As of early , 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. One of the largest sources of uncertainty concerns the number of Jews murdered in the Soviet Union.
Whereas the Jews of the countries of Europe occupied by the Germans were for the most part deported to death camps, where fairly good records were kept, the murders in the USSR were carried out by Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units , as the German army made its way east. Their records were far less comprehensive, so that it is possible only to make a rough estimate of the numbers of Jews killed — generally between , and 1 million.
The overall death and destruction that took place during World War II may well be beyond human comprehension. Nonetheless, the murder of the Jews of Europe is in a class by itself — not because of the numbers, but because of the ideology behind it, which placed the elimination of an entire people and their culture from the earth as one of its primary goals.
It was unique because Nazi propaganda focused so intently on the Jews as an almost supernatural cause of evil, and the German war machine remained devoted to killing Jews up to the very last day of the war, long after it was clear that that war was lost. That is to say: Murdering the Jews was an end in itself, and it was used to motivate the German nation to great sacrifices of its own.
That being said, there were other groups and peoples that were singled out by Nazi eliminationist ideology. Most notable among these were the Roma, or Gypsies, with estimates of the number killed ranging from 90, to 1.
One reason estimates vary so widely is attributed to a traditional secrecy and silence among the Roma regarding what they endured. Proportionally, these numbers are as high or higher than the fraction of Jews who were killed. But it was the nomadic way of life, rather than their supposed racial background — which was Aryan — that made them enemies of the regime.
Poland is not alone in having to come to terms with what happened during the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe - and the role of its soldiers, citizens and officials in it. Of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the vast majority - over 5. That includes 1. Yad Vashem estimates that half of Jews killed in the Holocaust died in extermination camps run by the SS, while at least a quarter were shot by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen - mobile death squads - as well as their accomplices, SS brigades, police formations, units and soldiers.
That at least some of these accomplices were not German but local residents of countries occupied by the Nazis is uncomfortable - but it is nevertheless a fact, says Yad Vashem. For many nations, the question of culpability has been a difficult pill to swallow. After , much of eastern Europe was subsumed by the Soviet Union, which discouraged focus on the Nazi genocide as uniquely Jewish tragedy. It was only when the Berlin Wall fell that historians were able to gauge the true scale of the atrocities committed in Eastern Europe.
It was before Romania recognised that its soldiers had been involved in the deportation and murder of Jews - supervised by the Nazi SS - during WW2. It was before the Hungarian government - via its ambassador to the UN - took responsibility for the mass deportations of Jews to death camps in , carried out by Hungarian officers supervised by the Nazi SS. Writing this week in Politico, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, argued that rather than being perpetrators in Nazi crimes during World War Two, Poles created underground organisations to help Jews and many were sent to death for doing so.
There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. Towards the end of the war, the Nazis and their collaborators attempted to destroy much of the existing documentation and other physical evidence.
To accurately estimate the extent of human losses, scholars, governmental agencies, and Jewish organizations since the s have relied on a variety of different records—including census reports, captured German and Axis archives, and postwar investigations. Current estimates might change as new documents are discovered or as historians arrive at a more precise understanding of the events. While no precise numbers are likely to ever be determined, after 70 years of research and increasingly open archives, these ranges are likely not to change dramatically in the years ahead.
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Jews, deemed "inferior," were considered an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted and killed other groups, including at times their children, because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority: Roma Gypsies , Germans with disabilities, and some of the Slavic peoples especially Poles and Russians.
Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. There is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed in the Holocaust or World War II. To accurately estimate the extent of human losses, scholars, Jewish organizations, and governmental agencies since the s have relied on a variety of different records, such as census reports, captured German and Axis archives, and postwar investigations, to compile these statistics.
As more documents come to light or as scholars arrive at a more precise understanding of the Holocaust, estimates of human losses may change. The single most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to document numbers of victims of the Holocaust is that no one master list of those who perished exists anywhere in the world.
Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents. What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and captured soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. These estimates are calculated from wartime reports generated by those who implemented Nazi population policy, and postwar demographic studies on population loss during World War II.
With regard to the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, best estimates for the breakdown of Jewish loss according to location of death follow:. Only one comprehensive statistical study conducted on behalf of SS chief Heinrich Himmler survived the war. A copy was among the records captured by the US Army in The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union have used most of these documents at one time or another as exhibits in criminal or civil proceedings against Nazi offenders.
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