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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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For reference:

The 1926 Soviet Census counts about 2.6 million Jewish-ethnicity people.

The 1931 Polish Census counts about 3.1 million Jewish-faith people.

Granted, these figures might not be trustworthy. However, they roughly track with the 1897 Russian Empire census, which counts about 5 million Jewish native speakers, which I think lends credence to the figures. (Keep in mind that in 1897, the Russian Empire controlled much of 1931 Poland.) Also, I imagine that generally governments have a good incentive to keep accurate census information for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and other kinds of social control.

So we have good reason to believe that in the territories of Poland and the USSR alone, there were probably over 5 million Jews in 1939.

However, I suppose that for this to be part of a good argument in favor of the theory that the Nazis really did kill millions of Jews, it is also necessary to establish that the post-war Jewish population of the USSR plus Poland was substantially lower than 5 million. And to determine that would require some research that I have not done so far.

I am not sure that I really need much more convincing, though. The Nazi regime openly hated Jews, openly praised violence as a legitimate political method, demonstrably murdered members of many different opposition groups and even sometimes its own former allies, and between 1941 and 1944 controlled the part of Europe where most of Europe's Jews lived. Common sense tells me that it is much more likely that this regime actually killed millions of Jews than that the idea that it did is the result of a giant hoax that for some reason the US and USSR governments collaborated on during the Cold War, a hoax that also would have required the participation of many other governments, plus various eyewitnesses, family members, and so on.

it is also necessary to establish that the post-war Jewish population of the USSR plus Poland was substantially lower than 5 million.

It's pretty clear. In 1946 Jewish leaders in the cities and towns of Poland (where the vast majority of Polish Jews lived, they were not very rural people) conducted a census which found something like 250,000 Jews in Poland. However, it is important to remember that about 200,000 Polish Jews spent the war in the USSR, either because they fled of their own free will or because they were deported in 1939-1940 from the pre-war Polish territories annexed by Stalin. In 1946 the USSR repatriated all Polish Jews who wanted to leave, which was the great majority of them, and most of them went back to Poland, though most eventually kept moving to Palestine or the US.

So of those 250,000 odd Jews in Poland in 1946, the vast majority were those who had spent the war in Soviet territory. only about 80,000 remained of the 2,000,000+ Jews which actually spent the war in Nazi custody. It's a big balance to make up, and cannot be done. Jewish immigration to Palestine and the US up to 1946-47 are well accounted for, and so are the Jews in the DP camps in Germany and Austria. Uncertainty exists, but on the order of tens of thousands, not millions or even hundreds of thousands.

This was not a dark ages Völkwanderung. 20th century Europe, even at its most war-torn was not the kind of place where an entire nation could fall into a black-hole.

The best revisionists can do is handwave and insist Stalin deported all the Jews to Siberia so he could claim they had been killed by the Nazis, which is soundly contradicted by Soviet archives, which contain no mention of such a massive operation, which would have been the single largest of all the Soviet mass deportations (all of which are well-documented.)

Deniers have no actual answer for how 2,000,000+ people vanished into thin air and never will.