Majdanek Death Toll?

[Schmauser]

How many victims are officially attributted to the Majdanek Death Camp? The Soviet came to 1.7 million!, when they liberated the camp. Then the figure dropped to 1.5 million at Nuremburg, by 1960 the number of people murdered declined to 350,000. This was corrected by the guidebook, when it was learned that no more than 300,000 people had even been sent to Majdanek. The actual death toll was 250,000 people killed at Majdanek. hmmm what effect does this have on the 5 or 6 million estimate?

~Regards Schmauser

[Luca]

Appare that the exact number can't be determinated but probable around 250.000 / 360.000.Why is possible say 360.000 is no clear cause more that 100.000 was polish, 80.000 jews from different nations, 50.000 soviet citizen and 20.000 from others country.

[Luca]

Around 46.000 was trasfered with transports during all time.
When the 8th Tank Corps cross the camp only 500 POW soviet remain.
So appare that Your 300.000 is correct.

[Roberto]

How many victims are officially attributted to the Majdanek Death Camp? The Soviet came to 1.7 million!, when they liberated the camp. Then the figure dropped to 1.5 million at Nuremburg, by 1960 the number of people murdered declined to 350,000. This was corrected by the guidebook, when it was learned that no more than 300,000 people had even been sent to Majdanek. The actual death toll was 250,000 people killed at Majdanek. hmmm what effect does this have on the 5 or 6 million estimate?

~Regards Schmauser

None at all, as this estimate relied and relies as much on the overblown Soviet estimate regarding Majdanek as it did on their equally overblown estimate regarding Auschwitz-Birkenau - not at all, that is.

The greater proportion of the victims of Majdanek were not Jews but Polish political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war, by the way.

According to Frank Golczewski's assessment of the fate of Polish Jews in the study Dimensionen des Völkermords by Wolfgang Benz et al, the realistic minimum numbers of Polish Jews who perished at the extermination camps are the following:

Chelmno, 1st phase: 215,000
Sobibor: 80,000
Belzec: 390,000
Treblinka: 974,000
Auschwitz: 300,000
Majdanek: 50,000
Chelmno, 2nd phase: 10,000

Total: 2,019,000

The total number of Polish Jews who fell victims to Nazi persecution, including the victims of the above mentioned extermination camps as well as those of ghettoes, "plain" concentration camps and mass executions by mobile killing squads, is estimated by Golczewski at ca. 2,700,000.

The number of Soviet Jews killed mostly by Einsatzgruppen and other mobile German formations is estimated at ca. 2,100,000 in Gert Robel's assessment contained in the same study.

As to other European countries, the assessments of various historians published in Dimensionen des Völkermords arrive at the following figures:

German Reich: 160,000 to 165,000

Austria: 65,459

Luxembourg: 1,200

France ("including foreign nationals"): 76,134

Belgium ("including foreign nationals"): 28, 518

Netherlands: 102,000

Denmark: 116

Norway: 758

Italy: 6,513

Albania: 591 ("deportees")

Greece: 59,185

Bulgaria (deported from Bulgarian-occupied areas): 11,393

Yugoslavia: 60,000 to 65,000

Hungary: 550,000

Chechoslovakia ("Reich Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia" plus Slovakia): 143,000

Romania: 211,214

Poland: 2,700,000

Soviet Union: 2,100,000

Total: 6,276,081 to 6,286,081

[paolosilv]

Chelmno, 1st phase: 215,000
Sobibor: 80,000
Belzec: 390,000
Treblinka: 974,000
Auschwitz: 300,000
Majdanek: 50,000
Chelmno, 2nd phase: 10,000

These numbers aren't accepted. At Auschwitz Birkenau, Wolfgang Benz's book "The Holocaust" places the number of Jews murdered at 1.1 million.

It is proven that at least 152,000 Jews died at Chelmno, and Sobibor has listed 250,000 Jews murdered.

[uberjude]

Paolosilv, the numbers you're challenging (e.g, 300,000 at Auschwitz) are only for Polish Jews, most of whom were murdered in the Aktion Reinhard camps and Chelmno. The 1.1 million million (and the Auschwitz museum puts it at 1 million) Jews killed/died in Auschwitz from all countries.

Schmauser, as for the Majdanek numbers, as well as the notorious 4 million figure for Auschwitz, please note that nowhere did it ever say that 4 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz, or 1.7 million Jews killed in Majdanek. The projections and estimates were for total inmates killed. Some came from rumor, some from estimates (I believe that at Auschwitz, they made an estimate based on the maximum number that could have been killed based on crematoria capacity or some such thing. But at no point were those numbers ever used to calculate the number of Jews, and again, not even the plaque that Holocaust deniers love to cite says anything about Jews. http://brianakira.files.wordpress.com/2 ... o-1990.jpg

Hence, these numbers have no bearing whatsoever on the figure of 5.2 -6 million or so Jews killed.

Moreover, it's important to note that by and large, the Soviet Union downplayed the Jewish element in the Holocaust. Some of this was understandable, given the huge numbers of Soviet citizens killed, some was political, both because of anti-Jewish/anti-Zionist sentiment, as well as the Soviet desire to depict themselves as liberators rather than occupiers. In other words, if Auschwitz was a place where 1 million Jews were killed, it wouldn't do much for the Soviet image. If 4 million Jews, Czechs, Poles and others were killed, then the Soviets were liberating Eastern Europe from the genocidal fascists.

For more on Soviet historiography and the holocaust, see the first essay here, by Zvi Gitelman, which highlights efforts to "dejudaize" the holocaust:
http://books.google.com/books?id=zIAkGq ... q=&f=false

[paolosilv]

Thank you. The current estimate for Jews who perished at Majdanek ranges from 80,000 in the camp proper to 160,000, including the subcamps, according to the USHMM and wiki. I hope they can find out a closer estimate.