Estimated how many jews died in the holocaust

Photo taken by a Russian photographer shortly after the liberation of the camp. Over its five-year tenure, some 8, worked at the camp , including female guards.

According to the limited available information, many were Catholic or Lutheran. Of 1, Auschwitz SS men, 70 percent had only an elementary education, while 5. While some of the charged of crimes were sentenced to death or spent years in prison, many were acquitted of their crimes. Other former SS workers known to have worked in the camps were called by the court as witnesses but did not face trial, themselves.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. As more documents come to light or as scholars arrive at a more precise understanding of the Holocaust, estimates of human losses may change. The single most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to document numbers of victims of the Holocaust is that no one master list of those who perished exists anywhere in the world.

Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents. What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and captured soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. These estimates are calculated from wartime reports generated by those who implemented Nazi population policy, and postwar demographic studies on population loss during World War II.

With regard to the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, best estimates for the breakdown of Jewish loss according to location of death follow:. Only one comprehensive statistical study conducted on behalf of SS chief Heinrich Himmler survived the war. A copy was among the records captured by the US Army in The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union have used most of these documents at one time or another as exhibits in criminal or civil proceedings against Nazi offenders.

With regard to the Polish and Soviet civilian figures, at this time there are not sufficient demographic tools to enable historians to distinguish between:. Virtually all deaths of Soviet, Polish, and Serb civilians during the course of military and anti-partisan operations had, however, a racist component.

German units conducted those operations with an ideologically driven and willful disregard for civilian life. Counting victims is important for research and to understand the magnitude of the crimes.

The magnitude is clear. And behind each number are individuals whose hopes and dreams were destroyed. Efforts to name the victims are important to restore the individuality and dignity their killers sought to destroy. Concentration Camps. The Einsatzgruppen. Gassing Victims. Zyklon B. Medical Experiments. Sterilization of Jews. Creating the Master Race. Reserve Police Battalion Sonderkommando Documents Regarding Mass Murder.

The time sequence aligns reasonably well with the spatial sequence of districts that we have already noted, namely, Warsaw red in July and August, followed by Radom District, Lublin, and lastly, in November and December, Bialystok District green and yellow.

This temporal sequence of events also perfectly corroborates events known to have occurred and that are documented in the literature 2 , suggesting that our time series analysis of kill rates is reasonably accurate.

The sites of the many Jewish communities listed in the Arad 2 dataset that were deported to Treblinka by train. The communities deported in July to August are marked as red dots, and those in the months of September, October, November, and December are marked as blue, purple, green, and yellow dots, respectively. Map was constructed using CartoDB software. Instead, the enormous pulse of death in Fig.

The subsequent rapid plunge in the death rate in November and December simply reflects that there were very few Jewish victims left alive to murder by this stage in the GG. The Nazi agenda was then revised to transport and murder the remaining Jewish populations of Europe to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination facility. Auschwitz was operating on a continual basis from but had exceptionally high kill rates in , as evidenced by the very large peak around that time in Fig.

That the mass killings of Operation Reinhard mostly occurred in a 3-month period likely created substantial confusion among the victims, and its speed would have made the possibility of organized resistance difficult to coordinate in time.

That is, the massacre was effectively over before there was time for an organized response. Despite this, some resistance operations occurred 1 , 2. At the Belzec death camp, some , Jews were exterminated 2.

Rudolf Reder, one of only two survivors of the Belzec death camp, gave the following testimony in 32 :. This was a long period of intensified murder of Jewish people. I was told by prisoners ….. During these three months the greatest number of Jewish people were murdered…. A minimum of 10, victims were murdered every 24 hours. A similar nightmare was taking place at Treblinka simultaneously. Aron Gelberd, who eventually escaped from Treblinka, wrote that, in October , for the 19 days he was imprisoned, he witnessed three to four train transports arriving each day with additional transports sometimes arriving at night 2.

Of the roughly , victims who entered Treblinka, there were only approximately 50 survivors 6 , and a similar number survived Sobibor 2. A similar decimation rate applies for the whole GG region.

In short, the genocide was almost total in the GG area. Thus, the relatively enormous power of the Nazi regime led to the almost complete decimation of the Jewish people in the GG. While this was not always the case for other locations or periods over the Holocaust, neither was it a singular occurrence. In the last two decades, there have there been other attempts to make a larger reckoning of the pace of the killing over the year , but they are usually presented in broad summary terms that are less precise.

It is not clear how many victims perished in the 5-month interval that Browning mentioned. Neither is there a monthly breakdown of the kill rate, as in Fig. In contrast, the approach here focuses on exploiting detailed data on transportation activities of Operation Reinhard to document the pace of killing as it progressed. Thus, the time series in Figs. Apart from the Browning quote and several other similar statements, there has been little else in the voluminous Holocaust literature that attempts to give a detailed summary picture of the short intense mass killings during the Operation Reinhard period until recently.

His statement presumably relies on the German doctoral thesis of Berger 13 who gives figures that are accurate for the three different death camps, but not beyond that.

Both studies complement the present paper, as discussed in more depth in section S3. Especially when comparing modern genocides, historians, social scientists, policy-makers, and journalists have consistently relied on inaccurate assessments that greatly underestimated the Holocaust kill rate during Operation Reinhard.

These underestimates have been repeated for nearly two decades without substantial criticism, a pattern that has effectively rewritten the history of the Holocaust in a way that diminishes its historical standing and the scale of human life it encompasses. These underestimates have arisen and persisted because of a lack of awareness of the details concerning the Reinhard death camps and the effectiveness of the Nazi efforts to obscure those details during the war.

Our analyses shed new light on this period of the Holocaust and provide a clearer and detailed picture of the dynamics and rates of the major events as they unfolded during Operation Reinhard. The assembly line efficiency of murder by the Nazis and the capability to reach and maintain these high kill rates were an outcome of having the key death camps operating simultaneously for a period, supported by the railway system to rapidly transport Jewish victims to the camps.

The deportation trains were only a small fraction of the rail traffic of the time and thus likely a relatively small exercise for the Deutsche Reichsbahn to orchestrate The results of this modest effort by the Reichsbahn illustrate the substantial power at the disposal of the Nazi leaders to target and destroy their enemies. Arad 2 lists the dates day, month, year and number of deportees for different transports to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, grouped by spatial location.

Figure 4 provides spatial plots of the many towns and communities recorded in the dataset. The data were organized and sorted temporally over and to construct the following:. S1 and S2 ;. The complementary datasets necessitated using a monthly time scale see Fig.

The final time series and datasets contain dates, approximate numbers of victims, and their source locations and destinations, as described further in section S1. Some further remarks and warnings are necessary concerning simple procedures for comparing genocides, as routinely applied in the literature. Usually, this entails making use of one or more standard quantitative indices, often none of which are more correct or more valid than any other.

An obvious index is. One of the most horrific attributes of Operation Reinhard is that, of the 1. This is a useful quantitative index as long as the time frame or window is chosen in an appropriate manner. Clearly, two different indices may fail to rank the same dataset in the same way, and contradictory conclusions can easily arise for the same dataset.

This opens the door for researchers to choose the index that suits their particular agenda best, and therefore, reasonable caution is needed when interpreting any analysis. For the Holocaust, all of the above three indices K r , K p , and K are unusually large, which would indicate that it is an extreme event, even in comparison to other recent genocides.

Yet, there have been debates in the literature over whether the Holocaust is an extreme event There should be well over half a million Jews who lost their lives when hiding, which were also not considered.

Moreover, murders of Gypsies Roma or other minority groups have not been included [e. The 3 million non-Jewish Poles who were murdered over the war were also not included in the calculation. I thank A.

Clauset, G. Peters, Y. Artzy-Randrup, S. Ash, D. Mayerson, and D. Simberloff for helpful discussions about the manuscript. I thank R. Geohegen for assistance with data collection and V. Bharti, S. Wilson, M. Ash, and J. Malter for help with the graphics. CartoDB software package was used to construct Figs. Funding: None. Competing interests: The author declares that he has no competing interests.

The data for the three death camps are available in Arad 2.