Perpetrators of genocide often pay little attention to the number of victims murdered. The ultimate act of dehumanization is the complete stripping of their subjectivity—to the point that they become a faceless mass, not individual persons—with names, surnames, or even numbers.
On the morning of July 22, 1942, several cars pulled up to the building at 26 Grzybowska Street, then the seat of the Jewish Council in Warsaw. A group of uniformed Germans, led by Hermann Höfle, the chief of staff of "Aktion Reinhardt," got out and proceeded to a meeting with Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Judenrat, and a group of councilors. The secretary at the meeting, Marceli Reich-Ranicki, a renowned cultural critic after the war, recalled that the audience could hear the sounds of a Johann Strauss waltz played by the SS men waiting in the car. Höfle opened the meeting by announcing, "You should be aware that the number of Jews in Warsaw is too great," and then dictated the deportation order, which was to begin that same day. According to his instructions, the Jewish Council was to ensure "that every day, starting from 22.7 July [19]42, 6000 people were delivered to Zbory Square by 16 p.m. at the latest." On the same day, the first transport of Jews left Warsaw for Treblinka.
The extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto began. Over the next two months, hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported from Warsaw.
In the autumn of 1942, Gustawa Jarecka, a writer residing in the ghetto, attempted to describe the course of the operation, recalling the events she witnessed as an employee of the Jewish Council. However, in her introduction, she cautioned: "In reality, nothing is more telling than numbers!" Despite her appeal, the number of deportees from Warsaw in the summer of 1942 has not yet been thoroughly researched, and the literature offers widely divergent estimates. This article aims to outline the results of existing research and to narrow the range within which the number of deportees might fall.
At the outset, it should be noted that perpetrators of genocide often pay little attention to the number of those murdered. The ultimate act of dehumanizing victims is to completely strip them of their subjectivity—to the point that they become a faceless mass, not individual persons—with names, surnames, or even numbers. This idea was most clearly expressed by the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, Franz Stangl, who, while serving a life sentence, spoke with investigative journalist Gitta Sereny:
[Sereny] – So you didn't see them as human beings?
[Stangl] – A cargo – he said in a flat voice – It was a cargo. […]
[Sereny] – There were so many children among them, didn't you think about your own children, about how you would feel in their parents' situation?
[Stangl] "No," he said slowly, "I don't think I've ever thought that way." He paused for a moment. "You see," he continued, still with that great seriousness and obvious desire to find new truth within himself, "I rarely perceived them as individuals. They were always a great mass to me."
This approach was also reflected in the way the count of deportees from Warsaw was conducted. As Gustawa Jarecka wrote: "The deportees were recorded as they were being loaded onto the wagons. The figures on each wagon were probably not very precise, chalked down. From there, the Order Service copied them down. A dozen or several dozen fewer could always be counted." Mieczysław Brzeziński was responsible for maintaining this count. As the anonymous author wrote, "the district officer of the Order Service, Engineer Brzeziński, has more precise data (unless he deliberately falsifies them). He was the leader of the group of loaders." It was most likely a list based on his notes that has been preserved in the Underground Ghetto Archives – the data contained therein was described as semi-official or official. This data was continuously transmitted to both the deportation management and the German civilian authorities, which is why it was also referred to as German data. For the purposes of this article, this will be referred to as the "loaders" list.
According to this list, a total of 227,954 people were deported from the ghetto from July 22 to September 21 to the Treblinka extermination camp, while a further 11,580 were sent to the transit camp ("Dulag"). However, this number cannot be accepted uncritically, as the Jewish authors of the report "Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw" written in the autumn of 1942 noted. They commented on the data as follows: "the numbers in the individual columns [...] of the table come from German sources interested in a tendentious reduction; they should be considered minimal and deviating from the actual state of affairs." This comment is unclear – it is unclear why the Germans would be interested in underestimating the number of deportees. The authors of "Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw" also pointed to the lack of data on deportations for several days (August 19–24, August 26, September 11, 1942). They supplemented the entries for these periods with estimates: "presumably 20,000," 3000, and 5000. Furthermore, the report's authors omitted data for September 21 (2196 people) – the last day of this deportation operation. This led them to a total of 251,795 deportees, while after adding data from September 21, the figure appears to be 253,991. However, the authors of "Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw" overlooked the fact that the list of "loaders" does not provide the number of deportees for September 1–2, and they did not present any estimates for these dates.
Findings made so far
Data drawn from The Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw are considered credible by some historians. These include Israeli extermination camp researcher Yitzhak Arad and Polish historian Ruta Sakowska, who, however, allowed for the possibility that this estimate should be raised. Izrael Gutman, on the other hand, considered these numbers to be underestimated and assumed that 265,000 Jews were deported in the summer of 1942. Two researchers, Tatiana Berenstein and Adam Rutkowski, reached a different conclusion. Based on demographic data, they proposed several estimates of the number of Jews in Warsaw on the eve of the deportations, the number of escapees beyond the walls, and those remaining after the deportations in the so-called residual ghetto. Depending on the scenario, the authors estimated that from 246,000 to over 280,000 were deported from July to September. Jews, considering the upper end of this range (270,000–280,000) as the most probable. Even higher figures were presented by the authors of Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw , who, in addition to presenting data from the "loaders" list, insisted on the figure of 300,000 deportees. The Stroop Report , on the other hand , uses the figure of 310,322 deported in the summer of 1942. Most historians consider these figures either exaggerated or as representing the total human losses in the ghetto, also taking into account deaths (both natural and from gunshot wounds) and those sent to labor by the "Dulag." In such a case, the number of deportees to the Treblinka extermination camp would exceed 280,000. In Polish literature on the subject, the figure of 280,000 deported to Treblinka and the Warsaw Ghetto's human losses during the operation, estimated at around 300,000, are frequently cited, for example, in in the works of Bernard Marek and in the study by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak.
Estimation based on deportation notes
Few researchers have considered the possibility that a figure below 254,000 deportees was realistic. However, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The additions to the list of "loaders" made by the authors of The Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw raise some doubts – particularly regarding the period from August 19th to 24th, as Hermann Höfle's unit responsible for the extermination of Jews was absent from Warsaw for part of that period – during which they organized deportations from other cities in the Warsaw district. It is unclear on which of these days trains departed from the railway siding at Umschlagplatz to the Treblinka extermination camp. In the first years after the war, Tatiana Brustin-Berenstein suggested that the six-day gap (August 19th to 24th) resulted from a break in deportations, a claim quickly refuted. After verifying it with Abraham Lewin's diary, it turns out that the break could have lasted at most from August 19th (on that day Lewin wrote: "Today there is no 'action' in Warsaw, the gang went to Otwock"), to August 21st (already on August 23rd he noted: "Yesterday was the thirty-second day of the bloody 'action'. They did not interrupt it"). This would mean that the break lasted at most three days – during the remaining three days, transports most likely departed. During this period of the action, approximately 4,000 Jews were deported in a single train, so between August 19th and 24th, probably closer to 12,000 rather than 20,000 people were deported, as suggested by the authors of Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw.
Another gap in the deportation list occurred between August 28th and September 2nd, 1942, when deportations were supposedly suspended. This suspension is confirmed by German documents. From August 28th, the Treblinka extermination camp experienced a pause in accepting new transports because the then-commander, Imfried Eberl, had caused a backlog of several trains carrying Jews, and the camp grounds were strewn with unburied corpses, making it impossible to deceive the arrivals into believing they would be sent to work after their "bath." It is unclear, however, on what day this pause ended. A roundup had already taken place in the ghetto on September 1st, but due to a lack of wagons, the Jews were confined to the Umschlagplatz overnight. That night, Warsaw was bombed by Soviet aircraft, and in the resulting confusion, some Jews escaped from the Umschlagplatz. The next day, the blockade of the Fritz Schultz and Walter Többens factory resumed, and "several thousand workers were taken away." It is unclear whether the transport left Warsaw that day, or whether the Jews were only sent out the following day, along with those captured on September 3rd.
If we assume that the "loaders" counted the deportees reliably, then the number of deportees should be estimated slightly below the figure given in Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw , whose authors overestimated the number of deportees from the period August 19–24. Therefore, the minimum estimate of the number of deportees should be around 245–250.
Estimation based on demographic data
In February 1942, the last census of the ghetto population before the deportations was conducted, determining the population at the end of January. It showed that the district was home to between 369,000 and 377,000 people. Nearly 21,000 deaths were recorded in the ghetto from the end of January to the end of June, with approximately 4,000 Jews resettled to the ghetto from the Reich and a similar number from towns in the eastern part of the Warsaw District. Therefore, the number of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto at the end of June should have been between 356,000 and 364,000. The first of these figures is confirmed by the number of food cards issued for July 1942 – 355,514. Just over 2,000 people died before the deportations began. If we subtract from this figure (353,000) the number of ghetto escapees, those deported to labor camps, those who died within the district, and the ghetto population after the deportations, we arrive at the number of people actually deported.
Determining the ghetto's population at the end of the deportations remains a difficult task. In the final phase of deportations, over thirty thousand "life tickets" were distributed – according to official German statistics, 34,969 Jews were believed to have resided in the ghetto. In addition to these, a number of so-called "wild" Jews remained in the ghetto – individuals residing illegally, often hidden in apartments by working family members or occupying vacant apartments in buildings not assigned to any of the enterprises operating within the ghetto. In October 1942, a census of the ghetto's inhabitants was conducted, but it was based on the residents' own declarations – as its authors wrote: "for many people [...] the question arose of declaring or concealing the fact of their presence. This issue was resolved by these individuals entirely individually, as no instructions in this regard were available from the authorities, and the Jewish Council also provided no guidance." Only a certain number of the "savages" decided to reveal their existence and address, and census cards from some tenement buildings in the ghetto were not received at all by the Office for the Registration of the Jewish Population. The authors calculated that they did not receive data from 35 (out of 295) buildings designated as housing blocks for Jews remaining in the ghetto, including the tenement buildings of Werterfassungstelle employees, where approximately one thousand Jews lived, as well as an unknown number of "savages." As a result, the census included only 32,340 of the legally residing Jews in Warsaw, omitting approximately 2500 individuals. In the sample of the Jewish Council and Jewish Order Service apartment building examined by the authors, 898 "savages" were found among the 4178 people registered (constituting 21,5% of the total), which is a lower estimate of the percentage of "savages."
If we assume that the percentage of unregistered Jews was similar in other parts of the ghetto, then, using the official figure of 34,969 people residing in the district, we can estimate the number of "savages" at around 7500 and the total population at least 42,500. The authors of "Liquidation..." followed a similar line, believing the ghetto's population after the deportations was 45,000, which seems a very conservative estimate, as the tenement houses not assigned to any institution were almost exclusively inhabited by "savages." Similar figures were provided by Abraham Lewin, who believed that approximately 50,000 people remained in the ghetto in the final days of deportation, from which one should deduct a certain group deported in the last transport to the Treblinka extermination camp and several groups sent to labor camps. In the fall of 1942, Emanuel Ringelblum presented popular hypotheses in the ghetto: "Some estimate the number of illegals at 7000, others at 10,000, or even 15,000"—which would give a maximum population estimate of around 50,000. A figure of 15,000 "savages" was also postulated by the author of the Demographic Note located in the Underground Ghetto Archive. Many diarists, however, insisted on a higher estimate. Stefan Szpigielman, a generally well-informed employee of the Labor Department, believed that some 50,000 or so people survived the operation, while Henryk Bryskier believed that 55,000–60,000 survived. These higher estimates are consistent with the findings of postwar researchers. Berenstein and Rutkowski believed that 60,000 people were in the ghetto in the fall of 1942. Jews, with which Engelking and Leociak agreed, while Gutman estimated the number of "savages" at at least 20,000, which gave a total population of close to 55,000.
The ghetto population after the deportation was therefore in the range of 45-60 people – with the higher of these values seeming closer to the truth.
During the deportations within the ghetto, the following people died and were buried in the Jewish cemetery: 1620 people between July 22nd and 31st, 4516 in August, and 4244 in September, including 3767 by mid-month. These figures should be considered the least likely, as in the chaos of the extermination campaign, many deaths (and executions) were likely unrecorded or recorded with delays. A significant proportion of those buried were gunshot victims (30,7% in the last ten days of July, 51% in August, and 74,1% in September), illustrating the increasing brutality with which the blockades were carried out. The accuracy of the data on the number of those shot was a subject of debate within the ghetto. Abraham Lewin commented at the end of August 1942: "Some believe, e.g. Dr. R[ingelblum], that they killed 15,000 people, others maintain (police chief Brz[eziński]) that the number of those killed is < > 6000." The number provided by Brzeziński corresponds to the number of burials that took place until the end of August, indicating that he was presenting official data. It is difficult to determine where Ringelblum obtained his data at that time. In his notes, he gave a figure of 12,000 killed during the Aktion period – it is unclear whether he included those who died of natural causes or only those murdered. However, it seems that Ringelblum's observation that official statistics were underreported was not without foundation – for example, he noted that 120 people were shot on July 26, while no data was recorded for that day.
During the same period, according to The Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw , 11,580 people were sent from the Warsaw Ghetto to the transit camp ("Dulag"). This number may be somewhat underestimated, as suggested by reports of minor blockades on days when no trains were dispatched from Warsaw to Treblinka. For example, on August 28 and 29, groups of returning workers were supposedly led to the Umschlagplatz, on August 29, several hundred workers from the Brauer factory, and in the following days, groups of several dozen workers from other factories. It is possible that the Jews captured at that time remained imprisoned at the Umschlagplatz for several days, until deportations to the extermination camp resumed, but it is also likely that they were sent to labor camps on an ongoing basis.
Determining the number of Jews who escaped the ghetto during the deportation period is a difficult task. Although sources agree that the first large wave of escapes to the "Aryan side" occurred during the deportations, a precise estimate of the number of escapees is impossible. The author of a note from the Underground Ghetto Archive estimated that 15,000 people escaped during the deportations, and several thousand more in subsequent waves of escapes. This number is almost certainly exaggerated, although it also appears in the literature. Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in the autumn of 1942: "How many hid on the other side? Over ten thousand," but noted that some returned to the ghetto after some time. Interestingly, Gunnar Paulsson, often accused of inflating estimates, believed that around 6000 escapees escaped from the ghetto during this period. For the purposes of the calculation below, an estimate of 5,000–10,000 refugees was used in the period in question.
A summary of the estimates is presented below. Since only the lower end of the range is estimated for the number of those who died in the ghetto and those sent to the "Dulag," this result should be considered a maximum estimate of the number of deportees, and further research will likely narrow the resulting range.
Of the 353 Jews living in the ghetto on July 21, 1942, over the next two months:
- At least 11,580 people were sent to labor camps (via "Dulag")
- At least 10,380 people died in the ghetto.
- 5-10 thousand people fled from the district
- 45-60 thousand people remained in the ghetto
- All the rest were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.
Therefore, the number of deportees estimated using this method is in the range of 261–281.
Summary
The above calculations do not allow for a precise determination of the number of Jews deported – the minimum estimate is 36 from the maximum. Reducing this range would require finding new sources or utilizing new research methods. Personally, I favor an estimate of 260–270 deportees, which falls within the estimated range of deportees based on demographic data. This would mean that, consistent with the intuition of the authors of " The Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw ," the "loaders" underestimated the number of people packed into the train cars. However, lower estimates, closer to daily records of deportees, cannot be dismissed out of hand. For these estimates to be accurate, however, it would be necessary to lower the estimated number of ghetto inhabitants before the deportations, thus calling into question the results of the census from early 1942 and the subsequent data on the distribution of food stamps.
Bibliography:
- Arad Yitzhak, The operation Reinhard death camps, 2nd ed., Bloomington 2018.
- Ringelblum Archive, Underground Ghetto Archive, vol. 11.
- Ringelblum Archive, Underground Ghetto Archive, vol. 23.
- Ringelblum Archive, Underground Ghetto Archive, vol. 29.
- Ringelblum Archive, Underground Ghetto Archive, vol. 33.
- Berenstein Tatiana, Rutkowski Adam, The number of Jewish people and the area they inhabited in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, "Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute" No. 26/1958, pp. 73 et seq.
- Brustin-Berenstein Tatiana, Deportations and extermination of Jewish communities in the Warsaw district, "Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute", no. 3/1952, pp. 83 et seq.
- Bryskier Henryk, Jews under the swastika, Warsaw 2021.
- Engelking Barbara, Leociak Jacek, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to a Lost City, 2nd edition, Warsaw 2013.
- Gutman Israel, Warsaw Jews 1939-1943, translated by Z. Perelmuter, Warsaw 1993.
- Mark Bernard, Life and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, 2nd ed., Warsaw 1959.
- Paulsson Gunnar, The Hidden City, translated by E. Olender-Dmowska, Cracow 2007.
- Reports of Ludwig Fischer, Governor of the Warsaw District, ed. K. Dunin-Wąsowicz, Warsaw 1987.
- Reich-Ranicki Marceli, My life, Warsaw 2000.
- Sakowska Ruta, People from the closed district, Warszawa 1975.
- Serena Gitta, Into the Darkness: Conversations with the Commandant of Treblinka, Warszawa 2002.
- Stroop Jürgen, The Jewish residential district no longer exists!, ed. A. Żbikowski, Warsaw 2009.
- Szpigielman Stefan, The Third Front: On the Struggle of Greater Germany against the Jews of Warsaw, ed. M. Janczewska, Warsaw 2020.
