If Germany's Jewish population was only 1% during Hitler's reign, then how was an estimated 6 million Jews killed?

I’m glad you came here with that question as it is something Holocaust deniers use, so it’s important to debunk. The main reason is that the vast, vast majority of Jews killed were not German Jews. In fact German Jews had higher rates of survival than Jews in places like Poland or Lithuania. The actual genocide portion of Nazism couldn’t begin until the war started because that was when Hitler actually got control over large Jewish populations. Most scholars agree with between 1940 and 1941 as the beginnings of the Holocaust, with the period before being lead up. This is important because it shows how long before the genocide started that the world and the German people, had to stop Hitler had they chosen to do so. When Hitler invaded Poland the Jewish population of Poland was between three and a quarter and three and a half million people, while the Jewish population of Germany was only a few hundred thousand people. About thee million of the Jews killed during the Holocaust were Polish Jews. He immediately had an enormous Jewish population once he invaded Poland. Once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union the number of Jewish people under his control again grew exponentially. This was both where and when the vast majority of the Holocaust happened. The overwhelming majority of the deaths perpetrated during the Holocaust were not carried out in Germany, but rather in Nazi controlled areas of Eastern Europe, and particularly in Poland and the occupied areas of the USSR. About 165,200 German Jews were killed, about half of the Jewish population in 1939. A high death toll in normal circumstances, but actually fairly low in terms of the Holocaust. Half of the Jews killed during the Holocaust were Polish, the death toll of Polish Jews was well over ninety percent. Similar percentages are seen in Lithuania (130,000 of the prewar population of 153,000), Latvia ( 70,000 of 93,500 in 1939) and in some countries in South Eastern Europe such as Yugoslavia, and the other areas of the USSR under Nazi occupation, particularly Ukraine and Belarus. The country with the highest percentage of deaths in Western Europe was the Netherlands (102,000 deaths of the 1940 population of 140,300) and the highest in Southern Europe was Greece (about 59-65,000 deaths of the 1941 population of about 71,000). Most of the Jews who were killed from both Western and Southern Europe were not killed in their home countries (including those from Germany) but instead were transported to killing centers in the East where they were killed either by mass shooting or gassing. There were at least six camps where Jews were killed en masse with gas, all of which were built by the Nazis in Poland, not Germany. The largest site where German Jews were transported to be killed by mass shooting was the Ponar forest, in Lithuania, where much of the Lithuanian Jewish population was also killed. Not only did German Jews actually have a higher survival rate than Eastern Jewish communities, but they made up a relatively small percentage of the Jews killed during the Holocaust. By looking just at Germany you only get a very small picture of the actual scale of the Holocaust, because their pre-war population was small relative to places like Poland or the Soviet Union.

All these numbers are highly studied and peer reviewed and were taken from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and backed up with data from Yad Vashem and other research institutions and scholars. My analysis comes from major scholarship on the subject by scholars including Saul Friedlander, Yehuda Bauer, Martin Gilbert, Timothy Snyder, and others.