More Jews Were Alive After the War Than Before

This claim is the inverse of an arithmetic mistake the deniers hope the listener will not check. It compares the world Jewish population at one date with the world Jewish population at another, claims the second is higher, and concludes that no large loss can have occurred. The figures do not show what the claim says they show, and the comparison is the wrong comparison anyway. The wartime loss happened to the European Jewish population. The post-war count includes the unaffected American, Soviet-interior, British, Latin American, Palestinian and other Jewish populations who were never at risk of being killed in Europe. Comparing two world figures answers a different question.

The figures the claim depends on

The denier claim usually pairs two specific numbers. The first is a 1939 estimate of world Jewry, often given as the figure published in the World Almanac for 1940 (covering 1939) of approximately 15.6 million. The second is a post-war figure, often the figure published in the World Almanac for 1949 (covering 1948) of approximately 11.3 million, or sometimes the higher 1948 figure of approximately 15 million from a different source. The argument has variants: in one version, the post-war figure is higher than the pre-war figure, “proving” that nothing was lost; in another, the post-war figure is lower but not by anything like six million, “proving” that the gap is much smaller than claimed. The figures themselves come from real publications. What the deniers do with them does not.

The 1939 World Almanac figure of approximately 15.6 million was a global figure for world Jewry, calculated by the American Jewish Committee from national counts that included approximately 9.5 million in Europe, approximately 4.7 million in North America, approximately 1 million in Asia (mostly the Yishuv in Palestine and the Jewish communities of Iran and Iraq), approximately 600,000 in Latin America, and smaller numbers in Africa and Australasia. The 1948 figures, depending on the source and the year, give world Jewry at between 11 and 12 million, with the European component reduced from approximately 9.5 million to approximately 3.5 million, the Soviet figure separated out and given as approximately 2.5 million (including the Asian republics where Polish Jewish refugees had spent the war), and the American, Latin American and Palestinian figures slightly higher than in 1939 because of births and refugee absorption. The world figures are not in agreement on the exact total because different counters used different methods and different cut-off dates, but the European component falls by approximately 6 million across every honest reconstruction.

The arithmetic the deniers ask the listener to skip

The pre-war figure includes Jewish populations who were never at risk. The American Jewish population in 1939 was approximately 4.7 million. By 1948 it had grown by natural increase and by absorbing refugees to approximately 5 million. The increase was approximately 300,000 over nine years. The Latin American Jewish population grew from approximately 600,000 to approximately 700,000 over the same period. The Palestinian Jewish population grew from approximately 460,000 in 1939 to approximately 650,000 in 1948 (with the figure jumping further in late 1948 as the Israeli War of Independence ended and emigration accelerated). The Soviet-interior Jewish population, behind the Urals and in the Asian republics, was largely beyond German reach; the Polish-Jewish refugees who had fled east in 1939 and 1940 swelled the Soviet figure substantially during the war. The unaffected populations together numbered approximately 6 to 6.5 million in 1939 and approximately 7 million in 1948.

The European Jewish population, the actual subject of the killing, fell from approximately 9.5 million in 1939 to approximately 3.5 million in 1946, with much of the post-war European figure consisting of repatriates from the Soviet interior. The fall of approximately 6 million in the European total accounts for the gap. The world figures appear to fall by less because the unaffected populations were growing while the European one collapsed; the world figures appear to be in the same range pre- and post-war because two opposing movements (a large fall in Europe, smaller rises elsewhere) partly cancel out at the global level. Looking at the global figure to assess the European loss is exactly like looking at the population of Asia to assess casualties on the Western Front.

What the standard sources actually said at the time

The American Jewish Year Book, the standard demographic publication of the period, was entirely explicit about this distinction. Its 1947 to 1948 volume (covering data through 1946) gave the European Jewish population at approximately 3.8 million, the world Jewish population at approximately 11 million, and noted in its accompanying text that the gap from the pre-war European figure represented the wartime losses. The volume’s editor, Maurice Karpf, set out the methodology in detail and noted, with the understatement appropriate to a statistical publication, that the differential between the European and world counts had to be understood as a function of where the killing had taken place. The figures were not hidden. They were published in the standard reference work of the field, in the same form as the pre-war volumes, with the same methodology, and the same explicit distinction between European and world figures.

The argument that the world figure shows no loss requires the listener to ignore the published distinction in the very source the figure comes from. The American Jewish Committee, which compiled the figures, has been on the record from 1946 onwards saying that the figures show approximately six million European Jewish dead, and that the world total partly masks this through unaffected population growth elsewhere. The deniers cite the figure and ignore the explanation that travels with it.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it has the surface appearance of an arithmetic argument that the listener can check, while in fact relying on the listener not checking. It picks two numbers, displays them, and skips the categorical distinction (European versus world, pre-war versus repatriated, killed versus unaffected) that the numbers themselves carry in their original publications. To accept the denial, one would have to accept that the editorial offices of the American Jewish Year Book, the American Jewish Committee, the Joint Distribution Committee and the World Jewish Congress, working on the same figures from 1945 onwards, all collectively missed the elementary point that the world total had not fallen as much as the European total, and that the deniers are the ones to have spotted it. They are not. The point was understood and stated in print at the time. The denial requires the listener not to look.

What is the European Jewish population in 1939 in their reckoning? What is the European Jewish population in 1946? Why is the world figure being compared instead?

See also

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Sources

• The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1940 edition (covering 1939), New York World-Telegram, with population tables drawn from the American Jewish Committee figures
• The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1949 edition (covering 1948), New York World-Telegram
• American Jewish Year Book, volumes 41 (1939 to 1940) and 49 (1947 to 1948), American Jewish Committee, with the Lestschinsky and Karpf demographic tables and accompanying methodological notes
• Jacob Lestschinsky, Crisis, Catastrophe and Survival: A Jewish Balance Sheet 1914 to 1948, Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, 1948, with the explicit distinction between European and world figures
• Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991, country-by-country and continental tables
• Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population”, annual chapter in American Jewish Year Book, with continued historical reconstructions of pre-war and post-war figures
• Roberto Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1976
• U. O. Schmelz, World Jewish Population: Regional Estimates and Projections, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981, with the standard treatment of how unaffected populations partly mask European losses in world totals
• 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