The Numbers Were Exaggerated to Justify Israel

This claim is a hybrid: it does not flatly deny that Jews were killed, it concedes some killing, but argues that the headline figure was constructed for a post-war political purpose. The factual chronology is the easiest way to address it. The figure of six million was in circulation, in print, in court and in private SS conversation, before the United Nations partition vote of 29 November 1947. It was in circulation before the founding of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948. It was in circulation, in identical form, before the publication of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry’s report on Palestine in April 1946. It was in circulation before any post-war Zionist political body had drafted a case based on Holocaust losses. It pre-dates the political moment it is alleged to have been invented for.

When the figure first appeared

The figure of approximately six million Jewish dead was given on the record at Nuremberg by Wilhelm Höttl, an SS officer who had served as deputy head of the SD’s Foreign Intelligence Branch in Hungary, in a sworn affidavit dated 26 November 1945 (Nuremberg Document PS-2738). Höttl said Adolf Eichmann had given him the figure in a private conversation in late 1944, breaking it down as approximately four million in the camps and two million by shooting. The affidavit was given to the Nuremberg prosecutors in November 1945, two years before the partition vote. It was used in evidence by the American chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, in his opening statement on 21 November 1945, in front of the assembled judges and the international press, in the second week of the main trial. The figure was on the record, in the most public possible setting, two years and one week before the United Nations General Assembly voted on the partition of Palestine.

The figure was repeated in the British and American closing addresses at Nuremberg in July 1946 (Sir Hartley Shawcross for the United Kingdom, Robert Jackson for the United States, Auguste Champetier de Ribes for France, Roman Rudenko for the Soviet Union). It appeared in the judgment of the International Military Tribunal of 1 October 1946. It was used by Jacob Lestschinsky, the Jewish demographer, in his published reckoning Crisis, Catastrophe and Survival (a 1948 book based on papers prepared for the World Jewish Congress in 1946 and 1947). It was used in evidence at the subsequent Nuremberg trials of 1946 to 1949, including the Einsatzgruppen Trial (1947 to 1948), where the prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz placed it on the record again. It appeared in every serious post-war work of historical scholarship from 1946 onwards. The figure was not constructed in 1947 or 1948 to justify a state. It was on the public record, repeatedly and in court, before the state was founded.

The other half of the chronology

The argument also requires that the founding of Israel was contingent on the Holocaust losses, that without the figure of six million the United Nations would not have voted for partition. The historical record on the partition vote does not support this. The 1947 partition plan was the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), whose mandate had been to consider the future of the British Mandate, which Britain had announced its intention to surrender. The committee’s majority recommendation was based on the practical question of governing a territory in which two national communities had been in armed conflict for over a decade and could no longer be jointly administered. The committee heard evidence on Jewish refugee pressures, the impossibility of returning Holocaust survivors to the European countries that had murdered their families, and the practical infeasibility of a single binational state. The Holocaust was part of the moral context, plainly. It was not the analytical foundation of the plan. The plan would have been on the table even if the European Jewish death toll had been a tenth of what it was, because the immediate question UNSCOP had to answer was what happens after Britain leaves.

The vote itself, on 29 November 1947, passed by 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions. The decisive blocs were the Soviet bloc (which voted for partition for its own geopolitical reasons unrelated to Holocaust sympathy) and the United States (which voted for partition under heavy domestic political pressure but also against the advice of its own State Department, which was hostile to a Jewish state). The argument that the six million figure was constructed to win this vote requires the further argument that the Soviet bloc and the United States were each individually moved by the figure to vote in ways they would not otherwise have voted; the diplomatic record of the vote, fully published, does not support either claim.

Where the figure actually came from

The figure of six million entered the record because two SS officers (Höttl in his sworn affidavit, Eichmann in his recorded conversations with Willem Sassen in Argentina in 1957, played in evidence at his trial in 1961) had used it themselves. They had used it because Eichmann’s own bureaucracy, drafting the Wannsee Protocol in January 1942, had set a target of approximately 11 million Jews to be “evacuated” from the territories it intended to bring under control, and his bureaucracy had also tracked the operation’s progress against that target. The figure of approximately six million represented the operation having got through somewhat over half its target before the Allied advance brought the killing to a halt. The figure is the perpetrators’ own arithmetic, captured in their own files and confirmed in their own private conversations. It was not constructed for a post-war political purpose by the people whom the operation had been intended to murder.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that the figure was inflated or invented to justify Israel is harmful for two reasons. The first is the chronological dishonesty: the figure pre-dates by years the political moment it is alleged to serve, and the documentary record demonstrating this is in print and freely available. The second is the move it tries to make: by suggesting that the figure was constructed by Jews for the political purpose of getting a state, the claim invites the listener to suspect every other Jewish account of the killing as similarly motivated. It transfers the moral discredit from the perpetrators to the victims. That is the actual function of the claim, and recognising the function makes the claim’s appeal to the unwary listener legible. It is a strategy for shifting the moral weight of the Holocaust off the people who did the killing and onto the people who were killed.

When did the figure first appear in print? Where was it cited? Who put it there?

See also

• Adolf Eichmann
• The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
• The Six Million Figure is an Exaggeration
• The Nuremberg Trials
• Roman Rudenko
• Robert Jackson

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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, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 31, Nuremberg, 1948
• 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
• Sir Hartley Shawcross, closing address for the United Kingdom, 26 to 27 July 1946, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 19, Nuremberg, 1948
• International Military Tribunal, Judgment of 1 October 1946, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 1, Nuremberg, 1947
• Wannsee Conference Protocol, 20 January 1942, surviving copy held at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial, Berlin, with the country-by-country tabulation drafted by Adolf Eichmann; full text at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• Jacob Lestschinsky, Crisis, Catastrophe and Survival: A Jewish Balance Sheet 1914 to 1948, Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, 1948
• Benjamin Ferencz, opening statement at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, 29 September 1947, in Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, vol. 4, US Government Printing Office, 1950
• United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, Report to the General Assembly, 3 September 1947, A/364
• United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 29 November 1947, with the published voting record
• Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Knopf, 2014, on the Sassen recordings and Eichmann’s private use of the figure
• Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, Free Press, 1986, on the relationship between the Holocaust and the founding of the state
• Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2005, the standard scholarly treatment of how the Holocaust was incorporated into Israeli political discourse, with a careful account of when the figure entered Israeli political language
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org