What is the revisionist account of where the jews went?

[Numar Patru]

This is silly. For what you're claiming to be true, the survival of Jews in the USSR would have to be nearly 100%.

[TlsMS93]

And what do you know? I don't believe it was 100%, but let's face it, 5,000 German officers and a troop of collaborators going to hunt down 5 million Jews in those vast expanses that were twice the size of the Reich while at the same time fighting an inglorious war against partisans is a huge overestimation of the German capacity for efficiency. No, they were not efficient and there was an incentive to declare in reports substantial numbers of executions of partisans and collaborators.

In addition, revisionists such as Stephen Challen estimate that of the 1.2 million Jews killed, 750,000 were in the German sphere of influence. Sanning points out that of the 1.2 million, 1 million were in combat in the USSR and losses in evacuations to Siberia. Dalton estimated 570,000 Jews killed under German control.

The lack of harmony between the revisionist thesis and these data does not mean any weakness; this cannot be used as proof that, because the Holocaust is an officially established field, it should be considered an end point in the discussion.

By the way, how many of the 5 million Soviet Jews fought for the Red Army? Were they left out of that massive war?

[Numar Patru]

5,000 German officers and a troop of collaborators

You're going to need to start citing your sources. Each Einsatzkommando alone consisted of at least 500 men, and that says nothing of killing done by the Wehrmacht, Order Police, other SS agencies, and auxiliaries.

[Hektor]

...
1) Jews went to where Jews are

2) Its pracitcally impossible to geolocate each and every one of them, given these were the exact people who i) were hiding under floorboards and in lofts, ii) have a documented history of evading the attention of centralised authorities, iii) resisting integration and iv) changing their names in order to help achieve all of the above

3) If any of this sounds implausible, consider in the present day, USA and Europe with all of their modern surveillance tech and operational means, have absolutely no idea how many undocumented migrants are living in their respective contintents:
...

The "where did they go" is a trick question... Essentially insisting that there are six million Jews missing and that the best explanation was that they were gassed or exterminated by other means... It totally ignores that people may simply not register as Jews (again) and that there were migration movements in the period 1930 to 1950.

Germans speak of the number of Jews under their control in multiple documents and it is fairly well known by the outside world that large numbers of Jews came under German control. Asking what happened to those Jews is certainly NOT a "trick question".

There was an influx of Jews in Palestine, Americas, South Africa, Australia, Soviet Union, etc... Now that answers the "where did they go question sufficiently"... But now. Now you have to show that each and everyone of those must be a would be holocaust victim. or one of those supposedly missing (Those people were citizens of European countries, they just many not have mentioned that they were Jews any longer. Can you imagine the reason for this?)

Nope it is a trick question. There were Germans, Poles, French etc. under German control during WW2. Nobody asks "where did they go" and folks will think you are obnoxious for asking this question. Especially if you insist that you not giving a clear answer, implies that this proves they have been gassed.

The ground for the where did they go question is fallacious reasoning. That if someone can't say that X is in Y, then this somehow proves the thesis that he has been murdered. That way almost anything can be proven, so the attempt to prove something with that question - which is what the askers are trying - is indeed a 'trick question'.

....
This only makes sense if you think that it was the Germans' obligation to register where each Jew was under their rule, they were not obliged to do so and yet they determined that millions crossed the Reich's area of ​​influence into the occupied eastern territories in the Korherr Report, which was part of the German foreign policy on the Jewish question. And at the same time, they had to evacuate the Jews from where they left them in accordance with the retreat of the Eastern Front.

So you are asking the wrong question, it was up to the Soviet authorities to determine how many Jews remained in their territory, was this done? When? How accurate was this data? Were Jews afraid to declare themselves as such in censuses behind the Iron Curtain?

For example. He also did not mention which documents he thinks prove how many Jews were under German / Axis control.

[SanityCheck]

5,000 German officers and a troop of collaborators going to hunt down 5 million Jews in those vast expanses that were twice the size of the Reich while at the same time fighting an inglorious war against partisans is a huge overestimation of the German capacity for efficiency.

The 'hunt down' is especially hilarious since Jews in the expanded Soviet Union of 1941 were an overwhelmingly urban population.

The cities and towns were flooded with German troops - some Axis contingents like the Hungarians occasionally occupied areas which were then transferred to German control, and the differences are often commented on by survivors. The rear area services meant lots of men in uniform with guns were gadding around town.

The occupation and security forces were not inconsiderable, and they were the ones who first imposed control. Feldkommandanturen and Ortskommandanturen plus forces of security divisions, the Kommandanturen generally had military police sections, in addition to more MP units and security units. The military administration then handed over regions in the west of the occupied Soviet Union to the German civil administration and regular police (Gendarmerie and Schutzpolizei).

Both the military and civil administrations were heavily dependent on local administrations and police forces, who kept Jews in provincial towns under control, guarded ghettos ordered to be established by the Germans, and in many regions, especially Lithuania and western Ukraine, had terrorised the Jewish population left behind under occupation with targeted killings and pogroms.

There were a variety of small and even midsized towns where the local Wehrmacht garrison, often a company of an infantry regiment of a garrison division like the 339th or 707th Infantry Division, carried out mass executions of Jews all by themselves; there were many more where the local Wehrmacht garrison provided the cordons and passive manpower to herd victims to killing sites where they would be shot by very small numbers of SS. In other towns, the collaborator police were the cordons, and in Lithuania usually the majority of the killers in 1941.

In nearly all regions there was a gap between imposing ghettoisation orders and the eventual liquidation of the ghetto. The military and civil administrations were the ones to issue ghettoisation orders, the SS would be involved if they were present, but they could not be everywhere. So there were countless towns where Jews were hemmed in, also subject to the general threats of punishment if caught wandering outside the municipal boundaries in the countryside, uncertain of their fate.

Further east, Jews were more extensively mobilised or evacuated as factory workforces, and some also fled as refugees. So there is a drop from west to east in the percentage of Jews who were caught under the Axis occupation. The majority of those left behind were thus elderly, less fit, less mobile or less capable of fleeing. Nonetheless, there were very large numbers who did attempt to flee. In Polish Volhynia, around 10% of the Jewish population under occupation tried to escape in 1942 and another 10% tried to hide inside the ghettos in cellars, bunkers, attics etc. This was a region overrun early on where few had been mobilised and there were few big factories to evacuate from an area which was already a battle zone by early-mid July 1941. A relatively small percentage had succeeded in escaping east. By contrast, the 200,000 Jews of Kyiv were reduced to at most 40,000 by the time the Germans took the city, and those unsurprisingly skewed older and less mobile. 80% could escape, expecting 100% to escape when time and again we've seen civilians remaining in wrecked cities because they cannot move is wholly unrealistic.


Partisan activity in 1941 was essentially nonexistent in the Baltic states and western Ukraine; it had little chance of developing in Soviet central Ukraine due to the lack of forests or swamps, and was easily crushed in 1941, by the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht security forces were the main ones sallying out from their provincial town garrisons to sweep the countryside or patrol roads and highways. They were not so overwhelmed in 1941 that they couldn't back up the SS in ghetto liquidations, as mentioned, and were lectured extensively on the alleged Jew/partisan link, so murdering Jews in a ghetto for supposedly supporting non-Jewish partisans (mostly Red Army stragglers, a few stay-behinds from the Party or NKVD) was sold to them as a worthwhile counterinsurgency strategy.

The SS and Police were certainly involved as well, but the Einsatzgruppen were not elite special forces tasked exclusively to counterinsurgency, contrary to the claims of some revisionists. They had a variety of tasks, and with the splintering into small subunits (Trupps of an Einsatzkommando) they were actually not as overburdened with the task of targeting Jews as one might think. I called Einsatzgruppe B part-time genocidaires about twenty years ago and would stand by that.

Police battalions in the nine security divisions did some of the dirty work, the three police regiments in Centre and South - so another nine battalions - did even more. Then there were two Waffen-SS brigades who carried out killing actions either side of the Pripyat river. These paramilitary forces were much more numerous than the Einsatzgruppen and were involved with quite substantial body counts. Sometimes together with the Einsatzgruppen, so Babyn Yar was the work of Sonderkommando 4a backed up by Police Battalions 45 and 303, together with Ukrainian auxiliary police, over a thousand armed men. Most could be on cordon duty to herd victims to the ravine, the bulk of the shooting could be done by a much smaller number on rotation.

All of this leaves aside the Romanians, whose Army units, Gendarmerie and Secret Police were all involved in massacres in Bessarabia, Bukovina and the part of Soviet Ukraine which was taken over as Transnistria. There were Soviet ethnic German militias also involved in late 1941-early 1942, so Einsatzgruppe D passed through these regions and could move on further east to the southern Ukrainian coastal region and Crimea, leaving behind many, many thousands of shooters, who killed Jews into the six figures in this corner of the occupied Soviet Union. The frenzy of 1941 was not just a German affair.

[TlsMS93]

As news of the massacres spread, many Jews fled; in Ukraine, 70 to 90 percent of Jews fled. This was seen by the leader of Einsatzkommando VI as beneficial, as it would save the regime the expense of deporting victims further east, over the Urals.

Peter Longerich - Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

This suggests that the aim was not to murder all Jews but only those involved in sabotage and aid to the Bolshevik apparatus. If we are to believe that Generalplan Ost would have been carried out had Germany been victorious in the conflict, it has been estimated that 6 million Jews were among the 30 million deported to the Urals.

[SanityCheck]

By the way, how many of the 5 million Soviet Jews fought for the Red Army? Were they left out of that massive war?

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh (ed.), Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014) - open access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zxsjkw

Yitzhak Arad, In the shadow of the red banner: Soviet Jews in the war against Nazi Gemany (New York: Gefen/Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010)

The evidence indicates 300-500,000 Soviet Jews fought in the Red Army, which was an above-average share of the original 1939 Soviet Jewish population of just over 3 million, and an even more above average share of the 2 million Soviet (pre-1939) Jews who did not come under Axis occupation.

Their casualties in KIA were also above the Soviet average, and they were awarded a high number of medals. There were Soviet Jewish line commanders all the way to front level. As a nationality with above average education levels, Soviet Jews provided an above average share of officers, and not all were medical officers, either.

Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, pp.77-79, chapter 7, discusses the mobilisation of the Soviet Jewish population in the soon to be overrun regions and proceeds from a figure of 300,000 mobilised by summer 1941 - 72,000 already in the Red Army and 230,000 mobilised in the first weeks and months. Many of these were not properly recorded in army statistics in the chaos of 1941, and most fell into captivity or died on the battlefield. The 1941 figures for the Red Army given in official sources are decidedly incomplete.

A certain proportion of Soviet urban Jews would have been also locally mobilised to the militia (opolchenie) and 'destruction battalions' which also functioned as a militia more than as a partisan force, there was also extensive mobilisation of civilian trench-diggers in Russia and Ukraine - large numbers of 'POWs' captured by the Germans were civilian trench diggers. So the 300,000 figure will include these groups, not recorded systematically in Red Army records, but who were counted as POWs in German reports.

An estimated 75-80,000 Soviet Jews died as POWs or were murdered under the remit of the Commissar Order and Einsatzbefehl Nr 8 from 14 July 1941, which laid down the singling out of all Jews from Soviet POWs. These would overwhelmingly have been captured in 1941.

The 2 million Jews added in 1939-40 from the annexed territories of the Baltic states, eastern Poland and Bessarabia/Bukovina were the first to be overrun, so could not contribute much to the 1941 mobilisation. Refugees from these regions did form disproportionate shares of units like the 16th Lithuanian Rifle Division, and contributed large shares to several Latvian divisions.
https://www.peripheralhistories.co.uk/p ... y-soldiers

There is more data in this book in Russian:

Aleksey Bezugol'nyi, Natsional'nyy sostav Krasnoy armii. 1918–1945. Istoriko-statisticheskoye issledovaniye (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2021, 790pp); Alexey Bezugolny, National composition of the Red Army. 1918-1945. Historical and statistical research (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2021, 790pp)

Bezugol'nyi went through the Red Army administrative records for salaries, mobilisation and hospitals (convalescents) as well as other field records, to reveal a wealth of data on the proportion of different Soviet nationalities serving in the Red Army. It hugely complements and contextualises the 1990s data on casualties published by the Russian Ministry of Defense, which are the subject of much criticism. There are statistical tables galore, albeit these don't browser-translate from Russian.

Table 37 shows the number and proportion of smaller nationalities in the Red Army, previous sections dealt with the bigger ones (Caucasians, Central Asians, Ukrainians/Belarusians and Russians). The line 2nd from bottom is for 'evrei' (Jews).
http://loveread.ec/read_book.php?id=95095&p=112

The table shows a fluctuation between 172 and 208,000 Jews serving in the Red Army from 1942-45, with a decline as of January 1945 to 195,000. Soviet Jews suffered 120,000 or so KIAs and many 10s of 1000s more dying in Nazi captivity.

The Navy and NKVD would be additions to the Red Army figures, but the table shows that the numbers were in general proportion to the 1939 Soviet census, which recorded 3 million Jews, and disproportionate when compared to the 2 million pre-1939 Soviet Jewish population that escaped German occupation.

The preceding discussion in Bezugol'nyi's book highlights the changing reliance on different nationalities at different stages of the war, and also statistical planning for what manpower could be expected from territory under Nazi occupation when liberated.

In 1942, after the loss of Belarus and Ukraine, the proportion of Ukrainians and Belarusians fell significantly, while Caucasians and Central Asians were used extensively as replacements, especially in the rifle forces. Slavic nationalities were used to man technical branches (artillery, tanks, signals, etc) and to ensure that no division remained too skewed to one nationality. The non-Slavic peoples formed a disproportionate number of 'rank and file at the active front' and among convalescents in the hospital system: they were drafted as enlisted infantrymen and suffered high casualties. The data can be supplemented by the overall figures for KIA/MIA by nationality in the 'official' losses. Obviously, a proportion would have been invalided out as well - there is such data for overall numbers, but snapshots and breakdowns remain to be cited.

The exploration of why certain nationalities weren't conscripted - before some were deported - is rather good, ditto the initial restrictions on Central Asians' service seen in 1941, continuing prewar prejudices. In 1942, Kazakhs were redirected from labour armies to the actual frontline army, this is the most standout example. 1942 also saw experiments with national formations from the Caucasus, alongside national formations from the Baltic states (Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian divisions). In 1942-43, future 'traitor nationalities' like Chechens were mobilised fairly normally at first, but suffered higher desertion rates; they could be excluded from military service by the time of the formal deportations of nationalities in 1943-44 with the liberation of more territory, and sent to labour armies in Central Asia or Siberia.

In 1943-44, as Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states were liberated, large numbers of men previously under Nazi occupation were drafted directly into the advancing Soviet forces; the Germans called these conscripts 'Beutesoldaten' or 'booty troops'. The proportion of Ukrainians returned to the 'natural' 20% level from the previous underrepresentation. The same dynamic played out with the new draftees from the liberated western territories: the nationalities were overrepresented among convalescents and rank and file. So they were a new wave of cannon fodder. There is a strong suspicion that field commanders directly conscripted Ukrainian peasants without properly registering them, so the official figures are a minimum; some would have been conscripted and died without ever being properly counted, but this seems to have been a 1943 local phenomenon, by 1944 the system was more conspicuously organised and could feed replacements into units in a more organised fashion after giving them some actual training.

The 1.10.41 figure of 66,000 Jews in the Red Army reflects the chaos of the moment and the extremely high casualties suffered in the first months of the war.

Jews in the western pre-1939 Soviet territories were only partially mobilised then overrun, about 1 million Jews escaped from the pre-1939 Soviet territories by being evacuated, so the increase to 172,000 Jews by 1.7.42 fits absolutely with that - 10% of the evacuees were efffectively mobilised for the summer battles of 1942. The further mobilisation and squeezing of the population in late 1942 increases the number of Jews, despite battle casualties and KIAs, to a peak of 208,000 in mid-1943. Thereafter it falls to 196,000, and with the liberation of the western territories, the number rises again to 201,000.

That makes sense, given how many or rather how few Jewish partisans and Jews in hiding emerged to be conscripted, like one of the the Bielski brothers, or Roman Kravchenko who survived in Volhynia to fight until the end of the war. Since such drafteees suffered very high casualties, the number dips again to 195,000 at the start of 1945.

Polish Jews, or rather Jews claiming Polish nationality, were supposed to be incorporated into the Polish Army, as per official policy. There were cases of Poles being drafted into Soviet units and complaining to get out of them, and also cases of many Belarusians and Ukrainians pretending to be Poles to avoid conscription. Draft-dodging was significant in the reconquered western territories. The UPA was disruptive enough to prevent the call-ups of 40-70% of conscripts in Lviv and Stanislav provinces in late 1944. Over a quarter of Lithuanians also avoided the draft despite call-ups. It's messy, but the system still could impress even the most reluctant despite the shortfalls.

The proportion of Polish Jews in Berling Army service is available from Dobrozyscki's statistical study, for June 15, 1945, before any demobilisation, there were only 13,000 Jews in the Polish Army out of 73,955 total, before the next wave of repatriations from Soviet exile/labour in Central Asia etc kicked in. The Jews deported from eastern Poland in 1940-41 provided some forces for both the initial Berling Army as well as the Anders Army (Menachem Begin being one famous example of the latter).

While some Jews were evacuated as skilled workers and might have been exempted from service, the trend was for the mobilisation of fit military-age males while jobs in factories were taken over by unfit men, the young/elderly and women, who also worked on the collective farms, minus tractors mobilised by the military. We can see clearly from evacuation records that records were kept, even allowing for bureaucratic inefficiencies, evacuees and refugees could not avoid the authorities forever.

I don't think the military or military-industrial bureaucracies that balanced manpower behind, roughly, the 1941 frontline and Volga river would have cared in the slightest about sparing Jewish refugees. Antisemites at the time and subsequently would sneer that Jews evaded military service, but the proportion of Jews in the military was basically the same as in the 1939 Soviet population, on average, and this understates the above average share since up to a third of the pre-1939 Soviet Jewish population fell under German and Romanian occupation. The Jews of the territories annexed in 1939-40 were not yet being systematically drafted in 1940-41, and were overrun in days or weeks in summer 1941 anyway.


Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, chapters 7 and 38, estimates that 2.6-2.7 million Jews out of just over 5 million (5.2 million) were left behind under German and Romanian occupation, and projected 103-119,000 survivors. Almost half of these (51-53,000) came from Bessarabia and Bukovina, since Romanian policy in Transnistria changed in 1942 and the previously expelled Jews were repatriated to Romania in 1943-44. Arad gives 30-36,000 survivors from the Baltic states and eastern Poland (western Belarus and Ukraine), and 24-29,000 survivors from the pre-1939 Soviet territories overrun, which had up to 1 million under German occupation. Only the latter two groups could be mobilised/conscripted in 1943-44, and some of the Baltic states survivors were beyond Soviet reach, as they had been evacuated from KZs in the Baltic to German KZs (Kovno to Dachau-Kaufering being one example route).

So the number of mobilisable Soviet Jews could have been as low as 2.5 million, which makes the contribution to Soviet mobilisation even more disproportionate.

While one can rescrutinise the data on Jews remaining behind under Axis occupation and bring in more research done since Arad's book on Jewish evacuees and refugees, the chance of the numbers being out by an order of magnitude, and only hundreds of thousands remaining under occupation, are negligible.

The Soviet Union had its back to the wall in early 1942, forcing not only the transfer of hitherto 'unreliable' Central Asian nationalities to frontline service but also prompting the use of women volunteers for anti-aircraft forces, auxiliary services etc a whole year before Germany did the same thing. The only nationalities deviating from the standard policy of mobilisation by 1942 were ethnic Germans, restricted to the labour armies as unreliable, and Poles from prewar Poland, who were being mobilised for the Anders Army and then Berling Army, minus rather a lot of officers murdered in the Katyn complex. Polish Jews from the 1939-41 German side of the border were drawn into these Polish mobilisations, Polish Jews from eastern Poland were overrun too quickly to be too conspicuous numerically. Soviet Jews from east of the 1939 border were clearly not spared from conscription, before or after the 1941 evacuations and refugee flights.

If a million more Jews had successfully extricated themselves from the Axis occupation, then we would expect to see more mobilised to the Red Army, as the Soviet regime could not afford to play a long game and 'hide' anyone when they needed every able bodied citizen to contribute something to the war effort, and were even busily transferring many 10s of 1000s from the GULag to military units (whole 'penal corps' were formed in 1942 as well - one fought on the Rzhev salient). Even if one allows for increasing numbers of less able bodied people in the counterfactual/hypothetical scenario of another million Jews escaping, then one is still talking 10s of 1000s of extra men - a 5% mobilisation rate would generate 50,000 extra soldiers, and the Soviets needed every one they could get.