The figure of six million murdered Jews is the most attacked number in modern history. It has been called invented, exaggerated, fabricated, propaganda, a Zionist plot, a tax dodge, a tool of empire, a hoax. None of those claims survive contact with the evidence. The number is the result of nearly eighty years of work by historians and demographers using sources that the deniers have never engaged with seriously. This page sets out how the figure is calculated, what the margins of error are, and what would have to be true for it to be wrong.
The basic method is straightforward. You take the prewar Jewish population of every country and region in Europe, using the censuses of the late 1930s and the surviving Jewish community registers. You take the postwar Jewish population using the same sources. The difference, after subtracting wartime emigration to the Americas, Palestine and elsewhere, gives you the lower bound of the dead. The figure is around six million. The two most cited demographic studies, Jacob Lestschinsky’s of 1946 and Wolfgang Benz’s of 1991, arrive at six million and around six point one million respectively, by different methods, working from different national starting points. They agree because the underlying data agree.
The figure is also reachable from the perpetrator side. Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews compiled, country by country, the deportation orders, the camp records, the railway timetables, the Einsatzgruppen reports, the labour assignments and the postwar trial transcripts. He arrived at five point one million as a conservative figure, working only from documented operations and excluding the unknown deaths in flight, in hiding, by hunger and disease in ghettos before deportation, and by the actions of local collaborators outside the formal German chain of command. Hilberg himself thought the true total was closer to six million. The two methods, demographic and operational, converge.
The components of the figure are themselves heavily documented. Around three million Polish Jews were murdered, of a prewar population of three point three million, a death rate above ninety per cent. Around one and a half million Soviet Jews were murdered, mostly by the Einsatzgruppen and their local helpers in 1941 and 1942. Around five hundred and fifty thousand Hungarian Jews were murdered, most of them at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944, the deportations carried out under Adolf Eichmann in around eight weeks. Around two hundred thousand French Jews. Around one hundred and four thousand Dutch Jews. The numbers go on. Each of them is documented from independent national sources, not from a central tally that could in principle have been manipulated.
The Auschwitz total alone is around one point one million dead, of whom around one million were Jews. That number was disputed for many years because the Soviet announcement of 1945 said four million, a propaganda figure with no basis in the operational records. The Auschwitz Museum revised the figure down in the 1990s when the Soviet records became fully available. Deniers seized on the revision as proof of fraud. It was the opposite. It was scholarship correcting an inflated wartime claim using the captured German records, the same records that establish the lower number is itself a confirmed minimum.
To make six million wrong, you would have to find around five million Jews who did not die. They would have had to live somewhere, work somewhere, be counted in some postwar census, leave a paper trail in tax records, marriage registers, birth certificates, social security files. No deniers have ever produced that paper trail because it does not exist. The dead are not hidden in some other country. They are dead. The records of their deaths exist. The names of around four million eight hundred thousand of them are in the Yad Vashem central database of victims, with documentation. The remaining gap between four point eight million named and the six million total is a function of which communities were destroyed most completely. Where the entire community was killed, including the registrars, there is no surviving roll to draw the names from. That is not evidence of fraud. It is evidence of how thorough the killing was.
The figure of six million is, if anything, conservative. Some recent historians, including Snyder and others working on the killing fields of the east, have argued for figures of six point two or six point three million. The official Yad Vashem figure remains six million. The honest answer to the question how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust is that the figure is six million, with a small uncertainty in either direction, and that no deniers’ argument has ever succeeded in moving it.
See also
- Raul Hilberg
- The Einsatzgruppen
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- The Six Death Camps
- The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
- The Eichmann Trial as a Turning Point in Holocaust Consciousness
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards