I noticed that some people are constantly referring to a Red Cross figure of 300,000 dead from all nationalities for the Nazi camp system. The numbers I derived are considerably higher. I spent lots of time and made detailed calculations. No, they do not support the official story of 6 million gassings, and no, I am not cheating you in any way, and no, I am not a crackpot, nor a Nazi or Anti-Semite, nor a Holocaust denier in any sense.
I will give a short summary of these results here, as nobody cares to read calculations nowadays. For details, see my other posts on Holocaust. You have the calculations there. It is just basic arithmetic starting from the best known numbers (Jewish numbers, but they seem accurate for the Western Europe and state well when they are uncertain). No cheating anywhere. If you think they are wrong, then show it. They are as correct as can be.
You often see stated that the Jewish death toll in the Holocaust ranges from 4.5 million to 6 million. This is incorrect. It does not range from the lower number to the higher: nobody has proposed intermediate values. There are two very different values: one is always very close to 4.5 million and it is calculated from Jewish populations before and after the Holocaust using the population numbers in the American Jewish Congress (AJY) yearbooks and known Jewish immigration out of Europe. The second figure ranges around 6 million (always over 5 million) and it is calculated by adding death tolls in different sites. These death tolls are very unstable: in Auschwitz once was claimed that 4 million died, now the figure is 1-1.5 million. Despite this level of variation in the death tolls in individual sites, the sum is always quite close to 6 million, i.e., deaths are added somewhere else if they are reduced from some site. The two ways of calculating the death toll should give very similar numbers, but they do not. It should be obvious to anybody that the first way, the one giving 4.5 million, is much better supported and this calculation does indeed stay quite stable, but it is fully acknowledged that the population figures for Eastern Europe are very uncertain (that is, the Soviet Union and Romania, Romania is today rather well understood). The in second number, 6 million, the death tolls in individual sites are highly unstable and in fact totally unknown. This is the starting point of any discussion of the actual death toll.
The total Holocaust death toll for Jews is 4.5 million if we accept the Soviet figure 2.8 million in the Soviet Union in 1939 before the attack to Poland. At that time the Soviet Union had occupied the three Baltic nations. I have a good reason to believe that the correct figure is smaller. Calculating from the size of the Jewish population of the USA it appears that there were one million more Jewish immigrants to the USA before 1939. I wrote a post on this calculation. If so, then the correct figure for the Soviet Union in 1939 is 3.35 million (that is, 1.8 million plus 1.55 million from Eastern Poland). The Jewish sources (AJY) admit that the Soviet figure is highly uncertain. It should be noted that the Soviet consensus of 1937 claimed 170 million inhabitants in the Soviet Union, while the raw data from that census was 162 million. This shows much Soviets were willing to cheat, so how much confidence can one put to their figures?
In the West and Western Poland before the Barbarossa Operation there were about 3 million Jews taken to Nazi camps or ghettos, while 0.6 million stayed in the occupied countries. (There were Jews also in unoccupied countries, see my posts). Of these 3 million 0.33 million died in German camps outside Poland and 0.17 million died in ghettos and work camps in Poland. Additionally in the Warsaw ghetto uprising died 7,000 Jews.
As I derived an upper bound of 300,000 Jews who could have died in Auschwitz, I cannot accept the customary estimate of 1-1.5 million in Auschwitz. For that reason I set (say, for discussion purposes if you prefer that expression, I say: as it seems to have been) the death tolls in the death camps as follows (in millions): Majdanek 0.06, Chelmno 0.06, Auschwitz 0.06, Belzec 0.05, Treblinka 0.05, Sobibor 0.05. The sum of these numbers is 0.33 million.
The total for West and Western Poland is 0.84 million for the camp system and if you remove the three Operation Reinhardt camps it is 690,000. This is a number that I have often seen. It is correct, but excludes the three camps. Additionally Nazis shot 0.06 million in Yugoslavia and 0.05 million died in the attack and initial terror in Poland or in POW camps. All these sum up to roughly 1 million in the West and Western Poland. It is actually very precisely 1 million if we include the deaths in Romania and Yugoslavia and exclude the deaths in the three Operation Reinhardt camps.
The number of Jews in the Soviet Union of 1941 was 4.35 million assuming that the figure 2.8 million for Soviet Jews in 1939 is correct, but I believe it is at least one million too high since immigration to the USA shows that there were one million more Jewish immigrants before 1939. (The figure could be too high by more than a million as Jewish birth rate in Russia/Soviet Union could have been smaller as so many young left the country.)
There is a bit more reliable number: the number of Jews in 1948 is said to have been 2 million. I assume that this is also the figure for 1946 (though it may not be). It is estimated that 60-80% of Jews were evacuated or fled when Germans attacked in 1941. They had to be placed to refugee camps, which are not any different from any camps and probably in the war time had a death rate of some 28%. If 2 million survived and 28% died, there had to be originally 2.78 million in these camps.
You find 28% too high? It is not, concentration camps, POW camps, refugee camps of that time had diseases, starvation and so on. Finnish POW camps for Russians had the death rate 28%, German POW camps for Russians had 25%. Neither gassed any inmates. See how it was with British camps for Boors in South Africa or US POW camps in the civil war.
Now I will use the magic explanation I presented in one post: what liquidation means. I think this is one of the few contributions I can make to this topic.
Assuming, as I have done, that in the Operation Reinhardt camps (Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec) died only 0.15 million of 1.45 million, who were transported there, I conclude that Germans transported to Eastern Poland 1.3 million Jews. Now, there is this diary entry, which says that of them 60% were to be liquidated and 40% used for work.
What does it mean? Normally you would read this that liquidated means to be killed, but that does not agree with the official story according to which nearly 100% were exterminated, not 40% used for work. So, in the post I assumed that liquidated means the same as the same word means in the writings of Herzl: turning an asset into money. I assume that 60% of this 1.3 million (that is 0.78 million) were robbed of everything, their documents were burned, and they were transported by provider-gas vans to Ukrainian march lands, while 40% (0.52 million) work capable people had to work for Germans. (Actually they could have been transported to cities where they took over some flats left by Jews who had escaped. Germans probably put the Jews to Jewish ghettos. But Hitler or Himmler mentioned the march lands in some talk.)
These liquidated Jews managed as they could and they would be among the Jews in Soviet Union, of whom 2 million survived. As the original number of Jews from whom 2 million survived was previously estimated as 2.78 million, I conclude that 2 million were evacuated before the German attack in 1941. How many stayed?
Using the number from the American Jewish Yearbook the figure is 4.35-2=2.35 million, but this cannot be: Germans are assumed to have killed all who stayed and the figure is 1-1.5 million. Assuming I am correct in that 1 million immigrated to the USA before 1939 the figure is 3.35-2=1.35 million. This is very well within the range 1-1.5 million that are said to have been left behind and killed by Germans.
What happened to the 40% used for work (0.52 million)? I calculated in another post that 0.26 million of the Jews who appeared after 1946 to the Western DP camps were survivors of Jews sent to the Operation Reinhard camps. That means, 0.26 million of this 0.52 million did survive, a half. We cannot say what happened to the rest, but probably they died in camps or in the war.
That is about all about the summary of my Holocaust calculations. Do not plan on taking me to court. I do not deny the Holocaust, I do not deny the gas chambers, I do not claim or deny anything. I just say that basic arithmetics should work also in this problem.
Can this 1.35 million that the Nazis presumably shot or gassed in the Eastern front be made smaller? Of course it can. The figure is simply calculated from the presumed number of Jews before the war and after the war. The number before the war is not known for Eastern Europe. There was a Russian census in 1892, but it is indeed very rough to assume that the Jewish population in the old Russian areas grew with the rate about 1.4% yearly even though millions of young people left the country for the USA.
It is perfectly possible that the 2 million Jews who were evacuated represented 80% of the Jews in the Soviet Union in 1941. Then there originally were 2.5 million Jews and not 3.35 million. If so, then German Einsatzgruppen shot only 0.5 million Jews after the 1941 attack. Certainly they shot a large number of Jews. Killing of Eastern Jews was admitted in Nazi documents: Jews were treated as spies and guerillas, who can be shot.
I summarize:
Jews who died in the Nazi camp system in the West is 0.83 million, about 28% of the 3 million in Nazi hands. This is a normal figure for concentration camps of that time. Additionally 0.12 million died in the West elsewhere and in total we can estimate that 1 million Jews died in the West and Western Poland.
Jews who died in Soviet camps: 0.78 million, it is 28% of 2.78 million and estimated from the fact that 28% is quite typical for camps in those times and conditions. Jews shot by Einsatzgruppen: 1.35 million (this could be smaller only by assuming that there were less Jews originally or more than 2 million survived). Jews taken to work for Germans (40% of 1.3 million, i.e., 0.52 million) of whom 0.26 million died (because 0.26 million appeared to the DP camps). The total Jewish death toll in the Soviet Union is 2.39 million.
Additionally some 0.18 million Jews died in Romania.
All together this makes 3.57 million, which is about one million smaller that the number 4.5 million I calculated subtracting survivors from the original number in one post, and it is the number we get assuming that the amount of Jewish immigrants to the USA was 1 million larger than is officially told, as I explained in the post. We got some confirmation of this assumption in this calculation which I just made.
Further reductions to the death toll are possible but not certain.
A. It is possible that the figure I used for the Jewish population of Poland, 3.25 million, is 0.5 million too high. The reasons why this may be so are two: 1) calculating the Jewish death toll for Auschwitz using this 3.25 million figure gives 300,000. It is either too small (to be the official 1-1.5 million) or too large (to be about 60,000 of registered deaths). It may be that the West Poland’s Jewish population is too high implying that Poland’s Jewish population is too high. But there is a good explanation for these 240,000 Jews: they are the missing Hungarian Jews. 2) in France and other Western European countries there were many Jews, who moved there recently from Poland. Indeed, the presence of these Eastern European Jews was the reason the French first suggested the Madagascar plan. It is quite possible that 0,.5 million Polish Jews were in Western Europe in 1939.
B. The birth rate may have been lower in Eastern areas because many Jews had immigrated. Typically the immigrants are younger and the remaining population is older and the birth rate drops. This could account to maximum 0.5 million. We can make a rough estimate of the Jewish population of Soviet Union of 1937 in the following way. In the Finnish front Finns took some 65,000 POWs and Germans some 9,000. Some of these were Jewish and Finns transferred them to Germans. Germans had finally about 200 Jewish POWs. That would imply 200 out of 74,000 but many POWs died and it is more correct to compare the figure 47,000 alive POWs by Finns and 6,000 by Germans, together 53,000, with these 200 Jewish POWs. That is about 0.38%. The Russian solders in the Finnish front were from Russia (not Ukraine etc.), which had a population of about 80 million. Jews were taken to conscription just like anybody in the Soviet Union. 0.38% of 162 million is 300,000. The AJC yearbook for 1939 gives the figure 800,000 for the Jewish population of Russia proper. The estimate of AJC is high even taking into account the uncounted immigration of 1 million Jews from Eastern Europe to the USA, as this immigration was largely from Ukraine, White Russia and Baltic countries. It seems quite possible that the Jewish population of Russia proper could have been 0.5 million smaller than the AJC figure I used.
C. It is possible that there were more than 2 million Jewish survivors in the Soviet Union in 1948. I, however, have not looked into this question.
Considering A and B and maybe C, the actual Jewish death toll may be on the range of 2-2.5 million, but this is only a possibility. I cannot say one way or another, not being any expert on this topic.
What is the meaning of all this? There is a common argument pointing a Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and implying that it is a sufficient reason why the number of Jewish deaths in Auschwitz must be 1-1.5 million and not for instance 0.06 million. I cannot imagine any camp prisoner had any possibility for estimating the number of dead in the camp. 60,000 is very high, 1.5 million is very, very high, especially as those people were not supposed to have ever appeared in the camp (not registered, nobody met them, they were killed on arrival). The number of Jewish inmates in these camps, who claimed to have seen gassings and to know how many were killed, are small and they have all died. We cannot ask them, we can only ask whether to trust that addition/subtraction/division/multiplication works as was told in the school or whether we should trust people, who make claims that are in contradiction with basic arithmetic.