Did Six Million Really
Die?
By Richard E.
Harwood
3
POPULATION AND EMIGRATION
Statistics relating to Jewish populations
are not everywhere known in precise detail, approximations for
various countries differing widely, and it is also unknown exactly
how many Jews were deported and interned at any one time between the
years 1939-1945. In general, however, what reliable statistics there
are, especially those relating to emigration, are sufficient to show
that not a fraction of six million Jews could have been exterminated.
In the first place, this claim cannot remotely be upheld on
examination of the European Jewish population figures. According to
Chambers Encyclopaedia the total number of Jews living in pre-war
Europe was 6,500,000. Quite clearly, this would mean that almost the
entire number were exterminated. But the Baseler Nachrichten, a
neutral Swiss publication employing available Jewish statistical
data, establishes that between 1933 and 1945, 1,500,000 Jews
emigrated to Britain, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Australia, China,
India, Palestine and the United Sutes. This is confirmed by the
Jewish journalist Bruno Blau, who cites the same figure in the New
York Jewish paper Aufbau, August 13th, 1948. Of these emigrants,
approximately 400,000 came from Germany before September 1939. This
is acknowledged by the World Jewish Congress in its publication Unity
in Dispersion (p. 377), which states that: "The majority of the
German Jews succeeded in leaving Germany before the war broke out."
In addition to the German Jews, 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian
Jews had emigrated by September, 1939, while from March 1939 onwards
the Institute for Jewish Emigration in Prague had secured the
emigration of 260,000 Jews from former Czechoslovakia. In all, only
360,000 Jews remained in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia after
September 1939. From Poland, an estimated 500,000 had emigrated prior
to the outbreak of war. These figures mean that the number of Jewish
emigrants from other European countries (France, the Netherlands,
Italy, the countries of eastern Europe etc.) was approximately
120,000. This exodus of Jews before and during hostilities,
therefore, reduces the number of Jews in Europe to approximately
5,000,000. In addition to these emigrants, we must also include the
number of Jews who fled to the Soviet Union after 1939, and who were
later evacuated beyond reach of the German invaders. It will be shown
below that the majority of these, about 1,250,000, were migrants from
Poland. But apart from Poland, Reitlinger admits that 300,000 other
European Jews slipped into Soviet territory between 1939 and 1941.
This brings the total of Jewish emigrants to the Soviet Union to
about 1,550,000. In Colliers magazine, June 9th, 1945, Freiling
Foster, writing of the Jews in Russia, explained that "2,200,000 have
migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape from the Nazis,"
but our lower estimate is probably more accurate. Jewish migration to
the Soviet Union, therefore, reduces the number of Jews within the
sphere of German occupation to around 3-1/2 million, approximately
3,450,000. From these should be deducted those Jews living in neutral
European countries who escaped the consequences of the war. According
to the 1942 World Almanac (p. 594). the number of Jews living in
Gibraltar, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland and
Turkey was 413,128.
3 MILLION JEWS IN EUROPE
A figure, consequently, of around 3 million
Jews in German- occupied Europe is as accurate as the available
emigration statistics will allow. Approximately the same number,
however, can be deduced in another way if we examine statistics for
the Jewish populations remaining in countries occupied by the Reich.
More than half of those Jews who migrated to the Soviet Union after
1939 came from Poland. It is frequently claimed that the war with
Poland added some 3 million Jews to the German sphere of influence
and that almost the whole of this Polish Jewish population was
"exterminated". This is a major factual error. The 1931 Jewish
population census for Poland put the number of Jews at 2,732,600
(Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, p. 36). Reitlinger states that at
least 1,170,000 of these were in the Russian zone occupied in the
autumn of 1939, about a million of whom were evacuated to the Urals
and south Siberia after the German invasion of June 1941 (ibid. p.
50). As described above, an estimated 500,000 Jews had emigrated from
Poland prior to the war. Moreover, the journalist Raymond Arthur
Davis, who spent the war in the Soviet Union, observed that
approximately 250,000 had already fled from German-occupied Poland to
Russia between 1939 and 1941 and were to be encountered in every
Soviet province (Odyssey through Hell, N.Y., 1946). Subtracting these
figures from the population of 2,732,600, therefore, and allowing for
the normal population increase, no more than 1,100,000 Polish Jews
could have been under German rule at the end of 1939. (Gutachen des
Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1956, p.80). To this
number we may add the 360,000 Jews remaining in Germany, Austria and
former Czechoslovakia (Bohemia-Moravia and Slovakia) after the
extensive emigration from those countries prior to the war described
above. Of the 320,000 French Jews, the Public Prosecutor representing
that part of the indictment relating to France at the Nuremberg
Trials, stated that 120,000 Jews were deported, though. Reitlinger
estimates only about 50,000. Thus the total number of Jews under Nazi
rule remains below two million. Deportations from the Scandinavian
countries were few, and from Bulgaria none at all. When the Jewish
populations of Holland (140,000), Belgium (40,000), Italy (50,000),
Yugoslavia (55,000), Hungary (380,000) and Roumania (725,000) are
included, the figure does not much exceed 3 million. This excess is
due to the fact that the latter figures are pre-war estimates
unaffected by emigration, which from these countries accounted for
about 120,000 (see above). This cross-checking, therefore, confirms
the estimate of approximately 3 million European Jews under German
occupation.
RUSSIAN JEWS EVACUATED
The precise figures concerning Russian Jews
are unknown, and have therefore been the subject of extreme
exaggeration. The Jewish statistician Jacob Leszczynski states that
in 1939 there were 2,100,000 Jews living in future German-occupied
Russia, i.e. western Russia. In addition, some 260,000 lived in the
Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. According to Louis
Levine, President of the American Jewish Council for Russian Relief,
who made a post-war tour of the Soviet Union and submitted a report
on the status of Jews there, the majority of these numbers were
evacuated east after the German armies launched their invasion. In
Chicago, on October 30th, 1946, he declared that: "At the outset of
the war, Jews were amongst the first evacuated from the western
regions threatened by the Hitlerite invaders, and shipped to safety
east of the Urals. Two million Jews were thus saved." This high
number is confirmed by the Jewish journalist David Bergelson, who
wrote in the Moscow Yiddish paper Ainikeit, December 5th, 1942, that
"Thanks to the evacuation, the majority (80%) of the Jews in the
Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia before the arrival of the
Germans were rescued." Reitlinger agrees with the Jewish authority
Joseph Schechtmann, who admits that huge numbers were evacuated,
though he estimates a slightly higher number of Russian and Baltic
Jews left under German occupation, between 650,000 and 850,000
(Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 499). In respect of these Soviet
Jews remaining in German territory, it will be proved later that in
the war in Russia no more than one hundred thousand persons were
killed by the German Action Groups as partisans and Bolshevik
commissars, not all of whom were Jews. By contrast, the partisans
themselves claimed to have murdered five times that number of German
troops.
'SIX MILLION' UNTRUE
ACCORDING TO NEUTRAL SWISS
It is clear, therefore, that the Germans
could not possibly have gained control over or exterminated anything
like six million Jews. Excluding the Soviet Union, the number of Jews
in Nazi-occupied Europe after emigration was scarcely more than 3
million, by no means all of whom were interned. To approach the
extermination of even half of six mfilion would have meant the
liquidation of every Jew living in Europe. And yet it is known that
large numbers of Jews were alive in Europe after 1945. Philip
Friedmann in Their Brother's Keepers (N.Y., 1957, p. 13), states that
"at least a million Jews survived in the very crucible of the Nazi
hell," while the official figure of the Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee is 1,559,600. Thus, even if one accepts the latter
estimate, the number of possible wartime Jewish deaths could not have
exceeded a limit of one and a half million. Precisely this conclusion
was reached by the reputable journal Baseler Nachrichten of neutral
Switzerland. In an article entitled "Wie hoch ist die Zahl der
jüdischen Opfer?" ("How high is the number of Jewish victims?",
June 13th, 1946), it explained that purely on the basis of the
population and emigration figures described above, a maximum of only
one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties. Later
on, however, it will be demonstrated conclusively that the number was
actually far less, for the Baseler Nachrichten accepted the Joint
Distribution Committee's figure of 1,559,600 survivors after the war,
but we shall show that the number of claims for compensation by
Jewish survivors is more than double that figure. This information
was not available to the Swiss in 1946.
IMPOSSIBLE BIRTH RATE
Indisputable evidence is also provided by
the post-war world Jewish population statistics. The World Almanac of
1938 gives the number of Jews in the world as 16,588,259. But after
the war, the New York Times, February 22nd, 1948 placed the number of
Jews in the world at a minimum of 15,600,000 and a maximum of
18,700,000. Quite obviously, these figures make it impossible for the
number of Jewish war-time casualties to be measured in anything but
thousands. 15-1/2 million in 1938 minus the alleged six million
leaves nine million; the New York Times figures would mean,
therefore, that the world's Jews produced seven million births,
almost doubling their numbers, in the space of ten years. This is
patently ridiculous. It would appear, therefore, that the great
majority of the missing "six million" were in fact emigrants -
emigrants to European countries, to the Soviet Union and the United
States before, during and after the war. And emigrants also, in vast
nunibers to Palestine during and especially at the end of the war.
After 1945, boat-loads of these Jewish survivors entered Palestine
illegally from Europe, causing considerable embarrassment to the
British Government of the time; indeed, so great were the numbers
that the H.M. Stationery Office publication No. 190 (November 5th,
1946) described them as "almost amounting to a second Exodus." It was
these emigrants to all parts of the world who had swollen the world
Jewish population to between 15 and 18 millions by 1948, and probably
the greatest part of them were emigrants to the United States who
entered in violation of the quota laws. On August 16th, 1963 David
Ben Gurion, President of Israel, stated that although the official
Jewish population of America was said to be 5,600,000, "the total
number would not be estimated too high at 9,000,000" (Deutsche
Wochenzeitung, November 23rd, 1963). The reason for this high figure
is underlined by Albert Maisal in his article "Our Newest Americans"
(Readers Digest, January, 1957), for he reveals that "Soon after
World War II, by Presidential decree, 90 per cent of all quota visas
for central and eastern Europe were issued to the uprooted."
Reprinted on this page is just one extract from hundreds that
regularly appear in the obituary columns of Aufbau, the Jewish
American weekly published in New York (June 16th, 1972). It shows how
Jewish emigrants to the United States subsequently changed their
names; their former names when in Europe appear in brackets. For
example, as below: Arthur Kingsley (formerly Dr. Königsberger of
Frankfurt). Could it be that some or all of these people whose names
are 'deceased' were included in the missing six million of
Europe?
Index
Introduction
1. German policy toward the Jews prior to the
war
2. German policy toward the Jews after the outbreak
of war
3. Population and Emigration
4. The Six Million: Documentary Evidence
5. The Nuremberg Trials
6. Auschwitz and Polish Jewry
7. Some Concentration Camps Memoires
8. The Nature & Condition of War Time
Concentration Camps
9. The Jews and The Concentrations Camps: A Factual
Appraisal by the Red Cross
10. The truth at last: The work of Paul
Rassinier
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