Anyone here a statistician?

[Stubble]

That is nothing less than interesting history, but, ultimately it fails to address the original query, what are the odds Mr Check.

There are a lot of rabbit holes in that post and it will take me time to dive each one individually and to vet them.

At the end of the day, Mr Cole was shouted down by a man whose brother had been 'gassed at Auschwitz', only for that brother to end up being very much not gassed at Auschwitz and living in New York.

It is a curious set of circumstances.

the gassed at Auschwitz part on the show was wrong - Zoltan Hollander was nowhere near Auschwitz. That's the tl;dr

Oh, I certainly noted that Sir. I didn't want to get side tracked. Like I said, lots of rabbit holes there.

[SanityCheck]

That is nothing less than interesting history, but, ultimately it fails to address the original query, what are the odds Mr Check.

There are a lot of rabbit holes in that post and it will take me time to dive each one individually and to vet them.

At the end of the day, Mr Cole was shouted down by a man whose brother had been 'gassed at Auschwitz', only for that brother to end up being very much not gassed at Auschwitz and living in New York.

It is a curious set of circumstances.

the gassed at Auschwitz part on the show was wrong - Zoltan Hollander was nowhere near Auschwitz. That's the tl;dr

Oh, I certainly noted that Sir. I didn't want to get side tracked. Like I said, lots of rabbit holes there.

I think you've got brothers or shows with David Cole slightly mixed up; Cole doesn't mention this in his description of the Montel Williams show in Republican Party Animal, and Mark Weber doesn't allude to this in the JHR piece you linked earlier. Ernest Hollander was on the Montel Williams show with Cole and Weber and said his brother had been killed - but Cole doesn't suggest that Ernest said Zoltan had been gassed at Auschwitz.

Ernest's understanding of his family's fate was that his four female relatives (mother and three sisters) had been gassed at Birkenau and this would have been known to him as they were deported together and selected on arrival. His father died in a KZ in Germany. He had been informed his brother had been killed elsewhere - I don't see where

Zoltan, meanwhile, did think his brothers had been gassed at Auschwitz, but he had been entirely separated from his family for basically the whole of the Cold War, so it's not exactly much of a coinkydink if he found out he was wrong about Ernest in 1992.

The odds become astronomical because he saw his brother on TV and this led to the reunion. So the real 'what are the odds' numbers kick in when one considers how many Auschwitz survivors have been on TV or in some other media and this leads to a reunion. My guess is very, very few, and this example doesn't help because Zoltan was the one who'd been reported falsely as dead yet was never in Auschwitz anyway.

Since a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz with well over 100,000 surviving to be transferred out in 1944-45, *especially* the Hungarian Jews, one can project quite a lot of 'miraculous reunions' from 1945 onwards, and this would still not matter much against 800-900,000 presumed dead. 0.1% of 800-900,000 is 800-900 cases, the number currently known would not reach 80-90 and might be only 8-9 since the same ones get trotted out all the time.

[Nessie]

The chances a TV show that is about the Holocaust will have at least one Holocaust survivor on it, is nigh on 100%. The chances of other Holocaust survivors watching a mainstream popular TV show back then, when there was not the proliferation of programmes about the Holocaust as there is now, is very high. That massively increases the chances of an unexpected reunion.

[Stubble]

the gassed at Auschwitz part on the show was wrong - Zoltan Hollander was nowhere near Auschwitz. That's the tl;dr

Oh, I certainly noted that Sir. I didn't want to get side tracked. Like I said, lots of rabbit holes there.

I think you've got brothers or shows with David Cole slightly mixed up; Cole doesn't mention this in his description of the Montel Williams show in Republican Party Animal, and Mark Weber doesn't allude to this in the JHR piece you linked earlier. Ernest Hollander was on the Montel Williams show with Cole and Weber and said his brother had been killed - but Cole doesn't suggest that Ernest said Zoltan had been gassed at Auschwitz.

Ernest's understanding of his family's fate was that his four female relatives (mother and three sisters) had been gassed at Birkenau and this would have been known to him as they were deported together and selected on arrival. His father died in a KZ in Germany. He had been informed his brother had been killed elsewhere - I don't see where

Zoltan, meanwhile, did think his brothers had been gassed at Auschwitz, but he had been entirely separated from his family for basically the whole of the Cold War, so it's not exactly much of a coinkydink if he found out he was wrong about Ernest in 1992.

The odds become astronomical because he saw his brother on TV and this led to the reunion. So the real 'what are the odds' numbers kick in when one considers how many Auschwitz survivors have been on TV or in some other media and this leads to a reunion. My guess is very, very few, and this example doesn't help because Zoltan was the one who'd been reported falsely as dead yet was never in Auschwitz anyway.

Since a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz with well over 100,000 surviving to be transferred out in 1944-45, *especially* the Hungarian Jews, one can project quite a lot of 'miraculous reunions' from 1945 onwards, and this would still not matter much against 800-900,000 presumed dead. 0.1% of 800-900,000 is 800-900 cases, the number currently known would not reach 80-90 and might be only 8-9 since the same ones get trotted out all the time.

That's a fair point Sir, touche. I very well may have assumed he said 'gassed' when he in fact simply said died.

It has been a while since I actually watched the clip.

[HansHill]

The chances a TV show that is about the Holocaust will have at least one Holocaust survivor on it, is nigh on 100%. The chances of other Holocaust survivors watching a mainstream popular TV show back then, when there was not the proliferation of programmes about the Holocaust as there is now, is very high. That massively increases the chances of an unexpected reunion.

I have to agree with Nessie on this - add to the fact there is a population completely unknown and unknowable to us - that is, family members who reunited privately where there is no public record of this. It is of course their right to keep family matters private and that is their business as to why - the cynic in me thinks it to avoid inconvenient embarrassments like OP is addressing, but either way only increases the odds further.

Gassed family members meeting up after the gassing, who would have thunk it!

[Stubble]

If we assume the orthodox narrative that almost half of world jewry was murdered surely that would factor into the calculus in some way.

[curioussoul]

According to Ernest, his brother fought against the Germans until the end of the war, but the Soviets thought he was a pro-German spy and sent him to Siberia for ten years, where he worked on roads and in factories. “You can use the worst word in the dictionary to describe what the Russians did to him,” says Ernest. After he was finally released by the Soviets and returned home, Yugoslav authorities — Ernest says — accused Zoltan of having been a Soviet spy, and mistreated him.

While Ernest Hollander and his relatives living here in the United States believed for 50 years that Zoltan had perished as yet another “victim of the Holocaust,” Zoltan, for his part, believed for half a century that his entire family had perished in the war.

So much for the impossibility of Western Jews disappearing in the Soviet Union after the war due to, among other things, severe Soviet repression. The absurd irony of this entire story should wash over anyone skeptical of the resettlement theory. Both sides of the family believed the other to have perished in the Holocaust. Turns out neither had; one had just been stuck behind the Iron Curtain. Who woulda' thunk!

[SanityCheck]

I have to agree with Nessie on this - add to the fact there is a population completely unknown and unknowable to us - that is, family members who reunited privately where there is no public record of this. It is of course their right to keep family matters private and that is their business as to why - the cynic in me thinks it to avoid inconvenient embarrassments like OP is addressing, but either way only increases the odds further.

Public records would include archived 'private' materials from missing persons queries to Displaced Persons and immigration records to compensation claims, only some of which is readily accessible digitally, but the same applies to all personal records for Germans in the fallout from WWII such as the Lastenausgleichsgesetz, Wehrmacht casualties bureau, widows' pensions claims etc.

Holocaust survivors had considerable incentives to make themselves known - firstly to be traceable to relatives, which included well above average proportions of relatives already living abroad in the diaspora. Then to register for repatriation, as displaced persons, or for emigration. The circumstances of 1945-48 meant that one had to pass through numerous hoops if one was repatriated from the USSR or allowed to leave for Poland, then decide to move on from Poland, before becoming stuck in a DP camp in 1945-48 due to barriers to immigration to Palestine or seeking emigration elsewhere. The contingents brought rapidly to Sweden or the UK ('the boys') were extensively documented, as was the case for all immigrants. Ukrainian, Baltic and Polish displaced persons went through the same hoops to get into the UK, as an example.

From the 1940s to the present, it's also clear that survivors gave accounts of their whereabouts, even if only a brief questionnaire in 1945, to an extreme level. As was noted elsewhere by Callafangers, the oral history programs were quite active, culminating in the Shoah Foundation scouring the world for 52,000 interviews between 1994-1999. Before this, memorial books and landsmanshaftn provided a community level framework, then there would be national/regional associations, all for a generation who were adults in the post-1945 era and were joiners, not loners.

So the real question is, how many of the 100,000+ survivors (KZ survivors and those in hiding/with partisans in the east), or 200,000 survivors if one counts all those in hiding in western Europe, noted reunions with families after 1945. Most likely a lot of stories about this in the 1940s coupled with stories of trying to find the whereabouts of missing relatives that were answered with 'deported to Auschwitz, not known to have survived' and other explanations. Then a big drop in such reunions from the 1950s to 21st Century.

Considering that deportations included the elderly (for non-Reich Jews over 65, for Reich Jews over 50 to 65 if not deported to Theresienstadt), reunions with parents, uncles and aunts were highly unlikely to happen by the 1980s-1990s, the reunions reported tend to be of siblings and school friends i.e. from the younger generation. Who survived in much larger numbers to record their survival.

Gassed family members meeting up after the gassing, who would have thunk it!

And how many are 'known knowns'? One of the early IHR directors before Mark Weber (forget whether it was David McCalden or someone else) supposedly liked to collect 'miraculous reunion' stories, but the example of Ernest and Zoltan Hollander doesn't fit the desired script at all.

[SanityCheck]

According to Ernest, his brother fought against the Germans until the end of the war, but the Soviets thought he was a pro-German spy and sent him to Siberia for ten years, where he worked on roads and in factories. “You can use the worst word in the dictionary to describe what the Russians did to him,” says Ernest. After he was finally released by the Soviets and returned home, Yugoslav authorities — Ernest says — accused Zoltan of having been a Soviet spy, and mistreated him.

While Ernest Hollander and his relatives living here in the United States believed for 50 years that Zoltan had perished as yet another “victim of the Holocaust,” Zoltan, for his part, believed for half a century that his entire family had perished in the war.

So much for the impossibility of Western Jews disappearing in the Soviet Union after the war due to, among other things, severe Soviet repression. The absurd irony of this entire story should wash over anyone skeptical of the resettlement theory. Both sides of the family believed the other to have perished in the Holocaust. Turns out neither had; one had just been stuck behind the Iron Curtain. Who woulda' thunk!

Zoltan Hollander belonged to a high-risk group for Soviet internment: he was a member of the Hungarian Labor Service so was liable to be treated as a POW even before being at risk of being considered a spy.

Being considered a spy or traitor meant a GULag sentence or execution, and those numbers are well documented, they don't allow for massive numbers of hidden missing people. For broader categories of suspects there were the 'special settlements' or internal exiles, again well documented statistically and not composed of categories who could hide five, six or seven figures worth of missing Jews. The death rates in these systems, especially the GULag and the Soviet POW camp system GUVPI, were also documented, so when the GULag was dismantled after 1953 at the same time as POWs from Axis states were released, this was after a phase of lowered mortality compared to the wartime peaks. So one cannot easily bump them off prior to Stalin's death, either.

The Soviets arrested or deported significant numbers of Germans, Hungarians and Romanians in 1945 including civilians for forced labour, who were repatriated within the decade. Some Jewish nationals of these Axis enemy nation states were caught up in the arrests, a much larger number avoided this

Conversely, the Soviets concluded a repatriation agreement with Poland so that all Poles and Jews resident within the prewar borders of Poland, including eastern Poland, could be repatriated. Thus very few Poles remained either in the GULag system by the early 1950s or in the 'special settlements'.

The nationality counts also recorded Jews, which would have been Soviet citizens rather than foreign nationals, but neither category would be sufficient for explaining the whereabouts of Polish Jews. In several listings I've seen, there isn't even an entry for Hungarian nationals either in the GULag or special settlements, and one with 1600 'Romanians' out of 2.5 million in the GULag in 1951, and only 8198 non-native 'others'

The 'missing' Jews did not end up in the Soviet GULag, GUVPI or special settlements systems - and there were no other major systems of internment or confinement in 1945-1953, with most being dissolved or drastically reduced after Stalin's death, triggering further repatriations of the last German and Axis POWs, and reopening closed windows of emigration, so a few thousand remaining Polish nationals after the bulk were repatriated in 1945-47.

Poles and Polish Jews, able to return to postwar Poland at the end of the war due to repatriation agreements, and then able to emigrate or leave in the 1940s, wrote down many of the first post-1945 GUlag and exile/Siberia memoirs, followed by German nationals who were repatriated in the 1950s.

Highly recommended for this phase, but covering the 1920s to 1970s/1980s:
Dariusz Tołczyk, Blissful blindness: Soviet crimes under Western eyes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023)

[Stubble]

Feel free to correct me here, but, I was under the impression children were 'gassed' first because they were unable to work. I've also been told children were killed selectively 'so they wouldn't grow up to be avengers'.

So, how can there be more children?

[SanityCheck]

You guys also need to remember the counter-examples of Soviet liberations - starting with the liberation of 7000 inmates at Auschwitz in January 1945. The foreign nationals were repatriated in 1945, one ship from Odesa reached Marseille in April 1945. Primo Levi was home in October 1945 after a detour to a refugee/displaced persons camp in eastern Belarus, as he described in The Truce.

The Soviets were primarily interested in ensuring reciprocal repatriations so that the Allied/western powers gave up Soviet nationals as per the Yalta agreement. Undoubtedly there were frictions and the use of accusations of espionage as well, but the official Soviet repatriation commission had returned 969,736 Allied nationals by December 1945, with barely more than 10,000 awaiting repatriation - this number including 172,000 Poles, which likely overlaps with other direct Soviet-Polish repatriation statistics, the western numbers are more striking, e.g. 307,000 French nationals, 33,909 Belgians, 34,108 Dutch.

The repatriation channels went via Murmansk and Odesa, the ideal being on returning ships which had repatriated Soviet nationals, this meant that British, American and other foreign nationals were often temporarily housed in camps in Belarus and Ukraine, and had mostly come from Poland, but the French cases includes 'malgre-nous', Alsatian-Lorrainers who had often been conscripted into German service. Foreign workers would also have been liberated in eastern Germany despite German efforts to evacuate labour forces (and KZ prisoners).

Bernstein, Seth. 2025. “Negotiating Respect: Soviet Aspirations and the Repatriation of Allied Nationals from Eastern Europe.” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 38 (1): 62–81. doi:10.1080/13518046.2025.2463165.

[SanityCheck]

Feel free to correct me here, but, I was under the impression children were 'gassed' first because they were unable to work. I've also been told children were killed selectively 'so they wouldn't grow up to be avengers'.

So, how can there be more children?

Younger generation is what I wrote - meaning teenagers and twentysomethings, not babies, toddlers and primary schoolkids, who would be considered children.

The Germans were assessing the age of 'fitness for work' for Belarusians in 1944 at ten years old - they also were obviously applying a generous definition for Hungarian Jews and others deported in 1944, to puberty or just below it, and of course to the 16 year old Anne Frank, although 16 was a typical minimum age already in 1942 in directives ordering the use of able bodied Jews above 16 and not their 'special treatment'.

The age pyramid of 3,000 Hungarian Jewish survivors of Auschwitz testifying in 1945 to DEGOB confirms the pattern; there are very few under 14 and only four who might have been under 10, one of which is almost certainly a typo on birth year
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... ewish.html

The bulge of survivors aged between 14 and 24 is conspicuous, and also should be comprehensible considering that so many 'known' Hungarian Jewish survivors from Elie Wiesel to Mel Mermelstein to Ernest Hollander were born in the interwar period. Unsurprisingly, it's the doctors like Gisella Perl or Olga Lengyel who were born before WWI.

Note also how the fathers of Elie Wiesel and Ernest Hollander were both selected for work but perished in the KZ system before liberation. That's purely anecdotal, but worthy of further investigation to see if this is more of a pattern.

A former student of mine turned his undergraduate dissertation into a journal article on Hungarian Jewish youth in Auschwitz, and has just earned his PhD from Oxford on Jewish youth experiences during the Holocaust in Hungary.

Balint, Barnabas. 2021. “Coming of Age During the Holocaust: The Adult Roles and Responsibilities of Young Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau.” The Journal of Holocaust Research 35 (1): 20–40. doi:10.1080/25785648.2020.1863637.
Balint, Barnabas. 2024. “Traces of Youth: Reconstructing Hungarian Women’s Lives during the Holocaust.” European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 31 (3): 349–69. doi:10.1080/13507486.2024.2354680. (open access)

[Stubble]

I'll put it on the list. Thank you.

At some point, I'd like to generate a headcount in, a headcount out, and do a statistical analysis of it, but, that task is rather herculean, and sisyphean.

If you know of others that have already trod that ground, I'd appreciate a recommendation for reading. If you find the time.

Regardless, it is my opinion that the subject of this thread is statistically aberrant although you make a compelling argument that it may not be.

[SanityCheck]

I'll put it on the list. Thank you.

At some point, I'd like to generate a headcount in, a headcount out, and do a statistical analysis of it, but, that task is rather herculean, and sisyphean.

It's been done for west European nations including Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany and the Czech lands/Theresienstadt to quite fine levels of detail. Generally complete transport lists, compared with known returning survivors, broken down by transport, with memorial books or databases often also identifying places of death if a deportee selected for work then died in Mauthausen, Buchenwald, etc. The names of survivors might be included in the memorial books (as with Klarsfeld's books on France and Belgium or the Buch der Erinnerung for the Reich>Baltic states deportations), there might be micro-studies of individual transports (several for France). So one can then compare with the testimonies, memoirs and other materials from the survivor cohorts (2500 returning to France, 1000 returning from the deportations from the Reich to Riga in 1941-2).

The data is then often reproduced online, such as the Bundesarchiv's memorial book or Gedenkbuch for Germany (which also has a useful list of transports from the Reich), or the Wiki pages on deportations from France, etc.

The basic stats in the 1991 collection Dimension des Völkermords really haven't budged much for the countries mentioned above, because they were generally investigated either by states/NGOs or by researchers like the Klarsfelds on the basis of fuller data, well before the end of the Cold War. Reunified Germany rechecked its 1980s memorial book so the current Bundesarchiv Gedenkbuch online database reflects some chased loose ends.

Dimension des Völkermords is open access, what you might google for the countries above will generally match the findings, and indeed match the enumerations in Reitlinger and Hilberg in several cases since the 1940s investigations for some countries, especially Netherlands and Belgium, were so thorough at the time.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document ... 08332/html

These countries would be more manageable to 'sample' and reinvestigate if one wanted to, but it's highly unlikely that if one added up all subsequent memoirs, oral histories, news/media stories, obituaries, war crimes investigation statements or any other evidence, or went looking through the Arolsen Archives etc, that one would find hitherto unspotted names. One would instead be able to compile data to do things like age breakdowns and more.

Unsurprisingly, revisionists including Mattogno tend to avoid these countries for more detailed examination, as there isn't a lot of room for speculation, and the status of the unaccounted for deportees is pretty unequivocally 'declared legally dead' as an absolute minimum. Which is how France has acknowledged them in acts of parliament this century, to cap off the individual declarations of missing-therefore-dead that might have been filed with local courts decades ago.

There are at best some errata, which is how one should consider any anomalies that are harped on about in comparison to sets of 1000, 2000 or 60,000 or more names.

If you know of others that have already trod that ground, I'd appreciate a recommendation for reading. If you find the time.

There's a lot of stuff to google up and bookmark, e.g. a page of 'Lodz ghetto statistics' on jewishgen.org which matches other sources. The Lodz ghetto is unusually well-documented with complete house registration lists and changes, transport lists for 1942 and 1944 prior to the final Auschwitz deportations (but remember the names of those who were resident in 1944 were all recorded).

For Hungary a useful page is this one
Honey, Michael, ‘Research Notes on the Holocaust in Hungary’, (useful tables and listings of transports plus discussion of Glaser list) now at https://web.archive.org/web/20170403185 ... g/hungaria

The DEGOB website has lots of useful articles http://degob.org/index.php

1944 deportation waves from Hungary and Lodz segued heavily into the expanded KZ system of 1944-45 across Germany and Austria. 25% or more were selected for work, and their transfers to new sub-camps or evacuation contributed to the expansion of the KZ system. So the camps encyclopedias and studies of the other camps plus displaced persons issues all add up very quickly.

I think the most interesting book to recommend would be:

Dan Stone, Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (Oxford, 2023)

This is a history of the ITS Arolsen but deals with early postwar investigations and missing persons tracing efforts as well, and also has enough on non-Jewish missing persons - whether in the KZs or not - to put the Holocaust side into context. It is not a full statistical history nor does it sum up all of the other investigations going on across Europe in the second half of the 1940s, but one spots them in the discussion. One comes away appreciating the practical limits of what could be achieved with 1940s postwar resources but also how the missing persons issue functioned in subsequent decades.

Several states still haven't worked out WWII losses in 'precise' form despite extensive efforts to do so and a lot of public demand (since this is a matter of family history for those societies). I think it would be impossible for China to do so with any precision whatsoever, and it is obviously very difficult to break down or identify all dead in the former USSR although the demographic total is pretty clear (26 million) due to poor record keeping with military casualties at various times. Ukraine was more candid for the 1930s-1940s after independence but whether it really caught everyone in the massive series of memorial books is unclear. Poland would like to do more but is running up against the overwhelming numbers and how they might be individualised - going from numbers to names can be a problem. Russia has been publishing memorial books for the war with names, but these are incomplete.

Germany has made at least eight overall estimates-calculations-recalculations of the WWII death toll between 1949 and 2005. Britain, the US, Italy and the Netherlands really only needed to issue one set of figures, since the numbers were more manageable, unlike Germany calculating between 5.4 and 7.3 million total war dead from all causes. So it makes sense that Germany has been digitising the Wehrmacht casualty bureau records very intensively, after being aware the archives receive thousands of queries about relatives every year to this day. The problem is civilian casualties including in the expulsions are much harder to document when only servicemen were made to wear dog tags.

Regardless, it is my opinion that the subject of this thread is statistically aberrant although you make a compelling argument that it may not be.

the original saying was 'the plural of anecdote is data', the problem being establishing when one has accumulated enough anecdotes to be statistically representative and to become actual data.

[Nessie]

I'll put it on the list. Thank you.

At some point, I'd like to generate a headcount in, a headcount out, and do a statistical analysis of it, but, that task is rather herculean, and sisyphean.

If you know of others that have already trod that ground, I'd appreciate a recommendation for reading. If you find the time.

Regardless, it is my opinion that the subject of this thread is statistically aberrant although you make a compelling argument that it may not be.

The Nazis completed headcounts during the war, all of which recorded huge drops in the Jewish population. Each nation aligned to, or occupied by the Nazis, have their own headcounts of their Jewish population and they also record drops. Only Denmark and Finland could say where their Jewish populations were in 1944.

Why did those two countries get a pass from the hoax of pretending many of their Jewish citizens were murdered by the Nazis? I know that some did get arrested and died, but the vast majority survived, and both countries get to stand out for defying the Nazis and protecting their Jewish citizens.