These days it is germs rather than guns that make the headlines, be it because of what has happened and is happening or because of what some fear might still happen. Interest in past pandemics like the Black Death and the Spanish flu has probably increased accordingly, related monographs like John Kelly’s The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time and Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World are likely to be in higher demand, and as concerns works of fiction I’m probably not the only one who discovered Albert Camus’ The Plague on this occasion. At this moment man-made disasters of the past don’t have the connection with a current threat that past pandemics have.

That said, discoveries regarding the latter sometimes provide information that is of interest to research about the former.



A 2014 article in the Spanish newspaper El País, Peste negra en primera persona (English version Staring Black Death in the face in Barcelona), mentions an excavation under the sacristy of the Basilica of Sant Just i Pastor in Barcelona in which 120 skeletons of plague victims were discovered. There were people of both sexes and all ages, including children. The corpses had been unclothed and wrapped only in linen shrouds, lined up in rows 11 bodies deep, then covered with quicklime dissolved in water to attempt to stop the disease spreading and mask the smell of the rotting bodies. The archaeologists were not able to excavate the entire grave, which was partially dug up in the mid-15th century when the church was extended. The original grave may have been four meters long, 3.5 meters wide and 1.5 meters deep. Bearing in mind the density of the remains found, the archeologists estimated that there would originally have been around 400 people in the grave.

400 people in a grave of (4 x 3.5 x 1.5 =) 21 cubic meters means a density of ca. 19 corpses per cubic meter. At this density the mass graves at Bełżec extermination camp discovered by archaeologist Prof. Andrzej Kola, who estimated their total volume as 21,310 cubic meters, could have accommodated 404,890 corpses distributed by ages and sexes like the corpses in the mass grave at the Basilica of Sant Just i Pastor – which would have been the distribution of the general population unless the Black Death killed in a distinctly age- and/or sex-selective manner. Most of Bełżec’s 434,508 victims could thus have fit into the mass graves discovered by Kola (which were probably not the only ones), even without considering factors like "recovery" of grave space through corpse volume reduction due to leachate leaving the corpses (as the corpses were buried not all at once but over a period of months), which I addressed in this article and due to which the pre-decomposition burial density was probably much lower than what would have been possible.

Bełżec was one of those places where human beings inflicted on other human beings suffering on a quantitative scale exceeding that of many a natural cataclysm, including the current pandemic. According to my projections based on the increase of cases between 9 and 10 July 2020, as published here, the current pandemic will have caused 1,655,677 deaths throughout the world by its first anniversary assuming linear growth (same number of new deaths every day as on 10.07.2020, i.e. 5,416), or 22,974,051 assuming exponential growth (new cases increase every day according to the growth factor total cases on 10.07.2020 ÷ total cases on 09.07.2020, which is ca. 1.019, and the case fatality rate is as on 10.07.2020). The latter figure seems quite unlikely as things stand at this moment. The former is a little higher than the total number of people murdered at four small places in Poland during World War II, mostly in 1942.

Crisis mortality from infectious diseases can be more devastating for a continent’s or the world’s population than any man-made disaster so far. The current pandemic, however, is still very far from being one of those cases.

Nick Terry named this blog"Holocaust Controversies" nearly 15 years ago, but we don't do much here on actual controversies regarding the Holocaust in our public discourse as much as we do attacking the perceived or imagined controversies about the history of the Holocaust cited by Holocaust deniers in their writing.

This series seeks to remedy this shortcoming. I want here to discuss the recent (last few months) controversy that emerged over the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, who is currently professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbembe's academic work focuses on postcolonial studies regarding Africa and has contributed to the concept of necropolitics, i.e., the power over life and death.

Back in the spring, in "The Before Times," Mbembe found himself in the German news cycle, accused of antisemitism and relativization of the Holocaust. The backstory is that Mbembe had been invited to give a speech at the Ruhrtriennale -- a triennial music and arts festival held in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). The center-right Freie Demokratische Partei in NRW criticized the Ruhrtriennale's organizer, Stephanie Carp, for inviting Mbembe given the latter's signing of a petition supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to coerce Israel to disengage from the Palestinian territories. Carp was apparently already on notice for already having done the same two years earlier. A pile-on of sorts then began, with Felix Klein, Germany's Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Anti-Semitism -- a position created two years ago -- demanding that Mbembe be disinvited because he had relativized the Holocaust.

The summary of the controversy at Deutsche Welle notes the attempts to mine Mbembe's writings for quotes to support the allegations of antisemitism and Holocaust relativization. The article provides some quotations without judging them one way or the other. It also notes that Mbembe has utterly rejected the charge, citing his longstanding commitment to universal human rights and his assertion that the Holocaust cannot be equated with the crime of apartheid in South Africa.

In this series, I intend to do the following: (1) examine Mbembe's writings for evidence of the charges of antisemitism and Holocaust relativization; (2) investigate the politicization of the Holocaust in the context of increasing pressure on Israel via BDS; and (3) have a look at some of the bad historical writing that has come out of the Mbembe affair.

Should be fun.

Intro: The Mbembe Affair
Part I: What Has Mbembe Written?
Part II: BDS and the Holocaust
Part III: Mbembe and Uniqueness

Our first order of business must be determining whether Achille Mbembe's writings reflect antisemitism and Holocaust relativization. As noted in the article from Deutsche Welle, the claims are based on two pieces of writing: his book Necropolitics (originally published in French as Politiques de l'inimitié -- Politics of Enmity); and the introduction he wrote to a volume of essays entitled Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy.

There are several mentions of the Holocaust in Necropolitics. The first includes a reference to Jews who "managed to escape the gas chambers" (p. 39) among other populations deemed undesireable in a world increasingly characterized less by equality and more by separation. Less than ten pages later, Mbembe continues this examination of separation: "The apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe—the latter in an extreme fashion and within a distinct context— constitute two emblematic manifestations of this fantasy of separation" (p. 46). Note that this juxtaposition of apartheid with the Holocaust clearly notes which of the two was worse.

The third mention comes in a discussion of what Mbembe considers the colonial nature of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories; here, the author notes how the competing narratives of Israelis and Palestinians, being irreconcilable while they struggle over the same land, result in the occupation being "profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of truth and exclusivity" (p. 80); that part of the Israeli claim on Palestine lies in "the terror of the Holocaust" (ibid) merely complicates matters further. While perhaps controversial, this material is not qualitatively different from the claims made by the Israeli historian Tom Segev in The Seventh Million -- Segev being merely one of multiple authors who have investigated how the Holocaust has informed Israeli national identity and foreign policy.

The fourth mention of the Holocaust in Necropolitics comes in the fifth chapter. After noting the role played by Jews in the Dolchstoss myth that emerged after World War I and the exterminationist rhetoric that it gave rise to, Mbembe writes that the Holocaust and its use of concentration camps as sites for genocide added an additional layer of complexity to their pre-existing role as infrastructures of colonialism -- in Mbembe's words, "the space where humans were made to experience their becoming-animal in the gesture by which other human existences were reduced to the state of dust" (p. 123). And while we might question the wisdom of considering the Holocaust within the larger context of colonialism, Mbembe is careful to note that concentration camps and death camps ("the extermination camps in which the Judeocide was perpetrated" (p. 126, emphasis in original)) are indeed different. In addition, Mbembe is not alone in discussing the Holocaust alongside colonialism. Multiple authors have undertaken such investigations, including Thomas Kühne, Sven Linqvuist, Stephan Malinowksi, and others. 

None of these references to the Holocaust amounts to minimization or relativization. Nor is there anywhere in the text that Mbembe condones or excuses antisemitism. Hatred of Jews is classed with any other irrational and murderous hatred, as Mbembe's own comments in his defense from last spring clearly indicate.

Mbembe's intro to the Apartheid Israel collection was published online by the excellent Africa Is a Country blog, where it can be read in its entirety. It is not kind to Israel, but it would be surprising if it were, given its place in a volume with the title that this one has. The questions to bear in mind, again, are whether anything in the essay can be considered antisemitic or relativizing of the Holocaust. Taking the second point first, Mbembe refers nowhere in the short intro to the Holocaust, so if there is Holocaust minimization or relativation to be found in his work, we must look elsewhere. Regarding antisemitism, the intro also literally never refers to Jews directly, so it's difficult to conclude he's being antisemitic, even as he is deeply critical of Israel.

That said, there is one problematic passage in the intro to the apartheid volume. I quote it here in its entirety (emphasis added):

We each know why they do what they do—the army, the police, the settlers, the pilots of bombing raids, the zealots, and the cohort of international Pharisees and their mandatory righteousness, starting with the United States of America.

This could, frankly, have been worded better. You're not doing much to ward off attacks that you're antisemitic by engaging in the rhetoric of the Gospel According to St. John. Nevertheless, we should bear in mind that English is not Mbembe's first language or likely even his second (it's not clear whether he originally wrote the intro in French or English); moreover, the larger context in which he makes this statement is defensible: Israel's actions, regardless of how one feels about them, are underwritten by the support given it by the United States in the form of military aid and a veto in the U.N. Security Council.

The larger question looming from Mbembe's intro to the volume of essays is whether his harsh criticism of Israel itself is antisemitic. Over the last decade in particular, there has been increasing enunciation by some on the right that, while criticism of Israel is fine, certain forms of criticism cross a line into antisemitism. Accepting for a moment for the sake of argument that these points of view are correct, do they even apply in Mbembe's case?

It is said that questioning Israel's right to exist is antisemitic on its face. But in the intro, Mbembe writes, "Israel is entitled to live in peace. But Israel will be safeguarded only by peace in a confederal arrangement that recognizes reciprocal residency, if not citizenship." This is not negation of Israel's right to exist; it doesn't even demand citizenship for Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.

The final point to consider is whether it is antisemitic, as some claim, to apply the label of apartheid to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Here again, Mbembe likely could be more delicate or at least draw a sharper distinction. The term is certainly not appropriate to describe the condition of Israel's non-Jewish minority citizens, who enjoy multiple civil and legal rights despite persistent second-class citizenship status. The situation on the West Bank is more complex. There, two populations -- Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jewish settlers -- live under two sets of laws, the latter of which undoubtedly provides for more expansive rights and privileges than the former, which is a law of military occupation. Many analysts, including Israelis, have used the term "apartheid" to describe it; others have seen it inappropriate to do so. There would seem to be sufficient debate to undermine the definition of the term's use as prima facie evidence of antisemitism.

In short, Mbembe's cited writings do not bear out the charges of antisemitism and Holocaust relativization, even if the tone is sometimes hostile and the language sometimes lacking in art. Next, we'll look at how the Holocaust has been weaponized in the debate over BDS. 

Intro: The Mbembe Affair
Part I: What Has Mbembe Written?
Part II: BDS and the Holocaust
Part III: Mbembe and Uniqueness

In this installment on the Achille Mbembe affair, we'll examine how the battle over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has engaged the issue of the Holocaust. It's necessary, however, to state some important things right off the bat.

First and foremost, although it should be obvious, antisemitism is a very real and very deadly phonomenon. Many Jews, particularly those living in places that are unsafe -- Israel among them -- are right to fear it and to be proactive about opposing it. The mistake is not one of magnitude but one of kind; i.e., Jews (and their purported allies) who identify antisemitism in BDS are to a large extent driven by this fear, and it would be wrong to dismiss it out of hand. Overcoming the current problem requires understanding where the other side comes from and comprehending its narrative. That means acknowledging the very real concerns of Jews everywhere about antisemitism.

These concerns include the fear of genocide. Seventy-five years might seem like a long time, but it really isn't, and we would be mistaken to think that the Holocaust does not constitute a very real example to people on both sides of the current debate where unchecked antisemitism can lead. Moreover, Holocaust denial is virtually always an attempt to make the ideologies that resulted in the Holocaust seem more palatable. We ought never forget this point because, whether we like it or not, the Holocaust affected not only those Jews who survived it (to say nothing of the millions who were murdered) but also their children and grandchildren, as well as generations of Jews in safe places, the U.S. chiefly among them, who saw newsreels at the end of the war of hundreds or thousands of murdered Jews and realized that only the accident of their country of residence had saved them from the same fate. Waving one's hands and asking one's opponent to live in the present day do not change the lessons taught to these witnesses. Understanding and empathy are far more constructive in engendering a dialogue.

All of this is a long way of saying that, while it can be tempting to see Achille Mbembe's detractors and the opponents of BDS as cynically deploying the Holocaust in defense of their positions, it is not necessarily the case that they are. In some cases, it is the manifestation of the concerns enunciated in the foregoing paragraphs. Delegitimation of Israel in the minds of many who oppose BDS is akin to inviting a second Holocaust. Frustratingly, discussions about possible solutions to the conflict that would alter our current understandings of how Israel is constituted as a state or about how the Palestinian population on both sides of the Green Line can be fully emancipated end up being non-starters as a result. To his benefit, as noted in the last installment of this series, Mbembe has been clear where he stands on Israel's future -- he has acknowledged Israel's own needs for security while being resolute in pressing for equality for Palestinians, even conceding the possibility of a resolution that does not include citizenship for Palestinians.

Some behaviors on the BDS side -- principally Holocaust denial itself -- are inexcusable and should be rejected out of hand. To its benefit, the International Solidarity Movement has been proactive in isolating elements of the BDS movement engaging in such rhetoric. Other forms of rhetoric employed by some in the BDS movement are unhelpful or incorrect but probably informed more by misunderstanding or emotion than by genuine malice.

For instance, referring to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory or even of the ethnic cleansing of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs in the wake of the creation of Israel as "genocide" is wrong. While undoubtedly immoral and, in certain respects, illegal, it is not genocide by any reasonable definition of the term. Rather, the death toll among Palestinians and the growth of the Palestinian population, both in the territory west of the Jordan River and in exile, indicate a persistent, low-level war of attrition (which flares up periodically) that has displaced, sometimes deliberately, hundreds of thousands --  but not genocide. The claim of genocide against the Palestinians is particularly egregious when packaged with Holocaust denial, but even for those who accept the historicity of the Holocaust, charging Israel with genocide against the Palestinians is unproductive. We can describe the situtation accurately with all its negative realities without needing to resort to such a term.

Here, as noted earlier, Mbembe's rhetoric has sometimes been unhelpful, although it bears repeating that he has consistently in his work acknowledged the extreme brutality of the Holocaust and placed it outside the sorts of cruelty that normally characterized the phenomena of colonialism and slavery. If nothing else, the case of Mbembe should demonstrate that one can sign a petition supporting BDS and not be advocating antisemitism, the delegitimation of Israel, or the relativization of the Holocaust.

In the next and final installment, I'll look at how the Mbembe affair has been incorporated into the debate over the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Intro: The Mbembe Affair
Part I: What Has Mbembe Written?
Part II: BDS and the Holocaust
Part III: Mbembe and Uniqueness

In this final installment of the series on the Achille Mbembe affair, we'll look at how Mbembe has been incorporated into the debate over the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

By early summer, the controversy over Mbembe's invitation to the Ruhrtriennale had blown over, at least in part because the event was canceled due to COVID. However, two essays on the affair have appeared since then. The first, a short piece by Jonathan Lanz, a doctoral student in history and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, was published by Open Democracy at the end of May. In that essay, Lanz addresses some of the topics noted in this series. The second, "The Attacks on the Uniqueness of the Holocaust" by Manfred Gerstenfeld, appeared in July on the website of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Had Lanz wished to see the issues addressed in his piece reified in written form, he could have asked for no better example than the Gerstenfeld essay.

A note first on Gerstenfeld is warranted. Austrian by birth but raised in the Netherlands, he made aliya in 1968 and since has had a long record of activism for right-wing concerns such as BESA and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. His career has not been without controversy, as a perusal of his Wikipedia page will attest. He is one of the chief ideologues in Israel invested in the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. To be clear, there is indeed significant overlap here, but as I hope to have already demonstrated, there is room enough for a distinction to be drawn.

As the title of Gerstenfeld's essay suggests, his concern is the increased question of the unique status of the Holocaust. This is not a new debate. On one side are academics and intellectuals arguing that the Holocaust should be considered in the context of other historical genocides, even as certain unique aspects of the Holocaust (e.g., the assembly line nature of killings in the Reinhard camps) are acknowledged; on the other side are those who consider the Holocaust as categorically unique. The sides in this debate break down roughly across political lines to the left (not unique) and right (unique).

Gerstenfeld is in the uniqueness camp, but his argument in the BESA Center essay for being there is often ahistorical. For example, he argues the Holocaust was unique because of “its impracticality (instead of exploiting Jews for labor purposes, they were killed),” while this point is demonstrably untrue; Jewish populations were routinely screened for able bodied laborers, and only those unable to work were immediately sent to their deaths. Similarly, Gerstenfeld repeatedly states that the Nazis’ designs on the Jews were global, whereas the available evidence suggests that their concerns were limited to Europe.

Gerstenfeld’s essay recklessly repeats the disproved allegations against Mbembe, adding without any evidence whatsoever that he “has been involved in antisemitic acts.” Then Gerstenfeld transitions to a discussion of the controversy surrounding the uniqueness debate within academia, specifically citing the case of Israel Charny, director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. Charny is a longstanding fixture in Holocaust and genocide studies, including writing a preface to the excellent collection of essays edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum entitled Is the Holocaust Unique?

Although he had earlier distinguished himself among genocide scholars for acknowledging the Armenian genocide and condemning those who refused to call it a genocide, Charny in recent years has launched a broadside against the Journal of Genocide Research, alleging Holocaust minimization, if not outright denial in some of the journal's publications. The response -- authored by five major genocide scholars in the Australia, Israel, Spain, the U.S., and the U.K. and undersigned by luminaries in Holocaust studies such as Daniel Blatman, Debórah Dwork, Peter Fritzsche, Thomas Kühne, Dominick LaCapra, Jürgen Matthäus, Mark Roseman, Timothy Snyder, and Nicholas Stargardt -- found Charny's allegations baseless, but he has continued his frontal assault against JGS.

If Mbembe's specific case seems distant from this kerfuffle, return to the Deutsche Welle article on Mbembe, in which Aleida Assmann is cited as "point[ing] out that comparisons are always necessary for historians and should not be confused with equations." The bottom line is that, probably on the basis of his having signed a BDS petition, Mbembe was adjudged antisemitic and his words interpreted in that light. Regardless of his clearly having not minimized or relativized the Holocaust, he did make comparisons -- but comparisons are necessary for scholars.

A year ago, I sat in a seminar in Jewish history in which one of the two professors team teaching the course and I had a discussion about the Goldhagen affair. The professor noted how Goldhagen had asserted the uniqueness of the Holocaust and had found insult in Browning's assertion in Ordinary Men that the act of genocide itself could be carried out by wholly typical people, given the right circumstances. For such people, the professor said, comparison with the Holocaust is impossible; but, he continued, barring comparison robs historians of one of their principal techniques of analysis. That, he said, is what Goldhagen and the proponents of uniqueness failed to understand.

Beyond the debate over Israel and the Palestinians lies this matter. That Mbembe was drawn into this ongoing debate is deeply unfortunate for everyone involved, but in the end, it has accomplished nothing for the side of the debate advocating for uniqueness beyond showing its willingness to smear an innocent man in pursuit of its agenda. That should give everyone with a stake in this matter deep cause for concern.

Intro: The Mbembe Affair
Part I: What Has Mbembe Written?
Part II: BDS and the Holocaust
Part III: Mbembe and Uniqueness

The Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf published an article on "The Thin Internal Walls of Krematorium I at Auschwitz" with supposedly "far-reaching consequences" - summed up as yet another nonsensical slogan: "No doors, no destruction.".

Rudolf argues that the internal walls of the crematorium were "unable to support the installation of massive steel doors". Even if - for the sake of argument - the internal walls of the crematorium were too weak for a "massive steel door", there is no reason the Nazis had to have used a "massive steel door" in the first place. The screwing shut mechanism mentioned by witnesses does not point to "massive steel fixtures", as Rudolf presumes, but to the makeshift gas-tight strong wooden doors pictured in Pressac's Technique and Operation of the Auschwitz Gas-Chambers (see also Rebutting the "Twitter denial"). Nothing suggests, let aside proves, that these doors and their anchoring could not withstand the pressure from inside the homicidal gas chambers (Viewer's Guide to "Auschwitz - The Surprising Hidden Truth").

The homicidal gassings in the crematorium in Auschwitz main camp are demonstrated by numerous pieces of evidence (e.g. Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria). It does not 'hinge' on the gas-chamber's door. There is no indication that the gas-tight wooden doors produced in the camp's workshop could not do the job for the provisional crematorium 1 gas chamber (or any other, for that matter).

 On David Irving's site we find the following message:

Innocent executed

Doing my reading on the history of German war crimes, German war criminals and their adjudication by the victors after World War II, I came across a most interesting passage. In November 1945, seven officers of the German Wehrmacht (and I think it is reasonable to mention their names -- K.H. Strueffling, H. Remlinger, E. Böhom, E. Sommerfeld, H. Jannike, E. Skotki and E. Geherer) were tried by a court of the victorious allies, the Americans, the English, the French and the Russians. They were condemned to death for war crimes and subsequently hanged.

Three more were tried on the same charges (E.P. Vogel, F. Wiese, A. Diere), received sentences of 20 years of hard labor, were turned over to the Russians and never heard of again.

Most interesting about this particular war trial is the charge. The officers were charged and hanged for having shot thousands of Polish officers in the forest of Katyn after the defeat of Poland in 1939.

Now, with glasnost and all, it has been officially established and admitted by the Russians themselves that the murder of thousands of the gallant Polish officer corps in the forest near Katyn was committed by the bolsheviks of Stalin, not by the murderous Nazis, years before the German army invaded. The poor above-mentioned soldiers never got near the scene of the crime.

What evidence was used to hang these innocent soldiers? Who fabricated the "facts" that convinced the court that these men were guilty? Murderers? What do the judges, if they are still alive, have to say for themselves? What of the prosecutors? What were these people hanged for?

H. Famira

Professor of German

Concordia University

Montreal

This claim is moderately popular among the Holocaust deniers. One finds it in places "high" and "low". There are messages at the CODOH forum making the claim. 

It is repeated by the denier Georges M. Theil in his Heresy in Twenty-First Century France, 2006, pp. 65-66:

Although the Allied intelligence services (notably the British) had known from the start that it was the Soviets who had put thousands of captive Polish officers to death in Katyn forest in 1940, they subsequently let the rumour spread that the Germans were the authors of that massacre. Afterwards, the Soviets were to hang seven German officers and men for the crime: Ernst Böhm, Ernst Geherer, Herbard Janicke, Heinrich Remmlinger, Erwin Skotki, Eduard Sonnenfeld and Karl Strüffling. They sentenced another three innocent Germans to twenty years’ hard labour: Arno Diere, Erich Paul Vogel and Franz Weiss.

By Joachim Nolywaika in Die Sieger im Schatten ihrer Schuld, 1994, p. 246:

Im Winter 1945/46 wurde in Leningrad mehreren deutschen Offizieren als angeblich für die Katyn-Morde Verantwortlichen der Prozeß gemacht, worüber die sowjetische Agentur „Tass" am 30. Dezember 1945 berichtete. Zum Tode durch den Strang wurden verurteilt Karl Hermann Strüffling, Heinrich Remmlinger, Ernst Böhm, Eduard Sonnenfeld, Herberd Janike. Erwin Skotki und Ernst Geherer. Zwanzig beziehungsweise fünfzehn Jahre Zwangsarbeit erhielten Erich Paul Vogel, Franz Wiese und Arno Diere.

The claim also appears in the neo-Nazi "encyclopedia" Der Grosse Wendig and in the neo-Nazi wiki Metapedia and the Holocaust denying fraudster Germar Rudolf simply swallows and then regurgitates the latter's claim in his Garrison and Headquarters Orders of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, 2020, p. 2:

Ernst Böhm (born 1911 in Oschersleben, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, died on 5 January 1946) was one of the seven German officers of the Wehrmacht who were convicted and executed/murdered in the Soviet Union after a show trial. They had been wrongly accused of having participated in the Katyn massacre. For me, the choice of this name as a pseudonym is a declaration of solidarity for those innocently persecuted. Metapedia writes in the entry about Ernst Böhm (accessed on March 27, 2020): ...

One of the dishonest denier gurus, Walter Lüftl, also repeated the claim.

Predictably, most of the claim is false. But first let's address the core of truth (I. S. Yazhborovskaja, A. Yu. Yablokov, V. S. Parsadanova, Katynskij sindrom v sovetsko-pol'skikh i rossijsko-pol'skikh otnoshenijakh, Moscow, 2001, pp. 336, 337):

Two people were prepared as "German witnesses who were participants in the Katyn provocation" - Professor Butz's assistant Ludwig Schneider and soldier Arno Düre. Military prosecutors [investigating the Katyn crime] found the archive criminal case of general of the German army H. Remlinger, who carried out punitive actions on the territory of Leningrad region. As it turned out, from December 28, 1945 to January 4, 1946, the criminal case against Remlinger, Düre and five other German soldiers was considered by the military tribunal of the Leningrad military district in the presence of a large number of Soviet and foreign correspondents. A. Düre, who had shot people with a machine gun in several villages, escaped the death penalty because, answering the prosecutor's leading questions, he confirmed that he had allegedly participated in the burial of 15-20 thousand Polish prisoners of war in Katyn. For this, the security organs let the "witness" live (he received 15 years of hard labor), but still did not dare to use him as a witness at Nuremberg: he was not able to play the role assigned to him properly. Düre gave absurd answers to many questions of the prosecutor and the court, which unambiguously exposed the false plot. For example, allowing his fantasy to run wild, he claimed that the Katyn Forest was in Poland, that the depth of the ditch in which the Poles had been buried was 15-20 m, that they had strengthened the walls of the ditch with tree branches, etc. Later, in a statement of November 29, 1954, Düre recanted his testimony about his participation in the burial of the Poles in Katyn, and declared that he had been forced to say so during the investigation.

Now let's turn to the indictment of the trial from 25.12.1945 (TsA FSB, f. K-72, op. 1, por. 28, l. 247–258). We see that nobody was accused of anything to do with Katyn and specifically Düre was accused as follows (p. 18 of the indictment):

The accused DÜRE, while a soldier of the 2nd company of the 2nd battalion for "special purposes" on 20.07.1944, while retreating with the battalion, took part in the burning of a village near the town of Ostrov and at that time shot 25 peaceful Soviet citizens.

That's all.

Now let's look at the verdict (ibid., l. 221-246). Katyn is not mentioned at all. Nobody was convicted for participating in the Katyn massacre. About Düre the verdict has only the following to say (p. 6 of the verdict):

Wiese, while the commander of the 1st company of the 2nd battalion for special purposes, and Düre and Vogel being soldiers of this same battalion in July of 1944 in the vicinity of the town of Ostrov took part in the burning of villages, incl. the village of Yudino, and in shooting and robbery of peaceful citizens.

Düre's sentencing (p. 6v of the verdict):

... exile for hard labor for the duration of 15 years.

Vogel and Wiese were sentenced to 20 years of hard labor, the rest were sentenced to death. There's no evidence whatsoever any of them were innocent.

So let's sum up. While Düre was a false witness about Katyn and probably provided his testimony during the trial in exchange for a more lenient sentence, contrary to the deniers the trial wasn't about Katyn, nobody was accused of participating in the Katyn massacre or sentenced for it. (And, I should add, Düre recanting his false testimony was pretty typical and makes a mockery of the deniers' claims that the Nazis who confessed in a much more free environment of West Germany would have upheld their allegedly false testimonies until their deaths).

So much for the "revisionist""research".

On 15.07.1944 the director of 1st Directorate of NKGB, the Soviet intelligence, Pavel Fitin wrote to Aleksandr Shcherbakov, a Central Committee secretary and the head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army and the Soviet Information Bureau:

ЦК ВКП(б)
товарищу Щербакову

Нами из Варшавы от нашего корреспондента получена информация следующего содержания:

"В лагере Освенцим немцы отравляют газами венгерских евреев по 10-15 тысяч в день и жгут их на кострах. Проверено точно, реагируйте."

Начальник I Управления НКГБ
Союза ССР
(ФИТИН)

CC AUCP(b)
to comrade Shcherbakov

We received the following information from our correspondent in Warsaw:

"In the camp Auschwitz the Germans are poisoning 10-15 thousand Hungarian Jews a day with gas and burning them on pyres. Definitely verified, react."

Head of the 1st Directorate of NKGB
USSR
(FITIN)

Source: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 250, l. 89.

Today, I updated the list of Citations of Holocaust Controversies in the Literature, adding two sources: a book on the Kurdish and Armenian genocides published back in 2007 by Desmond Fernandes, who was a senior lecturer in geography at De Montfort University in the U.K.; and a book on anti-imperialism from 2018 by Rohini Hensman. There was a third citation of our work that I found, but I won't be adding it to our list. Here's why.

The book that I won't be including that cites our blog is Grover Furr's Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every Revelation of Stalin's (and Beria's) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev's Infamous Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of February 25, 1956, Is Provably False. (As Max Amann famously said before deleting the subtitle Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit from Mein Kampf, "Everyone needs an editor.") If you're not aware who Grover Furr is, my blogmate and comrade Sergey Romanov has written fairly extensively about his work at this very blog. Several words come to mind to describe Furr, but "kook" is perhaps the one that comes most readily.

Look, I get it. I too have a Ph.D. in English and ended up doing most of my writing in the field of history. It happens. It happened to me. I just ended up on the "other side" of Furr. And lest it be said that we both see the Soviets as the "good guys" in World War II, the similarity pretty much ends there. (OK, I also wrote a doctoral dissertation that addressed the topic of medieval European literature, and we share an interest in Arthurian literature, but it really does end after that. Honest.)

The funny thing about Furr's citation of us is what he cites from us and why. Specifically, on page 520 (footnote 26) of Khrushchev Lied: He Really, REALLY Did!, Furr cites this blog post by Sergey, as a way of marshalling evidence against Tim Snyder, the historian of modern European history at Yale and author of Bloodlands, among other studies, for having "lied" about a source on the antisemitism of Joseph Stalin. Notably, Sergey, while providing the correct translation and source of the quotation, does not exculpate Stalin of antisemitism -- he merely notes that Stalin was likely more tactful. Indeed, Sergey writes, "This is not to say that he [Stalin] wasn't an antisemite." And indeed, the context for the dispute is the Doctors' Plot -- one of Stalin's final repressions, which specially targeted Soviet Jews.

Furr writes, "Snyder is either deliberately lying or never bothered to check the source of this quotation. Whatever is the case, it does him no credit as a historian." While it's not my intention to venture into this particular thicket of weeds, I do want to point out that this discovery is not exactly the "gotcha" Furr seems to think it is. Not only was Stalin demonstrably antisemitic, particularly in the last chapter of his life (although other examples exist), but also Stalin in the correct quotation is clearly not referring to Zionists when referring to "Jewish nationalists." When he said, "Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA (there you can become rich, bourgeois, etc.)," the "nation" Stalin was referring to was not Israel -- it was the Jewish nation, i.e., the Jewish people.

Funnier is that Furr cites our blog as a way to attack Snyder without (apparently) checking to see whether we'd ever commented on his own work here. It's a bit ironic that Furr didn't fully check his source in this case (HC blog) while accusing Snyder of doing the same. As a famous Jew once said, "Physician, heal thyself!"

Since we began this blog 15 years ago, we've been fully aware that Holocaust deniers have individual motives. Certainly among these motives is antisemitism -- it's perhaps the one trait that the overwhelming majority of deniers share -- but there are also motives like ego and grift.

With the rapid graying and dying of the American denier community, Michael A. Hoffman II, at 64 years old, is now among the elder statesmen of American deniers. One thing I've also found in my interactions with individual deniers is that he's also among the most unpopular figures in that small circle. One confided in me that Hoffman was an acid casualty from the 1970s who emerged in the radical right-wing "movement" in the 1980s with an obvious mental illness (a point I've never been able to independently verify, let it be said). More recently, David Cole told me that Hoffman was known among deniers in particular for his openly genocidal rhetoric against Jews and non-whites generally. This was a problem for the denier movement then since the prevailing strategy was to present denial as a quasi-academic alternative to the "orthodox" history of the Holocaust.

What has marked Hoffman's "career" most prominently, however, is his chameleon-like nature. The man has undergone a frequent process of reinvention over the course of the last 30 years or so. When I first encountered him in Usenet in the mid-1990s, he presented as a wannabe public intellectual, flaunting his "expertise" on Jewish legal texts. This, we now know, was his second act, since the first act relates to the materials we are presenting below. Hoffman's third (and final?) act has been that of dissident Catholic, taking issue with post-Vatican II Catholicism and particularly its embrace of usury (he claims). He oddly calls Jews "Judaics," but he now claims to be a critic of the Third Reich. Among his more recent books is Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People. A couple of months ago, in a blog post of his own, he responded to an ADL press release that called him a Holocaust denier using his Hitler book as a sort of defense. 

It is possible that Hoffman has undergone a genuine transformation. Perhaps his Hitler book is a sort of mea culpa. One thing is clear, however: Hoffman has never publicly renounced his earlier fascist stance. Lest it be thought that the word "fascist" is being thrown around here willy-nilly, we present two important pieces of evidence.

The first is Hoffman's novel A Candidate for the Order, which he self-published in 1988. If you were looking for a Turner Diaries with a slightly elevated vocabulary, this is probably right up your alley. 

You can view a copy at the Internet Archive here: https://tinyurl.com/mah2novel1
I've also archived that link here: https://archive.is/Ldsot
Finally, you can download a PDF version directly here: https://tinyurl.com/mah2novelpdf

The following year, Hoffman participated with neo-Nazi Harold Covington and several major KKK figures, most notably Louis Beam -- head of the Texas KKK and author of "Leaderless Resistance" -- in a rally against the Martin Luther King holiday in Pulaski, Tennessee, where the Klan was originally founded. You can view Hoffman's 13-minute speech here:

https://tinyurl.com/mah2vid1989

The "Hail Victory" that Hoffman yells out at the end is a nice touch.

A final note: I reached out directly to Hoffman before writing and publishing this post. I asked him whether he had ever renounced his previous positions. He did not respond.

 * In Bradly Smith's "Smith's Report No. 195", February 2013, Alvarez described himself as "Contents Manager", "Manager of the mutual CODOH & VHO/CHP web project", and "CODOH Webmaster".

This article is not about Holocaust denial. Or maybe a different sort of denial, which consists in blowing up (or simply inventing) crimes committed by Nazi Germany’s opponents in order to play down those of Nazi Germany.



The late Canadian writer James Bacque, who became (in)famous as the author of Other Losses, wrote a follow-up book with the title Crimes and Mercies.^[1] The "crimes" part is summarized in the Goodreads advertisement as follows:

More than 9 million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after World War II—one quarter of the country was annexed, and about 15 million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Over 2 million of these alone, including countless children, died on the road or in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere. That these deaths occurred at all is still being denied by Western governments.

The 9 million is actually Bacque’s minimum figure. He suggested that it might be much higher:^[2]



Though Bacque didn’t expressly state this, the idea he tried to convey is clear: the Allies committed at least one, perhaps even two crimes on the scale of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews. They were no better than the Nazis. Arguably even worse.

How did Bacque arrive at these sensational figures?

The 9.3 million "minimum" has 3 components: 1.5 million German prisoners of war, 2.1 million German expellees and 5.7 million German indigenous inhabitants of the four Allied occupation zones, which later became East Germany (the extinct "German Democratic Republic") and West Germany (the German Federal Republic). Bacque’s claims regarding these three groups will be examined in turn.

Prisoners of War

Bacque repeated his Other Losses contentions whereby "undoubtedly" over 800,000, "almost certainly" over 900,000 and "quite likely" over a million German PoWs died in US or French captivity beginning in April 1945.^[3] Baqcue claimed that his figures were vindicated by records of the former Soviet Union whereby 450,600 German PoWs died in Soviet captivity.^[4] This is supposed to mean that the majority of PoW deaths were attributable to the Americans and French.

The total number of deaths in the German armed forces (including Austrians and ethnic Germans from outside the German Reich in its prewar borders) in active service or captivity during or after WWII was in the order of 4.3 million, of which 1.2 million were still reported as missing as of 2005, that is, their places of burial had not yet been found.^[5] In 2005 Manfred Stiel, head of the grave locations section of the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V.), stated that the number of dead and missing servicemen in the East was estimated at about 3 million, and most of the missing (at least 650,000) were held to have died in Soviet captivity.^[6] I think the figure for the East must be somewhat higher than 3 million, as 3 million on the Eastern Front would imply 1.3 million elsewhere, which, based on what is known from other sources about German losses in other theaters, I consider much too high. These sources include the most complete (though still very much incomplete) wartime tabulation of losses suffered by the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht High Command’s monthly casualty reports of January 1945, showing Tote durch Feindeinwirkung - deaths from enemy action, including killed in action (KIA), and died of wounds (DOW), Verwundete und Erkrankte durch Feindeinwirkung (wounded in action and sick - hereinafter WIA) and Vermisste (missing in action - hereinafter MIA).^[7] Figures are given for the following branches of service and theaters of operations:

Heer (field army, including Waffen-SS units): Osten (Eastern Europe), AOK 20 (WB Norwegen) (the Northern Theater of Operations, including Norway and Finland), OB Südwest (Southwestern Europe), OB Südost (Southeastern Europe), OB West (Western Europe), Ersatzheer (replacement army). The table on the dead further includes a number (295,659) of DOW (An Verwundung Verstorbene), which is not broken down by theaters.
Kriegsmarine (Navy): Atlantik und sonstige Meere (Atlantic and Other Seas), Osten (East) and Mittelmeer (Mediterranean).
Luftwaffe (Air Force): Westen + Erweitertes Reichsgebiet (West + Expanded Reich Territory), Süden (South), Osten (East) and Betriebsverluste (Operational Losses, i.e. losses through accidents or in training). The Luftwaffe figures include airborne troops.
The table below shows the Wehrmacht High Command’s figures, which refer to the period from 1.9.1939 to 31.1.1945 and add up to 1,793,010 dead (thereof 1,497,351 KIA, broken down by theaters, and 295,659 DOW, not broken down), 4,401,049 WIA and 1,901,940 MIA, for a total of 8,095,999 casualties (7,800,340 without DOW). The MIA figure obviously includes, in unknown relative proportions, servicemen killed in action and prisoners of war. The sum of KIA and MIA is 3,399,291, the sum of KIA and DoW is 5,898,400.

Table 0



Adding up the figures of the three branches of services for Osten yields 1,164,755 KIA (77.79% of the total of 1,497,351), 3,621,568 WIA (82.29% of the total of 4,401,049) and 1,071,415 MIA (56.33% of the total of 1,901,940), the sum of the three categories being 5,857,738 (75.10% of the total of 7,800,340). Of the 3,399,291 KIA+MIA, 2,236,170 (65.78%) correspond to the East, whereas of the 5,898,400 KIA+WIA 4,786,323 (81.15%) occurred in the East.

These figures, as already mentioned, are everything other than complete, first because they only go until 31.1.1945 and second because there must have been a considerable backlog in reporting. However, they show a clear predominance of the East as concerns KIA (77.79%), WIA (82.29%), KIA+WIA (81.15%) and KIA+WIA+MIA (75.10%).

Though there are no comparable figures for the remaining period of the war, there’s no reason to assume that the proportions were higher in other theaters than in the East during that period. To be sure, there were far more prisoners of war in northwestern Europe (especially in the last two months, when German troops surrendered in masses to the Western Allies without putting up much of a fight if any at all), but the proportion of KIA and WIA in the East was, if anything, higher than in the period up to 31 January 1945. According to the Heeresarzt (Army Medical Officer) Reports for the field army in the period from 1 February to 20 April 1945^[8] (when recording ended), 108,181 out of 129,816 killed (83.33%) and 494,003 out of 564,440 wounded (87.52%) occurred on the Eastern Front. For the period 1–10.4.1945, the Heeresarzt recorded 12,510 killed in the East vs. 100 killed in the West.

Estimates of the number of deaths in captivity vary, especially as concerns Eastern Europe. There are older estimates, published in a study by a commission under Erich Maschke, whereby 1,219,187 German PoWs died in captivity, thereof 1,094,250 in Soviet captivity.^[9] More recent estimates put the death toll in Soviet captivity at about 650,000^[10] or 700,000.^[11]

If out of ca. 4,300,000 German military dead from WWII 1,219,187 perished in captivity, the remaining 3,080,813 died in active service. Applying the above proportion of KIA East vs. KIA in other theaters according to the January 1945 Wehrmacht Report (77.79%) to the total number who died in active service yields 2,396,494 deaths in active service for the Eastern Front. The total of German servicemen who perished on the Eastern Front or in Soviet captivity would thus be (2,396,494 + 1,094,250 =) 3,490,744, that is, 81.18% of German military deaths in World War II.

If the number of deaths in Soviet captivity was not 1,094,250 but in the order of the 650,000 mentioned by Stiel, the number of German military deaths in captivity (assuming that Maschke’s other figures are correct) would be 774,937 (USSR 650,000, Eastern and Southeastern Europe 93,028, France 24,178, USA 5,802, Great Britain 1,254, others 675), leaving 3,525,063 deaths in active service. 77.79 % of these would be 2,742,066 on the Eastern Front. The total of German servicemen who perished on the Eastern Front or in Soviet captivity would thus be (2,742,066 + 650,000 =) 3,392,066, that is 78.89% of German military deaths in World War II. This scenario I consider the more probable. If deaths in US captivity were higher than 5,802, the number of deaths in captivity increases and the number of deaths in active service decreases accordingly.

The German War Grave’s Commission’s 2005 estimate of 650,000 deaths in Soviet captivity exceeds the official Soviet figure by 199,400. Soviet figures on PoW deaths may be incomplete as concerns PoWs killed right after capture or in transit to PoW camps. For instance, only 9,147 out of about 60-70,000 German PoWs captured by the Soviets until the end of 1941 reached the camps in the rear.^[12] It is also possible that the number who died in Soviet captivity was lower and the number who died in active service was correspondingly higher than my estimates. Indicative of this possibility is the fact that large numbers of German war dead continue being found on battlefields throughout Eastern Europe.^[13] Either possibility is more plausible than Bacque’s fantasies. I still haven’t given up hope that the remains of my uncle, Obergefreiter Ernst August Schmidt, will one day be found somewhere in the Czech Republic and given a decent burial.

The actual number of deaths in US captivity in the Rheinwiesenlager was up to 40,000.^[14]

German refugees/expellees

Bacque’s "minimum" figure for expellees is in an order of magnitude that has been around since the 1950s. It includes not only postwar expellees but also refugees who perished during the war, and it was defended in 2006 by Christoph Bergner, then Secretary of State in the German Federal Republic’s Ministry of the Interior, against recent studies whereby the number of refugees and expellees who perished is much lower.^[15] However, Bacque suggested that there might be 2.5 million on top of those 2.1 million and the total might be as high as 6 million, a figure claimed by German chancellor Konrad Adenauer at a speech in Bern on 23.03.1949^[16], which is reproduced in Adenauer’s memoirs.^[17] So I’ll have a look at these figures.

An essential source for understanding the evolution of Germany’s population in the postwar period is a collection of four articles published under the overall heading "Deutsche Bevölkerungsbilanz des 2. Weltkrieges" in the October 1956 edition of Wirtschaft und Statistik, a publication of the Statistisches Bundesamt, the German Statistics Office.^[18] I would encourage anyone who reads German to read it. The articles that are of interest for this discussion are "Einführung und Zusammenfassung" by Dr. Kurt Horstmann, "Gesamtüberblick der Bevölkerungsentwicklung 1939 - 1946 – 1955" by Dr. Karl Schwarz and "Die Vertreibungsverluste der Bevölkerung in den Ostgebieten des Deutschen Reiches" by Dr. Werner Nellner. The fourth article, "Die Luftkriegsverluste während des zweiten Weltkrieges in Deutschland" by Dr. Hans Sperling, is an analysis of wartime civilian losses due to bombing attacks and thus not relevant for this discussion.

Although Bacque referred to various publications of the German Statistics Office, he ignored the "Deutsche Bevölkerungsbilanz des 2. Weltkrieges". If the reason was that he considered it unreliable, he should at least have mentioned it. Anyway, this source renders moot his conjectures about losses among German refugees and the indigenous population of the four occupation zones that eventually became the two German states.

The article by Dr. Karl Schwarz includes a table "Bevölkerungsbilanz des Deutschen Reiches 1939-1946 und 1939-1955". This table shows population figures for the 1939-1946 period based on a census conducted at the behest of the occupying powers on 29.10.1946^[19] and projected figures for the 1939-1955 period. Not shown in the table are the results of censuses in 1950 conducted separately in the German Federal Republic (West Germany including West Berlin) and the "German Democratic Republic" (aka East Germany), but some figures in the articles of Schwarz and Nellner are given based on the 13 September 1950 census in the German Federal Republic and estimates for East Berlin, the "Soviet occupation zone" (although the "German Democratic Republic" had been created from the Soviet occupation zone in 1949, it was not yet recognized in 1956 as a state by the German Federal Republic) and the Saarland. The Saarland’s population was included in the 1946 census figures, as it was part of the French occupation zone, but not in the 1950 figures for the German Federal Republic as the Saarland was not yet part of it but under French administration as a protectorate. The projection for 1955, however, included the population of the Saarland, presumably because it was expected that it would soon join the German Federal Republic pursuant to one of the pacts signed between West Germany and France (it actually joined later). Below is a copy of Table 1 in Schwarz’s article containing the aforementioned figures, followed by a table I made with these figures and a translation of the designations in Table 1.^[20]

Table 1



Table 1a



Note the designations "expellees from abroad" and "eastern territories of the German Reich now under foreign administration". The expression "now under foreign administration" is due to the fact that, while the relevant territories were now part of Poland or the Soviet Union, the German Federal Republic had not yet acknowledged this as a final situation (that only happened with the pacts signed by German chancellor Willi Brandt in the early 1970s). The population of these territories, which had been living in the German Reich in its borders as of 31.12.1937 on 17.05.1939, was not listed separately except as concerns those who were still living under "foreign administration" (1,750,000 in 1946, 1,040,000 in 1955) and the expulsion losses and deportees (1,260,000), because its original stock had been part of the German population in 1939. The "expellees from abroad", on the other hand, were ethnic Germans who had been living outside Germany on the territory of various foreign states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia) as of 17.05.1939. They were thus not part of the prewar German population but had only been added to that population after the war. Therefore, unlike the refugees from the eastern territories of the former German Reich who had only moved from one part thereof to another, they were listed separately in the table.

The population figures according to the separate censuses in both Germanys, 18,388,172 in East Germany and 49,842,624 in West Germany^[21], add up to 68,230,796, a figure also used by Bacque. As mentioned above, this figure does not include the Saarland, so in order to compare it with the 1946 figure of 65,310,000, which includes the Saarland, the Saarland’s population has to be added. According to Schwarz’s article^[22] the Saarland’s population at the end of 1955 was in the order of 1 million. The population in 1950 cannot have been much lower, according to an online source it was 955,000.^[23] The 1950 comparator of the 1946 figure of 65,310,000 would thus be 68,230,796 + 955,000 = 69,185,796.

As concerns the refugees/expellees, Dr. Nellner’s afore mentioned article includes two tables, which are reproduced below.

Table 2



Table 3



Table 2 is about the population of eastern territories of the German Reich under "foreign administration", Table 3 about the ethnic German population abroad except for the Soviet Union (that is, ethnic Germans who before the war had been living on territory of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia). In the overview below I put the figures from both tables together. As some of Nellner’s figures were apparently not rounded to two decimals when adding them up, there are some differences in the sums, but these are minimal (the difference to the Table 2 total of 7.09 million is 0.02 million, the difference to the Table 3 total of 4.51 million is none). To match the breakdown with the totals of 7.09 million + 4.51 million = 11.60 million, I arbitrarily changed some figures by give or take 10,000. Some subtotals are thus slightly different in my overview than in the above tables. The figures from the above tables are rendered in brackets in the text following my overview.

Table 4



One can see that the total prewar German population of the territories considered was estimated at about 16,940,000, thereof about 9,530,000 in the eastern territories of the German Reich in its 1937 borders and 7,410,000 ethnic Germans outside Germany in its 1937 borders. Of these about 1,030,000 (1,020,000), thereof 650,000 (640,000) from the eastern territories and 380,000 ethnic Germans from abroad, were assumed to have died as members of the German armed forces, and 2,460,000 (2,470,000), thereof 1,030,000 (1,040,000) from the eastern territories of the Reich and 1,430,000 ethnic Germans from abroad, were assumed to be still living in September 1950 on the territories where they had lived before the war. 450,000 were now living in western countries, 100,000 were still living as prisoners of war or deportees, and 11,600,000 (7,090,000 from the eastern territories, 4,510,000 ethnic Germans from abroad)^[24] were living on territory of East Germany or West Germany as of 13 September 1950. There were an estimated about 2,290,000 (2,280,000), thereof 1,270,000 (1,260,000) from the eastern territories and 1,020,000 from abroad, whose fate had not been clarified and who were presumed to have perished during flight and expulsion.^[25] Of the 7,090,000 now living on territory of the two Germanys, according to Nellner^[26], about 5,760,000 had been living in the four occupation zones at the time of the 1946 census. Additionally, about 4,080,000 ethnic German refugees/expellees from outside the 1937 German borders were living in the four occupation zones and included in the 1946 census figure. So, a total of about 9,840,000 refugees/expellees were living on territory of what later became the two Germanys as of 29.10.1946^[27], and another 1,760,000 (1,330,000 from the eastern territories, 430,000 ethnic Germans from outside the 1937 German borders) arrived there between that census date and 13 September 1950, the date of the census in the German Federal Republic.

I highlight these figures because of their importance for the later analysis of Bacque’s claims regarding losses among the indigenous German population of the four occupation zones/two Germanys. But first let’s have a look at the Germans who remained behind where they had been living before the war, as Bacque suggested that they also died.^[28] Who were these people? As concerns the eastern territories, Nellner explained as follows^[29] (my translation):

A larger group of Germans was deported both by the Poles and the Soviets or retained in their home territories because they were needed as specialized labor. Besides that, especially Poland was eager to "polonize" [quote marks added] the eastern German territories handed over to it as fast as possible and also show that they held a large indigenous Polish population. For this reason, they recurred to the term "autoctonous", by which they designate the local population they could not simply declare as Polish without wanting to admit that they were Germans. It is noteworthy, however, that this group of persons was first subject to a so-called verification procedure. This procedure offered no true choice, as those affected had no say in whether or not they wanted to be included in the program. This applied to a very few who spoke Polish and a larger group who usually communicated in the Upper Silesian, Masuria and Kashubian local languages and besides these also spoke German. The largest group included in the program, however, were Upper Silesians who only spoke German. It can thus be proven that almost exclusively such persons were stated to be autoctonous who until the end of the war had affirmed their German identity. In Silesia alone these are 800,000 persons, but on the whole one must assume about 1.04 million Germans who stayed behind in the eastern territories of the German Reich.

So, unlike what Bacque obviously assumed, the Poles (who had taken over the former eastern territories of the German Reich except for East Prussia, which became part of the Soviet Union) by no means wanted to get rid of all the German population, at least not so fast. They needed a sizable part thereof as specialized labor or merely to populate the territories with a supposedly indigenous Polish population. Thus, they made many ethnic Germans look like Poles (something that Nellner seems to have been indignant about), at least for some time as the number of stay-behinds decreased from 1.75 million in 1946 to 1.04 million in 1955.

Regarding ethnic Germans who had lived outside the 1937 German borders, Nellner wrote the following^[30] (my translation):

Among the 4.92 million Germans known in 1950 to have been expelled from abroad about 3 million had before the war lived in Czechoslovakia, 0.70 million in Poland, 0.30 million in Yugoslavia and 0.28 million in Danzig. Deduction of births and deaths from the time of expulsion until the end of 1950, which have been calculated as 140,000, yields 4.78 million Germans from abroad who after expulsion from their homeland were received in Germany (Federal Republic, Berlin, Soviet occupation zone and Saarland); that is 65 % of the population of these territories at the end of the war. For the remaining 2.51 million information about their whereabouts had to be obtained. For some territories, especially for the states of southeastern Europe, various data about the Germans still living there have been published in the last years. These numbers must however be examined in detail, as they are not always free from tendentiousness. For Poland, the Baltic States and other territories, however, extensive inquiries had to be made. The result was a total of 1.43 million persons, thereof 410,000 in Romania, 400,000 in Poland, 290,000 in Hungary and 250,000 in Czechoslovakia. It is furthermore estimated that about 60,000 to 70,000 ethnic Germans are still alive as prisoners of war, missing and deportees and others that cannot be established. This leaves a remainder of about 1 million unclarified cases, the larger part of which must be considered expulsion losses.

So, it seems that entities of the German Federal Republic looked as deeply as circumstances permitted into the matter of what had happened to German inhabitants of the former eastern territories of the German Reich and ethnic German minorities outside the 1937 borders. Bacque apparently didn’t bother to inform himself about this research, or then he dismissed it without further ado because he thought it could not be "believed"^[31].

What about Adenauer? Indeed, the German chancellor stated the following, in his already mentioned speech in Bern on 23 March 1949^[32] (my translation):

From the eastern parts of Germany, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary etc., as established by the Americans, a total of 13.3 million Germans were expelled. Of these 7.3 million arrived in the Eastern Zone and mainly in the three Western Zones. 6 million Germans disappeared from the face of the earth. They died and rotted away.

7.3 million is a little more than the number of expellees from the eastern territories of the German Reich alone who lived on German territory as of 13 September 1950, in addition to 4.5 million ethnic Germans from outside the 1937 borders. So, Adenauer obviously based his calculation on faulty information. Adenauer may not have been aware of the actual 1950 figures, but he made this statement three years after the 1946 census, whose figures included a higher total number of refugees or expellees (9.84 million, as mentioned above) who were on territory of the four occupation zones at that time. This means that he or whoever gave him the figures was either careless or in bad faith. Whichever it was, the mistake is so obvious that no serious researcher of history would give Adenauer’s figure a chance of being realistic. Bacque, however, seems to have been guided by the principle that whatever served the ideas he was trying to convey might be useful, however far-fetched.

So much for the refugees/expellees, now for the whopper among Bacque’s figures.

Indigenous population of the four occupation zones

Bacque claimed that there were about 5.7 million unrecorded deaths among German civilians other than refugees in the 1946-1950 period, more precisely between the census dates 29.10.1946 and 13.09.1950.

Nothing like this order of magnitude has been proposed by any historian. To grasp just how extraordinary it is, one must put it in relation to figures on German civilian war losses estimated by historians and search services. According to the latter, the total number of German civilian losses during the war and in the immediate postwar period is in the order of about 3.1 million, including civilians killed by bombing or ground fighting, deaths during flight and expulsion and victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder.^[33] Adding Bacque’s 5.7 million to these 3.1 million yields 8.8 million, almost three times what is already a comparatively high estimate of German civilian casualties.

How did Bacque arrive at this figure? He explained it on pp. 121-122 of Crimes and Mercies:

The population of all occupied Germany in October 1946 was 65,000,000, according to the census prepared under the ACC.29 The returning prisoners who were added to the population in the period October 1946-September 1950 numbered 2,600,000 (rounded), according to records in the archives of the four principal Allies. Births according to the official German statistical agency, Statistisches Bundesamt, added another 4,176,430 newcomers to Germany.30 The expellees arriving totalled 6,000,000. Thus the total population in 1950 before losses would have been 77,776,430, according to the Allies themselves. Deaths officially recorded in the period 1946-50 were 3,235,539, according to the UN Yearbook and the German government.31 Emigration was about 600,000, according to the German government.32 Thus the population found should have been 73,940,891. But the census of 1950 done by the German government under Allied supervision found only 68,230,796.33 There was a shortage of 5,710,095 people, according to the official Allied figures (rounded to 5,700,000).*

So, this was Bacque’s calculation:

Table 5



What’s wrong with this calculation?

First of all, as mentioned above, the 1946 census figure included the Saarland, whereas the 1950 censuses did not. So, in order to compare 1946 with 1950 figures the population of the Saarland (which I assumed to be 955,000 million) has to be added to the latter, yielding 69,185,796. There goes the first of Bacque’s 5.7 million.

The 2.6 million returned prisoners of war were calculated by Bacque and must be taken with a big grain of salt on that account already, considering Bacque’s past performance. Moreover, Bacque’s figure is much higher than the one given by Schwarz, whose Table 1 shows 1,750,000 surviving prisoners of war outside Germany in 1946, of which 1,740,000 had returned by 1955.^[34] However, Bacque’s trump card was the 6 million expellees who supposedly arrived between 1946 and 1950. Where did he get this figure from? Bacque rendered his source and reasoning as follows^[35] (emphases added):

The source for this is the Murphy Papers, including the Council of Foreign Ministers papers at Stanford. Many authorities in Germany and elsewhere have written about the expellees, but there is no record at the HIA of any scholar having published these figures of Murphy's before. This lack of a publication record may mean little, because a scholar may in fact have used some of these figures without notifying Hoover. Courtesy of Ron Bulatoff, HIA, October 1994- These papers were declassified in several bunches, beginning in 1988. Others were declassified in 1991 by the State Department.
These papers include documents prepared for and presented at the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in Moscow and elsewhere, from 1947 to 1949. They are based on statistics gathered by the ruling interzonal agency operating in Germany at the time, the Allied Control Council, under the aegis of the several Military Governments. Murphy states in April 1947 (CFM Papers, 9 April 1947, Statement by US Delegate, Box 61, Murphy Papers, HIA) that 5-6 million refugees had arrived. Since all other population figures in these papers are based on the census of October 1946, we can be sure that this figure is also for that date. The French delegate in the Moscow meeting said on 17 March 1947 that only 4-5 million had arrived. Murphy's assistant Brad Patterson stated on 18 May 1949 that 12 million had arrived (Murphy Papers, Box 67, file 67-6). The figure usually accepted by all authorities for the total arrivals in 1950 is 12 million. (The effect on the death estimates in this book of accepting the 12 million figure for May 1949 as valid for the final total of deaths in 1950 is nil.) This means that according to the Americans, between 6 and 7 million expellees arrived between October 1946 and May 1949.

As mentioned before the 1946 figure included 5.76 million arrivals from the eastern territories of the former German Reich, so this is obviously what Murphy (whose figures, as Bacque emphasized, are based on the census of October 1946) was referring to. But the total number of deportees who had arrived by that time, either from the former eastern territories or from abroad, was 5.76 million (eastern territories) + 4.08 million (abroad) = 9.84 million, as I have shown above. The number that arrived between 1946 and 1950 was thus not 6 to 7 million as Bacque would have it, but 11.60 – 9.84 = 1.76 million. Let’s see what this does to Bacque’s figures, assuming that his 2.6 million returning PoWs are realistic:

Table 6



According to the above all but 515,095 of Bacque’s 5,710,095 go up in smoke.

Bacque calculated from 65 million in 1946, whereas the German Statistics Office’s figure for 1946 based on census data was 65,310,000. Assuming this higher figure, and the 500,000 emigrees mentioned by the German Statistics Office instead of the 600,000 assumed by Bacque, yields the following comparison:

Table 7



By the above calculation Bacque overestimated unrecorded civilian deaths by 4,785,000, or by a factor of 6.

Now, assuming that Bacque’s figure of 2.6 million prisoners of war returning from abroad in the postwar period is correct and the German Statistics Office’s figure is too low, what would this mean? Assuming 10,000 prisoners remaining in captivity in 1955, which is a well-known figure as Konrad Adenauer obtained their release by the Soviet Union in his famous 1955 trip to Moscow^[36], it would mean that on 29 October 1946, the date of the census, 2,610,000 prisoners of war (and not 1,750,000 as per the German Statistics Office) were still in prison camps outside Germany. This, in turn, would mean that the number of losses in the 1939-1946 population balance (Tables 1 and 1a in this article) would have to be increased by (2,610,000 – 1,750,000 =) 860,000 prisoners, and that the 1946 census figure from the German Statistics Office (1939 population plus gains minus losses) would have to be reduced by 860,000, from 65,310,000 to 64,450,000, in order to compare it with the 1950 census + Saarland figure of 69,185,796. The effect of thus reducing the 1946 census figure while maintaining Bacque’s 2,600,000 would be the following:

Table 8a



The same effect is obtained by maintaining the 1946 census figure of 65,310,000 and using the German Statistics Office’s figure for returning PoWs in the 1946-1950 period, i.e. 1,740,000, instead of Bacque’s 2,600,000.

Table 8b



So, the difference between actual deaths and the number of recorded deaths given by Bacque (3,235,539) would be a mere 65,095. This means that Bacque exaggerated the number of unrecorded deaths by 5,645,000, or by a factor of 88. In other words, Bacque’s spectacular "revelation" that the Allies caused 5.7 million civilian deaths in excess of recorded mortality in the four occupation zones/two Germanys between October 1946 and September 1950 is just hot air. The above comparison suggests that the number of recorded plus unrecorded deaths in the four occupation zones, later the two Germanys, was 3,235,539 + 65,095 = 3,300,634, and not 3,235,539 + 5,710,095 = 8,945,634 as Bacque would have it.

This is of course assuming that the German Statistics Office’s other figures are correct. There is at least one that seems far too low, which is that of 20,000 civilians on territory of the four occupation zones who were killed in ground fighting. As many as 22,000 may have been killed in the battle inside Berlin between 23 April and 2 May 1945 alone^[37], and another 10,000 may have perished in the Battle of Halbe between 24 April and 1 May 1945.^[38] Civilian deaths in the entire area of the Red Army’s Berlin offensive have been estimated at about 100,000.^[39] The total number of collateral civilian deaths from ground fighting throughout Germany was thus probably much higher than the number assumed by the German Statistics Office. This in turn would reduce the number of unrecorded deaths even further. One might even make a case that there were no unrecorded deaths at all and the 1950 census figures were higher than the actual population.

Before I move on, these are the differences in migration balance between Bacque and reality (WiSt = Wirtschaft und Statistik), which are the main reason for Bacque’s 5.7 million phantoms.

Table 9



Besides the blatant fallacies in Bacque’s calculation, the above tables also illustrate the absurdity of suggesting that of all deaths in Germany between 1946-1950 the large majority (5,710,095 out of 8,945,634, almost 64 %) were not officially recorded. Are the Allied and local authorities supposed to have left most deaths unrecorded or suppressed most records? Thousands of Allied and German officials would have to be involved in such gigantic cover-up conspiracy, with not a single whistle-blower to this day. Extremely unlikely, to say the least. Or are the Allied and local authorities supposed to have been overwhelmed by mortality on such a scale that their keeping of death records (even independently of cause) couldn’t keep up with it?

And where would they have buried all those 5,710,095 unrecorded dead without anybody noticing? Well, maybe each time a recorded dead was buried, they reopened the grave once the grieving relatives were gone, took two unrecorded bodies out of the refrigerator and put them on top of the recorded one. Maybe my maternal grandfather, who died of cancer in 1949, is sharing his grave with two other people.

US Ambassador Murphy, Bacque’s key source for his census calculations, is also referred to in several parts of Bacque’s book as having written something in 1947 about expecting a shrinkage of the population by two million in the next two or three years "owing to the present high death rate in Germany"^[40], or that "the death rate in Germany was so high that, in effect, it must exceed the birth rate by two million people in the few years during which the expellees and prisoners were to return"^[41], or that "after the influx, which he expected to number two million prisoners and four million expellees, the population would rise by only four million"^[42], or that he expected "two million deaths to come soon after 1947 based on his knowledge ‘of the present death rate in Germany’"^[43]. What Murphy actually stated is unclear because, for all his reliance on this source and several partial quotes of Murphy’s predictions, Bacque never provided a comprehensive quote of Murphy’s statement. Instead, he calculated that the death rate that Murphy must have been referring to was something like 24 %o p.a.^[44] based on the reading that Murphy expected deaths to exceed births by two million over a period of one, two or three years. This is Bacque’s calculation, in which he assumed an annual birth rate of 14.47 %o:

Table 10



This calculation leads to interesting results if continued – after 10 years the population will be 73,460,000 and the death rate will be about 16%o. And it would get better and better the further you go down.

Actually the 3-year scenario, assuming a birth rate of 14.47 %o p.a., would be more like this:

Table 11



The death rate per 1,000 is calculated as number of deaths ÷ (population at beginning of year + births during year).

In this scenario, assuming that births and deaths evened each other out in 1950, the positive migration balance would have to be 6,185,796 for the Census 1950 + Saarland figure of 69,185,796 to be reached. Or then this figure would include 6,185,796 people who weren’t there.

The actual migration balance between 29 October 1946 and 13 September 1950 was 3,000,000, as mentioned above (1,740,000 returning PoWs plus 1,760,000 expellees minus 500,000 emigrants). So, in order to reach the 1950 figure of 69,230,796, and replacing Bacque’s starting population of 65 million with the actual population count of 65,310,000, there would have to be an excess of births vs. deaths of 875,796 as shown below.

Table 12



If the birth rate was 14.47%o p.a. as estimated by Bacque, the average death rate over the 1947 to 1950 period would have been 10.96%o to 10.99%o p.a., and the total number of deaths over the same period couldn’t have been higher than 2,923,356.

Bacque mentioned 4,176,430 births between the 1946 and 1950 censuses, which would mean a birth rate of ca. 15.91%o. This in turn would mean that the population could take more deaths and still maintain the birth excess of 875,796 required to match the census data, as shown below. With a birth rate of 15.90%o, the death rate would be 12.36%o to 12.39%o.

Table 13



A birth rate of 15.91%o would be close to the 1946 birth rate of 16.1 %o given for the territory of the later German Federal Republic by the German Statistics Office.^[45]

Bacque assumed a 16.1 %o birth rate for West Germany but a much lower birth rate (10.4%o) for East Germany. But why should the birth rate in East Germany have been so much lower than in West Germany? If it was, and if the death rate was accordingly lower than the 12.36%o to 12.39%o shown above, this would mean that the death rate in West Germany was accordingly above 12.36%o to 12.39%o and may have been in the order of 13 %o as per the German Statistics Office for 1946.^[46]

Anyway, the numbers of births and deaths in the above calculation match the respective numbers in the above census comparisons (4,176,430 births, 3,300,634 deaths), which suggests that this calculation, with an average birth rate of 15.91%o and a death rate of 12.36%o to 12.39%o, is the most realistic one for both Germanys together.

It may be that mortality reached higher levels during certain periods and in certain regions, especially where there was a huge refugee population. But Bacque’s mortality scenario, where 8,945,634 civilian inhabitants of the four occupation zones (3,235,539 recorded plus 5,710,095 unrecorded) died between October 1946 and September 1950, would require a mortality rate of 34.8%o % or 3.48 % throughout all of Germany and the entire period of about 4 years, if one assumes a birth rate of 14.47 %o or 1.447 % Bacque does.

Table 14



The 1950 census + Saarland figure would in such case not be lower than the expected population, as Bacque claims, but would exceed the expected population by 6,157,950. In other words, either the 1950 census + Saarland figure would include 6,157,950 people who were not actually there, or then the positive migration balance was 9,157,950 instead of 3,000,000.

Table 15



With influx of expellees the only variable, 7,917,950 would have had to enter the four occupation zones, later the two Germanys, between October 1946 and September 1950. Added to the 9,840,000 who were already there in October 1946, this would mean that a total of 17,757,950 ended up in West or East Germany. Which is just 172,050 less than the sum of the prewar population of 1937 Germany’s eastern territories and ethnic minorities outside the 1937 borders and excess births among these populations during and after the war until 1950 (16,940,000 + 990,000 = 17,930,000). This would mean that just 172,050 of this population, less than 1 %, died in military service during the war or stayed in their prewar home territory or died during flight and expulsion, etc. Which is as unrealistic a proposition as can be in this context.

That said, there are also sources more serious than Bacque suggesting a very high excess mortality among the German population in the postwar year, especially in 1945 and 1946.

In an October 1945 letter to the Assistant Secretary of War, U.S. Deputy Military Governor Lucius Clay reported that "undoubtedly a large number of refugees have already died of starvation, exposure and disease.... The death rate in many places has increased several fold, and infant mortality is approaching 65 percent in many places. By the spring of 1946, German observers expect that epidemics and malnutrition will claim 2.5 to 3 million victims between the Oder and Elbe." […] At a Cabinet meeting in London in early October, the participants acknowledged that the overall death rate among German civilians had already climbed to four times the prewar normal, while the mortality rate for children had risen tenfold.^[47]

The prewar overall mortality on the territory of the German Reich had been 11.6 %o (1.16 %) p.a. in 1938 according to the German Statistics Office^[48], and the infant mortality had been 68 %o (6.8 %) p.a. in 1935^[49]. The Cabinet meeting would thus have been contemplating an infant mortality rate of 68 % and an overall mortality rate of 4.64%.

To put this into perspective, in Kharkov (Kharkiv), a city with a population of about 450,000 while under German occupation, there was a famine starting in the winter of 1941/42 that lasted until the end of September 1942. The local administration recorded 19,284 deaths between the second half of December 1941 and the second half of September 1942, thereof 11,918 (59.6 %) from hunger.^[50] The Foreign Office representative at Army High Command 6 noted on 25.03.1942 that according to reports reaching municipal authorities at least 50 people were dying of hunger every day, and that the true number might be much higher as in many cases the cause of death was stated as "unknown" and besides many deaths were not reported.^[51] The reported cases would signify an overall mortality rate of 4.29 % over a period of 10 months, equivalent to 5.71% p.a.^[52] . Another comparison: in the first half of the 14th century (before the Black Death), famine regularly caused mortality rates to jump from a favorable 2.7 % p.a. in the last half of the 13th century to 5 % p.a. throughout Britain, 10 % in towns.^[53]

Was it all that bad for the indigenous population of the four Allied occupation zones of Germany in October 1945? Were the Cabinet members referring to mortality among refugees from the German Reich’s former eastern territories and from ethnic German populations of Eastern Europe, like the previously quoted Clay obviously did? Or was their mortality scenario just overly pessimistic?

Whichever applies, an estimate for 1946, when famine was still widespread in Europe and elsewhere, is that the death rate in Germany was double the prewar figure^[54], which assuming a prewar mortality rate of 1.16% would be 2.32%. Conditions tended to be best in the U.S. zone and worst in the French and Soviet zones, despite the fact that the latter was traditionally a food surplus region. Urban centers tended to be hardest hit as well, with inhabitants of Berlin and the Ruhr suffering most of all. Small children, university students, and older people were hardest hit by the malnutrition.^[55] Though deaths resulting directly from starvation remained rare even during the worst phases of the postwar occupation, there was an increase in the rate of deaths from suicides and diseases like tuberculosis, typhus, diphtheria, and influenza in which malnutrition likely played at least some contributing role.^[56]

In the German Statistics Office’s 1939 to 1946 population balance shown above (Tables 1 and 1a) excess deaths from malnutrition and disease would be counted among the 7,130,000 "natural" deaths between 17.05.1939 and 29.10.1946. Applied to the 1939 population of 69,310,000 this would be 1.38% p.a., which suggests that excess mortality in 1945/46 may have been lower than 2.32%. According to the German Statistics Office, as mentioned above, the 1946 mortality rate in what later became the German Federal Republic was 13%o (1.3%).^[57] According to a study about the postwar hunger years in Rheinland-Pfalz, in the French occupation zone, the mortality rate rose from 11.3 %o in 1938 to 13.1 %o in 1946, then dropped to 12.9 %o in 1947, 11.7 %o in 1948 and 11.1 %o in 1949.^[58] There seems to have been some seasonal variation, as according to the same study the mortality rate jumped from 11.4 %o in November 1946 to 17.4 %o in February 1947, during the dreadful winter known as the "hunger winter" or the "white death", for which the number of excess deaths from hunger and cold has been estimated by historians at several hundred thousand, based on extrapolations from partial data.^[59]

In the four occupation zones mortality in 1945/46 seems to have been worst in Berlin^[60], largely due to the battle, which may have killed about 22,000 of the city’s inhabitants between 24 April and 2 May 1945^[61], and to massive rape and associated deaths after the battle.^[62] Additionally there were epidemics. By mid-July 1945 a hundred Berliners a day were said to be dying of typhoid fever and dysentery.^[63] In a sermon in Dahlem on 23 July 1945, bishop Dibelius claimed that there were more than 1,000 deaths in the city per day, up from 250 during and 200 prior to the war.^[64] Where did he get these figures from? It there were records showing so large an increase in mortality, more would probably be known about it. How long this situation lasted can only be guessed from the available information.^[65] Anyway, the baseline figures are unrealistically high.^[66]

During the winter of 1945/46, which was not abnormally cold but made worse by a terrible lack of coal and food, about 60,000 Berliners are supposed to have died.^[67] The following winter, which according to a White House official was the "rock bottom" of the food supply situation^[68], "killed off an estimated 12,000 more when temperatures hovered around thirty degrees below".^[69] It seems counterintuitive that the 1945/46 winter should have been much deadlier in Berlin than the far more severe 1946/47 winter, which figures much more prominently than that of 1945/46 in Ruth Friedrich’s diary, where she mentioned horrors like people dying of cold in their beds^[70] and a refugee train arriving from Poland with 53 frozen to death, 182 with severe frostbite and 25 having to be amputated^[71], which became the talk of the town^[72]. Even assuming that the 12,000 mentioned for the 1946/47 winter are excess deaths only whereas the 60,000 for the previous winter are total deaths including 51,990 excess deaths^[73], the difference would still be 39,990. How can this be?

Part of the explanation may be the infant mortality rate, which according to Ruth Friedrich was reportedly 80-90 % in the autumn of 1945.^[74] According to a recent PhD thesis, infant mortality was around 76 % in the Kaiserin-Auguste-Victoria Haus (KAVH), one of the most important clinics for children in Berlin. The causes were destruction of medical facilities by artillery fire or their unavailability as the Soviets confiscated them for their own wounded, shortage of fresh milk and epidemic diseases like diphtheria, which unusually affected even newborns.^[75] In the summer of 1945 a doctor in the Reinickendorf borough stated that if no proper nourishment was provided all newborns would die until the coming spring, and that in some of the city’s districts there were no newborns anymore. As late as the spring of 1946 infant mortality in Berlin, varying among districts, was up to 80 %.^[76] Of all children treated at the KAVH, about 30 % died in 1945.^[77] Much of the mortality seems to have been related to the presence of many refugees from the east, whose children were considerably worse off than those of the city’s indigenous population, infant mortality among those who reached Berlin – pediatricians assumed that most newborns had not even come that far – being about 20 % higher.^[78] The situation gradually improved over the next years, with a temporary reversal during the Berlin Blockade in 1948/49.^[79] In the crisis years 1945 and 1946 child mortality was higher in the summer than in the winter months, with up to 72 % in July of each year. In 1947, however, infant mortality was reduced to just 12 %.^[80] These figures may refer to the entire Soviet occupation zones and not only to Berlin.^[81]

Assuming a 12 % infant mortality rate in 1947 vs. a rate of 90 % in 1945/46, the respective census populations for 1945 and 1946 and an equal birthrate in both years of 16%o or 1.6 %^[82], the difference would be as follows:

Table 16



However, 8,561 excess infant deaths less would still leave a difference of 31,429 unexplained. It is therefore likely that the claimed 60,000 number of Berlin deaths in the 1945/46 winter (which would amount to about 2.14% of the August 1945 population of 2,807,405, the per annum equivalent being ca. 8.67%) is much too high. Assuming non-infant excess deaths in the 1946/47 winter (12,000 – 654 = 11,346) and that the non-infant excess mortality in 1945/46 was equal, then adding excess infant deaths in the 1945/46 winter (9,215), yields 20,561 excess deaths that winter, still making it worse than the 1946/47 winter.^[83] Adding an assumed 8,010 deaths that would have occurred under prewar circumstances would yield a total of 28,571 deaths in the 1945/46 winter – about 1.02% of the population in this period, equivalent to an annual mortality rate of 4.13%. Bar the summer famine, with a mortality rate of 5.79 – 6.96 % p.a. in July 1945^[84] and the days of the battle, this would have been the deadliest period in Berlin’s history since the Thirty Years War.^[85]

As to the 1946/47 winter, assuming 101 "normal" deaths per day^[86] over 90 days (the winter period from 21/12/1946 to 21/03/1947) and ca. 133 excess deaths per day over the same period^[87] for a total of 234 daily deaths yields 9 090 + 11,970^[88] = 21,060 deaths, corresponding to a mortality rate of 0.66% in the period and an annual mortality rate of 2.68%. This is lower than the death rate for all of 1947 (29 %o or 2.9 %) claimed by Adenauer in his above-mentioned speech on 23.03.1946, in which he also claimed a birth rate of just 10 %o (1 %) in 1947 and a child mortality rate (Kindersterblichkeit) of 135 %o (13.5 %) in the second quarter of 1946. The term for child mortality covers deaths before five years of age and is thus not identical with Säuglingssterblichkeit (infant mortality), which was down to 12 % by 1947.^[89] How can an assumed infant mortality of 12 % be matched with an overall mortality rate of 2.9 %?

A birth rate of 10 % and an infant mortality rate of 12 % would mean 31,871 births and 3,824 infant deaths in 1947 as shown below, thereof 1,657 in excess of an assumed baseline mortality of 6.8 %.^[90]

Table 17



A death rate of 2.9 % in 1947 among 3,187,114 inhabitants would mean 92,426 deaths, that is 55,455 more than the 36,971 that would correspond to the above-mentioned 1938 baseline of 1.16 %. Only 1,657 of these 55,455 excess deaths would be accounted for by infant mortality exceeding the assumed 6.8 % baseline, leaving 53,798 other deaths. Most 1947 excess deaths would probably have occurred during the 1947 portion of the murderous 1946/47 winter. Assuming 133 per day as per the above calculations, there would have been 10,640 such deaths in the 80 days from 01/01/1947 to 21/03/1947. This in turn would imply 55,455 minus 10,640 = 44,815 excess deaths in the friendlier periods of the year, 157 per day vs. 133 per day in the hunger winter. What would have caused these?

Unless and until a plausible answer to this question is found, Adenauer’s claim (or the statistics supporting it) should be regarded with suspicion, especially as Adenauer produced these figures in the same speech in which he also claimed a very exaggerated number of expellee and refugee deaths as mentioned before (6 million, an exaggeration by a factor of about 3).

That’s how bad things got, or may have got, for the inhabitants of Berlin.^[91] What about other places in the four occupation zones?

I have already mentioned Rheinland-Pfalz, where the mortality rate was 13.1 %o (1.31 %) in 1946 and peaked at 17.4 %o (1.74 %) p.a. in February 1947, up from 11.4 %o (1.14 %) in November 1946, and the average rate for 1947 and 1948 was respectively 12.9 %o (1.29 %) and 11.7 %o (1.17%).^[92]

Bavaria, according to Schenck^[93], had its mortality peak in April 1945, 37.9 %o (3.79 %), almost as high as in November 1918 when it had been 40.2 %o (4.02 %). The annual average for 1945 was 19.6 %o (1.96 %). In 1947 it was down to 11.9 %o (1.19 %) due to "mortality anticipation" (Vorwegnahme der Sterblichkeit). I presume this means that periods of high mortality are followed by periods in which mortality is much lower as the population would have a higher proportion of more resistant specimens. In the years 1940 to 1945, according to Schenck, a quarter of a million people more had died in Bavaria than would have died under normal circumstances.

For other regions in the four occupation zones no overall mortality rates are provided by Schenck unless I missed something. However, Bacque himself referred to a British Army report whereby the death rate in North Rhine province in 1946 was about 12%o p.a. (1.2 %) and fell during the year until it hit only 8%o p.a. (0.8 %) in September. The death rate in Hamburg in 1946, according to official British Army reports, was 14.9%o (1.49 %) p.a. on average. Having started near 20%o p.a. in January, it had declined to only 12.63%o (1.263 %) p.a. by the end of the year.^[94] Considering the figures for Rheinland-Pfalz and Bavaria mentioned above, this seems quite realistic.

As concerns the Ruhr region, there was a study whereby in Wuppertal there was no actual famine, and the weight loss of the inhabitants between 17 and 23 %.^[95] Wuppertal is close to Essen, where both my parents come from and where in I interviewed my mother’s elder sister and some of her friends on video in 2008, about their experiences during and after WWII. Their accounts are rendered in my answer to a question on Quora, Did you know any World War II survivors? What was their story?. They told me about bombing attacks during the war and about hunger in the postwar years, but none of them told me anything about having seen or heard about or known someone who succumbed to starvation or to malnutrition-related diseases like tuberculosis, typhus or typhoid fever. No one told me anything about cemeteries being enlarged to cope with increased mortality, about having seen vehicles loaded with corpses taken away for burial, about having witnessed or heard about mass burials. Privation in the postwar years increased mortality, but not to the extent required to make everyday death as visible to the common citizen as would correspond to a die-off on the scale claimed by Bacque. The only member of my family who died between 1946 and 1950 was my maternal grandfather. He died in 1949 at age 62, of throat cancer. Malnutrition may have hastened his death, but the likeliest reason why he got cancer in the first place was that he was a trumpeter and a heavy smoker. My aunt’s arms and legs puffed up from malnutrition, but she was never hospitalized let alone in risk of dying. Her condition soon improved after she got a better diet. My mother, like many German children at the time, benefited from the quaker feeding, a charity initiated by Herbert Hoover, the hero of the "mercies" part of Bacque’s book.

None of these accounts looks to me like the narrators had been living under conditions as bad as those in Berlin, let alone in a country where there was anything like 5.7 million unrecorded deaths in excess of "normal" mortality from 29 October 1946 to 13 September 1950. My afore mentioned relatives were not of a privileged class, they were ordinary people who lived in a city that had been heavily destroyed by bombs. Hunger there was, yes, but nothing they told me suggests mass dying due to hunger and/or related diseases.

In the first years of my study in Konstanz am Bodensee, which had been in the French zone of occupation, I talked about the war and postwar years with my first landlady and an older woman for whom I mowed the lawn to earn some extra money. Again, privation yes (my landlady had a bone problem in her lower jaw, presumably a consequence of malnutrition in her youth), anything to suggest mass death from privation, no.

How about the Soviet occupation zone? My maternal grandfather’s family was from Bad Dürrenberg in Saxonia, and my aunt spent some time there at the end of the war and thereafter. Again, no accounts that would suggest people dying at a much higher rate than during the war. None of my mother’s relatives died from malnutrition related causes.^[96]

The postwar period in West Germany was also described in what was known as "Trümmerliteratur", which literally means rubble literature of literature in the rubble.^[97] I have read the works of Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Borchert related to the war and postwar period. Böll mentioned nothing in his short stories or novels that would suggest a situation as dramatic as to cause the gigantic leap in mortality that Bacque’s figures suggest.^[98]

Borchert died in 1947 in Basel, Switzerland, from complications of an infection he had contracted during the war as a soldier on the Eastern Front. His most famous work is the drama Drauβen vor der Tür, about a homecoming soldier who finds that his wife, his home and hopes are gone.^[99] Borchert also wrote a number of short stories including Das Brot (The Bread)^[100]. An older woman wakes up in the dark of the night and catches her husband who is eating an extra slice of their rationed bread. They don't talk about what happened and a perplexed conversation takes place. They end up with the fact that there was nothing and they both woke up because of the wind outside and the sound of the rain gutter. They go back to bed. While they are trying to sleep, she hears her husband secretly eating more bread. The next evening, she prepares dinner and gives him an extra slice of her ration of bread under the pretext that in the evening she can't take the bread all that well. They avoid eye contact, after a while she sits down at the table.

That’s the postwar hunger years in a nutshell, according to Böl^[101], a story that says more about the subject than any erudite commentary, in which the entire misery and the entire greatness of a human being is incorporated. It is set in a dire situation of food rationing. But not in a situation that would cause millions of unrecorded excess deaths within a few years.

A German docudrama available on YouTube shows how bad it was in Germany in the winter of 1946/47.^[102] But again, none of the witnesses recalled anything that would suggest the kind of catastrophe that Bacque’s figures would imply. Nothing comparable to the situation in Berlin, where according to Margret Boveri’s diary people fainted from hunger in the metro or while queuing for food in July 1945.^[103]

Maybe some of the witnesses quoted by Bacque recall apocalyptic scenarios of people dying like flies? Not from among the refugees, whose situation was much worse than that of the indigenous population, but from among the indigenous population or someone who observed first-hand how these people were living and dying. What does Bacque’s book offer by way of such evidence? Not someone’s morbidity or mortality estimates, not doomsday predictions of what would happen or might happen if …^[104], but descriptions of how people lived and died before the eyes of the observer. Unless I missed something, Bacque offers only two such direct eyewitnesses regarding the four occupation zones, Probst Heinrich Grüber and Victor Gollancz.

Grüber is supposed to have described an end-of-the-world scene in the forest around Berlin where mothers buried their children by the wayside and "countless" corpses, presumably suicides, were hanging from trees. I say "supposed to" because, although his reference to Grüber ("wrote that") suggests otherwise, Bacque did not quote from any writing of Grüber’s, but from someone who quoted Grüber, American Senator Wherry in a speech at Congress.^[105] Assuming that Wherry was quoting Grüber correctly, what Grüber would have been describing is irrelevant as evidence regarding the occupation zones’ indigenous population. High suicide and child mortality rates in Berlin cannot be gainsaid, but unless Berliners went to the forests outside the city to bury their kids and then hang themselves instead of doing that in loco, what Grüber described was the plight of refugees or expellees, not that of indigenous inhabitants.^[106] Besides, as shown above, Berlin was much worse off than other parts of the occupation zones.

That leaves Gollancz, who Bacque quoted for a harrowing account from a tour of dwelling places in the ruins of Düsseldorf and other information collected in Germany.^[107] The integrity of this witness is beyond question. Gollancz's campaign for the humane treatment of German civilians involved efforts to persuade the British government to end the ban on sending provisions to Germany and ask that it pursue a policy of reconciliation, as well as organizing an airlift to provide Germany and other war-torn European countries with provisions and books. He wrote regular critical articles for, and letters to, British newspapers, and after a visit to the British Zone of Occupation in October and November 1946, he published these in his book In Darkest Germany in January 1947.^[108]

Gollancz visited hospitals in the British Zone of Occupation where he saw and photographed severely malnourished patients including children and interviewed doctors about subjects like the alarming increase of tuberculosis and other diseases related to malnutrition and other misery. Gollancz also visited and described in graphic detail the squalid conditions in which many bombed-out Germans lived in destroyed cities in the British Zone. Except on one occasion when he got carried away into writing that there must be hundreds of thousands of dead beneath the ruins of Hamburg^[109], I consider Gollancz’s descriptions to be accurate. He is the best eyewitness that Bacque had as concerns conditions in the four occupation zones, so why didn’t Bacque use more of his testimony? Maybe because Gollancz’s comparatively sober observations don’t fit into the apocalyptic predictions that Bacque was fond of quoting. Take for instance hunger oedema. Bacque made it look as if 100,000 people in Hamburg suffering from hunger oedema were "in the last stages of starvation", about to die.^[110] Gollancz mentioned (and defended) the same figure, saw and photographed severe cases of hunger oedema in hospitals. But he wrote nothing about all these people being on the verge of death. In fact, he mentioned only one patient dying of starvation, unless I missed something. Here’s some of what he wrote:

Though, say, 80 per cent, of the town population in our zone of Germany supplements the official ration by a few hundred calories—through the black market, which is keeping people alive, or from other sources—the condition of millions is indescribably wretched. One expert whose job it is to make an assessment of such things estimates that in the city of Hamburg some 100,000 people are suffering from hunger oedema or the equivalent; and according to figures given to me by the German public health authorities 13,000 people in Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf were being treated for this illness in hospitals or by private practitioners during the month of September. I saw at a hospital in Hamburg a starving man who had been brought in a few hours before: his death-rattle was beginning. I had a photograph of him taken—with me by his side, to save myself from the charge of exaggeration. I saw another man in the same hospital whose swollen scrotum reached a third of the way to the floor. I have a photograph of him also.*
[….]
* I have decided at the last minute, after a great deal of hesitation, to suppress the photographs of these two cases, except that of the second man’s face (Plate 4). I have similarly suppressed all other photographs of really bad cases of oedema where the water is still present, as I cannot bear to perpetuate a visible record of these horrors. (In hunger oedema the body swells, sometimes abominably, with water.) I have retained a photograph of a less terrible case of emaciation, and one or two of oedema where the water has gone.^[111]

It is not a question of old ladies with varicose veins. I have personally seen only two women with hunger oedema, though I have seen many who are painfully emaciated. Some indication of the true position is provided by a survey recently made (under British auspices) of the nutritional state of about 1,000 employees of the Reichspost Direktion, Hamburg. In males of all ages the incidence of hunger oedema was found to be no less than 17 per cent., and in females of all ages 9 per cent. These are horrifying figures. “This is a clinical assessment,” says the report, “in which there was always a higher incidence among persons examined in the afternoons, and this regardless of whether or not theirs was a sedentary job. The incidence of this cardinal sign of malnutrition must therefore be even higher in fact. Further, it should be borne in mind that among large numbers of persons in the same general state of under-nourishment necessitating hospitalization little more than half do manifest this sign.” It was to the latter fact that I referred when I wrote “hunger oedema or its equivalent”. No less than 52 per cent, of the males and 34 per cent, of the females in the same group showed “marked loss of flesh”, and 24 per cent, of the males and 22 per cent, of the females “looked positively ill”.
Finally, your correspondents question the figure of 13,000 officially given by German public health authorities as the number of people in Regierungsbezirk Dusseldorf being treated for hunger oedema in hospitals or privately during September. This scepticism is not shared, apparently, by responsible British officials on the spot. “Recent surveys by Public Health in the Regierungsbezirk Dusseldorf,” reported the Colonel commanding R.B. Dusseldorf to the Deputy Regional Commissioner in June, “showed that the number of hospitalized cases of people suffering from hunger oedema was comparatively low, the reason being shortage of beds. The number of nonhospitalized cases is high—-in the region of 25,000.”
Allow me to add a word in conclusion. The most horrible of my experiences has been a visit to the camp at Belsen, where I saw the tattoo marks on the arms of the Jewish survivors. I am never likely to forget the unspeakable wickedness of which the Nazis were guilty. But when I see the swollen bodies and living skeletons in hospitals here and elsewhere; when I look at the miserable “shoes” of boys and girls in the schools, and find that they have come to their lessons without even a dry piece of bread for breakfast; when I go down into a one-roomed cellar where a mother is struggling, and struggling very bravely, to do her best for a husband and four or five children—then I think, not of Germans, but of men and women. I am sure I should have the same feelings if I were in Greece or Poland. But I happen to be in Germany, and write of what I see here.^[112]

Within a few days of my arrival I had a remarkable interview with a British medical officer of fair importance. He started by advising me always to see English doctors; he was so emphatic on the point that I realized at once how important it was for me to see German doctors as well. He agreed that “there wasn’t enough penicillin”, but his own explanation— “the Germans can’t pay for it” appeared, in his view, to dispose of the matter once and for all. I was to remember what he said when I saw a man a few days later at the University Hospital of Hamburg, in agony because there was no penicillin for him—you can see his face for yourselves on plate 5. This doctor also suggested that the German authorities had falsified the V.D. figures—penicillin at that time being permitted only for cases of gonorrhoea—“to get more penicillin”. As to insulin, hospitals, he said, had 100 per cent, of their requirements—“and bad cases presumably go to hospital”. I was to remember this too, when I was told by a German doctor whom I learned to trust that people forced their way into hospitals when the coma was about to come on in order to compel admittance. I next learned that all the people suffering from oedema, for instance in the Hamburg hospitals, were oldish—and so they might really be suffering from other kinds of oedema, such as cardiac or renal. So indeed this one or that one might; but the general impression that the remark might have conveyed to the unwary would have been wholly false, as I shall presently show. I ended the interview by asking whether any drugs etc. were in seriously short supply, and if so what, and in what order of priority. I got a satisfactorily categorical answer—penicillin, insulin, fiver extract, cod-liver oil and malt, vitamins A and D.^[113]

As to hunger oedema in Hamburg, there is little to add to what I have written in The Times. I am satisfied that the estimate of 100,000 is a reasonable one; and it must be remembered that the survey of post-office workers was carried out under expert British auspices, and that but for it the existence of the majority of such cases would probably never have been known. The survey makes nonsense, of course, of the “old people with renal and cardiac oedema” argument. When the reader looks at the photographs of cases of oedema and emaciation which I took in various hospitals,* he must bear in mind that doctors are sometimes in error, and that this case or that may in fact be due, for instance, to kidney trouble or cancer. But the point is that this is what bad cases of oedema and emaciation look like, and that a very high percentage of them are unquestionably caused by starvation. I will give further proof of this later on.^[114]

Back in Düsseldorf, I spent a morning (November 5th) at the Town Hospital. I saw a few very badly underweight children there—the trouble was, the doctor said, that they had to be sent home without proper shoes and clothes, and so got ill again. I also saw a child of ten with heavy TB—the kind of TB, I was told, that you find normally only in babies. The disease was spread over the whole body, and bandages could be changed only under morphia. Such cases, it appeared, were today much commoner in older children. Previously there had not been enough to fill the building; now another building, as well as this, was full. Photograph on plate 18.
One of the patients at this hospital was its own lady doctor. She lived alone, was too busy to get food from the Black Market, and couldn’t queue up; so she had had no bread for weeks. She was now recovering slowly from hunger oedema.
At the baby clinic attached to this hospital I was told that only one in three mothers could feed her baby properly; the breasts of the others were dry within a week.
Later in the day I had a talk with Dr. Arnold, the Burgomaster of Düsseldorf and one of the half dozen best Germans I met. During the last few weeks, he said, he had been visiting factories and workshops, and had personally examined people in Stadtkreis and Landkreis Düsseldorf, as well as in Essen, Bochum and the Ruhr generally. The condition of the men was so bad that their working capacity was on the verge of collapse. He had noticed that when miners and metal workers were bathing at a distance of 8 yards he could count their ribs. He had been told by factory doctors that within a period of three months there had been losses of 15 to 20 lbs.
Dr. Amelunxen, the Minister-President of North Rhine- Westphalia, spoke in a similar sense. He was convinced that during the next few years two or three million would die as a direct result of present conditions—old people, the tuberculous, and a very large number of young children who would fail to overcome the normal childish diseases. Many senior British officials are equally alarmed. “There is a general deterioration in the health of the population” wrote the Colonel commanding Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf to the Deputy Regional Commissioner on June 25th, and in their ability to resist disease, which is having an adverse effect on their morale. There is a considerable increase in the number of cases of hunger oedema in the larger towns in the R.B., notably among women and old people and business men who are at work all day. Stillbirths are on the increase. . . . Simple ailments, such as colds, boils, carbuncles etc., which would normally be treated at home, have now to be treated in hospital, and complications often follow. People have been seen collapsing while waiting in queues, and for the Dusseldorf ferry. He proceeds to give some particulars from Essen, Wuppertal, Oberhausen, Solingen, Dusseldorf, Mulheim and Remscheid. “In Dusseldorf on 19th May there were 145 cases of hunger oedema in one hospital (Grafenberg). Of 934 persons reported to one of the Stadtkreis Medical Officers, 206 were found to be suffering from hunger oedema, and only 70 were in normal health.” “In Mulheim average loss of weight in hospital 20%. Increase in number of hospital patients in one year 18% to 20%.” “In Remscheid definitely undernourished in April 6,648, in May 7,259. Suffering from lack of albumen April 1,732, May 1,792.” Then follows the estimate of 25,000 as the number of persons in the R.B. suffering from hunger oedema, which I quoted in my letter to The Times.
I thought I would round off the whole investigation by having a talk with a world-famous British expert on nutrition, who was doing special work in the neighbourhood on hunger oedema. He was as cautious as a scientist no doubt should be, and he had a poor opinion of the veracity of Germans in general and of German scientists in particular. Nevertheless, the upshot was substantially to confirm my own conclusions. He could not say whether the prevalence of spots and sores was due in some degree to malnutrition. He agreed that the majority of adults you saw about looked yellow (as well as thin); but the reason, he said, was not clear to him. If I understood him aright, he thought that the yellow, parchmenty appearance might be caused by a failure of the blood to flush the skin. “A sort of defence mechanism” suggested one of his assistants. But when I put a direct question, the answer was a frank “Of course, it’s connected in some way with malnutrition”. As to oedema, he explained, as so many others had explained already, that only some of it was hunger oedema, and that this type could easily be identified by its quick response to extra food. Later on in the conversation, when I was asking another question about oedema, “You’d be surprised” I was told “how many of the cases that pass through my hands improve very rapidly when quite a small amount of additional food is given.” These cases, then, must have been hunger oedema.^[115]

As I mentioned before, my aunt’s condition improved as soon as her food intake got better. She therefore had hunger oedema. But she wasn’t hospitalized let alone in risk of dying, and she didn’t tell me about having known anyone who died or almost died of malnutrition. Gollancz’s accounts go in the same direction. Much hunger, much misery, but Gollancz rarely mentioned having witnessed deaths from malnutrition or related disease, and where he did it was individual cases he saw.

Regarding infant mortality in the areas he visited, Gollancz wrote the following^[116]:

Infant mortality in Schleswig-Holstein for the first six months of 1946 was at the rate of 116.1 per 1,000 live births, against the 1 936 figure (for the Reich as a whole) of 66. But in the zone generally infant mortality is at the moment declining: it was 136 per 1,000 live births in January 1946 against 61 in January 1938, but only 75 (provisional figure) in August 1946 against 57 in August 1938. It is to be hoped that the winter will not see another rapid increase.
[…]
There was an improvement in the infant mortality rate for Hamburg similar to that for Schleswig-Holstein. It was (approximately) 50 per 1,000 live births in 1938, 145 in 1945, 125 in January 1946, 77 in March 1946, 114 in April 1946, 82 in June 1946, and 84 in July 1946. Miscarriages, on the other hand, which according to statistics of the Hamburg Health Authority were 12.2 per cent of reported pregnancies in 1940 and increased about cent, a year till the end of 1945, when they reached 17.7 per cent, jumped during the first six months of 1946 to 20.1 per cent.

The mentioned rates were outrageous for a developed country like Germany, but a far cry from the 1945/46 rates in Berlin.

Gollancz did not describe anything like seeing hospital patients, let alone persons outside hospitals, being taken for burial much of the time. He even expressly pointed out the following^[117]:

All this doesn’t mean, as I said at the beginning, that people are dropping dead in the streets. The crude mortality rate has been improving and in August was normal. The point is that a very great number of people feel wretchedly weak and ill, and that the health of the population as a whole is being undermined with such startling rapidity that, unless radical measures are taken to effect an improvement, the toll in one, two or three years’ time will be appalling. It must be remembered that mortality from tuberculosis did not reach its climax until five years after the last war.

People were not dropping dead in the streets^[118], a crude mortality rate improving up to normal, appalling mortality (whatever Gollancz meant by that) within "one, two or three years’ time" if nothing radical was done about it but not happening at the time to which this writing refers (October 1946) – none of this goes down well with Bacque’s monumental mortality claims. Neither does the optimism occasionally displayed by Gollancz, for instance on his visit to the devastated town of Jülich^[119]:

All this was the dreadful side Jülich: and it wasn’t exceptional, as you’ll appreciate when you remember that seven thousand people are living there, and hardly a house even partially standing. But there was a happy side too. I had been getting friendly with my Stadtdirektor, who turned out to be a Social Democrat, and to have been “on the run” continuously from 1933 right up to what he still called, in spite of everything, the liberation. He was a gentle little man, and when he found me sympathetic asked if he might come in my car as far as Düren (on the way to Aachen) so as to be able to talk a little longer. As we were leaving the rubble for the green fields, I noticed a longish bungalow of wood that seemed somehow to gleam and glisten in that awful desolation: and over the door the words, in bold lettering, “Hotel-Restaurant Kaiserhof”. I looked at my comrade with a gesture of enquiry, and he replied with a smile, half proud and half deprecating, Es beginnt (“Something’s beginning”). I got out to have a look. Two or three men were drinking a glass of beer in the vestibule-restaurant, and we sat and talked with them for a moment or so. Then we went down the corridor. The rooms that opened out of it on both sides were small, overcrowded, and furnished with the minimum of necessities; but they were bright and clean, and the people seemed contented. In one room there was a mother with the three most beautiful children I have ever seen. (Plate 54.)

Certainly not the kind of descriptions that Bacque would want his readers to read.

With even this key witness not supporting his contentions and figures as concerns the indigenous population, what did Bacque have to show in support of these by way of first-hand testimonies describing what things looked like on the ground? I didn’t find anything. Bacque referred to Canadian Army General Maurice Pope, Head of Mission in Berlin, who in April 1947 wrote that "the death rate is high, and the suicide returns do not show much improvement", and a few weeks later reported five "authenticated" deaths from starvation in Hamburg.^[120] Horrible, but those five starvation deaths seem to have been outstanding enough to merit special mention of the cause, and apparently Pope did not report starvation deaths on more occasions (if he had Bacque would probably have let his readers know).^[121]

Bottom line, no contemporary witness I know recalled anything that would suggest an apocalyptic scenario of unrecorded mass mortality. Neither did Pope, and neither did Gollancz in his accounts from "darkest Germany". Like all the above figures in this section, these accounts show that Bacque’s claim of 5.7 million unrecorded deaths among the indigenous inhabitants of the four occupation zones between 29 October 1946 and 13 September 1945 is just phantastic nonsense.

Again, I’m referring to the situation of the indigenous population of the four occupation zones, not to the refugees from the eastern territories of the former German Reich and from outside the 1937 German borders. These were often in situations like the ones that become apparent from Grüber’s account, from other accounts that Bacque reproduced with apparent relish, from Ruth Friedrich’s diary and other sources. But if you want to know what things looked like on the ground for the worst-off among the indigenous population of the four occupation zones other than in Berlin, forget about Bacque. Read Gollancz’s In Darkest Germany, which I highly recommend. And if you know any people who lived in the four occupation zones in the 1946-1950 period, try to collect their accounts about what life was like in Germany at that time. Soon these valuable contemporary witnesses will all be gone.

Notes

[1] James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies. The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation 1944-1950, Little Brown and Company (Canada) Limited, 1997.
[2]Crimes and Mercies (hereafter "C&M"), p. 131.
[3] James Bacque, Other Losses 1991 edition, Prima Publishing, page 2. Bacque’s claims of mortality in German and French captivity have been amply refuted. I added some considerations of my own in my answer to the Quora question What were the Eisenhower death camps and how did he get away with them, politically?
[4] C&M, pp. 76 ff. The Soviet figures (450,600 out of 2,389,600 prisoners taken) are mentioned in G.F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century, 1997 Greenhill Books, p. 278.
[5] Higher figures are given by Rüdiger Overmans in Deutsche Militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. However, Overmans‘ estimates don’t stand up to a cross check against other evidence (including claims by Nazi Germany’s opponents) regarding German casualties, especially but not only as concerns the year 1945. So, there is no reason to assume an order of magnitude above ca. 4.3 million.
[6]Narben bleiben. Die Arbeit der Suchdienste - 60 Jahre nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (a publication of the Search Service of the German Red Cross about the work of the various search services), p. 216.
[7] Copies of these records are available on the website Human Losses in World War II, Wehrmacht Monthly Casualty Reports, 1945 The records are kept in the German Federal Archives/Military Archives (Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv), the archival reference being BA/MA RM 7/810.
[8] BA/MA RH 2/1355, 2/2623, RW 6/557, 6/559, figures copied under Heeresarzt 10-Day Casualty Reports per Theater of War, 1945.
[9] Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich. The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, 2007 Basic Books , p. 421, citing Erich Maschke, ed., Zur Geschichte des Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, vol. XV: Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges – Eine Zusammenfassung, Munich 1967; Wikipedia page Kriegsgefangene des Zweiten Weltkriegs, citing Rüdiger Overmans, "Die Rheinwiesenlager 1945". In: Hans-Erich Volkmann (Hrsg.): Ende des Dritten Reiches – Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Eine perspektivische Rückschau. Herausgegeben im Auftrag des Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamtes, München 1995, S. 278. Other figures are about 1.1 million PoW deaths in "eastern" and 0.3 million in "western" captivity (E.G. Schenck, Das menschliche Elend im XX Jahrhundert, 1965 Nikolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung Herford, p. 94). According to Schenck, whose book was published before the before the Maschke Zusammenfassung, about 1 million died in Soviet, 80,000 in Yugoslavian, 15,000 in Polish and 5,000 in Czechoslovakian captivity. The death toll for French captivity was 19,118 according to the French government, but unofficial sources mentioned about 115,000. PoWs in Great Britain had low mortality except for one abnormal case in which 3,000 died in one camp in the first postwar winter. PoW mortality in the US was also low. About camps on German, Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish territory no figures had been published, but at least in Germany and Belgium the death toll was assumed to be high. The camps on the Rhine Meadows until the summer of 1945 and some others in Northwest, Central and Southern Germany and in Belgium could, according to Schenck, be compared with concentration camps and with camps in Eastern Germany, Poland and the USSR as concerns living conditions, diseases and extraordinarily high mortality. There’s no information, however, about how deaths at these camps would add up to at least 185,000 (assuming 115,000 deaths in French captivity) of the 300,000 deaths in "western" captivity claimed by Schenck.
[10]Narben bleiben, p. 216.
[11] Christian Streit, "Deutsche und Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene", in: Wolfram Wette/Gerd R. Ueberschär, Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, 2001 Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt, pp. 178-192 (p. 178).
[12] Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42, p. 544, quoted in my article Scrapbookpages on Subhuman Cannibalism.
[13] David Crossland, "Germany Still Locates 40,000 War Casualties a Year", SPIEGEL International 08.05.2012; Crossland, Germany Still Burying Eastern Front Dead, SPIEGEL International 31.07.2013; Zita Ballinger Fletcher, Burying Germany’s war dead with dignity is a delicate work of mercy, America Magazine January 14, 2020; Fletcher, "Germans and Russians Work Together to Discover Fates of War Dead", Historynet July 11,2020; Vermisste des Zweiten Weltkriegs: Verloren und wiedergefunden, Deutsche Welle, 06.05.2020.
[14] Arthur L. Smith, Die "vermiβte Million", Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Band 65, p. 86.
[15]Keine deutsche Opferarithmetik, interview by Deutschlandfunk published on 29.11.2006. Regarding lower figures see Rüdiger Overmans, Zahl der Vertreibungsopfer ist neu zu erforschen, Deutschlandfunk 06.12.2006, Historiker: Vertriebenen-Verband nennt falsche Opferzahlen (interview with Ingo Haar, Deutschlandfunk 14.11.2006) and the page Die Flucht der deutschen Bevölkerung 1944/45 on the Lebendiges Museum Online website of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. German historian Ingo Haar’s contention that the number of refugee and expellee deaths was in the order of about 600,000 rather than two millon, and that the latter had been an exaggeration for political reasons, brough bitter recrimination from Erika Steinbach, head of the German Expellees‘ Association (Bund der Vertriebenen), which she expressed i.a. in her memento „Haar“-sträubende Zahlenklitterung des Historikers Ingo Haar ("Hair"-raising numbers quivering by historian Ingo Haar, a word-play on Haar’s name). Haar’s argumentation heavily relies on Overmans‘ problematic study about German military casualties (Ingo Haar, "Die deutschen ›Vertreibungsverluste‹ – Forschungsstand, Kontexte und Probleme", in: Rainer Mackensen, Jürgen Reulecke, Josef Ehmer (editors), Ursprünge, Arten und Folgen des Konstrukts „Bevölkerung“ vor, im und nach dem „Dritten Reich“. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Bevölkerungswissenschaft, pp. 363-380 (p. 371)).
[16]23. März 1949: Rede vor der Interparlamentarischen Union in Bern
[17] C&M, pp. xv, 109, 119; Konrad Adenauer, Erinnerungen 1945-1953, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt Stuttgart 4. Auflage 1980, pp. 182-192 (p. 186).
[18]Wirtschaft und Statistik, Heft 10, Oktober 1956, hereinafter "WiSt 1956/10".
[19] The population count of the census on 29 October 1946 was about 65,911,000 (Office of Population Research, "The Demography of War", Population Index Vol. 14, No. 4 (Oct., 1948), pp. 291-308 (p. 299)). Prisoners of war, displaced persons and interned civilians on occupation territory were counted by the occupation authorities while all other inhabitants were counted by the local German authorities (p. 297). It is not clear whether the total also included non-Germans, though the article refers to "65.9 million Germans enumerated in October, 1946" on p. 300. On the same page it is pointed out that "The possibility of incompleteness and inaccuracy in enumeration is high, for conditions were disorganized in many areas. There is also the strong likelihood that illegal migrants from one zone to another were not reached by census enumerators". The German Statistics Office’s figure of 65,310,000 was arrived at by deducting non-Germans (which suggests that these were included in the census figure of 65.9 million) as well as births and deaths among refugees/expellees from abroad after arrival on territory of the four occupation zones (WiSt 1956/10, p. 494). A 1985 publication of the German Statistics Office, Bevölkerung gestern, heute und morgen, states a population figure of about 64,457,000 for the occupation zones in 1946 (p. 12).
[20] Note 1 in the text below Table 1 reads "Wehrmachtstote einschlieβlich Kriegsgefangene ohne nach 1946 in der Gefangenschaft Verstorbene" ("Wehrmacht dead including prisoners of war without deaths in captivity after 1946"), which is confusing. However, in the text of the article (WiSt 1956/10, p. 495) it is clearly stated that deaths in captivity after 1946 are included in the number of Wehrmacht dead (3,760,000) and not in the number still in captivity abroad in 1946 (1,750,000).
[21] Figures in the Wikipedia article Liste der Volkszählungen in Deutschland.
[22] WiSt 1956/10, p. 494.
[23]Demographic History of the Saarland
[24] A slightly higher total, 11,730,000, is mentioned in Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge. The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 (1993 St. Martin’s Press, New York), p. 152, citing the German Federal Ministry for Expellees, 1967. Of these 6,944,000 are stated to be from the eastern territories of the German Reich, 2,921,000 from Czechoslovakia and 1,865,000 from other countries.
[25] De Zayas, citing the German Federal Ministry of Expellees, 1967, mentions 2,111,000, thereof 1,225,000 from the eastern territories of the German Reich, 267,000 from Czechoslovakia and 619,000 from other countries (A Terrible Revenge, p. 152).
[26] WiSt 1956/10, p. 496.
[27] This number corresponds to the order of magnitude expected by US occupation authorities a year before the 1946 census. On 18 October 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a telegram to Washington, stated that the total number potentially involved in westward movement to the Russian zone of Germany and Czechoslovakia was in the range of 10 million (quoted in de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge, p. 113).
By July 1, 1947, more than 9.5 million German refugees were reported in "rump Germany".
[28] The total number of stay-behinds according to WiSt 1956/10 is 2,460,000, thereof 1,030,000 from the eastern territories of the German Reich and 1,430,000 from outside the Reich’s 1937 borders. De Zayas, citing the German Federal Ministry for Expellees, 1967, mentions 2,645,000, thereof 1,101,000 in the former eastern territories of the Reich, 250,000 in Czechoslovakia and 1,294,000 in other countries (A Terrible Revenge, p. 152).
[29] WiSt 1956/10, pp. 496-497.
[30] WiSt 1956/10, pp. 497-498.
[31] C&M, pp. 109, 129.
[32]23. März 1949: Rede vor der Interparlamentarischen Union in Bern
[33]Narben bleiben, p. 12.
[34] WiSt 1956/10, p. 494.
[35] C&M, note 26 on page 250.
[36]"The Last Soldiers of the Great War": Article from Die Zeit (October 13, 1955)
[37] Peter Antill and Peter Dennis, Berlin 1945. End of the Thousand Year Reich (Osprey Publishing Limited, 2005), p. 85.
[38] Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Viking-Penguin Books, 2002), p. 337.
[39] Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle, 1966 Simon and Schuster, New York, p. 337: "Even twenty years later no one knows with any certainty what the civilian losses were during the battle of Berlin. Even yet, bodies are being unearthed from ruins, in gardens, in parks where they were hurriedly interred during the battle, and from mass graves. However, based on statistical studies, probably close to 100,000 civilians died as a result of the battle. At least 20,000 succumbed to heart attacks, some 6,000 committed suicide, the remainder were either killed outright from shelling of street fighting or died later from wounds."
[40] C&M, pp. XVII
[41] C&M, p. 115
[42] C&M, p. 128
[43] C&M, p. 202
[44] C&M p. 200
[45]Bevölkerung gestern, heute und morgen, p. 15.
[46] As above, p. 21.
[47] Richard Dominic Wiggers, "The United States and the Refusal to Feed German Civilians after World War II", in: Vardy, Steven Bela; Tooley, T. Hunt (eds.), Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, pp. 274 – 288 (p. 280).
[48]Bevölkerung gestern, heute und morgen, p.21.
[49] As above, p. 29.
[50] Document USHMM, RG-31.010M, R.7, 2982/4/390a, transcribed in Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskriegs, Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, p. 346.
[51] Document PAAA, R60763, transcribed in Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, p. 345.
[52] According to Soviet estimates, about 70-80,000 people died of starvation in Kharkov during the Nazi occupation, a figure that British journalist Alexander Werth thought was "slightly, but not greatly, exaggerated" (Alexander Werth, Russia at War 1941-1945, 2000 Carroll & Graf Publishers New York, pages 607/608). 70,000 famine deaths would be 15.56% of the population.
[53] William Rosen, The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century.
[54] Wiggers, as above p. 287.
[55] The infant mortality rate nevertheless declined throughout 1946 (Wiggers, as above p. 284).
[56] As above.
[57]Bevölkerung gestern, heute und morgen, p.21. According to Wiggers (as above p. 287) the mortality rate by 1948 (the second full year of the massive die-off claimed by Bacque) was 30 % higher than the prewar level, which assuming a prewar mortality rate of 11.6 %o (1.16%) would mean 15.1 %o (1.51 %). It was also 35 % higher than in the US, where according to US government statistics it was 10.1 %o (1.01 %) in 1947 and 9.9 %o (0.99 %) in 1948 (Federal Security Agency and Public Health Service Surgeon General, Vital Statistics of the United States 1948 Part I, Table II – Crude Death Rate per Place of Occurrence, page 5). The rates refer to the estimated mid-year population. 35 % above these rates would be 13.6 %o (1.36%) for 1947 and 13.4 %o (1.34%) for 1948. It is possible that Wiggers assumed a lower prewar mortality rate in Germany than the 11.6 %o (1.16 %) in 1938 according to the German Federal Statistics Office.
[58] Karl-Heinz Rothenberger, "Die Hungerjahre nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg am Beispiel von Rheinland-Pfalz", in Geschichtliche Landeskunde - Band 46
Note that the mortality rate in 1947, 1948 and 1949, the three complete years of the massive die-off period claimed by Bacque, the mortality rate was respectively 12.9 %o, 11.7 %o and 11.1 %o.
[59]Der "weiße Tod" im Hungerwinter 1946/47, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, 07.05.2020.
[60] It was worse in the eastern territories of the former German Reich that became part of Poland or the Soviet Union, especially in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), but deaths there are included in the numbers of refugee/expellee deaths. The fate of Königsberg’s German population may be the subject of another blog article.
[61] Antill and Dennis, Berlin 1945, p. 85. Cornelius Ryan’s figure in The Last Battle (about 100,000, thereof 20,000 due to heart attacks and 6,000 suicides) refers to the whole area of the Battle of Berlin, not the city alone.
[62] About 95,000 to 130,000 Berlin women were raped during or after the battle. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide (Beevor, Berlin, p. 414). Some women were killed because they resisted or out of sheer sadism. German journalist Margret Boveri recorded in her diary entry on 03.05.1945 a particularly horrible case that occurred in the Dahlem district towards the end of the battle. A woman and her four child daughters, who she personally knew, and another woman with her daughter were found hanging in a cellar. They had been raped and badly mangled before their deaths. A snoring Russian was lying beside them. Boveri assumed that this had been a case of lust murder (Margret Boveri, Tage des Überlebens, Munich 1985, p. 106).
[63] Boveri, as above p. 195. Boveri assumed that about half the city’s population suffered from dysentery and diarrhea, which sometimes took horrible forms. She came down with it herself for four days. The German term "Typhus" designates a disease caused by salmonella bacteria that is usually contracted by consuming contaminated water or food but can also be transmitted from person to person. It is known in English as typhoid fever. The English term typhus, on the other hand, designates a disease that is mostly transmitted by body lice. The German term for this disease is "Fleckfieber", spotted fever. As Boveri mentioned "Typhus" along with dysentery, I assume she was referring to the term in German usage, i.e. to typhoid fever.
[64] As above, p. 251. Boveri wondered how many of these deaths were from hunger and disease and how many were suicides. How to commit suicide was a frequent conversation topic among Berliners and one of Boveri’s own preoccupations (as above pp. 136-137). Boveri mentioned suicides, not necessarily related to rapes, on a number of occasions, like when an actor named Paul Bildt poisoned himself together with 20 others including his daughter and survived while all others died (p. 239). Suicides are also addressed in the diary of Ruth Andreas Friedrich, a journalist and member of the German resistance during the war, which was published as Schauplatz Berlin. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1945 bis 1948 (Suhrkamp, Berlin 1985). Suicides are also a subject in the celebrated anonymous diary A Woman in Berlin, written by a woman who suffered repeated rapes until she managed to obtain the protection of Soviet officers (first a 1st lieutenant, then a major) by becoming their mistress. Berlin was the only city in the four occupation zones that saw a marked increase in the suicide rates, from 50-100 to 250 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1945 (Schenck, as above p. 66).
[65] While deaths from the battle and suicides are repeatedly mentioned in the diaries of Ruth Friedrich and the anonymous diarist, there is little there that would suggest a high excess mortality from malnutrition and disease in the 1945/46 period. Margret Boveri’s diary contains more information in this respect. The most critical month seems to have been July 1945, when food rations were shortened due to differences among the occupying powers about how food supply in the various occupation sectors of the city was to be handled. That month Boveri only managed to buy, besides bread, 2 kohlrabi, 1 small lettuce, half a pound of cranberries, 600 g of sugar and 300 g of meat. Potatoes, fat, salt and vinegar were not to be had. Even for bread Berliners now had to queue up (p. 244). A friend of hers was getting thinner every day and somehow managed to feed a husband with a stomach ailment (p. 245). Instead of 24 pounds of potatoes that she was entitled to in July, Boveri got only 8 pounds and 400 g of potato wedges. She still considered herself comparatively fortunate as she was occasionally given vegetables. The less fortunate fainted in the metro or while queuing for food or died at home. Men looked worse than women even though all women known to her went hungry so their men would have more to eat. Shoulder blades and bones could be seen through clothing (p. 253, entry for 29 July 1945). In posterior annotations to her diary Boveri cited a correspondent of the Times mentioning a woman who had not eaten potatoes or any form of fat for a month and expressing the conviction that many would die of hunger. On 30 July Soviet general Gorbatov gave an interview to the British and American press addressing the dire food situation. He stated that the cause was Nazi sabotage but admitted that, except for bread, ration values were not being complied with. Bread could be provided in relatively large quantities due to Soviet flour shipments (pp. 253-254).
It should be mentioned in this context that the Soviet occupiers had to feed the Berlin population under their control at a time when famine in Central Asia had reduced families there to cannibalism (Beevor, Berlin, p. 392). The first Soviet city commandant, General Berzarin, who went out and chatted with Germans queuing at Red Army field kitchens, soon became almost as much of a hero to Berliners as he was to his own men. His death in a drunken motorcycle accident on 16 June 1945 provoked widespread sadness and rumors among the Germans that he had been murdered by the NKVD (as above, p. 409). Berzarin is commemorated in Berlin by a street bridge named Nikolai-E.-Bersarin-Brücke in 2006. There is also a Bersarinstraβe in the city’s Friedrichshain district. Berzarin was made an honorary citizen of Berlin in 2003, after some controversy due to accusations that he had participated in deportations from the Baltics and done nothing to curb excesses by his troops in Berlin. A monument honoring Berzarin was inaugurated on 16 June 2020. Berzarin’s popularity among Berliners is also mentioned in Boveri’s diary (p. 211).
[66] Berlin is believed to have had 4,338,756 inhabitants in 1939, 2,807,405 inhabitants on 12.08.1945 (registered population "present in the city"), 3,187,114 inhabitants on 29.10.1946 (census data) and 3,336,026 on 13.09.1950 (census data), see Bevölkerungsentwicklung in Berlin. In April 1945 the population was "anything between 3 and 3.5 million people, including around 120,000 infants" (Beevor, Berlin, p. 177). 200 deaths per day in "normal" times would mean 73,000 deaths per year, which applied to a 1939 population of 4,338,756 would mean a mortality rate of 16.8 %o or 1.68 %. Such mortality would be higher than the mortality rate in Germany in 1910 (16.2 %o or 1.62 %, according to Bevölkerung gestern, heute und morgen, p. 21) and is thus implausible. Assuming the 1938 mortality rate of 11.6 %o, the last figure for "normal" times available for the German Reich, the "normal" equivalent for the lower August 1945 census population of Berlin (2,807,405) would be 89, and the quintuple thereof (assuming that the death rate quintupled as claimed by Dibelius) would be 445 (thereof 19 suicides assuming the rate of 250 per 100,000 according to Schenck, as above). This would correspond to an annual mortality rate of 57.9 %o or 5.79% (that is, 57.9 %o or 5.79 % of the population would have died if this mortality situation had lasted one year). Schenck (as above p. 68) mentioned a study by physician F. Raedeker whereby mortality in Berlin in July 1945 was about 6 times higher than before the war, which assuming a prewar mortality rate of 11.6 %o would mean a mortality rate of 69.6 %o (6.96 %). In her diary entry of 1 August 1945 (as above p. 267) Margret Boveri wrote that, if a famine was predicted for the winter, she wondered what the current situation would be called.
By May 1946 the mortality rate was down to 3 times the prewar level (Schenck, as above), which would be 34.80 %o (3.48 %). This roughly corresponds to the mortality rate in early modern European cities in non-crisis years (see my article Friedrich Jansson responded …, reference to Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500-1670, p. 17).
[67] MacDonogh, as above, p. 497. The source given is Cyril Buffet, Berlin, Paris 1993, p. 359.
[68] Wiggers, as above p. 284.
[69] MacDonogh, as above. The source given is Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis – A History of Berlin, London 1998, p. 638.
[70] General mention in the entry of 30 December 1946, specific named cases published by the press in the entry of 31 January 1947.
[71] Entry of 24 December 1946.
[72] Entry of 2 January 1947.
[73] The other 8,010 would be deaths that would also have occurred under "normal" circumstances (89 per day, see note 66, for 90 days from 21/12/1945 to 21/03/1946, the winter period).
[74] Entry of 3 October 1945.
[75] Dissertation "Kinder-und Heilkunde in Berlin. Zwischen Fürsorge und Forschung (1945-1965)". Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doctor medicinae (Dr. med.) vorgelegt der Medizinischen Fakultät Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin von Lea Münch, 18.09.2020. Pages 27-29. Münch cites one of the clinic’s physicians at the time, Gerhard Joppe.
[76] As above, pages 30-31.
[77] As above, page 34.
[78] As above, pages 37-39.
[79] As above, page 41.
[80] As above, p. 62.
[81] The source given is the publication Das Deutsche Gesundheitswesen, issued by the Deutsche Zentralverwaltung für das Gesundheitswesen in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone.
[82] This is the last known birth rate for the German Reich (1943) according to Bevölkerung gestern, heute und morgen, p. 15.
[83] According to MacDonogh (as above, p. 535), the 1948/49 winter of the Berlin Blockade, in which up to 2,000 Berliners died of cold and hunger, was "second only to the winter of 1946-7."
[84] See note 66.
[85] Berlin disasters from the 1576/77 plague (believed to have killed half the city’s population) via the Thirty Years War (about one third of the population) to the Battle of Berlin (64,000 deaths in the city itself, including 22,000 civilians) are mentioned in Simone Donovan et al, Berlin’s apocalyptic past, EXBERLINER December 18, 2012.
[86] Based on the 1938 mortality rate of 11,6 % (1.16 %) and the 1946 census population of 3,187,114.
[87] Based on 12,000 excess deaths in the period, rounded figure.
[88] The difference of 30 towards 12,000 is due to rounding of the daily figure for excess deaths.
[89] Münch, as above, p. 62.
[90] Figure for 1935 in Bevölkerung gestern, heute und morgen, p. 29. This is the last figure available for the German Reich. For the territory of the later German Federal Republic there is a 1938 figure of 60 %o or 6.0 %.
[91] Death rate estimates, especially for the 1945/46 period, may also include refugees from the East. Although they were not supposed to enter the city, many so did and "thousands" died in the streets (Richie, Faust’s Metropolis p. 636, citing British Captain Marples).
[92] Rothenberger, as above.
[93] As above p. 65.
[94] C&M, p. 214.
[95] Schenck, as above p. 71. It’s worth mentioning in this context that, except in situations of famine and epidemics, mortality in periods of dearth need not be much higher and may even be lower than in periods of prosperity. The reason is that prosperity brings its own health problems. More cars on the street means more air pollution. Alcohol, cigarettes, fatty foods and sweets may be consumed in larger quantities because they are more available and affordable, leading to a higher incidence of cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes and obesity. People may also become more sedentary when they can sit at home watching TV instead of having to go out in search of food or wood for heating, which at least implies some exercise. There are studies according to which life expectancy in the US increased during the Great Depression. Then there is the problem of aging populations that plagues some European countries. Poor countries with a younger population may have much lower crude death rates than prosperous countries where the population is older on average. For example, the death rate in Venezuela, a country known to be in dire straits, was 6.953%o in the 2015 – 2020 period whereas in Germany it was 11.158%o in the same period, according to the United Nation’s database Crude death rate (deaths per 1,000 population) (consulted on 17.07.2021).
[96] In conquered Dresden the Soviets "showed some genuine concern" for the welfare of the German population. On May 16, 1945, the Red Army released thirty thousand tons of potatoes, ninety-five hundred tons of wheat, and eleven hundred tons of meat and other provisions to cover the Dresdeners’ emergency needs. By May 20, hundreds of food stores and bakeries had reopened for business, and a rationing system was initiated to avoid outright starvation. (Frederick Taylor, Dresden Tuesday, 13 February 1945, HarperCollins e-books, p. 385).
[97] Characteristics of this literature are explained in the article Trümmerliteratur (1945–1950): Das sind die typischen Merkmale. For an explanation in English see What are the characteristics of German Trümmerliteratur.
[98] Some of Böll’s works have been translated into English, e.g. The Casualty (the reviewer unfairly chides Böll for his focus on what Germans suffered rather than what Germans did), A Soldier’s Legacy, The Train was on Time, And Where Were You, Adam?.
[99] The play was translated into English as The Man Outside
[100]The short story can be read online in German. Probably the shortest short story ever written, it is also one of the most powerful.
[101] Afterword of draußen vor der tür und ausgewählte erzählungen, a collection including Drauβen vor der Tür and selected short stories.
[102]Hungerwinter 1946/47.
[103] As above, p. 253. Another comparison to put Bacque’s claim into perspective would be a hypothetical scenario of the current pandemic in which 5,700,000 ÷ 4 = 1,425,000 people per year died of Covid-19 in Germany alone. As of 13.07.2021, according to Worldometers, the reported death toll from the pandemic in all of Europe was 1,115,017, and Germany had reported 91,799 deaths from Covid-19. Imagine what Germany would be like if (at least) 1,425,000 had died there from Covid-19 so far.
[104] Invoking someone’s predictions of mass dying as evidence that such mass dying must have happened is about as fallacious as invoking predictions about the possible death toll of a pandemic as evidence that such death toll occurred, or invoking the Nazis’ apocalyptic scenarios whereby 30 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union would die as a consequence of Nazi exploitation policies (see my articles Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder and A Critique of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, and the reference thread The Nazi Hunger Plan for Occupied Soviet Territories) as evidence that this many actually died. There was no mass dying of Soviet civilians under Nazi occupation on the scale predicted by Nazi officials. Except in besieged Leningrad, among Soviet prisoners of war and to a lesser extent in some other hotspots like Kiev and Kharkov, there is no evidence of people in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union having died like flies from famine and disease, to the point where disposing of their bodies alone would have become a major problem.
[105] C&M p. 35 and note 43 on page 230.
[106] Ruth Friedrich’s diary contains harrowing accounts of encounters with refugees from the east, one with expellees from Königsberg who looked more animal than human and more dead than alive (entry of 10 September 1947), and one with a wretched procession of refugees outside the city that included a sobbing boy trying to walk on his bleeding naked feet, a woman gone mad who repeated a phrase again and again and an elder woman visibly about to die (entry of 15 June 1945). This sight led to a conversation with her companion about whether Berliners should help these people by receiving them in their homes, which they concluded would only create unbearable tension and conflict among persons crammed into a tiny space with just eight square meters per person.
[107] C&M, pp. 33-34.
[108] This book can be read online and downloaded as a PDF.
[109]In Darkest Germany, p. 93. The actual death toll from bombing was in the order of 35,000 in the July/August 1943 attacks and 45,000 throughout the war according to Hans Brunswig, Feuersturm über Hamburg (Motorbuch Verlag Stuttgart, 1992) p. 402.
[110] C&M, p. 32.
[111]In Darkest Germany, pp. 25-26.
[112] As above, pp. 28–30.
[113] As above, pp. 39–40.
[114] As above, p. 47.
[115] As above pp. 51–53.
[116] As above pp. 42 and 45/46.
[117] As above p. 53.
[118] In June 1946 a relief worker testifying before the US Senate stated the following (Wiggers, as above p. 283): "Starvation is not the dramatic thing one so often reads and imagines... of people in mobs crying for food and falling over in the streets. The starving... those who are dying never say anything and one rarely sees them. They first become listless and weak, they react quickly to cold and chills, they sit staring in their rooms or lie listlessly in their beds... one day they just die. The doctor usually diagnoses malnutrition and complications resulting therefrom. Old women and kids usually die first because they are weak and are unable to get out and scrounge for the extra food it takes to live." However, even if starvation was not a public spectacle, relatives, acquaintances and neighbors of the deceased person would know about it, and the relief worker obviously assumed that each death diagnosed as being due to "malnutrition and complications resulting therefrom" was recorded by a doctor.
[119] As above p. 110-111.
[120] C&M, p. 215.
[121] Schenck (p. 70) mentioned that according to one study 6,325 cases of hunger oedema were reported in Hamburg from mid-May 1946 to Mid-January 1947, of which 275 = 4.3 % died. The author of the study, H.W. Bansi (apparently a physician at a hospital), counted 944 patients suffering from malnutrition in his section between the start of 1946 and July 1947, of which 58 = 6.1 % died. Only 25 of these were actual starvation deaths. Other studies mention 36 deaths of people with hunger oedema in 2,300 autopsies, thereof 13 starvation deaths, 82 starvation deaths including many elderly people in 1,310 autopsies, and 3 starvation deaths among 93 autopsies of severely malnourished persons.

The title of this article is derived from The Great Mortality, by John Kelly, a bestselling book about the Black Death. However, the article is not about a natural but about a relatively unknown man-made disaster.



About half the victims of crimes committed by Nazi Germany and its European allies succumbed not to direct hard violence, like shooting and gassing, but to more or less deliberately caused massive die-offs from hunger and related diseases.^[1] Most of the about 3 million Soviet prisoners of war who perished in German captivity died from these causes.^[2] Up to 1 million civilians in Leningrad died, overwhelmingly from starvation and cold, as the Nazis tried (and fortunately failed) to get rid of the city’s population in order to avoid having to feed it and in line with the General Plan East, according to which the city was to be replaced by a sparsely populated rural area called "Ingermanland".^[3] Famines in Greece and the Netherlands were largely the consequence of Axis occupation policies.^[4] Famine and disease killed a large part of the population of Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland, and would have killed an even larger part had not most of the population been deported to extermination.^[5]

The fate of the Polish ghetto Jews, or what would have been their fate if they had not mostly been exterminated otherwise, may have a parallel in what happened to the German population of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) under Soviet rule.

The capital of former East Prussia had a population of about 372,000 in 1937, including about 3,500 Jews. The Jewish population was reduced to less than half by emigration until 1939. The remainder were mostly deported, starting 24 June 1942 when 465 were taken to the Maly Trostenets extermination center. British air attacks in August 1944 destroyed much of the city and rendered about 200,000 people homeless.^[6] In April 1945 the city was conquered by the Red Army after a battle that devastated most of the city.^[7] The battle, especially the final assault starting on 6 April and ending with the capitulation on 9 April 1945, caused heavy losses among the civilian population. The battle and its aftermath were marked by rape on a large scale and other atrocities committed by Red Army soldiers.^[8]

Information about what happened to Königsberg’s German population under Soviet rule comes from documents that became available to historians after the demise of the Soviet Union^[9] and from several eyewitness accounts, most notably those of Johann Schubert (writing under the pseudonym Hans Deichelmann)^[10], Hans Graf von Lehndorff^[11],Wilhelm Starlinger^[12] and Michael Wieck^[13]. Schubert/Deichelmann was a physician working at the Königsberg central hospital, which the Soviets had transferred to the facilities of the Krankenhaus der Barmherzigkeit, until he was allowed to leave and transported from what by then had become Kaliningrad in March 1948. Graf von Lehndorff was a surgeon who treated wounded and sick soldiers and civilians during the siege and battle for the city, and after the battle and his return from a Soviet internment camp worked at the central hospital until October 1945. Starlinger, also a physician, worked as head of two hospitals for epidemic diseases, Yorckstraβe and St. Elisabeth, until he was arrested by the Soviets and sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag, from where he returned to West Germany in 1954. Wieck was born in 1928 to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father with no ascertainable Jewish ancestry. Raised in the Jewish faith, he was not deported to extermination, as happened to most Königsberg Jews who had not emigrated in time, on account of his partly "Aryan" descent. During Soviet rule he and his parents managed to survive in the ruined city thanks to his and his mother’s resourcefulness, until they were allowed to leave in 1949.

These accounts are valuable evidence of what happened in Königsberg under Soviet rule – Starlinger’s terse account due to the largely medical data contained therein, the other three due to their level of detail, all four due to their comparative objectivity and lack of animosity towards the Soviets. The accounts of Deichelmann, Graf von Lehndorff and Starlinger have the added value of immediacy, as they were written, respectively, in 1948, 1947 and 1955, whereas Wieck’s account was first published in 1989, its particular value lying in that it was written from another vantage point than those of the three physicians. The accounts are essentially corroborative of each other, however Graf von Lehndorff’s is the only one that can be considered independent of all others, as it was the first to be written. Starlinger was familiar with Deichelmann’s account when he wrote his own^[14], and Wieck was familiar with Starlinger’s account, from which he extensively quoted.^[15]

Most of the city’s inhabitants had fled or otherwise left the city by the time the final Soviet attack began on 6 April 1945. About the number that remained there are various estimates in the range of 90,000 to 130,000.^[16] The most detailed of these estimates was made by Starlinger, whose reasoning was as follows^[17]:

When the city was encircled by enemy forces on 23 January 1945 and was at first also cut off from the Samland District ports of Peyse and Pillau (which refugees tried to reach to be evacuated from there by sea), the commissioner for the city’s defense stated that the number of civilian inhabitants was around 150,000, according to a communication to Starlinger by the government and military director of the East Prussian province, Dr. Dembowski. A few days before the final assault the city defense commissioner’s public health officer Dr. Sett mentioned the same number to Starlinger. The city mayor’s department in charge of feeding the population, however, issued only 90,000 ration cards at the same time. Starlinger thought the number of ration cards was lower than that of inhabitants because a large part of refugees from rural areas in the city were self-sufficient as concerns food and didn’t apply for ration cards, also in order to avoid the public authorities. After connection to the ports was reopened following a German counterattack, however, a large number of inhabitants, which under the circumstances was not and could not be counted, left the city for the ports and mostly also managed to be evacuated by sea. On the other hand, there had been a considerable influx from neighboring communities already filled with refugees at the beginning of the siege, when the encirclement was still less tight. Besides, as long as the way to and from the ports was open a considerable number of refugees returned from there to Königsberg to escape the misery of the overcrowded port cities. There could be no doubt, however, that population movement was larger outbound than inbound. Assuming that of the difference between 150,000 and 90,000 about two-thirds left the city permanently while one third came back and deducting the balance of 40,000 from 150,000 yields about 110,000 city inhabitants before the fall of the city. According to a Soviet census at the end of June 1945, whose order of magnitude Starlinger considered realistic, there were about 73,000 people in the city at that time.

Wieck wrote that, according to his estimate, of the "allegedly" ("angeblich") 130,000 inhabitants at the time of the city’s fall at most half were still alive by the time he returned to his family from a Soviet camp he called the Rothenstein concentration camp.^[18] Deichelmann wrote in his diary entry for 20 April 1945 that according to Russian data 30,000 civilians had died in the battle, and he assumed that 50,000 were in the city at the time while the larger part of the population was still in camps.^[19] When in June-July returnees from rural areas and the Reich had again swelled the population, he calculated from the numbers on registration carts that there were about 70,000 Germans in the city at that time. He now attributed 30,000 deaths not only to the battle but also to subsequent forced marches out of the city and back he called "propaganda marches".^[20]

The number of civilians killed in the four days of the final battle for the city, between 6 and 9 April, and in the violence that followed the city’s surrender, was certainly enormous. Returning to Königsberg after a forced march of the kind described by Deichelmann, Wieck and other civilians were tasked with burying dead civilians, after the military dead of both sides had already been buried. His description of what he called the Königsberg "cemetery"^[21] is impressive. Unburied bodies were everywhere, in houses and cellars, yards and gardens. The first corpse his work team removed was that of a naked young woman lying in a half-burned house, with dried blood on her vagina and mouth. She was thrown into a bomb crater, then a man who had been shot was thrown on top of her. Later the Russians gave them ropes with a noose at one end, so that it took only one person to drag a body to the next bomb crater. Wieck remembered all the murdered women and men he saw, not only their faces but also the objects surrounding them. Young and old, mostly shot, some stabbed to death or strangled. There were also a number of suicides, who had taken poison or hanged themselves in the stairways. In the Auf den Hufen district there was a road with a particularly large bomb crater, into which he dragged people whose bodies had shrunk from the heat of buildings burning above them after, so he claimed, they had been deliberately locked in the cellars. These corpses were thrown into the pit together with the carcass of a horse, after which the pit was closed with a sort of snow plough, a tracked vehicle adapted for this purpose, and by civilians with shovels. Similar scenes were described by Deichelmann in his entry for 20 April 1945.^[22] In the Barmherzigkeit hospital a Professor Unterberg was performing a difficult forceps delivery when Russian soldiers burst in and took away his instruments, so that he barely managed to deliver the child. Thereupon they dragged the woman from the operating chair and raped her. Prof. Unterberger committed suicide. Hospital buildings were set on fire, civilian patients forced to move out even if walking on crutches, wounded German officers and soldiers then cruelly massacred. Most of the population was marched out of the city and walked across the countryside for no discernible purpose. They spent the night in barns, where men were called out for interrogatories and women for rape. Many died of exhaustion along the way or committed suicide. In the hospital’s new anatomy building a number of massacred German officers and soldiers was found on the autopsy tables, together with some women whose throats had been cut and bellies slit open. The Pregel river was full of dead bodies. So were the cellars. And so on. Von Lehndorff mentioned ditches by a railway embankment where several hundred corpses from the days of Soviet conquest had been buried in layers.^[23]

Notwithstanding these descriptions of mayhem, a civilian death toll in the order of 30,000 seems too high considering the mortality in the much larger city of Berlin due to the battle and to massive rape and associated deaths^[24], which claimed the lives of about 22,000 – 100,000 out of about 3 million inhabitants.^[25] In Berlin a maximum of about 3.33% of the population perished during the battle for the city and its immediate aftermath. In Königsberg, assuming the lower end of population estimates for the eve of the final battle (ca. 90,000), about one-third of the population would have perished, a death rate ten times higher than in Berlin.

The city’s Soviet administration following its capture was in the hands of a "Military Headquarters of the Königsberg City and Fortress". The Headquarters’ administrative organization was the "Military Headquarters Administration". It was subdivided on 10 May 1945 into departments for passport matters, commerce, industry, communal matters, living conditions and public health. Analogous departments were set up in each city district. The Passports Department was tasked with the registration and employment of the local population. It was simultaneously a registration authority and labor administration. The Commerce Department included an "Agricultural Task Group" whose task it was to create a food supply basis for feeding the city’s local population, more precisely to plan the local population’s needs and meet them with food supplies and to conduct agricultural work. The German population was subdivided into sections led by a section elder (starosta) presiding over elders in charge of every street. The German population was expelled from its dwellings and concentrated in segregated districts, like Kohlhof, Charlottenburg and Rothenstein.^[26]

The first Soviet report about the number of Germans in the city was issued by the Passports Department on 26 April 1945. Until that day 23,247 Germans had been registered there. As the number was considered much too low, the local headquarters, together with the military counterespionage organization SMERSH, conducted inquests in the dwellings occupied by Germans that led to an estimate of about 40,000 nonregistered persons, and thus the Passport Department assumed that 63,247 German were living in the city in late April 1945. Its report pointed out that an increasing number of people from other parts of East Prussia, namely from Pillau, were entering the city. The available documentation shows subsequent estimates throughout the year 1945, which are rendered in the table below from Fisch and Klemeševa’s article.^[27]



Terms:
"Paβabteilung" = Passport Department
"Landwirtschaftsgruppe" = Agricultural Task Group
"real versorgt" = actually fed
"geschätzter Bedarf" = estimated requirement
"Quelle" = source.

The Passport Department (hereinafter "PD") counted or estimated 63,247 in April 1945, "about" 60,000 in June, 68,014 in September and 60,642 in November. The Agricultural Task Group (hereinafter "ATG") estimated 82,000 inhabitants to feed in June and 80,000 in July, vs. 51,000 inhabitants actually fed in June, "over" 65,000 in July and 59,120 in October.^[28]

The differences between the numbers actually fed according to the ATG and the numbers given by the PD are not so large, but the differences between the numbers to feed and actually fed according to the ATG are, as are the differences between the numbers to feed according to the ATG and the PD’s numbers: 82,000 to feed (ATG) vs. 51,000 actually fed (ATG) and 60,000 (PD) in June, which would mean that 22,000 – 31,000 inhabitants did not receive any food. In July the difference between inhabitants to feed (80,000) and inhabitants actually fed (65,000) was 15,000 according to the ATG. While the available documentation provides insight into how the PD arrived at its figures, the same does not apply to the ATG’s figures for inhabitants to feed. Fisch and Klemeševa assumed that these figures were related to Soviet planning methods and can therefore be ignored.^[29] A report by the PD from November 1945 shows the following figures reproduced by Fisch and Klemeševa, regarding the status and migration movements of the German population:



Terms:
"Bestand" = Population status
"Zugug" = In-migration
"Wegzug" = Out-migration
"Wegzug ohne Registrierung" = Out-migration without registration

The figures are not connected to each other in that the status figure for one month plus in-migration minus out-migration does not yield the status figure for the next month.^[30] The orders of magnitude for June/July and 20 October are also not consistent with the above-mentioned figures in other PD documents. There is an almost exact match, however, between the figures for September in the above table and the figure for the same month (68,014) in another PD document. The order of magnitude of the June/July, August and September figures also coincides with the above-mentioned estimate of about 70,000 by Deichelmann, and is not much lower than the census figure for the end of June 1945 mentioned by Starlinger (73,000). For the whole of northern East Prussia (the part of East Prussia that later became part of the Soviet Union), Fisch and Klemeševa calculated a number of 140,114 German inhabitants based on other PD figures, thereof 68,014 in Königsberg and 72,100 in other communities of the region.^[31] Higher figures are stated in an official Soviet document apparently issued by an authority other than the Königsberg PD on 1 September 1945: 174,125 in the whole region, thereof 84,651 in Königsberg^[32], 16,637 more than according to the PD. What would explain the difference? Maybe (this is my conjecture) the higher figures drew from Soviet planning sources like the ATG’s figures for inhabitants to feed? Or did the figures also include Soviet civilians living in the city?^[33] Or were the PD’s figures too low?

Whatever their number was, the life of Königsberg’s German inhabitants was beyond bleak. The misery vividly narrated by Deichelmann, von Lehndorff and Wieck was tersely described by Starlinger.^[34] The physical and mental burden, he wrote, fell especially on women and children, as the men, where they had survived the final battle, had been moved out of the city soon after its fall. The first irregular and insufficient food supply got going only in May 1945 and benefited only the working population. The bread, 400 g with much water in it, was until the summer of 1946 the only food handed out by the Soviet authorities. Most people lived from rye grain collected in fields outside the city. Much meat of dug out decomposed animal carcasses was eaten. In the 1945/46 winter there were ascertained cases of cannibalism.^[35] People were crowded into tiny spaces, and in the winter they had barely enough water to cook. In the 1946/47 winter whole families died on some nights from cold and exhaustion. At the height of the typhoid fever^[36] epidemic in the autumn of 1945 Königsberg’s inhabitants got water only out of mostly contaminated wells and bomb craters, they washed in the water of bomb craters as the way to the Pregel river was too long and dangerous^[37], and they could rarely change clothes. The sewer system had broken down, latrines were insufficient and badly maintained, yards and cellars accordingly soiled. Electric light became available in some districts only in 1946, and then only few could use it. In the summer of 1945 flies became so numerous that every receptacle, every piece of bread, every sick person and all fresh excrement was instantly covered by them. The rat population reached such numbers that rats sometimes attacked people sleeping. The population received no disinfectants and rarely had even soap. The city’s cleanup was limited to opening the traffic alleys. Even corpse disposal was weeks delayed.

Regarding his own medical specialty, epidemic diseases, Starlinger wrote that these hit a population concentrated in a small area that had not been immunized by previous vaccination or epidemic experience, could not be protected by sanitary-hygienic measures other than often belated isolation, and suffered from such an excess of physical and psychological stress that any individual susceptibility was bound to result in an infection. It seemed to him that fate and nature meant to test what human beings can endure while protecting themselves against rampant epidemics.^[38]

The stage seemed set for epidemics of historical proportions, and according to Soviet records this was what happened. Soviet authorities recorded a death wave between September 1945 and May 1946, with 1,799 deaths outside and 881 deaths in hospitals on 20 September, respectively 2,933 and 901 deaths on 20 October and 21,111 deaths in the whole 9-month period. The two epidemics of typhoid fever that visited the city in this period were stated as the main cause for this enormous mortality, and these epidemics were in turn solely attributed to the crowded conditions in which the Germans lived, oblivious of Soviet records showing that in October 1945 the city’s 42,000 inhabitants counted as non-workers (children, invalids and other people unable to work) received a mere 200 g of bread per day if they paid for it, and that malnutrition was thus the obvious main cause of mortality.^[39]

An epidemic taking the lives of about 31 % of the at-risk population^[40] would have a place among the deadliest epidemics in history.^[41] However, according to Starlinger’s detailed figures mortality from typhoid fever and other epidemic diseases was not that high. In the hospitals for epidemic diseases under his direction about 2,700 out of 13,200 patients died. The case fatality rate for typhoid fever was 24 % (1,850 out of 7,700, with 6,150 cases occurring from May 1945 to June 1946 and 1,300 from April to October 1946) and 25 % for typhus (300 out of 1,200). Depressing though these figures were, the typhoid and typhus case fatality rates didn’t look so bad, considering the lack of immunity and vaccination, the difficult environment and the reduced means of medical attendance, if compared with case fatality rates from these diseases elsewhere and at other times (23 % for typhoid according to statistics of the Vienna General Hospital for 1846-61, 40 % in a World War I frontline hospital, 23.4 % for typhus in the Moabit district of Berlin in 1876-79, among other examples).^[42] According to Starlinger’s calculations, mortality in the hospitals for epidemic diseases accounted for less than 4 % of total mortality among the German population in 1945-47. Violence, hunger, cold and exhaustion were far more prolific killers than all epidemics together.^[43]

This comparative success was not just the merit of Starlinger and his medical and nursing staff, according to Starlinger. An important factor, already in the first and by far the larger typhoid epidemic, was that that the "extirpation through death" (Todesausmerze) from non-epidemic causes robbed typhoid of its prey by removing the less resistant specimens before they had a chance to get typhoid, and leaving the more resistant ones to contract the disease, which these also had a better chance to survive due to their resistance. Another factor frequently observed was that the reduction of vital functions from pre-existing dystrophy surprisingly put a brake on the development of infectious disease. Typhoid in turn contributed to an "extirpation through death" that helped to keep typhus mortality comparatively low.^[44]

Starlinger’s assessment of the relative importance of epidemics vs. other causes of death (starvation, exhaustion, cold and injuries) is borne out by the accounts of von Lehndorff and Deichelmann, written before Starlinger’s account. The below translated excerpts from some of their entries show what people mainly died from. They also show that the Soviets were reluctant to call the cause of most deaths by its proper name, starvation.

Graf von Lehndorff’s diary

About fifteen hundred people are staying in this house. A thousand patients and at least five hundred nursing personnel, female and male. Many of them have never had anything to do with nurse work, but they try as they can to remain linked to the hospital as they thus have more protection and possibilities to live. Outside they are exposed to any arbitrary acts. For the same reason it is also hardly possible to release any of the patients. As they no longer have a home, death from starvation is what usually will come to them soon. We thus try to somehow include them in the hospital’s routine. The need to do so seldom occurs, however, for just about all who are received as patients die sooner or later without having seen any improvement. Every day there are thirty to forty dead, who in the morning are carried down wrapped in blackout paper and piled up by the rear gate. From there they are taken in batches with a two-wheeled wooden cart to the area by the destroyed Altroßgärter Church, where under the supervision of Father Leitner they are buried in mass graves.^[45]

The people they bring us are almost all in the same state. Above they are skeletons, below heavy sacks of water. On shapeless swollen legs they come, sometimes still walking, and settle in front of the door, where there are already lots of similar figures lying on improvised stretchers or on the floor. When it is their turn, they often mention some minor ailment, like an infected finger, as the reason for their coming, because the main problem, their legs, they don’t even feel anymore. We notice this when we lie them on the table and slit open their greasy glassy skin, without them reacting in any way. We then often ask ourselves if it still makes sense to amputate the legs, or whether one should rather let the people die as they are. Mostly we opt for the latter.
Death from hunger is a strange death. No revolt. The people give the impression that they already left death proper behind. They still walk upright, one can still talk to them, they grab a cigarette butt – rather than a piece of bread which they no longer have any use for – an then they suddenly collapse, like a table bearing a maximum of weight until the additional weight of a fly causes it to break down.
Besides these legs we mainly treat heavy and heaviest phlegmons, including many neck carbuncles that sometimes go from one ear to another. If they are filled with maggots, we consider this a good sign because then there’s still a chance of healing.^[46]

Besides we get to see things that otherwise hardly exist anymore, for instance Noma disease, in which a section of the face with jaw bones, teeth, lips and cheeks falls out within days, leaving an enormous hole.^[47]

Only in winter – but no, we don’t want to and cannot go through that here. It simply cannot be. The people are all dying already as it is. And then the cold, and many months when nothing grows, not even weeds – one simply cannot think of that.^[48]

Deichelmann’s diary

10 May 1945^[49]

For about 200 patients requiring surgery there is only one fully qualified surgeon, who must operate from early in the morning until late at night. Every day new wounded are brought in, mostly women with heavy gunshot wounds in chest and belly. They often lie for days in cellars until someone finds them. Usually they die in the hospital, if not earlier, and are buried somewhere in empty air-raid pits and combat dugouts.

30 June 1945^[50]

Mortality is immense. The grave digger detachment has its hands full. The number of purulent wound infections is enormous. Due to lack of proper nourishment the patients’ resistance diminishes in an unexpected manner. If they then get diarrhea on top of that, they die within a few days.
The situation of the children is appalling. The children’s ward with 120 patients including infants gets 3.5 liters of milk per day. Mortality among the latter already runs at 90 to 95 percent. Only those survive for the time being whose mothers’ breasts can provide nourishment. The children are lying two in each bed. It is impossible to prepare special meals for the children’s ward. They receive the same food as the whole house – rotten Fleck in thin groats soup.
[…] In the children’s ward lie the first cases of hunger oedema. Two, three children 8 to 12 years old. Face and limbs deformed by swelling, the body puffed up and full of water. The sight is shattering. As the disease according to previous experience is caused by lack of protein, the children receive the rest of protein preparations; small strips of meat are fished out of the buckets in which the meals for the whole ward are brought and fed to the oedema patients. One tries to save, even if one must open one gap to fill another.[…]
Some have already eaten dogs and cats, other brag that they have.[…]
Assault victims with heavy gunshot wounds still come in almost daily. From the various camps prisoners of war and internees, men and women, are brought in incredibly disheveled, always accompanied by a Russian guard, sometimes also male and female officers are present. The prisoners are mostly exhausted to the point of dropping down, covered by scabies, eaten by lice, abscesses and furuncles everywhere. Many fall victim to these infections, and not rarely to the dysentery-like diarrhea they bring along. Psychologically they are numb, without will, just finished. The hospital for infectious diseases is also filling up. In the city typhoid and paratyphoid fever rage on such a scale as has probably not been seen in a German city since the Thirty Years War.

30 July 1945^[51]

The horror around us increases. The morgue’s occupancy still grows every day. Among the about 400 occupants there are 30 typhoid patients.[…]
The number of typhoid victims in the city continues growing. In the York(epidemics) hospital there may be already 1,400 patients. They are now lying two each in the small air raid beds. There are almost no medications anymore, especially heart medications that might save many a life are completely lacking.

15 August 1945^[52]

Still more typhoid, still more diarrhea. Now there are reportedly about 1,600 typhoid patients lying in the York hospital. Also among our personnel the number of cases constantly grows.

2 September 1945^[53]

Every day two, three bundles wrapped in packing paper lie at the children’s ward. Thus, the mothers can take the mortal remains home more easily. People with oedema dying of starvation are no longer a rarity.

5 September 1945^[54]

Physicians are no longer allowed to mention hunger disease. The Russians want it to be called "dystrophy", which literally means "nutritional disturbance". It is discussed in detail in medical conferences, studied, autopsies show the self-consumption of the inner organs and the muscles. Everyone would know what could be done to help, no one knows how to help. Besides there are other nutritional disturbances, especially scurvy. Here there are better possibilities to show or give the patients help. There are lots of green vegetables around. Now malaria is also showing up throughout the city, only individual cases for the time being. But it is only August. Every day in the city’s garbage heaps and ruins there are enormous clouds of the dangerous mosquitoes that transmit the disease. East Prussia had been free from malaria for 50, nay 80 years, now yet another scourge visits the land. The general mortality in the hospital may be 40 percent. The dead are brought to the morgue barely clothed. Care for the living comes first, the hospital needs every piece of clothing.

5 November 1945^[55]

Now one still finds potatoes along the way, and one can sleep outside if need be, but winter is approaching and hunger is here already. Typhoid has barely diminished. In the York hospital the number of patients has sunk to 1,600, but now typhus is coming around. It is already showing its teeth here and there in the city.

Entry of 20 December 1945^[56]

Yes, it takes strong muscles to dig mass graves day after day in the heavy, wet soil. It still works, and so far we only had strong frost for short times and the frost layer quickly melted into the soil due to the current very rainy weather. With strong frost bomb craters must serve as mass graves.

Entry of 31 December 1945^[57]

However, all memories come back on this day, wounds that have barely scarred reopen. Thus, this Christmas is a Christmas of suicides. Quite a few quietly disappear in the ruins.[…] In our hospital alone two young people try to put an end to their lives. A young nurse succeeds, another is brought back to life by timely help. When he regains consciousness he is angry at the doctors for having saved him.[…]
The year’s statistic of our grave diggers is shattering in its simplicity. Since the resuscitation of our hospital at the end of June they buried 3,989 dead in the small cemetery behind the Frischbier School. Our hospital’s occupancy is between 1,300 and 1,400 patients. So this year every bed supplied three dead.

Entry of 9 January 1946^[58]

Outside there is strong cold and the thick snow screeches hard under the soles. The frost bites the feet of anyone whose shoes are worn out. Many a half-starved person has died from this. The water-swollen feet burst and get infected, and once an infection gets hold it often overruns the water-swollen body. All medications at our disposal can no longer help then. Some tie rags of sacks around their feet or walk in crude wooden clogs. Yet I saw no one as poor as two ragged, barefoot Russian kids who searched some rubbish in the ruins.

Entry of 10 January 1946^[59]

Hunger and cold have become beasts of prey. Every day the corpse carriages rumbles twice through the gates. Our dead number 40 per day.

Entry of 6 February 1946^[60]

Typhus is already making the rounds among us. Two doctors, on medical assistant and two women got it already. Nobody has died of it yet.

Entry of 16 February 1946^[61]

The doctor in charge of the transferred tuberculosis ward informs the Antifa-Club of its balance. Since taking over the ward he has had about 240 patients. Of these about 150 have died. 60 were turned over to the St. Catherine’s Hospital, of which 10 at most will survive, and 30 were released as cured to ambulatory treatment. So in about half a year there were 200 deaths or death candidates out of 240 patients. 83.5 %. Commentary superfluous.

Entry of 28 February 1946^[62]

Between us and our homeland the Iron Curtain has descended. We are prisoners of war, except that our barbed wire enclosure is a little wider. On the other hand, the prisoners of war have their food, if little. Here anyone can starve to death, even those who work.

Entry of 13 April 1946^[63]

Concern about a repetition of the previous year’s typhoid tragedy causes the hospital’s management to vaccinate the personnel.

Entry of 07 May 1946^[64]

Much more important is the fight against the rats, which have become a plague that no one thought possible. Everywhere, day and night, one sees giant specimens of these grey long-tailed creatures. Every nightguard counts thirty, forty within half an hour. The steal the bread from the table, gnaw through beds and walls, devour the corpses in the morgue and spread their fleas everywhere. Of course this pest is most numerous around the trash sites. And there are hardly any cats left.

Entry of 18 May 1946^[65]

Hunger oedema continue in the foreground of all diseases. The doctors are unanimous in that this disease is caused by lack of protein in the first place. In the scientific conversations all means and possibilities to make good for this deficit are considered and discussed. But where to take it from? Professor Böttner suggests to regularly take blood from the hospital’s only two cows, which are as good as dry anyway, in order to help at least the neediest among the oedema patients. The problem with this suggestion, among others, is that the Russians would see it as sabotage against their cows.[…] What is left is one doctor’s suggestion to recover proteins from the liquid obtained through punctures in the breast and belly, add it to the meals properly prepared and feed it back to the patients.

Entry of 08 June 1946^[66]

A generation that can inspire horror is growing up here. The hard struggle for survival, far from any education, has probably nipped in the bud the more noble sides of humanity already. Despite this, or better inevitably, these wild children have also remained far behind in their physical development. Our pediatrists have already seen, especially in children, the gruesome, almost invariably fatal Noma, the ulcerous hunger disease whose aspect could be seen only in medical treatises since decades ago in Germany.^[67]
Hungry children roam the hospital and the Frischbier School. In front of each door the same monotonous chant, the tone of which I won’t forget as long as I live. "Uncle, please give me a piece of bread." You give gladly to the first, reluctantly to the second, the third already goes empty-handed. After all you want to live yourself, you have to live.

Entry of 15 June 1946^[68]

Starvation is a strange matter. Even if oedema is very advanced already and there is heavy diarrhea, it is sometimes possible to save the patient by improving nutrition. But few of our patients are that lucky, for where would the hospital get the additional food? To be sure, the hospital’s food has improved now that the personnel itself gets ration cards and may no longer share the patients’ food, but the rations are still barely sufficient to maintain a bedridden person’s weight, let alone to restore the weight of one dying of starvation. Only if by chance an acquaintance takes care of the patient it may be possible to save him. Yet there is a moment after which no however good nutrition can save such oedema patients; the entire digestive system is so damaged that it can no longer dissolve and transform the nourishment offered. Unstoppably these patients fade into death without help having any effect. […]
Also in other respects the doctors gain new, surprising knowledge. The tendency to develop purulent wound infections increases. Every splinter in a finger, every scratch on the skin flaming red with scabies, and especially every sting of a louse may become a furuncle. It this becomes a phlegmon, the patient, especially if sick with oedema, is inevitably lost. Now however extensive drainage, no however high amputation, no however intensive inner and outer application of modern chemotherapeutic agents may arrest the deadly outcome. The skin of the affected body part becomes so worn that even slight prodding with a finger or a pincer penetrates it. Withing four, five days a whole leg is affected by a needle-sized infection spot. If the conditions for scientific processing of these findings are already lacking, the treatment possibilities are quite desolate. Even bandaging material, gauze bandages are hardly available despite greatest parsimony; in the operation room sheets are used as bandages.

Entry of 16 December 1946^[69]

Within about half a year the Russians have managed to reduce our hospital occupancy by about 600 patients, where we Germans thought an increase by double or triple necessary.
Hunger is growing in the city. Cold on top of it has a horrible effect.

Entry of 23 December 1946^[70]

Our pathologist is complaining about constant overwork. It is terrible what hideousness is brought to him. Murder, murder, murder – mainly in the Junkerstraβe. The relation between Germans beaten dead and murdered Russians is at least 6:1. To be sure, the Germans are more defenseless, without strength, undernourished; unarmed as they are they make easy prey. But who can at the same time expect to find much booty with them? Is it robbery or sheer bloody murder that is happening here?

Entry of 31 December 1946^[71]

So now on new year’s ever we have a total of 859 patients. 200 of these are Russians. The health department has achieved its goal. Since summer we have lost 850 sickbeds for Germans. Our cemetery, according to our burial book, holds about 7,000 mute sleepers …

Entry of 15 January 1947^[72]

People are freezing to death on the street, in apartments and beds. Who seeks acquaintances finds dead in every cellar, starved or frozen to death. Who walks to work in the morning through the dark streets occasionally stumbles upon dead covered with a merciful blanket by the night snow. Almost every morning dead are found on the stairs of the Raiffeisen House in the former General-Litzmann-Straβe, now called Sovestskij-Prospekt. Mayors and command headquarters don’t keep up with burials. The soil is frozen solid, and no German is so well fed as to endure the hard work. Thus corpses pile up in many places.
"Simple dystrophies may no longer be taken in." In practice this means barring hospital access to Germans in general. Mercilessly the emaciated, exhausted, ragged figures are chased out into the street. With fading senses, trembling knees and titillating pulse the rejected ones stumble on to their desolate end. […] The next day the hospital no longer denies them access.
Sometimes they collapse right next to the hospital. If they then lie unconscious, rattling on the cold snow, maybe medical assistants are sent out with a stretcher to take them into the hospital for their last hours. But those are the only two exceptions for "simple dystrophies", dying or dead.

Entry of 23 January 1947^[73]

I’m horrified every time I enter the morgue. There they lie in their dozens, in the positions in which death surprised them, stiff from the cold and rigor mortis, in their miserable rags, face and hands eaten by rats who still find plenty of food on the streets and in the morgue. The causes of death are almost always the same: murder, hunger, cold. Hardly ever a suicide among the Germans.

Entry of 21 February 1947^[74]

In the autopsy room a Russian is now working as a pathologist and forensic doctor, a small, elder man who speaks German quite well. The German doctor he kept as assistant.[…]
Only in exceptional cases the term dystrophy shows up in the pathologist’s vocabulary. […] One the street people beaten to death are found, the skull smashed into shapelessness with heavy iron bars. Every day there are 5 to 6 autopsies on average.

Entry of 25 February 1947^[75]

The misery keeps growing. We only receive murder cases and unknowns (starved, frozen) for autopsy. Everyone who dies in the hospital is supposed to also be autopsied, but we simply cannot manage.

Entry of 27 February 1947^[76]

They say that in Ponarth corpses are sprayed with gasoline and burned as one can no longer get rid of them otherwise. In other parts of the city they are simply thrown onto the old cemeteries.[…]
It is an infernal martyrium. Hunger burrows into the entrails. Cold eats up the limbs.

Entry of 01 March 1947^[77]

Hunger drives people mad. A man I knew well, about 36 years old, beat his twelve-year-old daughter to death in a bout of hunger insanity.[…]
Our pathologist has gradually given up resisting the dystrophy diagnosis. He now states this cause as often as the German doctor would if he were to decide. After all it makes no sense to deny starvation if people start eating each other. The Russians watch the starvation of the Germans with curious indifference.

Entry of 18 March 1947^[78]

Actually the number of dead at our hospital is low now, compared with the previous year. But this reduction, which is surely reported as a success to Moscow, is merely due to reducing our number of beds and barring access to the starving.

Entry of 05 April 1947^[79]

A locksmith I was acquainted with, who during the winter had worked in Schichau, collapsed at the vice, dragged himself halfway home and collapsed with exhaustion in a ditch by the road. After some hours his wife and grown-up daughter finally found him, unconscious, frozen in the snow which was still deep at that time.
They had to leave him lying, had to first go back home to borrow a handcart somewhere, as even the poor emaciated body of the dying man was too heavy for their faded strength. In the dark of the night that had meanwhile come down they barely found the starved man. It was a tremendous effort for them to lift him onto the cart, even more to keep him there. It was a relief for the women that the man finally died when dropping from the unsteady cart. But transporting the corpse was still difficult enough.
It is horrible to hear the women say how relieved they felt by this death. But who has seen people in the last stages of hunger can understand that.

The primacy of literal starvation over epidemic disease as a cause of death makes the Königsberg famine into what Irish economist and famine expert Cormac O’Grada would call a "modern" famine.^[80] Where mortality from infectious diseases is high even in non-crisis times (as was the case throughout the world before the 20th century and is still the case in some poor countries, especially in Africa), famine will cause a massive die-off from such diseases before actual starvation takes hold, so most of those who die will not actually starve to death. Where such diseases have been brought under control in non-crisis times through advances in medicine and public health, where people live in relative prosperity and measures that prevent the spread of diseases have become part of their daily routine, a famine will primarily kill by literal starvation. The Bengal famine of 1943 was still one of the "traditional" category, as were 1918-1922 famines in the Soviet Union. The Soviet famine of 1931-33 may have marked the beginning of a transition from "traditional" to "modern" famine as concerns the main causes of death: while there was a big rise in recorded cases of typhus and typhoid fever, the proportion of all deaths due to infectious diseases was lower in 1933 than in the immediate wake of the crisis in 1934.^[81] The Leningrad blockade famine of 1941-43, also thanks to the cold weather and the city administration’s public health efforts (like ordering the population to clean up all breeding grounds where infectious disease might start) was a "modern" famine as well. While about a third of the city’s population perished, few of the 0.8 million or so victims died of contagious diseases. In fact, the numbers succumbing to typhoid fever, typhus and dysentery – the "classic" famine diseases in temperate climates according to O’Grada – were actually fewer in December 1941 than in December 1940. A clear primacy of starvation over disease was also observed in western Holland during the "hunger winter" of 1944, in Axis-occupied Greece, and – perhaps most remarkably – in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the death rate rose four-fold between 1940 and 1941-42, but the proportion attributed to literal starvation shot up from 1 to 25 percent.^[82] So the experience of Königsberg was not unique.

Why did the Soviet authorities in Königsberg, which as of 04.06.1946 was named Kaliningrad, let the German inhabitants die like flies, mostly from starvation?

Lack of means is part of the explanation. The Königsberg famine happened at a time when the Soviet Union could barely feed its own population. At the time the Soviets entered Berlin, famine in Central Asia had reduced families there to cannibalism.^[83] In 1946/47 famine killed about 1 million people throughout the Soviet Union.^[84] Many German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union recognized that the Soviet civilian population had it just as bad or worse than them.^[85]

Wieck acknowledged that the Russians in Königsberg were themselves supplied very poorly and had nothing to give away, and that the Russian administration barely managed to feed even the Russian population arriving in the city.^[86] Deichelmann noted the misery of the Russian settlers who came to Kaliningrad from all parts of the Soviet Union, often sent there against their will or tricked by promises. He mentioned a 14-year-old Russian boy who had come from Sakhalin, traversing the whole continent, arrived sick in Insterburg in the winter, and was sent onwards after eight days in the hospital. The boy arrived in Kaliningrad feverish and full of lice, with a heavy pleurisy.^[87] The arrivals were living in utmost poverty, the kind of people, according to Deichelmann, who would call a piece of bread and a handful of salt an excellent meal.^[88] Child mortality among them must have been very high, for Deichelmann mentioned "countless" autopsies of Russian children.^[89] A young Russian female worker earned 360 Rubel per month, of which she spent 240 on milk for her baby and 60 on bread. Russians also starved to death on occasion.^[90] Deichelmann recalled having talked to people from all parts of the Soviet Union, who unanimously told him that nowhere it was as bad as in Kaliningrad.^[91]

Corruption and incompetence of Soviet authorities were also to blame. Deichelmann reckoned that the Soviet rulers of Königsberg/Kaliningrad were hardly a Soviet elite, perhaps even a negative selection – people who were of no use where they came from and who hoped to get rich quickly.^[92] The hospital’s Russian director is supposed to have bought himself a house from what he skimmed off.^[93]The director of an old-age home at Tilsit-Neukirch, where some of the Kaliningrad central hospital’s elderly German patients had been shipped, was reportedly a brutal young Russian whose large family was the main recipient of the food meant for the home’s occupants.^[94]

However, lack of means, corruption and incompetence cannot have been the only reasons for the great mortality in Königsberg/Kaliningrad. If they had been, a mass dying on this scale might also have happened in other parts of Germany conquered by the Soviets, but that wasn’t the case.^[95] In the Soviet Occupation Zone rations were incomparably better. Among the urban population of Brandenburg, as of 01.11.1945, the lowest-ranking consumer group officially received not only 200 g of bread like non-workers in Königsberg/Kaliningrad, but also 300 g of potatoes, 15 g of sugar, 30 g of marmalade and 10 g of other nutrients per day. Children received that plus 15 g of meat and 10 g of fat per day.^[96] In Königsberg/Kaliningrad, where in practice the large majority of the German population got just about nothing, the Soviet authorities seem to have acted with a malignant indifference to the Germans that was not present elsewhere. At least that was how it looked like from the receiving end perspective. Wieck had the impression that the Russians wanted all Germans to starve and to this effect tried to hinder their efforts to survive by work, black-market trading or otherwise.^[97] Deichelmann considered some official measures – reducing the number of hospital beds at a time when they should have been increased, barring people with "simple" dystrophy from hospital treatment, chasing away begging children – to be nothing short of sadistic.^[98] He left it open whether this sadism was a matter of the local administration only or the Soviet central state was also behind it. A commission from Moscow is supposed to have been horrified about the living conditions of the German population.^[99]

How many Germans died under these conditions?

Again, the most detailed estimate comes from Starlinger, who reasoned as follows^[100]:

Assuming about 110,000 inhabitants before the fall of the city and about 73,000 according to the Soviet census at the end of June 1945, the city’s population diminished by about 35,000 between the two dates. Of the loss about 10-15,000 were mostly adult males deported to camps in East Prussia or further east, while 20-25,000 were deaths. Assuming about 12,000 deaths in each of April and May, the number of inhabitants at the end of May 1945 would have been about 85,000 to 90,000. In October 1945 the population was between 60,000 and 55,000, in March 1946 it was between 45,000 and 40,000, in October 1946 between 40,000 and 35,000 and in March 1947 it was 25,000 at maximum. As there was no reduction by migration, this would mean that out of about 100,000 inhabitants (110,000 minus 10,000 deportees) about 75,000 died, a death rate of 75 %. Of these about 50,000 out of 75,000 died after the Soviet census at the end of June 1945, that is about 65 %.

Deichelmann estimated that about 30,000 had died in the battle and the subsequent marches across the countryside and back to the city, and that in June/July 1945, after some replenishment by returnees from the countryside, there were about 70,000 Germans in the city. Of these 50,000 died until the end of 1945, for a total of about 80,000 dead, and 17,000 to 20,000 survived to be deported.^[101] Of the dead about 9,000 died in the central hospital according to Deichelmann and 2,700 died in the hospitals for infectious diseases under Starlinger’s direction.^[102] Most deaths occurred outside the hospitals, which is also what becomes apparent from the above-mentioned records of the Soviet administration.^[103]

The highest death toll estimate comes from Wieck, according to whom there were about 130,000 Germans in the city at the time of its fall and of these at most 20,000 survived to be deported.^[104] This would mean a death rate of about 85 %.

Soviet sources vary as concerns the German population. According to the already mentioned document regarding the population of the Soviet parts of East Prussia as of 1 September 1945, Königsberg had 84,651 and the whole region 174,125 inhabitants.^[105] Following the integration of northern East Prussia into the Soviet Union as the "Kenigsbergskaja oblast" on 7 April 1946, an improvised census counted 45,120 Germans in the East Prussian capital and 114,070 in the whole oblast as of 1 May 1946, besides 41,029 Soviet citizens including forced laborers from NS-times. Kossert considers the number of Germans too low as many were not registered.^[106] 45,120 out of 84,651 would mean 39,531 losses in the interim, and as the number of the oblast inhabitants also diminished these 39,531 could be all considered deaths. As mentioned above, Soviet city authorities recorded 21,111 German deaths in the city between September 1945 and May 1946. The misattribution of this mortality to typhoid rather than starvation seems quite obvious in the light of the German witnesses’ accounts, but would the Soviets city authorities have failed to record 18,420 deaths, almost half the total?

Starlinger’s figures regarding the death toll from the city’s fall to the end of June 1945 are at odds with the aforementioned estimate from the Soviet passport department in Königsberg, whereby there were about 63,247 German inhabitants in the city at the end of April 1945. It seems improbable, even considering the intensity of the battle and the subsequent mayhem and forced marches, that 47,000 out of 110,000 inhabitants, thereof 32,000 deaths assuming 10,000 – 15,000 deportees as per Starlinger, should have been lost in the interim. The ca. 63,000 can however be reconciled with the Deichelmann’s ca. 70,000 for June/July 1945 following some in-migration from the countryside. They can also be reconciled with the end of June census figure of about 73,000 mentioned by Starlinger, the 69,055 inhabitants in June/July and the 68,014 German inhabitants counted/estimated for September 1945 by the Soviet PD, assuming in each case that people returned to the city after the April 1945 Soviet count/estimate. They can furthermore be reconciled with Deichelmann’s claim of about 30,000 losses in the battle and the subsequent forced marches (which according to Deichelmann were all deaths), assuming the minimum figure of 90,000 German inhabitants on the eve of the final Soviet assault on 6 – 9 April 1945, mentioned by Lasch, which coincided with the number of ration cards mentioned by Starlinger.^[107] The difference to the ca. 63,000 counted/estimated by the PD for the end of April 1945 would be 27,000. Assuming 10,000 to 15,000 deportees as per Starlinger’s estimate, this would leave about 12,000 to 17,000 civilian deaths in the battle and subsequent mayhem, about 13.33 – 18.89 % of the population. As mentioned above, a maximum of about 3.33% of Berlin’s population perished during the battle for Berlin and its immediate aftermath, so the losses of Königsberg’s population would be at least 4 to 6 times higher in proportion than those of Berlin’s population.

Contrary to what Starlinger assumed, population changes in the city after June/July 1945 were not wholly deaths, if one is to give credence to the PD’s aforementioned report of November 1945 whereby 4,390 people entered and 13,480 left the city in July, August, September and October 1945. One can speculate, though not prove, that the outbound figure consists wholly or mostly of deaths rather than out-migrants. As mentioned before only the September population status figure of 68,019 in Fisch and Klemeševa’s Table 2 matches other PD figures whereby in September 1945 there were 140,114 Germans in the region, thereof 68,014 in Königsberg and the remainder in other communities. How many people migrated into and out of the city and how many died between April and September 1945 cannot be established on hand of the available numbers. In the following I will assume for good measure that the difference between the April 1945 PD figure in Fisch and Klemeševa’s Table 1 (63,247) and the June 1945 figure of "about" 60,000 in the same table were deaths, that in the months June to September there was a positive migration balance into the city in the order of 13,000, yielding the end of June census figure of 73,000, and that of these 68,014 were still alive at the beginning of September 1945. This would mean 8,233 deaths between the end of April and the beginning of September 1945, a figure consistent with the hospital horrors described by von Lehndorff and Deichelmann if one assumes that, as Soviet records suggest, most deaths occurred outside the hospitals. Adding this to the above 12,000 – 17,000 deaths from the battle and subsequent violence in April 1945 would yield about 20,233 -25,233 deaths between early April and early September 1945.

The next PD figure in Fisch and Klemeševa’s Table 1, 60,642 in November 1945, is a little higher than Starlinger’s figures (60,000 to 55,000) for October 1945. Assuming that the difference between the PD’s September figure of 68,014 and the November figure of 60,642 is accounted for by deaths alone, there would be an additional 7,372 deaths, for a total of 27,605 to 32,605 deaths so far since early April 1945.

As mentioned above the city’s German population was 45,120 according to a Soviet census as of 1 May 1946. Klemeševa calculated a lower figure (43,617) for the spring of 1946.^[108] Assuming this lower figure and no out-migration, this would mean 17,025 deaths since November 1945, for a total of 44,630 to 49,630 deaths so far. The total of deaths between September 1945 and May 1946 would be 68,014 minus 43,617 = 24,397 deaths, 3,286 more than the 21,111 recorded by the Soviet city administration for the period between 1 September 1945 and 1 May 1946. The difference is in accordance with Fisch and Klemeševa’s reckoning that many deaths were not reported^[109], and while high it seems more realistic than assuming that almost half of all deaths were not recorded.

About the number of German inhabitants in the city of Kaliningrad when the deportations to the Soviet Occupied Zone began there are no Soviet figures. What becomes apparent from the available documentation is that a total of 102,407 Germans were deported from the Kaliningrad oblast in 6 stages between April-June 1947 and May 1951.^[110] The difference of 37,707 can be safely assumed to have died since September 1945. If, as Starlinger estimated, no more than 25,000 of Königsberg’s inhabitants were left to deport, this would mean 77,407 deportees from other towns and villages in the region – more than the 72,100 that had been estimated by the Soviet Passport Department as of September 1945. This in turn would mean a negative migration balance of the city’s population in favor of the countryside, even under the unrealistic assumption that the rural population had no demographically significant losses from hunger, disease, cold and violence. A more realistic assumption might be that the rural population lost about 10 % of its stock, which is quite conservative.^[111] This would mean that 64,890 of the 102,407 deportees were from rural areas and 37,517 were from Kaliningrad, and that out of 68,014 German inhabitants of the city in September 1945 a total of 30,497, about 44.84%, had perished.^[112] Adding 8,233 deaths between the end of April and the beginning of September 1945 and 12,000 to 17,000 deaths from the battle and subsequent violence in April 1945 yields a total of 50,730 to 55,730 deaths, about 56.37% to 61.92% of the assumed population of 90,000 before the final Soviet attack on the city. Deaths among the deportees in Soviet camps in East Prussia or elsewhere would have to be added. These camps were highly lethal. According to Starlinger the death rate there was in the order of 60 %^[113], but Starlinger assumed the same for the Gulag camps in the first postwar years, which is far too high.^[114] According to the German Federal Archives’ 1974 report about expulsion and expulsion crimes from 1945 to 1948, the death rate in Soviet camps in northern East Prussia was between 20% and 50%, and in the prison at Preuβisch-Eylau about half of the about 12,000 – 14,000 inmates died of typhoid fever and other hunger-related diseases.^[115] Assuming that about half of the 10,000 to 15,000 deportees (5,000 to 7,500) died in Soviet camps, the total death toll of Königsberg’s population would be 58,230 to 60,730 out of a baseline population of 90,000, that is 64.70% to 67.48% of the total.

This death rate is beyond what the Stalinist regime inflicted on any other civilian population under its rule. The deadliest year in the Gulag camps was 1942, when 248,877 out of 1,415,596 prisoners died^[116], a death rate of about 17.58%. The average annual death rate in 1945-1947 was much lower, about 4.30 %.^[117] Under these circumstances a sentence to Gulag imprisonment, like the one handed to Starlinger, might have been a life-saving stroke of good luck for Germans perishing in Königsberg/Kaliningrad. Even the most unfortunate of the Soviet Union’s repressed ethnicities, the Kalmyks, suffered a lower mortality rate than these Germans.^[118]

What is more, the mortality rate among Königsberg’s German population also exceeds any mortality rate that Nazi Germany inflicted on civilian populations outside the context of deliberate mass extermination. Even the famine in besieged Leningrad was less deadly in proportional terms, though that was so not because of any restraint on the German side but because the Wehrmacht didn’t manage to wholly cut off the city as intended.^[119] My above mortality rate estimates for Königsberg place this demographic catastrophe about half-way between the siege of Leningrad and the Nazis’ mobile killing operations (one of which took place in neighboring Lithuania in 1941^[120]) and extermination camps. Assuming the higher mortality rates estimated by Deichelmann, Starlinger and Wieck it would be closer to the latter two than to Leningrad. Michael Wieck, the half-Jewish survivor of both Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes, mentioned it alongside the Holocaust.^[121] In its effects on the affected population, if not in necessarily in its intent, the great mortality in Königsberg was as close as Stalin’s USSR got to the worst crimes of Hitler’s Germany.

Notes

[1] See my article Nazi killing methods.
[2] See my article Scrapbookpages on Subhuman Cannibalism and the reference thread The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War.
[3] Jörg Ganzenmüller, "Ein stiller Völkermord", Die Zeit 15 January 2004. Translation in the reference thread The Siege of Leningrad.
[4] Regarding Greece see Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece. The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 23-53. The Dutch Famine of 1944/45 is addressed in, among other publications, William I. Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York: Free Press, 2008), Part I Chapter 3.
[5] In the Łódź ghetto alone, 45,000 out of 200,000 inhabitants died throughout its existence. In the Warsaw ghetto the number was 83,000 out of 470,000 inhabitants between the end of 1940 and September 1942 (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Revised and Definitive Edition, 1985 by Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. New York, page 269). On August 24, 1942, after having decided that of the 1.5 Jews still alive all but 300,000 working for the Germans would no longer be fed, Hans Frank noted by the way that 1.2 million Jews had been sentenced to die of hunger and that should the Jews not starve to death he hoped for a speeding up of anti-Jewish measures (Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, p. 220). The months August, September and October 1942 were the most intensive killing period of the Aktion Reinhard camps (see my article A nightmare with no way out).
[6]"Königsberg/Kaliningrad", article of the Online-Lexikon zur Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa. HC articles related to the mentioned extermination center are collected under the label Maly Trostenets.
[7] For a narrative of the Battle for Königsberg see Pritt Buttar, Battleground Prussia. The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Front 1944-45 (2010 Osprey Publishing, Oxford), pages 293 to 308.
[8] The best-known of many such atrocities occurred in the Königsberg suburb of Metgethen and were discovered after a German counterattack temporarily reconquered the area. The most gruesome description of these atrocities is that of a former captain in the Fortress Königsberg command staff, Hermann Sommer, whose account is partially transcribed in English translation in Alfted-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge. The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 (1986 St. Martin’s Press, New York), pp. 40-41. Sommer claimed that, after the discovery by German troops of "several mounds of corpses situated quite close to one another", the fortress commander General Lasch had ordered a commission to investigate these discoveries. The commission, according to Sommer, reported that "many similar piles of bodies were strewn throughout the area; but in two cases there were virtual mountains of bodies made up of ca. 3,000 women, girls, children and only a few men". Sommer claimed that a special commission of doctors, forensic investigators and foreign journalists was formed to establish identities and the circumstances of the deaths, that many of the dead were photographed, and that the pictures "graphically showed the often savage circumstances under which these people had been murdered". A large number of bodies, according to Sommer, "had the breasts cut off, the genitals stabbed through and were disemboweled". Sommer claimed that the testimonies of surviving witnesses along with the photographs were on file in his department. He also claimed that on February 27, 1945 he had himself witnessed the carnage, which he described in some detail. Fortress Commander General Otto Lasch, upon returning from Soviet captivity, wrote a decidedly anti-Soviet account of the battle, in which he highlighted the bravery and prowess of the city’s defenders and described his own role in favorable terms. Lasch didn’t mention having ordered an investigation or that huge mounds or "mountains" of bodies had been found, just horrible finds of atrocities including one in which 32 civilians had been blown up with an electrically detonated mine in a tennis court (General Otto Lasch, So fiel Königsberg, 4. Lizenzausgabe 1991 des Motorbuch Verlags Stuttgart, p. 74). He also quoted an unnamed commander of a grenadier regiment, who recalled having seen Germans killed in masses in the retaken villages, some women still having ropes around their necks they had been dragged to death with, and others with their heads in the mud or in fertilizer pits and traces of bestial mistreatment on their bodies. The US Library of Congress possesses an album with the title "Bildbericht über von den Bolschewisten ermordete und geschändete Deutsche in Metgethen" ("Photo Report about Germans defiled and murdered at Metgethen"), which consists of 13 pages with two captioned photographs on each (the images are very graphic and should not be viewed by sensitive readers). 12 of these pictures show single corpses, 9 show more than one corpse (two women and three children, a woman and two boys, a woman, an amputated soldier and a little girl, a couple, a female and a male corpse). Some corpses were photographed several times, from different angles or distances. 5 pictures show bodies and body parts of people killed by an explosion, which must be the one mentioned by Lasch as 31 male and female corpses were counted around the explosion crater according to one caption. One picture, captioned as having been taken inside a house where two women and three children were found shot, shows "two dead Bolsheviks killed by German soldiers as atonement for their foul deeds" ("zwei tote Bolschevisten, die von deutschen Soldaten als Vergeltung für ihre Schandtaten erschossen wurden").
[9] Bernhard Fisch and Marina Klemeševa, "Zum Schicksal der Deutschen in Königsberg 1945-1948 (im Spiegel bislang unbekannter russischer Quellen)", Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung Bd. 44 Nr. 3 (1995) (hereinafter "ZOMEF 44-3"), pp. 391-400; Andreas Kossert, Ostpreußen. Geschichte und Mythos (München, Siedler Verlag, 2008), p. 345.
[10] Hans Deichelmann, Ich sah Königsberg sterben. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Arztes von April 1945 bis März 1948. The copy used for this article is a new edition published in 2016 by Verlag Siegfried Bublies, Schnellbach.
[11] Hans Graf von Lehndorff, Ostpreussisches Tagebuch. Aufzeichnungen eines Arztes aus den Jahren 1945 – 1947. The copy used for this article is the 6th edition published in 1961 by Biederstein Verlag, Munich. Lehndorff’s diary was published in English translation as Token of a Covenant: Diary of an East Prussian Surgeon 1945-47.
[12] Wilhelm Starlinger, Grenzen der Sowjetmacht im Spiegel einer West-Ostbegegnung hinter Palisaden von 1945-1954. Mit einem Bericht der Deutschen Seuchenkrankenhäuser Yorck und St. Elisabeth über das Leben und Sterben in Königsberg 1945-1947; zugleich ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis des Ablaufes gekoppelter Groβseuchen unter elementaren Bedingungen. Edited in 1955 by Holzner-Verlag Würzburg.
[13] Michael Wieck, Zeugnis vom Untergang Königsbergs. Ein "Geltungsjude" berichtet. Mit einem Vorwort von Siegfried Lenz. The copy used for this article is a 2nd edition published in 2009 by C.H. Beck oHG Munich. The book was translated into English and published as A Childhood Under Hitler and Stalin: Memoirs of a "certified" Jew, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
[14]Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, p. 18.
[15]Zeugnis, pp. 294-296.
[16] Lasch, p. 116.
[17]Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, pp. 36-37.
[18]Zeugnis, p. 264. The Rothenstein camp was described as a lethal hellhole by both Wieck (Zeugnis, pp. 243-255) and von Lehndorff, who was detained there between the end of April and mid-June 1945 (Tagebuch, pp. 109-144).
[19]Königsberg, pp. 41-42.
[20] As above, pp. 298-299.
[21]Zeugnis, pp. 238-240.
[22]Königsberg, pp. 29-37.
[23]Tagebuch, p. 148.
[24] About 95,000 to 130,000 Berlin women were raped during or after the battle. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide (Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, Viking-Penguin Books, 2002, p. 414). The city’s population was "anything between 3 and 3.5 million people" (as before, p. 177). Some women were killed because they resisted or out of sheer sadism. German journalist Margret Boveri recorded in her diary entry on 03.05.1945 a particularly horrible case that occurred in the Dahlem district towards the end of the battle. A woman and her four child daughters, who she personally knew, and another woman with her daughter were found hanging in a cellar. They had been raped and badly mangled before their deaths. A snoring Russian was lying beside them. Boveri assumed that this had been a case of lust murder (Margret Boveri, Tage des Überlebens, Munich 1985, p. 106).
[25] Peter Antill and Peter Dennis, Berlin 1945. End of the Thousand Year Reich (Osprey Publishing Limited, 2005), p. 85. A higher figure was given by Cornelius Ryan (The Last Battle, 1966 Simon and Schuster, New York, p. 337): "Even twenty years later no one knows with any certainty what the civilian losses were during the battle of Berlin. Even yet, bodies are being unearthed from ruins, in gardens, in parks where they were hurriedly interred during the battle, and from mass graves. However, based on statistical studies, probably close to 100,000 civilians died as a result of the battle. At least 20,000 succumbed to heart attacks, some 6,000 committed suicide, the remainder were either killed outright from shelling of street fighting or died later from wounds." However, Ryan’s 100,000 estimate referred to the entire area of the battle of Berlin and not to the city alone. About 10,000 civilians may have died in the Halbe encirlement outside the city (Beevor, Berlin, p. 337). According to Alexandra Richie (Faust’s Metropolis – A History of Berlin, London 1998, p. 756), when the Western Allies entered the city many of the "100,000 civilians who died in the Battle for Berlin" still lay unburied, US General Clay described Berlin as a "city of the dead", and US Colonel Sheen wrote that the stench of unburied dead was almost overpowering.
[26] Fisch and Klemeševa, ZOMEF 44-3, pp. 392-393.
[27] As above, p. 394.
[28] As above. The number 51,000 appears in the column of inhabitants to feed in the article but logically belongs in the column of inhabitants actually fed, as 82,000 inhabitants to feed are mentioned for June and 80,000 for July.
[29] As above, p. 395.
[30] The results of this calculation would be 68,431 instead of 68,686 in August, 67,223 instead of 68,019 in September and 64,103 instead of 65,810 on 20 October 1945.
[31] As above. The figures for the other communities are: Labiau 8,184; Pillkallen 4,254; Insterburg 1,317; Heiligenbeil 5,915; Friedland 2,544; Kranzburg 2,395; Gumbinnen 2,024; Tilsit 4,651; Heinrichswalde 3,988; Königsberg Land 7,754; Samland 20,893; Stallupönen 947; Wehlau 3,985; Darkehmen 1,146; Gerdauen 2,103. The PD mistakenly added up the figures for these communities and the 68,014 for Königsberg to 139,614, a difference of 500 in relation to the mathematically correct sum of 140,114.
[32] Kossert, as above. The title of the document is translated as "Bevölkerung in den Kreisen Ostpreußens, die an die UdSSR fielen (ohne Memelgebiet), am 1. September 1945" ("Population in the Districts of East Prussia that fell to the USSR (without Memel region), on 1 September 1945"). Kossert’s source is Eckhard Matthes (Hg.): Als Russe in Ostpreußen. Sowjetische Umsiedler über ihren Neubeginn in Königsberg/Kaliningrad nach 1945. Ostfildern 1999, p. 312.
[33] The first such civilians were returnees from forced labor under the Nazis who chose to stay in Königsberg. On 24 May 1945 the City Commandant ordered the city’s district commandants to provide the numbers of repatriated Soviet citizens, local inhabitants who could be used for qualified work, locals who could be used for other work and non-working people and children in families without food supply. Patients in local hospitals were not to be counted as they received food from other sources. (ZOMEF 44-3, p. 394)
[34]Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, pp. 24-26.
[35] According to Wieck (Zeugnis, p. 301) Klopse (traditional Königsberg meatballs) sold on the black market in the winter of 1945/46 turned out to be made of human flesh, and the Russians found a literal human slaughterhouse in the ruins, where people were tricked to go and then killed for consumption. Von Lehndorff wrote that in October 1945 eating human flesh had been going on for some time here and there. He recalled the horror he had felt during the war when learning about cannibalism among Soviet PoWs, thinking that only "Asians" were capable of such things. Now the Soviets were concerned about cannibalism among the Germans, and one Dr. Rauch was called upon again and again to take part in autopsies, exhumations and examinations of meat chunks to determine if they were of human origin. (Tagebuch, p. 168). Under 19 March 1946 Deichelmann (Königsberg, pp. 126-127) noted that a colleague of his appeared in the company of a Soviet "MVD" officer with a covered bucket containing meat that a German "bandit" (in Soviet parlance) had been selling. The buyer had become suspicious and alarmed the MVD. The physician opened the bucket, examined he chunks and found what was unmistakably a human knee. Cannibalism among the German population was also mentioned in official Soviet reports. One such report is cited in the Spiegel article "Zum Schluβ Schokolade", 27.06.1993.
[36] The German term "Typhus" designates a disease caused by salmonella bacteria that is usually contracted by consuming contaminated water or food but can also be transmitted from person to person. It is known in English as typhoid fever. The English term typhus, on the other hand, designates a disease that is mostly transmitted by body lice. The German term for this disease is "Fleckfieber", spotted fever.
[37] The danger was violence from Russian soldiers or criminal gangs. Von Lehndorff mentioned a gang of Russian adolescents that attacked women and on account of which people used to walk only in groups. He himself always had a crowbar in hand and made sure that everyone could see it. (Tagebuch, pp. 166-167). In charge of autopsies in the central hospital’s morgue, Deichelmann noted in his diary entry for 18 June 1946 that New York had 365 murders per year and Königsberg had seen that many within half a year (Königsberg, p. 244).
[38]Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, pp. 23-24.
[39] ZOMEF 44-3, pp. 396-398. Besides the non-workers there were 1,100 skilled workers on the city’s infrastructures who received 600 g per day and 15,900 unskilled workers who received 400 g per day.
[40] Assuming 68,014 German inhabitants as per the Passport Department figures. If the number was 84,651, the mortality rate would still be almost 25 %.
[41] For comparison, the Great Plague of 1709 to 1711 killed about 200,000 to 245,000 people in East Prussia, ca. 30-40% of the region’s population of 600,000 at the time (Kossert, as above p. 99). The Great Plague of Marseille is estimated to have killed about 30 % the city’s population (Christian A.Devaux, "Small oversights that led to the Great Plague of Marseille (1720–1723): Lessons from the past", in: Infection, Genetics and Evolution Volume 14, March 2013, Pages 169-185). The Great Plague of London killed up to 20 % of the city’s inhabitants (Anne Roberts, "The Plague in England", History Today Volume 30 Issue 4 April 1980). The medieval Black Death killed about 30-50% of the population of the affected areas (Mark Cartwright, "Black Death", World History Encyclopedia, 28 March 2020).
[42]Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, pp. 33-35, 44, 54.
[43] As above, p. 41.
[44] As above, pp. 47-48.
[45]Tagebuch, pp. 150-151.
[46] As above, pp. 152-153.
[47] As above, p. 153.
[48] As above, p. 166.
[49]Königsberg, pp. 46-47.
[50] As above, pp. 61-63. "Fleck" is the inner part of a bovine stomach cut in slices, an East Prussian delicacy when properly prepared. The hospital received these by the barrel, insufficiently salted and stinking so badly in the warm weather that the whole kitchen was polluted. The patients nevertheless ate them for lack of alternative, and so did the staff. Sometimes the staff held the nose shut with the one hand and ate with the other (Königsberg, p. 60).
[51] As above, pp. 63-64.
[52] As above, p. 65.
[53] As above, p. 69.
[54] As above, p. 70.
[55]As above, p. 90.
[56] As above, p. 104.
[57] As above, pp. 110-111.
[58] As above, p. 112.
[59] As above, p. 112.
[60] As above, p. 118.
[61] As above, p. 122.
[62]As above, pp. 122-123
[63] As above, pp. 132.
[64] As above, pp. 139.
[65] As above, pp. 146-147.
[66] As above, p. 154.
[67] Presumably unknown to Deichelmann, Noma (a cancerous growth, usually fatal, which appears mostly on the face, as the result of starvation and physical debility) was also observed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Rudolf Höss described it in his autobiography (Commandant of Auschwitz. The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. Phoenix Press, London, 2000. Page 126): "ln July 1942. the Reichsführer SS visited the camp. I took him all over the gypsy camp. He made a most thorough inspection of everything, noting the overcrowded barrack-huts, the unhygienic conditions, the crammed hospital building. He saw those who were sick with infectious diseases, and the children suffering from Noma, which always made me shudder, since it reminded me of leprosy and of the lepers I had seen in Palestine-their little bodies wasted away, with gaping holes in their cheeks big enough for a man to see through, a slow putrefaction of the living body."
[68] As above, pp. 156-158.
[69] As above, p. 192.
[70] As above, p. 195.
[71] As above, pp. 197-198.
[72] As above, pp. 199-200.
[73] As above, p. 201.
[74] As above, pp. 205-206.
[75] As above, p. 206.
[76] As above, p. 209.
[77] As above, p. 210.
[78] As above, p. 212.
[79] As above, p. 215.
[80] Cormac O’Grada, Famine. A Short History (2009 Princeton University Press), Chapter IV section "What do People die of during Famines" (pp. 108-211).
[81] As above, pp. 110-112 and 114.
[82] As above, pp. 112-113.
[83] Beevor, Berlin, p. 392.
[84] Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands : Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, Basic Books, 2010), p. 336.
[85] Christian Streit, "Deutsche und sowjetische Kriegsgefangene", in: Wolfram Wette/Gerd R. Ueberschär, Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert (2001 Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt) pp. 178 to 192; Günter Böddeker/Paul Carell, Die Gefangenen. Leben und Überleben deutscher Soldaten hinter Stacheldraht (Ullstein, Frankfurt/Main 1996), pp. 370-371.
[86]Zeugnis, pp. 265, 272.
[87]Königsberg, entry of 31 August 1947, pp. 269-270.
[88] As above, pp. 270-271.
[89] As above, entry of 30 April 1947, p. 224.
[90] As above, entry of 31 December 1947, p. 302-303.
[91] As above, entry of 31 August 1947, pp. 269.
[92] As above, entry of 31 December 1947, p. 306.
[93] As above, entry of 31 August 1947, pp. 268.
[94] As above, entry of 31 December 1946, p. 198.
[95] For example, the first Soviet city commandant of Berlin, General Berzarin, who went out and chatted with Germans queuing at Red Army field kitchens, became almost as much of a hero to Berliners as he was to his own men. His death in a drunken motorcycle accident on 16 June 1945 provoked widespread sadness and rumors among the Germans that he had been murdered by the NKVD (Beevor, Berlin, p. 409). In conquered Dresden the Soviets "showed some genuine concern" for the welfare of the German population. On May 16, 1945, the Red Army released thirty thousand tons of potatoes, ninety-five hundred tons of wheat, and eleven hundred tons of meat and other provisions to cover the Dresdeners’ emergency needs. By May 20, hundreds of food stores and bakeries had reopened for business, and a rationing system was initiated to avoid outright starvation. (Frederick Taylor, Dresden Tuesday, 13 February 1945, HarperCollins e-books, p. 385).
[96] ZOMEF 44-3, p. 398.
[97]Zeugnis, pp. 268-269, 301.
[98]Königsberg, entry of 31 December 1947, pp. 301-302.
[99] As above, entry of 1 July 1947, p. 246.
[100]Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, pp. 36-40.
[101]Königsberg, entry of 31 December 1947, pp. 298-300.
[102]Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, p. 33.
[103] 1,799 deaths outside and 881 deaths in hospitals on 20 September, respectively 2,933 and 901 deaths on 20 October (ZOMEF 44-3, p. 396).
[104]Zeugnis, pp. 265-265.
[105] Kossert, as above.
[106] As above pp. 347-348.
[107] Lasch, as above.
[108] ZOMEF 44-3, p. 399.
[109] As above, p. 400.
[110] As above, p. 399.
[111] According to German Federal Statistics Office (Dr. Werner Nellner, "Die Vertreibungsverluste der Bevölkerung in den Ostgebieten des Deutschen Reiches", Wirtschaft und Statistik, Heft 10, Oktober 1956, pp. 496 to 498), East Prussia had a population of about 2.43 million when the war began and gained 170,000 inhabitants due to excess births over deaths from then until 1950, for a total of 2.6 million. Of these about 290,000, that is more than 11 %, were considered probable deaths during flight and expulsion. Adding about 210,000 wartime deaths among German troops from East Prussia yields half a million, which would mean that nearly 20 % of East Prussia’s population lost their lives during and after the war. 1.94 million were assumed by Nellner to have found refuge on East and West German territory as of 13 September 1950, and about 140,000 were assumed to still be on East Prussian territory under "foreign rule" by Poland and the Soviet Union.
[112] Of these, according to the previous calculations, 24,397 would have died from September 1945 to May 1946 and 6, 100 from then until April 1947.
[113]Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, p. 62. Starlinger highlighted how much conditions had improved by the time of his incarceration.
[114]Based on the figures in Richard Overy, The Dictators. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, Allen Lane, p. 613, it can be calculated that from 1945 to 1947 the average annual population of the Gulag camps was 757,072. The total number of recorded deaths in these years was 97,670 (from Overy, p. 615), that is 32,557 per year on average, a mortality rate of 4.30% p.a.
[115]Vertreibungsverbrechen 1945—1948. Bericht des Bundesarchivs vom 28. Mai 7974. Archivalien und ausgewählte Eriebnisberichte. Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen, Bonn, 1989. The figures are on pp. 40-41.
[116] Overy, as above pp. 613, 615.
[117] Calculated from Overy, as above.
[118] According to Pavel Polian (Against their Will. The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, p. 194) there were 134,400 Kalmyks in the USSR in 1939, of whom 44,125 had died by 1 August 1948 – ca. 32.83%.
[119] Estimates of the number of Leningrad civilian siege victims go up to 1 million or more, but probably the most realistic estimate is that about 800,000 out of an immediate pre-siege population of about 2.5 million perished. This order of magnitude is mentioned in Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad. (Avon Books, New York, 1970), pp. 590ff.; Anna Reid, Leningrad. The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (2011 Bloomsbury, London), Appendix I (pp. 417-418); various sources cited in Blockade Leningrads 1941-1944. Dossiers (a publication of the Museum Berlin Karlshorst in German and Russian), pp. 110-113. For a history of military operations in the Leningrad region see David M. Glantz, The Siege of Leningrad 1941-1944. 900 Days of Terror, Spellmont, UK, 2001.
[120] See my series Mattogno takes on the Jäger Report (well, he tries)
[121]Zeugnis, p. 303, my translation: "The faster one died, the better. In the end, according to my estimate, it was 100,000 out of originally 120,000 to 130,000 civilians who did the Russians this favor. Hitler wanted Europe ‘clean of Jews’, Stalin East Prussia ‘clean of Germans’. Nevertheless, the one can never be compared with the other."

 Having written just a few days ago about Ryan Faulk's problematic foray into Jewish population analysis 1939-1945, I checked his Bitchute video again to see whether anyone had posted the link from here to the comments section.

Turns out someone did.

I also happened to visit the Cesspit, knowing that Faulk had registered there a few months ago. And what do you know? Turns out Faulk began a new thread since I made last week's blog post, consulting the brain trust over at CODOH to assure him that he's right and I'm wrong. Someone also apparently pointed out the Korherr Report to Faulk, and so he's second guessing himself in that regard as well.

"Basically, does anyone know how the Nazis were counting Jews? Did they have guys running around with clipboards?" asks our young hero.

Call me crazy, but maybe you should look into more sources than just the American Jewish Yearbook before you present yourself as an expert on the topic?

There's a British Shakespeare scholar named Neema Parvini who has made a second career out of far right commentary on a YouTube channel called Academic Agent. He Tweets under the handle OGRolandRat.

As I've written here before, I share something in common with Robert Faurisson and Grover Furr -- and it turns out with Parvini as well. That is, all four of us took our advanced degrees in literary studies. (In the case of Furr, we both wrote our dissertations on certain aspects of medieval literature.) I mention this fact because a recent interaction I had with Parvini on Twitter called to mind why history is perhaps something best left to people with actual historical training.

The issue at hand was the issue of the shrunken heads presented as evidence at Nuremberg. Our own Sergey Romanov put in his typical yeoman's work discussing this incident, so I'd refer the interested reader there. When I was tagged into the Twitter discussion by a follower, Parvini was vehemently insisting that the shrunken heads were fake. His objection seemed to come down to the following issues: 1) the shrunken heads were presented as evidence alongside purported lampshades made from human skin, the latter of which were later demonstrated by DNA testing to be fake; 2) both the heads and lampshades were presented at Nuremberg, which Parvini considers to be an entirely tainted proceeding; and 3) according to Parvini, the Nazis would not have made shrunken heads in any circumstance.

The problems with these three issues are the following, in order.

1) Just because one piece of evidence turns out to be bogus is no reason to dismiss all of the other evidence, although there is certainly good reason to be suspicious. In the case of the shrunken heads, since 1946, additional evidence has come to light suggesting that the shrunken heads were indeed real. Thus, whereas the human skin lampshades have been conclusively proven to be false, the shrunken heads cannot be similarly discarded. Rather, what the shrunken heads have that the lampshades lack is corroboration. In particular, there is corroboration in the form of documentary evidence. When I made this point to Parvini ("Yeah, that's kinda how history works. We use documents."), he dismissed the document I provided as "just a court record," despite the document not coming to light until decades later.

2) The issue of Nuremberg as a bogus proceeding is more complicated and would require too much time and effort to go into here. The underlying assumption is one of dishonesty, and certainly we can point to instances like the Soviets' inclusion of the Katyn Forest Massacre as a crime committed by Germany (when it was they who were the actual culprits) as reason to believe that all was not above board at Nuremberg -- certainly it was not. However, there is simply no reason to believe that the American prosecutors who presented the shrunken heads and lampshades were deliberately presenting false evidence. In fact, given the verified provenance of the shrunken heads, there is every reason to believe that the lampshades were believed to be just as real as the shrunken heads turned out to be. Presented together, they tell a particular story about man's inhumanity to man as practiced under Nazi occupation. That story is no less true if one of the pieces of evidence is ultimately disqualified. There's enough evidence remaining to make the case.

3) The point of whether the Nazis would make shrunken heads is the one over which Parvini lost his temper. As I stated in a thread, why wouldn't the Nazis have made shrunken heads from dead Poles? Does Parvini hold the Nazis to some elevated standard? Is this more of the old "Germans wouldn't have done it this way" garbage that deniers routinely spout, not understanding even for a moment how ad hoc much of what the Nazis did was or how often individuals on the ground acted without the prior approval of those above them? It really is a simple question. If the Nazis would engage in human experimentation of all grotesque sorts, what would stop them from shrinking a couple of heads? After all, it's not like other parties in the war didn't engage in trophy hunting in combat, notably Americans with the Japanese. American GIs routinely sent Japanese ears and skulls back to friends and family stateside. But we are to assume that a handful of Nazis experimenting with making shrunken heads is simply beyond the pale?

Much of what I argue here has been said at this blog multiple times before (often by me over more than a decade). In this particular case, I do think Parvini is blinded by his lack of historical training and his inability to understand how pieces of historical evidence are weighed and assessed. His arguments were loaded with logical fallacies -- primarily a flat-out appeal to incredulity -- that showed no real familiarity with the larger context of what he was trying to argue. One had to wonder why he was even bothering.

The other part of the story here is that, in Parvini, we have yet another case of a semi-prominent person on the far right dipping his foot into denial but not taking the big plunge. We've seen this pattern already with Paul Craig Roberts and Ron Unz (the latter of whom eventually did take the plunge). Parvini is a bit more clever, but he does have a bit of a record that precedes him.

For his own part, Parvini denies being a Holocaust denier and has threatened yours truly with a lawsuit should I even dare blog about him. I'm not prepared to say he's a Holocaust denier, to be clear. I am prepared to say that he's out of his depth debating this material and, further, that he's likely a deeply unpleasant person given the below tweets. 

Whether he's aware of it or not, Parvini using techniques of soft denial that most of us here can smell a mile off. He may not be a Holocaust denier, but absent his protestations, he sure as hell sounds like one.