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The Holocaust History Project.
The Holocaust History Project.

The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
 
 
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Part II
The Number of Victims of the "Final Solution"
and the Korherr Report


As soon as the war had ended, the question was raised as to the number of victims of the "final solution to the Jewish question."

It is evident that this macabre accountancy had to be kept by the administration of the Third Reich, so that the precise and total evaluation of the exterminations had to exist somewhere. Unfortunately, at the current writing, the archives of the Gestapo have yielded only incomplete data of this accountancy. They do, however, attest its existence.

The first summary indication concerning the problem was given at the time of the first important Nuremberg trial (1945-46), that of Goering and his associates, during the depositions of two witnesses, Wilhelm Hoettl, SS-Sturmbannführer of the Central Security Office of the Reich, and Dieter Wisliceny, SS-Hauptsturmführer. They were both friends of Eichmann and the second his close collaborator. On November 6, 1945, Hoettl declared that in April 1944 in Budapest, Eichmann had told him under the seal of secrecy that "in different extermination camps four million Jews had been killed, whereas two million more had met their deaths in another manner" (32, pp. 100 101). For his part, Wisliceny, under interrogation on January 3, 1946, related that at the end of February 1945, in Berlin, Eichmann had spoken to him of the murder of five million Jews (32, pp. 99 100).

1. Convergence of Diverse Estimates

Later a report due to Korherr, the "Inspekteur für Statistik" of the SS, was found. We shall refer to this below. Let us say immediately, however, that this report stopped at the date of March 31, 1943, so that it appears interesting only for the first year of the execution of the program of the "final solution," a program which was continued for another year and a half after that date. It nevertheless presents the inestimable advantage of a direct "accountancy" of the number of victims, drawn up by the executors of the "final solution" themselves.

In the course of the year 1945, an American specialist of statistics and demography, Jacob Lestchinsky, accomplished an important piece of work by attacking the problem of the number of Jewish victims according to statistical methods: he thus calculated the "balance sheet"
 

   
   

 
The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
Previous Page  Back Page 139 Forward  Next Page

   

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