| Holocaust Facts: Where Does the
Figure of 6 Million Victims Come From? One of the most well-known, if not iconic, facts known about the Holocaust is the number of Jewish victims killed by Nazi Germany up through the end of World War II. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is also this number - six million - that Holocaust deniers aim at when trying to discredit the essential nature of the Holocaust. Where did the number six million come from? And considering the amount of original research that has been done in recent decades, is it still considered accurate by scholars of the subject? The number seems to have first been mentioned by Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, an Austrian- born official in the Third Reich and a trained historian who served in a number of senior positions in the SS. In November 1945, Hoettl testified for the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials of accused Nazi war criminals. Later, in the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, he also submitted to a lengthy series of questions from the prosecution, speaking under oath from a courtroom in Austria. On both occasions, he described a conversation he had had with Eichmann, the SS official who had principal responsibility for the logistics of the Jewish genocide, in Budapest in August 1944. In the 1961 testimony, Hoettl recalled how “Eichmann … told me that, according to his information, some 6,000,000 Jews had perished until then -- 4,000,000 in extermination camps and the remaining 2,000,000 through shooting by the Operations Units and other causes, such as disease, etc.” On its website, Yad Vashem, Israel’s principal Holocaust research center, quotes the Eichmann reference, and then says that both early and more recent estimates by a variety of different scholars have fallen between five and six million. Such estimates are arrived at by comparing pre-war census data with population estimates made after World War II. The Germans, though they treated their plan for annihilation of the Jews as a state secret of the highest order, also kept scrupulous records of deportations and gassings, which also serve as a vital source of data. One of the earliest researchers, Raul Hilberg, came up with a figure of 5.1 million in his 1961 classic “The Destruction of the European Jews.” In the third edition, from 1985, he provides a lengthy appendix explaining how he calculated the estimate. Lucy Dawidowicz, in her “The War Against the Jews” (1975), used prewar birth and death records to come up with a more precise figure of 5,933,900. And one of the more authoritative German scholars of the subject, Wolfgang Benz, offered a range of 5.3 to 6.2 million. Each used his or her own method to arrive at the totals. Yad Vashem itself also has its Names Database, an ongoing project in which it attempts to collect the name of every Jewish victim of the Nazis. It relies on testimony from family and friends of those who perished, official archives from the period, and local commemoration projects. As of early 2012, Yad Vashem estimated that the database contained the names of a little over four million different individuals (an exact number is not yet possible because it believes that some hundreds of thousands of people appear in multiple records). Article continues here. |
