Is Six Million Accurate?
I grew up quietly thinking that six million might be a low number.
After all, I knew the killers’ efficiency was such that the three million Jews who lived in Poland in 1939 had been reduced to 3,000 by 1945. Granted, the S.S. was particularly effective in Poland, but, I thought, if Nazis eliminated 99% of Polish Jewry in six years—and no serious historian disputes that—could we have accepted and then become wedded to numbers from other German-occupied nations that were simply too low, that didn’t reflect the reality?
History’s slippery.
When generations of well-read, well-meaning people accept numbers said to be accurate by so many chroniclers over so many decades—particularly when those numbers are attached to the attempted destruction of a people and their history—the numbers themselves become as tenacious as Jew-hunters and adhere to our consciousness in ways that tend to defy challenge. Depending on the direction of the attempted recalculations (even if evidence driven), moral authority can attach to the original numbers and moral outrage to proposed revisions.
It now turns out that the chroniclers and researchers of the Final Solution may have, from the earliest post-war years, dramatically miscalculated the numbers; generations after ours may well renounce our six million in favor of an even more awful reality. That’s the conclusion of recent research by scholars at the United States Holocaust Museum. Lead researchers Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean compiled statistics on S.S.-run camps and ghettos in a multi-volume effort published by the museum. Every volume contains catalogs thousands of sites, providing a more comprehensive history than was ever available before of the “living and working conditions, activities of the Jewish councils, Jewish responses to persecution, demographic changes, and details of the liquidation of the ghettos.” Maps of the sites are included.
There may well have been, they report, over 42,500 S.S.-run camps and ghettos during the twelve years of the Third Reich. These sites, the researchers say, imprisoned, enslaved, and/or murdered between fifteen and twenty million Jews.
To be sure, these scholars are not the first to have suggested that the numbers “history” settled on before many of us were born—and then reinforced in us as children and as adults—may have been low. till, this new body of research appears to be the most detailed and comprehensive verification of this claim to date. If there were, as now seems quite possible, at least 42,500 sites, the destruction of European Jewry would then appear to have come far closer than we’d realized to Hitler’s goal of making Europe Jew-free.
A reason I love reading history, loved teaching history and the literature emerging from it, love writing about both, is precisely because history is this slippery.
It’s an eel.
If you can comfortably live with the idea that ambiguity might intrude at any time into what has been seen as settled, as undisputed, I think you’re a richer person for it, and we’re a richer culture for your lithe and resilient intellect and heart.
Mazal Tov.
08/06/2019 @ 10:33 am
I have never heard about this before. There is a corollary, however,. The mythic number of Jews living in the United States. That number has been quoted at 5 to 6 million since I was a child, but my own research, using extrapolated statistics, utilizing the 25% (one grandparent) rule and ignoring the female like of descent condition, I came up with a number of around 24 million. Just think about it. If we have had a 50% intermarriage rate for 50 years, and we started out with 6 million, with an average of two children in a Jewish household, then we have the six million that we claim, plus another three million who married out times two for their average number of children then times two twice over for the second generation factor. So, that’s 6 million plus 3 million x 2 x 2, or 12 million plus six million for 24 million. The numbers that are usually quoted (6 million) reflect only those Jews who are affiliated with a Jewish community in some fashion.
It’s always been my opinion that the leadership of the Jewish community in this country doesn’t want our actual numbers known.
Technically, under the Nuremberg Laws, anyone who was more than 1/8th Jewish was not considered a fully a person of German ancestry, although they were supposedly entitled to claim German citizenship. Therefore anyone with two great grandparents who were Jews were considered Jewish, which contradicts the official story that you were only sent to the camps if you were half-Jewish. It would not have been possible to exterminate 20 million German Jews because there weren’t that many. Therefore, it seems that the definition of who was a Jew was much more broadly interpreted.
08/06/2019 @ 11:10 am
What bothers me is not so much that we’d gotten the number of deaths wrong as that we’d gotten our prewar population that wrong. That more than anything makes me suspicious of estimates like that.