Jewish Population Passport Issue Protocols as a Statistical Source for the History of the Brest Ghetto

Abstract

The article describes the meaning of the use of mass sources of the Nazi occupation period to obtain data on the socio-demographic structure of the Jewish population of the city of Brest on the eve of the Great Patriotic War and in the times of the Brest Ghetto. Such a source of statistical data on the history of the Holocaust is fairly rare, since the Ghetto documentation has not survived in the archives of the former Soviet republics. The article focuses on passport issue protocols for the Jewish population dating from the end of the 1941. Quantitative methods used to process the information contained in the documents, taken on the basis of random sampling, enable the author to obtain representative results on the occupational structure of the Jewish population, its gender and age composition, the correlation between the skilled and unskilled workers among the Jews of Brest, the cultural and linguistic status of the Jewish population, as well as the settlement on the territory of the city. The materials of the article are the result of the analysis of 12,000 passport issue protocols and 5,000 entries on the children of the Ghetto. The passport issue protocols for the dwellers of the Brest Ghetto add to the materials available on the Jewish demography of Western Belarus of the first quarter of the 20th century.

Keywords

• массовый источник
• протоколы паспортизации
• статистика
• случайная выборка
• количественные методы
• репрезентативность
• демографические показатели
• профессиональная структура
• культурно-языковая ориентация
• половозрастные признаки
• гетто.