Holocaust Victims: A Statistical Analysis

1. Introduction

Polemic discussions about the Holocaust frequently come to a dead end when one party resorts to the argument that it is after all an indisputable fact that six million persons of Jewish faith were missing after the Second World War and that therefore it does not matter in the slightest how these people were killed. But is the number of victims really undisputed?

In this line of argument it is usually overlooked that for a long time the figure of ‘six million’ was based on nothing more than hearsay evidence given by two German SS-bureaucrats at the International Military Tribunal (IMT), specifically the written (never verbal) deposition of Wilhelm Höttl[1] and the verbal but never cross-examined testimony of Dieter Wisliceny.[2] These men claimed they had heard this figure from Eichmann[3] who, however, later disputed this.[4] On the basis of their testimony in Nuremberg both witnesses were transferred from the defendants’ dock to the witness quarters – usually a life-saving transfer. While Wisliceny and Eichmann were later convicted and hanged, W. Höttl was never prosecuted even though he was no less deeply involved in the deportation of the Jews. He had clearly been promised exemption from punishment in return for his services as witness and, unlike Wisliceny, was lucky enough to see that promise kept.

Höttl’s recent after-the-fact apologia for his testimony of that time[5] contradicts what he had stated earlier, and is thus not very credible.[6] For details of the ways and means with which the statements of such coerced witnesses were obtained during the Nuremberg Trials, see the chapter by Manfred Köhler in this volume.

Recently, British historian David Irving marveled that as early as June 1945, in other words immediately after the end of hostilities in Europe, some Zionist leaders were able to provide the precise number of Jewish victims – six million, of course – even though the chaos reigning in Europe at that time rendered any demographic studies impossible.[7] Not long ago the German historian Joachim Hoffmann pointed out that the chief Soviet atrocity propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, had publicized the six-million-figure in the Soviet foreign press as early as January 4, 1945, i.e., fully four months before the war’s end.[8] W. Höttl has found an article in Readers’s Digest which in February 1943 already reported the murder of at least the half of the six million Jews threatened by Hitler.[9]

In 1936, Chaim Weizmann is reported to have said in front of the Peel Commission:[10]

"It is no exaggeration to say that six million Jews are sentenced to be imprisoned in this part of the world, where they are unwanted, and for whom the countries are devided into those, where they are unwanted, and those, where they are not admitted."

But this ‘magic’ number probably dates back even further. A series of propaganda articles published shortly after the end of the First (!) World War already mentioned six million Jews who had perished in a Holocaust in eastern Europe,[11] and Benjamin Blech tells of an ancient Jewish prophecy that promises the Jews their return to the Promised Land after a loss of six million of their number,[12] which is certainly grounds for speculations.

The origin of the six-million figure, which has by now been acknowledged as "symbolic figure" even by historians of the establishment,[13] is thus more than questionable, and it is not surprising that even world-famous statisticians have long conceded that the issue of the numbers of victims is in no way settled.[14]

In introducing the discussion of Holocaust victims, revisionist scholars time and again cite a publication in the Swiss paper Baseler Nachrichten of June 12, 1946 which postulated a maximum number of 1.5 million Jewish victims of National Socialism, as well as the fact that the International Red Cross never made any mention in its post-war Activity Reports of a systematic extermination of the Jews in gas chambers.[15] Benz comments rightly that citing various undocumented newspaper sources and the IRC, which out of a lack of any comprehensive overview never compiled any statistics of its own about the numbers of victims, is a very dubious practice.[16] While there have been several attempts since the war’s end to determine the number of victims,[17] any monograph commensurate with the importance of the topic was lacking until the early 1980s. It was not until 1983 that a book was published in the United States – The Dissolution of the Eastern European Jewry, by W. N. Sanning[18] – which attempted, by drawing on statistical material from mostly Jewish sources, to ascertain the number of Jewish Holocaust victims in the Third Reich’s sphere of influence. Since Sanning concluded in his book that at the very most several hundreds of thousands of Jews perished of unknown causes in the Third Reich,[19] it was to be expected that the establishment would counter with a reply containing a wealth of statistical material intended to reconfirm the "symbolic figure" of six million Jewish victims. And indeed, in 1991 the official Institut für Zeitgeschichte published a 585-page study titled Dimension des Völkermords.

"The bottom line indicates a minimum of 5.29 and a maximum of just over 6 million [Jewish victims of the Holocaust]."[20]

This is how editor W. Benz summarizes the statistical investigations of his seventeen co-authors, each of whom focused on one nation that had been either occupied by or allied with the Third Reich. But it must be pointed out that

"Of course the purpose of this project also was not to prove any pre-set figure (‘six million’)",[21]

even if the final result does happen to coincide with the semiofficial number. In the following discussion of individual contributions to this book, we shall refer only to the editor W. Benz rather than to the various co-authors to avoid confusing the reader with a multitude of different names.

In the summary of his 239-page book, Sanning writes:

"– At the beginning of World War Two there were fewer than 16 million Jews in the world […]

– One million Jews died while fighting in the Red Army or in Siberian labor camps; […]

– Approximately 14 million Jews survived the last war […]"[18]

Further civilian and military losses must be deducted from the missing one million Jews, so that Sanning eventually arrives at only about 300,000 Jews who lost their lives in unexplained manner in the German sphere of influence during the Second World War.

In view of the fundamental contradiction between these two works, an interested and critical reader naturally wonders which of the two authors is right. Since the answer to this question is of great consequence, and since recent scientific and technical findings have rendered several aspects of the Holocaust extremely questionable, the following shall compare and contrast the approaches and findings of both works.[22]

2. Method

For this purpose, we will organize our analysis on the basis of the nations which, during World War Two, came under German rule either in whole or in part, and we will examine the fluctuations exhibited by the Jewish population statistics there. The sequence of the nations corresponds on the whole to that used in Benz’s work, where only these countries are dealt with. In comparison, Sanning incorporates more extensive demographic observations, taking into account non-European nations as well, for which reason no strictly defined sequence of nations under German rule can be maintained in his work.

Between 1933 and 1945, the national boundaries of the countries studied often underwent considerable changes. In the work by Benz each country is discussed by a different author, and since the various authors clearly did not agree among themselves with respect to common boundaries, there are many cases of overlap which frequently result in the populations in question being counted twice.[23] We shall point this out as individual examples occur, and total these doublings at the end. Since Sanning, being the sole author of his book, did not have such trouble in allotting boundary areas, we will subsequently follow his choice of boundaries. Since the Benz book goes into great detail where such territories as were subject to changes in sovereignty are concerned, the appropriate corrections are generally quite easy to accommodate here.

For each nation or group of nations we shall first give a brief tabular overview of the Jewish population statistics as given in each work. Only where the data given in the two books are at considerable odds will reference to the soundness of the data and their calculation be made in order to determine which author’s arguments are better. The reliability of the sources cited by the authors will also be touched on only in cases of dispute.

This will be followed by a comparison of the sum total of Jewish losses in German-occupied Europe, as calculated in each book, as well as by a summary critique which will also address the matter of where and how the victims Benz believes to have identified allegedly lost their lives; certain contradictions will become evident.

An overview of the numbers of Jewish emigrants from the European nations under former German occupation follows, as well as a survey of world Jewish population changes before and after the Second World War. Since these aspects are discussed only by Sanning, no comparison with the Benz book can be drawn – but since Benz’s book appeared eight years after Sanning’s, this certainly gives the impression that no factual counter-arguments were possible, at least where the matter of emigration was concerned.

And finally, Sanning’s work is verified statistically; a similar test was already performed some time ago by a Swedish statistician.

To avoid a vast number of footnotes, sources will be indicated in the text by parenthetical references giving only the page number in question and identifying the book by the initial of its author/editor (S or B), and in tables by appropriate notation in the column "Ref." or in brackets. Only rarely will reference be made to the source quoted by the book itself.

3. The Nations Under German Influence

3.1. Germany and Austria

Jewish emigration from the German sphere of influence, which had been strongly encouraged earlier,[24] became restricted in October 1941.[25] After that, deportations to labor, concentration and so-called extermination camps gradually began. For this reason, where reference is made in the following to Jewish population statistics prior to the beginning of the extermination of the Jews as described by defenders of the Holocaust claims, it is this approximate date that has been used as the temporal dividing line.

The low Jewish population in Germany as given for this time in the book by Benz is the same as that in Sanning’s, since both are based on a monthly report of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt [Reich Security Main Office]. Since this Association was an extension of the National Socialist state, the figure given is quite reliable. Benz, however, proceeds on the assumption that this figure represented only "full Jews", and adds approximately 43% for "half-Jews" and "quarter-Jews", even though these Jews were only partly (half-Jews) or not at all (quarter-Jews) subjected to the measures performed by the German authorities.[26]

Benz does not give any definite figures for the number of Jews in Austria, but believes that by the beginning of the war two-thirds of the Jews (as defined by the Nuremberg Race Laws) that had been present in Austria at the time of its unification with the Reich had fled (B68). This means that of 206,000 (B70), some 70,000 remained at the start of the war. Until October 1941, emigration – which amounted to approximately 15% in the Reich proper at this time (B35) – produced a further reduction of about 10,000.

For Germany, Sanning cites only those figures provided by the Reich Association. For Austria he refers to contemporaneous Jewish sources in Austria and the United States.

For the Jews to be found in post-war Germany Benz cites only estimates, and for those in Austria, nothing more than a number pertaining to ‘after the liberation’. However, due to the chaos reigning at that time, these statistics are very unreliable. Sanning cites data provided by the well-known Holocaust specialist Gerald Reitlinger, and his figures for Austria were not determined until October 1947, after the greatest of the population transfers in Europe had begun to subside.

While Benz ignores the increased mortality rate that characterized the Jewish population in the Reich between 1941 and 1945 due to the emigration of predominantly young people, which resulted in a disproportionate percentage of elderly Jews, Sanning does take this into account, which further reduces his tally of missing persons. This illustrates clearly the contrasting approaches of the two authors: Benz proceeds on the assumption that the difference between pre- and post-war Jewish population figures must be the result of the extermination program, which may make any calculation of natural mortality rates seem superfluous. Sanning, on the other hand, does not automatically consider the difference to be necessarily indicative of deaths – as yet, to him, these people are only missing. Further differences in the treatment of statistical questions will become apparent in the following, and will be summarized at the end.

I have reduced Benz’s numbers of victims by 21,000 for Germany and by 16,692 for Austria. These represent victims who fled to other European countries not then under German control, where, however, they later came under German rule and were allegedly exterminated (Germany: B64; Austria: B74). However, since these people are also counted as part of the Jewish population of their country of destination (particularly France and Czechoslovakia), it is necessary to deduct them once. For the moment we shall take note of 37,692 Jewish victims counted twice, which must be deducted from Benz’s total.

3.2. France, Benelux, Denmark, Norway and Italy

The reason for the great differences between the opening figures for France and the Benelux nations is that, except for the Netherlands, only estimates are available for the numbers of Jews living there before the war, both because these were simply never recorded statistically and because immigrants from Germany and Poland were not always registered. While Sanning bases his figures on information provided by the American Jewish Yearbook 1940 (New York) and by Reitlinger,[27] who cites barely half a million, Benz uses straight estimates for Belgium and France; among his sources for these estimates are reports from German authorities which, however, are likely to have inflated the numbers of Jews grossly for propaganda reasons.[28]

For Benz, the number of victims is by no means derived from the difference between pre-war and post-war Jewish populations, but rather from the number of those who allegedly were proven to have survived the deportations (2,566 of 75,720), and he cites Serge Klarsfeld to this effect.[29] The official post-war return registration of the deportees in France, as well as the accidental discovery of the survival of such as did not officially return, are what constitutes proof of survival to Klarsfeld.

Swedish demographer Carl O. Nordling comments rightly that the survivors from among the approximately 52,000 non-French Jews who fled to France before the war and were later deported to Auschwitz would not be very likely to report back to France after the war.[30] Similarly, a not inconsiderable portion of the survivors from some 23,000 remaining French Jews, some of whom had not taken French citizenship until shortly before the war, will have emigrated without registration after the war, possibly assuming a different name in their new homeland,[31] thereby becoming very difficult to trace.

Thus, Klarsfeld’s method for determining the number of victims, a method adopted by Benz, can hardly yield a correct result. The statements of former inmates claiming that their relatives had disappeared also fail to convince; to date there have been many cases of chance reunions of family members who each believed for decades that the other had been exterminated.[32] Since families were separated and scattered throughout Europe after being imprisoned, and since especially for Jews there was no way of searching for their kin amid the chaos of post-war Europe, the lack of proof of a family member’s survival is also no proof of his or her extermination. Carl Nordling recently demonstrated the fallacy of these incorrect and rash conclusion on the basis of an investigation of the fate of the Jewish population of the Polish city Kaszony.[33]

A further example of faulty methodology on the part of Klarsfeld and Benz may be found in their approach to those inmates who were ‘selected’[34] on their arrival in Auschwitz, i.e., who were not officially admitted into the camp and therefore were not tattooed with an ID number. Klarsfeld and Benz lump all of these Jews together as victims of gassing because, being unfit for forced labor, they were allegedly deemed useless. Nordling [30] pointed out that the first transports, between March and July 1942, were almost completely admitted into Auschwitz, but that larger proportions of the transports were no longer registered in the camp later on.

If one assumes that non-registration meant death by gassing, then if the Third Reich had indeed been pursuing a policy of extermination one might expect to see the opposite trend, since in 1943 the labor shortage was considerably more severe in Germany than in 1942 and therefore Jewish workers ought to have been accorded greater value as the war progressed. The actual registration pattern, therefore, indicates instead that the Auschwitz camp was first filled with workers and that the surplus was later channeled to the more than 30 affiliated labor camps surrounding Auschwitz, as well as to other camps and camp groups.

This theory explains why men from one 1942 transport were not registered (i.e., tattooed with prisoner ID numbers) in Auschwitz until April 1944.[35] Despite not being registered in 1942 they were obviously not killed, but rather employed outside Auschwitz in some other capacity for 1½ years. We do not know how Klarsfeld and his colleagues manage to be so certain that other inmates not registered in Auschwitz were not also put to work somewhere else, but were by necessity gassed.[36]

Thus it is clear that the statistical material on which Benz’s book is based rests at least in part on an unsound speculative basis.

Benz does not even attempt the other method of calculating casualties – namely, the comparison of pre-war and post-war Jewish populations. The post-war data given in the preceding table and identified with question marks are thus based simply on the subtraction of the supposed number of victims from the pre-war population.

Sanning again refers to Reitlinger for his post-war figures. In comparing the figures from Benz et al. and Reitlinger – both of them establishment Holocaust scholars – one sees that the estimation of the numbers of missing persons for these countries is very difficult due to the insufficient data available. For this reason Benz simply assumes that most of the Jews deported from France and the Benelux nations (213,813, B103; 127; 130; 165) were in fact murdered. Reitlinger’s data are obviously not suited to this argument, since they prove this assumption to be false, even if only by the fact that his data suggests that only approximately 134,000 Jews were missing. The question of how many of these missing persons emigrated unregistered immediately after the war is not addressed by Benz and will be discussed here in a later section.

Here, too, Benz’s number of victims was corrected because the Dodecanese Isles off the Turkish coast (Rhodes, Kos, and others) were counted for Italy as well as for Greece. The corresponding 1,641 victims were therefore subtracted from Italy’s original figure of 7,555 (B213; 216). Together with Germany and Austria this makes for 39,333 victims counted twice.

3.3. Albania

Benz assumes that Albania, with probably fewer than 1,000 Jews at the start of the war, lost a few hundred Jews, but he has only estimates to rely on for this (B236; 238). Sanning does not discuss this country at all, since neither statistics nor any relevant studies are available.

3.4. Greece and Yugoslavia

Where Greece is concerned, Benz has the better source material, since he had access to the Greek census data that was compiled just before the outbreak of the war (B247), whereas Sanning had to use one from 1931 (S134). Because of intensive emigration Sanning assumed a decrease in population and therefore mistakenly estimated the Jewish population at 65,000. Benz, on the other hand, arrives at a figure of at least 70,000 Jews in Greece, including the approximately 2,000 Jewish inhabitants of the Dodecanese Isles (primarily Rhodes and Kos).

With respect to Yugoslavia, both authors proceed from the last census data, collected in 1931 (approximately 68,000 Jews). Benz also estimates an increase of some 4,000 and an additional 5,000 or so foreign refugees, as well as another 3,000 – 5,000 de facto Jews who, while having renounced their faith, were nevertheless classed as Jews under the Nuremberg Race Laws. Sanning, on the other hand, seconds Reitlinger in the assumption that immigration and emigration balanced out in Yugoslavia, a country that grew increasingly anti-Jewish in its outlook since 1939 (B312). Sanning does not address the matter of de facto Jews.

For Greece, the difference between the data of the two authors results from Sanning’s deflated pre-war figure and from the 2,000 Dodecanese Jews which he may have missed.[37] For Yugoslavia, on the other hand, Benz appears to have estimated the pre-war figures a little too high. The actual number of missing persons, therefore, probably lies somewhere between the two figures, which do not deviate very much anyhow.

3.5. Hungary

First of all it is necessary to define which Hungary is at issue. Since Hungary had the same boundaries before the war as it did after, but briefly made tremendous territorial gains in between, we shall here confine our analysis to the area within the boundaries of today’s Hungary (so-called Trianon Hungary). Since both authors give their Jewish statistics for the newly added and subsequently lost regions separately from those for Trianon Hungary, it should be possible to transfer this definition to the numbers of Hungarian Jews without any difficulty. There is one serious problem, however. Benz’s distribution of the Jews among Trianon Hungary (some 401,000) and the territories gained (approximately 324,000) is based on a total of 725,000 Jews for Greater Hungary (B338), which is also Sanning’s initial figure (S138). But Benz adds approximately 100,000 de facto Jews of non-Jewish denomination but coming under the Nuremberg Race Laws, as well as approximately 50,000 immigrants from Poland (B340). This increase of about 20% must be added accordingly to the figure for Trianon Hungary, resulting in 484,000 Jews. The subsequent statistics (casualties at the front in the Hungarian Military Labor Force, Soviet deportations, as well as the numbers of survivors and victims) follow from the number Benz cites for Greater Hungary if one considers that approximately 55% of all the Jews in Greater Hungary resided in Trianon Hungary, and if one assumes that all changes affected all Jews equally. In fact, however, one cannot realistically assume this, since it is an undisputed fact that the Jews of Budapest – some 150,000 to 200,000 – remained completely unaffected by deportations into supposed extermination camps (B348f.; S143).

Working with Greater Hungary rather than Trianon Hungary would avoid these problems, but we cannot do this, for the reason that all of Hungary’s territorial gains have been incorporated into other sections of Benz’s book. These regions are: the Bačka of Yugoslavia, northern Transylvania of Rumania, and southern Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine of Czechoslovakia, with a total of approximately 324,000 denominational Jews, i.e., 391,000 de facto Jews (+20%). In computing his overall total, Benz counted all these Jews twice, with the exception of the Jews in those territories gained from Czechoslovakia.[38] Since the 214,000 de facto Jews who were counted twice amount to about 24.5% of Greater Hungary’s Jews, this corresponds to a duplicate counting of 122,500 Jewish victims out of an overall number of 500,000 Jews said to have been killed by the Germans (B351). If one considers that the proportion of victims in the border territories was greater than that in Trianon Hungary, since all of Budapest, for example, remained unaffected by the deportations, then a duplicate count of as many as 150,000 seems likely. This increases the number of Jews counted twice to at least 161,833.

Unfortunately not all of the co-authors contributing to Benz’s book employed the same methods as in the case of Hungary, where simple estimates added 20% to the initial number of Jews; the result is that the territorial overlaps and duplicate counts get completely out of hand. We shall focus less on the actual numbers in each case than on the methodologies applied. Hungary is an especially appropriate subject for a closer scrutiny of methodology, since this particular case represents an exceptionally explosive chapter of the (hi)story of the Holocaust. Advocates of the Holocaust doctrine assume as a matter of course that the Germans deported 400,000 to 500,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, where the majority of them were killed. The basis for this assumption are IMT documents which, according to Benz, prove that in spring and early summer 1944 "444,152 Jews were deported from Hungary" (B344).

In his book Sanning quotes Arthur R. Butz who pointed out that the International Red Cross made no mention in its Report, published in 1948, of any deportations of Jews to Auschwitz, but only of the beginning of Jewish tribulations in October 1944.[39] Aside from violent excesses, this time did see some deportations, whose purpose and destination, however, was forced labor in the Reich, not Auschwitz (B348; S139f.). Therefore, Butz and Sanning assume that no adequate evidence exists to prove that Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz at all.

There is no way around the fact, however, that there are still Jews living today who really were deported to Auschwitz in spring 1944 and who have repeatedly testified as witnesses in court.[40] Further, Pressac states that between ¹/₃ and ²/₃ of the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, whose arrival and selection were photographed by the SS,[41] were considered fit for forced labor, i.e., were not killed.[42] As well, it can be proven, he says, that in the spring some 50,000 of these Hungarian Jews were transported on to the Stutthof camp via Auschwitz.[43] In this respect, therefore, Sanning’s theory rests on a shaky foundation[44] – but so does that of Benz, who contends that the Hungarian Jews were killed immediately and almost without exception.

There are other indications as well that the theory of mass destruction of the Hungarian Jews is incorrect: the witnesses to this destruction unanimously claim that during these alleged mass exterminations the limited capacity of the Birkenau crematoria necessitated the excavation of enormous pits, in which the bodies were burned. Dark clouds of smoke, they claim, darkened the sky over Birkenau during this procedure. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective) the aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by the Allies during this time prove that in the Birkenau camp, which was not obscured by clouds of smoke when the pictures were taken, there were neither open fires, nor giant pits, nor smoke activity on any scale large or small, nor piles of dead bodies, nor great supplies of firewood, nor anything else of the sort.[45] The Polish Historical Society concludes that in light of this evidence the number of victims in Auschwitz must be reduced by another 400,000 plus 74,000 (Polish Jews from the liquidated ghetto Lodz, who are also claimed to have been gassed around this time), leaving some 500,000 victims for Auschwitz.[46]

Even allegedly probative documents of the Nuremberg Tribunal cannot change this, since such documents are by no means always genuine, or true, and only ever provide evidence for deportations which are not disputed here in the first place – they never document an extermination. The reader is reminded of the example of Dachau, the concentration camp where the IMT alleged that hundreds of thousands were gassed, a claim which in the end turned out to be nothing more substantial than an atrocity propaganda lie.[47] We shall come across another case of dubious IMT documents in the discussion of the Soviet Union.

Benz’s methodology proves to be very slipshod where other factors are concerned as well. He can only give vague estimates of the number of Jews who lost their lives due to Soviet deportation and in the Hungarian Military Labor Force (B339), whereas Sanning cites verifiable figures based on Jewish or at least pro-Jewish sources (S140; 142). Benz maintains the birth deficit at pre-war levels, whereas Sanning reasons that the Labor Force for Hungarian Jews as well as the overall poor conditions for Jews during the war would have caused the pre-war birth rate to drop further. Benz completely ignores the numbers of Jews who ‘converted’ to the Christian faith; in any case, Jews who converted to Christianity were no longer represented in any post-war statistics about Jews, and are thus considered by Benz and his co-authors to have been ‘gassed’.

Now, what is interesting are the two authors’ contrasting observations regarding the Jews said to be remaining in Hungary after the war. Whereas Benz suggests a total of 300,000 for Greater Hungary, Sanning cites that some 300,000 Jews were left after the war in Central (Trianon) Hungary alone. He bases his claim on, first, the US War Refugee Board’s Final Summary Report, which states that more than 200,000 Jews from Budapest were exempted from deportations following negotiations with the SS (S143). Second, in its aforementioned report the International Red Cross stated that some 100,000 Jews poured into Budapest from the provinces.[48] Furthermore, 200,000 Jews had been counted in Trianon Hungary in 1946, while according to Reitlinger one can assume that by then a veritable mass exodus of Jews to the West had begun (S143). One must also consider, he says, that no doubt a great many foreign, mostly Polish Jews were included in this migration. Sanning thus cites 200,000 as the minimum number of Jews present in post-war Trianon Hungary. For Benz, the number of survivors derives almost exclusively from the number of Jews present before the war, minus the decreases estimated as above, minus the actual or supposed deportations to concentration camps, i.e., (according to Nuremberg documents) to forced labor camps. Absolutely no other sources are used.

3.6. Czechoslovakia

We shall consider Czechoslovakia as defined by its post-war borders (up to 1992), in other words without the Carpathian Ukraine. Benz, while discussing Czechoslovakia as for its borders prior to its first collapse in 1938/39, does give a breakdown of the proportions for the individual regions.[49]

Benz assumes a migration balance of net 33,000 emigrants up to mid-1943, while no net. emigration was allegedly apparent for Slovakia (B369). Regarding emigration from the Protectorate he cites official statistics of contemporaneous Jewish authorities which, however, did not incorporate illegal emigration (B358). Sanning totals more than 52,000 emigrants, substantiating this with a reference to the Anglo-American Committee, according to which the Jewish population had already decreased by 40,000 by late 1939 (S144). Sanning is the only one to take into account the drop in birth rate and the casualties of the Hungarian Labor Force.

Benz arrives at what he claims to be the approximate number of survivors in the Protectorate by totaling those Jews who officially reported back as survivors of the deportations, or who were otherwise found in Czechoslovakia after the war. Unfortunately such data were only ever gathered selectively, with respect to specific camps or cities, and never nationwide for any given point in time, so that the results are by necessity incomplete. For Slovakia, Benz derives his survivor statistics from the difference between those Jews who failed to return from deportations, and the population level prior to the deportations. Any westward migration is disregarded. Where the regions that were ceded to Hungary are concerned, Benz assumes that the Jews there suffered the same fate as the remaining Hungarian Jews. Aside from the Carpathian Ukraine, some 45,000 Jews were affected. The problems involved in the study of the Jews in the territory of Greater Hungary have already been mentioned.

Sanning refers to Reitlinger in pointing out that in 1946, in other words after the westward migration had already begun, some 32,000 Jewish survivors were found in the former Protectorate alone (S145). Also according to Reitlinger, 45,000 Jews – and according to other pro-Jewish sources, as many as 60,000 Jews – were found in Slovakia after the war (S146), which of course stands in clear contradiction to the estimates advanced by Benz, who claims 20,000 Jewish survivors for Slovakia and bases this assertion largely on Czech publications (B374).

3.7. Rumania

Rumania is considered as defined by its post-war boundaries, including northern Transylvania and excluding Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. The only disagreement between the two authors consists in the treatment of the Jews of northern Transylvania, who came under Hungarian rule in the Second World War (see above). According to Benz, the majority of these were ‘gassed’ in Auschwitz, whereas according to Sanning, most of their losses were sustained in the Hungarian Military Labor Force. Since the number of survivors – up to 430,000, as Benz and Sanning document several times – rules out any great losses on the part of the North Transylvanian Jews, and since these findings do agree with the aforementioned results of recent investigations, one can assume that the Jews in the territory of post-war Rumania suffered next to no losses. Benz simply bases his calculation of the number of victims on the lowest documented number of survivors, in other words, he ignores the 430,000 Jewish survivors in his estimates, even though he mentioned them himself.

3.8. Bulgaria

Bulgaria is discussed here in its pre- and post-war boundaries, in other words, without Greek Thrace, without Yugoslav Macedonia, and without the southern Rumanian Dobruja with its quantitatively negligible Jewish population. Benz chose to base his analysis on the larger wartime territory, while failing to reduce the regions of Yugoslavia or of Greece accordingly. This results in duplicate counts of 4,200 victims for Greece (B272) and 7,160 for Yugoslavia (B298), increasing the overall duplicate count to at least 173,193.

On the whole, there is no doubt that the Jews on Bulgarian soil were not in any danger and suffered no losses.[50] Sanning even shows a post-war population greater than that of pre-war times, and explains that Bulgaria served as gateway to the Middle East for a vast number of legal as well as illegal immigrants. According to Sanning, it is likely that noticeable numbers of foreign Jews were still in Bulgaria immediately after the end of the war.

3.9. Poland

Poland is discussed here in terms of its post-war boundaries, without the eastern German regions. While Benz claims to add to this merely the administrative districts of Bialystok and Galicia, he does eventually include the victims for the entire territory that was Polish in the time between World Wars One and Two, i.e., parts of what was known during the Second World War as the Reich Commissionerships of Ukraine and Ostland. But since he deducts only the numbers of victims for Galicia and Bialystok from the total in his chapter about the Soviet Union, this results in duplicate counts which will be discussed in greater detail in the section regarding the Soviet Union.

3.9.1. Poland’s Pre-War Population

The last pre-war Polish census indicated approximately 3.1 million Jews (B416; S20).

On the basis of detailed studies Sanning shows that even during the period between the two world wars, the Polish Jews exhibited an extremely low rate of population increase (S26f.). The Institut für Zeitgeschichte adds that since 1933 some 100,000 Polish Jews per year had turned their backs on radically anti-Semitic Poland and emigrated to western Europe or overseas (S32).[51] Since those leaving the country were predominantly young people, the number of Jews in Poland must have decreased sharply due not only to this migration but also due to the increasingly disproportionate percentage of old people. Sanning puts the number of emigrants between 1931 and 1939 at only 500,000 and even factors in a population growth rate of 0.2%. He thus arrives at a population of 2,664,000 Jews prior to the war (S32).

This issue, to which Sanning devotes roughly 20 pages of intensive and thoroughly documented analysis, is accorded all of two sentences by Benz (B417):

"[…] if we extrapolate the census figures [of 1931] taking into account natural increase and emigration, we arrive at a 1939 total population of 35,100,000 persons for the Polish nation as a whole, of which the Jewish component is estimated at 3,446,000. We repeat: these figures are not certain […]"

So Benz assumes, first of all, that the numbers of Polish Jews increased like those of the remaining Poles. Since Sanning clearly disproved this assumption eight years before Benz’s work was published, and yet Benz does not even mention Sanning’s arguments, there can be only one explanation for why untruths are clearly being disseminated here: the purpose is to maximize the initial population figure for Polish Jews.

Secondly, Benz assumes that the rate of emigration was essentially negligible. But since his book is a publication of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte and since this same Institut has publicly announced that some 100,000 Polish Jews had left Poland annually since 1933, one wonders whether this is a case of the left hand not knowing (or not wanting to know?) what the right hand is doing.

Benz therefore bases his subsequent arguments on a starting figure of 3,350,000 Jews present in Poland at the beginning of the war (B417), of which 2.3 million are assigned to the western part which the Germans occupied in 1939 (B418). In this way Benz has falsified the statistic by probably 700,000 Jews at the least. Are we to believe that Benz is unaware of Sanning’s analysis of population trends in pre-war Poland? This seems out of the question, since after all Benz’s book is a response to Sanning’s. As I see it, the fact that Benz spares this complex topic no more than one sentence and an apologetic comment ("We repeat: these figures are not certain") explains everything: this is an example of statistics being stretched well past the breaking point!

3.9.2. Flight Migrations During the Polish Campaign

According to Benz, some 300,000 of the initial 2.3 million Jews of western Poland fled eastward from the German army during the Polish campaign, into the Soviet-occupied area; of these 300,000, approximately 250,000 were deported to Siberia by the Soviets. Benz states that these are estimates, since allegedly there are no reliable figures (B425f.; 443). Accordingly, Benz suggests that approximately 2 million Polish Jews came under German rule in western Poland (B443). To document these statistics, Benz refers first and foremost to data originating with German sources whose doubtful value has already been mentioned.[28] Sanning explains that these figures are estimates calculated by the German authorities by extrapolating the census data from 1931 on the basis of a 10% population increase (S44f.). Even in those days there were no more reliable figures and analyses available, and contemporaneous statisticians made the same mistake that Benz repeats in his book.

Sanning quotes numerous Zionist, Jewish and pro-Jewish sources, all of which indicate that between 500,000 and 1 million Jews fled to the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland during the German-Polish war (S39-43). Again, the majority of these were deported to Siberia. Among the sources cited are Jewish relief organizations, which attended to 600,000 Polish Jews in Siberian labor camps. Since a considerable proportion of these deported Jews already died during the inhumane transports to these camps, Sanning postulates a total of 750,000 Jews who fled into the Soviet zone as well as a further 100,000 who had fled to Rumania (S44).[52] Thus, the number of Jews in western Poland had decreased from an initial 1,607,000 (S39) to 757,000 (S44), while the number remained unchanged in eastern Poland due to the deportation of predominantly western Polish refugees (approximately 1 million, also Benz, B443).

The fact that such migrations of fleeing persons were not unusual is demonstrated by the example of Belgium, where 1½ to 2 million persons fled from the German army at the start of the war, effectively obstructing any strategic movements of the Allied armies (S43).

Benz’s and Sanning’s figures regarding the number of Jews remaining after the war are not very different from each other. It should be added, however, that according to the United Press the British and American investigative committee for the European Jewish problem declared, at a press conference in February 1946, that there were still an estimated 800,000 Jews in post-war Poland, all of whom wished to emigrate.[53]

3.9.3. The Destruction of the Polish Jews

Whereas Sanning does not touch on the methodology of the alleged mass murder, Benz makes several observations on this topic, of which we shall quote some aspects, with comments where necessary.

First, Benz expounds repeatedly on the alleged exhaust gas murders in vans, which of course he considers irrefutably proven (Kalisz, B431, Chelmno, B447, 462, cf. Yugoslavia, B320). The reader is referred to the chapter by I. Weckert in the present volume.

Regarding the methods of killing in other camps, he reports the use of bottled Zyklon B gas in Belzec (B462). But Zyklon B gas, i.e., hydrogen cyanide, is not and never was bottled. For industrial purposes hydrogen cyanide is transported in tanker trucks, but it is never bottled. Further, he recounts the use of Diesel engines for mass gassings (Belzec, B462, Treblinka, B463, cf. USSR, B540). Regarding gassing with Diesel exhaust fumes, cf. the chapter by F. P. Berg, and regarding Treblinka, cf. the study by A. Neumaier, both in this volume. Any further commentary would be superfluous at this point.

A noteworthy admission on Benz’s part is the following:

"Considering the fact that there are very few usable sources of documentation about the extermination camps, the number of Jews killed at these murder sites is especially difficult to ascertain, and depends primarily on estimates provided by witnesses, on the analysis of the regular transports and their numeric strengths, and on the population of those areas from which the respective killing centers were ‘supplied’ […]" (B463f.)

The unreliable nature of witness testimony is demonstrated repeatedly in the present volume. Furthermore, straight calculations based exclusively on pre- and post-war populations are possible only if no uncontrolled emigration took place and if the initial statistics are sure to be correct. It is quite amazing that Benz nevertheless has the gall to use this method.

Benz finally concedes that the availability of source material leaves a great deal to be desired, not only where the alleged extermination camps are concerned but also with respect to the entire organization of the alleged extermination network structure (B463, footnote), and that there is no written, i.e., documented and thus provable order for the destruction of the Jews (B3; 458f.; 512).

3.10. Soviet Union

The Soviet Union is considered here as defined by its post-war boundaries until the early 90’s. To determine the number of victims, Benz merely subtracts the number of Jewish citizens present after the war from the pre-war number. He then subtracts from the result the victims of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, in other words, 100,000 victims which are included in his count for Rumania (B409), as well as the victims from Bialystok and Galicia (600,000, included in his count for Poland, B451). We do not need to correct this here, since we have discussed Rumania as well as Poland in their post-war boundaries. But Benz commits two major errors in this context: first, he forgets that after the war the Soviet Union annexed the Carpathian Ukraine, with a pre-war Jewish population of approximately 100,000. But since the victims from this area were included in the count for Hungary (B338, approximately 90,000 victims), this does not affect Benz’s statistics. In our analysis, however, we considered Hungary and Czechoslovakia in their post-war boundaries and must therefore add the Carpathian Ukrainian Jews to the Soviet figures. This increases both the pre-war Jewish population and the number of victims accordingly. Of the approximately 101,000 Jews from the Carpathian Ukraine, Sanning considers 15,000 as missing and 86,000 as absorbed by the USSR (S156).

Secondly, Benz overlooks the fact that, contrary to his own claim, the former regions which made up the Reich Commissionerships of Ostland and the Ukraine are included in his discussion of Poland. Since Benz assumes approximately 1 million Jews in the Soviet-occupied area (B443), of which roughly 600,000 are properly accounted for in the adjustments he makes for Bialystok and Galicia (B457), this means that he counted some 360,000 Jewish victims twice (90% victims of the 400,000 Jews living there). This brings the total of Jewish victims counted twice by Benz to 533,193.

3.10.1. The Soviet Deportations

Sanning’s category "German Theater of War" in the above table includes Jewish losses suffered in the area under German military influence as the results of pogroms not carried out or initiated by German troops, of starvation and epidemics, as well as of the execution of partisans (permitted by international law) of which Jews are known to have comprised a very great percentage. This category, as well as "Casualties of deportation" and "Killed in combat" in the Red Army, are rather willfully dismissed by Benz:

"It [the number of victims] also includes the casualties among Jewish soldiers and civilians [partisans] as well as those who succumbed to the strain of flight and to starvation. This is justified. They too were victims of brutal National Socialist policies." (B560)

Benz neither quantifies these categories, nor does he give reasons for this catch-all approach, for these are the closing words of his book. However, there certainly are clues to be found regarding the attitude embraced by the book’s collective authorial mind.

For example, Benz speaks of the "attack on the Soviet Union" (B499), and asserts that Stalin had done everything he could to "give Hitler no pretext for anti-Soviet measures, least of all for war" (B507). Further, he believes that the Soviet Union had practiced a "policy of appeasement" (B508). Today it is generally acknowledged even in Russia that the fairy-tale of Germany’s attack on the peace-loving Soviet Union really belongs in the junk room of Communist war-time propaganda.[54] In this respect, the losses resulting from the war are not due exclusively to Germany, and they certainly have no relevance whatsoever to any aspect of the Holocaust.

Benz suggests that there are no systematic accounts of the extent and scope of Soviet evacuations and deportations of material resources and human beings. He dismisses this very important aspect in merely two paragraphs, with the comment that Stalin did not wish to provoke Hitler with evacuation activities (no, it’s not a joke – he really does claim this!) and that there were therefore hardly any noteworthy deportations (B507). Sanning, on the other hand, devotes pages 53-109 exclusively to this issue and draws on a wide range of Allied, Jewish and Soviet statistics to offer sound data regarding the scope of Soviet evacuation and deportation measures at the start of the war. And with that, Benz’s claim that there are no systematic accounts of this topic is already disproved. Did Benz and his co-authors not even read Sanning’s book after all? But clearly they must have, for Benz does not deem Sanning’s explanations in general to be a systematic account:

"[…] The author [Sanning] distinguishes himself through his methodologically unsound handling of the statistical material as well as through daring and demonstrably erroneous reasoning and conclusions." (B558, footnote 396.)

Unfortunately, Benz does not enlighten his readers as to what might be erroneous about Sanning’s arguments. While Benz assumes that approximately 3 to 3.2 million Soviet Jews came under the sphere of influence of German troops (B509), Sanning again shows, on the basis of unimpeachable sources, that the number must have been less than one million (S103). He documents the fact that in most Russian cities a large part of the population that was fit to work, and especially the intelligentsia, had already been evacuated by the time German troops moved in. It is beyond the scope of the present work to detail Sanning’s plethora of documentation and proof at this point, but one of his arguments shall be discussed in greater detail. It is generally accepted that some 600,000 Jews wore the Red Army uniform. If one considers that many Jews were deported to labor camps beyond the Ural Mountains, and that the normal recruiting level did not exceed 30% of the male population in any of the nations involved in World War Two (all of which has been documented), then according to Sanning at least 4 million Jews must have lived in the non-occupied parts of the Soviet Union.

Now it may well be that these 600,000 Jews were already conscripted before the war, since as we know the USSR was planning her own large-scale attack on Europe,[54] and for that the Soviets had deported most of the male population fit for military service during the German advance. This would mean for Benz that only few men of an age for military service would have been left to fall into the hands of the Germans, so that in the occupied regions more than 90% of the female Jews would have been exterminated while the conscripted and deported men in the hinterland and in the army would have had a considerably better chance for survival. According to Benz, the mortality rate among the women would thus have been greater than or at least equal to that among the men. From this it follows that a demographic analysis of the Soviet Union today should reveal greater or equal numbers of men in the age group that was of military age at the time in question. However, this is clearly not the case. Rather, the sex distribution corresponds to that of the other Soviet peoples, in other words, there is a similar deficit of men. This means either that men and women were deported in roughly equal numbers and consequently relatively few Soviet Jews actually fell into German hands, or that Jewish women who fell into German hands were generally not killed.

Regarding the number of Jews to be found in the post-war Soviet Union, Benz cites Soviet census data only. He sets out that "doubts about the reliability of Soviet censuses […] are not justified" because these data served as the basis and foundation of the Soviet national economy (B558).

But every child knows nowadays that all conceivable kinds of data have been falsified in the service of precisely this national economy so as to manifest Soviet superiority in economic competition with the capitalist western world. Domestically speaking, these falsifications served to close Russian eyes, ears and mouths to the inexorably approaching collapse. But where the number of Jews identified by the censuses is concerned, there is not even any need for falsification. After all, the radically atheistic Soviet Union was one of those nations that made it especially difficult for the Jews to profess their faith. Therefore, the numbers of Jews that voluntarily acknowledged their faith in 1959 and 1970 (2.2 and 2.1 million, respectively; B559; S117) says nothing at all about the number of survivors in the Soviet Union. Jewish estimates dating from the 1970s suggest 3 to 4 million Soviet Jews (S117ff.). More recent newspaper reports even speak of 5 million Jews and more, which, however, seems unlikely in light of the stagnating demographic trends.[55] Since Zionist circles are striving for the emigration of Jews from Russia to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is possible that they tend to exaggerate the number of Jews in Russia, with the intent to dramatize their hard lot during 70 years of Stalinist oppression. The numbers of presumably present or missing Jews thus serve as politically strategic putty in other respects as well.

3.10.2. Mass Extermination in the Soviet Union

In terms of the mass murders of Jews on Soviet soil, Benz again cites mostly witness testimony as evidence.

Behind the frontlines of the German troops fighting in the Soviet Union, the so-called Special Units (Sonderkommandos) served, according to Benz, to combat partisan activity (B514f.; 518; 520; 528f.; 540). Aside from that, they allegedly were also chiefly responsible for the mass executions of Jewish civilians, whose numbers are very difficult to ascertain (B577). Benz suggests that the statistics circulated during the war in this respect by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee are much too low, so as to "[…] show the Soviet endeavors to rescue the Jewish population in an (inappropriately) favorable light in the United States." (B557, footnote.) But since the United States never bothered about the Jewish victims, and in fact exaggerated the number of victims in their own propaganda after 1933, it is not clear just how and whom Jewish anti-Fascists could have impressed in the States with allegedly deflated statistics. Benz’s suggestion, that anti-Fascists should have trivialized the alleged Fascist atrocities for propaganda reasons, is something completely new; the opposite is surely more likely. One can only conclude from all this that these numbers of victims that Benz considers to have been deflated by the anti-Fascists are in fact already exaggerated.

Regarding the use of vans for mass gassings in the Soviet Union, Benz offers us a single, particularly suspect source: the Stalinist show trials of Char’kov and Krasnodar (B526f.; 540).[56] Such utterly uncritical, indiscriminate citing almost makes one wonder whether Benz and his co-authors perhaps might even share Stalinist sentiments. Ignorance is no excuse for qualified scholars.

The mass executions in the East are generally considered proven, i.e., documented by the so-called "USSR Event Reports" which the Special Units allegedly sent to Berlin on a regular basis and which detail, among other things, the number of executions. All events, however, were not listed there, so that Benz considers them an insufficient basis for determining the number of victims (B542f.). One exception, it is claimed, it the typical case of Babi Yar (B530; 534; 542). But as it has been irrefutably proven by now that the alleged massacre of Babi Yar is an atrocity lie of no substance,[57] this admittedly throws the authenticity or at least the reliability of the entire IMT document series "USSR Event Reports" and all other documents into doubt, and hence the entire Special Units mass murder per se. Even Benz’s shameless assertion that "the authenticity of these reports is beyond question" (B541) cannot change that, since H.-H. Wilhelm, whom Benz quotes as proof of his claims, states as well, that the reliability of the figures given in these documents is doubtful.[58] How did H.-H. Wilhelm describe the behavior of Benz:[59]

"Often, the consensus of research can only be explained by the researchers copying each other’s work uncritically."

Thus, Benz argumentation is typical of the reciprocal quoting that characterizes the "standard literature" of Holocaust apologetics, "in which reciprocal citing produces the impression of a scientifically sound network of argumentation [….]" (B8, footnote 24).

It should also be pointed out that Benz repeatedly stresses that the Germans destroyed all evidence of their mass exterminations, mostly through exhumation and complete incineration, for which reason no victims or mass graves remain in evidence (B320; 469; 479; 489; 537f.). Millions of victims allegedly disappeared without a trace. And in the case of Babi Yar, Benz implies, even in a manner invisible to methods of aerial reconnaissance.

Gigantic mass graves cannot be rendered undetectable by exhuming and burning the bodies they contain. Such large-scale disturbance of the soil and the concomitant disruption of soil layers, the settling of the fill etc. would be evident not only in the contemporaneous Allied and German air photos, but also today, if someone only cared to look. Since according to Benz "this task was [carried out] inadequately in at least a few cases", there ought in fact to be much more evidence remaining: bodies or parts thereof that were not burned, millions of bones and teeth, as well as loads of ashes.[60]

If anything of the sort had ever been found, the Stalinist Communists – who were known for their efficient and effective propaganda system – would have made the most of this, naturally in the presence of international investigative committees. It would have been a welcome opportunity for revenge for the embarrassment the Germans had inflicted on the Soviets with respect to Katyn, which was only then being revealed, with the assistance of international investigative bodies, as the Soviet mass murder of Polish officers.[61]

But no, the oh-so-peace-loving Soviet Union would never have thought of doing anything so mean… Even today, when the mass graves of hundreds of thousands of Stalin’s victims are being discovered, often by accident and 50 or even 60 years after the fact, there are still no traces of any German mass graves or burning sites, and in fact any public speculation whether modern methods might not help to locate some is studiously avoided – after all, any such sites have vanished without a trace, thanks to the wondrous methods only the Germans knew about.

When the German army retreated, what did turn up instead of mass graves were tens of thousands of women, old men, and children. In his address of indictment to the IMT, General Roman A. Rudenko explained that hundreds of thousands of children, women and old men who were unfit for forced labor were left behind in concentration camps by the Germans during their retreat.[62] Counselor A. A. Smirnov submitted a document giving more details of these camps in White Russia.[63] Urgent field research is needed to find out whether these people unfit for work may possibly have been some of those who were ‘selected’ in the camps further west and who, according to Steffen Werner’s theory, were in fact deported primarily to White Russia.[64]

4. Of Victims, and Persons Missing and Found

4.1. The Number of Victims, i.e., Missing Persons

*excluding the victims of Polish repatriation; **15,000 missing from the Carpathian Ukraine.

On pp. 15f. of his book Benz lists, for each country, the number of victims on which the co-authors of his book have agreed. In the preceding table, only the entries for Italy and Greece show different numbers, specifically the numbers given by the respective authors themselves, since the figures contained in Benz’s list differ slightly from these and do not appear in the chapters themselves (Italy 6,513, Greece 59,185).

The difference between Benz’s total and the total reduced here by the number of victims counted twice amounts to 517,656, which due to statistical rounding diverges only insignificantly from the 533,193 duplicate counts traced in the preceding. This proves fully half a million ‘duplicates’ in Benz’s highly lauded ‘definitive work’, and corresponds to an approximate 10% inflation of the total. This ought not to have happened if Benz had taken the trouble to coordinate the individual chapters of his book. In his introduction, however, Benz mentions a sum total of 5.3 to just over 6 million Holocaust victims.[20] It seems, therefore, as though Benz had already taken these duplicate counts into consideration, even if his results are not verifiable due to his failure to explain his line of reasoning.

The decisive difference between Benz and Sanning lies in their treatment of three countries: (Greater) Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union. On the basis of these examples we have shown here the (possibly deliberately) erroneous and falsifying methods of which Benz and his co-authors availed themselves in order to produce their statistics and to arrive at the desired result.

4.2. The Generally Accepted Distribution of Victims

In 1990, the number of victims for Auschwitz, which had been set at approximately 4 million by the Polish authorities ever since the time of the IMT trials, was officially reduced to one million.[65] In early 1993 the Polish Historical Society advised lowering the figure by another 400,000, since the air photos taken by Allied reconnaissance planes had shown that the extermination of the Hungarian Jews had never taken place.[45] The alleged mass extermination, they say, must therefore have been discontinued in May 1944 at the latest. In 1993 Pressac has begun to advocate the theory that the mass extermination did not start until 1942, half a year later than assumed to date, for which reason the number of victims, including the murdered Hungarian Jews, should be reduced to 630,000 gas chamber victims.[43] If one draws the obvious conclusions from these two publications – namely, the later beginning and earlier end of the killings – then the approximately 1 million victims must be reduced by 370,000 (according to Pressac) and by another 400,000 (according to the Polish Historical Society). We are thus left with only 230,000 alleged victims of the ‘gas chambers’. In the German edition of his latest book, Pressac reduces the number of gas chamber victims to about 500,000.[66] As I stated here in the first edition of this book, it seemed to be only a matter of time until the next downward revision of this continuously shrinking figure[67] would be made, and in fact, this downward revision came in 2002: ‘only’ 510,000 total victims are now claimed, 356,000 of them alleged gassing victims.[68]

Professor Ernst Nolte, for example, has considered it justified criticism to point out that while the number of victims of this supposedly largest extermination camp is being steadily reduced, the overall number of victims alleged for the Holocaust remains the same.[69] But the matter takes a turn for the grotesque when the number of Auschwitz victims is reduced and at the very same time the Israeli memorial site Yad Vashem hastens to report that new research in Soviet archives has revealed that the number of Jewish victims of mass execution behind the front is actually higher by 250,000 than was assumed to date, so that one should, in fact, reckon 6.25 rather than 6 million[71] or even up to 7 million.[71] One can only wonder with which statistical data and by which methods these revised figures were obtained.

But if the body count for the individual camps continues to drop and the overall total remains the same or even increases, then one must ask where the victims may have died, if not in the alleged gas chambers? To solve this problem there are always endeavors, for example, to increase the number of victims for other camps. Case in point: for Treblinka, figures ranging from 700,000 to 900,000 have been the standard to date.[72] Benz now postulates between 1 and 1.2 million (B468), of which 974,000 are said to have been Polish Jews (B495). Thus, Treblinka with its more than one million victims is weighted more heavily in Benz’s analysis than Auschwitz is – a completely new trend in Holocaust studies.

Now that the victims of Auschwitz have decreased numerically to far below the 1 million mark, the remaining 5 to 6 million victims must be distributed among other killing centers. The preceding table represents the distribution of victims as the official Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) would have it until recently.[73] It is interesting, first of all, that the IfZ revised the statement of its former Head, Martin Broszat, who had said that there were no gassings in the concentration camps of the Reich proper.[47] The fact that the above list once again contains the facilities of Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, etc.,[74] is no doubt due to the Institute’s realization that one must never partially admit a lie because that means running the risk of being exposed totally. The figures listed in the last column are those given in Benz’s book and originate with a much older publication of the IfZ.[75] One wonders why Benz did not use more recent statistics provided by the same source.

It would also be interesting to see how historians might try to explain the 3-million-plus discrepancy between these approximately 2,700,000, i.e., 3,000,000 victims, most of them ‘victims of the gas chambers’, and the overall total of roughly 6 (or even 7) million victims. If one continues to reduce the Auschwitz death toll in accordance with the new trends to this effect, and simultaneously increases the overall total, this means that there are 4 million victims that must be freshly redistributed. Benz’s minor increase of the number of Treblinka victims, from 700,000 to 1.2 million (B468), is not enough to solve the problem, and contradicts the above statements of the selfsame Institut für Zeitgeschichte. The remaining 3 to 4 million Jews cannot possibly be explained away as victims of Einsatzkommando executions, starvation and disease, and the like. Such numbers of people – numbers of a similar magnitude as the total population of Berlin – do not simply vanish without a trace. It is thus not surprising that Benz does not attempt to explain in his book where the missing remainder might fit in.

4.3. The Exodus – the Return of Missing Persons

Benz does not spend so much as one single paragraph on the problem of Jewish post-war emigration from Europe. And what is more: he does not even mention that after the war there was a large-scale migration, especially of the European population of Jewish faith, which has become known as the modern Exodus. The first ten sections of his book are conspicuous in their lack of any mention of post-war emigration, while others (Greece and Yugoslavia) fashion a fig-leaf for themselves by admitting to a few hundreds or thousands who left the country after the war’s end.

Since Benz usually calculates the numbers of victims from the difference between pre- and post-war populations, this cannot but result in a great margin of error. Sanning, on the other hand, presents a summary of Jewish immigration into non-European nations, which is reproduced in the above table (S173). These data has never been refuted, not even by Benz, so that one may assume that the figures are correct.

Sanning shows that in 1970 there were still some 860,000 Jews in formerly German-occupied Europe, excluding the Soviet Union (S174). Since the Jews of western Europe exhibited next to no population increase after the war, then in light of the post-war emigration (some 1.548 million, cf. above table) at least 2,408,000 Jews must have lived in the formerly German-occupied non-Soviet parts of Europe after the war. Sanning determines that immediately after the war only 1,443,000 Jews were statistically located in formerly German-occupied non-Soviet Europe (S157), while 1.1 million were considered missing.

Benz arrives at 1.2 to 1.3 million statistically accounted-for Jews in formerly German-occupied, non-Soviet Europe immediately after the war. The difference between this and the 2.4 million Jews which Sanning can account for, a difference of 1 to 1.2 million Jews, therefore, emigrated after the war without registering. If one relates these unregistered emigrations to the 1.1 million Jews which Sanning identifies as missing from the formerly German-occupied parts of Europe, then in view of the great fluctuations in the data one cannot, according to Sanning, make any statistically reliable observations regarding whether or how many Jews died from unknown causes under the Third Reich. In this context, ‘statistically reliable’ means: since the fluctuations in the data range well over several hundreds of thousands, any losses on this order of magnitude cannot be demonstrated with any degree of certainty. In any case, however, it indicates that the Jewish population in formerly German-occupied non-Soviet Europe very likely did not suffer any losses ranging into the millions during World War Two.

4.4. Corrections for Wolfgang Benz

If one deducts the approximately 1 million unregistered emigrants from the 5.3 to 6 million victims that Benz claims he found, this leaves him with 4.3 to 5 million victims. From this, one must further deduct the difference between the Soviet Jews who appeared in Soviet statistics and the real number (some 1.5 million), the number of Jews who died in the Soviet Union from other causes (deportation, war, partisan warfare, at least 500,000), the number of statistically fabricated additional Polish Jews (some 700,000) as well as the number of Hungarian Jews who probably did not succumb in their entirety (300,000), in other words, a total of roughly 4 million. This would leave Benz with a remainder of at most 1.3 to 2 million unsolved cases.

5. The Jewish World Population

Benz studiously avoids this ‘hot potato’ as well. Sanning, on the other hand, takes the trouble to trace the world-wide development of the Jewish population from before World War Two to today. He points out, among other things, that the official post-war statistics do appear to reflect losses from the Holocaust (S181). However, the Jewish world population outside the Soviet Union increased as rapidly in the first few decades after the war as is normally seen only in developing countries or in rural populations (S186ff.). Since nearly everywhere in the world the Jews are almost completely urbanized and belong mostly to the middle and even the upper classes, both of which factors would lead one to expect only a low rate of natural increase, this would indicate that something is very wrong here. From detailed demographic analyses Sanning draws those conclusions that were quoted here at the beginning, but which we will not discuss further since there appear to be no counter-arguments to them anyhow.

6. Statistical Checks

6.1. The Fate of Jewish Personalities

In the late 1980s the Swedish demographer Carl O. Nordling recreated the fate of Jewry during the Second World War by means of a statistical study[77] based on the Jewish personalities listed in the Encyklopædia Judaica.[78] He chose 722 Jews entered therein, drawn from 12 European countries[79] that had come under German rule or supremacy in the course of the war. His choice was based on the following criteria:

–

born between 1860 and 1909;

–

not emigrated by January 1, 1938;

–

still living on January 1, 1939.

According to Nordling’s study, 317 (44%) of these 722 Jews had emigrated by late 1941, 256 (35%) were spared internment of any kind. Altogether, 95 of these Jewish personalities died during this time (13%), of which 57 cases (8%) occurred in the eastern camps as well as in unknown places and under unknown circumstances. Aside from the casualties resulting from disease, transport and starvation, therefore, these 8% must also include the victims of any deliberate mass extermination.

For the Polish Jews, the matter stands as follows:[80]

Of 65 Jewish notables listed in the Encyklopædia Judaica on January 1, 1940, 13 (20%) emigrated, 14 (22%) survived, 38 (58%) died. Of these 38, however, 23 (60%) died, not in the eastern camps, but in freedom – in ghettos, on transports, as consequence of armed conflict or reprisals, as well as victims of starvation and disease in western camps (Dachau, Nordhausen). In only 15 cases, in other words in approximately 23% of the Polish Jewish notables, the place of death is either unknown or located in one of the eastern camps; and here it is again necessary to consider that some of them succumbed to starvation, disease and forced transports at the end of the war. Even among the Polish Jewish personalities, therefore, probably less than 15% could have been victims of a hypothetical mass extermination. Benz, on the other hand, assumes that approximately 80-90% of all Polish Jews present in Poland in 1940 – some 2 million, according to him – were murdered in the extermination gas chambers (B495).

In another study, Nordling compares his statistical findings with those of W. N. Sanning, a comparison which we will discuss at greater length here.[80]

The percentages determined are astonishingly similar in many respects, and this indicates that Sanning’s findings do indeed reflect the fates of Jewish notables as these are set out in the Encyklopædia Judaica. It is also worth noting that the opportunities for emigration were fewer, or the desire to emigrate was lesser, for Jewish personalities than was the case for the average Jewish population.

But before acknowledging Sanning’s statistical findings to be correct, it is necessary to examine the fates of other Jewish population groups in the same way as that of the Jews represented in the Encyklopædia Judaica in order to eliminate the following potential distortions:

1. The decision of which Jewish notables to include in the 1972 edition of the Encyklopædia Judaica will have been influenced by the fates of the Jews in question during and after the war:
   1. Some Jews may have been included only because they died as a result of German measures of persecution. Examples: Janusz Korczak (1879-1942) was included because he voluntarily went to Treblinka with a group of children; the nun Edith Stein (1891-1942) was included because she died a martyr. If these people had survived, they might not have been included in the encyclopedia.
   2. Some Jews, on the other hand, were included only because they survived the war and could go on to become famous afterwards. For example: Pierre Mendès-France (born in 1907) was only a little-known Undersecretary of State before the war.
2. International connections or material advantages may have made emigration easier for Jewish notables than for the average Jewish citizen. However, this category of Jews had largely already emigrated by the start of the war.
3. Jewish VIPs cannot change their identity, go underground, flee, or emigrate illegally as can persons who are less well-known. Unlike for the average citizen, therefore, the life and suffering of Jewish personalities is usually easier to trace.
4. It is possible that due to their greater social and political involvement Jewish notables were subject, especially during the war, to more restrictive measures imposed by the German occupation powers.

6.2. The Korherr Reports

Richard Korherr was the leading statistician of the Third Reich. In early 1943, on Himmler’s instructions, he drew up a report on the trends which European Jewish population statistics had exhibited since the NS had come to power. Himmler wanted to submit this report to Hitler. After several discussions and some correspondence with Himmler, Korherr revised and shortened his first report.[84] These two reports as well as the correspondence that goes with them are counted among the allegedly central pieces of evidence proving the Holocaust, on whose basis G. Wellers, for example, believes he can set the number of victims of the Holocaust at approximately 2 million by late March 1943 alone.[85]

It needs to be said at the start that there is nothing whatsoever in the Korherr Reports and the accompanying correspondence, which was intended for Hitler’s and Himmler’s eyes only, which would indicate any intent to exterminate the Jews of Europe, or which would suggest that killings had already taken place – which is surprising enough, since it would hardly have been necessary to keep any such goings-on from Himmler’s or Hitler’s knowledge. The Report does reveal, however, that some 2½ million Jews were evacuated to the East. Korherr states:

"Between 1937 and early 1943 the number of Jews in Europe had decreased by approximately 4 million, due partly to emigration, partly to the excess of deaths over births among the Jews of Central and western Europe, and partly to evacuations, particularly from the more densely populated eastern regions, which are counted here as part of the decrease."[86]

Why does Korherr mention that the evacuations are counted as part of the decrease? That would make sense only if they are not actually gone from Europe but are nevertheless counted statistically as having emigrated. So were they perhaps not dead? S. Challen was puzzled not only by this additional remark and by the absence of even the slightest allusion to the mass murder in these top secret papers intended for Himmler and Hitler only, but also by the fact that the reputedly best statistician in Germany covered up gross errors in his report so elegantly.[87]

In his conclusions, for example, Korherr wrote that the Jewish population losses in Europe from 1933 to 1943 ( some 5 million) were caused approximately 50% by emigration to other continents, but his statistics cite only about 1.5 million emigrants. So roughly 1 million emigrants are missing. This begs the question: why would Germany’s foremost statistician draw conclusions contradicting his own data, and in a secret report intended for Hitler, no less? Furthermore, if one adds Korherr’s individual 1943 figures regarding the Jews scattered throughout the world, one arrives at a total that is only slightly less than the pre-war total; this already rules out any mass extermination. S. Challen therefore went to the trouble of examining Korherr’s claims more closely. He ultimately concludes that Korherr, acting on Himmler’s orders, reduced the emigration statistics by one million and increased the number of Jews evacuated to the East by that same million. And in one of his letters, Himmler writes that this report would serve well as a cover.[88] Challen arrives at the well-founded conclusion that Himmler wanted to keep Hitler from realizing that a large part of the Polish and Russian Jews in the East had gotten away by means of flight and Soviet evacuation measures. On the basis of Korherr’s data, Challen calculated that the Jews lost approximately 1.2 million of their number during World War Two, some 750,000 of them in Germany’s sphere of influence.[89]

In 1977, Korherr himself confirmed that he did not know anything about an ongoing extermination of the Jews during the war and was not aware that the term "Sonderbehandlung" (special treatment) was used as a code word to allegedly cover up mass murder.[90]

In the end, therefore, the Korherr Reports confirm Sanning’s statistics regarding the fate of the eastern European Jews, and are not even remotely suited to proving a hypothetical mass murder.

6.3. Compensation

A common question is whether the number of Jewish applications for compensation from Germany would not reveal how many Jews survived the Third Reich. In fact, any such attempt runs into insurmountable problems. The German Federal Ministry of Finance does provide detailed information about compensation payments made to persons persecuted in the Third Reich. On July 1, 1979, approximately 4.3 million individual applications for compensation had been filed; 13 years later the Ministry cites some 4.4 million individual applications.[91] For several reasons, however, this number is difficult to interpret. For one thing, the Ministry does not register the faith group of the applicants, so that there is no way of telling how many Jews are included in the total. Secondly, approximately half the applications have been turned down, but no reasons for the individual decisions are given; perhaps the applicant had never actually been in the German sphere of influence, or perhaps he had not suffered any losses despite his/her alleged Jewish faith. The refusals can thus also not be interpreted. Thirdly, the Ministry’s statistics reflect the number of applications, not the number of applicants. Since each kind of compensation (damage to life, health, property, fortune, professional advancement, etc.) must be applied for separately, any one applicant may very well have applied several times. On the other hand, many applications were made collectively by groups of persons, so that the statistics reflect entire families or even larger groups with one single application. One must also consider that until recently the Jews in the Soviet Union could not collect any compensation and are thus not included in the figure.[92] And finally, an American newspaper has reported that only one in two Holocaust survivors receives compensation payments from Germany.[93] Thus, at the present time, the statistics available regarding applications for compensation do not lend themselves to answering demographic questions.

6.4. Holocaust Survivors

According to information from the Israel-based official organization Amcha, which devotes all its activities to taking care of Holocaust survivors, 834,000 to 960,000 Holocaust survivors were still alive in the summer of 1997. The same organization defines a Holocaust survivor as

"any Jew who lived in a country at the time when it was: – under Nazi regime; – under Nazi occupation, – under regime of Nazi collaborators as well as any Jew who fled due to the above regime or occupation."[94]

According to a letter from the German section of this organization, roughly ¹/₃ of all Holocaust survivors are so-called "child survivors"[95] and where "child survivors" means that the according Holocaust survivors were not older than 16 years at the end of the war.[96]

If the average life expectancy of all age groups of these survivors as well as the statistical distribution of the Jews over these age groups in 1945 were known, it would be possible to calculate approximately how many Holocaust survivors were still alive in 1945, i.e., after the war ended. Unfortunately we do not have such data, but we can on the one hand estimate this age distribution by extrapolating it from the known statistical distribution of the Jews of the 1920s and 1930s,[97] corrected by Amcha’s statement about the ¹/₃ of "child survivors". On the other hand we can draw on the life expectancy statistics of another people whose fate from 1945 onwards was at least similar to that of the surviving European Jews of that time.

Since the German people as a whole experienced terrible living conditions from 1941 to 1948, it seems appropriate to draw on their mortality statistics.[98] For our calculations we have assumed two different age distributions in 1945: the first as given in the Atlas quoted,[97] and the other based on the assumption that ¹/₃ of all survivors in 1997 must have been between 0 and 15 years of age.[99] The rest of the calculations simply draw on the German "death tables".

Probably the results as shown in the following table may change if we get better data about the death rates of the Jewish survivors and about their age distribution then and today. But certainly our results are likely to at least approximate the truth. If one assumes a more severe fate for the average Holocaust survivor than for the average German – which most scientists tend to do – then this would result in an even higher number of survivors in 1945.

The number of Holocaust victims would be the difference between our calculated number of survivors, and the number of Jews who were alive in Europe prior to National Socialist persecution. The inflationary definition of ‘Holocaust survivor’ by Amcha, however, makes our task difficult. Given this definition, it is for example not clear how one should handle the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were deported to Soviet slave labor camps by Stalin or who fled voluntarily with the Red Army to the East right at the beginning of the German-Russian war.[100]

According to Sanning, and corresponding to the findings of other statistical studies, in the late 1920s and early 1930s there were roughly 6.1 million Jews in those European countries, excluding the Soviet Union, which later came under the influence of National Socialism.[101] Undoubtedly some 3 million Jews lived in the pre-war Soviet Union, of which at least one million lived in areas that were never occupied by German troops. Thus, in the late 1920s and early 1930s some 8.1 million Jews lived in what was to become the German sphere of influence. According to our calculations, 3.46 to 5 million of them survived the ‘Holocaust’, and 3.1 to 4.64 million did not.

The word ‘Holocaust’ is placed in quotation marks here because this figure includes not only victims of arbitrary killings by the National Socialist regime (which is a more specific definition of the term ‘Holocaust victims’), but also many other categories, such as victims of Stalinist mass deportations, Stalinist slave labor camps, victims of regular combat (as soldier, labor force or air raid victims) as well as irregular combat (partisan), victims of non-German pogroms, natural excess of deaths over births, etc. All these reasons, which certainly did reduce the numbers of Jews compared to the time prior to National Socialist rule, may add up to more than one or even two million.[100] Consequently, the number of possible real Holocaust victims – according to official data provided by Israel – is probably less than 3 or even 2 million Jews. This admission is fair enough to start with.

However, one should be aware that even the published number of Holocaust survivors is a figure likely to be manipulated due to its financial implications for Jewish organizations who are permanently claiming compensations (cf. Note [92]). Thus, it was not very surprising that R. Bloch, Jewish head of the Swiss Holocaust fund, the task of which is the collection of money for Jewish Holocaust survivors, announced in early 1998 that there are more than 1.000.000 Holocaust survivors still alive at that time.[104] There appears to be a permanent Jewish resurrection nowadays…

7. Conclusions

In its analysis of the central and western European nations, W. N. Sanning’s book rests on a somewhat shaky foundation. Benz has the better material in this instance. Neither of the two works addresses the problem of ‘de facto Jews’ in sufficient detail; while each of Benz’s co-authors deals with the problem as far as he sees fit, Sanning touches on this matter only marginally.

But it is the analyses of the nations Poland, the Soviet Union and Hungary, as well as the issue of post-war emigration, that are of vital significance to a determination of the number of Holocaust victims. In this respect, Benz’s work fails miserably. Graph 1 is a visual summary of the two books. The overall height of the bars represents the number of Jews prior to World War Two in the area that later came under German dominion. Roughly speaking, Benz determines his number of Holocaust victims by subtracting the number of registered emigrants during and after the war from the initial pre-war population. He blames on the Germans Jewish victims of Soviet deportation and imprisonment no less than the victims of pogroms that took place neither with the participation nor even with the tacit approval of German troops, as well as the victims of Allied bombings, the casualties of the Labor Force, the Jewish soldiers who fell in the ranks of the Soviet armies, and the casualties from regular partisan warfare. Since none of these victims lost their lives due to deliberate or culpably negligent measures or actions by the Germans, this method of maximizing the number of victims can only be called dishonest. Sanning rightly excludes these victims from his analysis, of course with the exception of the regular partisan victims, whose numbers are difficult to estimate and which must not be lumped together with any victims of potential irregular executions.

Benz also all but ignores actual or apparent losses through non-military means such as the natural excesses of deaths over births, religious conversions, unregistered emigration during and especially after the war, as well as Jews not statistically recorded as such today. In particular, Benz fails to make any mention of the partly uncontrolled and unregistered post-war mass emigration that has become known as the ‘modern Exodus’; of the fact, generally acknowledged today, that Soviet statistics reflect only a fraction of the Jews actually living in the Soviet Union; and of the fact that the Polish Jews also suffered great population decreases in the inter-war period due to emigration, the disproportionate percentage of old people, and the excess of deaths over births.

Benz emphasizes that where the Soviet evacuations, the Jewish population trends in Poland, and the Polish flight migrations are concerned, there are no definite figures, and one must rely on estimates alone. He arrives at his utterly incorrect estimates in the space of a very few sentences, without any sort of logical line of reasoning. Even though he admits that these issues are in dire need of further research, he avoids any such endeavor.

Instead, the book unleashes a prodigious verbal deluge in order to rehash early Jewish history and the history of each nation’s anti-Jewish measures, something which countless other authors have already done (some of them much better) and which contributes nothing to solving the authors’ self-appointed task.

Recent findings, such as the evidence which air photos can provide regarding the alleged extermination of the Hungarian Jews, are also studiously ignored. And what is worse: where the alleged methods of killing are concerned, Benz regurgitates the old, oft-refuted claims and ignores the fact that engineers and scientists are the sole experts in this field.

Also, Benz and his co-authors quote Stalinist and Communist sources with not so much as half a thought to critical assessment even when these sources clearly go back to show trials, and blithely adopt Stalinist terminology in their arguments, showing themselves in a dubious and unscientific light in the process.

And finally, fourteen of the supposedly best subject historians in the world[105] were clearly incapable of ensuring uniform treatment of national boundaries in the individual chapters. An eye to this would have avoided counting half a million victims twice in the overall total.

Thus the judgment they thought to pronounce on another scholar ultimately reflects on themselves:

"[…] almost all other studies of the Holocaust give the impression that the number of victims could be […] determined directly from the retrospective number of [counted] Jews."(B408)

"The author [in this case, Benz et al.] distinguishes himself through his methodologically unsound handling of the statistical material as well as through daring and demonstrably erroneous reasoning and conclusions." (B558, footnote 396.)

Like Benz, Sanning commits the error of placing too much faith in those statistics which are available. In actual fact, the fluctuations in the data preclude any definitive answer to the question of how many hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their lives in the German sphere of influence. These figures are lost in the fluctuations characterizing the statistical material. To date, only those figures provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross can be regarded as certain. The ICRC’s Special Office in Arolsen keeps track of all officially documented deaths in German concentration camps of the Third Reich. A summary from January 1, 1993 documents 296,081 deaths. The distribution of these deaths among the individual camps is shown in the accompanying table.

Jews probably constitute about half of the total. One must keep in mind, however, that these cases are not all. The camps Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka are missing from the table, as are the victims in the ghettos. And finally, one must remember that according to the Death Books approximately 66,000 people died in Auschwitz by late 1943 alone,[106] and that the Americans mentioned 25,000 dead in the concentration camp Dachau during the war.[107] A realistic estimate of the actual number of victims, therefore, may be twice as high as the total of victims registered by name in the records at Arolsen. The number of victims registered by name is now said to be about 450,000.[108] Doubtless the greater part of these are Jews, but exact figures are as yet unknown.

Even from this perspective, death clearly took a heavy toll.

Notes