What Was the Approx. Total Number of Deported and Deaths in Nazi Concentration AND Extermination Camps?

by SalvatoreCiaoAmore

Hello everyone!

I've been looking for sources detailing the approximate numbers of inmates as well as the death toll of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. I'm not looking for the victim numbers of individual camps but more for a total number of this Nazi death machinery. As far as I read, the Jewish death toll can be estimated to be around 5,6 - 6,3 Million; ~1,1 Million of which were killed in Auschwitz alone. But how many people died in total in the concentration/death camps? Approximately how many of those were e.g. Sinti and Roma, homosexual, political prisoners, prisoners of war, etc.? I know that no concrete numbers exist and sometimes only vague estimates can be made. Any help is appreciated!

Disclaimer: I am NOT a Nazi or a Holocaust denialist. The Holocaust played a great part in my BA thesis and I want to use that information to teach others about the horrors that were these camps and to visualize to my students the scope of these atrocities.

commiespaceinvader

First of all, sorry for the bad quality but here you can find the tables concerning the number of registered inmates in the camp system and the number of deaths of registered inmates and Jews killed on arrival in Auschiwtz from Nicholaus Wachsmann's book KL. A history of the Nazi Concentration Camps. As you can see, he estimates the total number of deaths in the Concentration Camps at 1.7 million people, including the 870,000 Jews killed right after deportation in Auschwitz. His table also only includes the camps under the administration of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwlatungshauptamt, WVHA), meaning that if we add the number of Jews and so-called Gypsies killed in the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard (600,000 in Belzec, 250,000 in Sobibor, 900,000 in Treblinka, 130,000 in Majdanek, about 300,000 in Chelmno; 2.18 million in total), we arrive at 3.88 million people killed in total in both Concentration and Extermination Camps between 1933 and 1945.

Wachsmann's estimate is pretty much right in the middle of the numbers we have seen over the year, which range somewhere in between 795,889 and 955,215 deaths of registered prisoners in WVHA concentration camps, excluding the deaths of Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and Lublin/Majdanek; between 1,885,889 and 2,045,215 including those Jewish prisoners.

These numbers Wachsmann uses come mainly from Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (ed.): Der Ort des Terrors, which is a multi-volume collection of articles about every WVHA Concentration Camps and some of the smaller non-WVHA camps and the information they collected on the number of deaths comes mostly from the death registers kept at Concentration Camps and some other Nazi documentation. The problem with the death registers is that they often are not available in full and sometimes not at all, which makes it a difficult task to reconstruct the number of inmate deaths.

In fact, it is somewhat easier to reconstruct the number of Jews killed in the camps because unlike with other groups, there still is the documentation on deportation transports. I go into more detail for Auschwitz in this answer where I show how the documentation by the Reich Railway and others involved in the deportation of Jews gives us a pretty good idea of the number of Jews arriving in Auschwitz and comparing that with the number of registered prisoners, a good idea of how many were killed on arrival without registering them in the camp.

With other victim groups, we lack this sort of documentation since Poles, political opponents and so forth were not deported to the camps en masse but arrive there in small groups via various means of transportation. While we do have the number of registered inmates and some of the death books and thus can give an estimate, to put a precise number to it, is virtually impossible and we might never know exactly how many people were killed in the camps.

The same applies for a demographic break-down of prisoner deaths. With Auschwitz, we can give a pretty good estimate of how many people from what group died there.

Robert Jan van Pelt details this in his report for the Irving v. Lipstadt trial:

  • General number system, given to gentiles and Jews (May 1940 and later): 202,499 men and 89,325 women. Total:291,824 inmates.

  • Jews, A series (May 1944 and later): 20,000 men and 29,354 women.

  • Total: 49,354 inmates.

  • Jews, B series (May 1944 and later): 14,897 men.

  • Re-education prisoners: 9,193 men and 1,993 women. Total 11,186 inmates

  • Soviet prisoners of war: 11,964. Total 11,964 inmates.

  • Romani: 10,094 men and 10,888 women. Total 20,982 inmates.

  • Total: 400,000 registered inmates.

He continues to write:

The mortality of the registered Jews is more difficult to determine. It is clear that, of the registered inmates, 190,000 were transferred to other concentration camps–most of them after the death marches of January 1945. A total of 8,000 inmates were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, some 1,500 inmates were released, and some 500 escaped. This means that some 199,500 inmates, or roughly half of all the registered inmates, are accounted for. The rest, or 200,000, must have died in the camp. According to Piper, the mortality rate for the general camp population (mainly Poles and Jews), was around 50 per cent over the life of the camp–for the Soviet prisoners- of-war and the Romani it was much higher. As a result Piper came to a rough estimate of 100,000 registered Jews that died in the camp. The result is that the total mortality of Jews in Auschwitz was 960,000.

Added to that the numbers of other groups of victims, it looks like this:

  • Jews: 860,000 unregistered and 100,000 registered inmates. Total 960,000 victims.

  • Poles: 10,00 unregistered and 64,000 registered inmates. Total 74,000 victims.

  • Romani: 2,000 unregistered and 19,000 registered inmates. Total 21,000 victims.

  • Soviet prisoners-of-war: 3,000 unregistered and 12,000 registered. Total 15,000 victims.

  • Others: 12,000 registered inmates. Total 12,000 victims.

  • Total: 1,082,000 victims.

But for other camps we often lack the detailed information to make this possible, simply because a.) Auschwitz was a huge camp complex with three main camps that produced a lot of documentation and b.) Auschwitz was liberated relatively early – on January 27, 1945 – meaning the camp administration had a harder time with destroying a lot of the pertinent information.

Except in cases where we have the documentation of certain special actions – such as the Kugel Aktion (Bullet Action) in Mauthausen where up to 5000 previsouly escaped POWs, most of them from the USSR, were killed – doing these break-downs of different prisoner groups is very hard to impossible.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has created a very general break-down of different victim groups for their Holocaust Encyclopedia, which I know to be solid because I know the person who's written that. It looks like this:

Number of Deaths

  • Jews: up to 6 million

  • Soviet civilians: around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figure for Jews)

  • Soviet prisoners of war: around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers)

  • Non-Jewish Polish civilians: around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites)

  • Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina): 312,000

  • People with disabilities living in institutions: up to 250,000

  • Roma (Gypsies): 196,000–220,000

  • Jehovah's Witnesses: around 1,900

  • Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials: at least 70,000

  • German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory: undetermined

  • Homosexuals: hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials noted above)

In some respect, these numbers are very conservative estimates, f.ex. newer scholarship thinks the number of Soviet civilians, so-called "Gypsies", and criminals and so-called "asocials" to be higher, especially the number of Roma and Sinti since they too were affected by the Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht shooting campaigns in the USSR and Serbia. The number above given for criminals and so-called "asocials", for JWs, and for homosexuals is almost exclusive to Concentration Camps, while the other numbers include deaths both inside and outside of the camps.

This is about the most general break-down I can give within this format since a more detailed one would require writing a rather large paper referencing a variety of sources. I recommend you check out Der Ort des Terrors and Nicholaus Wachsmann's book for more information.