----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Pretty" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 5:33 PM
Subject: Re: Soviet deaths due to the Great Patriotic War & historians treatment of numbers

Date:   Mon, 17 May 2004 15:23:18 -0700 (PDT)
From:   Jon Petrie <[log in to unmask]>

Simon Ertz (16 May) is almost certainly correct:
"[Re:] the contradiction in the Ellman /Maksudov paper
... the mistake is not the figure (70 000) but the
expression of the death rate, which should have been
"7 per thousand" or "0.7 percent" instead of "0.7 per
thousand." So the Ellman/ Maksudov claim of 400,000
*natural* deaths to be expected in the combined Soviet
armed forces and POW population of WWII is almost
certainly accurate and their reduction of official
Soviet estimates of 8.7 million military (including POW)
deaths is mathematically legitimate. (Sorry to have
lead readers astray.) (1)

I am embarrassed by my 14 May claim that there were
circa '500,000' excess WWII Soviet camp deaths --
excess beyond normal expected deaths in an equivalent
Soviet population in unoccupied Soviet territory.
Total deaths per the Simon Ertz figures 1941 thru 1945
is circa 932,000 -- so excess camp deaths per my
definition above would, I suspect, be over 700,000.
(2)

Simon Ertz argues that excess camp deaths should be
seen as war deaths.  Excess death tolls in Soviet
camps during the war were certainly largely a result
of war conditions but lumping those deaths with other
war deaths and without comment I think has mislead
many partly because this practice is contrary to the
practice employed in counting Holocaust dead.

In Germany war conditions -- allied bombing in
particular -- lead to a serious deterioration of
already terrible conditions within German camps in the
last months of the war and a significantly increased
monthly death toll in the working camp population.
Yet we think of the Jews who died in the German camps
in the spring of 1945 as victims of the Holocaust, not
of the war. (Ann Frank died of typhus circa 31 March
1945.)  We hold the Germans responsible for conditions
and deaths in the camps -- they put the people there.

I am not arguing that Holocaust practice is the
'right' way to go for Soviet camp victims -- if a
judgment call by a particular historian in a
particular context is made to include (or exclude)
Soviet camp victims as war victims that in itself is
of little consequence.  But if no thought is given to
inclusion/ exclusion, and if global Soviet death
figures are given without explanation (and thus
without differentation between Soviet camp victims and
the Soviet victims of German camps), important nuances
of the historical record are not being respected.


Re Mark Tauger's contestation of my claim that the
Bengal famine was largely a product of war time
conditions: 1) I thank Mark Tauger for drawing
attention to recently published work that contradicts
the accepted historical wisdom.  2)  The accepted old
wisdom was that the Bengal famine was the result of
war time conditions and the accepted old accounting
for British Commonwealth/ Empire deaths, to my
knowledge, did *not* include the Bengal famine victims.


Again, clarity/accuracy in historical accounting of
Soviet death tolls requires *not* that Soviet deaths due
to war time deprivations (Stalinist terror/ Shoah
murder) be excluded (included) from any totals of war
deaths but clarity/accuracy, given the practices in
other historical accounts, requires a prominent
statement indicating the inclusion (or exclusion) of
such categories of deaths and some estimate of such
deaths. (3)

In my April 30 posting which introduced this thread I
wrote:

"Within Holocaust studies an invented figure of 'five
million' non-Jewish victims of Nazi terror is
sometimes employed by historians and respected
institutions and has received essentially no
criticism."  And I cited such an employment that
referenced "many hundreds of thousands [!!] of
Ukrainians, Belorussians, Czechs and other Slavs ...
killed."

My 14 May posting documented significant minimizing
statements re Soviet death tolls in major museums
staffed by historians -- e.g. "While most POW's
suffered levels of privation and boredom, the
situation of Soviet and German captives
on the Eastern front was particularly harsh."

None of the five postings responding to the cited two
postings has evidenced any interest in discussing/
recognizing the concealing/ radical minimizing of
Soviet death tolls within prestigious, supposedly
educational, historian staffed, museums.

I am wondering about this silence.

("Elementary, my dear Watson" ... "But your deduction
does not explain why my dog did not bark." - "The
Hound of the Baskervilles")

Jon Petrie


(1) The 1970 American male death rate per 1000: 15-24
age group, 1.9; 25-34 age group, 2.2 -- in 1900 the
figures were 5.9 and 8.2 (Statistical History of US,
p. 61). Presumably Soviet 1939 death rates were
similar to the American death rates of 1900 (and not
significantly below those of 1970.)

I continue to claim that circa 500,000 should be added
to the Ellman/ Maksudov reduced figure to account for
the likely death of 500,000 1941 captured conscripts
-- conscripts who are not counted in official Soviet
figures.


(2) Per the Simon Ertz figures: in 1942 the 352,560
camp deaths were 24.9% of the camp population so the
camp population was very approximately 1.5 million.
Similar calculations for other later years result in
broadly similar camp populations. (In 1941 the camp
population was circa 2 million but once war started
"hundreds of thousands of *comparably* healthy male
prisoners [were] prematurely released and mobilized"
(Simon Ertz).)  WWII annual death toll in equivalent
non camp population in unoccupied Soviet Union bearing
in mind Ellman/Maksudov circa 7 million excess death
estimate I guess as 25 per 1000 [no expertese here] so
in 4 years expected deaths in a 1.5 million Soviet
camp population 150,000.  (And probably circa 20,000
of the 115,484 1941 camp deaths (41,275 in 1940)
occurred before the German invasion.)

(3) The draft of John Barber and Mark Harrison's new
book provides detailed estimates of the components of
Soviet war dead. Their figures are *very different* from
the Ellman/Maksudov component figures.

Barber/Harrison: "at least 10 million Red Army deaths
[including POWs],"  11.5 million killed/ dying
prematurely in German occupied Soviet 1941 territory,
2.2 million forced laborers from these territories
dying in Germany, and "one to two million" excess
deaths in the civilian population in the unoccupied
Soviet territories -- p 7
>http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/harrison/papers/patrioticwar.pdf<