Number of Victims of the Holocaust - Reference Thread

[nickterry]

The number of victims of the Holocaust is a continuously contentious question. Many threads exist on this forum which discuss the numbers. However, because there is so much debate and discussion, these threads are cluttered and not easily useable as reference sources.

The following figures below represent the results of past discussions on Axis History Forum, in particular these threads:

'How many Jews were killed for real'
viewtopic.php?t=33429&start=75&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

'The most reliable Holocaust statistics on web'
viewtopic.php?t=101014&start=30

as well as ongoing research and double-checking of the existing literature and primary sources.

The primary source for these figures is the well-known Wolfgang Benz collection, with however all evident double-countings eliminated. I have used post-1991 research to break down and clean up Eastern Europe, in particular Poland and the Soviet Union.

1) If border changes took place between 1933 and 1950 then any possible overlaps have been cleaned up, e.g. the overlap between Romania and Hungary has been identified.

2) The statistics refer to the number of Jews who died after being deported from the respective country or killed inside the country.

3) If e.g. German and Austrian Jews fled to France, they are counted as French and not double-counted as German or Austrian.

I hope it will be possible to present comparative listings giving pre-war, wartime and postwar border boundaries as the frames of reference, percentages of pre-war Jewish population, number of survivors, etc.

Victims of the German 'Final Solution of the European Jewish Question'

Germany 150,000
Austria 48,767
Luxemburg 720
Netherlands 100,000
Belgium 23,484
France 76,134
Denmark 116
Norway 758
Finland 8 German refugees handed over
Italy 6,513
Albania 591
Greece 59,185
Yugoslavia: 65,000
Hungary 410,000+ (1940 borders)
Czech Republic 77,297(1940 borders)
Slovakia 66,000 (1940 borders)
Romania 120,919 (1940 borders)
Estonia 1,000
Latvia 77,000
Lithuania 140,000 (1939 borders)
USSR 1,050,000 (1939 borders
- Belorussian SSR 250,000 (1939 borders)
- Ukrainian SSR 656,000 (1939 borders)
- Russian SFSR 144,000
Poland 2,890,000 (1939 borders)
- western Poland 1,600,000 (German occupation from 1939)
- eastern Poland 1,210,000
- Wilno district 80,000
Total 5,364,492 as a minimum



Camps
Auschwitz: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Netherlands, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Hungary, Poland
Belzec: Poland
Chelmno: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Luxemburg, Poland
Sobibor: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia
Treblinka: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland
Majdanek: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland Maly Trostinets: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Belorussia
Bergen-Belsen: Albania, Hungary

International Ghettos
Riga: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia
Theresienstadt: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Netherlands,

Killed on the spot in whole or in part
Yugoslavia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belorussia, Ukraine, Russia, Romania


Sources:
Wolfgang Benz (ed), Dimensionen des Völkermords, Munich, 1991 including chapters by
Ino Arndt/Heinz Boberach – Germany
Jonny Moser – Austria
Ino Arndt – Luxemburg
Juliane Wetzel – France and Belgium
Gerhard Hirschfeld – Netherlands
Hermann Weiss – Denmark
Oskar Mendelsohn – Norway
Liliana Picciotto Fargio – Italy
Gerhard Grimm – Albania
Hans-Joachim Hoppe – Bulgaria (= annexed Yugoslav and Greek territory)
Holm Sundhausen – Yugoslavia
Laszlo Varga – Hungary
Eva Schmidt-Hartmann – Czechoslovakia
Krista Zach – Romania
Franz Golczewski – Poland
Gerd Robel - Soviet Union


plus
Ilya Altman, Victims of Hate: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union 1941-1945, Moscow, 2002 (Russian)
Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg, 1999
Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel. Der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/45. Stuttgart, 2002
Alfred Gottwald and Diana Schulle, Die Judendeportationen aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941-1945, Wiesbaden, 2005
Emanuil Ioffe, Belarusian Jews: Tragedy and Heroism, 1941-1944, Minsk, 2003 (Russian)
Aleksandr Kruglov, Catastrophe of Ukrainian Jewry: Encyclopedic Dictionary, Kharkov, 2001 (Russian)
Franciszek Piper, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz, Oswiecim, 1993
Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944. Munich, 1996
Dieter Pohl, Von der ‘Judenpolitik’ zum Judenmord. Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernements 1939-1944. Frankfurt am Main, 1993

and compare with
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, Chicgo, 1961, German edition: Frankfurt am Main, 1991
Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, London, 1955
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Jerusalem, 1988

many more sources to be listed.

[nickterry]

I would beg everyone's indulgence and ask that discussion of the workings of these figures be posted at the following threads.

'How many Jews were killed for real'
viewtopic.php?t=33429&start=75&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

'The most reliable Holocaust statistics on web'
viewtopic.php?t=101014&start=30

The same goes for earlier or older calculations prior to 1991 (discussion of Reitlinger, Hilberg, Auschwitz).

I hope to present 'clean' versions of the workings in due course, and to cross-reference them with the camps etc.

[Sergey]

Dear Nick!

We discussed it before.

viewtopic.php?t=101014&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=60

The number of killed Jews that lived in Russian SFSR 144,000 looks as an absurd one. So it would be fair to correct the number or mark it as a questionable one.

[Csaba Becze]

From Hungary, 450 000+ Jewish people died (most of them in Auschwitz). I guess, the Hungarian Jewish population lost approx 480 000 souls (the rural Jewish population was simply annihilated in 1944, after Hungary was occupied by the Nazi Germany...)

[PF]

According to Yad Vashem website-they have presently listed 3 million Jews victiums.
Also-the SHOAH Jewish Victiums included Jewish soldiers From UNited States {Battle of the Atlantic/Battle in North Africa/BAttle of the Bulge}; Canada, British Empire...

[Harro]

Also-the SHOAH Jewish Victiums included Jewish soldiers From UNited States {Battle of the Atlantic/Battle in North Africa/BAttle of the Bulge}; Canada, British Empire...

Jews who fell as soldiers in the Allied armies are generally not regarded as Shoah victims, but rather as soldiers killed in war. However, tens of thousands of Jewish soldiers serving in the Soviet and Polish armies, who were taken prisoners and selected for death in Nazi POW camps, are considered as Shoah victims.

http://www.yadvashem.org

[anji5568]

I agree that the number of casualties changes. Be as it may, I have the following information from the book, "The Holocaust Chronicle", it states:
Total Deaths From Nazi Genocidal Policies:
European Jews: 5,600,000 to 6,250,00
Soviet POW : 3,000,000
Polish Catholics: 3,000,000
Serbians 700,000
Roma,Sinti, Lalleri 222,000 to 250,000
Germans {political, religious, resistance} 80,000
Germans { handicap} 70,000
Homosexuals 12,000
Jehovah's Witnesses 2500
Death Camps
Auschwitz- Birkenau 1.1 to 1.6 million
Belzec 601,500
Chelmno 255,000
Majdanek 360,000
Sobibor 250,000
Treblinka 750,000 to 870,000
Also in the book "Death Dealer The Memoirs of the Kommandant at Auschwitz Rudolf Hoss" page 376 the calculations are to be 11,000,000
In my opinion, both books are informative and a good read.

[David Thompson]

The posts discussing Freemasons and the Nazis now have a thread of their own, at viewtopic.php?f=6&t=137287

[David Thompson]

A post from bf109 emil, which added no sourced information to this reference thread, was moved to the general discussion area at viewtopic.php?f=6&t=137348&p=1194793#p1194793

Everyone -- The purpose of the reference threads is to give quick, summary sources of information to our readers on specific subjects of recurrent interest. They are not for purposes of general discussion. If you want to discuss something, please check the forum search engine and/or the FAQ indices to see if there is already an open thread on the topic. If there is, please post to that topic rather than multiply the number of existing threads on a single subject. If there is not, please create a new thread in the general discussion area of the H&WC section.

[David Thompson]

An inqiry post by vilak, together with a reply by Michael Mills, were moved to a separate thread in the discussion area of the H&WC section by this moderator. The new thread can be found at:

Number of deaths at Treblinka
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=168826

[kiseli]

number of victims according to R.Hilberg,"Destruction of the European Jews", 1985 edition



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

[Danielle]

Being a novice to this forum: why is Hilberg more credible then others?

[michael mills]

He isn't.

The only reasonably accurate numbers of victims are those of persons deported from Western and Central Europe and Hungary.

The largest proportion of victims came from the Soviet Union and Poland, and the different figures given by different historians for those vicitms are essentially guesstimates.

If you compare Hilberg's figures with those of other historians, you will find that there is general agreement on the order of magnitude of the number of victims from Germany, Austria, Western Europe, Hungary, Greece and the Balkans. Where the various historians differ is in their guesstimates of the number of victims from Poland and the Soviet Union.

[lostforwords]

The number of Roma killed varies hugely. In History of the Holocaust: a handbook and dictionary the figure is only 195,800, but Sybil Milton estimated "something between a half-million and a million-and-a-half" (as quoted in Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People", p.48). The only thing that seems to be agreed upon is that almost every Romani in Croatia was dead by the end of the war.

[kiseli]

The number of Roma killed varies hugely. In History of the Holocaust: a handbook and dictionary the figure is only 195,800, but Sybil Milton estimated "something between a half-million and a million-and-a-half" (as quoted in Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People", p.48). The only thing that seems to be agreed upon is that almost every Romani in Croatia was dead by the end of the war.

Romas Holocaust:
"BLANK PAGES OF THE HOLOCAUST: GYPSIES IN YUGOSLAVIA DURING WORLD WAR II"
by Elizabeta Jevtic