How many people, in total, were victims of (that is, died because of) the Holocaust?
Of the above, how many were Jews?
Of the answer to number 1, is there any further breakdown (Rroma/gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs, political opponents, Christians, etc.) with exact numbers available?
When Holocaust victims are remembered, are all Holocaust victims remembered?
Do the names often read out in remembering the Holocaust include categories in question 3?
Thank you.
WRS
“The Holocaust” normally specifically refers to the jewish victims. I suppose some might count all the people who ended up in exterination camps (gypsies), though given the uncertainty of the figures available and the fact that the ovewhelming majority of these deportees were Jews, I’m not sure it makes much of a difference.
Most of the people you listed in 3) were deported to concentration camps, not to extermination camps.
To give you an example I’m a little familiar with of the uncertainty of figures available, the death toll in the (contrentration, not extermination) camp where my father was deported is variously estimated between 20% and 55% of the deportees depending on the sources. And that’s a camp for which lists of the inmates are relatively available.
Just to give you an idea of the difference, I quickly checked the % of estimated survivors amongst some categories of deportees from France :
Racial : 5% or so
Resistants : 65% or so
Politicals : 90% or so
The Roma/Gypsies call it the “Porrajmos”…the devouring, and anywhere between half a million to a million and a half were killed. The prewar population of Roma in Europe was between 2-3 million.
In Hebrew, it’s called the “Shoah”…the calamity, and about 6 million Jews were killed. There were about 10 million Jews in Europe, pre-war.
The numbers I have seen usually estimate that 50% of the deaths were jews. To get more detailed information, try the Holocaust History Project here, which has several cites supporting its numbers if you follow the links, or the US Holocaust Museum here which has information on individual subgroups.
I wrongly (or so it seems) believed the figure was significantly
lower.