Chapter III — POPULATION AND EMIGRATION
Since statistics relating to Jewish populations are not everywhere known in precise detail, and approximations for various countries differ widely, it is unknown exactly how many Jews were deported and interned at any one time between the years 1939–1945. In general, however, what reliable statistics there are, especially those relating to emigration, are sufficient to show that not a fraction of six million Jews could have been exterminated.
In the first place, this claim cannot remotely be upheld on examination of the European Jewish population figures. According the Chambers Encyclopedia the total number of Jews living in Nazi Europe in 1939 was 6,500,000. Quite clearly, this would mean that almost the entire number was exterminated. But the Baseler Nachrichten, a neutral Swiss publication employing available Jewish statistical data, establishes that between 1933 and 1945, 1,500,000 Jews emigrated to Britain, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Australia, China, India, Palestine and the United States. This is confirmed by the Jewish journalist Bruno Blau, who cites the same figure in the New York Jewish paper Aufbau, August 13, 1948. Of these emigrants, approximately 400,000 came from Germany before September 1939.
This is acknowledged by the World Jewish Congress in its publication Unity in Dispersion (p. 377) which states that: “The majority of the German Jews succeeded in leaving Germany before the war broke out.” In addition to the German Jews, 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian Jews had emigrated by September, 1939, while from March 1939 onwards the Institute for Jewish Emigration in Prague had secured the emigration of 260,000 Jews from former Czechoslovakia.
In all, only 360,000 Jews remained in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia after September 1939. From Poland, an estimated 560,000 had emigrated prior to the outbreak of war. These figures mean that the number of Jewish emigrants from other European countries (France, the Netherlands, Italy, the counties of Eastern Europe etc.) was approximately 120,000.
This exodus of Jews before and during hostilities, therefore, reduces the number of Jews in Europe to approximately 5,000,000. In addition to these emigrants, we must also include the number of Jews who fled to the Soviet Union after 1939, who were later evacuated beyond reach of the German invaders. It will be shown below that the majority of these, about 1,250,000, were migrants from Poland. But apart from Poland, Reitlinger admits that 300,000 other European Jews slipped into Soviet territory between 1939 and 1941. This brings the total of Jewish emigrants to the Soviet Union to about 1,550,000. In Colliers magazine, June 9, 1945, Feiling Foster, writing of the Jews in Russia, explained that “2,200,000 have migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape from the Nazis,” but our lower estimate is probably more accurate.
Jewish migration to the Soviet Union, therefore, reduces the number of Jews within the sphere of German occupation to around 3 and ½ million, approximately 3,450,000. From these should be deducted those Jews living in neutral European countries who escaped the consequences of the war. According to the 1942 World Almanac (p. 594), the number of Jews living in Gibraltar, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland and Turkey was 413,128.
3 MILLION JEWS IN EUROPE
Consequently a figure of around 3 million Jews in German occupied Europe is as accurate as the available emigration statistics will allow. Approximately the same number however can be deduced in another way if we examine statistics for the Jewish populations remaining in countries occupied by the Reich. More than half of those Jews who migrated to the Soviet Union after 1939 came from Poland.
It is frequently claimed that the war with Poland added some 3 million Jews to the German sphere of influence and that almost the whole of this Polish Jewish population was “exterminated.” This is a major factual error. The 1931 Jewish population census for Poland put the number of Jews at 2,732,600 (Reitlinger, Die Endlosung, p. 36). Reitlinger states that at least 1,170,000 of these were in the Russian zone occupied in the autumn of 1939, about a million of whom were evacuated to the Urals and south Siberia after the German invasion of June 1941 (ibid. p. 50). As described above, an estimated 500,000 Jews had emigrated from Poland prior to the war.
Moreover the journalist Raymond Arthur Davies, who spent the war in the Soviet Union, observed that approximately 250,000 had already fled from German-occupied Poland to Russia between 1939 and 1941 and were to be encountered in every Soviet province (Odyssey through Hell, N.Y., 1946, p. 102). Subtracting these figures from the population of 2,732,600 therefore, and allowing for the normal population increase, no more than 1,100,000 Polish Jews could have been under German rule at the end of 1939 (Gutachen des Instituts fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1956, p. 80).
To this number we may add the 360,000 Jews remaining in Germany, Austria and former Czechoslovakia (Bohemia-Moravia and Slovakia) after the extensive emigration from those countries prior to the war described above. Of the 320,000 French Jews, the Public Prosecutor representing that part of the indictment relating to France at the Nuremberg Trials, stated that 120,000 Jews were deported, though Reitlinger estimates only about 50,000.
Thus the total number of Jews under Nazi rule remains below two million. Deportations from the Scandinavian countries were few and from Bulgaria none at all. When the Jewish populations of Holland (140,000), Belgium (40,000), Italy (50,000), Yugoslavia (55,000), Hungary (380,000) and Romania (725,000) are included, the figure does not much exceed 3 million. This excess is due to the fact that the latter figures were prewar estimates unaffected by emigration, which from these countries accounted for about 120,000 (see above). This cross-checking therefore confirms the estimate of approximately 3 million European Jews under German occupation.
RUSSIAN JEWS EVACUATED
The precise figures concerning Russian Jews are unknown and have therefore been the subject of extreme exaggeration. The Jewish statistician Jacob Leszczynski states that in 1939 there were 2,100,000 Jews living in future German occupied Russia — i.e. western Russia. In addition, some 260,000 lived in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. According to Loui Levine, President of the American Jewish Council for Russian Relief, who made a post-war tour of the Soviet Union and submitted a report on the status of Jews there, the majority of these number were evacuated east after the German armies launched their invasion.
In Chicago, on October 30, 1946, he declared that “At the outset of the war, Jews were amongst the first evacuated from the western regions threatened by the Hitlerite invaders — shipped to safety east of the Urals. Two million Jews were thus saved.” This high number is confirmed by the Jewish journalist David Bergelson, who wrote in the Moscow Yiddish paper Ainikeit December 5, 1942, that “Thanks to the evacuation, the majority (80%) of the Jews in the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia before the arrival of the Germans were rescued.
Reitlinger agrees with the Jewish authority Joseph Schechtmann who admits that huge numbers were evacuated, though he estimates a slightly higher number of Russian and Baltic Jews left under German occupation, between 650,000 and 850,000 (Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 499). In respect of these Soviet Jews remaining in German territory, it will be proved later that in the war in Russia no more than one hundred thousand persons were killed by the German Action Groups as partisans and Bolshevik commissars, not all of whom were Jews. By contrast, the partisans themselves claimed to have murdered five times that number of German troops.
‘SIX MILLION’ UNTRUE SAY NEUTRAL SWISS
It is clear therefore that the Germans could not possibly have gained control over, or exterminated, anything like six million Jews. Excluding the Soviet Union, the number of Jews in Nazi occupied Europe after emigration was scarcely more than three million, by no means all of whom were interned. To approach the extermination of even half of six million would have meant the liquidation of every Jew living in Europe. And yet it is known that large numbers of Jews were alive in Europe after 1945. Philip Friedmann in Their Brother’s Keepers (N.Y., 1957, p. 13) states that “at least a million Jews survived in the very crucible of the Nazi hell,” while the official figure of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is 1,559,600. Thus, even if one accepts the latter estimate, the number of possible wartime Jewish deaths could not possibly have exceeded a limit of one and a half million.
Precisely this conclusion was reached by the reputable journal Baseler Nachrichten of neutral Switzerland. In an article entitled “We hoch ist die Zahl der jiidischen Opfer?” (“How high is the number of Jewish victims?”, June 13, 1946), it explained that purely on the basis of the population and emigration figures described above, a maximum of only one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties. Later on however it will be demonstrated that the number was actually far less, for the Baseler Nachrichten accepted the Joint Distribution Committee’s figure of 1,559,600 survivors after the war, but we shall show that the number of claims for compensation by Jewish survivors is more than double that figure. This information was not available to the Swiss in 1946.
IMPOSSIBLE BIRTH RATE
Indisputable evidence is also provided by the post-war world Jewish population statistics. The World Almanac of 1938 gives the number of Jews in the world as 16,588,259. But after the war the New York Times, February 22, 1948, placed the number of Jews in the world at a minimum of 15,000,000 and a maximum of 18,000,000. Quite obviously, these figures make it impossible for the number of Jewish war-time casualties to be measured in anything but thousands. Fifteen and a half million in 1938 minus the alleged six million leaves nine million; the New York Times figures would mean, therefore, that the world’s Jews produced seven million births, almost doubling their numbers, in the space of ten years. This is patently ridiculous.
It would appear therefore that the great majority of the missing “six million” were in fact emigrants — emigrants to European countries, to the Soviet Union and the United States before, during and after the war. And emigrants also, in vast numbers to Palestine during and especially at the end of the war. After 1945 boat-loads of Jewish survivors entered Palestine illegally from Europe, causing considerable embarrassment to the British Government of the time; indeed, so great were the numbers that H.M. Stationery Office publication No. 190 (November 5, 1946) described them as “almost amounting to a second Exodus.” It was these emigrants to all parts of the world who had swollen the world Jewish population to between 15 and 18 millions by 1948, and probably the greatest part of them were emigrants to the United States who entered in violation of the quota laws.
On August 16, 1963 David Ben Gurion, President of Israel, stated that although the official Jewish population of America was said to be 5,600,000, “the total number would not be estimated too high at 9,000,000” (Deutsche Wochenzeitung, November 23, 1963). The reason for this high figure is underlined by Albert Maisal in his article “Our Newest Americans” (Readers Digest, January, 1957), for he reveals that “Soon after World War II, by Presidential decree, 90 per cent of all quota visas for central and eastern Europe were issued to the uprooted.” Reproduced on the prior page is just one extract from hundreds that regularly appear in the obituary columns of Aufbau, the Jewish American weekly published in New York (June 16, 1972). It shows how Jewish emigrants to the United States subsequently changed their names; their former names when in Europe appear in brackets. For example, as shown: Arthur Kingsley (formerly Dr. Konigsberger of Frankfurt). Could it be that some or all of these people whose names are ‘deceased’ were included in the missing six million of Europe?