The Six Million Figure is an Exaggeration

Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of transporting Jews to the camps from across Nazi-occupied Europe, used the figure of six million himself. He boasted about it on tape recordings made in Argentina in 1957, four years before his capture, in conversation with the Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen. On those tapes, played in evidence at his trial, Eichmann is heard saying that approximately four million Jews had been killed in the camps and a further two million by shooting, and regretting that the figure was not higher. He said: “If we had killed all of them, the thirteen million, then I would be satisfied and would say: good, we have destroyed an enemy.”

The figure was not given by Eichmann to a court or to a hostile interrogator. It was given to a fellow Nazi, in private, in exile, with no reason to inflate it. The same figure had been reported earlier by another SS officer, Wilhelm Höttl, in a sworn affidavit at Nuremberg in November 1945 (Document PS-2738). Höttl said Eichmann had given him the same breakdown, four million in the camps and two million by shooting, in a conversation in late 1944. Eichmann, when he was tried in Jerusalem in 1961, did not dispute that he had used the figure. His defence was that he had been a small functionary carrying out orders. He was hanged for his crimes in May 1962.

Eichmann had been the senior administrator of the operation. He took the minutes at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, the meeting at which the Final Solution was co-ordinated between the agencies that would carry it out. The decision to murder the Jews of Europe had been taken earlier; Wannsee was where the bureaucracy of the killing was settled. Eichmann drafted the protocol of that meeting. Thirty copies were made and tightly controlled; one survived, found in the German Foreign Office files in 1947. Its country-by-country tabulation, also drafted by Eichmann, lists 11 million Jews in the territories the regime intended to “resolve”. By the time the Allied advance brought the killing to a halt, the regime had got through somewhere over half its target. The arithmetic fits.

The figure of six million is therefore not a post-war Allied invention. It came from the perpetrators themselves, during the killing, used by the man who had administered the transports, in a private conversation with another perpetrator, and confirmed by the bureaucracy’s own surviving files when those files were captured.

The historians’ count

Historians have examined the available evidence, of which there is a great deal. The German regime was meticulous about recording what it had done, and reporting it up the chain. Allied intelligence captured the files at the end of the war. Other countries and organisations that participated, including the satellite states and the railway and police bureaucracies, kept their own records. Post-war, individual victim names have been collected with documentary support. The exact figure cannot be proven to the last person. The scale is not in serious dispute.

The most rigorous of the post-war counts is the collaborative volume edited by Wolfgang Benz, Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, published in 1991. Benz’s team of national specialists worked country by country and arrived at a total range of 5.29 to 6.0 million. Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews, gives 5.1 million as a deliberately conservative figure. Israeli scholars working from the Yad Vashem material reach figures around 5.85 million. Yad Vashem’s own names project, running since 1955, has so far named nearly five million people individually, each with documentary or testimonial support, and continues to add to the database. The differences between these independent estimates are small. They agree that the figure is approximately six million.

What scholars argue about, and they do, is the precision of the breakdowns: how many at Treblinka against how many at Sobibor, how many among the Hungarian deportees who were never registered. Those are the proper subjects of historiographical debate. The question of whether the killing was on the scale of millions, or of “a few hundred thousand” as some deniers propose, is not.

Why the claim is harmful

Promoting the claim that the six million figure is exaggerated is harmful in several ways. It disrespects the victims and survivors by attempting to minimise their suffering or suggest their experiences are being overstated. It distorts history: the sheer scale of what was done, carried out on an industrial scale across Europe, demonstrates how meticulously planned and executed the Holocaust was, and how deliberate it was; understanding the scale is part of how the lesson gets passed on, and diminishing the scale is part of how the lesson gets lost. And it is a brazen attempt to rehabilitate the image and reputation of the Nazis by downplaying one of their biggest crimes and making it seem less systematic and less extreme than it really was. It is almost as if factually reporting six million people were murdered is an affront to them and the Nazis are having their reputation traduced.

Anyone promoting the claim that the figure of six million is exaggerated should be challenged to back it up. What is the true figure in their reckoning? Where did they get it? What is their evidence?

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Sources

• The Sassen interviews, recorded in Argentina in 1957, partial transcripts published as Eichmann Interrogated, ed. Jochen von Lang, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1983; full materials at the German Federal Archives, Koblenz
• Wilhelm Höttl, sworn affidavit on Eichmann’s statement of the six million figure, Nuremberg Document PS-2738, 26 November 1945
• Wannsee Conference Protocol, 20 January 1942, surviving copy held at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial, Berlin. Full text at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• Eichmann trial transcripts, Jerusalem 1961, available via the Nizkor Project and the Israeli State Archives
• Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, Yale University Press, 2003
• Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945, HarperCollins, 2007
• Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews, Cambridge University Press, 2016
• Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Knopf, 2014 (the definitive treatment of the Sassen tapes)
• Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, https://yvng.yadvashem.org
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution”
• House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site, Berlin, https://www.ghwk.de