Jewish Organisations Inflated the Numbers

This claim asks the listener to believe that the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Yad Vashem and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany either separately or in concert manufactured a figure of approximately six million Jewish dead in order to extract money and political concessions in the post-war period. The claim has its surface plausibility from the fact that these organisations did exist, did campaign for reparations, and did make use of the figure in their advocacy. The actual chronology of the figure, the actual sources of the count, and the actual identity of the people who set the count, do not survive contact with the claim.

Who established the figure

The figure of approximately six million Jewish dead was first placed on the public record at Nuremberg in November 1945 by the United States, British, French and Soviet prosecutors, drawing on the sworn affidavit of Wilhelm Höttl (Nuremberg Document PS-2738) and on the captured German bureaucratic records. The figure was used in the courtroom by Robert Jackson (US), Sir Hartley Shawcross (UK), Auguste Champetier de Ribes (France) and Roman Rudenko (USSR), in the presence of the four-judge international bench. The judgment of 1 October 1946 incorporated the figure. None of these prosecutors was a Jewish organisation. The figure was established by the Allied prosecuting governments and the international tribunal, in court, in front of the international press, in 1945 and 1946. Jewish organisations did not put it there.

The figure was independently confirmed in the same period by Jacob Lestschinsky, the Jewish demographer who had been compiling European Jewish population statistics since the 1920s. His balance sheet was published in 1948. The country-by-country reconstructions developed in subsequent decades, by Raul Hilberg (American Jewish but a wholly independent academic, working at the University of Vermont), Wolfgang Benz (a non-Jewish German historian at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich), Yitzhak Arad (an Israeli historian using newly accessible Soviet archives after 1991), Saul Friedländer (Israeli-American), Christian Gerlach (a non-Jewish German), Randolph Braham (Hungarian-American Jewish), Jean Ancel (Israeli), and the various national specialists who contributed to Benz’s Dimension des Völkermords (1991), all returned figures consistent with the standard total. The reconstructions used different sources, different methods, and different professional homes. They are not co-ordinated. Their convergence on the same total is the evidence that the total is not a Jewish-organisational construct.

What the Jewish organisations actually did

Jewish organisations did campaign for reparations, on the basis of the established figure, and the campaigns were frequently successful. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany was founded in October 1951 to negotiate with the Federal Republic of Germany on behalf of the surviving Jewish communities and the State of Israel. The negotiations led to the Luxembourg Agreement of September 1952, under which West Germany paid approximately 3.5 billion Deutschmarks in restitution over twelve years. The agreement was negotiated against detailed accounting of property seizures, slave-labour earnings, communal assets and survivor compensation, with the German government insisting on every figure being individually substantiated. The reparations were not paid on the basis of an inflated death toll; they were paid on the basis of itemised claims that the German government negotiators audited line by line.

The post-war Jewish organisations were also engaged in counting the survivors, for the immediate practical purposes of the relief operation. The Joint Distribution Committee, which led the Western relief effort in the displaced persons camps and across Europe from 1945 onwards, ran a continuous count of surviving Jews because it was using the count to plan rations, to find emigration destinations, and to certify entitlement to American visas. Inflating the death toll would have meant under-counting the survivors, which would have meant under-supplying the relief operation. The Joint had every operational reason to count accurately. So did the Jewish Agency, which was using the survivor count to project absorption capacity in Palestine. So did Yad Vashem, founded in 1953 by Israeli law specifically to collect the names of victims and which to date has identified approximately 5 million individual victims by name with documentary or testimonial support, each name supported by surviving records, family testimony or community memorial books.

The independence test

The standard test for whether a count was constructed by an interested party is to look for independent reconstructions arrived at by people without the alleged interest. The Holocaust figure passes this test repeatedly. The Allied prosecuting governments at Nuremberg in 1945 had no Jewish-organisational stake. The bureaucracies of the perpetrating regime, captured in their own surviving documents, had a strong interest in not having a figure in the millions on their files at all, and yet the Wannsee Protocol’s tabulation, the Korherr Report, the Operational Situation Reports of the Einsatzgruppen, and the Höfle Telegram of January 1943 (decoded by Bletchley Park, GCHQ file HW 16/23) all together support the figure of approximately six million from the perpetrators’ own arithmetic. The German non-Jewish historians who worked on the figures from the 1960s onwards, in many cases on West German government grants, had no plausible Jewish-organisational interest. The non-Jewish national specialists in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, France, Greece and elsewhere who reconstructed their own national components of the killing had no Jewish-organisational interest either.

For the figure to be a Jewish-organisational construct, all of these independent investigators would have to have been deceived in compatible ways, on compatible questions, across decades, in different countries, in different languages, working from different sources. The chance of this is zero, and the deniers have produced no evidence that it has happened.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it relocates the moral discredit of the Holocaust from the perpetrators to the victims and their organisations. The argument’s logical structure is: Jews benefited from the figure, therefore Jews invented the figure. The first half of the argument is half-true (Jews are not the only beneficiaries of accurate Holocaust history, and the principal beneficiary of the figure has been the post-war international moral consensus that genocide is wrong, but reparations did flow to surviving Jewish communities and to Israel); the second half does not follow at all. People can benefit from a true thing without having invented it. The denier move is the move of treating any group’s interest in a fact as evidence that the group invented the fact. Applied consistently, the move would dissolve every published figure on every subject. Applied selectively, as it is here, the move is what its function suggests it is: a way of inviting the listener to suspect Jewish accounts of the killing of Jews because they are Jewish accounts. Recognising that as the actual mechanism of the claim is the first step to seeing past it.

Who first established the figure on the public record? Which non-Jewish scholars have independently arrived at the same figure? What sources did they use, and where can their work be read?

See also

• Raul Hilberg
• Yad Vashem Jerusalem
• The Nuremberg Trials
• The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
• Adolf Eichmann
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Sources

• Wilhelm Höttl, sworn affidavit on Eichmann’s statement of the six million figure, Nuremberg Document PS-2738, 26 November 1945
• Robert H. Jackson, opening statement for the United States, 21 November 1945, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 2, Nuremberg, 1947
• International Military Tribunal, Judgment of 1 October 1946, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 1, Nuremberg, 1947
• Höfle Telegram, January 1943, decoded by GCHQ, file HW 16/23, The National Archives, Kew; published in Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942”, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 15:3, 2001
• Korherr Report, March and April 1943, “Die Endlösung der europäischen Judenfrage”, Nuremberg Document NO-5193, Eichmann Trial Document T/501
• Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, Yale University Press, 2003
• Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews, Cambridge University Press, 2016
• Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945, HarperCollins, 2007
• Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem, 2009
• Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, “Luxembourg Agreement Documents and Negotiating Records”, https://www.claimscon.org
• Ronald Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World: A History of the Claims Conference, second edition, Frank Cass, 2001
• Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, https://yvng.yadvashem.org, with published methodology on individual victim identification
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org