Number of Victims of the Holocaust - Reference Thread

[michael mills]

British army POWs who said they were Palestinian Jews were not murdered.

That is because they were accepted as having British nationality, Palestine being a British territory. Jews who were citizens of states which Germany recognised as legal belligerents, eg the United States and the countries of the British Empire, were treated in exactly the same way as non-Jewish citizens of those countries, ie as POWs or enemy civilians, and held in POW camps or civilian internment camps.

For example, Jews with British nationality living on the occupied Channel Islands were sent to internment camps in France, along with many non-Jewish civilians. By contrast, three female Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, who were not British subjects, were deported to auschwitz and pewrished there.

[michael mills]

The figure commonly used is the six million quoted by Adolf Eichmann

That is incorrect; Eichmann never himself stated that the number of Jews killed was six million. In fact, he never stated a total figure.

The figure actually comes from the testimony of Wilhelm Hoettl, who claimed that just before the end of the war, he had asked Eichmann how many Jews had been killed, and Eichmann had told him that it was six million. Hoettl actually gave a very dramatic version of that alleged conversation, saying that Eichmann had boasted that he would jump laughing into his grave knowing that he had killed six million enemies of the Reich.

The problem is that Hoettl was a very unreliable witness, given to making all sorts of lurid but unverifiable claims. The very lurid nature of the statement attributed to Eichmann by Hoettl suggests that it was invented.

There is also the consideration that it is unlikely that Eichmann actually knew the total number of Jews killed, due to the fact that the killing was not centralised but carried out by a number of different agencies which did not necessarily coordinate their actions with each other. Thus, Eichmann would have had a good knowledge of the number of Jews whose deportation was organised by his office, but not necessarily of the number killed by local SS police units in the occupied Soviet Union, or in the camps run by Globocnik in occupied Poland.

[Gorque]

The most reasonable position to take is that any estimate under four million is definitely too low, and any over five million is most probably too high.

Hi Michael Mills:

The general consensus is in the vicinity of six million. I realize that there is a great deal of uncertainty with the final numbers, but the approximate number has generally been settled by historical minds much greater than mine. Your number is about 10 to 15% lower. How do you account for the discrepancy between your calculations and the generally accepted calculations?

[michael mills]

It is not my calculation, it was a calculation made by Reitlinger.

As for the difference between his figure (min 4.2 million, max. 4.8 million) and the canonical six million, he explained it terms of the six million figure having been derived by making an estimate of the total Jewish population of the territory that came under German occupation, and subtracting from it an estimate of the total number of survivors. In his view that methodology left the way open for a large margin of error, since both estimates were imprecise.

He followed the methodoloy of adding up the best available figures of numbers killed in each country, based on German records and survivor testimony. In some cases his numbers of victims for particular countries turned out to be an undercount when more detailed German records became available, eg in the case of France.

I would say that his upper figure of 4.8 million is more likely to be correct, and is close to Hilberg's figure of five million. My most recent reading has revealed that at the time of the Trial of the Major War Criminals, five million was the common figure being bandied about. For example, in interviews with the accused by the prison psychiatrist, he would ask questions such as "How was it possible that five million Jews were killed", etc. That seemed to be the accepted figure at the time.

You need to bear in mind that the six million figure includes a fair amount of guesstimating. The numbers of victims from Western and Central Europe are pretty exact, since they are based on fairly complete German records; the grey area is Poland and the Soviet Union, since German figures for those areas are not complete. It would be reasonable to say that a total of at least four million can be documented from German records; anything above that is based on a number of assumptions about the size of Jewish populations in 1939 and the number of survivors.

[Gorque]

Hi Michael Mills:

Thank you for taking the time to answer in detail my question.

[NickA]

Hi All, I'm new here, having stumbled across this site after researching the book "Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides" by Thomas Dalton, a well-known Holocaust denier. I started reading this thread in its entirety, and, having just read the rules and them being fresh in my mind, I'm a bit confused about NickA's comments and the point he's trying to make.

I find your posting substantially unhelpful for understanding the point at issue in this thread ("Number of Victims of the Holocaust"). Much effort has gone into making this appear to be the single most important single element of the whole discussion.

I've brought it to everyone's attention that, 40 years after the business of the death toll of the Holocaust was supposed to be finally and completely settled, a top modern day Holocaust scholar (maybe the most important ever, at least in popular culture) seems to have thrown open again the central point of our settled historical narrative.

I had no problem with the figure of about 6 million (some calculations up to 6.7 million) Jewish victims of the Holocaust - not least because it was nearly arrived at from almost contemporaneous research by Raul Hilberg, a scholar who ploughed his own furrow and was apparently quite badly obstructed by people who now accept the figure that he came to no later than about 1955. (Hilberg actually put the death toll at 'only' 5.1 million - it was later work that summarised the research as "murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust )

Please recall that Hilberg's work is very, very well respected - and certainly acceptable to me as either definitive or at least completely dependable as far as it goes (as may not be all the way). The Wiki gives me near total confidence in Hilberg with this:

Christopher R. Browning has called [Raul Hilberg] the founding father of Holocaust Studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus The Destruction of the European Jews is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raul_Hilberg

Another report says this:

When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, she could draw on only two scholarly studies in the English language - Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Solution and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews.

And yet, I now find that the 6 million figure is quite widely being declared to be only a subset of the genocide. Its now being claimed that this is the number of Jews who died in the concentration camps. That's what we're supposed to get from Deborah Lipstadt's very famous book. "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory".

On the cover of Lipstadt's book there is a statement that deniers of the Holocaust are "those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy". This statement is not only on the cover of the book but has appeared many thousands of times in Google (falling from 2,000 or more ghits to 96 times currently January 2022). I can't find that phrase in the book itself but you know what I mean.

The "Holocaust of Bullets" seems to be poorly documented but for instance the (US-based?) "Centre for Holocaust Education" says "the Einsatzgruppen ... were involved in the murder of around 2.2 million Jewish people" - https://holocausteducation.org.uk/teach ... t-bullets/

Does that mean that the new figure is over 8 million? I have no problem accepting a new figure (8 or 9 or 12 million Holocaust victims) but I think we should be told where it comes from and what discoveries caused it to increase by 33% or 50% or 100%.

[NickA]

The most reasonable position to take is that any estimate under four million is definitely too low, and any over five million is most probably too high.

I'm relaxed with accepting that the 6 million figure is about correct. It may not be very good, but there's not much chance of improving it now and its useful, in the sense that it tends to encourage research into the total number of victims of other genocides.

However, I'm puzzled and a little perturbed to discover that the new "accepted" account is that six million is now said to be just the number of Jews murdered in camps. There is also the "Holocaust of Bullets", some respectable sources saying that around 2 million Jews died this way.

Add the two figures together and it appears that the canonical figure has been raised to 8 million. Can you comment on this?

[michael mills]

I do not think any historian claims that six million Jews were killed just in concentration and extermination camps. Whatever figure is quoted by a historian, it is the total number of Jews who dies by any means while under German control, whether gassed in camps or in gas vans, or shot, or simply dying of starvation or disease in camps and ghettos.

[NickA]

I do not think any historian claims that six million Jews were killed just in concentration and extermination camps.

I'd love to agree with you and state that someone is engaged in pretty obvious deception.

But do a Google on "those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy".

Consider:

1) that exact phrase is on the cover of Deborah Lipstadt's 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory".

2) but it does not appear inside the book. Its seems to have been tacked on by an agent of the author, but with no obvious encouragement from the text.

3) you and I are almost the first people protesting that the first part of the statement is contrary to 70 years of orthodoxy. (As I've posted, I have no fundamental problem with the canonical number).

4) the Google search misbehaves - the phrase is this moment (9th Jan 2022) registering 1,440 ghits. That number was 92 only a week or two ago. (It may have been showing over 2,000 times when I first went looking).

5) and the second part of that statement is peculiar and, I'd suggest, contrary to what we know as well!

So what's going on?

There are other mysteries about the whole affair. Towards the end of this long trial, Irving indeed disputed parts of the gas-chamber narrative and, I think, did so in ways that are ahistorical. But until those closing days ... I'll look at this more carefully once I find someone prepared to look in detail at the case and put my concerns to rest.

[steve248]

Michael
You imply in a post above (#107) that Eichmann did not have an idea of the numbers killed in "the camps run by Globocnik".
Richard Korherr when asked by Himmler to provide a total of Jews killed, he visited Eichmann's office to get the numbers (information from several of his postwar statements). That Eichmann's reports on this subject to Himmler (no longer in existence) were imprecise meant Korherr had to examine Eichmann's own sources. If you recall, Korherr came up with with the figure of 1,274,166 Jews "passing through" the camps of the General Govt by end 1942. Korherr's report dated 23 March 1943 also corresponds with the Hoefle Telegram of 11 Jan 1943 which was addressed to BdS GG and to Eichmann at RSHA. Details in the article Peter Witte and I wrote and published in Holocaust & Genocide Studies back in 2001.
Separately I wrote an article for David Bankier's "Secret Intelligence & the Holocaust" (2006) based on Eichmann in the then newly declassified German radio messages (they were not all Enigma messages) and several of these messages have Globocnik meeting Eichmann in Berlin and Lublin.

HW 16/25
msg ZIP/GPDD 498a transmitted 2 June 1943 (at 1300h)
RSHA BERLIN, zu Händen SS Obersturmbannführer EICHMANN.
Bin ab 3.6.43 früh in BERLIN. Melde mich telefonisch bei Ihnen.
SS und Pol.fhr LUBLIN, SS Gruppenführer … GLOBOCNIK.

HW 16/25
msg ZIP/GPDD 498a transmitted 2 June 1943 (at 1330h)
WVHA, zu Händen SS Gruppenführer Frank.
Bin ab 6.3.43 früh zur gewünschten Besprechung in BERLIN. Werde mir Termin telefonisch erfragen.
SS und Pol.fhr LUBLIN, SS Gruppenführer … GLOBOCNIK

HW 16/26
msg ZIP/GPDD 533a transmitted 7 July 1943:
An RSHA BERLIN, zu Händen SS Obersturmführer (sic) EICHMANN.
Bitte am Freitag den Pass für Wilhelm Caesar TOEBBENS mitbringen.
SS und Pol.fhr. LUBLIN, SS Gruppenführer und Generalltn.d.Pol. GLOBOCNIK.

HW 16/26
msg ZIP/GPDD 547a transmitted 21 July 1943:
An RSHA BERLIN, zu Händen SS Obersturmbannführer EICHMANN.
Bitte dringendst um Nachricht bezüglich Weiterarbeit, da sonst Termin 1.9.43 schwer einhaltbar.
SS und Pol.fhr LUBLIN, SS Gruppenführer und Generalltn.d.Pol. GLOBOCNIK

Eichmann had nothing to do with the confiscation of Jewish valuables and possession so the meetings were more to do with their roles in the Endlösung.

[Gorque]

The figure commonly used is the six million quoted by Adolf Eichmann

Hoettl actually gave a very dramatic version of that alleged conversation, saying that Eichmann had boasted that he would jump laughing into his grave knowing that he had killed six million enemies of the Reich.

Hi Michael Mills:

Are you sure that it was Dr. Höttl that retold the conversation? I see that DIeter Wisliceny stated basically the exact same during his testimony on 3 January 1946 in answer to Lt Colonel Brookhart.

LT. COL. BROOKHART: Did he say anything at that time as to the number of Jews that had been killed?

WISLICENY: Yes, he expressed this in a particularly cynical manner. He said he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had 5 million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/01-03-46.asp#wisliceny

Testimony from the 14 December 1945 references an affidavit given by Dr. Höttl:

I do wish, however, to offer one document, a statement, to establish the deaths of 4 million Jews in camps and deaths of 2 million Jews by the State Police in the East, making a total of 6 million- Document 2738-PS, Exhibit USA-296. This is a statement-of Adolf Eichmann, Chief of the Jewish Section of the Gestapo, and the source of the figures quoted-made by Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, Deputy Group Leader of the foreign section of the Security Police Amt IV of the RSHA. Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, in affidavit form, made the following statement; and I quote from Page 2:

"Approximately 4 million Jews had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional 2 million met death in other ways, the major part of which were shot by operational squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia."

and a few moments later...

MAJOR WALSH: I shall be pleased to read that in there, Sir. I made a statement that Eichmann has been the source of the information given to Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, one of his assistants, and on Page 1 it says:

"According to my knowledge, Eichmann was at the time a section leader in Amt IV (Gestapo) of RSHA; and in addition he had been ordered by Himmler to get hold of the Jews in all the European countries and to transport them to Germany. Eichmann was then very much impressed with the fact that Romania had withdrawn from the war in those days. Therefore, he had come to me to get information about the military situation, which I received daily from the Hungarian. . .Ministry of War and from the Commander of the Waffen-SS in Hungary. He expressed his conviction that Germany had lost the war and that he personally had no further chance. He knew that he would be considered one of the main war criminals by the United Nations, since he had minions of Jewish lives on his conscience. I asked him how many that was, to which he answered that although the number was a great Reich secret, he would tell me since I, as a historian too, would be interested and that probably he would not return anyhow from his command in Romania. He had, shortly before that, made a report to Himmler, as the latter wanted to know the exact number of Jews who had been killed."

It was on that basis of this information, Sir, that I read the following quotation.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/12-14-45.asp

EDIT: Höttl's affidavit can be found here

https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law ... l-XXXI.pdf

beginning on page 91 of the pdf and page 85 of the volume.

[NickA]

I am not a fan of David Irving and not for a minute do I believe he ran rings around the defence experts. Those defence experts who dissected all of Irving's works and found in all his books he marginalized sources that did not fit with his story line, relied on tittle tattle for some sources, misquoted and short quoted others.

There are many, many authors much worse than Irving. Here's a prime example - AJ Cristol was the 2003 author of "The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship"
US Veterans recognised and found the (by-then 35 year old) picture series that Cristol's sources (from a foreign military power) appear to have stolen and air-brushed to present as a "gun-camera" image. The image appears both on the front cover and inside as 4 consecutive images with the painted-on gun-sites moved around to make it appear they were successive frames from a film.
That is brazen falsification of history - which AJ Cristol turned into a second career, going round the world giving talks and handing out (signed) copies of his fraudulent book with the air-brushed photo right on the cover.
Who funded him to do that. His book and his subsequent conduct must surely be many, many times worse than anything Irving was ever guilty of. AJ Cristol is most notable for being state funded to carry out his deceit - but I can show you many other "historians" who are brazen propagandists for one side or another of history. Have a look for "McChrystal turns himself into an accidental whistleblower" and link him to Patreus and Austin.

His libel case was a major ill judgement on his part.

Was it? He'd been seriously successful as an author and claims to have been targeted to destroy his career. £millions and £millions were used against him twice - Phase I was to destroy his career as an author (I see no reason to doubt what Irving claimed in court):

Irving: The [Lipstadt] book ["Denying the Holocaust] which has been published by the First and Second Defendants has been not just sold through the normal outlets, it has been placed on the Internet on two different website locations ... that book will continue in perpetuity in cyber space. The book has been donated to very large numbers of university libraries around the world.
One of my correspondents at the University of Durham has found no fewer than three copies in Durham University library with library plate gummed into the front saying "donated by Friends of Durham University History Society". There is no such Society. So it has been actively propagated by who knows whom. The book is relied on as a source. It is an authoritative source by people who wish to attack me further. So it has an ongoing rolling effect far beyond the effect it has just on the one customer who picks it up at his local Barns & Noble or Waterstones bookshop, my Lord. https://www.hdot.org/day02/

Phase II of this massive operation can't be costed or checked either but it looks credible enough:

In terms of manpower and financial resources, the Irving-Lipstadt clash was a David-Goliath battle. Whereas Irving acted as his own attorney, the Lipstadt-Penguin side employed some 20 courtroom lawyers and legal experts.
Irving's adversaries were also fabulously better funded. According to British press reports, generous financial aid for the Lipstadt-Penguin defense came from the American Jewish Committee, Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (co-chairman of the giant Seagram's company, and president of the World Jewish Congress), and Steven Spielberg (filmmaker and Jewish activist). "If that is not evidence of the global scale of the endeavor to destroy me," commented Irving wryly, "I do not know what is."
More than 543,000 pounds (about $841,650) was paid to defense experts and researchers for their testimony, reports and other help. Of this amount, Robert Jan Van Pelt received a staggering 109,244 pounds ($169,330), while Richard Evans, a Cambridge University historian, was paid 70,181 pounds ($109,482), and Peter Longerich received 76,195 pounds ($118,102). In addition, courtroom lawyer (barrister) fees totalled some 509,989 pounds ($790,482), of which Richard Rampton alone reportedly received half a million dollars.

Over a period of a few years he went from a good career to a busted flush.The author of his downfall couldn't justify the allegations she'd made - a fact apparently known to the defense, that they turned to their advantage in an extraordinary fashion. Having got an order against Lipstad he is forced to tell the court:

I was informed by the second Defendants' lawyers when your Lordship will have seen that I succeeded in obtaining an order that the Second Defendant should be required to swear a list on affidavit. When that occurs, as your Lordship is aware, I am not allowed to go behind the affidavit until the trial of the action. I was repeatedly reminded of this by the defendants' solicitors, who said you will be able to cross-examine Professor Lipstadt when the time comes, on her affidavit, and, of course, now we will not.

No expert in history has faced this level of confrontation in his life and in court and Irving's entire case was chopped out from under his feet by taking away the defendant at the last moment. Its hard to believe that any court could properly get to the truth in these circumstances.

[LineDoggie]

I am not a fan of David Irving and not for a minute do I believe he ran rings around the defence experts. Those defence experts who dissected all of Irving's works and found in all his books he marginalized sources that did not fit with his story line, relied on tittle tattle for some sources, misquoted and short quoted others.

There are many, many authors much worse than Irving. Here's a prime example - AJ Cristol was the 2003 author of "The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship"
US Veterans recognised and found the (by-then 35 year old) picture series that Cristol's sources (from a foreign military power) appear to have stolen and air-brushed to present as a "gun-camera" image. The image appears both on the front cover and inside as 4 consecutive images with the painted-on gun-sites moved around to make it appear they were successive frames from a film.
That is brazen falsification of history - which AJ Cristol turned into a second career, going round the world giving talks and handing out (signed) copies of his fraudulent book with the air-brushed photo right on the cover.
Who funded him to do that. His book and his subsequent conduct must surely be many, many times worse than anything Irving was ever guilty of. AJ Cristol is most notable for being state funded to carry out his deceit - but I can show you many other "historians" who are brazen propagandists for one side or another of history. Have a look for "McChrystal turns himself into an accidental whistleblower" and link him to Patreus and Austin.

His libel case was a major ill judgement on his part.

Was it? He'd been seriously successful as an author and claims to have been targeted to destroy his career. £millions and £millions were used against him twice - Phase I was to destroy his career as an author (I see no reason to doubt what Irving claimed in court):

Irving: The [Lipstadt] book ["Denying the Holocaust] which has been published by the First and Second Defendants has been not just sold through the normal outlets, it has been placed on the Internet on two different website locations ... that book will continue in perpetuity in cyber space. The book has been donated to very large numbers of university libraries around the world.
One of my correspondents at the University of Durham has found no fewer than three copies in Durham University library with library plate gummed into the front saying "donated by Friends of Durham University History Society". There is no such Society. So it has been actively propagated by who knows whom. The book is relied on as a source. It is an authoritative source by people who wish to attack me further. So it has an ongoing rolling effect far beyond the effect it has just on the one customer who picks it up at his local Barns & Noble or Waterstones bookshop, my Lord. https://www.hdot.org/day02/

Phase II of this massive operation can't be costed or checked either but it looks credible enough:

In terms of manpower and financial resources, the Irving-Lipstadt clash was a David-Goliath battle. Whereas Irving acted as his own attorney, the Lipstadt-Penguin side employed some 20 courtroom lawyers and legal experts.
Irving's adversaries were also fabulously better funded. According to British press reports, generous financial aid for the Lipstadt-Penguin defense came from the American Jewish Committee, Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (co-chairman of the giant Seagram's company, and president of the World Jewish Congress), and Steven Spielberg (filmmaker and Jewish activist). "If that is not evidence of the global scale of the endeavor to destroy me," commented Irving wryly, "I do not know what is."
More than 543,000 pounds (about $841,650) was paid to defense experts and researchers for their testimony, reports and other help. Of this amount, Robert Jan Van Pelt received a staggering 109,244 pounds ($169,330), while Richard Evans, a Cambridge University historian, was paid 70,181 pounds ($109,482), and Peter Longerich received 76,195 pounds ($118,102). In addition, courtroom lawyer (barrister) fees totalled some 509,989 pounds ($790,482), of which Richard Rampton alone reportedly received half a million dollars.

Over a period of a few years he went from a good career to a busted flush.The author of his downfall couldn't justify the allegations she'd made - a fact apparently known to the defense, that they turned to their advantage in an extraordinary fashion. Having got an order against Lipstad he is forced to tell the court:

I was informed by the second Defendants' lawyers when your Lordship will have seen that I succeeded in obtaining an order that the Second Defendant should be required to swear a list on affidavit. When that occurs, as your Lordship is aware, I am not allowed to go behind the affidavit until the trial of the action. I was repeatedly reminded of this by the defendants' solicitors, who said you will be able to cross-examine Professor Lipstadt when the time comes, on her affidavit, and, of course, now we will not.

No expert in history has faced this level of confrontation in his life and in court and Irving's entire case was chopped out from under his feet by taking away the defendant at the last moment. Its hard to believe that any court could properly get to the truth in these circumstances.

the FIRST mistake is calling Irving a expert in history. that like saying Julius Streicher is an expert in journalism

I smell fascist

[michael mills]

Response to Gorque:

Both Wisliceny and Hoettl were very dubious witnesses.

Wisliceny was Eichmann's subordinate, and after the war he was trying to save himself by offering information about Eichmann's dealings, and even proposed that he be released so that he could track him down. To that end, he made all sorts of uncorroborated accusations, some of them them very melodramatic, such as this one.

Contrary to the statement by Major Walsh, Hoettl was not one of Eichmann's "assistants"; in fact he worked in an entirely different part of the RSHA, the bureau responsible for foreign intelligence. In 1944 he was sent to Hungary as an adviser to the German plenipotentiary Veesenmeyer, and it was in that capacity that he had dealings with Eichmann, who was also in Hungary at that time.

Hoettl's account of Eichmann's coming to him to seek information about the situation in Romania is entirely plausible, since Hoettl as an intelligence officer would have had that information. Eichmann was being sent to Romania to command a task force that had the mission of rescuing ethnic Germans and bringing them to safety in Germany. Furthermore, Eichmann confirmed that he had gone to see Hoettl, in the post-war interview he gave to Sassen.

In that interview with Sassen, he confirmed that he had told Hoettl that a large number of "enemies of the Reich" (Reichfeinde) had been eliminated during the war, and that he had played a role in it, but denied that he had specifically referred to Jews or given a precise number of those killed. It seems to me likely that Hoettl's affidavit was a rather lurid embellishment of his conversation with Eichmann, possibly using figures that were being bandied about at the time of the IMT.

It is noteworthy that Wisliceny and Hoettl give different totals, the former five million and the latter six million. Wisliceny's figure is probably fairly close to the true total, and is the figure that was being widely quoted at the time, which may well be why he used it.

Hoettl's figure is based on the assumption that four million Jews were killed in various concentration camps, which is an obvious exaggeration. The maximum number killed after arriving at Auschwitz, either in that camp or after being sent to other camps or workplaces, is one million; the maximum number killled at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek and Chelmno is two million.

Whatever the source of their figures, it is unlikely that they came from Eichmann. The only known involvement of Eichmann's office in the compilation of statistics on the Final Solution is in the preparation of the Korherr Report at the beginning of 1943; Eichmann would obviously have had knowledge of the statistics collected by Korherr, but those statistics were incomplete in some areas, particularly the numbers killed in the occupied Soviet Union. As I wrote, he would have had a good knowledge of the numbers of Jews deported in the various actions organised by his office, ie the deportations from the Reich, from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, from Theresienstadt, from Slovakia, from Greece, and especially from Hungary, in which he was personally involved.

[Gorque]

Hi Michael:

Thank you once again for the detailed response.

Hoettl's figure is based on the assumption that four million Jews were killed in various concentration camps, which is an obvious exaggeration. The maximum number killed after arriving at Auschwitz, either in that camp or after being sent to other camps or workplaces, is one million; the maximum number killled at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek and Chelmno is two million.

I too thought that Höttl's numbers were a bit on the high side regarding the deaths at the various concentration and death camps. I've come to accept, from various authors, the numbers of ~3 million west of the Curzon Line and about 2.7 million east of the line. I think the former is a number that is close to being "set in stone", whereas the numbers east of the line are more in the realm of educated guesses.

Getting back to Wisliceny and Höttl; Their numbers are reasonably close, considering the frantic conditions of late war Germany and the attempted blackout of information regarding the murders. I would think that Wisliceny would have the more accurate information in regards to the total numbers involved as he was a deputy of Eichmann. And, as such, I would imagine, that he would want to cast off as much blame onto the absent Eichmann as possible at the trials. Höttl, on the other hand, would have less reason to fear for his life on account of the Endlösung and therefor little to no reason not to be more honest with his interrogators regarding his discussion(s) with Eichmann.