How did the deaths occur?

[Lynn R]

Has there ever been a numeric analysis of modes of death during the Holocaust? Basically, how many people were gassed, dead from disease, starvation, shootings, other brutality?

[steve248]

This is a question that goes off to all points of the Nazi compass.

Euthanasia deaths - known until the program officially finished - ca 70,000, probably a mix of small % lethal injection and high % gassed.

Einsatzgruppen deaths - the Situation Reports (Ereignismeldungen) give an overview - ca 500,000 by January 1942, mainly by shooting, very small % at this time in gas vans. By January 1943, reported to have killed 1,500,000-2 million.

Aktion Reinhard camps in Poland (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka plus Lublin) ), 1,274,166 by 31 Dec 1942, all gassed. Possibly another 400,000 to 500,000 more at Sobibor and Treblinka in 1943; Belzec closed Dec 1942.

KL Auschwitz - you will need to look at Danuta Czech's mammoth work on the camp to establish the number of arrivals who were not registered and sent straight for gassing at Birkenau. The English translation of her work is very poor.

Other camps: Buchenwald, Dachau and Ravensbrück have all published "Death lists" but little info on how the victims met their deaths. Archival work will provide details on how some named individuals met their deaths. Out of interest the Ravensbrück "Deaths List" mentions 13,161 known victims, but doesn't say how many of them died other than a few marked "erschossen".

With a comparative dearth of paperwork left behind, history will never give us more than estimates.

Soviet POWs who were killed have few memorials - the work of Christian Streit on this has never been surpassed.

Apart from the various Korherr reports who in 1942-1943 had access to all records of deaths, mainly Jews, most everything else uses population losses, available but little documentation.

Gypsies, prostitutes, lesbians, homosexuals, communists, social democrats, resistance workers and their sympathizers, communists and their sympathizers from all countries of occupied Europe, the list of political and philosophical enemies of Nazi Germany incarcerated and killed in the camps is endless and little researched. There's a PhD topic for someone.

[Lynn R]

Thank you for your response.

Does it seem reasonable that disease and starvation caused more deaths than the other, more overt forms of aggression?

[steve248]

But how are you going to provide the numbers?

I know for example that all the prisoners who died at Ravensbrück from May 1939 when the camp opened to sometime in 1941 o 1942, were sent to the local village crematorium for cremation and the local authority issued a death certificate. Once the camp built its own crematorium, death certificates were not issued. It was possibly the same at the early camps in German (Dachau et al). Did all these people die of disease and starvation, no can say for certain. Some had been beaten to death.

Once you go east to Poland and beyond was any one collecting numbers of deaths?

I have a feeling that Christian Gerlach, in "Kalkulierte Mord" did some work on this. My copy is buried so can't easily check.

You ask "Does it seem reasonable that disease and starvation caused more deaths than the other, more overt forms of aggression?" - it depends on where you draw the line between "overt forms of aggression" and the other deaths. You know what they say about statistics.

[Stephan]

Does it seem reasonable that disease and starvation caused more deaths than the other, more overt forms of aggression?

There are several different answers, in part depending on what you mean.
For example, I know some revisionists tell; now, when its bad conditions and overall misery, like is common in wartime, so of course there will be lotsa of deaths. Especielly if some plague is going on, alike tyfus and the like... So altough its pity at them whom died, most of them werent actually killed off by purpose. It just happened because it was a severe time.

Theoretically a reasonable tale. SOME of the death were just so.

But.
One direct answer. even not being any expert on the statistics .If you take on overall calculation on the known numbers of organized murdered, by gassing, by mass-shootings, etc, you get into big tales, over half of the totale. OR?

Dying by themselves, is also different depending on. Because its harsh overall conditions for overyone, or because the conditions are organized so many shall die off, with time all off them?
IF you let a labor group work to death, "you havent killed anybody". But yet they almost all died, no? I think the japanese did so with some groups of war prisoners, so this example although drastic, is not made up.

Im sure you yourself can imagine the variations. And we know the Jews got here almost all the worst scenarios. Not caring if they did survive was the best of them, but actively pursuing they die off as the usual scenario. Already in the ghettos, but later on also in the "not lethal" parts of the concentrations camps.
The actively killings aside.

You can surely work out the different variations by yourself.

Re the register in the officially not lethal labor camps, like Dachau, in the prewar time, when most werent Jews as yet, but communists, socialdemocrats, and others whom were or could be in opposition to Hitler and party.
As I understand and know, the death registers were often made up, to conceal to be beaten up to death, or worked to death, or even shot.
Such death were never or very seldom accounted. All had died nicely of heart attacks, of pneumonia, cancer and other diseases which people use to die off, even when perfectly free.
I had read of cases when they send the body home (as said,prewar and these were good germans and catholic too). Before fetching the body, the relatives got to write on documents they would keep secret, and not reveal any cirmustances nor state secrets. Or else.
And the body? Traces of fresh beating, inclusive broken bones. Rectum stopped up, so blood for internal damages wont flow out... Etc.
So this entirely normal heart attack wasnt no heart attack. Even if the death technically did come when heart stopped at last...

[Sheldrake]

Thank you for your response.

Does it seem reasonable that disease and starvation caused more deaths than the other, more overt forms of aggression?

The wikipedia article on the Holocaust includes an analysis which broadly coverts your question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims

It does depend on how you define the Holocaust. The Germans went out of their way to try to exterminate as many of the Jews as they could. Steve 248 gave a list which I suspect comes to around 5 million or so, if figures for the extermination camps are accurate.

The Germans had a policy of simply not feeding their Russian PW very much. It is estimated that 2-3 million prisoners captured by the Germans in 1941 died during the war, as did around 1-2 million ethnic poles. Political prisoners incarcerated in concentration camps or working as slave labour were starved and ill- treated. I saw a figure of 10,000 dead out of 30,000 workers on the V2 factory at Dora B.

Do you want to count the 22,000 dutch who died during the 1944-5 Hunger winter?

There is an interesting book on the topic of hunger abnd starvation in WW2. The Taste of War by Lizzie Cunningham review here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/f ... ham-review

One of the big themes she explores is the German Hunger plan as a factor behind the march to the East and the holocaust. Germany starved in ww1, largely attributed to the British blockade with fatalities from starvation estimated at 750,000.(wikipedia turnip-winter) Capturing the Ukraine would divert food to the Reich at the expense of Soviet urban population. Eliminating Russian prisoners of War and "undesirable elements" headed by the Jews would mean fewer mouths to feed.

What is your interest?

[Sheldrake]

Thank you for your response.

Does it seem reasonable that disease and starvation caused more deaths than the other, more overt forms of aggression?

The wikipedia article on the Holocaust includes an analysis which broadly covers your question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims

It does depend on how you define the Holocaust. The Germans went out of their way to try to exterminate as many of the Jews as they could. Steve 248 gave a list which I suspect comes to around 5 million or so, if figures for the extermination camps are accurate.

The Germans had a policy of simply not feeding their Russian PW very much. It is estimated that 2-3 million prisoners captured by the Germans in 1941 died during the war, as did around 1-2 million ethnic poles. Political prisoners incarcerated in concentration camps or working as slave labour were starved and ill- treated. I saw a figure of 10,000 dead out of 30,000 workers on the V2 factory at Dora B.

Do you want to count the 22,000 dutch who died during the 1944-5 Hunger winter?

There is an interesting book on the topic of hunger abnd starvation in WW2. The Taste of War by Lizzie Cunningham review here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/f ... ham-review

One of the big themes she explores is the German Hunger plan as a factor behind the march to the East and the holocaust. Germany starved in ww1, largely attributed to the British blockade with fatalities from starvation estimated at 750,000.(wikipedia turnip-winter) Capturing the Ukraine would divert food to the Reich at the expense of Soviet urban population. Eliminating Russian prisoners of War and "undesirable elements" headed by the Jews would mean fewer mouths to feed.

I am not sure that disease and starvation enforced by the threat of execution by bullet or rifle butt is anything other than overt aggresstion!

What is your interest?

[Christian Ankerstjerne]

It does not make sense to talk about concentration camp (and death camp and slave labor camp) deaths that was not caused explicitly by Nazi Germany. As soon as you incarcerate someone, for whatever reason, that persons health becomes your responsibility, and it is up to you to prove that they would still have died had they not been incarcerated. This includes very old people dying from cancer and heart attacks, and camp inmates who kill each other for whatever reason; without an independent court ruling that such deaths were not in any way the fault of the camp system (this of course never happened), the deaths were the fault of the camp system.

[Sheldrake]

As soon as you incarcerate someone, for whatever reason, that persons health becomes your responsibility, and it is up to you to prove that they would still have died had they not been incarcerated. This includes very old people dying from cancer and heart attacks, and camp inmates who kill each other for whatever reason; without an independent court ruling that such deaths were not in any way the fault of the camp system (this of course never happened), the deaths were the fault of the camp system.

Hmm that doesn't quite wash. It is possible and done to compare the mortality of the people incarcerated with life insurance mortality tables. It may not be possible to say that prisoner X died because of ill-treatment, but it is possible to conclude that, say, 90% of the people who died while in concentration camps or working as malnourished slave labour would not have died had they not been starved and beaten.

[Christian Ankerstjerne]

That doesn't change that it is the responsibility of those who worked in the camp system to prove that they are not guilty of each murder on an individual basis; you can't apply statistics to murder cases, stating that there was for example a ten percent chance that an individual might still have died, and that the murderer was therefore only a 90 percent murderer. Even if an individual would have lived for just one more minute if free, killing him without consent is murder. This is not a mass of people dying, but rather 15 to 20 million individual murders to which the camp system workers conspired.

[Sheldrake]

That doesn't change that it is the responsibility of those who worked in the camp system to prove that they are not guilty of each murder on an individual basis; you can't apply statistics to murder cases, stating that there was for example a ten percent chance that an individual might still have died, and that the murderer was therefore only a 90 percent murderer. Even if an individual would have lived for just one more minute if free, killing him without consent is murder. This is not a mass of people dying, but rather 15 to 20 million individual murders to which the camp system workers conspired.

No but I think this argument would apply under "crimes against humanity" in the Hague

If the NAZIs were a criminal gang then joint enterprise might apply under UK law. If some SS men could be proven to have murdered camp inmates, then those that formed part of the same enterprise would be jointly liable. But the Nazis were a foreign political party that legitimately took over a government. It was only their actions against other governments that prompted their destruction.

[David Thompson]

For interested readers -- For the concentration camps, there is a discussion of the "deaths by disease" issue at:

Documents on Nazi Concentration Camp Mortality Rates
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=63730