[lbo-talk] Jews and states [was: lynching]

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Yoshie 1uoted:
> *****   3. Q: How many Jews were murdered in each country, and what
> percentages did they constitute of that country's pre-War Jewish
> population?
> 
> A:
> Austria 40,000 20%         Hungary 200,000 50%
> Belgium 40,000 67%         Italy 8,000 16%
> Bulgaria --- ---           Latvia 80,000 84%
> Czechoslovakia 315,000 88% Lithuania 135,000 87%
> Denmark 500 08%            Luxembourg 700 23%
> Estonia 1,500 33%          Norway 760 42%
> Finland 8 01%              Poland 2,850,000 88%
> France 90,000 30%          Rumania 425,000 50%
> Germany 170,000 32%        USSR 1,252,000 44%
> Greece 60,000 80%          Yugoslavia 60,000 80%
> Holland 105,000 75%
> 
> <http://www.holocaustcenterbuff.com/questions.html>   *****
> 
> Do the above proportions correlate with the degrees of anti-Jewish
> legislations, social practices, and cultural institutions of the
> respective nations before WW2?

WS: Seems like an already made conclusion, does not it?

But I have another take on the same figures, which suggest a very
different explanation.  I rearranged these figures into two groups, A
and B, and computed the average loss of the pre-war Jewish population
for each group.  The results are shown below:

GROUP A	
Austria		20%
Denmark	8%
Finland	1%
France		30%
Germany	32%
Holland	75%
Hungary	50%
Italy		16%
Luxembourg	23%
Norway	42%
Rumania	50%
Average	32%

	
GROUP B	
Belgium	67%
Czechoslovakia	88%
Estonia		33%
Greece		80%
Latvia		84%
Lithuania	87%
Poland		88%
Yugoslavia	80%
Average	77%
As you can see the countries in group B lost on average twice as much of
it pre-war Jewish population as countries in group B (77% vs. 35%).
What differentiates countries in group A from those in group B?  

The countries in group A had functioning local governments under the
Nazi occupation, which cooperated (or was forced to do so, to be more
exact) with the Nazis, but enjoyed some limited autonomy, which they
often used to thwart the deportation of Jews to the death camps.

The countries in group B, by contrast, lacked such government - they
were either ruled directly by Nazi occupational authority (e.g. Poland),
or the local Nazi-appointed authority could not function at all due to
communist resistance (esp. Yugoslavia or the Baltics).  

The notable exceptions to that rule were the Netherlands which had a
local functioning government with some autonomy during the Nazi
occupation, yet lost 75% of its pre-war Jewish population (the same as
the Group B average).

This suggests that a functioning local government, even if it is a
puppet government, was better for the local Jewish population under the
Nazi occupation than the direct Nazi rule of the occupied territory.
> From the point of causal logic, it makes more sense to attribute causal
relation to the condition existing during the holocaust than to the
conditions distant in time and obliterated, to a large extent, by the
Nazi invasion.  But it would not tell the same politically correct
story, would it?

Wojtek