By Jonathan Friedrichs, former VHEC Research Assistant
The fundamental claim of Holocaust deniers is that the Nazis did not murder 6 million European Jews and did not implement a policy of genocide. Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel was, until his deportation in March 2005, Canada’s most vociferous proponent of this form of anti-Semitism. His internet page “Zundelsite” and his many publications are intended to convince the world that Holocaust history is in fact a hoax. One publication in which he was involved was a pamphlet entitled, “Did Six Million Really Die?” Several chapters are devoted to the wide discrepancy that exists between historians—Jewish and non-Jewish— in their estimates of the total number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. While today 6 million is the figure generally used, some respected historians believe the figure to be closer to 5 million. Holocaust deniers have used this inconsistency as “proof” that the figure has been conjured up as part of “atrocity propaganda.”
Zundel is of course spreading completely spurious information.
He and other Holocaust deniers take advantage of the fact that exact numbers of Holocaust victims can never be known. Available statistics include a wide margin of error because not all victims of the Holocaust were registered; countless numbers of Jews were murdered in isolated actions outside the Nazis’ organized vehicle for murder or were killed by collaborators who did not keep records. Often records that did exist were destroyed by the Nazis, or were lost, burned, or damaged in military actions. In addition, different scholars have used different dates for computing the figures, a situation that results in statistical differences due to the changing national borders during the Holocaust period. Hence the question must be asked, how then do we calculate the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust and why is it important to do so?
There are several ways in which historians have been able to derive a figure nearing 6 million, and in fact these methods have not changed since the Jewish death toll was declared at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. The Tribunal at Nuremberg declared the number of Jewish victims to be 5,700,000. The Tribunal’s calculations, as well as all subsequent ones, first examine pre-war and post-war censuses to determine the population of Jews in Europe before and after the war. The Jewish population of Europe was about 9.5 million in 1933 and it fell to roughly 3.5 million by the end of the war. In Poland for example, there were roughly 3 million Jews in 1933 and 45,000 in 1950, according to a census taken that year.
Calculating the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust has also been carried out by examining the available documents of the Nazis and their agencies. The Nazis kept meticulous records of Jews deported to concentration camps and death camps and kept extensive lists of deportations and transports from one facility to another. Deportation lists from countries in Western Europe were in large part recovered by the Allies and although the Nazis tried to obliterate traces of their crimes towards the end of the war, many lists within Eastern Europe were recovered as well. Based largely on deportation records, it is known that the majority of Jewish deaths, over 3 million, occurred in the extermination camps.
In Auschwitz alone, between 1.1 and 1.5 million Jews perished.
Numbers of Jews who perished in the ghettos can also be estimated based on records that the Jewish councils were forced to keep. Each ghetto had to report the number of deaths by starvation, disease or fatigue to Nazi officials. The Nazis used these figures to decrease rations and space, and to rewrite forced labour lists. During 1942 and 1943 the Nazis liquidated the ghettos by deporting and murdering their inhabitants. But based largely on the information Jewish councils provided, it has been estimated that over 800,000 Jews died through ghettoization in German-occupied Europe, before the liquidations took place.
Where calculations are particularly difficult to discern are in the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and their collaborators in Eastern Europe.
The Einsatzgruppen were to report the shootings of every Jew, Roma, and Polish dissident. Some did so with precision, including breakdowns by date, location and type of victim. More commonly, individual mobile killing units did not document their operations with such scrupulous care, and reported only rough estimates. Based on Einsatzgruppen reports, approximately 1.3 million Jews in Eastern Europe were murdered in this way.
The total number of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust is usually estimated as between 5.1 and 6 million victims, with the latter being the more commonly ascribed total. Due to the chaos inherent in war and genocide, calculating figures with exactness is simply not possible. There are no figures for the number killed in isolated actions, local pogroms carried out by Nazi collaborators or for Jews shot when discovered in hiding. Despite this lack of exactness and the resulting inconsistency among historians, there is without a question of a doubt evidence to place the figure with certainty at between 5 and 6 million Jewish victims as a result of the Nazi genocide.
It is important to use these figures in order to understand the uniqueness of the Holocaust and to contextualize it within the 20th century’s other genocides. It is important to recognize the magnitude and vast extent of the loss of life, as Jewish communities were decimated in every country in occupied Europe and Jews were murdered by almost every conceivable method. And it is important to use as accurate estimated figures as possible in order to ensure that Holocaust deniers do not have an audience.