Holocaust Victims: A Statistical Analysis
W. Benz and W. N. Sanning - A Comparison
In this line of argument it is usually overlooked that for a long time the figure of ‘six million’ was based on nothing more than hearsay evidence given by two German SS-bureaucrats at the International Military Tribunal (IMT), specifically the written (never verbal) deposition of Wilhelm Höttl[1] and the verbal but never cross-examined testimony of Dieter Wisliceny.[2] These men claimed they had heard this figure from Eichmann[3] who, however, later disputed this.[4] On the basis of their testimony in Nuremberg both witnesses were transferred from the defendants’ dock to the witness quarters - usually a life-saving transfer. While Wisliceny and Eichmann were later convicted and hanged, W. Höttl was never prosecuted even though he was no less deeply involved in the deportation of the Jews. He had clearly been promised exemption from punishment in return for his services as witness and, unlike Wisliceny, was lucky enough to see that promise kept.
Höttl’s recent after-the-fact apologia for his testimony of that time[5] contradicts what he had stated earlier, and is thus not very credible.[6] For details of the ways and means with which the statements of such coerced witnesses were obtained during the Nuremberg Trials, see the chapter by Manfred Köhler in this volume.
Recently, British historian David Irving marvelled that as early as June 1945, in other words immediately after the end of hostilities in Europe, some Zionist leaders were able to provide the precise number of Jewish victims - six million, of course - even though the chaos reigning in Europe at that time rendered any demographic studies impossible.[7] Not long ago the German historian Joachim Hoffmann pointed out that the chief Soviet atrocity propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, had publicized the six-million-figure in the Soviet foreign press as early as January 4, 1945, i.e., fully four months before the war’s end.[8] W. Höttl has found an article in Readers’s Digest which in February 1943 already reported the murder of at least the half of the six million Jews threatened by Hitler.[9]
In 1936, Chaim Weizmann is reported to have said in front of the Peel Commission:[10]
The origin of the six-million figure, which has by now been acknowledged as "symbolic figure" even by historians of the Establishment,[13] is thus more than questionable, and it is not surprising that even world-famous statisticians have long conceded that the issue of the numbers of victims is in no way settled.[14]
In introducing the discussion of Holocaust victims, revisionist scholars time and again cite a publication in the Swiss paper Baseler Nachrichten of June 12, 1946 which postulated a maximum number of 1.5 million Jewish victims of National Socialism, as well as the fact that the International Red Cross never made any mention in its post-war Activity Reports of a systematic extermination of the Jews in gas chambers.[15] Benz comments rightly that citing various undocumented newspaper sources and the IRC, which out of a lack of any comprehensive overview never compiled any statistics of its own about the numbers of victims, is a very dubious practice.[16] While there have been several attempts since the war’s end to determine the number of victims,[17] any monograph commensurate with the importance of the topic was lacking until the early 1980s. It was not until 1983 that a book was published in the United States - The Dissolution of the Eastern European Jewry, by W. N. Sanning[18] - which attempted, by drawing on statistical material from mostly Jewish sources, to ascertain the number of Jewish Holocaust victims in the Third Reich’s sphere of influence. Since Sanning concluded in his book that at the very most several hundreds of thousands of Jews perished of unknown causes in the Third Reich,[19] it was to be expected that the Establishment would counter with a reply containing a wealth of statistical material intended to reconfirm the "symbolic figure" of six million Jewish victims. And indeed, in 1991 the official Institut für Zeitgeschichte published a 585-page study titled Dimension des Völkermords.
In the summary of his 239-page book, Sanning writes:
- One million Jews died while fighting in the Red Army or in Siberian labor camps; […]
- Approximately 14 million Jews survived the last war […]"[18]
In view of the fundamental contradiction between these two works, an interested and critical reader naturally wonders which of the two authors is right. Since the answer to this question is of great consequence, and since recent scientific and technical findings have rendered several aspects of the Holocaust extremely questionable, the following shall compare and contrast the approaches and findings of both works.[22]
Between 1933 and 1945, the national boundaries of the countries studied often underwent considerable changes. In the work by Benz each country is discussed by a different author, and since the various authors clearly did not agree among themselves with respect to common boundaries, there are many cases of overlap which frequently result in the populations in question being counted twice.[23] We shall point this out as individual examples occur, and total these doublings at the end. Since Sanning, being the sole author of his book, did not have such trouble in allotting boundary areas, we will subsequently follow his choice of boundaries. Since the Benz book goes into great detail where such territories as were subject to changes in sovereignty are concerned, the appropriate corrections are generally quite easy to accommodate here.
For each nation or group of nations we shall first give a brief tabular overview of the Jewish population statistics as given in each work. Only where the data given in the two books are at considerable odds will reference to the soundness of the data and their calculation be made in order to determine which author’s arguments are better. The reliableness of the sources cited by the authors will also be touched on only in cases of dispute.
This will be followed by a comparison of the sum total of Jewish losses in German-occupied Europe, as calculated in each book, as well as by a summary critique which will also address the matter of where and how the victims Benz believes to have identified allegedly lost their lives; certain contradictions will become evident.
An overview of the numbers of Jewish emigrants from the European nations under former German occupation follows, as well as a survey of world Jewish population changes before and after the Second World War. Since these aspects are discussed only by Sanning, no comparison with the Benz book can be drawn - but since Benz’s book appeared eight years after Sanning’s, this certainly gives the impression that no factual counter-arguments were possible, at least where the matter of emigration was concerned.
And finally, Sanning’s work is verified statistically; a similar test was already performed some time ago by a Swedish statistician.
To avoid a vast number of footnotes, sources will be indicated in the text by parenthetical references giving only the page number in question and identifying the book by the initial of its author/editor (S or B), and in tables by appropriate notation in the column "Ref." or in brackets. Only rarely will reference be made to the source quoted by the book itself.
| BENZ |
Jews 10/41
|
Ref.
|
Jews 1945
|
Ref.
|
Victims
|
Ref.
|
||
| Germany Austria |
164-235,000
60,000 |
34ff.
68 |
20,000
5,000 |
52/64
71 |
139-174,000
48,767 |
52/53
74 |
||
| TOTAL |
224-295,000
|
25,000
|
188-223,000
|
|||||
| SANNING |
Jews 10/41
|
Ref.
|
Jews 1945
|
Ref.
|
Deaths
|
Ref.
|
Missing
|
Ref.
|
| Germany Austria |
164,000
50,000 |
136
137 |
27,000
9,000 |
138
138 |
14,000
5,000 |
138
138 |
123,000
36,000 |
137
138 |
| TOTAL |
214,000
|
36,000
|
19,000
|
159,000
|
The low Jewish population in Germany as given for this time in the book by Benz is the same as that in Sanning’s, since both are based on a monthly report of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt [Reich Security Main Office]. Since this Association was an extension of the National Socialist state, the figure given is quite reliable. Benz, however, proceeds on the assumption that this figure represented only "full Jews", and adds approximately 43% for "half-Jews" and "quarter-Jews", even though these Jews were only partly (half-Jews) or not at all (quarter-Jews) subjected to the measures performed by the German authorities.[26]
Benz does not give any definite figures for the number of Jews in Austria, but believes that by the beginning of the war two-thirds of the Jews (as defined by the Nuremberg Race Laws) that had been present in Austria at the time of its unification with the Reich had fled (B68). This means that of 206,000 (B70), some 70,000 remained at the start of the war. Until October 1941, emigration - which amounted to approximately 15% in the Reich proper at this time (B35) - produced a further reduction of about 10,000.
For Germany, Sanning cites only those figures provided by the Reich Association. For Austria he refers to contemporaneous Jewish sources in Austria and the United States.
For the Jews to be found in post-war Germany Benz cites only estimates, and for those in Austria, nothing more than a number pertaining to ‘after the liberation’. However, due to the chaos reigning at that time, these statistics are very unreliable. Sanning cites data provided by the well-known Holocaust specialist Gerald Reitlinger, and his figures for Austria were not determined until October 1947, after the greatest of the population transfers in Europe had begun to subside.
While Benz ignores the increased mortality rate that characterized the Jewish population in the Reich between 1941 and 1945 due to the emigration of predominantly young people, which resulted in a disproportionate percentage of elderly Jews, Sanning does take this into account, which further reduces his tally of missing persons. This illustrates clearly the contrasting approaches of the two authors: Benz proceeds on the assumption that the difference between pre- and post-war Jewish population figures must be the result of the extermination program, which may make any calculation of natural mortality rates seem superfluous. Sanning, on the other hand, does not automatically consider the difference to be necessarily indicative of deaths - as yet, to him, these people are only missing. Further differences in the treatment of statistical questions will become apparent in the following, and will be summarized at the end.
I have reduced Benz’s numbers of victims by 21,000 for Germany and by 16,692 for Austria. These represent victims who fled to other European countries not then under German control, where, however, they later came under German rule and were allegedly exterminated (Germany: B64; Austria: B74). However, since these people are also counted as part of the Jewish population of their country of destination (particularly France and Czechoslovakia), it is necessary to deduct them once. For the moment we shall take note of 37,692 Jewish victims counted twice, which must be deducted from Benz’s total.
3.2. France, Benelux, Denmark, Norway and Italy
The reason for the great differences between the opening figures for France and the Benelux nations is that, except for the Netherlands, only estimates are available for the numbers of Jews living there before the war, both because these were simply never recorded statistically and because immigrants from Germany and Poland were not always registered. While Sanning bases his figures on information provided by the American Jewish Yearbook 1940 (New York) and by Reitlinger,[27] who cites barely half a million, Benz uses straight estimates for Belgium and France; among his sources for these estimates are reports from German authorities which, however, are likely to have inflated the numbers of Jews grossly for propaganda reasons.[28]
| BENZ |
Jews 10/41
|
Ref.
|
Jews 1945
|
Ref.
|
Victims
|
Ref.
|
| Luxembourg Belgium France Netherlands Denmark Norway Italy |
3,500-3,700
52,000 300,000 161,000 6,000 1,800 34,000 |
104
109f. 109 144 175 187 201 |
2,450
?23,482 ?223,866 ?59,000 ?5,884 ?1,042 ?28,086 |
103
(? is calculated data from 10/41 minus the number of victims) |
1,200
28,518 76,134 102,000 116 758 5,914 |
104
130 127 165 185 196 216 |
| TOTAL |
558,400
± 100
|
?343,810
|
214,640
|
|||
| SANNING |
Jews 10/41
|
Ref.
|
Jews 1945
|
Ref.
|
Missing
|
Ref.
|
| Luxembourg Belgium France Netherlands |
Total: 460,000 |
132 |
500
61,000 238,000 36,500 |
133
133 133 133 |
Total: 124,000 |
133 |
| Denmark & Norway |
Total: 8,000
|
133
|
Total: *7,000
|
133
|
Total: 1,000
|
133
|
| Italy |
48,000
|
132
|
39,000
|
133
|
9,000
|
133
|
| TOTAL |
516,000
|
382,000
|
134,000
|
|||
| *fled |
Swedish demographer Carl O. Nordling comments rightly that the survivors from among the approximately 52,000 non-French Jews who fled to France before the war and were later deported to Auschwitz would not be very likely to report back to France after the war.[30] Similarly, a not inconsiderable portion of the survivors from some 23,000 remaining French Jews, some of whom had not taken French citizenship until shortly before the war, will have emigrated without registration after the war, possibly assuming a different name in their new homeland,[31] thereby becoming very difficult to trace.
Thus, Klarsfeld’s method for determining the number of victims, a method adopted by Benz, can hardly yield a correct result. The statements of former inmates claiming that their relatives had disappeared also fail to convince; to date there have been many cases of chance reunions of family members who each believed for decades that the other had been exterminated.[32] Since families were separated and scattered throughout Europe after being imprisoned, and since especially for Jews there was no way of searching for their kin amid the chaos of post-war Europe, the lack of proof of a family member’s survival is also no proof of his or her extermination. Carl Nordling recently demonstrated the fallacy of these incorrect and rash conclusion on the basis of an investigation of the fate of the Jewish population of the Polish city Kaszony.[33]
A further example of faulty methodology on the part of Klarsfeld and Benz may be found in their approach to those inmates who were ‘selected’[34] on their arrival in Auschwitz, i.e., who were not officially admitted into the camp and therefore were not tattooed with an ID number. Klarsfeld and Benz lump all of these Jews together as victims of gassing because, being unfit for forced labor, they were allegedly deemed useless. Nordling [30] pointed out that the first transports, between March and July 1942, were almost completely admitted into Auschwitz, but that larger proportions of the transports were no longer registered in the camp later on.
If one assumes that non-registration meant death by gassing, then if the Third Reich had indeed been pursuing a policy of extermination one might expect to see the opposite trend, since in 1943 the labor shortage was considerably more severe in Germany than in 1942 and therefore Jewish workers ought to have been accorded greater value as the war progressed. The actual registration pattern, therefore, indicates instead that the Auschwitz camp was first filled with workers and that the surplus was later channelled to the more than 30 affiliated labor camps surrounding Auschwitz, as well as to other camps and camp groups.
This theory explains why men from one 1942 transport were not registered (i.e., tattooed with prisoner ID numbers) in Auschwitz until April 1944.[35] Despite not being registered in 1942 they were obviously not killed, but rather employed outside Auschwitz in some other capacity for 1½ years. We do not know how Klarsfeld and his colleagues manage to be so certain that other inmates not registered in Auschwitz were not also put to work somewhere else, but were by necessity gassed.[36]
Thus it is clear that the statistical material on which Benz’s book is based rests at least in part on an unsound speculative basis.
Benz does not even attempt the other method of calculating casualties - namely, the comparison of pre-war and post-war Jewish populations. The post-war data given in the preceding table and identified with question marks are thus based simply on the subtraction of the supposed number of victims from the pre-war population.
Sanning again refers to Reitlinger for his post-war figures. In comparing the figures from Benz et al. and Reitlinger - both of them Establishment Holocaust scholars - one sees that the estimation of the numbers of missing persons for these countries is very difficult due to the insufficient data available. For this reason Benz simply assumes that most of the Jews deported from France and the Benelux nations (213,813, B103; 127; 130; 165) were in fact murdered. Reitlinger’s data are obviously not suited to this argument, since they prove this assumption to be false, even if only by the fact that his data suggests that only approximately 134,000 Jews were missing. The question of how many of these missing persons emigrated unregistered immediately after the war is not addressed by Benz and will be discussed here in a later section.
Here, too, Benz’s number of victims was corrected because the Dodecanese Isles off the Turkish coast (Rhodes, Kos, and others) were counted for Italy as well as for Greece. The corresponding 1,641 victims were therefore subtracted from Italy’s original figure of 7,555 (B213; 216). Together with Germany and Austria this makes for 39,333 victims counted twice.
3.3. Albania
Benz assumes that Albania, with probably fewer than 1,000 Jews at the start of the war, lost a few hundred Jews, but he has only estimates to rely on for this (B236; 238). Sanning does not discuss this country at all, since neither statistics nor any relevant studies are available.
3.4. Greece and Yugoslavia
| BENZ |
Jews 4/41
|
Ref.
|
Jews 1945
|
Ref.
|
Victims
|
Ref.
|
| Greece Yugoslavia |
70-71,500
80-82,000 |
272
312/3 |
12,726
16,000 |
272
329 |
58,885
60-65,000 |
272
330 |
| TOTAL |
150-153,000
|
28,726
|
119-124,000
|
|||
| SANNING |
Jews 4/41
|
Ref.
|
Jews 1945
|
Ref.
|
Missing
|
Ref.
|
| Greece Yugoslavia |
65,000
68,000 |
134
136 |
12,000
12,000 |
135
136 |
53,000
56,000 |
136
136 |
| TOTAL |
133,000
|
24,000
|
109,000
|
With respect to Yugoslavia, both authors proceed from the last census data, collected in 1931 (approximately 68,000 Jews). Benz also estimates an increase of some 4,000 and an additional 5,000 or so foreign refugees, as well as another 3,000 - 5,000 de facto Jews who, while having renounced their faith, were nevertheless classed as Jews under the Nuremberg Race Laws. Sanning, on the other hand, seconds Reitlinger in the assumption that immigration and emigration balanced out in Yugoslavia, a country that grew increasingly anti-Jewish in its outlook since 1939 (B312). Sanning does not address the matter of de facto Jews.
For Greece, the difference between the data of the two authors results from Sanning’s deflated pre-war figure and from the 2,000 Dodecanese Jews which he may have missed.[37] For Yugoslavia, on the other hand, Benz appears to have estimated the pre-war figures a little too high. The actual number of missing persons, therefore, probably lies somewhere between the two figures, which do not deviate very much anyhow.
3.5. Hungary
First of all it is necessary to define which Hungary is at issue. Since Hungary had the same boundaries before the war as it did after, but briefly made tremendous territorial gains in between, we shall here confine our analysis to the area within the boundaries of today’s Hungary (so-called Trianon Hungary). Since both authors give their Jewish statistics for the newly added and subsequently lost regions separately from those for Trianon Hungary, it should be possible to transfer this definition to the numbers of Hungarian Jews without any difficulty. There is one serious problem, however. Benz’s distribution of the Jews among Trianon Hungary (some 401,000) and the territories gained (approximately 324,000) is based on a total of 725,000 Jews for Greater Hungary (B338), which is also Sanning’s initial figure (S138). But Benz adds approximately 100,000 de facto Jews of non-Jewish denomination but coming under the Nuremberg Race Laws, as well as approximately 50,000 immigrants from Poland (B340). This increase of about 20% must be added accordingly to the figure for Trianon Hungary, resulting in 484,000 Jews. The subsequent statistics (casualties at the front in the Hungarian Military Labor Force, Soviet deportations, as well as the numbers of survivors and victims) follow from the number Benz cites for Greater Hungary if one considers that approximately 55% of all the Jews in Greater Hungary resided in Trianon Hungary, and if one assumes that all changes affected all Jews equally. In fact, however, one cannot realistically assume this, since it is an undisputed fact that the Jews of Budapest - some 150,000 to 200,000 - remained completely unaffected by deportations into supposed extermination camps (B348f.; S143).
| BENZ |
Jews 1941 (340)
|
Killed in combat, and
Soviet deportation (351)
|
Birth deficit (340)
|
Flight (340)
|
Jews 1945 (351)
|
Victims (351)
|
| Hungary |
484,000
|
Total: 27,000
|
2,900
|
9,000
|
166,000
|
277,000*
|
|
*Discrepancies in calculation
are the result of revision; see text.
|
||||||
| SANNING (144) |
Jews 1941
|
Conversions
|
Killed in combat
|
Soviet deportation
|
Birth deficit
|
Flight
|
Jews 1945
|
Missing
|
| Hungary |
400,000
|
10,000
|
27,500
|
65,500
|
20,000
|
6,000
|
200,000
|
71,000
|
Unfortunately not all of the co-authors contributing to Benz’s book employed the same methods as in the case of Hungary, where simple estimates added 20% to the initial number of Jews; the result is that the territorial overlaps and duplicate counts get completely out of hand. We shall focus less on the actual numbers in each case than on the methodologies applied. Hungary is an especially appropriate subject for a closer scrutiny of methodology, since this particular case represents an exceptionally explosive chapter of the (hi)story of the Holocaust. Advocates of the Holocaust doctrine assume as a matter of course that the Germans deported 400,000 to 500,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, where the majority of them were killed. The basis for this assumption are IMT documents which, according to Benz, prove that in spring and early summer 1944 "444,152 Jews were deported from Hungary" (B344).
In his book Sanning quotes Arthur R. Butz who pointed out that the International Red Cross made no mention in its Report, published in 1948, of any deportations of Jews to Auschwitz, but only of the beginning of Jewish tribulations in October 1944.[39] Aside from violent excesses, this time did see some deportations, whose purpose and destination, however, was forced labor in the Reich, not Auschwitz (B348; S139f.). Therefore, Butz and Sanning assume that no adequate evidence exists to prove that Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz at all.
There is no way around the fact, however, that there are still Jews living today who really were deported to Auschwitz in spring 1944 and who have repeatedly testified as witnesses in court.[40] Further, Pressac states that between 1/3 and 2/3 of the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, whose arrival and selection were photographed by the SS,[41] were considered fit for forced labor, i.e., were not killed.[42] As well, it can be proven, he says, that in the spring some 50,000 of these Hungarian Jews were transported on to the Stutthof camp via Auschwitz.[43] In this respect, therefore, Sanning’s theory rests on a shaky foundation[44] - but so does that of Benz, who contends that the Hungarian Jews were killed immediately and almost without exception.
There are other indications as well that the theory of mass destruction of the Hungarian Jews is incorrect: the witnesses to this destruction unanimously claim that during these alleged mass exterminations the limited capacity of the Birkenau crematoria necessitated the excavation of enormous pits, in which the bodies were burned. Dark clouds of smoke, they claim, darkened the sky over Birkenau during this procedure. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective) the aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by the Allies during this time prove that in the Birkenau camp, which was not obscured by clouds of smoke when the pictures were taken, there were neither open fires, nor giant pits, nor smoke activity on any scale large or small, nor piles of dead bodies, nor great supplies of firewood, nor anything else of the sort.[45] The Polish Historical Society concludes that in light of this evidence the number of victims in Auschwitz must be reduced by another 400,000 plus 74,000 (Polish Jews from the liquidated ghetto Lodz, who are also claimed to have been gassed around this time), leaving some 500,000 victims for Auschwitz.[46]
Even allegedly probative documents of the Nuremberg Tribunal cannot change this, since such documents are by no means always genuine, or true, and only ever provide evidence for deportations which are not disputed here in the first place - they never document an extermination. The reader is reminded of the example of Dachau, the concentration camp where the IMT alleged that hundreds of thousands were gassed, a claim which in the end turned out to be nothing more substantial than an atrocity propaganda lie.[47] We shall come across another case of dubious IMT documents in the discussion of the Soviet Union.
Benz’s methodology proves to be very slipshod where other factors are concerned as well. He can only give vague estimates of the number of Jews who lost their lives due to Soviet deportation and in the Hungarian Military Labor Force (B339), whereas Sanning cites verifiable figures based on Jewish or at least pro-Jewish sources (S140; 142). Benz maintains the birth deficit at pre-war levels, whereas Sanning reasons that the Labor Force for Hungarian Jews as well as the overall poor conditions for Jews during the war would have caused the pre-war birth rate to drop further. Benz completely ignores the numbers of Jews who ‘converted’ to the Christian faith; in any case, Jews who converted to Christianity were no longer represented in any post-war statistics about Jews, and are thus considered by Benz and his co-authors to have been ‘gassed’.
Now, what is interesting are the two authors’ contrasting observations regarding the Jews said to be remaining in Hungary after the war. Whereas Benz suggests a total of 300,000 for Greater Hungary, Sanning cites that some 300,000 Jews were left after the war in Central (Trianon) Hungary alone. He bases his claim on, first, the US War Refugee Board’s Final Summary Report, which states that more than 200,000 Jews from Budapest were exempted from deportations following negotiations with the SS (S143). Second, in its aforementioned report the International Red Cross stated that some 100,000 Jews poured into Budapest from the provinces.[48] Furthermore, 200,000 Jews had been counted in Trianon Hungary in 1946, while according to Reitlinger one can assume that by then a veritable mass exodus of Jews to the West had begun (S143). One must also consider, he says, that no doubt a great many foreign, mostly Polish Jews were included in this migration. Sanning thus cites 200,000 as the minimum number of Jews present in post-war Trianon Hungary. For Benz, the number of survivors derives almost exclusively from the number of Jews present before the war, minus the decreases estimated as above, minus the actual or supposed deportations to concentration camps, i.e., (according to Nuremberg documents) to forced labor camps. Absolutely no other sources are used.
3.6. Czechoslovakia
| BENZ (379) |
Jews 1939
|
Emigration
|
Jews 1945
|
Victims
|
| Czechoslovakia |
251,745
|
33,000
|
40,000
|
164-168,000*
|
|
*Discrepancies exist in
the author’s work itself.
|
||||
| SANNING (146) |
Jews 1939
|
Emigration
|
Killed in combat
|
Birth deficit
|
Jews 1945
|
Missing
|
| Czechoslovakia |
254,288
|
52,300
|
3,000
|
5,000
|
82,000
|
112,000
|
Benz assumes a migration balance of net 33,000 emigrants up to mid-1943, while no net. emigration was allegedly apparent for Slovakia (B369). Regarding emigration from the Protectorate he cites official statistics of contemporaneous Jewish authorities which, however, did not incorporate illegal emigration (B358). Sanning totals more than 52,000 emigrants, substantiating this with a reference to the Anglo-American Committee, according to which the Jewish population had already decreased by 40,000 by late 1939 (S144). Sanning is the only one to take into account the drop in birth rate and the casualties of the Hungarian Labor Force.
Benz arrives at what he claims to be the approximate number of survivors in the Protectorate by totalling those Jews who officially reported back as survivors of the deportations, or who were otherwise found in Czechoslovakia after the war. Unfortunately such data were only ever gathered selectively, with respect to specific camps or cities, and never nationwide for any given point in time, so that the results are by necessity incomplete. For Slovakia, Benz derives his survivor statistics from the difference between those Jews who failed to return from deportations, and the population level prior to the deportations. Any westward migration is disregarded. Where the regions that were ceded to Hungary are concerned, Benz assumes that the Jews there suffered the same fate as the remaining Hungarian Jews. Aside from the Carpathian Ukraine, some 45,000 Jews were affected. The problems involved in the study of the Jews in the territory of Greater Hungary have already been mentioned.
Sanning refers to Reitlinger in pointing out that in 1946, in other words after the westward migration had already begun, some 32,000 Jewish survivors were found in the former Protectorate alone (S145). Also according to Reitlinger, 45,000 Jews - and according to other pro-Jewish sources, as many as 60,000 Jews - were found in Slovakia after the war (S146), which of course stands in clear contradiction to the estimates advanced by Benz, who claims 20,000 Jewish survivors for Slovakia and bases this assertion largely on Czech publications (B374).
3.7. Rumania
| BENZ |
Jews 1941
|
Jews 1945 (407)
|
Victims
|
|||||
| Rumania (409) |
466,418
|
356-430,000
|
107,295
|
|||||
| SANNING |
Jews 1941
|
Emigration
|
Killed in combat
|
Jews 1945
|
Missing
|
|||
| Rumania (153) |
465,242
|
20,000
|
11,500
|
430,000
|
3,742
|
|||
3.8. Bulgaria
| BENZ |
Jews 1941
|
Jews 1945
|
Victims
|
| Bulgaria (308) |
50,000
|
50,000
|
0
|
| SANNING |
Jews 1941
|
Jews 1945
|
Immigration
|
| Bulgaria (154) |
48,400
|
56,000
|
7,600
|
On the whole, there is no doubt that the Jews on Bulgarian soil were not in any danger and suffered no losses.[50] Sanning even shows a post-war population greater than that of pre-war times, and explains that Bulgaria served as gateway to the Middle East for a vast number of legal as well as illegal immigrants. According to Sanning, it is likely that noticeable numbers of foreign Jews were still in Bulgaria immediately after the end of the war.
3.9. Poland
| BENZ |
Jews 9/39
|
Ref.
|
Jews 1945
|
Ref.
|
Victims
|
Ref.
|
| Poland |
2,000,000
|
443
|
200,000
|
492f.
|
1,800,000
|
495
|
| SANNING |
Jews 1941
|
Ref.
|
Jews 1945
|
Ref.
|
Missing
|
Ref.
|
| Poland |
757,000
|
44
|
240,489
|
45
|
516,511
|
45
|
On the basis of detailed studies Sanning shows that even during the period between the two world wars, the Polish Jews exhibited an extremely low rate of population increase (S26f.). The Institut für Zeitgeschichte adds that since 1933 some 100,000 Polish Jews per year had turned their backs on radically anti-Semitic Poland and emigrated to western Europe or overseas (S32).[51] Since those leaving the country were predominantly young people, the number of Jews in Poland must have decreased sharply due not only to this migration but also due to the increasingly disproportionate percentage of old people. Sanning puts the number of emigrants between 1931 and 1939 at only 500,000 and even factors in a population growth rate of 0.2%. He thus arrives at a population of 2,664,000 Jews prior to the war (S32).
This issue, to which Sanning devotes roughly 20 pages of intensive and thoroughly documented analysis, is accorded all of two sentences by Benz (B417):
Secondly, Benz assumes that the rate of emigration was essentially negligible. But since his book is a publication of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte and since this same Institut has publicly announced that some 100,000 Polish Jews had left Poland annually since 1933, one wonders whether this is a case of the left hand not knowing (or not wanting to know?) what the right hand is doing.
Benz therefore bases his subsequent arguments on a starting figure of 3,350,000 Jews present in Poland at the beginning of the war (B417), of which 2.3 million are assigned to the western part which the Germans occupied in 1939 (B418). In this way Benz has falsified the statistic by probably 700,000 Jews at the least. Are we to believe that Benz is unaware of Sanning’s analysis of population trends in pre-war Poland? This seems out of the question, since after all Benz’s book is a response to Sanning’s. As I see it, the fact that Benz spares this complex topic no more than one sentence and an apologetic comment ("We repeat: these figures are not certain") explains everything: this is an example of statistics being stretched well past the breaking point!
Sanning quotes numerous Zionist, Jewish and pro-Jewish sources, all of which indicate that between 500,000 and 1 million Jews fled to the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland during the German-Polish war (S39-43). Again, the majority of these were deported to Siberia. Among the sources cited are Jewish relief organizations, which attended to 600,000 Polish Jews in Siberian labor camps. Since a considerable proportion of these deported Jews already died during the inhumane transports to these camps, Sanning postulates a total of 750,000 Jews who fled into the Soviet zone as well as a further 100,000 who had fled to Rumania (S44).[52] Thus, the number of Jews in western Poland had decreased from an initial 1,607,000 (S39) to 757,000 (S44), while the number remained unchanged in eastern Poland due to the deportation of predominantly western Polish refugees (approximately 1 million, also Benz, B443).
The fact that such migrations of fleeing persons were not unusual is demonstrated by the example of Belgium, where 1½ to 2 million persons fled from the German army at the start of the war, effectively obstructing any strategic movements of the Allied armies (S43).
Benz’s and Sanning’s figures regarding the number of Jews remaining after the war are not very different from each other. It should be added, however, that according to the United Press the British and American investigative committee for the European Jewish problem declared, at a press conference in February 1946, that there were still an estimated 800,000 Jews in post-war Poland, all of whom wished to emigrate.[53]
First, Benz expounds repeatedly on the alleged exhaust gas murders in vans, which of course he considers irrefutably proven (Kalisz, B431, Chelmno, B447, 462, cf. Yugoslavia, B320). The reader is referred to the chapter by I. Weckert in the present volume.
Regarding the methods of killing in other camps, he reports the use of bottled Zyklon B gas in Belzec (B462). But Zyklon B gas, i.e., hydrocyanic acid, is not and never was bottled. For industrial purposes hydrocyanic acid is transported in tanker trucks, but it is never bottled. Further, he recounts the use of Diesel engines for mass gassings (Belzec, B462, Treblinka, B463, cf. USSR, B540). Regarding gassing with Diesel exhaust fumes, cf. the chapter by F. P. Berg, and regarding Treblinka, cf. the study by A. Neumaier, both in this volume. Any further commentary would be superfluous at this point.
A noteworthy admission on Benz’s part is the following:
Benz finally concedes that the availability of source material leaves a great deal to be desired, not only where the alleged extermination camps are concerned but also with respect to the entire organization of the alleged extermination network structure (B463, footnote), and that there is no written, i.e., documented and thus provable order for the destruction of the Jews (B3; 458f.; 512).
3.10. Soviet Union
| BENZ (560) |
Jews 6/41
|
Jews 1945
|
Victims
|
| Soviet Union |
5,200,000
|
2,300,000
|
2,890,000
|
| SANNING (109) |
Jews 6/41
|
Killed in combat
|
Casualties of deportation
|
German
Theater of war |
Jews 1945
|
Missing
|
| Soviet Union |
5,439,000
|
200,000
|
700,000
|
130,000
|
3.5-4.5 million
|
0-1 million
|
Secondly, Benz overlooks the fact that, contrary to his own claim, the former regions which made up the Reich Commissionerships of Ostland and the Ukraine are included in his discussion of Poland. Since Benz assumes approximately 1 million Jews in the Soviet-occupied area (B443), of which roughly 600,000 are properly accounted for in the adjustments he makes for Bialystok and Galicia (B457), this means that he counted some 360,000 Jewish victims twice (90% victims of the 400,000 Jews living there). This brings the total of Jewish victims counted twice by Benz to 533,193.
For example, Benz speaks of the "attack on the Soviet Union" (B499), and asserts that Stalin had done everything he could to "give Hitler no pretext for anti-Soviet measures, least of all for war" (B507). Further, he believes that the Soviet Union had practised a "policy of appeasement" (B508). Today it is generally acknowledged even in Russia that the fairy-tale of Germany’s attack on the peace-loving Soviet Union really belongs in the junk room of Communist war-time propaganda.[54] In this respect, the losses resulting from the war are not due exclusively to Germany, and they certainly have no relevance whatsoever to any aspect of the Holocaust.
Benz suggests that there are no systematic accounts of the extent and scope of Soviet evacuations and deportations of material resources and human beings. He dismisses this very important aspect in merely two paragraphs, with the comment that Stalin did not wish to provoke Hitler with evacuation activities (no, it’s not a joke - he really does claim this!) and that there were therefore hardly any noteworthy deportations (B507). Sanning, on the other hand, devotes pages 53-109 exclusively to this issue and draws on a wide range of Allied, Jewish and Soviet statistics to offer sound data regarding the scope of Soviet evacuation and deportation measures at the start of the war. And with that, Benz’s claim that there are no systematic accounts of this topic is already disproved. Did Benz and his co-authors not even read Sanning’s book after all? But clearly they must have, for Benz does not deem Sanning’s explanations in general to be a systematic account:
Now it may well be that these 600,000 Jews were already conscripted before the war, since as we know the USSR was planning her own large-scale attack on Europe,[54] and for that the Soviets had deported most of the male population fit for military service during the German advance. This would mean for Benz that only few men of an age for military service would have been left to fall into the hands of the Germans, so that in the occupied regions more than 90% of the female Jews would have been exterminated while the conscripted and deported men in the hinterland and in the army would have had a considerably better chance for survival. According to Benz, the mortality rate among the women would thus have been greater than or at least equal to that among the men. From this it follows that a demographic analysis of the Soviet Union today should reveal greater or equal numbers of men in the age group that was of military age at the time in question. However, this is clearly not the case. Rather, the sex distribution corresponds to that of the other Soviet peoples, in other words, there is a similar deficit of men. This means either that men and women were deported in roughly equal numbers and consequently relatively few Soviet Jews actually fell into German hands, or that Jewish women who fell into German hands were generally not killed.
Regarding the number of Jews to be found in the post-war Soviet Union, Benz cites Soviet census data only. He sets out that "doubts about the reliability of Soviet censuses […] are not justified" because these data served as the basis and foundation of the Soviet national economy (B558).
But every child knows nowadays that all conceivable kinds of data have been falsified in the service of precisely this national economy so as to manifest Soviet superiority in economic competition with the capitalist western world. Domestically speaking, these falsifications served to close Russian eyes, ears and mouths to the inexorably approaching collapse. But where the number of Jews identified by the censuses is concerned, there is not even any need for falsification. After all, the radically atheistic Soviet Union was one of those nations that made it especially difficult for the Jews to profess their faith. Therefore, the numbers of Jews that voluntarily acknowledged their faith in 1959 and 1970 (2.2 and 2.1 million, respectively; B559; S117) says nothing at all about the number of survivors in the Soviet Union. Jewish estimates dating from the 1970s suggest 3 to 4 million Soviet Jews (S117ff.). More recent newspaper reports even speak of 5 million Jews and more, which, however, seems unlikely in light of the stagnating demographic trends.[55] Since Zionist circles are striving for the emigration of Jews from Russia to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is possible that they tend to exaggerate the number of Jews in Russia, with the intent to dramatize their hard lot during 70 years of Stalinist oppression. The numbers of presumably present or missing Jews thus serve as politically strategic putty in other respects as well.
Behind the frontlines of the German troops fighting in the Soviet Union, the so-called Special Units (Sonderkommandos) served, according to Benz, to combat partisan activity (B514f.; 518; 520; 528f.; 540). Aside from that, they allegedly were also chiefly responsible for the mass executions of Jewish civilians, whose numbers are very difficult to ascertain (B577). Benz suggests that the statistics circulated during the war in this respect by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee are much too low, so as to "[…] show the Soviet endeavors to rescue the Jewish population in an (inappropriately) favorable light in the United States." (B557, footnote.) But since the United States never bothered about the Jewish victims, and in fact exaggerated the number of victims in their own propaganda after 1933, it is not clear just how and whom Jewish anti-Fascists could have impressed in the States with allegedly deflated statistics. Benz’s suggestion, that anti-Fascists should have trivialized the alleged Fascist atrocities for propaganda reasons, is something completely new; the opposite is surely more likely. One can only conclude from all this that these numbers of victims that Benz considers to have been deflated by the anti-Fascists are in fact already exaggerated.
Regarding the use of vans for mass gassings in the Soviet Union, Benz offers us a single, particularly suspect source: the Stalinist show trials of Char’kov and Krasnodar (B526f.; 540).[56] Such utterly uncritical, indiscriminate citing almost makes one wonder whether Benz and his co-authors perhaps might even share Stalinist sentiments. Ignorance is no excuse for qualified scholars.
The mass executions in the East are generally considered proven, i.e., documented by the so-called "USSR Event Reports" which the Special Units allegedly sent to Berlin on a regular basis and which detail, among other things, the number of executions. All events, however, were not listed there, so that Benz considers them an insufficient basis for determining the number of victims (B542f.). One exception, it is claimed, it the typical case of Babi Yar (B530; 534; 542). But as it has been irrefutably proven by now that the alleged massacre of Babi Yar is an atrocity lie of no substance,[57] this admittedly throws the authenticity or at least the reliability of the entire IMT document series "USSR Event Reports" and all other documents into doubt, and hence the entire Special Units mass murder per se. Even Benz’s shameless assertion that "the authenticity of these reports is beyond question" (B541) cannot change that, since H.-H. Wilhelm, whom Benz quotes as proof of his claims, states as well, that the reliability of the figures given in these documents is doubtful.[58] How did H.-H. Wilhelm describe the behavior of Benz:[59]
It should also be pointed out that Benz repeatedly stresses that the Germans destroyed all evidence of their mass exterminations, mostly through exhumation and complete incineration, for which reason no victims or mass graves remain in evidence (B320; 469; 479; 489; 537f.). Millions of victims allegedly disappeared without a trace. And in the case of Babi Yar, Benz implies, even in a manner invisible to methods of aerial reconnaissance.
Gigantic mass graves cannot be rendered undetectable by exhuming and burning the bodies they contain. Such large-scale disturbance of the soil and the concomitant disruption of soil layers, the settling of the fill etc. would be evident not only in the contemporaneous Allied and German air photos, but also today, if someone only cared to look. Since according to Benz "this task was [carried out] inadequately in at least a few cases", there ought in fact to be much more evidence remaining: bodies or parts thereof that were not burned, millions of bones and teeth, as well as loads of ashes.[60]
If anything of the sort had ever been found, the Stalinist Communists - who were known for their efficient and effective propaganda system - would have made the most of this, naturally in the presence of international investigative committees. It would have been a welcome opportunity for revenge for the embarrassment the Germans had inflicted on the Soviets with respect to Katyn, which was only then being revealed, with the assistance of international investigative bodies, as the Soviet mass murder of Polish officers.[61]
But no, the oh-so-peace-loving Soviet Union would never have thought of doing anything so mean… Even today, when the mass graves of hundreds of thousands of Stalin’s victims are being discovered, often by accident and 50 or even 60 years after the fact, there are still no traces of any German mass graves or burning sites, and in fact any public speculation whether modern methods might not help to locate some is studiously avoided - after all, any such sites have vanished without a trace, thanks to the wondrous methods only the Germans knew about.
When the German army retreated, what did turn up instead of mass graves were tens of thousands of women, old men, and children. In his address of indictment to the IMT, General Roman A. Rudenko explained that hundreds of thousands of children, women and old men who were unfit for forced labor were left behind in concentration camps by the Germans during their retreat.[62] Counsellor A. A. Smirnov submitted a document giving more details of these camps in White Russia.[63] Urgent field research is needed to find out whether these people unfit for work may possibly have been some of those who were ‘selected’ in the camps further west and who, according to Steffen Werner’s theory, were in fact deported primarily to White Russia.[64]
| Nation |
Victims, Benz
|
Victims, Benz - reduced
by duplicate counts
|
Missing, Sanning
|
|
| Germany Austria |
160,000
65,459 |
139,000 48,767 |
123,000 36,000 |
|
| Luxembourg Belgium France Netherlands |
1,200
28,518 76,134 102,000 |
(Total: 207,852) |
1,200 28,518 76,134 102,000 |
Total: 124,500 |
|
Denmark Norway |
116
758 |
116
758 |
Total: 1,000 |
|
| Italy Albania Greece Yugoslavia Hungary Czechoslovakia Rumania Bulgaria Poland Soviet Union |
8,564
?200 58,885 60,000 550,000 143,000 211,214 11,393 2,700,000 2,100,000 |
5,914
?200 58,885 60,000 277,000 164,000 107,295 0 1,800,000 2,890,000 |
9,000
0 53,000 56,000 71,000 112,000 3,742 -7,600 516,511* 15,000** |
|
| TOTAL |
6,277,441
|
5,759,785
|
1,113,153
|
|
*excluding the victims of Polish repatriation;
**15,000 missing from the Carpathian Ukraine.
On pp. 15f. of his book Benz lists, for each country, the number
of victims on which the co-authors of his book have agreed. In the
preceding table, only the entries for Italy and Greece show different
numbers, specifically the numbers given by the respective authors
themselves, since the figures contained in Benz’s list differ slightly
from these and do not appear in the chapters themselves (Italy 6,513,
Greece 59,185).The difference between Benz’s total and the total reduced here by the number of victims counted twice amounts to 517,656, which due to statistical rounding diverges only insignificantly from the 533,193 duplicate counts traced in the preceding. This proves fully half a million ‘duplicates’ in Benz’s highly lauded ‘definitive work’, and corresponds to an approximate 10% inflation of the total. This ought not to have happened if Benz had taken the trouble to coordinate the individual chapters of his book. In his introduction, however, Benz mentions a sum total of 5.3 to just over 6 million Holocaust victims.[20] It seems, therefore, as though Benz had already taken these duplicate counts into consideration, even if his results are not verifiable due to his failure to explain his line of reasoning.
The decisive difference between Benz and Sanning lies in their treatment of three countries: (Greater) Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union. On the basis of these examples we have shown here the (possibly deliberately) erroneous and falsifying methods of which Benz and his co-authors availed themselves in order to produce their statistics and to arrive at the desired result.
4.2. The Generally Accepted Distribution of Victims
In 1990, the number of victims for Auschwitz, which had been set at approximately 4 million ever since the time of the IMT trials, was officially reduced to one million.[65] In early 1993 the Polish Historical Society advised lowering the figure by another 400,000, since the air photos taken by Allied reconnaissance planes had shown that the extermination of the Hungarian Jews had never taken place.[45] The alleged mass extermination, they say, must therefore have been discontinued in May 1944 at the latest. Now Pressac has recently begun to advocate the theory that the mass extermination did not start until 1942, half a year later than assumed to date, for which reason the number of victims, including the murdered Hungarian Jews, should be reduced to 630,000 gas chamber victims.[43] If one draws the obvious conclusions from these two publications - namely, the later beginning and earlier end of the killings - then the approximately 1 million victims must be reduced by 370,000 (according to Pressac) and by another 400,000 (according to the Polish Historical Society). We are thus left with only 230,000 alleged victims of the ‘gas chambers’. In fact, in the German edition of his latest book Pressac reduces the number of gas chamber victims to about 500,000.[66] It would seem to be only a matter of time until the next downward revision is made.[67]
Professor Ernst Nolte, for example, has considered it justified criticism to point out that while the number of victims of this supposedly largest extermination camp is being steadily reduced, the overall number of victims alleged for the Holocaust remains the same.[68] But the matter takes a turn for the grotesque when the number of Auschwitz victims is reduced and at the very same time the Israeli memorial site Yad Vashem hastens to report that new research in Soviet archives has revealed that the number of Jewish victims of mass execution behind the front is actually higher by 250,000 than was assumed to date, so that one should, in fact, reckon 6.25 rather than 6 million[69] or even up to 7 million.[70] One can only wonder with which statistical data and by which methods these revised figures were obtained.
But if the body count for the individual camps continues to drop and the overall total remains the same or even increases, then one must ask where the victims may have died, if not in the alleged gas chambers? To solve this problem there are always endeavors, for example, to increase the number of victims for other camps. Case in point: for Treblinka, figures ranging from 700,000 to 900,000 have been the standard to date.[71] Benz now postulates between 1 and 1.2 million (B468), of which 974,000 are said to have been Polish Jews (B495). Thus, Treblinka with its more than one million victims is weighted more heavily in Benz’s analysis than Auschwitz is - a completely new trend in Holocaust studies.
|
Camp
|
Victims
according to the IfZ |
Method of killing
|
Victims,
Benz, p. 17 |
|
Chelmno: Belzec: Sobibor: Treblinka: Majdanek: Auschwitz-Birkenau: Mauthausen: Neuengamme: Natzweiler: Stutthof: Ravensbrück: Dachau: |
150,000
600,000 200,000 700,000 50,000 more than 1,000,000 4,000 450 several thousands 200 more than 1,000 at least 2,300 experimental gassings |
gas vans (CO)
exhaust gases (CO) exhaust gases (CO) exhaust gases (CO) shooting, exhaust gases (CO), Zyklon B Zyklon B Zyklon B, gas vans (CO) Zyklon B Zyklon B Zyklon B Zyklon B Zyklon B |
152,000
600,000 250,000 900,000 60-80,000 1,000,000 |
|
Total, appr.
|
2,710,000
|
3,000,000
|
|
|
Total victims, appr.
Remainder, appr. |
6,000,000
3,290,000 |
6,000,000
3,000,000 |
It would also be interesting to see how historians might try to explain the 3-million-plus discrepancy between these approximately 2,700,000, i.e., 3,000,000 victims, most of them ‘victims of the gas chambers’, and the overall total of roughly 6 (or even 7) million victims. If one continues to reduce the Auschwitz death toll in accordance with the new trends to this effect, and simultaneously increases the overall total, this means that there are 4 million victims that must be freshly redistributed. Benz’s minor increase of the number of Treblinka victims, from 700,000 to 1.2 million (B468), is not enough to solve the problem, and contradicts the above statements of the selfsame Institut für Zeitgeschichte. The remaining 3 to 4 million Jews cannot possibly be explained away as victims of Einsatzkommando executions, starvation and disease, and the like. Such numbers of people - numbers of a similar magnitude as the total population of Berlin - do not simply vanish without a trace. It is thus not surprising that Benz does not attempt to explain in his book where the missing remainder might fit in.
4.3. The Exodus - the Return of Missing Persons
Benz does not spend so much as one single paragraph on the problem of Jewish post-war emigration from Europe. And what is more: he does not even mention that after the war there was a large-scale migration, especially of the European population of Jewish faith, which has become known as the modern Exodus. The first ten sections of his book are conspicuous in their lack of any mention of post-war emigration, while others (Greece and Yugoslavia) fashion a fig-leaf for themselves by admitting to a few hundreds or thousands who left the country after the war’s end.
Since Benz usually calculates the numbers of victims from the difference between pre- and post-war populations, this cannot but result in a great margin of error. Sanning, on the other hand, presents a summary of Jewish immigration into non-European nations, which is reproduced in the above table (S173). These data has never been refuted, not even by Benz, so that one may assume that the figures are correct.
Sanning shows that in 1970 there were still some 860,000 Jews in formerly German-occupied Europe, excluding the Soviet Union (S174). Since the Jews of western Europe exhibited next to no population increase after the war, then in light of the post-war emigration (some 1.548 million, cf. above table) at least 2,408,000 Jews must have lived in the formerly German-occupied non-Soviet parts of Europe after the war. Sanning determines that immediately after the war only 1,443,000 Jews were statistically located in formerly German-occupied non-Soviet Europe (S157), while 1.1 million were considered missing.
|
Immigration of European Jews Before
and After the Second World War
|
||
| Destination |
After the war
|
Before the war
|
| Palestine Israel USA[75] Latin America Canada, Australia, England, South Africa |
73,000 (‘45-‘48)
585,000 (‘48-‘70) 490,000 150,000 250,000 |
293,000 (‘32-‘44)
406,000 (‘33-‘43) 180,000 (‘30s) 90,000 (‘30s) |
| TOTAL |
1,548,000
|
969,000
|
4.4. Corrections for Wolfgang Benz
| Starting figure (Benz) | Minus | Reason |
| 5.3 to 6 million | at least 1 million at least 1.5 million at least 0.5 million 0.7 million at least 0.3 million |
unregistered
post-war emigration Jews not statistically registered in the Soviet Union victims of war, partisan warfare and Soviet deportation statistically inflated no. of Jews in pre-war Poland destruction of the Hungarian Jews disproved |
|
5.3 to 6 million minus at least 4 million
® a maximum of 1.3 to 2 million
missing persons
|
||
In the late 1980s the Swedish demographer Carl O. Nordling recreated the fate of Jewry during the Second World War by means of a statistical study[76] based on the Jewish personalities listed in the Encyklopædia Judaica.[77] He chose 722 Jews entered therein, drawn from 12 European countries[78] that had come under German rule or supremacy in the course of the war. His choice was based on the following criteria:
- born between 1860 and 1909;
- not emigrated by January 1, 1938;
- still living on January 1, 1939.
For the Polish Jews, the matter stands as follows:[79]
Of 65 Jewish notables listed in the Encyklopædia Judaica on January 1, 1940, 13 (20%) emigrated, 14 (22%) survived, 38 (58%) died. Of these 38, however, 23 (60%) died, not in the eastern camps, but in freedom - in ghettos, on transports, as consequence of armed conflict or reprisals, as well as victims of starvation and disease in western camps (Dachau, Nordhausen). In only 15 cases, in other words in approximately 23% of the Polish Jewish notables, the place of death is either unknown or located in one of the eastern camps; and here it is again necessary to consider that some of them succumbed to starvation, disease and forced transports at the end of the war. Even among the Polish Jewish personalities, therefore, probably less than 15% could have been victims of a hypothetical mass extermination. Benz, on the other hand, assumes that approximately 80-90% of all Polish Jews present in Poland in 1940 - some 2 million, according to him - were murdered in the extermination gas chambers (B495).
In another study, Nordling compares his statistical findings with those of W. N. Sanning, a comparison which we will discuss at greater length here.[80]
The percentages determined are astonishingly similar in many respects, and this indicates that Sanning’s findings do indeed reflect the fates of Jewish notables as these are set out in the Encyklopædia Judaica. It is also worth noting that the opportunities for emigration were fewer, or the desire to emigrate was lesser, for Jewish personalities than was the case for the average Jewish population.
But before acknowledging Sanning’s statistical findings to be correct, it is necessary to examine the fates of other Jewish population groups in the same way as that of the Jews represented in the Encyklopædia Judaica in order to eliminate the following potential distortions:
- The decision of which Jewish notables to include in the 1972 edition of the Encyklopædia Judaica will have been influenced by the fates of the Jews in question during and after the war:
- Some Jews may have been included only because they died as a result of German measures of persecution. Examples: Janusz Korczak (1879-1942) was included because he voluntarily went to Treblinka with a group of children; the nun Edith Stein (1891-1942) was included because she died a martyr. If these people had survived, they might not have been included in the encyclopedia.
- Some Jews, on the other hand, were included only because they survived the war and could go on to become famous afterwards. For example: Pierre Mendès-France (born in 1907) was only a little-known Undersecretary of State before the war.
- International connections or material advantages may have made emigration easier for Jewish notables than for the average Jewish citizen. However, this category of Jews had largely already emigrated by the start of the war.
- Jewish VIPs cannot change their identity, go underground, flee, or emigrate illegally as can persons who are less well-known. Unlike for the average citizen, therefore, the life and suffering of Jewish personalities is usually easier to trace.
- It is possible that due to their greater social and political involvement Jewish notables were subject, especially during the war, to more restrictive measures imposed by the German occupation powers.
|
Comparison of Statistical
Analysis
of the Jews Living in the German Sphere of Influence and the Corresponding Data for Identified Jewish Notables in the Same Region |
|||||
| Jewish Overall Population | Identified Personalities | ||||
| CATEGORY |
‘000
|
%
|
%
|
NO.
|
CATEGORY |
| Present 1939[18] |
5,044
|
177
|
148
|
629
|
Present in Jan. 1939[77] |
| Emigration 1939-1941[18] |
-2,197
|
77
|
48
|
-206
|
Emigration 1939-1941[77] |
| Present 1941 |
= 2,847
|
100
|
100
|
= 423
|
Present 1941 |
| Jews registered in Auschwitz (assuming that 60% of all internees were Jews)[77] |
244
|
8.6
|
8.5
|
35
|
Deported to Auschwitz[77] |
| Missing, May ‘45[77] |
-207
|
7.3
|
7.6
|
-32
|
Missing, May ‘45[77] |
| Survivors of Auschwitz |
= 37
|
1.3
|
0.9
|
= 4
|
Survivors of Auschwitz |
| Registered in Theresienstadt[81] |
141
|
5.0
|
5.0
|
21
|
Deported to Theresienstadt[77] |
| Deported from Theresienstadt[81] |
-88
|
3.1
|
1.2
|
-5
|
Deported from Theresienstadt[77] |
| Died in Theresienstadt[81] |
-33.5
|
1.2
|
1.2
|
-5
|
Died in Theresienstadt[77] |
| Survivors of Theresienstadt |
= 19.5
|
0.7
|
2.6
|
= 11
|
Survivors of Theresienstadt |
|
17.0
|
72
|
Disappeared in concentration camps after deportation[77] | |||
| Disappeared, due neither to emigration nor death by natural causes[18] |
304
|
10.7
|
12.3
|
52
|
Disappeared, not due to death by natural causes |
| Survivors in all camps, April 1945[82] |
275
|
9.6
|
5.7
|
24
|
Survivors in all camps, May 1945 |
6.2. The Korherr Reports
Richard Korherr was the leading statistician of the Third Reich.
In early 1943, on Himmler’s instructions, he drew up a report on
the trends which European Jewish population statistics had exhibited
since the NS had come to power. Himmler wanted to submit this report
to Hitler. After several discussions and some correspondence with
Himmler, Korherr revised and shortened his first report.[83]
These two reports as well as the correspondence that goes with them
are counted among the allegedly central pieces of evidence proving
the Holocaust, on whose basis G. Wellers, for example, believes
he can set the number of victims of the Holocaust at approximately
2 million by late March 1943 alone.[84]It needs to be said at the start that there is nothing whatsoever in the Korherr Reports and the accompanying correspondence, which was intended for Hitler’s and Himmler’s eyes only, which would indicate any intent to exterminate the Jews of Europe, or which would suggest that killings had already taken place - which is surprising enough, since it would hardly have been necessary to keep any such goings-on from Himmler’s or Hitler’s knowledge. The Report does reveal, however, that some 2½ million Jews were evacuated to the East. Korherr states:
In his conclusions, for example, Korherr wrote that the Jewish population losses in Europe from 1933 to 1943 ( some 5 million) were caused approximately 50% by emigration to other continents, but his statistics cite only about 1.5 million emigrants. So roughly 1 million emigrants are missing. This begs the question: why would Germany’s foremost statistician draw conclusions contradicting his own data, and in a secret report intended for Hitler, no less? Furthermore, if one adds Korherr’s individual 1943 figures regarding the Jews scattered throughout the world, one arrives at a total that is only slightly less than the pre-war total; this already rules out any mass extermination. S. Challen therefore went to the trouble of examining Korherr’s claims more closely. He ultimately concludes that Korherr, acting on Himmler’s orders, reduced the emigration statistics by one million and increased the number of Jews evacuated to the East by that same million. And in one of his letters, Himmler writes that this report would serve well as a cover.[87] Challen arrives at the well-founded conclusion that Himmler wanted to keep Hitler from realizing that a large part of the Polish and Russian Jews in the East had gotten away by means of flight and Soviet evacuation measures. On the basis of Korherr’s data, Challen calculated that the Jews lost approximately 1.2 million of their number during World War Two, some 750,000 of them in Germany’s sphere of influence.[88]
In 1977, Korherr himself confirmed that he did not know anything about an ongoing extermination of the Jews during the war and was not aware that the term "Sonderbehandlung" (special treatment) was used as a code word to allegedly cover up mass murder.[89]
In the end, therefore, the Korherr Reports confirm Sanning’s statistics regarding the fate of the eastern European Jews, and are not even remotely suited to proving a hypothetical mass murder.
6.3. Compensation
A common question is whether the number of Jewish applications for compensation from Germany would not reveal how many Jews survived the Third Reich. In fact, any such attempt runs into insurmountable problems. The German Federal Ministry of Finance does provide detailed information about compensation payments made to persons persecuted in the Third Reich. On July 1, 1979, approximately 4.3 million individual applications for compensation had been filed; 13 years later the Ministry cites some 4.4 million individual applications.[90] For several reasons, however, this number is difficult to interpret. For one thing, the Ministry does not register the faith group of the applicants, so that there is no way of telling how many Jews are included in the total. Secondly, approximately half the applications have been turned down, but no reasons for the individual decisions are given; perhaps the applicant had never actually been in the German sphere of influence, or perhaps he had not suffered any losses despite his/her alleged Jewish faith. The refusals can thus also not be interpreted. Thirdly, the Ministry’s statistics reflect the number of applications, not the number of applicants. Since each kind of compensation (damage to life, health, property, fortune, professional advancement, etc.) must be applied for separately, any one applicant may very well have applied several times. On the other hand, many applications were made collectively by groups of persons, so that the statistics reflect entire families or even larger groups with one single application. One must also consider that until recently the Jews in the Soviet Union could not collect any compensation and are thus not included in the figure.[91] And finally, an American newspaper has reported that only one in two Holocaust survivors receives compensation payments from Germany.[92] Thus, at the present time, the statistics available regarding applications for compensation do not lend themselves to answering demographic questions.
6.4. Holocaust Survivors
According to information from the Israel-based offical organization Amcha, which devotes all its activities to taking care of Holocaust survivors, 834,000 to 960,000 Holocaust survivors were still alive in the summer of 1997. The same organization defines a Holocaust survivor as
If the average life expectancy of all age groups of these survivors as well as the statistical distribution of the Jews over these age groups in 1945 were known, it would be possible to calculate approximately how many Holocaust survivors were still alive in 1945, i.e., after the war ended. Unfortunately we do not have such data, but we can on the one hand estimate this age distribution by extrapolating it from the known statistical distribution of the Jews of the 1920s and 1930s,[96] corrected by Amcha’s statement about the 1/3 of "child survivors". On the other hand we can draw on the life expectancy statistics of another people whose fate from 1945 onwards was at least similar to that of the surviving European Jews of that time.
Since the German people as a whole experienced terrible living conditions from 1941 to 1948, it seems appropriate to draw on their mortality statistics.[97] For our calculations we have assumed two different age distributions in 1945: the first as given in the Atlas quoted,[96] and the other based on the assumption that 1/3 of all survivors in 1997 must have been between 0 and 15 years of age.[98] The rest of the calculations simply draw on the German "death tables".
Probably the results as shown in the following table may change if we get better data about the death rates of the Jewish survivors and about their age distribution then and today. But certainly our results are likely to at least approximate the truth. If one assumes a more severe fate for the average Holocaust survivor than for the average German - which most scientists tend to do - then this would result in an even higher number of survivors in 1945.
The number of Holocaust victims would be the difference between our calculated number of survivors, and the number of Jews who were alive in Europe prior to National Socialist persecution. The inflationary definition of ‘Holocaust survivor’ by Amcha, however, makes our task difficult. Given this definition, it is for example not clear how one should handle the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were deported to Soviet slave labor camps by Stalin or who fled voluntarily with the Red Army to the East right at the beginning of the German-Russian war.[99]
According to Sanning, and corresponding to the findings of other statistical studies, in the late 1920s and early 1930s there were roughly 6.1 million Jews in those European countries, excluding the Soviet Union, which later came under the influence of National Socialism.[100] Undoubtedly some 3 million Jews lived in the pre-war Soviet Union, of which at least one million lived in areas that were never occupied by German troops. Thus, in the late 1920s and early 1930s some 8.1 million Jews lived in what was to become the German sphere of influence. According to our calculations, 3.46 to 5 million of them survived the ‘Holocaust’, and 3.1 to 4.64 million did not.
|
Jewish Holocaust Survivors according
to Amcha and drawing on German ‘death tables’
|
||||||||||
|
Age
1945
|
German surviving rates [%]
|
living Holocaust survivors 1945[101]
|
||||||||
|
1945 from original
sum [%]
|
1997 from original
sum [%]
|
1997 from survivors
1945 [%][102]
|
Age
1997
|
distribution according
to Atlas…[96] |
distribution 1/3
"child-survivors" 0-15 years
|
|||||
|
[%]
|
(1997: 834,000)
|
(1997: 960,000)
|
[%]
|
(1997: 834,000)
|
(1997: 960,000)
|
|||||
|
0-4
|
89.5 | 72.0 | 80.4 |
52-56
|
5.0 | 217,231 | 250,050 | 2.4 | 83,003 | 95,543 |
|
5-9
|
88.5 | 66.5 | 75.1 |
57-61
|
5.9 | 256,332 | 295,059 | 3.4 | 117,588 | 135,353 |
|
10-14
|
87.5 | 58.0 | 66.3 |
62-66
|
5.9 | 256,332 | 295,059 | 5.5 | 190,216 | 218,954 |
|
15-19
|
86.0 | 45.5 | 52.9 |
67-71
|
5.7 | 247,643 | 285,057 | 11.0 | 380,432 | 437,907 |
|
20-24
|
83.0 | 30.5 | 36.7 |
72-76
|
6.3 | 273,711 | 315,063 | 15.0 | 518,771 | 597,146 |
|
25-29
|
78.0 | 15.5 | 19.9 |
77-81
|
4.3 | 186,818 | 215,043 | 16.7 | 577,565 | 664,823 |
|
30-34
|
73.0 | 5.5 | 7.5 |
82-86
|
6.7 | 291,089 | 335,067 | 15.0 | 518,771 | 597,146 |
|
35-39
|
66.0 | 1.0 | 1.5 |
87-91
|
7.7 | 334,535 | 385,077 | 12.0 | 415,017 | 477,717 |
|
40-44
|
61.0 | 0.2 | 0.2 |
92-96
|
8.3 | 360,603 | 415,083 | 8.0 | 276,678 | 318,478 |
|
45-49
|
54.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
97-101
|
8.8 | 382,326 | 440,087 | 5.0 | 172,924 | 199,049 |
|
50-54
|
47.5 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
102-106
|
8.1 | 351,914 | 405,081 | 3.0 | 103,754 | 119,429 |
|
55-59
|
40.5 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
107-111
|
7.5 | 325,846 | 375,075 | 2.0 | 69,169 | 79,619 |
|
60-64
|
33.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
112-116
|
6.6 | 286,745 | 330,066 | 0.5 | 17,292 | 19,905 |
|
65-69
|
24.5 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
117-121
|
6.1 | 265,021 | 305,061 | 0.5 | 17,292 | 19,905 |
|
70-74
|
15.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
122-126
|
3.8 | 165,095 | 190,038 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
|
>75
|
5.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
127-131
|
3.3 | 143,372 | 165,033 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
|
Total:
|
100.0 | 4,344,614 | 5,000,994 | 100.0 | 3,458,472 | 3,980,975 | ||||
However, one should be aware that even the published number of Holocaust survivors is a figure likely to be manipulated due to its financial implications for Jewish organizations who are permanently claiming compensations (cf. Note [91]). Thus, it was not very surprising that R. Bloch, Jewish head of the Swiss Holocaust fund, the task of which is the collection of money for Jewish Holocaust survivors, announced in early 1998 that there are more than 1.000.000 Holocaust survivors still alive at that time.[103] There appears to be a permanent Jewish resurrection nowadays…
|
Benz
|
Sanning | ||
|
Victims
of the Holocaust |
Death due to Soviet deportation and imprisonment | ||
| Death due to pogroms by non-Germans, without German collaboration or sanction | |||
| Death due to effects of war (labor service, bombing victims) | |||
| Death as soldier | |||
| Death as partisan (battle or execution) | |||
| Natural excess of deaths over births | |||
| Religious conversions | |||
| Unregistered emigration during and after the war | |||
| Jews not statistically registered or identified as Jews today | |||
| Unsolved cases, mostly death by ‘natural’ causes in ghettos and camps | |||
|
as for Sanning |
Registered emigration during and after the war | ||
|
as for Sanning |
Jews remaining today | ||
| Graph 1: Diagrammatic representation of W. Benz’s and W. N. Sanning’s approaches to determining the number of Holocaust victims. The size of the individual bars does not reflect the number of cases. | |||
Benz also all but ignores actual or apparent losses through non-military means such as the natural excesses of deaths over births, religious conversions, unregistered emigration during and especially after the war, as well as Jews not statistically recorded as such today. In particular, Benz fails to make any mention of the partly uncontrolled and unregistered post-war mass emigration that has become known as the ‘modern Exodus’; of the fact, generally acknowledged today, that Soviet statistics reflect only a fraction of the Jews actually living in the Soviet Union; and of the fact that the Polish Jews also suffered great population decreases in the inter-war period due to emigration, the disproportionate percentage of old people, and the excess of deaths over births.
Benz emphasizes that where the Soviet evacuations, the Jewish population trends in Poland, and the Polish flight migrations are concerned, there are no definite figures, and one must rely on estimates alone. He arrives at his utterly incorrect estimates in the space of a very few sentences, without any sort of logical line of reasoning. Even though he admits that these issues are in dire need of further research, he avoids any such endeavor.
Instead, the book unleashes a prodigious verbal deluge in order to rehash early Jewish history and the history of each nation’s anti-Jewish measures, something which countless other authors have already done (some of them much better) and which contributes nothing to solving the authors’ self-appointed task.
Recent findings, such as the evidence which air photos can provide regarding the alleged extermination of the Hungarian Jews, are also studiously ignored. And what is worse: where the alleged methods of killing are concerned, Benz regurgitates the old, oft-refuted claims and ignores the fact that engineers and scientists are the sole experts in this field.
Also, Benz and his co-authors quote Stalinist and Communist sources with not so much as half a thought to critical assessment even when these sources clearly go back to show trials, and blithely adopt Stalinist terminology in their arguments, showing themselves in a dubious and unscientific light in the process.
|
Documented deaths in
German concentration camps as of Jan. 1, 1993 |
|
| Total |
296.081
|
| Auschwitz |
60.056
|
| Bergen-Belsen |
6.853
|
| Buchenwald |
20.687
|
| Dachau |
18.456
|
| Flossenbürg |
18.334
|
| Groß-Rosen |
10.951
|
| Majdanek |
8.831
|
| Mauthausen |
78.859
|
| Mittelbau |
7.468
|
| Natzweiler |
4.431
|
| Neuengamme |
5.785
|
| Ravensbrück |
3.639
|
| Sachsenhausen |
5.014
|
| Stutthof |
12.634
|
| Theresienstadt |
29.375
|
| Other camps |
4.704
|
Thus the judgement they thought to pronounce on another scholar ultimately reflects on themselves:
"[…] The author [in this case, Benz et al.] distinguishes himself through his methodologically unsound handling of the statistical material as well as through daring and demonstrably erroneous reasoning and conclusions." (B558, footnote 396.)
Jews probably constitute about half of the total. One must keep in mind, however, that these cases are not all. The camps Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka are missing from the table, as are the victims in the ghettos. And finally, one must remember that according to the Death Books approximately 66,000 people died in Auschwitz by late 1943 alone,[105] and that the Americans mentioned 25,000 dead in the concentration camp Dachau during the war.[106] A realistic estimate of the actual number of victims, therefore, may be twice as high as the total of victims registered by name in the records at Arolsen. The number of victims registered by name is now said to be about 450,000.[107] Doubtless the greater part of these are Jews, but exact figures are as yet unknown.
Even from this perspective, death clearly took a heavy toll.
| [1] | International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, IMT, Nuremberg 1947, v. XXXI, pp. 85f., and v. XI, pp. 228ff., 256ff. |
| [2] | Ibid., v. IV, p. 371. |
| [3] | Also claimed by W. Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords, Oldenbourg, Munich 1991, pp. 1ff. |
| [4] | R. Aschenauer, Ich, Adolf Eichmann, Druffel, Leoni 1980, pp. 460f., 473ff., 494; regarding this Eichmann biography’s value as historical source material, cf. D. Kluge, Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart (DGG) 29(2) (1981) pp. 31-36. See also P. Rassinier, Was ist Wahrheit? Druffel, Leoni 1982, pp. 90, 134; R. Servatius, Verteidigung Adolf Eichmann, Bad Harrach, Kreuznach 1961, pp. 62ff.; U. Walendy, Historische Tatsachen (HT) no. 18, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichte, Vlotho 1983; H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Reclam, Leipzig 1990, pp. 331ff. |
| [5] | W. Höttl, Einsatz für das Reich, S. Bublies, Koblenz 1997, esp. pp. 77, 412f. |
| [6] | Cf. G. Rudolf, "Wilhelm Höttl - ein zeitgeschichtlich dilettantischer Zeitzeuge", Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (VffG), 1(2) (1997) pp. 116f (online: vho.org/VffG/1997/2/Buecher2.html#Hoettl). |
| [7] | D. Irving, Nuremberg. The Last Battle, Focal Point, London 1996, pp. 61f. |
| [8] | J. Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945, Verlag für Wehrwissenschaften, Munich 1995, pp. 160f. |
| [9] | W. Höttl, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 412, 515-519. |
| [10] | Retranslated from the introduction of Walter A. Berendsohn to Thomas Mann, Sieben Manifeste zur jüdischen Frage, Jos. Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt 1966, p. 18. I am grateful to R.H. Countess for bringing this to my attention. |
| [11] | Most prominently in The American Hebrew, v. 105, no. 22, Oct. 31, 1919, pp. 582f. The New York times carried many ‘reports’ about millions of Jews suffering and dying in eastern Europe during and after WWI, see the analyses by Don Heddesheimer, The Barnes Review, 3(2) (1997), pp. 19-24 (online: vho.org/VffG/1999/2/Heddesheimer153-158.html) |
| [12] | B. Blech, The Secret of Hebrew Words, Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1991, p. 214. |
| [13] | Testimony of M. Broszat, expert witness for the Frankfurt Jury Court, May 3, 1979, Ref. Js 12 828/78 919 Ls. |
| [14] | Cf. Prof. F. H. Hankins, temporary President of the American Association for Demography, quoted in The Journal of Historical Review (JHR), 4(1) (1983) pp. 61-81 (online: ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p-61_ Hankins.html). |
| [15] | R. Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die? Historical Fact No. 1, Samisdat Publishers, Toronto n.d., pp. 26ff. (online: www.zundelsite.org/english/harwood/Didsix01.html); cf. also J. Rothkranz, Die kommende Diktatur der Humanität, v. 2, Pro Fide Catholica, Durach 1990, pp. 91ff. |
| [16] | W. Benz, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 9ff., based on H. Rothfels, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ) 14 (1966) p. 244. |
| [17] | J. Leszcinsky, "The Decline of European Jewry", Congress Weekly, New York, Sept. 24, 1951; L. Poliakov, Breviaire de la haine, Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1979; G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, Mitchell, London 1953, Ger.: Die Endlösung, Colloquium, Berlin 1956; H. Krausnick, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 4(32) (1954) p. 426; P. Rassinier, Was nun, Odysseus?, Priester, Wiesbaden 1960; A. Ehrhardt, special supplement to Nation Europa 12 (1961); H. Krausnick, in Dokumentation zur Massenvergasung, Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, Bonn 1962, pp. 16-22; P. Rassinier, Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (DHZ) 1/2 (1963) p. 61; G. Wellers, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 28(30) (1978) pp. 22-39; R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Holmes & Meier, New York 1985, ch. VIII section 3. |
| [18] | W. N. Sanning, The Dissolution of the Eastern European Jewry, Institute for Historical Review, Newport Beach, CA 1983; Ger.: Die Auflösung des osteuropäischen Judentums, Grabert, Tübingen 1983; cf. Sanning, DGG 28(1-4) (1980) pp. 12-15, 17-21, 17-21, 25-31 (online: vho.org/D/DGG & …/D/da), as well as the discussions with representatives of the opposing side: W. D. Rubinstein, W. N. Sanning, A. R. Butz, JHR 5(2-4) (1984) pp. 367-373; D. Desjardins and J. S. Conway, JHR 7(3) (1986) pp. 375, 379 (online: ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p375_Desjardins.html and …/v07p379_Conway.html). |
| [19] | W. N. Sanning, The Dissolution…, op. cit. (note 18), p. 14. |
| [20] | W. Benz, op. cit. (note 3), p. 17. Since each contribution to this book opens with a summary of the history of the Jews in the country under discussion, and gives a detailed account of all the anti-Jewish laws, measures and events that took place there, one must first dig one’s way through masses of extraneous material which has already been set out in many other books before one can isolate the statistically relevant data among all the alphabet soup. The size of Benz’s book is thus no indication of its statistically pertinent content. |
| [21] | Ibid., p. 20. |
| [22] | Initial critiques of W. Benz’s work have already appeared in W. Hackert, DGG 40(2) (1992) pp. 19-24 (online: vho.org/D/DGG/Hackert40_2.html), and: U. Walendy, HT 52, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho 1992, pp. 27-33. |
| [23] | This was also pointed out by E. Jäckel, Professor of Contemporary History in Stuttgart, in his review of Benz’s book in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit of June 28, 1991. |
| [24] | For the relationship between Zionism and National Socialism, cf. A. Schölch, VfZ 30 (1982) pp. 646-674; F. R. Nicosia, Hitler und der Zionismus, Druffel, Leoni 1989; Nicosia, VfZ 37 (1989) pp. 367-400; Y. Bauer, Jews for Sale?, Yale University Press, New Haven 1994. |
| [25] | Cf. the letter of GeStaPo Chief Müller to the representative of the Chief of the SiPo and the SD in Belgium and France, Oct. 23, 1941, in P. Longerich (ed.), Die Ermordung der europäischen Juden, Piper, Munich 1990, p. 82. |
| [26] | Cf. IMT Document PS-4055 (USA Exhibit 923), IMT v. XX, pp. 330ff., reprint with preceding comments in VffG, 1(2) (1997), pp. 60-68 (online: vho.org/VffG/1997/2/Xanten2.html). |
| [27] | G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, A. S. Barnes, New York 1961. |
| [28] | W. N. Sanning gives several examples of such exaggerated data from German sources: Rumania, 1.5 to 2 million (in actual fact, approximately 700,000); France, 1.2 million (actually about 300,000) (S45). |
| [29] | S. Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews deported from France 1942-1944, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1983, p. xxvi. |
| [30] | C. O. Nordling, "Was geschah den 75.000 aus Frankreich deportierten Juden?", VffG 1(4) (1997), pp. 248-251 (online: vho.org/VffG/1997/4/NorFra4.html); cf. also the analysis of the "Sterbebücher" of Auschwitz by E. Aynat which supports Nordling’s thesis presented in his article: "Datos estadísticos sobre la mortalidad de los judíos deportados de Francia a Auschwitz en 1942", in J.-M. Boisdefeu, E. Aynat, Estudios sobre Auschwitz, publ. by E. Aynat, Valencia 1997; German: "Die Sterbebücher von Auschwitz", VffG 2(3) (1998), pp. 188-197; online: …/1998/3/Aynat3.html; cf. E. Aynat, "Consideraciones sobre la deportación de judíos de Francia y Bélgica al este de Europa en 1942", in Ayant, Estudios sobre el "Holocaust", publ. by author, Valencia 1994. |
| [31] | Jewish immigrants to Israel were subjected to moral pressure to discard their usually German-sounding names in favor of Hebrew ones; cf. J. G. Burg, Schuld und Schicksal, Damm, Munich 1962. |
| [32] | Various reports in St. Petersburg Times, Oct. 30, 1992: "Miracles still coming out of Holocaust"; Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1987: "Piecing a family back together"; State-Times (Baton Rouge), Nov. 24, 1979, p. 8; Jewish Chronicle, May 6, 1994: "Miracle meeting as ‘dead’ sister is discovered"; cf. San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 25, 1978, p. 6; Northern California Jewish Bulletin, Oct. 16, 1992; cf. JHR 13(1) (1993) p. 45. |
| [33] | C. O. Nordling, "Die Juden von Kaszony", VffG 1(4) (1997), p. 251-254 (online: vho.org/VffG/1997/4/ NorKas4.html). |
| [34] | The German word used at that time was "sortieren" [sort] and not "selektieren" [select], as used today. |
| [35] | S. Klarsfeld, op. cit. (note 29), notes for Table III, p. xxvi. |
| [36] | R. Faurisson has pointed out (S. Thion, Vérité Historique ou vérité politique?, La Vielle Taupe, Paris 1980, p. 328, online: abbc.com/aaargh/fran/histo/SF1.html; Engl.: …/engl/SThtpt1.html) that according to D. Czech (Hefte von Auschwitz 7 (1964), p. 88) none of the women in Transport No. 71 from France to Auschwitz were given registration numbers, in other words, that all women were gassed on arrival. This is disproven by S. Klarsfeld (op. cit. (note 29), p. XXVII) who states that 70 women from this transport had survived, among them Simone Jacob (ibid., p. 519), who later became the first woman President of the European Parliament (as Simone Veil). The revised edition of D. Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945 (Henry Holt, New York 1989, p. 612) now states that 223 women from this transport did receive a number after all (78560-78782), and - as prevailing opinion would have it - had thus been ‘selected’ as fit for forced labor. As far as we know it has not been determined whether the 70 surviving women mentioned by Klarsfeld were among these 223. |
| [37] | Sanning does not mention whether he perhaps listed them under Italy. Since his figures for this country are greater than those of Benz (see above), this is a possibility. |
| [38] | Regarding Bačka see B330, regarding Transylvania see B409. |
| [39] | A. R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Institute for Historical Review, Newport Beach, CA 1992, p. 138. |
| [40] | E.g., the witnesses I. Lazar and L. Heuser in the trial of G. Weise, cf. R. Gerhard (ed.), Der Fall Weise, Türmer, Berg 1991, pp. 28, 33. |
| [41] | S. Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz-Album, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1980. |
| [42] | As G. Holming has pointed out, this relation of 1/3 to 2/3 may be the one of inmates registered in Birkenau and those sent to other camps, and not of those killed, "Wieviele Gefangene wurden nach Auschwitz gebracht?", VffG, 1(4) (1997), pp. 255-258 (online: vho.org/VffG/1997/4/HolWie4.html). |
| [43] | J. C. Pressac, Les crématoires d’Auschwitz, la machinerie du meurtre de masse, Édition du CNRS, Paris 1993, p. 147, cites the Yad Vashem without giving any further details; acc. to findings of J. Graf and C. Mattogno in the archives of the former camp of Stutthof, only 25.000 Jews were deported (cf. J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Das Konzentrationslager Stutthof und seine Funktion in der nationalsozialistischen Judenpolitik, Castle Hill Publishers, Hastings 1999; online: vho.org/D/Stutthof). Perhaps the rest was sent to other labor camps. Cf. also the report about Hungarian Jews as forced laborers in the Volkswagenwerke in Wolfsburg: H. Mommsen, M. Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, Econ, Düsseldorf 1996; P. Bölke, "Der Führer und sein Tüftler", Der Spiegel 45 (1996), p. 138f. |
| [44] | W. N. Sanning has since reconsidered this theory; personal communication. |
| [45] | Cf. J. C. Ball, Air Photo Evidence, Ball Resource Services Ltd., Delta, BC, 1992; cf. his chapter in the present volume, as well as J. Konieczny, The Soviets, but not the Western Allies, should have bombed the Auschwitz camp, Polish Historical Society, PO Box 8024, Stamford, CT 06905, April 1993. |
| [46] | J. Konieczny, op. cit. (note 45). |
| [47] | Cf. correction, M. Broszat, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Die Zeit, Aug. 19, 1960, as well as a letter on IfZ stationery to a Swedish addressee, dated July 17, 1961; also H. Wendig, Richtigstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte, issue 5, Grabert, Tübingen 1993, p. 50; E. Kern, Meineid gegen Deutschland, Schütz, Göttingen 1968, pp. 263ff.; extensive source material in F. A. Leuchter, The Second Leuchter Report, Samisdat, Toronto 1989 (online: www.zundelsite.org/english/leuchter/report2/leucha.html). |
| [48] | A. R. Butz, op. cit. (note 39), p. 139. |
| [49] | Whereas the chapter about Czechoslovakia speaks of 102,542 Jews in the Carpathian Ukraine (B355), the chapter about Hungary mentions only 78,000 Jews there (B338). Once again: inaccuracies and contradictions in Benz’s book. |
| [50] | According to R.H. Countess, at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (26-28 January 2000), Bulgaria was specifically singled out for protecting its Jews. That means that Bulgaria will not have to pay any ‘reparations’ - unless certain discoveries are made. |
| [51] | H. Graml, Die Auswanderung der Juden aus Deutschland zwischen 1933 und 1939, in Institut für Zeitgeschichte (ed.), Gutachten des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, v. 1, pub. by ed., Munich 1958, p. 80. |
| [52] | Cf. also J. G. Burg, op. cit. (note 31), pp. 11ff. |
| [53] | Keesing’s Archiv der Gegenwart, 16th/17th year, Rheinisch-westfälisches Verlagskontor, Essen 1948, p. 651, Memo B of Feb. 15, 1946. After the War the Allied occupation authorities officially registered up to 5,000 Polish Jewish emigrants per week (!) in the western zones alone (no number of weeks given, though); W. Jacobmeyer, VfZ 25 (1977) pp. 120-135, esp. p. 125. In addition, there were migrations via other countries, as well as the non-registered emigrants. |
| [54] | Eg. cf. V. Suvorov, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? Hamish Hamilton, London 1990; E. Topitsch, Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War, Fourth Estate, London 1987; W. Post, Unternehmen Barbarossa, Mittler, Hamburg 1995; F. Becker, Stalins Blutspur durch Europa, Arndt Verlag, Kiel 1996; Becker, Im Kampf um Europa, 2nd ed., Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz/Stuttgart 1993; W. Maser, Der Wortbruch. Hitler, Stalin und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Olzog Verlag, Munich 1994; J. Hoffmann, "Die Sowjetunion bis zum Vorabend des deutschen Angriffs", in Horst Boog et al., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion, 2nd ed., Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1987; Hoffmann, "Die Angriffsvorbereitungen der Sowjetunion", in B. Wegner (ed.), Zwei Wege nach Moskau, Piper, Munich 1991. |
| [55] | New York Post, July 1, 1990. |
| [56] | Cf. the chapters by F. P. Berg and I. Weckert, this volume. |
| [57] | Cf. the chapters by H. Tiedemann and J. C. Ball, this volume. |
| [58] | Cf. the remarks of E. Gauss in his introducing chapter, note 138-140. |
| [59] | H.-H. Wilhelm, in U. Backes, E. Jesse, R. Zitelmann (eds.), Die Schatten der Vergangenheit, Propyläen, Berlin 1992, p. 403. |
| [60] | Cf. C. Loos, RHR 5 (1991) pp. 136-142 (online: www.lebensraum.org/french/rhr/Loos.pdf), as well as the chapter by A. Neumaier, this volume. |
| [61] | F. Kadell, Die Katyn-Lüge, Herbig, Munich 1991. |
| [62] | International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, IMT, Nuremberg 1947, v. VII, p. 171, Feb. 8, 1946. |
| [63] | Ibid., v. VII, pp. 578ff., Feb. 19, 1946; cf. Document USSR-4, not included in the IMT Document Volumes. |
| [64] | S. Werner, Die 2. babylonische Gefangenschaft, pub. by auth., Pfullingen 1990 (online: vho.org/D/d2bg/I_II.html; English: vho.org/GB/Books/tsbc); Werner, DGG 41(4) (1993) pp. 13-17 (vho.org/D/DGG/Werner41_4.html). |
| [65] | Cf. Jüdische Allgemeine Wochenzeitung, July 26, 1990; Der Spiegel 30/90, 111; Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sept. 21, 1990; Die Tageszeitung, July 18 and 19, 1990; cf. also F. Piper, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz, Verlag Staatliches Museum in Oswiecim, Auschwitz 1993. |
| [66] | J.-C. Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmordes, Piper, Munich 1994, p. 202. |
| [67] | For a general critique of the alleged Auschwitz death toll, see Robert Faurisson, "Wieviele Tote gab es im KL Auschwitz?", VffG 3(3) (1999), pp. 268-272 (online: vho.org/VffG/1999/3/Faurisson268-272.html; Engl.: www.corax.org/revisionism/misc/auschwitz_deaths.html); Werner Rademacher, "Die Wandlungen der Totenzahl von Auschwitz", ibid., pp. 256-267 (online: vho.org/VffG/1999/3/Rademacher256-267.html). |
| [68] | E. Nolte, Streitpunkte, Propyläen, Berlin 1993, p. 312. |
| [69] | "Mehr Judenmorde als bisher bekannt" [More Jews murdered as known before], Süddeutsche Zeitung, Dec. 17, 1991, p. 7; similar reports were to be found throughout the other daily media. |
| [70] | R. Breitman, "Holocaust Secrecy Now Abets More Genocide", New York Times, November 29, 1996; D. David, "British Documents: 7 million died in Holocaust", Jerusalem Post, May 20, 1997. |
| [71] | Cf. the chapter by A. Neumaier, and Ingrid Weckert’s remark about Yad Vashem, this volume. |
| [72] | Report of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, May 1990. |
| [73] | E. Kern, op. cit. (note 47); see also G. Schirmer, Sachsenhausen - Workuta, Grabert, Tübingen 1992, pp. 10, 49ff. |
| [74] | I. Arndt, W. Scheffler, VfZ 24 (1976) p. 105. |
| [75] | Since the United States does not register the religious denomination of immigrants, the official American statistics regarding the immigration of Jews are very unreliable; cf. Sanning, The Dissolution…, op. cit. (note 18), pp. 160-166. How very problematic the statistics for Jews living in the United States are becomes apparent from a report of the National Observer of July 2, 1962, according to which the number of Jews in the States was not 5 to 6 million, as officially reported, but rather 12 million - a most improbably high figure; cf. E. L. Ehrlich, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 38(16) (1988) pp. 16-22; DHZ 4 (1962) pp. 31f. |
| [76] | C. O. Nordling, Revue d’Histoire révisionniste (RHR) 2 (1990) pp. 50-64; Engl.: JHR 10(2) (1990) pp. 195-209 (online: vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/10/2/Nordling195-209.html). I am grateful to R. Faurisson for bringing these papers to my attention. |
| [77] | Encyklopædia Judaica, Jerusalem 1972. |
| [78] | 170 French, 96 Poles, 93 Germans, 85 Austrians, 64 Hungarians, 63 Italians, 49 Dutch, 42 Czechs, 29 Rumanians, 13 Danes, 9 Yugoslavs, 9 Belgians. |
| [79] | C. O. Nordling, RHR 4 (1991) pp. 95-100 (online: online: www.lebensraum.org/french/rhr/Nordli4.pdf), with corrections to update op. cit. (note 76); the data given here were updated by C. O. Nordling in accordance with his latest findings. |
| [80] | C. O. Nordling, RHR 5 (1991) pp. 96-106 (online: www.lebensraum.org/french/rhr/Nordl.5.pdf); Engl.: JHR 11(3) (1991) pp. 335-344 (online: vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/11/3/Nordling335-344.html). |
| [81] | H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941-1945, Mohr, Tübingen 1955. |
| [82] | N. Masur, En jude talar med Himmler, Stockholm 1945. |
| [83] | IMT Documents NO-5193 to 5198. |
| [84] | G. Wellers, op. cit. (note 17); cf. the critique of Wellers by C. Mattogno, "Sonderbehandlung. Georges Wellers und der Korherr-Bericht", VffG 1(2) (1997) pp. 71-75 (online: vho.org/VffG/1997/2/Mattogno2.html). |
| [85] | IMT Documents NO-5193. |
| [86] | S. Challen, Richard Korherr and his Reports, Cromwell Press, London 1993. |
| [87] | IMT Documents NO-5197. |
| [88] | See also Carlo Mattogno, "Sonderbehandlung. Georges Wellers und der Korherr-Bericht", VffG 1(2)(1997), pp. 71-75 (online: vho.org/VffG/1997/2/Mattogno2.html) |
| [89] | Korherr’s Letter to the Editor, Der Spiegel, no. 31 (1977). p. 12: "The allegation that I stated that over a million Jews died as a result of special treatment in the camps of the Government General and the Warthegau is likewise untrue. I must protest against the word ‘died’ in this connection. It was precisely that word ‘Sonderbehandlung’ that led me to make a telephone inquiry to the RSHA asking what this word meant. I received the answer that it referred to Jews who were to be settled in the district of Lublin." |
| [90] | J. Fisch, Reparationen, C. H. Beck, Munich 1992; E. Rumpf, Wiedergutmachung, Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte - Archiv der Zeit, Rosenheim n.d. [1992]; cf. M. Weber, JHR 8(2) (1988) pp. 243-250 (online: vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/8/2/Weber243-250.html); Ger.: DGG 37(1) (1989) pp. 10-13 (online: vho.org/D/DGG/Weber37_1.html). |
| [91] | It lasted until mid of 1997 that this topic was raised between International Jewish Organizations and Germany; cf. The American Jewish Committee, "Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe deserve pensions from the German Government", Open Letter to the German Government, signed by 83 Senators, New York Times, August 17, 1997; Erik Kirschbaum, "Jewish leader urges Bonn to pay Holocaust claims", Reuter, Bonn, August 19, 1997; "Jewish group rejects offer to Holocaust survivors", Reuter, Bonn, August 24, 1997; "Jewish group to issue list of holocaust fund recipients", Reuter, New York, September 17, 1997. |
| [92] | The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Georgia, March 31, 1985, pp. A14ff. |
| [93] | Adina Mishkoff, Administrative Assistant Amcha,
Jerusalem, E-mail |
| [94] | Amcha Germany, letter from Aug. 22, 1996, to all Germany mayors in order to raise funds for Amcha; facsimile in VffG, 1(2), (1997), p. 70 (online: vho.org/VffG/1997/2/RudWie2.html). |
| [95] | Letter of A. Mishkoff, Amcha Israel, Jerusalem, May 17, 1998, in which the 1/3-2/3-distribution is confirmed. |
| [96] | E. Friesel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 1990. |
| [97] | Cf., e.g., the ‘Death tables’ (Sterbetafeln) for Germans in Lexikon Institut Bertelsmann (ed.), Ich sag dir alles, Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1968 |
| [98] | For more details on this see my second articles, note 94. Since we divided our age distribution list into 5 year steps, we could not calculate a ‘child’-age of 16 years. Thus, the real numbers will be a bit lower than those given in the table’s row for 0-15 years. We didn’t correct them since the base on which these figures were calculated are not very reliable anyway, as Prof. Alan Glicksman, responsible for compiling the data for the USA, stated in in an e-mail message. This is just in order to give us a clue. |
| [99] | Cf. W.N. Sanning, Die Auflösung…, op. cit. (note 18), p. 53-136. |
| [100] | Ibid., p. 243; the value for Germany has to be increased to 539,000, and the Jews of the Baltics must be added to the value for the occupied Europe. |
| [101] | Equation used: (distribution[%])/Σ((1997 from survivors 1945)·(distribution[%]))·Σ(survivors 1997); for 0-4 years in 1945, e.g.: distribution[%] for Atlas = 5.0%; Σ((1997 from survivors 1945)·(distribution[%])) = 19,2 (i.e.: 19,2% of all survivors of 1945 still alive in 1997); Σ(survivors 1997) = 834,000, result: 217,231 for age 0-4 in 1945; total survivors in 1945: 4,344,614. |
| [102] | Surving rates 1997 divided by those of 1945. Only one decimal digit given. |
| [103] | Handelszeitung (Switzerland), February 4, 1998. Even the Israeli Prime Minister’s office recently stated that there were still nearly one million living survivors, see Norman Finkelstein, "How the Arab Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to a memorial industry", London Review of Books, January 6, 2000. I owe this information to David Irving. |
| [104] | Aside from the contributors to his volume, Benz also thanks Professors Yisrael Gutman, Otto D. Kulka, Yehuda Bauer, Christopher Browning, Czeslaw Madajczyk, Helmut Krausnick, H. D. Loock, Randolph L. Braham and Wolfgang Scheffler, p. 20. |
| [105] | Cf. Sonderstandesamt Arolsen (ed.), Die Sterbebücher von Auschwitz, Saur, Munich 1995; for the entire time of the camps’ existence, Pressac estimates the total at a reasonable 130,000: op. cit. (note 43), pp. 144ff. |
| [106] | Prosecution Exhibit no. 35, National Archives USA, May 13, 1945, ref. no. M-1174, roll 4, frame 54; cf. E. Gauss, Vorlesungen über Zeitgeschichte, Grabert, Tübingen 1993, p. 235 (online: vho.org/D/vuez/v4.html). |
| [107] | Without specifying the exact source, W. Sofsky (Die Ordnung des Terrors: Das Konzentrationslager, Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, p. 331, footnote 37) quotes the Red Cross regarding 450,000 victims registered by name. |
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