Such speculations as the above happen to coincide approximately with published estimates. For
example Professor Stefan Possony reports that "The records of Israel's War Crimes Investigations
Office indicate that throughout occupied Europe some 95,000 nazis and nazi collaborators were
directly connected with anti-Jewish measures, massacres, and deportations...." (The
Ukrainian-Jewish Problem, Plural Societies, Winter 1974). The middle column below contains the
rate of anti-Semitic war criminality 1939-1945 per 10,000 population, and the right-hand column
contains the estimated number of such war criminals. Possony points out that these figures fail
to cover Croats, Serbs, and Jews themselves who also "were forced to participate in the
extermination" (p. 92). It must be kept in mind that Possony did not himself conduct any
research, but is merely passing on Israeli estimates without any scrutiny of his own; neither is
it explained how the incidence per 10,000 is calculated - we may wonder when Russians together
with Byelorussians contribute 9,000 war criminals and Ukrainians contributed 11,000, and when we
know that the number of Russians together with Byelorussians is much greater than the number of
Ukrainians, how it can be that the Russian rate of 8/10,000 can be higher than the Ukrainian
rate of 3/10,000. Perhaps the calculation used as a denominator the number of Russian,
Byelorussians, and Ukrainians actually under German occupation, and so who had the opportunity
to offer their criminal collaboration so that even though the number of Russian collaborators is
low, the Russian collaboration rate is high because only a comparatively small number of
Russians found themselves under German occupation.
Balts
Austrians
Russians and Byelorussians
Germans
Poles
Ukrainians
Western Europeans
20
10
8
6
4
3
0.5
11,000
8,500
9,000
45,000
7,500
11,000
3,000
______
95,000
The figure of 11,000 for Ukrainians being some three times higher than my speculative figure of
3,600 can be explained by the Israeli researchers using a more inclusive definition of what
constituted collaboration (where I was specifying criminal collaboration) and might be explained
too by the Israeli researchers requiring weaker evidence than would be required to commence
criminal prosecution (where I was demanding evidence which would launch a criminal
prosecution). In any case, whether it's one criminal collaborator per 10,000 Ukrainians or
three makes no difference to the fundamental argument which I propose below.