Archie wrote: ↑Fri Aug 22, 2025 5:29 pm
In is indisputable that the number was used prematurely. They were saying six million in 1944 and they are still saying it in 2025. This strongly suggests the origin of the number is based on legend rather than any rigorous accounting. The accounting is post hoc.
"Also just because a number was thrown out there during the war doesn't make it necessarily wrong."
Yeah, it does. Sure, there is some microscopic probability that Zionist activists "guessed" the correct number in their propaganda, but Occam's razor says the number is simply a legend. You are not being objective if you say the premature usage is meaningless.
Early claims that six million Jews had been killed
viewtopic.php?p=11432&#p11432
On the unreliability of the census figures see here (where I quote from Jewish sources admitting the opposite)
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=8332&#p8332
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=8281&#p8281
This shows how bad your reasoning skills are because census reports have nothing to do with a war time estimate. Zero. They are mathematical and statistical estimates. Nobody is relying on some number that was mentioned during the war. I'm sure a ton of other wrong estimates were thrown out as well. FUGGETABOUTIT!
The consensus is that there were roughly ~16.6 million Jews worldwide in 1939, ~9.5 million in Europe based on many sources (all of which have to be wrong in order for you to be right which is extremely unlikely). This comes from pre-war censuses in Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, etc.; community registries; neutral demographic studies (e.g., Arthur Ruppin, American Jewish Committee). Statistical estimates will have a margin of error but it won't be in the millions. The margin of error for this kind of census will be significantly less than a million. I don't think I have seen any statistical literacy among people on here.
By 1945–1950, Jewish population surveys show ~11 million worldwide. This looks at national censuses (U.S., USSR, UK, Israel after 1948), refugee organization records, Jewish community reports. The drop of ~5.5–6 million between 1939 and 1945 is consistent across all independent counts. Migration does not account for anywhere near this decline. Even with emigration to the U.S., Palestine, and Latin America, the numbers are still missing millions of people.
The Korherr Report (1943), commissioned by Himmler, explicitly states that millions of Jews had “disappeared” from Europe due to “special treatment”. They were sent to the camps but then why didn't the allies find millions of Jews there when the camps were liberated? What about the Einsatzgruppen reports where mass shootings in the USSR were tallied and sent back to Berlin, with hundreds of thousands killed in just months. These are Nazi records — not “Jewish sources” or “Communist propaganda.” Where did all the Jews go who were dealt with in the Einsatzgruppen reports?
Jewish communities across Eastern Europe were annihilated. Town after town that had tens of thousands of Jews in 1939 had none left by 1945 including those where my family lived. Survivor testimonies, Red Cross reports, and Allied liberation records confirm the destruction. Where did all of these people relocate? Did they stick together? Did they disperse? They clearly didn't go back home? They didn't leave Europe because we have a good idea how many people left Europe and it wasn't close.
You claim that Britannica’s older estimates “don’t add up” and imply Jews couldn’t have grown from 6 million in 1880 to 16 million by 1939. Jewish fertility rates in Eastern Europe were in fact very high (average 6–7 children per woman in the 19th century). Combined with declining infant mortality, this explains the rapid population growth. This impression reveals so much ignorance and how you don't even think for yourself and just parrot other deniers.
In that other link, you quote a report from 1941 which is deep in the middle of the war when it was quite literally impossible to do a broad census. His point was not “we can’t know at all,” but that precision was lacking during the war years due to disrupted census methods and differing definitions of “Jew.” Literally, I don't think you have come up with any of your own thoughts. Later scholarship had access to Nazi records, Allied records, postwar censuses, and refugee registries that Kohn did not have.
Chaos after the war made immediate postwar counts difficult which is obvious. Millions of displaced persons, destroyed communities, and border changes created challenges. This is why Jewish population reconstruction doesn’t rely only on a single chaotic 1945 “census”. Historians track country by country: what census/community records existed before 1939, how many were deported/killed in camps or mass shootings (from Nazi records), how many emigrated, and how many survivors appeared in 1945–50 censuses. By 1950, censuses in the U.S., Israel, USSR, France, UK, and Latin America stabilized the global Jewish count (~11 million).
Gerald Reitlinger (1953) was one of the first major Holocaust historians. He himself estimated between 4.2 and 5.7 million Jews killed — which is why deniers love quoting him.
But they ignore that even Reitlinger said millions were murdered and that “the total number of Jewish victims was at least 4 million and may well have been 6 million.”
There is no anchoring. That argument shows a complete lack of insight into how demography works. Professional demographic studies use Nazi documentation (deportation lists, camp statistics, Einsatzgruppen reports, Korherr Report), allied and Red Cross reports from liberated areas, survivor registries and censuses (U.S., Israel, USSR, etc.), community reconstructions (e.g., Yizkor books for annihilated shtetls). This triangulation produces a consistent picture across independent sources. It’s not just “pre-war number minus post-war number.” I can walk you through this process in more detail but I don't think you would understand it based on the types of comments that you are making.
All
serious scholarship, including Reitlinger’s (which you cite), concludes that millions — not hundreds of thousands — of Jews were killed. The convergence of estimates (Reitlinger 4–6m, Hilberg ~5.1m, Dawidowicz ~5.9m, modern consensus ~5.7–6m) strengthens the reliability.