The problem is that every person recorded to have been sent to a camp is accounted for to the limits of record keeping errors. Many died of disease, accident, old age and all the rest but none are recorded to have died of gassing. And, given the end when the system broke down and starvation took over and record keeping was not possible, the numbers are still about right.

      To assign people to death from gassing in these camps it is necessary to arbitrarily and without justification take twelve million people from the untraceable category which contains 31 million to the camps category. This has to be done without any claim of actually having traced them from one category to the other. The number is completely capricious.

      Thus they have to claim that they can divine from departure and arrival figures of people who were shipped by train, the number that disappeared and that they were gassed. This is quite an interesting claim but as they have a preconceived conclusion, anything will support it.

      But there are alternate explanations. For example, the time of greatest gassing at Auschwitz is cited to be in the summer of 1944. That is because of the story of one letter written from a cave near Lublin, Poland.

      On face value, that would appear damning. But something is being overlooked. That is that the allies were destroying anything and everything that moved because they had air superiority and trains with civilians were no exception. It might have been nice to make an exception for people transports but there was no way to tell from the air.

      That only covers the end of the war. The earlier phase of disappearances was in 1941. That was when Russia was permitting people to escape through the lines to refuge in Russia. Almost.

      Russia did a little bit of filtering in the refuge matter. Anyone, man or woman, who was capable of handling a rifle was given one, turned around and pointed towards the advancing Germans. This was a useless gesture at that time in the war. They died on the battlefield. If their names were even recorded, they are still hidden some place in the Russian archives.

      These two sources of the vanished 31 million do not account for a larger and nonrepresentative fraction of Jews that disappeared. For that there are several possibilities. I am not claiming these are explanations but rather that they did occur and need to be considered cumulatively.

      First, Jews had a reason to run from the Germans due to the known internment in concentration camp policy. Thus they would be most likely to run into the hands of the Russians, be given a rifle and turned around to face the Panzer Divisions.

      Second, those that did not run often put their children in orphanages (run by Christians) and their children were reported and raised as Christian, not Jewish and never reappeared on the roles of Jewish population.

      Third, given the Russian policy, women with children were not suitable to be given a rifle they continue into Russia. Did they return? Did they marry? Convert? That would account for the disappearance of most of a family.

      And how many of them died of starvation, disease and exposure along with millions of Russians?

      In line with the third, did Russia even keep records by religion or ethinicity? Why would an atheist society that did not officially believe in Mendelevian genetics (and therefore did not believe in race) do so? Jews would vanish without a trace into such a society just like Jewish immigrants vanish without a trace into the US as the US does not keep records by religion. Like it or not, Silberstein and Demjanjuk are identical save for country of origin in the US.

      Fourth, how many Jews vanished into the United States and other countries including Palestine? The US keeps no records by religion on immigrants. So how many vanished into the US and other countries?

      Although Latin America appears to get a lot of credit for harboring ex-Nazis, in fact the countries have large German communities, not Christian-German, German. How many Jews "vanished" to Latin America?

      But this begs the question of where the 31 million went. Russia does not have the slighest idea where 15 million of its people went. The Jewish "losses" pale in comparison but are at the same time quite explainable.

      And given the easily explainable reasons for "transported but did not arrive" it is clear that the allies, even at this late date and in the interests of accuracy, do not want to admit what clearly happened. Early in the war, the Russians used the escaped as cannon fodder against the Germans and towards the end all the Allies were destroying people in the transport trains.

      It is much easier to leave it all to the "evil Nazis" than to resurrect the matter this generation. It will take at least another twenty years to face this one directly.