Undeserved reply to CJ on population statistics

[Archie]

In another thread, CJ was complaining about his two-week ban and insinuated that he was banned only because we were terrified of confronting his devasting arguments about the population statistics. (He seems to think this is some brilliant new angle no one here has ever considered before.) First, as a point of clarification, the temporary ban was not earned for any single post but rather for a long pattern of behavior: very high-volume posting, mostly plagiarized, along with a refusal to read real sources while repeating the same falsehoods and "hallucinations" over and over even after being corrected. A ban had been in consideration for a while. It is simply a waste of people's time to respond to CJ's steady stream of uninformed rubbish, and at some point we have to wonder if such time wasting might be his entire purpose in posting here. (Nessie presents the exact same problem, but CJ somehow manages to exceed even Nessie in disruption and poor quality posting. At least Nessie presents his own thoughts, however ill-considered).

CJ thinks his arguments were so good we had to ban him to save face. The reality is closer to the opposite: I did not want to reply to him because I debunked all his points months ago and I didn't feel like repeating myself. I will do a single long response here not because CJ deserves it but simply because these topics will probably come up again.

For background, I had relinked for him several prior answers I had given him all the way back in May which he ignored. More recently he finally gave a very belated and very poor response which I will address in full below.
https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=14698#p14698

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 first sentence is another good example of why I no longer have the patience to "debate" CJ. If he really knew his stuff, I might be willing to overlook a bit of condescension, but the above is just insufferable coming from a noob who has no clue what he's talking about and whose posts have basic factual errors in every paragraph.

1) IDEALLY, census figures and population statistics would be perfectly objective, but we cannot ASSUME categorically that such statistics are immune from political pressures. Population statistics can be highly politically sensitive. It is especially absurd to claim this for the Eastern Bloc which has had many controversies in this regard.

2) It is trivially easy to show that the six million figure had "caught on" before any accurate census figures could have possibly been compiled. Given the chronology (that the "totally objective estimates" came after the propaganda number) it is foolish and naive to assume that this had "ZERO" influence whatsoever.

3) Reitlinger in his statistical appendix explicitly refers to "estimates which are based solely on alleged pre-war and post-war population returns, the latter being reached by deducting from the former the figure it is desired to prove." In other words, in Reitlinger's opinion the estimates, at least in some cases, were in fact anchored in the desired population change and were determined by working backwards, the exact thing you claim is impossible.

4) We can even see the anchoring and influence almost in real time in the AJC numbers. The AJC's 1945-1946 yearbook claimed that the global Jewish population was 15.75M prewar and 11.5M postwar, a difference of only 4.25M. Yet the next year, we see that they revised the prewar figure UP by around a million and revised the postwar figure DOWN in order to yield something closer to the EXPECTED six million number which again was already undeniably in use!
viewtopic.php?t=45

5) In many countries, Jews are not even censused. The numbers are just whatever Jewish orgs say they are. Let's not forget that Jews received billions of dollars in reparations for being "exterminated," so there was undeniably a strong incentive to have numbers supporting that conclusion.

At the very least there was means, motive, and opportunity here.

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.

Your claim here that there has always been a consensus on the prewar figure is objectively wrong. I just mentioned that the AJC's prewar numbers throughout the 1930s were a full million lower. And as I mentioned to you back in May, in the Korherr report, it says estimates for the global population varied from 15-18M with some as high as 20M.

And now we get to this beauty: "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." Except that I showed you way back in May that this is, objectively speaking, untrue. From Reitlinger:

"Already before the war there were widely differing estimates of the Jewish populations of Russia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and the Balkans, although in most of these countries there was a separate civil registry for Jews. Even in Western Europe, where the use of statistics was less open to reproach, the estimates of Jewish populations are neither more consistent nor more reliable. Since the war few European governments have conducted any census of which detailed figures are available. In the case of Russia particularly, to which the largest group of Jews escaped, there is no present basis for assessing the number of survivors."

After noting the many contradictory estimates for Russia, Reitlinger says: "Thus, there is a whole million difference between the highest and lowest of these estimates, none of which are realistic."

So that's a variation of a million just in Russia, and Reitlinger's opinion was that all those estimates were too low.

I will add here that the AJC in the 1980s(!) revised their numbers down by over a million (already linked). Thus we see the numbers are not even accurate within a million in the postwar period! Much less in the aftermath of a major and catastrophic war where we should expect to see uncertainty in the figures at a maximum.

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.

We have threads on the Korherr report. If you make the assumption that "evacuation" means executed, you could claim perhaps 2M killed by the end of 1942 based on Korherr, but that's only if that assumption is true; and in any case Korherr actually refutes the orthodox story which requires well over 4M Jews to be dead by that point. The Korherr report is not compatible with your six million number (which requires a very front-loaded killing schedule, mostly 1941 and 1942).

As far as your emotional appeals, that might be convincing to you personally as a Jew, but around here we focus on hard evidence.

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.

The Britannica figures I cited were: 6.2M in 1881, 11.5M in 1911, 14.9M in 1929. I said, "Those numbers don't really make sense as they imply very high fertility rates." To explain a bit more, the implied growth rates are 2.08% per year in the first period, 1.45% in the second period. Those are very high growth rates. That would require "third world" fertility. Fertility was higher back then in Europe, sure, but those rates are still quite high. And then to hit 16.7M by 1939, you'd need to grow another 1.15% a year during the 1930s during the economic depression. Keep in mind that Jews do not proselytize so any increase must be from internal demographics. Conversely some number of Jews will drop their Jewish identity each generation, especially in Western Europe and America. Are you statistically counted as a Jew in the current numbers? Have you checked?

Incidentally, other sources like World Almanac seem to have had completely different figures. According to Dalton, World Almanac had 7.2M in 1900 and 8.2M in 1910, figures that are totally inconsistent with the Britannica figures.

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).

I agree that you can't get accurate statistics during the war. That's just common sense. But this point is in my favor since your side is the one that was claiming six million during the war. Setting that aside, you are distorting the points raised by Dr. Hans Kohn (Jew) which apply generally to the difficulties of counting Jews, including under perfectly normal conditions. He wrote it in 1941, but your insinuation that the uncertainly he refers to is solely because of the war is false.

1) Kohn notes that the census in many countries does not include religion or Jews. This is a general point which applies before and after the war.

2) Kohn says the definition of "Jew" is not agreed upon. Again, this is a general difficulty having nothing to do with the war. The war simply makes these problems graver and adds the difficulties of chaos and migration to the mix.

Kohn: "Thus the assumption which generally varied around the figure of 16 million cannot claim any foundation on exact figures." Kohn specifically contradicts your claim that there is only minimal variation in the stats. Note that if Kohn's figure here is correct it would disprove the 6M since the net population decrease would only be 5M at most (and note that net population decreases is not the same as "murdered by Hitler").

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.”

Wrong. Reitlinger presented a range of 4,194,200 to 4,582,200. The 4.6M was his upper figure. He does discuss the 5.7M figure from Jackson (I assume that's where your AI that you plagiarized this from got confused) but he didn't believe that many were killed. That you are unable to quote even the most basic things accurately tells me that you are not using the actual sources but rather are copying and pasting AI hallucinations. Repeatedly.

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.

This is just vague gish gallop. And probably plagiarized since I know you have not actually read up on any of this material you mention and are not familiar with these sources. It is highly dishonest of you to try to the impression (unsuccessfully) that you know these sources when you don't. The supposed "triangulation" you refer to is all post hoc, and much of it is simply coming from Jews themselves. This stuff either doesn't say what you say it says or was compiled after the war to bolster a predetermined conclusion.

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.

It is circular and meaningless to say that everyone who disagrees is not "serious." And you forgot to take out the em dash here. Rookie mistake!

I really should not have indulged CJ with this reply since 1) I presented all this to him months ago, 2) he is simply repeating points that were already addressed, 3) he refers to sources he obviously hasn't actually seen, 4) he quoted a lot of what I said back to me, usually in a garbled way. I am quite certain that he fed my posts into the AI and had it construct a reply (which was full of errors). He then dishonestly reposted this without attribution as his own original post with only a few original additions (mostly just insults).

[bombsaway]

3) Reitlinger in his statistical appendix explicitly refers to "estimates which are based solely on alleged pre-war and post-war population returns, the latter being reached by deducting from the former the figure it is desired to prove." In other words, in Reitlinger's opinion the estimates, at least in some cases, were in fact anchored in the desired population change and were determined by working backwards, the exact thing you claim is impossible.

Where does he say this? https://archive.org/details/finalsoluti ... 0/mode/2up

[ConfusedJew]

In another thread, CJ was complaining about his two-week ban and insinuated that he was banned only because we were terrified of confronting his devasting arguments about the population statistics. (He seems to think this is some brilliant new angle no one here has ever considered before.) First, as a point of clarification, the temporary ban was not earned for any single post but rather for a long pattern of behavior: very high-volume posting, mostly plagiarized, along with a refusal to read real sources while repeating the same falsehoods and "hallucinations" over and over even after being corrected.

This would be more believable if recent posts fit anything near those criteria but the timing was not just arbitrary but inappropriate.

This is a very long post, but I appreciate the direct response, so I will go through it.

[Callafangers]

This is a very long post, but I appreciate the direct response, so I will go through it.

Translation: "I will copy-paste this into ChatGPT and then plagiarize its response, although now a bit more careful in rephrasing to avoid another ban. I will pretend I understand what is written, even though still posting frequent AI hallucinations, and never making concessions or taking any real accountability (e.g. humility) for errors, then gaslighting anyone who calls this behavior out. I will behave in very stereotypically-Jewish ways, a "living trope" so to speak, and then call anyone 'antisemitic' when they acknowledge this. Through all this, I will insist I am totally honest and just a confused, curious Jew."

Thanks for clearing this up for us, CJ. Much appreciated.

[Archie]

3) Reitlinger in his statistical appendix explicitly refers to "estimates which are based solely on alleged pre-war and post-war population returns, the latter being reached by deducting from the former the figure it is desired to prove." In other words, in Reitlinger's opinion the estimates, at least in some cases, were in fact anchored in the desired population change and were determined by working backwards, the exact thing you claim is impossible.

Where does he say this? https://archive.org/details/finalsoluti ... 0/mode/2up

Like I said in the post, it's in the statistical appendix (Appendix I). That particular quote is from pg. 490 of my copy (1953 edition). But I would recommend reading at least 489-490 which makes it clear that he does not regard the statistics as very definite at all (contrary to CJ's claims).

I quoted several of the good bits here.
viewtopic.php?p=8332&#p8332

[Archie]

In another thread, CJ was complaining about his two-week ban and insinuated that he was banned only because we were terrified of confronting his devasting arguments about the population statistics. (He seems to think this is some brilliant new angle no one here has ever considered before.) First, as a point of clarification, the temporary ban was not earned for any single post but rather for a long pattern of behavior: very high-volume posting, mostly plagiarized, along with a refusal to read real sources while repeating the same falsehoods and "hallucinations" over and over even after being corrected.

This would be more believable if recent posts fit anything near those criteria but the timing was not just arbitrary but inappropriate.

This is a very long post, but I appreciate the direct response, so I will go through it.

Dude, stop lying. You have been copy-pasting AI without attribution on here for months. See Wetzelrad's post here (and I believe Hans has collected similar examples).
viewtopic.php?t=464

The very post that I am replying to the OP very obviously has major portions that were copy-pasted from AI, and you posted it mere hours before your ban. So STFU with this nonsense about "timing" and how you had supposedly reformed.

[ConfusedJew]

1) IDEALLY, census figures and population statistics would be perfectly objective, but we cannot ASSUME categorically that such statistics are immune from political pressures. Population statistics can be highly politically sensitive. It is especially absurd to claim this for the Eastern Bloc which has had many controversies in this regard.

It's honestly not clear what point you are trying to make here. You ignored the point that many independent sources roughly confirm the same thing.

2) It is trivially easy to show that the six million figure had "caught on" before any accurate census figures could have possibly been compiled. Given the chronology (that the "totally objective estimates" came after the propaganda number) it is foolish and naive to assume that this had "ZERO" influence whatsoever.

No it's not. They are independent calculations and measurements. The burden is on you to prove that the methods were sloppy or biased if you want to try to debunk them. I would say that a random casualty estimate had zero influence on post war censuses. I'm well trained in statistics and probability so I can go as deep as is necessary here.

3) Reitlinger in his statistical appendix explicitly refers to "estimates which are based solely on alleged pre-war and post-war population returns, the latter being reached by deducting from the former the figure it is desired to prove." In other words, in Reitlinger's opinion the estimates, at least in some cases, were in fact anchored in the desired population change and were determined by working backwards, the exact thing you claim is impossible.

This missed the point that I was making. But that doesn't even describe how he came up with his estimates. Will you provide a link to that appendix? I think you are misrepresenting how he came up with his estimates.

4) We can even see the anchoring and influence almost in real time in the AJC numbers. The AJC's 1945-1946 yearbook claimed that the global Jewish population was 15.75M prewar and 11.5M postwar, a difference of only 4.25M. Yet the next year, we see that they revised the prewar figure UP by around a million and revised the postwar figure DOWN in order to yield something closer to the EXPECTED six million number which again was already undeniably in use!
viewtopic.php?t=45

I don't know about AJC estimates but I don't think those are currently accepted as accurate for reliable data. The fact that early estimates were based on unreliable data and methods isn't relevant if not used in settled consensus. That would be called a red herring argument.

5) In many countries, Jews are not even censused. The numbers are just whatever Jewish orgs say they are. Let's not forget that Jews received billions of dollars in reparations for being "exterminated," so there was undeniably a strong incentive to have numbers supporting that conclusion.

At the very least there was means, motive, and opportunity here.

The 1952 Luxembourg Agreement was not about paying "per victim". The total reparations bill didn’t change if the Jewish death toll was 4.5 million versus 6 million and the “motive” you’re suggesting doesn’t even match how reparations were calculated.

West Germany agreed to pay 3 billion Deutsche Marks to Israel and 450 million Deutsche Marks to the Claims Conference, which distributed compensation to Jewish survivors and communities outside Israel. These amounts were negotiated politically, not mathematically. They were presented as a moral obligation to compensate for destroyed property, livelihoods, and suffering but not based on a “per victim” total.

3 billion DM was equivalent to less than $800m at the time, a little over $100 per victim.

I'm reading about the agreement now and many Israelis, even Holocaust survivors, didn't want to accept blood money but Ben Gurion took it as a matter of survival.

Your claim here that there has always been a consensus on the prewar figure is objectively wrong. I just mentioned that the AJC's prewar numbers throughout the 1930s were a full million lower. And as I mentioned to you back in May, in the Korherr report, it says estimates for the global population varied from 15-18M with some as high as 20M.

The AJC numbers are not generally accepted as reliable. Even if they were off by a full million, it is still waaaaaaay out of the possible margin of error. Please, none of these nitpicking arguments.

And now we get to this beauty: "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." Except that I showed you way back in May that this is, objectively speaking, untrue. From Reitlinger:

"Already before the war there were widely differing estimates of the Jewish populations of Russia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and the Balkans, although in most of these countries there was a separate civil registry for Jews. Even in Western Europe, where the use of statistics was less open to reproach, the estimates of Jewish populations are neither more consistent nor more reliable. Since the war few European governments have conducted any census of which detailed figures are available. In the case of Russia particularly, to which the largest group of Jews escaped, there is no present basis for assessing the number of survivors."

After noting the many contradictory estimates for Russia, Reitlinger says: "Thus, there is a whole million difference between the highest and lowest of these estimates, none of which are realistic."

So that's a variation of a million just in Russia, and Reitlinger's opinion was that all those estimates were too low.

You may have sent me something in May when I was still getting up to speed but you can't reasonably expect me to remember that from five months ago. You are complaining about gaps in information with postwar censuses that were later filled in when Hillberg got access to Soviet archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This point is not valid but we can go deeper on that if you need to. He was was of the first historians to systematically measure how many casualties there were and was thus cautious in his estimates as he didn't trust his data. Those were later clarified and verified.

I will add here that the AJC in the 1980s(!) revised their numbers down by over a million (already linked). Thus we see the numbers are not even accurate within a million in the postwar period! Much less in the aftermath of a major and catastrophic war where we should expect to see uncertainty in the figures at a maximum.

AJC numbers aren't currently accepted as reliable. It's quite literally like trusting science from 50 years ago with worse tools, information, and less general scientific understanding.

We have threads on the Korherr report. If you make the assumption that "evacuation" means executed, you could claim perhaps 2M killed by the end of 1942 based on Korherr, but that's only if that assumption is true; and in any case Korherr actually refutes the orthodox story which requires well over 4M Jews to be dead by that point. The Korherr report is not compatible with your six million number (which requires a very front-loaded killing schedule, mostly 1941 and 1942).

The 2.5m figured that Korherr mentioned as “processed” in camps corresponds to the Operation Reinhard camps (Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Chelmno) by the end of 1942, but it excludes other categories of killings such as Einsatzgruppen shootings in the Soviet Union. When you take into account the missing counts, it reinforces the consensus that 4m Jews were already dead by early 1943.

The Britannica figures I cited were: 6.2M in 1881, 11.5M in 1911, 14.9M in 1929. I said, "Those numbers don't really make sense as they imply very high fertility rates." To explain a bit more, the implied growth rates are 2.08% per year in the first period, 1.45% in the second period. Those are very high growth rates. That would require "third world" fertility. Fertility was higher back then in Europe, sure, but those rates are still quite high. And then to hit 16.7M by 1939, you'd need to grow another 1.15% a year during the 1930s during the economic depression. Keep in mind that Jews do not proselytize so any increase must be from internal demographics. Conversely some number of Jews will drop their Jewish identity each generation, especially in Western Europe and America. Are you statistically counted as a Jew in the current numbers? Have you checked?

The entire idea of the first world vs third world didn't exist until the Cold War. Russia is still "developing".

Modern demographic work, like Sergio DellaPergola’s which I copied, reconstructs Jewish populations country by country using actual census data, migration records, and fertility trends, and consistently lands at about 17 million Jews worldwide in 1939.

Incidentally, other sources like World Almanac seem to have had completely different figures. According to Dalton, World Almanac had 7.2M in 1900 and 8.2M in 1910, figures that are totally inconsistent with the Britannica figures.

Modern historians don’t rely on either the World Almanac or Encyclopedia Brittanica. They reconstruct country-by-country populations from censuses, migration records, and fertility data. That approach better aligns with what we know about regional distributions.

I agree that you can't get accurate statistics during the war. That's just common sense. But this point is in my favor since your side is the one that was claiming six million during the war. Setting that aside, you are distorting the points raised by Dr. Hans Kohn (Jew) which apply generally to the difficulties of counting Jews, including under perfectly normal conditions. He wrote it in 1941, but your insinuation that the uncertainly he refers to is solely because of the war is false.

1) Kohn notes that the census in many countries does not include religion or Jews. This is a general point which applies before and after the war.

2) Kohn says the definition of "Jew" is not agreed upon. Again, this is a general difficulty having nothing to do with the war. The war simply makes these problems graver and adds the difficulties of chaos and migration to the mix.

Kohn: "Thus the assumption which generally varied around the figure of 16 million cannot claim any foundation on exact figures." Kohn specifically contradicts your claim that there is only minimal variation in the stats. Note that if Kohn's figure here is correct it would disprove the 6M since the net population decrease would only be 5M at most (and note that net population decreases is not the same as "murdered by Hitler").

It's a red herring to complain about a single war time estimate whether its right or wrong.

Kohn’s point wasn’t that censuses varied in quality, definitions of ‘Jew’ were inconsistent, and many states didn’t collect religion data at all. He was emphasizing the limits of precision statistics, not denying the reality of large populations or later losses. The ‘around 16 million’ figure he mentions wasn’t a precise census count but a working estimate which was eventually updated with more modern methods.

Wrong. Reitlinger presented a range of 4,194,200 to 4,582,200. The 4.6M was his upper figure. He does discuss the 5.7M figure from Jackson (I assume that's where your AI that you plagiarized this from got confused) but he didn't believe that many were killed. That you are unable to quote even the most basic things accurately tells me that you are not using the actual sources but rather are copying and pasting AI hallucinations. Repeatedly.

This might be the first fair point. AI got mixed up. ChatGPT 5 is a lot smarter though.

Reitlinger built his totals by favoring only what he could document and discounted everything that looked like “before/after” demographic arithmetic. This was a bias that systematically pushed his range down.

In practice that meant (a) he treated large swaths of Eastern Europe conservatively because there were thin or closed archives for the biggest killing zones, especially the occupied USSR (b) conservative camp tallies; and (c) he didn't include missing perpetrator paperwork we now have for Operation Reinhard.

He added deliberate allowances for evacuees and other survivors, and his methodology which was careful for its time, yielded an upper bound around 4.6 million, lower than later country-by-country reconstructions that incorporated the fuller post-1960s/1990s document base.

It is circular and meaningless to say that everyone who disagrees is not "serious." And you forgot to take out the em dash here. Rookie mistake!

That's not what I did or do. Reitlinger seems to have been serious although he had a biased methodology that led him to underestimate the victims. Some of that was just due to missing information at the time which I wouldn't blame him for.

If you look at the availability information and rigorously evaluate it, that is generally pretty serious. A lot of the arguments on here are not even plausible, let alone likely or substantiated. Possible, maybe. But so unlikely and implausible it's basically negligible. Some of the arguments on here are interesting though and I'm learning more about how to rigorously analyze history from this exercise.

[Wahrheitssucher]

Some of the arguments on here are interesting though and I'm learning more about how to rigorously analyze history from this exercise.

Ha ha!

[Nessie]

....

2) It is trivially easy to show that the six million figure had "caught on" before any accurate census figures could have possibly been compiled. Given the chronology (that the "totally objective estimates" came after the propaganda number) it is foolish and naive to assume that this had "ZERO" influence whatsoever.

...

That appears to be true, if you only look for 6 million. But a wider search of different figures will find that 6 million was one of many used.



"A telegram recently revealed, sent in 1939 by Polish Jewish organizations to then British Prime Minister Chamberlain, shows the chilling cry for help of 3.3 million Polish Jews, of whom very few survived."

Here are the results of a search for 5 million Jews;

https://www.google.com/search?q=%225%2C ... -wiz-books

Here they are for 4 million Jews;

https://www.google.com/search?q=%224%2C ... z-modeless

What ever the postwar Holocaust death toll was, it could then be referrenced back to past use of that figure, to claim evidence of the planning of a conspiracy. Hence, there is no evidential significance to the use of 6 million before the war.

[Wetzelrad]

That appears to be true, if you only look for 6 million. But a wider search of different figures will find that 6 million was one of many used. [...] Hence, there is no evidential significance to the use of 6 million before the war.

Prewar, 6 million was used in the context of terms like "extermination" and "Jewish question" and even "holocaust". It was extreme hyperbole with little basis in fact, mostly employed against Russia. Years later, exactly the same hyperbole was employed against Germany. Your random newspaper articles about other numbers of Jews are irrelevant unless they relate to claims of persecution.

However, what you are doing is context denial. Archie's comment concerned wartime estimates, explicitly. In wartime, the claims of six million victims obviously could only have been premature. For example, Haaretz credits Eliezer Unger as the first "Jew Who Cited That Figure", which was somehow already known to him in April 1943. Link. Other examples can be seen if you follow the reply chain backward.

It has to be asked: did you respond this way because your reading comprehension failed you, or was this a deliberate attempt to divert from Archie's incisive arguments?

[Wahrheitssucher]

…there is no evidential significance to the use of 6 million before the war.

…what you are doing is context denial.

It has to be asked: did you respond this way
because of reading comprehension failure, or
was this a deliberate attempt to divert from Archie's incisive arguments?

This question gets to the heart of the issue here
— both with this poster and with CJ.

[borjastick]

What ever the postwar Holocaust death toll was, it could then be referrenced back to past use of that figure, to claim evidence of the planning of a conspiracy. Hence, there is no evidential significance to the use of 6 million before the war.

More weasel words from Mrs Nessiebaumgoldfarb.

What he really means is all the evidence and claims by the jews in the previous 100 years or more of 6m jews being at risk was all nonsense and should ignored and filed under 'Lies' but the 6m in their holocaust was verifiably true and credible because he says so. We're still waiting for a gas chamber to be found btw.

All evidence of holocaust deaths to the tune of 6m are to be believed regardless of source and status but when an historian or engineer claims the opposite they immediately become 'the wrong type of expert'.

2700 posts here on this new site from Nessiebaumgoldfarb and 2700 of those 2700 are total shite.

[Nessie]

That appears to be true, if you only look for 6 million. But a wider search of different figures will find that 6 million was one of many used. [...] Hence, there is no evidential significance to the use of 6 million before the war.

Prewar, 6 million was used in the context of terms like "extermination" and "Jewish question" and even "holocaust". It was extreme hyperbole with little basis in fact, mostly employed against Russia. Years later, exactly the same hyperbole was employed against Germany. Your random newspaper articles about other numbers of Jews are irrelevant unless they relate to claims of persecution.

I linked to one about the persecution of 3.5 million. It is not difficult to find articles that use different figures.

https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=0 ... 69&dpr=1.3

However, what you are doing is context denial. Archie's comment concerned wartime estimates, explicitly. In wartime, the claims of six million victims obviously could only have been premature. For example, Haaretz credits Eliezer Unger as the first "Jew Who Cited That Figure", which was somehow already known to him in April 1943. Link. Other examples can be seen if you follow the reply chain backward.

It has to be asked: did you respond this way because your reading comprehension failed you, or was this a deliberate attempt to divert from Archie's incisive arguments?

The 6 million death toll came early, in 1945, from an authoritative figure, Wilhelm Hoettl. That it was estimated earlier, is not more than a good estimation. It is not beyond comprehension that someone could predict the final death toll. It was not known to Unger in 1943, it was a prediction, a guess or estimation.

Cherry-picking is a logical fallacy.

[Nessie]

...

1) IDEALLY, census figures and population statistics would be perfectly objective, but we cannot ASSUME categorically that such statistics are immune from political pressures. Population statistics can be highly politically sensitive. It is especially absurd to claim this for the Eastern Bloc which has had many controversies in this regard.

...

That makes the census figures the Nazis gathered, for each country they occupied, most likely to be accurate. It was a key part of Nazi policy, for which they dedicated a lot of time and resources and in return, they gained a lot of resources. There was a strong motive to find Jews and steal their property from them.

The key that so-called revisionists can use, to unlock the Holocaust and expose it as a proven hoax, are Nazi records of Jews in the camps and ghettos and estimations of how many were yet to be arrested. If millions were not killed, it stands to reason millions were still alive in 1944. Your reluctance to look for that evidence is suspicious. I think you don't want to, because you do not want to be confronted with the reality of a huge recorded, documented drop in the Jewish population.

[TlsMS93]

Why does this idiot always ask where the Jews were in the German camps in 1944? Isn't he familiar with the revisionist answer that millions of Jews left the German sphere of influence, as recorded in the Korherr report and which was German policy on the Jewish question, as outlined by Martin Luther in his memorandum?

I'm still waiting for the exterminationists to sift through the ashes from those camps in Poland so that the total number is 1.7 million. There's no point in saying it can't be done or appealing to Jewish laws regarding the treatment of the dead; that's a straw man.