Re: The Jews Went to Work? Organization Todt
Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2025 10:44 am
Multiple sources for 1943 indicate the number of Jews remaining in the Ostland, following multiple sources for late 1942, since in November 1942 the number remaining and employed by all agencies including the SS was surveyed.Callafangers wrote: ↑Thu Aug 28, 2025 11:34 pm Let's take just one, then:
Yes, fortunately, I was able to dig up this 'inconvenient source(s)' you reference, it's here: https://rodoh.info/post/16436SanityCheck wrote: ↑Thu Aug 28, 2025 9:32 pmI went over some very inconvenient sources for your 'theory' at RODOH a while back, specifically showing that by mid-1943, multiple sources indicated 72,000 Jews remained in the RK Ostland, a mixture of Latvian, Lithuanian and Reich Jews.
Weissruthenien counted first 30,000, then 27,000 Jews remaining in November 1942; this included 9500 in the Minsk ghetto. In February 1943, the Slutsk ghetto was liquidated with 3300 Jews killed, and other ghettos and camps were similarly destroyed. This included 2850 Jews working under the auspices of the OT in Krasne/Krasnoje in the Wilejka district. The conference in July 1943 referenced 16,000 Jews in Weissruthenien, a separate report from the same month counted 11,776 Jewish labourers in Weissruthenien.
Data and details are quite clear in Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, a book which is ultimately essential to read and digest, even if it takes you a decade, for covering the relevant themes from all possible angles (agriculture/food, labour, industry/towns and infrastructure, organisation, antipartisan warfare, POWs and the murder of Jews in Belarus)
Lithuania had 44,000 Jews at the start of April 1943 according to the KdS, this number included Jews from the Belarusian border strip annexed in April 1943, 4000 of whom were executed at Ponary that same month as noted in the same report.
Latvia documented 11,000 Jewish workers in January 1943 in sources I cited and linked to earlier in the thread. 15,000 total fits with these and other sources.
Estonia had no Jews other than a hundred or two taken from two 1942 transport to Raasiku from the Reich who were otherwise murdered. All native Estonian Jews had been murdered by mid-1942 and there weren't many to begin with; 1000 is the rounded number for Holocaust deaths for Estonian Jews. As noted earlier, Estonia's total population under occupation was just 1 million. More Jews arrived only in September 1942 with the setting up of KL Vaivara and the transfer of thousands of Jews from Vilnius when the Vilna ghetto was dissolved.
Back to showing there really weren't large numbers of hidden Jews in the Ostland:
In mid-1943, the GK Weissruthenien noted that there were a total of 505,000 Versorgungsberechtigte (those entitled to supply/rations) in the Generalkommissariat, of whom 281,000 were nonworkers i.e. dependents, 164,000 normal workers and 60,000 heavy, extra-heavy and barracksed (kasernierte) workers.
This compares with a population of 2.4-2.9 million through the occupation.
C.f. WiIn Ost La, 12.7.43; RMO III E, 3.7.43; GK Weissruthenien III E, 20.7.43, NARA T77/1196/378-85.
workers would include officials of the Belarusian collaborator administration; the definition of worker in this context is someone who is not a 'self-supplier' i.e. a peasant farmer growing their own food. As food was rationed, such counts are telling.
Minsk had a population of 100,000 in 1942-2. The 10 district capitals were small towns adding several hundred thousand more in total: Baranovichi had a population of 25,000 in mid-1942, Slonim 12,000 after the liquidation of the ghetto there. Smaller market towns also would have workers on the ration lists, the heavy workers would be more likely to be deployed in dispersed camps for the railways, OT, etc in the countryside.
Rationing policy for Jews tended to equate them with lower categories, sometimes Jewish workers were given the same rations as non-Jewish dependents or children, or heavy worker supplements withheld and the Jewish workers treated as 'normal' workers. However organised, the documents just cited did not distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, the remaining total of 16,000 Jews would have been a small fraction of the 505,000 on the ration lists.
You're welcome to try claiming that there were hundreds of thousands of foreign Jews in Weissruthenien hidden away... somewhere, but that figure of 505,000 on rations, and 224,000 in the non-agricultural workforce for mid-1943 should surely give you pause. This was a very under-urbanised region and considered part of Poland B in the interwar period, the eastern underdeveloped part.
In case you're tempted to try displacing large numbers further east to Army Group Centre's rear area, the ration lists were deliberately cut in this region from 1.4 million out of 6 million inhabitants, to 800,000 by August 1943, with the withdrawals playing only some of the role here; the military economics staffs deliberately threw Russian and Belarusian civilians off the ration lists, with a target of cutting 243,000 dependents from the lists among other goals. They aimed to increase the number of heavy workers in the process.
There's no trace of large numbers of foreign Jewish dependents i.e. those unfit for work anywhere in the planning materials for agricultural quotas or rationing for these regions. Please explain.