Holocaust and World War II Statistics

Holocaust and World War II Statistics

This is from my write-up of my visit to Auschwitz death camp in August, 2013.



“On Thursday, August 22 we visited Auschwitz (Oswiecim, pronounced  “oss vien chiem”) and Birkenau (Brzezinka), also known as Auschwitz 2, about 1 ½ hours west of Krakow.  We watched an orientation film on the bus by Lech Piotrowski about the concentration camps.  Our tour guide in the camps was Gabriella a young Polish college graduate.  We observed the sorting areas, gassing “showers”, crematoria, and medical laboratories that I had previously read about.  I had seen the concentration camp, Dachau, outside of Munich, in 1967, but I had never seen anything on the scale of these two extermination camps.



It is difficult to comment with some measure of equanimity on the horror elicited by these extermination camps.  The Nazis created an industry concerned with killing people that they considered “undesirable”.  Not just Jews: also Poles, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals, cripples. 

5.1–6.0 million Jews, including 3.0–3.5 million Polish Jews
1.8 –1.9 million non-Jewish Poles (includes all those killed in executions or those that died in prisons, labor, and concentration camps, as well as civilians killed in the 1939 invasion and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising)
500,000–1.2 million Serbs killed by Croat Nazis
200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti
200,000–300,000 people with disabilities
80,000–200,000 Freemasons [23]
100,000 communists
10,000–25,000 homosexual men
2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses



The following groups of people were also killed by the Nazi regime, but there is little evidence that the Nazis planned to systematically target them for genocide as was the case for the groups above.

3.5–6 million other Slavic civilians
2.5–4 million Soviet POWs
1–1.5 million political dissidents
Additionally, the Nazis' allies, the Ustaša regime in Croatia conducted its own campaign of mass extermination against the Serbs in the areas which it controlled, resulting in the deaths of at least 330,000–390,000 Serbs.



The Nazis engineered the camps to kill more efficiently and to make use of all of the raw materials resulting from this slaughter – hair, teeth, skin, clothing, eye glasses, etc. Nothing was wasted in this efficient Nazi endeavor. 



I take care to use Nazi, rather than German in this discussion.  By “Nazi” I mean specifically the National Socialist German Workers' Party government dictatorship headed by Adolph Hitler and in power in Germany from 1934 into 1945.



A horror even more sociologically relevant than the killing industry and the extermination camps is the fact that this happened in Germany, which is a fount of western values.  This is the country that gave us Beethoven, Mozart, Kant, Goethe; and on and on.  The fact that a modern western country like Germany could come under the influence of the group of Nazi megalomaniacs headed by Hitler is beyond belief.  We certainly should never forget.



It was encouraging to see that many young people were in the crowds visiting the camps.  I believe that this is extremely important.  It’s fine for us older folks who were alive during WWII and for us mavens of historical knowledge to remember these horrors, but the younger generation needs to know what happened and to prevent such a thing ever happening again.

The following shows the deaths during WW 2 from various causes.  Sorting the table by “Total Deaths”, or “Military Deaths” is instructive.



 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties



 We Americans like to say that we won the war, and indeed American financial and industrial might were instrumental in the Allied victory.  But look at the death figures.  The Soviet Union lost upwards of 11 million soldiers and 27 million total people.  Can we not see a rationale for them saying that they won the war?  In comparison, we lost slightly over 400 thousand people.





Ray Gruszecki

November 16, 2019