3 - Antecedents
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
Summary
In the regions that after 1918 formed the new state of Poland following the removal of the Russian, Austrian, and German authorities, and also in the other Eastern European countries, pogroms occurred, and there were atrocities and mass killings of Jews during the years 1918 to 1921. While Goerdeler was in Eastern Europe, about one hundred Polish towns experienced bloody anti-Jewish pogroms. At least 150,000 Jews were murdered in Eastern Europe between 1918 and 1921. The murders in Lemberg (Lwów) on 22–24 November 1918, and in Pińsk, Vilna, Lida, and Minsk in April 1919, were notorious.
On 15 March 1919, representatives of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe formed the ‘Comité des Délégations Juives auprès de la Conférence de la Paix’. The Comité submitted to the Peace Conference at Paris A Report on the Pogroms in Poland, by Israel Cohen, and a memorandum entitled ‘Les Droits Nationaux des Juifs en Europe Orientale’ by Léo Motzkin, the Comité's secretary general. The memorandum stated that there were approximately 6,500,000 Jews in Congress Poland, 2,250,000 in Austria-Hungary, 240,000 in Romania, and 9,000,000 in the Turkish Empire, in Greece, Bulgaria, ‘etc.’. When Léo Motzkin wrote his memorandum, reliable demographic statistics did not exist; his numbers were estimates.
The best currently available estimates for the numbers of Jews in those countries are 2,845,300 Jews in Poland in 1921, 667,062 in Austria-Hungary in 1910, 128,859 in Austria in 1925, 756,900 in post-Trianon Romania in 1930, 473,400 in post-Trianon Hungary, around 10,000 in Greece before 1914, 43,232 in Bulgaria in 1920, and a minimum of 187,073 (in reality an estimated 220,000, allowing for the usual undercount) in the Ottoman Empire in 1914.
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- Carl Goerdeler and the Jewish Question, 1933–1942 , pp. 34 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011