The allegation that 6-million Jews were murdered during World War II is today widely considered an established historical fact. For example, the Encyclopedia Judaica states, “There can be no doubt as to the estimated figure of some 6 million victims.”[1] The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. has described itself in its information sheet as a “living memorial to the 6-million Jews and millions of other victims of Nazi fanaticism who perished in the Holocaust.” However, an analysis of the number of 6-million Jewish wartime deaths shows that this figure is not the result of any meaningful investigation, research or calculation.

History of the 6-Million-Jewish-Deaths Meme

The figure of 6-million Jewish deaths had been used and predicted long before the end of World War II. An ancient Jewish prophecy had promised the Jews their return to the Promised Land after a loss of 6 million of their people.[2] According to the book Breaking the Spell by Nicholas Kollerstrom, publications and speakers had referred to the death or persecution of 6 million Jews on at least 166 occasions from 1900 until the end of 1945.[3]

For example, the 10^th edition, volume 25 of the Encyclopedia Britannica published in 1902 stated: “While there are in Russia and Rumania 6 millions of Jews who are being systematically degraded…” An article in the March 25, 1906 edition of the New York Times worried about the “condition and future of Russia’s 6 million Jews…” This article further stated “…the Russian Government’s studied policy for the ‘solution’ of the Jewish question is systematic and murderous extermination.” Max Nordau, cofounder of the World Zionist Organization, also warned in 1911 of the “annihilation of 6 million people” at the Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.[4]

The New York Times on December 2, 1914 published an appeal for aid to Jews in Europe. The paper stated: “The American Jewish Relief Committee, called into being at a conference of more than 100 national Jewish organizations which was held at Temple Emanu-El on October 25 to consider the plight of more than 6,000,000 Jews who live within the war zone…”[5]     

The figure of 6-million Jewish deaths was also used by Martin H. Glynn, the governor of New York, in an article entitled “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!” printed in The American Hebrew magazine published by the American Jewish Committee. Glynn stated in this article: “Six million men and women are dying from lack of the necessaries of life; eight hundred thousand children cry for bread. And this fate is upon them through no fault of their own, through no transgression of the laws of God or man; but through the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood.” Glynn’s article was printed on October 31, 1919. The allegation was that “this threatened holocaust of human life” was occurring in the wake of the Great War.[6]

The Chicago Tribune on July 20, 1921 published an article headlined: “Begs America Save 6,000,000 in Russia.” This article claimed that “Russia’s 6 million Jews are facing extermination by massacre. As the famine is spreading, the counter-revolutionary movement is gaining and the Soviet’s control is waning.” The United Jewish Campaign of New York in 1926 set a fundraising goal of $6,000,000 to help the “dying” Jews of Europe. On December 29, 1931, a Montreal newspaper ran a baseless claim by Rabbi Stephen Wise that 6 million Jews faced starvation in southeastern Europe.[7]

The New York Times on May 31, 1936, published an article headlined “Americans Appeal for Jewish Refuge.” This article appealed to Great Britain to “…throw open the gates of Palestine and let in the victimized and persecuted Jews escaping from the European holocaust.”[8] Also in 1936, Chaim Weizmann is reported to have said to the Peel Commission: “It is no exaggeration to say that 6 million Jews are sentenced to be imprisoned in this part of the world, where they are unwanted, and for whom the countries are divided into those, where they are unwanted, and those, where they are not admitted.” [9] On January 9, 1938, the New York Times reported another false claim of 6-million Jewish victims of persecution.[10]

In an article appearing in the June 25, 1940 issue of the Palm Beach Post, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, who was the administrative committee chairman of the World Jewish Congress, said “if the Nazis should achieve final victory 6,000,000 Jews in Europe are doomed to destruction.” Not one single Jew had been interned by Germany, and Hitler was still pleading for peace, at that time. Yet the so-called Holocaust and the 6 million Jews doomed to destruction was already established.[11]    

The number of 6 million appeared again on January 4, 1945, when the Jewish chief of Soviet atrocity propaganda, Ilya Ehrenburg, stated that this is the number of Jews that had died in World War II.[12] On January 8, 1945, the New York Times published an article in which Jacob Lestchinsky, a Communist correspondent for the New York Jewish Daily Forward, estimated that the Jewish population in Europe had been reduced from 9,500,000 in 1939 to 3,500,000. Lestchinsky stated: “Of the 6,000,000 European Jews who have died, 5,000,000 had lived in the countries under Hitler’s occupation.”[13] How Ehrenburg and Lestchinsky came up with their 6 million Jewish deaths figure four months before the end of the war is anyone’s guess.

Immediately after the end of the war in Europe, an article appeared in the Pittsburgh Press on May 13, 1945 headlined “Nazis Destroy Six Million Jews.”[14] In June 1945, some Zionist leaders were also able to state that 6 million Jews had died during the war. These Zionist leaders made this statement even though the chaos in Europe at the time made any definitive demographic studies impossible.[15]

The figure of 6 million Jews who died during World War II reappeared at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg. The number of 6 million used at the IMT was based primarily on the hearsay evidence given by the written deposition of German SS-bureaucrat Wilhelm Höttl.[16] The verbal but never cross-examined testimony of Dieter Wisliceny, who said that 5 million Jews had died during the war, was also used to substantiate the figure of 6-million Jewish deaths.[17]

These two men claimed they heard these statements from Adolf Eichmann, but Eichmann later disputed that he ever made these statements.[18] Thus, the prosecution’s claim at the IMT that 6 million Jews died during World War II is based solely on hearsay evidence from two German SS-bureaucrats seeking to escape or mitigate punishment whose only source later said that he never made the statement. Most courts would not have accepted such hearsay testimony as evidence. However, the IMT, in keeping with Article 23 of their charter, deemed this hearsay evidence to have “probative value” and so admitted it into evidence.[19]

The figure of 6 million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany was widely regarded as a proven fact by the end of the IMT. Sir Hartley Shawcross stated in his closing address that “more than 6 million” Jews were killed by the Germans, and that “…murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Majdanek and Oranienburg.”[20]

Why 6-Million Jewish Deaths Is a Gross Exaggeration

Stephen F. Pinter served as a U.S. Army prosecuting attorney stationed in Germany after the war. Pinter disputed the claim that millions of Jews were murdered by Germany. In a statement made in 1959, he wrote: “From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject.”[21] 

The eyewitness testimony of Jewish veterans of the German concentration camps is often cited to establish the genocide of 6-million European Jews by Germany. However, the New York Jewish publication Aufbau documented in 1965 that 3,375,000 inmates, the vast majority of whom were Jewish, had survived the German camps and were receiving reparations from Germany.[22] How could there be 3,375,000 veterans of the German concentration camps receiving reparations from Germany 20 years after the war was over if Germany had murdered 6 million Jews? Norman Finkelstein, the author of The Holocaust Industry, quotes his mother as asking, “If everyone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill?”[23]

As of January 1984, there were 4.39-million successful individual restitution claims under the terms of the German Federal Compensation Law (BEG) of 1953 and 1956. This law provides monetary compensation to individuals who were “persecuted for political, racial, religious or ideological reasons” by the wartime German government. The great majority of these successful restitution claims were from Jews. Raul Hilberg estimated that about two-thirds of the allowed claims had been from Jews.[24] Using Hilberg’s conservative estimate would mean that over 2.9 million Jews had received BEG restitution by January 1984.

The number of 2.9-million Jewish claimants understates the number of Jews who survived World War II because as of 1985 Jews in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia were not permitted by their governments to apply for or receive BEG restitution. Also, some European Jews who survived World War II died before the German BEG restitution law was enacted in 1953. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper estimated that only half of the Jewish “Holocaust survivors” around the world in 1985 had received restitution under the BEG.[25] If this 50% estimate is accurate, it would mean that approximately 5.8 million European Jews survived German persecution during World War II. Such a large number of surviving Jews is not consistent with a German program of genocide against European Jewry, per Mrs. Finkelstein’s query quoted above.  

The Holocaust story also originally claimed that about 4 million Jews died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As late as 1988, on page 19 of the official Auschwitz State Museum Guidebook, the official figure of 4 million Jews killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau is affirmed. The 4 million Jews who perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau had also been used by the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland, and the IMT in Nuremberg. The estimate of 4 million Jews who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau was based on the evidence of hundreds of surviving prisoners and the opinion of experts.

Scholars such as Israeli Holocaust expert Yehuda Bauer and Dr. Franciszek Piper decided around 1989 to lower the Auschwitz-Birkenau death count. Dr. Piper states in his book Auschwitz: How Many Perished, “Altogether, a total of about 1,100,000 Jews ended up in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the years 1940-1945.”[26] The number of approximately 1 million Jews who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau is most-often used as the official figure today, although some pro-Holocaust researchers such as Jean-Claude Pressac use much lower estimates. By dramatically lowering the figures, the camp curators were in effect admitting that the Communists and other officials had fabricated numbers that were too inflated to be believed. The 4-million Jewish deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau had to be lowered to approximately 1 million in order to maintain the credibility of the overarching Holocaust story.

Since the figure of 6 million Jews who died in German camps presumably is based on the 4 million Jews who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, one would think that the 6-million Jewish deaths in the German camps should concomitantly be lowered to about 3 million. However, the official number of Jews dying in German concentration camps remains at 6 million even though this is now obviously an overstated number. There has been no rush to correct the encyclopedias or the endless stories quoting the 6-million-Jewish-deaths figure.[27]

Another factor making impossible the official number of 6 million Jews dying in German camps is the fact that thousands of corpses could not possibly have been cremated every day at Auschwitz-Birkenau as is commonly claimed. Ivan Lagacé, manager of a large crematory in Calgary, Canada, testified at the 1988 Ernst Zündel trial that based on his experience it would have only been possible to cremate a maximum of 184 bodies a day at Birkenau. Lagacé stated that the claim that the 46 retorts at Birkenau could cremate over 4,400 bodies in a day is “ludicrous,” “preposterous” and “beyond the realm of reality.”[28]

Jürgen Graf writes: “The only possible scientific conclusion is that the supposed many-hundred-thousand-fold murder of Jews in spring and fall 1944 could not have happened, because cremations of this quantity were technically impossible. Bodies do not generally disappear all on their own, even in the Third Reich.”[29]

The book The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter Sanning is probably the most-assiduous study ever conducted of 20^th-Century Jewish demography, especially in its analysis of World-War-II-related Jewish population changes. Sanning bases his study almost exclusively on Allied, Zionist and pro-Zionist West German sources. His analysis includes evidence given by the wartime U.S. assistant secretary of state, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the American Jewish Year Book, official census publications, and the pro-Zionist Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Sanning keeps his book as free of emotion as possible in order to contribute to a reasoned discussion underlying the charge of German genocide.[30]

While it would be impossible for anyone to give an exact number of Jews who died in the German camps during World War II, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry proves that not anywhere close to 6 million Jews died during the war. Sanning calculates that the worldwide losses suffered by Jewry during the Second World War are in the neighborhood of 1¼ million.[31] He estimates that 15,967,000 Jews were alive worldwide in 1941 before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and that the Jewish population was reduced to approximately 14,730,000 after the war.[32]

Critically, Sanning shows that many of these Jewish losses were caused not by any program of German genocide, but by Soviet depredations. Sanning states that hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their lives in Soviet deportations to the east or in Siberian labor and concentration camps. Sanning concludes that the food supply, shelter, and clothing provided to the Jewish inmates in the Soviet camps was woefully inadequate, and that medical attention was almost completely lacking.[33] Sanning’s conclusion is supported by Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger, who said: “In Southern Siberia the death-rate was very high for…Jews….”[34]

Sanning also writes that Jewish sources document that a minimum of 200,000 Jews died while serving in Allied armies during the war.[35] These Jewish “in-service” deaths cannot be attributed to any German program of genocide against the Jews.

Conclusion

Revisionist historians concede that Germany persecuted Jews during World War II. National-Socialist Germany saw Jews as being an influential force behind international communism, and therefore considered Jews to be a potential danger to their war effort. Consequently, Jews were sent to concentration camps, forced to live in ghettos, conscripted for labor, stripped of their civil rights, and suffered extreme hardships. Unfortunately, many Jews died in the German concentration camps during World War II.

However, Germany did not conduct a program of genocide against Jews. The widely quoted figure of 6-million Jewish deaths during the war is also a major exaggeration. As documented in this article, the figure of 6-million Jewish deaths originated from Zionist propaganda dating back to at least the year 1900. The figure of 6-million Jewish deaths in the “Holocaust” is an ahistorical invention having no basis in reality.[36] 

Endnotes