This questions is not as easy to answer as it appears since the Nazis had evacuated Auschwitz, the last remaining major camp for Jews in 1945 before the arrival of the Red Army, leaving only those too sick or wounded to walk behind. Having sent them on brutal death marches to the Reich, they were sent to concentrations camps within Germany, where since Himmler's order in October 1942, no Jews had been held and were subsequently liberated by the Western Allies.

British and American forces however, did not immediately register nationality and religion upon the liberation of the camps. They only did so a while later when setting Displaced Persons camps in Germany where non-German nationals could live until repatriated to their country of origin or emigrate to the US, Palestine or Great Britain and the Commonwealth. By August 1945, 75.000 Jewish Displaced Persons were registered in Germany.

This number however, does not fully represent the Jews liberated from the camps. First of all, of the Polish and Soviet Jews 80% of those who survived the years between 1939 and 1945 did so because they had been deported or resettled by the Soviet Government after their invasion of Poland and after the invasion of German troops. They had been sent mainly to the Central Asian Soviet Republics and by August 1945 some of them had already made their way back to their previous homes and finding them destroyed or taken from them, went on to Germany to await emigration.

Secondly, the dying of concentration camp inmates did not stop with the arrival of the Allied Forces. Being starved, beaten and in horrible physical condition those who had survived the death marches and the confinement in the concentration camps they had been evacuated to, often were so sick that they continued dying. When the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen, one of the main destinations for death marches, they found 60.000 prisoners, 10.000 of whom died within the next couple of weeks from typhus.

Also, the problem with the DP population is that by August or any later date, not all camp survivors are counted. Some of them returned home right away while others refused to live in camps and the assistance of the Western Allies and later UNRAA.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a database of Holocaust survivors in in the 15 years, it has registered survivors, they have amassed 195.000 names. However, their definition of survivor counts every Jew who lived under Nazi rule, so people confined to Ghettos, people who have been hidden etc. are counted too.

In the end, without going to through a wealth of files including UNRAA, the ITS, emigration records, and restitution records, it is not exactly possible to say just how many of the people liberated were Jewish.

• Shephard, Ben. 'The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War.' (Bodley Head, 2010).

• Stefan Hördler: Ordnung und Inferno. Das KZ-System im letzten Kriegsjahr. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015.

• Nichaolas Wachsmann: KL. A History of the Concentration Camps.