The Korherr Report

The “Statistical Report on the ‘Final Solution’”, also known as the Korherr Report, was written on March 23, 1943 by Dr. Richard Korherr at the request of SS leader Heinrich Himmler. This report compiles data about the populations of Jews across Europe. It begins by warning the reader of the difficulty in accurately tracking the precise number of Jews, then goes on to list in its “Balance Sheet” the number of Jews in Germany. From there, Korherr explains the “weakness of the Jewish Volk” to explain the decrease in their numbers. He then discusses separately the emigration and evacuation of Jews from Reich territory. The following sections enumerate the Jews in ghettos, concentration camps, penal institutions, and work deployments. The report concludes with a summary of the Jewish populations across Europe, declaring in its closing lines, that “All in all, it is likely that…in the first decade of the National Socialist German Machtergreifung, European Jewry is likely to have lost close to half of its numbers.” This report is, as one would expect from a Nazi …show more content…
Examples of this are throughout the document. Korherr warns in his introduction that numbers given may have contradictions due to the “nature of Jewry and its historical development”, citing the “restless wanderings” of the Jewish population, assimilation, and Jewish attempts to evade counting as reasons for the uncertainty in his data. Attempts to count racial Jews were “sabotaged” by the Jews themselves. These comments ascribe the Nazi’s issues—specifically here the collection of census data—on the Jews, a running theme of the Nazi