Census Data Does Not Support the Claimed Losses

This claim picks at the level beneath the headline demographic accounting. It accepts, by implication, that censuses exist; it argues that the censuses, looked at properly, do not return a six million loss. Sometimes a specific census is named (the German 1939 census of the expanded Reich, the Soviet census of 1939, the Hungarian census of 1941, the Polish census of 1931), and a specific number is paired with another specific number to suggest that the gap cannot be what the standard accounts say. The argument relies on the fact that few listeners will check the censuses themselves. The censuses do exist, the figures are what they are, and the loss is what the standard accounts say it is.

The Polish census of 1931

The Polish general census of 9 December 1931 was conducted by the Polish Central Statistical Office (Główny Urząd Statystyczny). It recorded the population by religion as well as by language and nationality. The Jewish population of Poland, defined by religious affiliation (Mosaic), was 3,113,933. By mother tongue, 2,489,034 declared Yiddish or Hebrew as their first language, with the rest reporting Polish or another language as their first tongue while remaining religiously Jewish. The census was a state-run statistical exercise, not a Jewish self-report. Its results were published in detail by the Polish government in the multi-volume Statystyka Polski series in the years that followed. The post-war Polish census of 14 February 1946 recorded a Jewish population of approximately 240,000, the great majority of whom had survived the war in the Soviet interior and been repatriated. The gap is on the order of 2.9 million. The denier argument that the Polish census does not support a loss in the millions has nothing in the actual census reports to support it.

The Soviet census of 1939

The Soviet all-union census of 17 January 1939, conducted by the Central Statistical Administration of the USSR, recorded a Jewish population of 3,028,538 within the Soviet borders as they then stood. After the September 1939 partition of Poland, the June 1940 annexation of the Baltic states, and the same-year annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, the Soviet Jewish population grew by approximately 2 million through territorial acquisition. By June 1941, when the Wehrmacht invaded, the Jewish population of the USSR within its expanded borders was approximately 5 million. The next full Soviet census, on 15 January 1959, recorded 2,267,814 Jews. The interval contains the war losses, post-war emigration, and natural change. The reconstructions by Yitzhak Arad, Mordechai Altshuler and Mark Tolts, working from the surviving Soviet wartime records and the Einsatzgruppen reports, settle the wartime loss in the Soviet territories at approximately 2.5 million Jewish dead, with the precise figure depending on how the contested annexed regions are counted. The Soviet census record supports the standard accounts; it does not contradict them.

The German census of 1933 and 1939

The German census of 16 June 1933 was the last conducted before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. It recorded 499,682 Jews by religious affiliation in the territory of the Reich as it then stood. The census was reanalysed after the Nuremberg Laws to capture those defined as Jewish on racial grounds (the so-called Glaubensjuden, the religious Jews, plus the Geltungsjuden and Mischlinge defined by ancestry); the resulting count of those subject to the racial laws was approximately 565,000 within the 1933 borders. The census of 17 May 1939, conducted after the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland, recorded a Jewish population, by then much reduced by emigration, of 213,930 in the expanded Reich. Those who remained were largely the elderly, the poor and those who had been refused entry by other countries. The fate of those who remained, plus the Austrian Jews counted in the 1939 figure, is documented in the deportation lists held at the Bundesarchiv and the Arolsen Archives, with names, dates and destinations. Approximately 165,000 to 195,000 German and Austrian Jews were killed. The German census record is unambiguous, and it does not refute the standard count; it supplies one of its inputs.

The Hungarian census of 1941

The Hungarian census of 31 January 1941 was conducted within the country’s wartime borders, which by then included territories regained from Romania (northern Transylvania), Czechoslovakia (the Felvidék and Subcarpathia) and Yugoslavia (the Délvidék). It recorded 725,007 Jews by religion. The census also recorded a further 100,000 or so persons who had converted to Christianity but were subject to the Hungarian racial laws of 1938 and 1939; these were counted as Jews for the purposes of the laws, though as Christians for the purposes of the census religion field. Of the resulting population subject to the racial laws, approximately 565,000 were killed, the great majority deported to Auschwitz between May and July 1944 in the operation organised by Adolf Eichmann’s office in Budapest. The deportation totals are not contested in the scholarly literature; they were recorded by the Hungarian gendarmerie at the time, by the Auschwitz administration on arrival, and by the Hungarian Statistical Office’s own post-war reckoning. The Hungarian post-war Jewish population in 1949 was approximately 134,000. The gap is consistent with the standard figure.

What the denier argument does

The technique used by the deniers is not to dispute that censuses exist but to pick a single pair of figures that, in isolation, sounds awkward. A favourite is the claim that the 1939 World Almanac figure for world Jewry (approximately 15.6 million) is barely lower than the post-war figure (approximately 11 million in 1948), implying that the gap cannot be six million. The argument relies on the listener not noticing that the post-war figure includes the natural increase that would have occurred in the unaffected American, British, Soviet-interior and Palestinian Jewish populations across the war years; that the headline 1939 figure includes Jews outside Europe (in North America, Latin America, the British Empire, Palestine and the unaffected portions of the USSR) who were never at risk; and that the relevant comparison is between the European Jewish population on the eve of the war and the European Jewish population after it, not between two world figures. When the comparison is set up correctly, the gap is what the censuses say it is.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that census data does not support the claimed losses is harmful because it borrows the surface authority of statistical rigour to argue the opposite of what the statistics actually say. Census records are public documents, mostly available in print and increasingly online, and they support the standard count by themselves. To accept the denial, one would have to accept that the Polish, Soviet, German, Hungarian, Czechoslovak, Romanian and other national statistical offices, conducting their decennial counts under domestic political pressures of every conceivable kind across the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, had been collectively reporting figures that, when compared to the post-war counts, all happen to be wrong in the same direction by approximately the same proportion. They were not. The figures are open to anyone who chooses to look at them.

Which census is in their reckoning? What figure does it report? What is the post-war counterpart, and how is the gap accounted for?

See also

• The Nuremberg Laws
• Adolf Eichmann
• The Baltic States

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Sources

• Główny Urząd Statystyczny, Drugi Powszechny Spis Ludności z dnia 9 XII 1931 r., multiple volumes, Warsaw, 1936 to 1939, with the Jewish population tables in volumes covering each voivodeship
• Central Statistical Administration of the USSR, Itogi Vsesoyuznoy perepisi naseleniya 1939 goda, Moscow, partially published 1939 to 1941, full reanalysis post-war by Yu. A. Polyakov and others
• Statistisches Reichsamt, Volks-, Berufs- und Betriebszählung vom 16. Juni 1933, Berlin, 1936, with subsequent racial reanalysis by the Reich Statistical Office under the 1935 laws
• Statistisches Reichsamt, Volkszählung vom 17. Mai 1939, Berlin, 1941
• Magyar Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Az 1941. évi népszámlálás, Budapest, partially published 1947 onwards
• Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991, country-by-country tables drawn from the national census records
• Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem, 2009
• Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile, Centre for Research of East European Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998
• Mark Tolts, “Demography of the Jews in the Former Soviet Union: Yesterday and Today”, in Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, no. 50, 2003
• Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, condensed edition, Wayne State University Press, 2000, with the Hungarian census tables
• Bundesarchiv Berlin, Gedenkbuch: Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945, online edition with full deportation records
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org