Your post is one of the reasons why education about the holocaust is so important because you're right, it is staggering. It's difficult to even comprehend let alone believe for those who didn't see it first hand and as history wears on it would be easy to say 'Oh no, that surely cannot be. It must be exaggerated, that many is not even possible.' Thankfully the Allies had the foresight to painstakingly document everything that they found, as they found it, rather than only going back to do so after the war was won.

In terms of just how such a thing is possible, it would be wrong to imagine the Nazis as gassing 100 people every hour of every day for years and years - in fact, much of their work was done through simple starvation, and working their captives to death. Many more would have been killed in mass exterminations on the Eastern Front, never having made it to a camp.

The most notorious of these was probably at Babi Yar, where over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed over a period of just two or three days in mass shootings where people were machine-gunned, thrown into ravines and buried - in some cases still alive.

There's also the Rumbula Massacre, where 25,000 Latvian Jews were killed in only a couple of days. And then the killings in Budapest towards the end of the war, where the Germans and Hungarians had so many people to exterminate that, in order to save bullets, they would tie several Jews together, shoot one, and then throw the whole lot into the Danube so that the dead one dragged the others down and they drowned.

And then there's Aktion Erntefest, which translates cheerfully to 'Operation: Harvest Festival' where in a single day over forty-thousand Jews were liquidated throughout the Nazi Concentration Camps located in Eastern Poland, in anticipation of a Russian offensive.

These are just a few of the massed killings of thousands of people, often carried out by small numbers of men with little more than automatic weapons in their hands and hatred in their hearts. With these mass killings you can easily begin to understand how the Nazis managed to average out to your 100 per hour figure.

Edit: Wow, Reddit gold! This is the first time I've received it, so thank you.

11 million people died in the Holocaust not 6 million. 6 million is just the number of Jewish people killed.

Fitzgerald 2011, p. 4; Hedgepeth & Saidel 2010, p. 16.

Keep in mind how frightenly sophisticated the killing operations of the Nazis were. Death camps were run like the most effective slaughterhouses. Trains carrying repurposed box and cattle cars stuffed to the absolute brim with prisoners would roll up to the camps, where prisoners would be filed out, processed, stripped down, and forced into gas chambers. Once the execution was complete, workers (often times prisoners themselves) would salvage things like gold fillings from the bodies, which would be burned in industrial furnaces.

At the height of the "Final Solution", around 6,000 prisoners were executed everyday in Auschwitz alone.

I would like to ask a follow-up question: I've always wondered how the Holocaust was possible from a material standpoint. Wouldn't the amount of transport, personnel, the resources involved be an enormous cost to a country already under so much economic strain to fight a war? Or does genocide in a way pay for itself because of how Nazis reaped from forced labor, confiscated peoples' material goods?

As a follow-up, what were the logistics of larger-scale historic atrocities? How did 40,000,000 to 100,000,000 people die in the Taiping Rebellion?

Did the two sides of the civil war routinely slaughter all civilians encountered in enemy territory? What made that conflict so bloody?

I'm sure others have mentioned this, but that 6 million figure is inaccurate, as it only accounts for Jews.

If you account for homosexuals, gypsies, and other "undesirable subhumans," the true number is more like 11 or 12 million.

It's twice as bad.