SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 371
less they had very personal reasons, such as a marriage with a local
partner.
2) This hypothesis is much more convincing than the preceding one,
especially in the case of France. Only 22,691 Jews from the 67,693 deported
from the Drancy camp actually had French citizenship. The remainder
consisted of foreign Jews (German, Polish, Russian, Romanian)
who had emigrated to France 75 and had lived there more or less
legally. These people probably did not have strong emotional ties to
France.
On the other hand, it is impossible that the 8,000 Parisian Jews mentioned
above, who had taken refuge with the Red Army, should have
belonged exclusively or even largely to this group and then emigrated
overseas without exception. There is no mention anywhere in the
French literature on this subject concerning the return of even one such
French Jew from the USSR, which is at least an indication that there
were no (or only very few) such returnees.
Hypothesis 2 breaks down completely when we consider the Jews
deported from Holland. They were for the most part Dutch citizens,
formed one of the most strongly assimilated groups of Jews in Europe,
did not have marked Zionist tendencies, and had not suffered from anti-
Semitism in their country before the war. Moreover, Holland had not
sustained serious material damage during the conflict and promised to
become rapidly the wealthy country it had been before the war. Hence,
most Dutch Jews had neither an ideological nor an economic incentive
to emigrate.
3) There are no indications in the sense that official western European
agencies would have consciously falsified their statistics.
4) We may also exclude the idea that the Germans massacred the
Jews before retreating. As A. Butz has rightly remarked, such crimes
would not have gone unnoticed, and the victorious powers could have
presented at Nuremberg hard evidence for mass murder rather than relying
on the nonsensical tale of the “gas chambers.” 1103 (We can obviously
not exclude excesses by desperate German soldiers under the circumstances
they faced.)
5) We believe that this explanation is very convincing for the following
reason:
1103 A. Butz, op. cit. (note 1038), p. 271.