The Holocaust deniers claim: “There were not enough Jews in Europe before the war for six million to have been killed. The pre-war Jewish population numbers do not support the claim.”
The pre-war Jewish population of Europe is one of the better-attested demographic facts of the twentieth century. Jews were a recognised religious and ethnic group in every European country, recorded in national censuses (the Polish census of 1931, the German census of 1933, the Romanian census of 1930, the Hungarian census of 1941, the Soviet census of 1939) and counted independently by Jewish community organisations for the practical purposes of running schools, synagogues, welfare bodies, burial societies and federations. The figures were compiled annually in the American Jewish Year Book, the standard demographic reference of the period, and used by governments, by the League of Nations, by the American Joint Distribution Committee, and by the Jewish Agency for Palestine to plan policy in the years before the war. They were not invented after 1945.
The standard figure for the Jewish population of Europe on the eve of the Second World War, drawn from this body of pre-war evidence, is approximately 9.5 million. The figure appears in the American Jewish Year Book volume 41 (1939 to 1940), based on the work of the demographer Jacob Lestschinsky, the leading Jewish demographer of the period, who had been compiling these counts since the 1920s. After the war, the same demographic methods applied to the post-war population produced a figure of approximately 3.5 million Jews remaining in Europe, including the displaced persons in the camps. The gap between the two figures is approximately 6 million. That is the demographic accounting in its bluntest form.
The country-by-country picture
The headline figure dissolves into a set of national catastrophes, each separately documented. The largest by a long way was Poland. The Polish census of 1931 recorded just under 3.1 million Jews; estimates for September 1939, when the country was invaded, put the figure at approximately 3.3 million. Of those, the most rigorous post-war counts give a Jewish population in Poland in 1946 of between 200,000 and 300,000, the great majority of them survivors who had spent the war in the Soviet interior rather than under German occupation. The Jewish population of Poland under German occupation had been effectively destroyed. The figure of approximately 3 million Polish Jews killed appears in the work of every serious historian, from Raul Hilberg to Yehuda Bauer to Wolfgang Benz to Christian Gerlach.
The second largest national loss was in the Soviet territories under German occupation. The 1939 Soviet census recorded just over 3 million Jews in the USSR; the territories overrun by the Wehrmacht in 1941 contained approximately 2.7 million Jews once the post-1939 annexations of eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Bukovina are included. Of these, between 1.34 million and 1.5 million were killed, mostly by the Einsatzgruppen and their local auxiliaries in the second half of 1941 and through 1942. The work of Yitzhak Arad, drawing on Soviet, German and Jewish archival material that became accessible after 1991, settled the figure for Soviet Jewish dead at approximately 2.5 million when the annexed territories are included.
Hungary is the third largest case. The Hungarian census of 1941, taken within the country’s wartime borders (which included territory recovered from Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), recorded approximately 725,000 Jews and a further 100,000 converts subject to the racial laws. Of these, approximately 565,000 were killed, the great majority in a fifty-six day period in the spring and summer of 1944 when Adolf Eichmann’s office organised the deportation of the Hungarian Jewish provinces to Auschwitz at a rate of around 12,000 people a day.
The other large national components are documented to comparable standards. Romania within its 1940 borders had a Jewish population of approximately 757,000; the figure killed lies between 270,000 and 380,000, the wider range reflecting the regime’s mixed record (genocidal in Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria, broadly protective in the Old Kingdom). Czechoslovakia within its 1938 borders had approximately 357,000 Jews; about 270,000 were killed. Germany and Austria within their 1933 borders had approximately 565,000 Jews; about 165,000 to 195,000 were killed, the lower headline figure reflecting the substantial pre-war emigration that the regime had itself enforced. France had approximately 330,000 Jews on the eve of the war, of whom about 76,000 were deported and killed. The Netherlands had approximately 140,000 Jews, of whom about 102,000 were killed, the highest proportional loss in Western Europe. Greece had approximately 73,000 Jews, of whom about 60,000 to 65,000 were killed, mostly the Sephardic community of Salonika, which had existed since 1492 and was effectively destroyed in two months of deportations in the spring of 1943. Yugoslavia had approximately 78,000 Jews, of whom about 60,000 to 65,000 were killed. Lithuania within its 1939 borders had approximately 168,000 Jews, of whom about 140,000 were killed, mostly in the second half of 1941. Latvia had approximately 95,000 Jews, of whom about 70,000 were killed. Belgium had approximately 66,000, of whom about 28,500 were killed. Italy had approximately 44,500, of whom about 7,500 were killed. Bulgaria had approximately 50,000 Jews within its pre-war borders, of whom about 7,000 were killed in the territories it annexed in 1941 (Macedonia and Thrace). Smaller communities in Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark and Albania completed the European total.
These national figures, summed, account for the headline. They are not Allied propaganda. They were produced after the war by historians working in the national archives of the countries concerned, mostly during the 1980s and 1990s, often by scholars from those countries working in their own languages on their own communities. The single most rigorous compilation is the volume edited by Wolfgang Benz, Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, published by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich in 1991, in which national specialists worked through the surviving demographic, deportation and killing records country by country. Benz’s total range was 5.29 to 6.0 million. Raul Hilberg, working independently and deliberately conservative in his counting, gave 5.1 million in the third edition of The Destruction of the European Jews. Israeli scholars working from the Yad Vashem material reach figures around 5.85 million. The differences between independent estimates are small, and they are arguments about the lower edge of the range, not about whether the killing was of millions or of hundreds of thousands.
The post-war count
The other half of the demographic accounting is the count of the surviving Jews of Europe after the war. The American Joint Distribution Committee, which led the relief effort in the displaced persons camps and across liberated Europe, produced detailed counts in 1945, 1946 and 1947 for the express practical purpose of feeding people and finding them homes. The Joint’s figures, cross-checked against the national counts compiled by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and against the post-war censuses of the European countries themselves (Poland 1946, Czechoslovakia 1947, Hungary 1949, France 1946), gave a Jewish population of Europe in 1946 of approximately 3.8 million, falling to approximately 3.5 million by 1948 as emigration to Palestine, the United States and elsewhere accelerated.
The Soviet Jewish population, the largest single component of the post-war total, was concentrated in the unoccupied interior and in the territories liberated by the Red Army. The 1959 Soviet census, the first full population count after the war, recorded approximately 2.27 million Jews. The Polish Jewish population in 1946 was around 240,000, more than three quarters of them Jews who had survived in the Soviet interior and were repatriated. The Romanian Jewish population in 1947 was approximately 380,000. The Hungarian Jewish population in 1946 was approximately 200,000. The German and Austrian post-war Jewish population, including the displaced persons in the camps, was approximately 200,000. The French Jewish population was approximately 250,000. The other Western European communities together amounted to a further 100,000 or so. These figures sum to a post-war European Jewish population in the broad range of 3.5 million.
The arithmetic, then, is not opaque. Approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe in 1939. Approximately 3.5 million Jews lived in Europe in 1946. The gap is approximately 6 million. The gap is corroborated, from a wholly different evidence base (perpetrator records, deportation lists, killing-site archaeology, individual victim names), by the historians’ country-by-country counts. Two independent methods, applied to two independent bodies of evidence, by scholars working in different countries and different decades, produce the same answer.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim that the pre-war population numbers do not support the figure of six million is harmful because it asks the listener to disbelieve the entire body of demographic, governmental, communal and academic record-keeping on which the modern understanding of European Jewish history rests. To accept the denial, one would have to dismiss the Polish census of 1931, the German census of 1933, the Hungarian census of 1941, the Soviet census of 1939, the running figures of the American Jewish Year Book, the work of Jacob Lestschinsky compiled across the 1920s and 1930s, the post-war counts of the Joint Distribution Committee and UNRRA, the post-war national censuses of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and France, and the country-by-country scholarly compilations of Hilberg, Benz, Bauer, Arad, Friedländer and Gerlach. The evidence is not in one place to be disputed; it is everywhere, produced at different times, for different purposes, by different bodies, and it converges. Pretending that this body of evidence does not exist, or that it is unreliable in toto, is not historical revisionism; it is wishing the record away. And the wish, when it is granted in conversation, lets the killing recede a little.
What is the pre-war figure in their reckoning? What is the post-war figure? What demographic source has produced these figures, and where can it be read?
See also
Sources
- American Jewish Year Book, volumes 41 (1939 to 1940) and 47 (1945 to 1946), American Jewish Committee, demographic tables compiled under the direction of Jacob Lestschinsky and Harry Schneiderman
- Jacob Lestschinsky, Crisis, Catastrophe and Survival: A Jewish Balance Sheet 1914 to 1948, Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, 1948
- 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, statistical appendices
- Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem, 2009
- Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, revised edition, Franklin Watts, 2001
- Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945, HarperCollins, 2007
- Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews, Cambridge University Press, 2016
- Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, condensed edition, Wayne State University Press, 2000
- Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania, University of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem, 2011
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933 to 1945, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1975, statistical appendices
- American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, post-war population reports for Europe, 1945 to 1948, https://archives.jdc.org
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, https://yvng.yadvashem.org