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The number that I’m most familiar with is around 1 million, followed by a similar number for Treblinka, half as many for Belzec, and so on. More Jews (around 1.3m) are believed to have been killed by mass shooting and mobile gas chambers than any individual camp.
Correct. Read "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" to understand the many instances were whole communities were rounded up and killed in the woods nearby. The book is also chilling in other ways.
https://religiondocbox.com/73089029-Judaism/Transcript-of-th...
Required viewing.
"It said the plaques were taken down in line with findings by the Auschwitz State Museum that the number of victims in the two camps in southern Poland actually was 1.1 million to 1.5 million. Of that number, at least 960,000 were Jews, the museum concluded.
Previously, plaques in front of the ″International Monument to Victims of Fascism″ spoke of 4 million victims. Poles, not Jews, were listed first among the victimized peoples."
> The figure widely used in Poland of 4 million victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau was arrived at by a Soviet commission that came to the camp in February 1945, one week after its liberation.
> Poland has pressed the Soviets since the 1970s to grant historians access to World War II camp records, which were packed up and taken to the Soviet Union soon after the liberation, Piper said.
Which is probably why the plaque came down within months of the communist ruling party being dissolved. Not only should we not use Soviet officials to critique Western historians, but the article even says that Western historians critiqued the number:
> Some Western scholars have long questioned the 4 million figure.
In fact, that article is a good example of how serious scholars _have_ questioned figures, have been free to do so, and have openly revised figures. The result of those decades of efforts and study is the current historical consensus, which has been pretty well vetted at this point.
Where, precisely, is the grievance?
The grievance is that nobody updated total numbers even when this component was updated.
It's not "weirdly touchy". Holocaust denial is a relentless conspiracy theory, and those pushing antisemitism are relentlessly pushing slippery-slope arguments to push their agenda.
It's irrelevant if 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during WW2 instead of 7 million or 5 million. The problem is how this sort of nitpicking revolving high-level gross estimates is leveraged to deny it ever exist and fuel further hatred targeting Jewish people.
The number is not wrong. It's an estimate. Any reasonably intelligent person easily understands that the Nazis did not operated a counter which stopped the genocide when I hit 6000000. It means nothing if you say "up to 7" or "up to 6".
What makes a huge difference is the relentless effort to leverage this sort of revisionism to argue that nitpicking over estimates means the Holocaust did not happened at all.
This seems like a strawman. The dispute in question isn't over whether 6000000 died or 6000001. It's over "4-5 million" or "6 million".
>What makes a huge difference is the relentless effort to leverage this sort of revisionism to argue that nitpicking over estimates means the Holocaust did not happened at all.
Suppose we had incontrovertible evidence that it was actually 4 mililon. Would you suggest that we all pretend that the number was still 6 million, because revising the official number down would give ammo to Holocaust deniers?
I that my statement is not easy to misunderstand, and only bad faith can lead to this sort of conclusion. Did you actually had any difficulty understanding the point I made?
> Suppose we had incontrovertible evidence that it was actually 4 mililon.
Again, this is the sort of disingenuous argument that can only originate in bad faith.
Let's put things in perspective: the wikipedia article you're supposedly discussing is already quite clear in it's section on the death toll of the Holocaust.
It states in no unclear terms that "The most commonly cited death toll is the six million given by Adolf Eichmann to SS member Wilhelm Höttl, who signed an affidavit mentioning this figure in 1945."
Afterwards, the same article points out that "Historians' estimates range from 4,204,000 to 7,000,000.[419] According to Yad Vashem, "[a]ll the serious research" confirms that between five and six million Jews were murdered."
And here you are, pushing the Holocaust denial agenda by misrepresenting what an estimate is what wikipedia actually states, and the veracity of anything that supports the idea the Holocaust happened.
preposterous, shameful exaggeration of what the parent comment was saying.
The accurate number doesn't matter, but if you say the accurate number, that's bad, because the people who think the number is zero will somehow win. So don't say the accurate number.
Okay.
If everyone was really looking for the truth, this wouldn't be an issue because this is how science works. But, often one side is only pushing an agenda where the truth is irrelevant.
Not really.
One side says "there is no way to accurately tell exactly how many died in the Holocaust, but it's estimated the number can go as high as 6 million".
The other side says "the 6 million number is a lie they made up to push the idea the Holocaust happened".
Let's not pretend that attacking estimates by misrepresenting them like this is an argument made in good faith.
It's more likely that a Holocaust denier would have luck convincing someone if the commonly touted numbers are inaccurate and vociferously defended.
Why do you think Holocaust deniers are hell bent on nitpicking about these estimates? Their tactic is to use them as a wedge to push other bad faith arguments to cast doubt on all aspects of the Holocaust. Again, do you think it makes any difference if a gross estimate is 5-10% over or under? The strategy followed by Holocaust deniers is to abuse this logic to jump to conclusions like "if they are wrong about these numbers then what other lies have they been pushing?"
With that said, the figure of six million is about as accurate a number that is available. There are good reasons for the uncertainty:
> The two most reliable sources for Holocaust data are the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. Though this is the best information available, it is based on estimates and cannot take into the unknown number of victims whose bodies were never recovered or for whom there were no records. The Nazis kept detailed records of the people who passed through the camps; nevertheless, we do not know how many Jews may still have been unaccounted for in the many places where they were murdered. In addition, as the Allies began to close in on Germany, the Nazis began to destroy their records. We also don’t know the precise number of Jews in any of these areas. The population data ranges from 1937-1941 so, for example, the countries where the figures came from 1937 may not accurately reflect the number of Jews at the time the war began. Though the two institutions have different estimates, if you average the total number of Jews each says were murdered, the result is the commonly used figure of six million.
From: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/estimated-number-of-jew...
It’s not “fishy” at all. History is not an exact science, and the perpetrators of this genocide were highly motivated to conceal their crimes.
I think it’s important to recognize that no one is responsible for educating you. You are responsible for educating yourself. If you have chosen to be ignorant about the facts of the holocaust, and then you were to communicate your “concerns” to a Jewish person about the accuracy of the historical narrative, or perhaps question whether it was as bad as most people believe it was, or even worse, whether it happened at all, then I really don’t think it’s their responsibility to address you in a kind and loving manner.
And it is really, truly, absolutely not their fault if you then decide to become an antisemitic holocaust denier and/or white supremacist.
Thus, some people are very reactive and touchy around this subject. It’s obvious why the civil war isn’t a similarly contentious topic; nobody debates its existence.
The comments in this thread are extremely disconcerting. I didn’t expect to find this on HN but apparently nowhere is safe.
There are those of us who accept reality, and also a highly vocal contingent of willful deniers who incessantly muddy the waters and obfuscate the truth.
I am also shocked and saddened by the comments in this thread, how foolish of me to have thought HN was above it.
Was attempting to respond to the parent comment in a “rational” way in the event that it was a good faith comment.
But frankly I think it wasn’t. It is obvious why people are reactive to questioning the holocaust, nothing “fishy” about it. Alleging that it’s fishy implies a conspiracy, which puts us on the road to holocaust denial.
Really disgusted with all of this, I wish I hadn’t opened HN this morning.
Why is it fishy that people get emotionally reactive about a genocide?
Again, I don’t believe you are arguing in good faith. I’m exiting this conversation now.