Prisoners Died of Typhus Not Systematic Murder

The claim has a small kernel of truth. Many people did die of typhus, dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis, exhaustion and starvation in the camps, particularly in the chaotic final months of the war when the SS administration collapsed and the camps were overwhelmed by evacuation transports. The argument fails because it asks the listener to mistake one cause of death for the entire phenomenon. The systematic killing operation, which used gas chambers, mass shootings, designed starvation, untreated disease, and forced labour to death, is documented separately and at length. The disease deaths and the murder deaths are not alternatives; they are categories of an overall operation in which the SS arranged the conditions for both.

Where the disease deaths actually occurred

Typhus was endemic in the German camp system, particularly in the period from late 1944 onwards as the system imploded. Bergen-Belsen, originally a small holding camp for Jewish prisoners considered for exchange, became a dumping ground in the final winter for evacuation transports from camps further east. Its population swelled from approximately 7,000 in summer 1944 to approximately 60,000 by April 1945, in facilities designed for a fraction of that number. The water supply collapsed, the sewage system failed, the food ration disappeared, and a typhus epidemic swept through the camp killing thousands per week. Anne Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, in conditions that would have killed them whether or not the SS had any further plans for them. Approximately 35,000 to 40,000 prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen in this final phase, the majority of disease.

The disease deaths at Bergen-Belsen, at the satellite camps of Mauthausen and Dachau in the final weeks, and at the camps that received evacuation transports as the eastern killing facilities were closed, were real. The British medical reports by Brigadier Glyn Hughes at Bergen-Belsen, the American medical reports at Buchenwald and Dachau, and the contemporaneous Red Cross observations document the conditions and the causes of death in detail.

What this does not address

The disease-deaths argument addresses Bergen-Belsen and the final-phase western camps. It does not address Auschwitz-Birkenau, where approximately 1.1 million people were killed (the great majority on arrival, in the gas chambers, without registration), of whom only those selected for labour were ever in danger of dying of typhus because only they were ever in the camp long enough. It does not address the Operation Reinhard camps (Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka), where approximately 1.7 million people were killed, almost all on arrival, with no labour-camp infrastructure where typhus could have been the cause of death. It does not address the Einsatzgruppen killings in the occupied Soviet territories, where approximately 1.5 million people were shot, mostly in the second half of 1941. It does not address the gas-van killings at Chełmno (approximately 200,000). It does not address the killings by the Romanian, Hungarian, Croatian and other axis-allied forces. It does not address the ghetto deportations to the killing centres. None of this can be characterised as typhus.

The total Jewish dead of approximately six million breaks down, in the standard reconstructions, into approximately 3 million in the gas chambers and gas vans, approximately 1.5 to 2 million by shooting, approximately 800,000 to 1 million in the ghettos and through deportations to camps where they died of starvation and exposure (a category that is partly disease but is also itself the result of deliberate policy), and a smaller number from various other operations. Disease accounts for a fraction of the total. The dishonest move is to take the most disease-affected population (Bergen-Belsen at the very end) and present it as representative of the whole.

The deliberate use of disease conditions

The deeper point is that the SS used disease as an instrument. The conditions at the labour camps and ghettos, where typhus and other epidemics regularly broke out, were not accidents. The food rations were calibrated below the level that would sustain life over months; the housing was overcrowded by deliberate decision; the sanitary infrastructure was deliberately inadequate; medical treatment was largely withheld. The mortality from disease in these conditions was a foreseen and accepted consequence of the policy. The SS officer Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, the senior SS and police leader in occupied Poland, wrote explicitly in 1942 that the food and housing conditions in the Lublin district ghettos would lead to “natural” reduction of the population, and that this was an acceptable outcome. The Goebbels diary entry of 27 March 1942 records that “the procedure is fairly barbaric and not to be described in detail. Of the Jews not much will remain. Approximately sixty per cent will have to be liquidated, only forty per cent can be put to work.” The “liquidation” included the disease-and-starvation track as well as the explicit killing track. They were the same operation.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it uses a real category of death (disease in the final months at Bergen-Belsen and similar camps) to obscure the much larger category of explicit killing. It also obscures the fact that the disease deaths themselves were not natural but the consequence of a deliberate regime of malnutrition, overcrowding and medical neglect that the SS knew would produce them. To accept the denial, one would have to ignore Auschwitz, the Operation Reinhard camps, the Einsatzgruppen, the gas vans, and the documented SS attitude towards the disease deaths in the camps where disease was the immediate cause. The reduction of the entire operation to typhus is the reduction of a six-million death toll to a sliver of itself.

What proportion of the dead can disease account for? What proportion was killed in the gas chambers? What proportion was shot? Where can the breakdown be read?

See also

• The Einsatzgruppen
• Anne Frank
• The Red Cross Reported Only 300000 Deaths

---

Sources

• Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, contemporaneous medical reports on Bergen-Belsen, April to May 1945, Imperial War Museum and the Wellcome Library
• Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, Routledge, 1998
• Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany 1945 to 1950, Wayne State University Press, 2002
• Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991, with the breakdown of cause of death across the killing operation
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, Yale University Press, 2003, statistical appendices
• Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 to March 1942, University of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem, 2004, on the deliberate use of starvation conditions in the ghettos
• Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, edited by Elke Fröhlich, K. G. Saur, 1993 to 2008, entry of 27 March 1942
• Christian Gerlach, Calculated Murders: The German Economic and Annihilation Policy in White Russia 1941 to 1944, Hamburger Edition, 1999, on the food-policy origins of the killing
• Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, Princeton University Press, 2002, on the deliberate use of starvation as a method
• Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector (eds.), The Einsatzgruppen Reports, Holocaust Library, 1989, on the shooting operations that disease cannot account for
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Bergen-Belsen” and “Mortality in the Concentration Camps”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org