I've just started reading Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial. In it, she, quite aggressively, accuses Simon Wiesenthal of "invent[ing] a historical fantasy"; she claims that Wiesenthal came up with a number of 5 million non-Jewish victims of the holocaust "in order to give the Holocaust a more universal cast and to find a number which was almost as large as the Jewish death toll but not quite equal to it." -here is the full context.
This 5 million number has indeed become 'accepted wisdom' - I remember this figure as historical fact, and when I was looking whether this question had been asked before on /r/askhistorians, I see people providing this figure as fact (without referencing a source) - e.g., here. There have also been books published, like this one which quite explicitly mention the 5 million figure. Another example is this BBC article.
Lipstadt is a very well-respected expert on the history of the holocaust, and she references other trustworthy figures Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer to back her up on this, so I have no reason to distrust her.
Nonetheless, the debunking of this 5 million figure takes place in a very off-hand way, buried within a couple pages where she goes on a tangent about the untrustworthiness of Simon Wiesenthal.
To further frustrate matters - whenever I search for anything specifically about the Lipstadt quote, I run into holocaust denialist forums and /r/holocaust and /r/conspiracy posts. In typical fashion, these posts take the quote out of context and run with it, taking it to mean that there is a giant Jewish conspiracy to falsify holocaust figures, whereas Lipstadt only seems to have a personal intellectual vendetta with the late Nazi-hunter - in fact, she states that the number of exterminated non-Jews could be much higher than 5 million, or much lower, depending on the definition.
I'm hoping there's someone on this sub who can help shed some light on the origins of the '5 million non-Jewish victims' piece of 'accepted wisdom' - was this indeed 'invented' by Simon Wiesenthal, or are there other, independent sources that provide similar figures? If it was Wiesenthal who popularized this information, is it accurate?
This all hinges on what people use the term "Holocaust" for. In the public mind, it has gradually come to mean something along the lines of "all civilian deaths caused by the German invasion and occupation of various European countries as well as POW deaths". This is not what the term Holocaust was originally meant to convey.
The Oxford English Dictionary puts it this way: "the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis in the war of 1939–1945. Also used transf., of the similar fate of other groups."
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it this way :
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims—six million were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.
Holocaust scholars use the term to refer to the genocidal actions by Germany and its allies against the Jews and the Roma, Sinti and Jenisch (Gypsies). These were the targets of systematic deportations, executions and gassings. Most Holocaust scholars would not even include the "Gypsies" but that is related to the ongoing outsider status and "invisibility" of these groups rather than because they were not the victims of a genocide. Roma were the only other people (apart from Jews) gassed in the Operation Reinhard camps, the true death camps at the heart of the Final Solution.
The other groups often included as "victims of the Holocaust" were not targeted for systematic genocidal deportation, execution and gassing. A genocide includes the targeting of women and children, it is based on ethnicity (perceived or real), it is deliberate and aimed at total destruction. These criteria do not apply to POWs, political opponents, Jehova's Witnesses, homosexuals, the disabled, nor to the killing of Slav civilians, which, while brutal, was never systematic or aimed at total destruction.
A more concise criticism of Wiesenthal and a refutation of the 11 million figure by Lipstadt can be found in this article: Simon Wiesenthal and the Ethics of History.
In it, she speaks of 'therapeutic universalist revisionism' which she sees as providing ammunition to Holocaust deniers. Is this a widespread topic of discussion within the historiographical debate of the Holocaust?