Undeserved reply to CJ on population statistics
Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2025 8:55 pm
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
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.
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:
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.
As far as your emotional appeals, that might be convincing to you personally as a Jew, but around here we focus on hard evidence.
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.
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").
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.
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).
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
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.ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Fri Aug 22, 2025 6:51 pm 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!
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.
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 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.
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:
So that's a variation of a million just in Russia, and Reitlinger's opinion was that all those estimates were too low."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."
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.
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 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.
As far as your emotional appeals, that might be convincing to you personally as a Jew, but around here we focus on hard evidence.
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?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.
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.
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.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).
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.
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.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.
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!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.
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).