From whence come all the disparity in the number of Jewish dead during the Holocaust? Reliable scholars put the number of dead between 5,100,000 and about 6,000,000. What are the breakdowns of the individual calculations (i.e., camp to camp, Einsatzgruppen action to Einsatzgruppen action).
For instance:
The indictment at Nuremberg stated that 5.7 million Jews were killed. Gerald Reitlinger’s Final Solution puts the number closer to 5 million, as do Chirot and Brzezinski. Rummel states about 5.3 million. Gutman’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust asserts somewhere between about 5.5 million and 5.8 million.
The 6 million figure has become somewhat of an icon, although it was arrived at within about a year of the end of the turmoil in Europe, in time for Nuremberg.
Subsequent accounting that I’ve seen has usually presented a lower number, the lowest I recall being around 3.7 million,
I don’t know why there is this emotional attachment to 6 milliion. If it were demonstrable that only 3.5 million Jews were killed by the Holocaust, would it somehow not be as atrocious? Do the huge numbers of Poles and Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses also murdered matter in a tally?
In some cases, every single member of an extended family were killed. In some cases, every single person in an area containing a few towns were killed and all of the records for that area were destroyed. It’s impossible to come up with an exact number so all one can do is estimate. Almost all estimates are in the 5.2 to 5.8 million range. That’s plus or minus around 5% which is about what one would expect for an estimate given the available data.
The most point-by-point estimate I saw came out to about 5.8 million as well. I don’t see an ‘attachment’ to 6 million: we’re also forgetting that the number is sometimes rounded up, and as such people are most familiar with that total even if it’s not precisely accurate.
While the Germans could be meticulous, they could also be sloppy. The numbers from the Einsatzgruppen were notoriously inaccurate.
Many of the estimates were based on comparisons of pre- and post-war populations of Jews in various communities. Among scholars, the “6 million” is always understood to have been a handy phrase rather than an attempt at an explicit number. The highest number I recall seeing for an attempt at a genuine census was 5.87 million. (There are also, unfortunately, disagreements regarding Polish numbers, specifically, with questions as to how many Polish Jews died as Jewish victims of the Nazis and how many died as Polish victims of the Soviets.)
To get specific numbers, you generally have to go to the original sources where they were compiled, few of which are on the net.
Using different methods to estimate, figures of ~4-7 million have been obtained. The figure of 6 million was a rounded version of the 5.7 million given at the Nuremburg trials which was obtained by estimating the pre- and post-war Jewish populations of countries.
Here are a list of estimates from different sources:
I’ve read Europe a History by Davies and I can tell you his estimate is based on several other estimates.
Given that a great many Jews were not transported to the work camps and death camps but rather were simply shot or beaten or burned to death on the front, as the Germans rolled over various countries, I don’t see how it could be possible to get an accurate figure. On the numerous occasions when German troops herded Jewish women and children into old barns and buildings to be set afire, nobody was adding them up. The regrettable truth is that we’ll never know for sure who all the murdered victims were, so we can never accurately count them.
I do have one question though- AFAIK, the figure was calculated based upon “there was X number of Jews pre-war, and Y number of Jews post war, thus X-y= number of Jews killed in Holocaust”. However, many non-Jewish German & Polish civilians were killed in the war by such things as Allied bombing. Was this taken into account?
However, Ringo makes an excellent point. Even if the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was “only” 3.7 million- that does not decrease the horror. And, the “six million” figure does not take into acount the million & millions of others “racially cleased”.