The Auschwitz Death Toll Was Revised Downward

This is the most arithmetically literate of the denier claims about the numbers. The plaque revision did happen. The Soviet figure of four million for Auschwitz, displayed on the original memorial plaques from 1948, was indeed replaced in 1990 with a revised figure of approximately 1.1 million. The revision did indeed represent a downward adjustment of approximately 2.5 million. What the denier argument ignores is what the original figure was, where it came from, why it was wrong, what the new figure is, and why the revision had no effect on the overall total of approximately six million Jewish dead.

Where the four million figure came from

The Soviet figure of four million for Auschwitz was produced by the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union (Chrezvychaynaya Gosudarstvennaya Komissiya, ChGK), which had been set up in November 1942 to document German atrocities in occupied Soviet territory. After the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, the commission’s investigators arrived at the camp within weeks and produced a report dated 6 May 1945. Their methodology was rough by later standards: they took the Soviet engineers’ calculations of the maximum theoretical capacity of the four crematoria at Birkenau, multiplied by the number of days the crematoria had been in operation, and arrived at a figure they rounded to four million. The number was a calculation of upper-bound capacity, not a count of identified victims, and the Soviet investigators were operating in the immediate aftermath of liberation with limited access to the SS administrative records that had survived the German attempts to destroy them.

The four million figure was adopted as the official Polish state figure when the Auschwitz museum was established in 1947, and was inscribed on the memorial plaques in nineteen languages on the unveiling of the Birkenau international monument in 1967. It was never the figure used by serious historians of the Holocaust outside the Soviet bloc. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (first edition 1961) gave the Auschwitz figure as approximately one million; Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution (1953) had given approximately 800,000 to 900,000; the working consensus in Western Holocaust scholarship from the 1950s onwards was in the range of 1 to 1.5 million, never four million. The Western literature was clear about the discrepancy and clear about its origin in Soviet wartime methodology.

The 1990 revision

The revision came when the Auschwitz museum, freed by the end of communist rule in Poland to publish what its own historians had been working on for years, formally adopted the figure produced by Franciszek Piper, the museum’s senior historian. Piper had spent the 1980s working through the surviving Auschwitz administrative records (the Sterbebücher, or death registers, of which approximately 70,000 entries survive; the Hefte (notebooks); the Kalendarium; the SS communications captured at the end of the war; the Hungarian transport records; the railway timetables of the deportation operations; and the population registers of the camps from which transports had originated). His monograph Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz (Auschwitz Studies, 1991, German edition; English edition 1994) set out the calculation in detail. His total was approximately 1.1 million people killed at Auschwitz, of whom approximately 960,000 were Jews, approximately 75,000 were non-Jewish Poles, approximately 21,000 were Roma, approximately 15,000 were Soviet prisoners of war, and approximately 25,000 were others. The new plaques, unveiled in 1995, recorded these figures.

The revision was openly published, methodologically transparent, and accepted by the international Holocaust historical community without controversy. Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the major academic specialists adopted Piper’s figure. The German Dimension des Völkermords (Benz, 1991) used compatible figures. The Auschwitz figure had not been a contested matter in Western scholarship; the revision brought the official Polish state figure into line with what the working consensus had already been for several decades.

Why the overall total was unaffected

The arithmetic the deniers want the listener to perform is this: if Auschwitz dropped by 2.5 million, the overall figure must drop by 2.5 million. The arithmetic the deniers do not want the listener to perform is the actual one: the overall total of approximately six million Jewish dead was never built up by adding the Soviet four million Auschwitz figure to the other camps and shootings. It was built up by adding the deaths attributed to each killing site, each operation, each national catastrophe, using the country-by-country and operation-by-operation figures developed by independent scholarship. The Auschwitz figure used in those calculations was the working scholarly figure of approximately one to 1.1 million, not the Soviet four million. When the official Polish figure was revised in 1990, the overall total of approximately six million did not change because the scholarly figure had not changed. The two figures had been parallel, not connected, since the 1950s.

The same point can be made the other way around. If the Auschwitz figure had been four million, the overall figure of approximately six million would have been impossible: the country-by-country deportation lists, the Operation Reinhard camp totals, the Einsatzgruppen reports, and the ghetto deaths would together have to amount to less than two million, which they manifestly do not. The Western scholarly figure of six million has always been built on country and operation totals that were internally consistent, and the Auschwitz component of those totals has always been in the one-to-1.5 million range. The Soviet plaque was a public memorial figure, not a scholarly working figure. Its revision corrected a mistake; the mistake had never been load-bearing in the academic literature.

Why the claim is harmful

This claim is harmful because it borrows the appearance of scholarly self-correction (the museum revising its own figure) and uses it to suggest that the entire historical edifice is unstable. The opposite is the case. The revision is a piece of evidence that Holocaust historians correct themselves on the basis of evidence; that the institutions that hold the records are willing to publish revisions when the records support them; and that the standard total of approximately six million is robust enough that a 2.5 million correction at one site leaves it standing. To accept the denial, one would have to accept that no revisions ever happen in any field of history, that Auschwitz was the entire Holocaust, and that an inflated wartime Soviet figure was the foundation of the post-war scholarly consensus. None of these things is true.

What was the original Auschwitz figure, and where did it come from? What is the revised figure? Why does the overall total not change with the revision?

See also

• Raul Hilberg
• Soviet Prisoners of War
• Yad Vashem Jerusalem
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Sources

• Franciszek Piper, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz, Auschwitz Studies, Państwowe Muzeum w Oświęcimiu, 1991; English edition, The Number of Victims at Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1994
• Franciszek Piper, “The Number of Victims”, in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press / USHMM, 1994
• Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, Report on the Crimes Committed by the German-Fascist Aggressors at the Oświęcim Concentration Camp, 6 May 1945, Nuremberg Document USSR-008, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 39, Nuremberg, 1949
• Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Sterbebücher von Auschwitz (Death Books of Auschwitz), three volumes, K. G. Saur, 1995, with the surviving registration records
• Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939 to 1945, Rowohlt, 1989, the day-by-day reconstruction
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, first edition Quadrangle Books, 1961; third edition Yale University Press, 2003, with the Auschwitz totals tracked across editions
• Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939 to 1945, Vallentine Mitchell, 1953, with the early Western working figure
• Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991
• Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996, with detailed treatment of the museum’s revision history
• Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Memorial, “Number of Victims”, https://www.auschwitz.org, with the museum’s own published account of the revision
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Auschwitz”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org