The Demographic Evidence is Unreliable

This claim attacks not the figure itself but the means by which historians arrive at it. The argument is that demography of the Jewish population of pre-war Europe is too soft, too contested, too dependent on interpretation, to support a number to the nearest million, let alone the precise figure of six. The argument has a respectable surface. Demography is indeed a discipline of estimates; censuses are imperfect, definitions of who counts as Jewish vary, and the records on which any twentieth-century population count rests are uneven from country to country. The denier argument trades on the genuine messiness at the edges to suggest that the whole body of evidence is unreliable in its essentials. It is not. The methods used by the historical demographers of the European Jewish catastrophe are conventional, public, peer-reviewed and reproducible, and they converge.

How the pre-war counting was done

The pre-war Jewish population of Europe was counted from three independent kinds of source. The first was the national census. Most European states ran a census every ten years (Poland in 1921 and 1931, the Soviet Union in 1926 and 1939, Germany in 1925 and 1933, Romania in 1930, Hungary in 1930 and 1941, Czechoslovakia in 1921 and 1930) and most of them recorded religious affiliation as a standard demographic field. Censuses were not run for the convenience of post-war historians. They were run for the practical state purposes of taxation, conscription, school provision and electoral rolls; they were cross-checked against parish, civil registry and military records; and they were treated as authoritative by the governments that commissioned them. The records survive in national archives and have been worked through repeatedly since the war.

The second source was the records of the Jewish communities themselves. Every European country with a substantial Jewish population had a network of organised communal bodies (the Polish kehillot, the German Reichsvertretung, the French Consistoire, the Hungarian Magyar Izraeliták Országos Irodája, the Romanian Federation of Jewish Communities, the various Yiddish school networks and welfare bodies) that maintained their own counts for the practical purposes of running schools, synagogues, hospitals, burial societies, welfare programmes, ritual provision and voluntary tax collection. The communal counts were generally taken seriously by the relevant governments, since they were used to determine state subsidies and the allocation of communal seats on local councils. Many of these records survive, having been collected by the perpetrators in the course of the persecution and by the Allies, the Joint Distribution Committee and the post-war Jewish bodies in the course of recovery.

The third source was the work of the Jewish demographic institutes. The major figure was Jacob Lestschinsky, the Russian-born statistician who had run the demographic research department of YIVO in Vilna in the 1920s and 1930s, then the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York during the war. Lestschinsky had published a continuous series of papers on European Jewish demography from 1922 through the 1930s, drawing on the censuses, the communal records, the émigré statistics, the school registrations and the welfare data. His figures were the working standard used by the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency and the relevant departments of the British, American and French governments in the 1930s. He published them annually in the American Jewish Year Book. The figure he gave for European Jewry on the eve of the war, approximately 9.5 million, was not invented for post-war polemical purposes; it was the figure on which Jewish refugee policy, settlement planning and emigration projections had been based in the years before the war.

Why the three sources agree

The methodological power of the pre-war count comes not from any single source but from the convergence of the three. The Polish census of 1931 returned 3,113,933 Jews. The records of the Polish kehillot for the same year, totalled, returned a comparable figure. The Lestschinsky estimate for Polish Jewry in 1931, derived independently, returned a comparable figure. When three independent counting methods, each conducted by different organisations for different practical purposes, return the same number to within a percentage point or two, the result is not guesswork. The same convergence holds, with broadly similar margins, across every other major European Jewish community.

Where the three sources disagreed, they disagreed at the edges. There were arguments about the precise effect of the German 1933 census’s religious-affiliation question, which under-counted the Jewish population by missing those who had left the religious community (the so-called Konfessionslose Jews who would later be subject to the Nuremberg Laws on racial grounds). There were arguments about how to count Jews in the contested Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina, which had changed hands between Romania and the Soviet Union in 1940. There were arguments about how to handle the post-1939 Soviet annexations and the resulting double counts. These arguments produced ranges, not unbridgeable disagreements. The total European Jewish population in 1939 was understood by every serious authority to be in the range 9 to 10 million, with the consensus figure landing at approximately 9.5 million. The denier claim that the figure is wholly arbitrary cannot survive contact with the actual demographic literature.

How the post-war counting was done

The post-war demographic methodology used the same three kinds of source again. National censuses resumed across liberated Europe (Poland in 1946, France in 1946, Czechoslovakia in 1947, Hungary in 1949, the Soviet Union in 1959 for the first full count, smaller national counts in the Western European countries), with religious or ethnic affiliation again recorded as standard. Surviving Jewish communal organisations resumed their own counting for the same practical purposes as before the war (often with foreign relief funding that required exact head counts to plan rations and resettlement). The Joint Distribution Committee, which led the Western relief operation, ran its own continuous count from 1945 onwards, cross-checked against the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration figures from the displaced persons camps. The post-war methodology was, in fact, more rigorous than the pre-war methodology, because the relief agencies needed exact numbers to plan supply and the Jewish bodies needed exact numbers to plan emigration. The figures were known.

The same convergence applied. Independent counts produced by independent bodies for independent purposes returned compatible figures. The 1959 Soviet census of approximately 2.27 million Jews matched the projected post-war Soviet Jewish population calculated from the pre-war counts and the wartime losses to within a few per cent. The Polish census of 1946, the Joint figures for the same year and the Polish Jewish Central Committee’s own count all returned a Polish Jewish population of around 240,000. The argument that we cannot know the post-war Jewish population because the methods are unreliable runs into the same difficulty as the pre-war argument: three independent methods cannot be unreliable in compatible ways.

The country-by-country reconstructions

The post-war scholarly reconstructions of the killing took the same methodology a stage further. Specialists working in the national archives of each affected country (often scholars from those countries, in their own languages, on their own communities) reconstructed the wartime fate of each Jewish community by combining the pre-war community count with the deportation lists, the killing-site records, the survival registrations after liberation and the post-war communal counts. Where one source was thin, the others compensated. The Hungarian deportation lists are excellent; the Soviet wartime records are patchy but the Einsatzgruppen reports filled most of the gap; the Polish records are uneven but the post-war Yad Vashem names project, the Joint relief records and the regional studies by Polish-Jewish scholars together produced a triangulated reconstruction. The output of this scholarship is the volume edited by Wolfgang Benz, Dimension des Völkermords (1991), in which national specialists set out their working methods country by country and the resulting figures could be checked, debated and (where evidence emerged) revised.

The Benz volume is the standard reference for a reason: every estimate it contains is sourced, every method is set out, every range is justified. It is not an act of faith. It is a statistical report, of the kind that statisticians in any other field would recognise. The same standards apply to Hilberg’s appendices in The Destruction of the European Jews, to Yitzhak Arad’s reconstruction of the Soviet figures, to Randolph Braham’s reconstruction of the Hungarian figures, and to the Yad Vashem names database, which has now collected approximately 5 million individual victim names with documentary or testimonial support and continues to add to the total at the rate of tens of thousands a year.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that the demographic methods are unreliable is harmful because it pretends that the discipline of demography does not exist. Population estimation is a normal scientific activity that produces useful results in every other domain (epidemiology, economic planning, agriculture, military intelligence) and is subject in those domains to the same methodological constraints, the same imperfect source records, the same need for triangulation and the same residual uncertainty. Nobody seriously argues that we cannot know the population of Europe in 1939 because census methodology is imperfect. The claim is reserved exclusively for the question of how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and for that question alone the demographers are deemed unreliable. The selectivity is the giveaway. To accept the denial, one would have to accept that pre-war and post-war Jewish demographic work, conducted by professional demographers using standard methods on standard sources, peer-reviewed at the time and confirmed by every subsequent scholarly investigation, is uniquely unable to be trusted on this single question. It is not. The methods are conventional, the sources are open to inspection, the conclusions converge, and the work has been replicated.

What method would they accept as reliable? What demographic study has used that method and produced a different answer? Where can it be read?

See also

• Yad Vashem Jerusalem
• Hungary
• Raul Hilberg
• Romania
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• The Six Million Figure is an Exaggeration

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Sources

• Jacob Lestschinsky, Crisis, Catastrophe and Survival: A Jewish Balance Sheet 1914 to 1948, Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, 1948
• Sergio DellaPergola, “Review of Wolfgang Benz, Dimension des Völkermords“, in Jewish Journal of Sociology, 35:1, 1993, with subsequent technical exchange on methodology in the same journal
• Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population”, annual chapter in American Jewish Year Book, American Jewish Committee, multiple years; methodological appendices set out the standard demographic procedures used across the field
• Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991, with country-by-country methodological essays by the national specialists
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, Yale University Press, 2003, statistical appendices and notes on method
• Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem, 2009, methodological introduction
• Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, condensed edition, Wayne State University Press, 2000
• Yehuda Bauer, “The Place of the Holocaust in Contemporary History”, in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 1, Indiana University Press, 1984, on the methodological challenges of the field
• Roberto Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1976, the standard methodological text on twentieth-century Jewish demography
• Mark Tolts, “Demography of the Jews in the Former Soviet Union: Yesterday and Today”, in Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, no. 50, 2003, on the use of Soviet census records in reconstructing the pre-war and post-war Jewish populations
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org, with bibliography on the demographic methodology
• Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, https://yvng.yadvashem.org, with the published methodological notes on how individual victims are added to the database