This is a query certain to generate ire. The “Holocaust” is usually described as the “slaughter of 6 million Jews by the Nazis”. Sometimes the phase “& others” is thrown in after “Jews”. OK, there is no doubt that Nazi thugs killed millions of Jews in concentration/slave labor camps, plus thousands more in death camps. ( If you are one of the nutsos who does NOT know this, please do not bother to post, the Holocaust is an accepted historical fact).
BUT. How do they know it was SIX million? I have heard they estimated by taking the # pre-war & the # post-war, and thus 6 million missing, thus 6 million killed by Nazis. But, there were huge civilian casualties in Germany (fire bombing of Dresden <shows Nazia not the ONLY war criminals> etc). I am sure that if you counted PRUSSIAN like that you would have seen a big decrease too. So why are all 6 million assumed to die in the Holocaust? And is that 6 mil figure based on good #s?
Lastly, I have read that 7-10 million slavs died in Nazi camps. So should it not be "the Holocaust, where 10 million Slavs (and others) died in Nazi camps? ( As you can see I’m a little irritated at some of MY people, who were bulldozed into the same mass graves beiing usually listed as “and others”, like their lives were not as important.)
The six million is (obviously) an estimate. Does it matter if it was really only 5.75 million? or if it was as much as 6.25 million?
It also should be noted that the Nazi killers kept excrutiatingly detailed records. It was certainly a period when there were many missing, presumed dead; but a great deal of the evidence condemning the Nazis (and the accounts and death tolls) come from their own hands.
From what I understand, the 6 million number is an estimate, and not exact. The following quote illustrates how scholars calculated the numbers included in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust by Gutman and Rozett:
“The figures were derived from population demographics, taking the number of Jews registered living in every village, town, and city in Europe, the number reported transported to camps, the number liberated from camps, the number killed in “special actions” by the Einsatzgruppen, and the number remaining alive after the war. The minimum and maximum loss figures represent the range of error variation. [refers to a table that says the minimum loss = 5,596,029, and the maximum loss = 5,860,129]” From: Shermer, Michael. 1997. Why People Believe Wierd Things. W.H. Freeman and Co. p. 237 and 238.
It seems like the key point is that it wasn’t just a before minus after type of calculation, but included Nazi records from the camps and execution squads. They may still be off by some, but who can tell how many?
Hope that helps!
-Steve
“Heyyyy sexy mama! Wanna kill all humans?” -Bender, Futurama
“Your game shows reward knowledge. Ours punish ignorance!” -The Simpsons
The actual number of people who died is incomprehensible to me.
[Edited to fix link and quote, mostly out of idle curiosity. You somehow deleted part of the URL in both the UBB and the actual post, Rysdad. Here’s the UBB tutorial.–Gaudere]
Near the bottom of the first page on this thread, Holocaust deniers illegal?
there are several posts with links to where the estimates originated.
The numbers are estimates, but the numbers for Jewish victims never get as low as 5.5 million and most are higher.
The only serious and legitimate challenge that I have seen to the numbers has come from a position that Konrad has mentioned. A number of Polish historians are attempting to document the Polish victims of Stalin. Their contention is that many of the numbers for Polish Holocaust victims result from estimating pre-war and post-war populations. They are concerned that Stalin murdered millions of Poles, (regardless whether they were Christian, Jew, or agnostic) but that the numbers of Stalin’s victims are reduced by placing all the Jewish deaths in the tally for the Nazis.
I suspect that they have a legitimate concern in terms of reconstructing the actual events of history. If it comes to a matter of different groups playing tug-of-war with a roster of victims, (especially if they began to claim “You’re stealing my numbers!”), then I start to lose sympathy with the exercise. (I have not seen Konrad claim that no or few Jews were murdered. He has not crossed the line into the “I’m more of a victim than you” camp in any post I have seen.)
An article in the February 2000 Atlantic goes into the numbers in great detail. The article is mainly about a suit involving Holocaust denial, but the numbers issue is brought up.
RE your other point. It’s true that many people besides Jews were killed by Nazi murderers. However, with the possible exception of the Romany (gypsies), the Jews were the only people for whom the Nazis had a specific well-thought out plan for total genocide. The victims of the gas chambers at Auschwitz were almost exclusively Jewish. Most Slavs who died were Russian P.O.W.'s who were forced into slave labor under appalling conditions. This was a horrible war crime, to be sure, but if you can grade these things it doesn’t quite measure up to the attempted systematic extermination of an entire race, IMHO.
The figures I’ve heard are that there were approximately five to ten million total victims killed by the Nazis of whom approximately half were Jews. The Jews were undeniably the largest group of victims. Other groups which were targeted include Slavs, Romany, blacks (a little known aspect of the Holocaust was that Germany’s small black population was virtually exterminated), the mentally retarded or ill, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists and other leftists, criminals, and many members of various right-wing groups which were rivals of the Nazis and who failed to convert in time.
Larry, like I said in my 1st post, some of my ukrainian relatives were bulldozed into the same mass graves as the Jews. They were killed because they were slavic, not POWs (the nazis didn’t work their british & american POWs to death). They were killed because of their race, and bulldozed into the same damn mass graves. I really don’t think that makes the Jews who were killed for their race, and then bulldozed into the graves w/ my distant relative any more “special”. Dead is dead. Killed for your race is genocide.
And, Little nemo, if you have 15 million dead, and 6 million are Jews, and maybe 1 million Gypsies (etc), that leaves 8 million Slavs. My figures estimated 7-10 million, in any estimate more Slavs than Jews. In any case, why are the “other” 9-11 million non-jews lumped in as “and others” as sort of an afterthought?
I really want to show what sort of racist scum the nazis were, and I believe it is important to tell the whole story, and get the facts straight. I am getting happier w/ the 6 million estimate due to input here, but the other issue is not getting any better.
“blacks (a little known aspect of the Holocaust was that Germany’s small black population was virtually exterminated)”
Why do I recall an article (book review?) in one of the major magazines in the last few months about a black man who grew up in Nazi Germany (German mother and black diplomat father, but the father returned to his country, IIRC)? Mind you, he did say that he was nearly lynched by a mob during the firebombing of a city (Munich? Dresden?), but that was because the crowd mistook him for an American airman. The Allied firebombing was in '44, wasn’t it?
IIRC, he wasn’t hiding a la Anne Frank but was living quite openly. Not that I don’t doubt that the Nazi racist “ideology” extended to blacks – I would be very surprised if it didn’t – but how did a (half) black person live openly in a German city to at least the tail end of the war if blacks were included in systematic genocide?
Just jumped over to Amazon.com to see if there was such a book. There is. (Boy, am I glad that I’m not imagining things!)
Destined to Witness : Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, by Hans J. Massaquoi. And as I recalled, Hans from the mother’s side and Massaquoi from the father’s. From the reviews and summaries there, I gather that Hans had to put up with persecution, both unofficial (insults and threats on the street) and official (damned Nuremburg Law), but that he wasn’t sent off to a camp or anything. BTW, the city where he lived, and was almost lynched as an Allied airman, was Hamburg.
From all the history books I’ve read, the totals were always listed as 6 million Jews and 6 million “others” - gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents, mentally ill, Serbs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on. I don’t know where you are getting your figures, but I’m pretty sure 12 million was the generally accepted one. Perhaps you are referring to new data?
More mysterious to me are the Soviet massacres… I’ve heard figures of 10-20 million killed under Lenin and 20-40 million killed under Stalin, but I’m not sure where I saw the higher numbers. Perhaps for Stalin they’re adding in the some of the WW2 dead caused by the horrible leadership? (approx. 20 million Soviet dead in WW2)
Daniel, not having done any particular research in that direction, I’d guess that Slavs probably were the second largest group killed by the Nazis. But your math is a little off; subtracting the number of Jews and Romany killed from the total doesn’t give you the number of Slavs, because there were many of victim groups besides these three.
John, I’ll admit I’d never heard of Hans Massaquoi before now. But the fact that he and perhaps a couple dozen other blacks managed to survive the war doesn’t mean that Germany’s black population wasn’t virtually exterminated. Blacks were particularly vulnerable targets for several reasons. They were a small group. They were readily identifiable (the average black German couldn’t conceal his identity as a Jew, communist, or homosexual potentially could). And the origins of Germany’s black population offended the Nazis; most black Germans were either from the colonies Germany lost after WWI or were the children of foreign soldiers who occupied Germany after WWI. In either event, their presence reminded the Nazis of Germany’s defeat in the last world war.
Urblue: I checked your site, and I found no mention of slav at all. Some holocaust sources don’t list the slavs as they were mostly POWs, and freedom fighters. sources that do list slavs usu list 7-10 million.
Nemo: since my info was that none of the other groups even went into the 100s of thousands, let alone millions ( gypsies are the largest, 100000- 1 million), I think my math is OK. It may even be that there are 3 groups, Slavs (7-10M) Jews(5-6M) and “others” upto 5M. But all the arguements about #s just bolster my points: 1. Was it really 6 million Jews? 2. Is it fair to lump the millions & millions of non-jews into an occasional “and others”?
I think we need to change the definition of the Holocaust to “where untold millions of humans were killed by racist Nazi thugs for no better reason than their race/religion/ or ethnicity”
Daniel, this is the way I see it. There were several million people killed. Most of them were killed because they belonged to some group the Nazis were trying to eliminate. Now, from everything I’ve heard and read, it seems clear that the Jews were almost certainly the largest group of victims. The Slavs were probably the second largest group. So you can validly say any of the following:
The Nazis killed several million people.
The Nazis killed several million Jews and other people.
The Nazis killed several million Jews, Slavs, and other people.
The Nazis killed several million Jews, Slavs, Romany, homosexuals, Communists, blacks, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mentally retarded, anti-Nazis, and other people.
There was also a public and deliberate campaign against Jews – edicts forbidding Jews to own property, requiring them to wear identifying marks, etc. The Jews were thus the target of government-controlled hate-campaign, of unimaginable murderousness.
My understanding (admittedly limited) is that the Slavs were simply murdered. (The British opposed this, even though Britons never, never, will be Slavs.) (Sorry)
Anyway, the “Holocaust” (and the specifically Jewish focus) is NOT just the murders, but the lengthy process of building up hatred and separation that lead to the murders. No reasonable person seriously thinks that a minority in the U.S. could be suddenly targeted by the government for being murdered; but we do know that a continual pattern of hatred, bigotry, separation, and de-humanization can happen. Thus, the moral imperative is focused more on the mistreatment of the Jews than on the murders, if you follow me.
Let’s face it, Stalin murdered millions of “political” enemies too. We’re not worried that either Gore or G. W. Bush would murder political opponents, so there’s an “otherness” to it. The “slippery slope” in terms of treatment of the Jews, however, is something that we see COULD happen here, and thus receives more focus.
I have never heard that the Nazis killed more than 12 million people as part of the Holocaust. I would be curious to see where you are getting your numbers. (Any web sites?)
Perhaps they are referring to generic “Slavic peoples”? Would that include some Serbs, Polish Jews, and Russian Jews (among others)? Maybe your “7-10 million Slavs” are overlapping different groups within the entire 12 million.
If you’re ever in Washington D.C., visit the Holocaust Museum. Allow yourself plenty of time; I was there for more than 4 hours and could have stayed another hour at least.
If you’ve wondered how the Nazis came to power in the first place, how their policies of discrimination and state-sponsored violence and murder began in subtle insults and grew to systemic slaughter, visit, and see. I was there less than 2 weeks ago, and it still hasn’t faded. Cripes, when I think that my great-grandfather and his children fled Bohemia in the 1920s…
Be prepared for what you’ll see. Many of the exhibits are, to say the least, upsetting. But, because I think it’s important that as many people as possible see, and know, and remember, and learn…I recommend a visit.
From the reviews and summaries there, I gather that Hans had to put up with persecution, both unofficial (insults and threats on the street) and official (damned Nuremburg Law), but that he wasn’t sent off to a camp or anything. BTW, the city where he lived, and was almost lynched as an Allied airman, was Hamburg.