Number of Victims of the Holocaust - Reference Thread

[steve248]

Michael,
I did not say that Korherr got the Soviet numbers from Eichmann; I only mentioned that he had the Gen.Govt figures and especially the Aktion Reinhardt figures from him. I read recently that the Treblinka figure quoted in the Hoefle Telegram had, when Treblinka finished, gone up from 71355(5) to 950,000 when the rest of Warsaw Jewish population were murdered. And the Sobibor figure had risen from 101,370 to 110,000.
You could then say Aktion Reinhardt had maybe 1274166 + additional 246,445 giving 1,520,611 victims
Carrying on with this macabre line of numbers. How many were eventually murdered at Auschwitz?
How many were killed in other camps and ghettos in the Gen.Govt? I would not be surprised if that number was over 2,500,000 people (not just Jews) murdered.
So you could easily say Hoettl might be right on this point.

If we are willing to accept there is an element of truth in Hoettl's assertion, are we willing to accept a very short and to the point handwritten statement (in English(!) and signed) by Rudolf Hoess, dated 16 March 1946 at Minden, that under his command between June/July 1941 and end 1943 "two million persons" were killed at KL Auschwitz?

Carrying on with Hoettl for a moment, there is an unpublished Nuremberg interrogation of his: 2615-PS dated 5 Nov 1945. In this Hoettl states that he knew Eichmann from 1938 when both were in SD Vienna. He then remarks that he met Eichmann again in 1943. He goes on:
"In August 1944 at the occasion of a visit in my apartment in Budapest Eichmann told me that he had to make a report for Himmler on the number of Jews killed, and that he estimated the sum-total of the Jews killed as 6 millions. Of these 4 million had been killed in the extermination institutions in the East [he can only mean the Gen.Govt.], when the additional 2 millions were killed by shootings - mainly by the Einsatzgruppen of the SIPO and the SD during the campaign in the East."
Hoettl also mentions in the document that he knew of the shootings in Russia from a conversation in 1942 with SS-Brif Dr Stahlecker [Einsatzgruppe A ].
Going back to Korherr and his reporting of killings in Russia, this information would not have come from Eichmann because he had no role with the Einsatzgruppen. The figures more likely came from RSHA IV A1 which was the centre for information from the Einsatzgruppen. Out of interest, Eichmann's department, RSHA IV B4, did not receive their first copy of the daily Einsatzgruppen "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR" until 24 July 1941 (EM 25), according to the distribution lists.
That said, I wonder how the figure of 2 million victims in the East killed by the Einsatzgruppen was arrived at.
The Einsatzgruppen to end 1941 are not even 1 million and probably (?) not even at this mark by end 1942.
Did the various Police Battalions and Waffen-SS units of one kind or another really kill the missing numbers?
Maybe Hoettl's or Eichmann's number about the Soviet Jews was rounded up.

[NickA]

the FIRST mistake is calling Irving a expert in history.

There must be something about this discussion that some people are very afraid of.

I note you don't actually defend AJ Cristol who must surely have defended far <strike>worse</strike> ahistorical nationalist myths than Irving ever did.

[Gorque]

Carrying on with Hoettl for a moment, there is an unpublished Nuremberg interrogation of his: 2615-PS dated 5 Nov 1945. In this Hoettl states that he knew Eichmann from 1938 when both were in SD Vienna. He then remarks that he met Eichmann again in 1943. He goes on:
"In August 1944 at the occasion of a visit in my apartment in Budapest Eichmann told me that he had to make a report for Himmler on the number of Jews killed, and that he estimated the sum-total of the Jews killed as 6 millions. Of these 4 million had been killed in the extermination institutions in the East [he can only mean the Gen.Govt.], when the additional 2 millions were killed by shootings - mainly by the Einsatzgruppen of the SIPO and the SD during the campaign in the East."
Hoettl also mentions in the document that he knew of the shootings in Russia from a conversation in 1942 with SS-Brif Dr Stahlecker [Einsatzgruppe A ].

Hi Steve248:

I've seen the document mentioned in the Nuremberg transcripts by the prosecution and skipped over in the documents, from 2614-PS and then 2620-PS.

You wouldn't want to give poor ol' Gorque a clue as to where to look for some of these passed-over documents? *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*

[LineDoggie]

the FIRST mistake is calling Irving a expert in history.

There must be something about this discussion that some people are very afraid of.

I note you don't actually defend AJ Cristol who must surely have defended far <strike>worse</strike> ahistorical nationalist myths than Irving ever did.

Indeed, some are afraid of Irving being exposed as what he is going by his defenders posts.

[NickA]

some are afraid of Irving being exposed as what he is going by his defenders posts.

I've come across the occasional Holocaust Denier - I've never come across anyone I'd call a defender of Irving. He was plainly a falsifier:

Numbers killed – Irving’s claims
11.6 The estimates placed by Irving in succeeding editions of Dresden and in his speeches on the number of fatalities due to the bombing of Dresden are as follows:
(i) in the 1966 edition of The Destruction of Dresden Irving contended that 135,000 were estimated authoritatively to have been killed and further contended that the documentation suggested a figure between 100,00 and 250,000;
(ii) in the 1971 edition the figure for those killed was placed at more than 100,000;
(iii) in 1989 when launching the ‘Leuchter Report’ in Britain Irving informed journalists present that between 100,000 and 250,000 were killed;
(iv) in 1992 Irving told the Institute of Historical Review that 100,000 people were killed in twelve hours by the British and the Americans;
(v) in 1993 in a video made for the Australian public Irving contended that over 130,000 died;
(vi) in the 1995 edition of The Destruction of Dresden the attack was estimated to have killed 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants;
(vii) in 1996 in Goebbels: The Mastermind of the Third Reich Irving noted that between 60,000 and 100,000 people has been killed in the raids on Dresden.
11.7 Other such claims made by Irving include the following:
(i) in a speech in South Africa in 1986 Irving stated that 100,000 people were killed in one night in Dresden;
(ii) in Ontario in 1991 he told and an audience that over 100,000 people were killed in one night in February 1945;
(iii) in a television documentary screened on 28 November 1991 Irving said that 25,000 people may have been executed in Auschwitz but five times that number were killed in Dresden in one night, and
(iv) at the launch of the ‘Leuchter Report’ to in 1989 Irving stated that there were 1,000,000 refugees in Dresden of whom “hundreds of thousands” were killed.
11.8 In his Reply in the present action Irving asserted an intention to prove at trial that estimates of casualties in Dresden have indeed ranged between 35,000 and 250,000. At trial he testified that the best margins for figures which he would accept were between 60,000 and 100,000. Irving contended that earlier estimates had been inflated by the communist government of East Germany (in which Dresden was situated) for essentially political reasons. He denied that he had been responsible for some of the claims made on the dustjacket of the paperback editions of The Destruction of Dresden. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/David_Ir ... 99s_claims

But my attention is drawn to the last sentence "[Irving] denied that he had been responsible for some of the claims made on the dustjacket of the paperback editions of The Destruction of Dresden".

I would really like to know if that is even possible, that words can appear on a book cover that the author never intended or repudiates.

However, I've now seen something very similar - and I'm waiting for someone to either defend or deny the much, much more influential statement on the dust jacket of "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" that states that Holocaust Deniers 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 precise wording was picked up thousands of times in Google Search, though its mysteriously dropped to only 92 now.

I expected to find an explanation for this in "NUMBER OF VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST - REFERENCE THREAD".

Of course, if simple fiction has slipped into the entire narrative I'll not grill you over this astonishing discovery.

[NickA]

Hannah Szenes and Peretz Goldstein were parachute agents and when captured treated as spies/agents.

That's a really bad comparison - Hannah's mother wasn't angry with the Germans but with a minister in the Israeli government.

07/31/2007 ... PERFIDY IS a devastating account of how, toward the end of the Shoah, the Jews of Hungary were betrayed by Rudolf Kastner, deputy head of the Relief and Rescue Committee, an ideological affiliate of Mapai (precursor of today's Labor Party).
... Eichmann allowed Kastner to organize a rescue train which brought 1,685 of these people to safety in Switzerland, in return - so goes Hecht's damning accusation - for keeping the rest of Hungarian Jewry in the dark about the fate that awaited them. He thus facilitated the Nazi genocide.
... Hecht charges that Kastner, despite his connections with the SS, didn't lift a finger to help Hanna Szenes, the Palestinian Jewish heroine who had parachuted into Nazi-occupied Hungary on a rescue mission. Perhaps most damning of all: After the war, Kastner testified on behalf of SS officer Kurt Becher (a Nazi he'd been dealing with), though Becher had taken part in the genocide of Hungarian Jewry. With all this under his belt, Hecht wrote, Kastner eventually wound up in Israel vying for a spot on the Mapai Party's Knesset list. http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists ... -revisited

[mikegriffith1]

I've always been curious to ask Holocaust deniers how they explain all the footage taken of death camps at the end of WW II, footage that shows numerous and large piles of dead bodies, thousands of emaciated prisoners, etc. Was all that footage faked? And, did the Nazis at those camps only start murdering people in the preceding few weeks or months?

This is a small sampling of the footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPRsJrXZIYA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjj3WJFZcY0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFccy8xb7AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BI1WTC67ZI

[Princess Perfume]

I was just reading the tweet of the Auschwitz museum on six year old victim Gina Goldstein and the picture of her in a party dress (marred by the enforced Star of David).

Someone in the the thread colorized and enhanced Gina's photo and it's even more heartbreaking that way:

[wm]

I've always been curious to ask Holocaust deniers how they explain all the footage taken of death camps at the end of WW II, footage that shows numerous and large piles of dead bodies, thousands of emaciated prisoners, etc. Was all that footage faked? And, did the Nazis at those camps only start murdering people in the preceding few weeks or months?

Those weren't death camps. In 1945 all death camps (including Auschwitz gas chambers) were destroyed, basically razed to the ground.
The large piles of dead bodies resulted from the mass evacuation of the workforce of to-be-overrun concentration camps to central Germany (in the last months of the war) after the food supply in Germany had collapsed.

[Princess Perfume]

Exactly. The Germans made a big effort to hide what happened at Auschwitz, for example. The gas chambers there no longer exist. Though, would much be different today if they were still intact for visitors to see?

[Gorque]

Fortunately we have written records; No need for a Vernichtung Disney with trinkets to purchase at the end of the tour.

Hopefully a strong sense of empathy will do, unless of course one needs to have pablum be fed in order to understand the horror that was felt by those soon to murdered.

May the souls of the murdered rest in peace and those of their murderers, may they never find peace.

[Princess Perfume]

I'm still angry that in the 1950s, there were a lot of cogs in the murder machinery of the Third Reich still alive that neither the Allies or the West Germans felt any desire to do anything about. And, today, their great grand-children go after secretaries?

[Princess Perfume]

over a million children were murdered in the Holocaust. But, that's too big for most people in the general public to process, hence the heavy focus by pop history and culture on Anne Frank.

[steve248]

Princess P,
I take your points. Despite school-age children having lessons in the holocaust it is obviously done with a light touch to stop the poor things having nightmares. When I travelled in Poland until a few years ago I always made a point of going to Auschwitz. The carpark and main entry which is the former Auschwitz I is always a bit Disney-Holocaust when bus-loads of teenagers turn up, get off and sit down nearby turned into phone zombies. Zero interest in why they have come. It is a similar at Dachau. Flossenbürg and Ravensbrück attract a more informed public and much quieter.

The Allies did the best they could with denazification trials (a touch of farce about them) following by trials by the Allies involving thousands of defendants and many death penalties. The Americans and British stopped further trials by their military courts by about 1950 as they wanted to encourage the (West) German legal system to take over. It got off to slow start but trials have continued ever since.

Maybe ansata on this Forum will eventually produce a full listing of all NS war crimes trials before the "biological amnesty" also takes the posters here.

[steve248]

an addition:
I should add that the American and British military courts taking place in their respective Zones of Occupation could hardly continue after the Bundes Republic was created in May 1949. It was politically unacceptable for these courts to continue. Thus it was left to the nascent BRD justice system to take over. What you (and I) can carp about is neither of these Allies felt it incumbent to pass on the "majority" of their pending investigation files. The West Germans were on their own.