Jewish natural increase of 36% since 1926: 1,469,247
3. Total Jewish population in 1962: 5,550,489
4. Jewish immigrants from Central Asia since 1946: 1,100,000
5. Their natural increase of 16% since 1946: 176,000
6. Total Jewish population from Asia together with progeny: 1,276,000
7. Total Jewish population in the United States in 1962: 6,826,489
But, this total of 6,826,489 includes only immigration from Central Asia, and, therefore, it excludes all of those who, like Mme. Hannah Arendt and Mr. Robert W. Kempner, came to the United States by some other route from Europe. We can surely say that they number more than two, but, how many we do not know, or, at least, not yet. All that can be said is that they are there and that surely the Jewish population of the United States is greater than 6,826,489 persons. It can also be stated that the claim of the National Observer (July 2, 1962) that there were 12,000,000 Jews in the United States in 1962 may be an exaggeration toward the other extreme, but, I would not be astonished if one day soon a Zionist leader inadvertently reveals that there were about 8 million Jews in the United States. The estimate of 12,000,000 in the United States has been repeated several times with an attempt at numerical documentation by the Economic Council Letter published in New York City.
I repeat that the preceding analysis is only conjectural and is not a fact; it is, however, the hypothesis that is necessary to every work as a basis from which to conduct further research; it is the hypothesis which orients mine. To my, mind, it is plausible and it expresses, all the better, my profound conviction which, until now, has not led me to any impasse or error and which has made it possible for me to state some ten years ago the conclusions that were to be drawn later from the Jerusalem Trial and the study of the Jewish Communities of the World.
The actual Jewish population of the world in 1962 is very close to being the following, at least in the order of magnitude of the figures. By using statistics for each country of the world dated for 1926, or 1927, or 1928, as the case was, Mr. Arthur Ruppin estimated that world Jewry had reached a total of 15,800,000 persons as of that date. We have seen that the World Almanac of 1951 estimated the world Jewish population at 16,643,120 for 1939. The natural rate of increase having considerably dropped between 1926 and 1939 (Poliakov dixit, cf p. 295), but when it is compared with that of Mr. Arthur Ruppin, this estimate is allowable. Here, then is the Jewish population of the world in 1962, calculated on the corrected data of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation.
1. World Jewish population in 1939: 16,643,120
2. Jewish victims of Nazism: 1,589,492
3. World Jewish population living in 1945(l): 15,053,628
4. Jewish natural increase of 16% since 1946: 2,408,580
5. Total Jewish population on 1962(2): 17,552,208
And here is the same as calculated on the corrected data of Mr. Raul Hilberg:
1. World Jewish population in 1939: 16,643,120
2. Jewish victims of Nazism: 987,592
3. World Jewish population living in 1946: 15,655,528
4. Jewish increase of 16% since 1946: 2,504,884
5. Total Jewish population in 1962: 18,160,412
And, here we are at the end of this study. It remains for me only to make an apology to the reader: this study has clearly been very long, and difficult to follow, like all that is technical by nature. But a demographic study can only be of such a technical nature. What the reader must recognize is that, until now, the proponents of the Zionist line -- whose "official" contentions on the horrors of the war I have been following -- have never been faced with arguments other than those from journalists, which have been often vague and specious, factors that have been the main reason for their lack of success. The only way to shatter their arguments was to set up against them the arguments of a specialist. And, that is what I have tried to do.
Notes
1. Between 15 and 18 million in 1947," as Hanson W. Baldwin has said (cf p. 294 above).
2. It must not be forgotten that this total comes out of the study of Jewish sources, that is, those which have been published under the sanction of the Zionist movement or by the Rabbinate, after investigation of the synagogues. But, if it is true, as claimed by Arthur Koestler (A l'ombre du Dinosaure), that not more than two-thirds of the world's Jews are registered in the synagogues, then there is room to wonder if this figure should not be augmented in the same proportion.
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