"The World Almanac for 1940 gives the world's Jewish population as 15,319,359. The World Almanac for 1949 puts the number of Jews in the world at 15,713,638.
"If the World Almanac figures are correct, "the world's Jewish population did not decrease in the war decade, but showed a small increase."
The 1949 figure offered by Mr. Djurdjevic was, as you're about to see, an outright lie, as was the conclusion drawn.
When citing the World Almanac as a source for data "proving" that there was no Jewish population decline during World War II, Holocaust deniers are simply propagating one of the standard denier myths that has recurred regularly for more than a decade.
The problem has nothing whatever to do with rates of population increase or anything like that. It has to do with how frequently the World Almanac's sources had access to fresh estimates of religious populations.
Whoever first started propagating World Almanac figures neglected to mention that all figures before
1949 were from 1938 estimates. Since the year of etimate is given at the top of the chart it is difficult to believe that the originator did not intentionally mean to decieve by negelecting this key piece of information.
I have posted the following correction several times:
The University of Alberta library has the World Almanac issues for the pertinent period for 1941, 1944, 1947, 1948, and 1949. The figures listed for total world Jewish population are as follows:
1941 15,748,091
1944 15,192,089
1947 15,688,259
1948 15,688,259
1949 11,266,600
Now you may be wondering what happened to all those Jews in 1948-49. No fresh estimates were made between 1938 and 1947. The figures listed for 1941, 1947, and 1948 are identified as estimates made in 1938. The source for the estimate for 1944 is not given, and the numbers are listed differently than in other years. In 1944, the numbers are given as a part of a list of various world religions rather than standing on their own with a country-by-country breakdown as in the other years.
Only in 1949 are postwar estimates employed, the figures given are for estimates made in 1948. A year or two lag seems to be common for various other population estimates given by the World Almanac.
The difference between the 1938 and 1948 figures is thus 4,481,491.
In 1949, however, the World Almanac gives a revised 1939 population of 16,643,120 giving a difference of between 1938 and 1947 of 5,376,520. Where the extra population between 1938 and 1939 came from is not cited, though one might speculate that it was based upon the Nazi estimates made in 1942 for the Wannsee Conference.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-of-science/worldalmanac.html