The Jews Went to Work? Organization Todt

[Callafangers]

The numbers of camps do after all have to be presented alongside the sources and data for how many Jews had been registered in these regions, and whether there was any evidence of transfers in.

Let's slow down, right here. Which organizations were:

1. Doing the registering, AND
2. Necessarily equipped (even remotely) to capture accurate Jewish demographic information by 1943-4 in the Eastern territories

?

Silesia, as one example

Great choice -- one which was much further West, less impacted by the chaos of war progressing and the threat to administrative capacities like tracking and counting Jews and their movements between the thousands of labor camps across [Eastern] Europe.

The Korherr report, p.13, similarly notes 95,112 Jews in the Posen (Warthegau) area in ghetto and camp work, mostly Polish; on p.11 it recorded 87,180 Jews in the Lodz ghetto, which means the camps in the Warthegau at that time could have had as few as 7,932 workers.

Ah but you are forgetting the Jews "smuggled through the camps in the General Government", which likely includes the 1,030 labor camps I outlined as well as the three rockstars of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Korherr estimates about 1.2 million here overall.

This is not a lot for 205 camp locations, but most of those had ceased operating. While the Lodz ghetto was very much a work ghetto by the turn of 1942/43 one can expect some not to have been counted as workers. There are plenty of documents about the existing labour detachments in 1942-43 in the Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt records since it took over the finance side administering the receipt of pay for workers and paying out some costs.

Litzmannstadt? Again, not comparable to the areas further East, with less administration. How about RK Ostland? Ukraine? This is where you're struggling, so let's test you a bit, put your credentials to good use. How many Jews at labor camps in the East, Nick? Fancy a guess, even?

So that's a nominal 418 ZALfJ accounted for quite easily, since the regional statistics and documentation do not allow any of those with 'loose ends' to have been places of employment for thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Jews.

No, not exactly, since we have the same Jews you are counting being 'smuggled' East initially, then sifting back West as the front approached a year or two later. None of this bodes well for your extermination claims -- Jews were constantly on the move, not always registered as such and even less so the further East or further forward in [war]time.

The same is true of the Galicia district, since Katzmann tells us in his report from the end of June 1943 that there are only 21,000 Jews left in work camps.

Even if we infer Katzman has included all potential labor sites, there is every reason to infer he advanced the Final Solution policy of moving Jews further East.

One issue with the database is it seems to count camps for men and women separately when the descriptions indicate they were the same camp, and might note that the women's 'camp' was really just 10 female prisoners assigned to Lagerarbeiten (i.e. presumably cooking, cleaning, clothes-washing and so on).

That casts doubt on the validity of your numbers if the camps aren't named and listed.

LOL and no. You drop big assumptions yet you do not have the population of the largest, smallest, nor mid-range camps nor can you even provide an informed estimate. The fact remains that Jews were overwhelmingly sent to these locations, they were needed in wartime, and your claims of their murder are not technically feasible.

Another pattern with the Government-General is a lot of early camps for land reclamation or working for the Wasserwirtschaftsinspektion. These were mostly closed down with a network around Sobibor in Chelm county a significant exception. Deportation transports to Sobibor were certainly selected for these camps, including Slovakian Jews, but the network was shut down in spring 1943.

Another instance of "I cannot track down the activities of thousands of camps but here's one example I will try to generalize onto them all."

Jews went to work, they were told they were going to work, official German policy was that they were going to work, work was needed, etc.

Other types of work left statistics in documents

Yes, I'll just stop you right there -- you've failed to make a compelling case for why we should infer that Jews in the occupied Eastern territories (especially further East beyond Poland, where official German policy entailed they would eventually be sent) were not actually in labor camps en masse.

I suppose we will have to wait for the next volume of USHMM's encylopedia and hope it's something other than more creative testimony from Shlomo Goldberg 'corroborated' by ChGK reports.

[Nessie]

...

Those 1944 figures ought to give you pause. Even if you can accept the harsh conditions in ammunition factories like Skarzysko-Kamienna which killed thousands of Jews, the armaments camps were not big enough to have soaked up the 330,000 deported from the Radom District in 1942 to Treblinka.

Have you got any figures for the Jewish population of the camps, all types of camp, after the Lodz ghetto closed in 1944?

By October 1944 there were very few ZALfJ in Poland outside the WVHA KZ system. The only one to be liberated with a signiicant number of inmates was Czestochowa - as far as I can remember. Most camps outside the KZ system as of July 1944, along with most KL-Aussenlager inside Poland, were evacuated into it from July onwards.

Do you have any population figures? For example;

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ ... ps-1942-45

"According to SS reports, there were more than 700,000 prisoners left in the camps in January 1945."

That scant detail, has no source for the reports, nor does it say if that was the total of all prisoners, including POWs, or was it the labour camps, or how many were Jewish.

[Nessie]

...you've failed to make a compelling case for why we should infer that Jews in the occupied Eastern territories (especially further East beyond Poland, where official German policy entailed they would eventually be sent) were not actually in labor camps en masse.

The reason why historians can infer that Jews were not actually in labour camps, en masse, in the east, in 1944-5, is because of the lack of evidence of that taking place, and the evidence that those camps were being closed down as the Nazis fled west. Plus, there is the evidence all the ghettos had closed. Plus, there is the evidence from Nazi documents, that the Jewish population in the east was to be cleared, to make it Jew free, with mass shootings and huge reported drops in the Jewish population.

[bombsaway]

Ah but you are forgetting the Jews "smuggled through the camps in the General Government", which likely includes the 1,030 labor camps I outlined as well as the three rockstars of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Korherr estimates about 1.2 million here overall.

Korherr says they were "smuggled" through the camps, and then out of the GG by the time he wrote his report, early 1943. They are regarded as outgoing

"Between 1937 and the beginning of 1943, the number of Jews in Europe is likely to have declined by an estimated 4 million"