cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3313701

As I was editing my essay on why the Fascist bourgeoisie committed the Shoah, I looked for a thread that I made correcting Bordiga’s exaggeration that ‘no one anywhere else wanted to allow [Jews] to enter […] no one could allow them to enter’. To my surprise, I had not yet made such a thread!

Quoting Nathan Weinstock’s Le Sionisme contre Israël, page 146:

La grande majorité des juifs européens qui ont réussi à échapper au massacre ont trouvé refuge en Union soviétique : 1.930.000 personnes, soit 75,3 % de l’ensemble des réfugiés juifs¹⁸. D’après les recherches de Schwartz²⁰, l’évacuation méthodique des populations juives menacées d’extermination par les autorités soviétiques, dont on a souvent fait état, reposerait cependant sur une exagération manifeste de la portée réelle — fort restreinte en vérité — de l’intervention des autorités de l’U.R.S.S. dans ce domaine. Les estimations de l’Institute for Jewish Affairs de New York reproduites ci‐dessus incluent vraisemblablement les juifs de la Pologne orientale et des pays baltes occupés par l’Union soviétique.

[Citations]

19. Données fournies par l’Institute for Jewish Affairs de New York et citées d’après S. Adler‐Rudel, The Agony of a People, in The Future of the Jews. A Symposium edited by J.J. Lynx, London, 1945, p. 38, tableau 2.
20. Schwartz, o. c., pp. 222 et ss.

This translates to:

The vast majority of European Jews who managed to escape the massacre found refuge in the Soviet Union: 1,930,000 people, or 75.3% of all Jewish refugees. According to Schwartz’s research, the Soviet authorities’ methodic evacuation of Jews threatened by extermination, which one frequently mentions, could be based on an exaggeration of the real range — quite narrow in reality — of the Soviet authorities’ intervention in this domain. New York’s Institute for Jewish Affairs’s estimations reproduced above probably include Jews from eastern Poland and from the Soviet Baltics.

A corroborating source for this is Professor Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, volume I, page 295:

When the Einsatzgruppen crossed the border into the USSR, five million Jews were living under the Soviet flag. The majority of the Soviet Jews were concentrated in the western parts of the country. Four million were living in territories later overrun by the [Wehrmacht]:

Buffer Territories:²

Baltic area 260,000
Polish territory 1,350,000
Bukovina and Bessarabia up to 300,000

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up to 1,910,000

Old Territories:³

Ukraine (pre‐1939 borders) 1,533,000
White Russia (pre‐1939 borders) 375,000
RSFSR Crimea 50,000
Other areas seized by [Fascists] 200,000

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ca. 2,160,000

About one and a half million Jews living in the affected territories fled before the [Fascists] arrived.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Just to supplement these data, here is an anecdote from Adam Broner’s My War Against the Nazis: A Jewish Soldier with the Red Army, page 18:

The commander of the cavalry unit who met us about three miles inside Soviet territory started negotiating with us. He asked why we were coming over to their side. People in front told him that we were fleeing the fascists and we wanted to lead a productive life in the Soviet Union.
“Are you working‐class people?” the commander asked.
“Sure we are. Look at our hands!”
“If you promise not to push any further, I will ask at headquarters if we can let you in.”
“Yes, we promise.”
“Then,” said the commander, “wait here. It will take me two to three hours to return.” We promised to behave and waited anxiously for his return. Then afar we saw him riding back bringing the good news that we were allowed to enter the USSR. Hurray!