I have always heard that 11 million people were killed in the Holocaust: 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews. The 6 million number is obviously not in dispute among anyone worth listening to, but recently I came across this article which disputes the 5 million number and says that it was completely fabricated.
Does that article accurately reflect the views of historians? If not, what is a better source?
The 5 million number is not completely fabricated. It can best be described as somewhat outdated in that it doesn't reflect newer scholarship on the topic of Nazi mass killings, which when taken together and incorporating the deaths of Soviet civilians and POWs takes the number of non-Jewish deaths caused by Nazi persecution closer to 11 million people and the overall number of people killed as part of the Nazis' campaigns to 17 million people.
But that's not really what is disputed in the article. It says so itself:
The problem, according to Bauer, who has debunked the number repeatedly in his writings over the decades, is not that non-Jews were not victims; they were.
Because what this article – and Yehuda Bauer in as far as I know his writings – is disputing is not so much the number of non-Jewish victims of the Nazis but the definition of Holocaust.
As we write in our own macro:
The Holocaust refers the genocidal deaths of 5-6 million European Jews carried out systematically by Nazi Germany as part of targeted policies of persecution and extermination during World War II. Some historians will also include the deaths of the Roma, Communists, Mentally Disabled, and other groups targeted by Nazi policies, which brings the total number of deaths to ~11 million. Debates about whether or not the Holocaust includes these deaths or not is a matter of definitions, but in no way a reflection on dispute that they occurred.
There are historians, such as Bauer, Deborah Lipstadt, and others who argue that the term "Holocaust" refers or ought to refer solely to the persecution and murder of Jews because – and this is also somewhat mentioned in the article – the people defined by the Nazis as Jews were the only group targeted for genocide in its totality.
The focus of this definition on Jews – and more recently so-called gypsies – as well as the common association of the term Holocaust with the murder of six million Jews in Europe results from the difference in persecutorial practice and the totality of the planned annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis.
It was the Nazis' plan and policy to kill every Jew and every "gypsy" they could get their hands on, regardless of who they were, what they did, their gender, age, nationality, class or political conviction. They built an entire administration, bureaucracy, and infrastructure to that specific end and used all the tools the modern state has at its disposal from the rail way to the army in order to achieve this goal. What the Nazis referred to as the "final solution to the Jewish question" was genocide in its most encompassing and most extreme form.
The Nazi regime subjected millions of people to violence, starvation, exploitation of labor, imprisonment, and murder but no other group was targeted so systematically and with such totality than the Jews and "gypsies". These key differences become apparent when we look at how this was put in practice. While the Nazis did indeed start killing handicapped and disabled Germans before they started killing Jews, they did not pressure foreign governments to hand over their handicapped for example as they did with Jews. The fact that the Nazi government exerted diplomatic pressure on the Imperial Japanese government to hand over the 18.000 Jews in Shanghai demonstrates that for the Nazis even a comparatively small number of Jews thousands of miles away from any of their territory represented such a danger to them in their minds that they had to die.
Similarly, the Nazi regime imprisoned and shot thousands upon thousands of Soviet and Polish citizens, yet they never built camps that only existed with the sole purpose of murdering all Poles or Soviets they could get their hands on like they did with Jews. Camps such as Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec were nothing but a modicum of infrastructure surrounding a gas chamber. In Treblinka up to 900.000 Jews were murdered in the span of a year.
This all does in no way minimize or trivialize the horrors and cruelty of how the Nazis treated their non-Jewish victims. Soviets and Poles, handicapped and mentally ill people, Communists and Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals, all suffered tremendously under the Nazis and unimaginable numbers of them were killed. They all need to be remembered. Solely in terms of creating a shorthand for certain historical events and processes however, it can be reasonably argued that the term "Holocaust" should refer to what is described and concerns Jewish and Romani victims.
What the article gets wrong is that the debate about the inclusion of non-Jewish and non-"gypsy" victims in the term Holocaust is somehow Simon Wiesenthal's fault or something that is in some way "revisionist" as Lipstadt is strangely cited in that article. First of all, there are certain tendencies especially in the US to widen and universalize the Holocaust as part of a project of identity building but that's something /u/kugelfang52 can talk more about.
Rather, the debate that non-Jewish victims were also part of the Holocaust has existed since the term has come up and actually even predates the term somewhat since throughout the 50s and 60s it was mainly Jews who had to point out that they were victims of the Nazis en gros to wrestle away the interpretative hegemony of Nazi crimes from the surviving political prisoners who made up an important part of the political class in both East and West.
I don't share the Times of Israel's position that such an inclusion minimizes Jewish suffering but personally I also think that the term "Holocaust" is more useful as a shorthand for the persecution of Jews and so-called "gypsies" rather than a catch-all term for all victims murdered by the Nazis.
This is still a very contentious topic among historians. The question of whether to include non-Jewish victims under the heading of Holocaust victims, and which of these victims to include is a difficult one. To be very clear, for historians it is a question of definitions of the term Holocaust, not of whether or not these people died.
First the problem of who to include. The number of five million was reached by deciding which other victim groups to include under the heading of The Holocaust. Today I would say historians feel more comfortable talking about these groups under a heading like victims of Nazism, and talking about each discrete group desperately, while also analyzing how their stories overlap both with the Jewish story, and with the stories of other groups. In my experience, when they do include other victims under the heading of The Holocaust, most historians are most comfortable including Roma and Sinti victims under the heading of Holocaust victims because they were also killed for racial aims, and in killing centers like Auschwitz. The same sometimes goes for the murder of disabled people because of it's connections to the development of mechanized killing. For others it's more complicated because they were killed in different ways, and for different reasons.
The main reason for including only Jewish victims under the heading of The Holocaust, is because the Nazis racial war against the Jews, what they referred to as 'the final solution' was genocide in an all encompassing, systematic, and extremely singular way. For other groups the murder was less total, even if the numbers were enormous. For Jews there was a sustained effort to wipe every Jew off the face of the planet, or at least off the face of every scrap of territory the Nazis controlled.
One example of these differences is the prisoner hierarchies in Auschwitz. While political prisoners, Poles, and POWs lived under evil conditions, and were killed in extremely cruel ways, their treatment, and their chances of survival, and their treatment by guards was better than Jews. This is really poignantly discussed by French resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo in her memoirs. Most Jews who entered Auschwitz were killed by gas within a few hours of arrival, and once they were there repeated selections for he gas and rampant daily murder killed the majority of those who were left. This was not true, at least not in the same way for prisoners who weren't Jewish or Romani (both of whom were mainly imprisoned in the death camp Birkenau or Auschwitz II rather than the concentration camp Auschwitz I).
When writing, I generally prefer to use the word Holocaust, or better the hebrew term Shoah or Yiddish, Churbn, only when speaking of Jewish victims. When I talk about other groups I prefer to use victim first terminology such as "disabled victims of Nazism" or "gay men murdered by the Nazis". For historians it is a question of how do you most accurately represent the story of what each group went through. By throwing so many different groups under the umbrella term of Holocaust, you're actually doing a pretty poor job of discussing their individual experiences. To me by breaking down victim groups into individual stories scholars have the freedom to tell these stories better, including the Jewish story of the Holocaust.
Here is the USHMM break down of victim statistics:
And here is how they are currently defining the Holocaust, I'm including these because the USHMM is an institution at the center of Holocaust studies, which presents information in a way backed up by a consensus of scholars
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust
And here is the Yad Vashem definition, I'm including it because it is another important institution of Holocaust research
Hi! As this question pertains to basic, underlying facts of the Holocaust, I hope you can appreciate that it can be a fraught subject to deal with. While we want people to get the answers they are looking for, we also remain very conscious that threads of this nature can attract the very wrong kind of response. As such, this message is not intended to provide you with all of the answers, but simply to address some of the basic facts, as well as Holocaust Denial, and provide a short list of introductory reading. There is always more than can be said, but we hope this is a good starting point for you.
##What Was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust refers the genocidal deaths of 5-6 million European Jews carried out systematically by Nazi Germany as part of targeted policies of persecution and extermination during World War II. Some historians will also include the deaths of the Roma, Communists, Mentally Disabled, and other groups targeted by Nazi policies, which brings the total number of deaths to ~11 million. Debates about whether or not the Holocaust includes these deaths or not is a matter of definitions, but in no way a reflection on dispute that they occurred.
##But This Guy Says Otherwise!
Unfortunately, there is a small, but at times vocal, minority of persons who fall into the category of Holocaust Denial, attempting to minimize the deaths by orders of magnitude, impugn well proven facts, or even claim that the Holocaust is entirely a fabrication and never happened. Although they often self-style themselves as "Revisionists", they are not correctly described by the title. While revisionism is not inherently a dirty word, actual revision, to quote Michael Shermer, "entails refinement of detailed knowledge about events, rarely complete denial of the events themselves, and certainly not denial of the cumulation of events known as the Holocaust."
It is absolutely true that were you to read a book written in 1950 or so, you would find information which any decent scholar today might reject, and that is the result of good revisionism. But these changes, which even can be quite large, such as the reassessment of deaths at Auschwitz from ~4 million to ~1 million, are done within the bounds of respected, academic study, and reflect decades of work that builds upon the work of previous scholars, and certainly does not willfully disregard documented evidence and recollections. There are still plenty of questions within Holocaust Studies that are debated by scholars, and there may still be more out there for us to discover, and revise, but when it comes to the basic facts, there is simply no valid argument against them.
##So What Are the Basics?
Beginning with their rise to power in the 1930s, the Nazi Party, headed by Adolf Hitler, implemented a series of anti-Jewish policies within Germany, marginalizing Jews within society more and more, stripping them of their wealth, livelihoods, and their dignity. With the invasion of Poland in 1939, the number of Jews under Nazi control reached into the millions, and this number would again increase with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Shortly after the invasion of Poland, the Germans started to confine the Jewish population into squalid ghettos. After several plans on how to rid Europe of the Jews that all proved unfeasible, by the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, ideological (Antisemitism) and pragmatic (Resources) considerations lead to mass-killings becoming the only viable option in the minds of the Nazi leadership. First only practiced in the USSR, it was influential groups such as the SS and the administration of the General Government that pushed to expand the killing operations to all of Europe and sometime at the end of 1941 met with Hitler’s approval.
The early killings were carried out foremost by the Einsatzgruppen, paramilitary groups organized under the aegis of the SS and tasked with carrying out the mass killings of Jews, Communists, and other 'undesirable elements' in the wake of the German military's advance. In what is often termed the 'Holocaust by Bullet', the Einsatzgruppen, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht, the SD, the Security Police, as well as local collaborators, would kill roughly two million persons, over half of them Jews. Most killings were carried out with mass shootings, but other methods such as gas vans - intended to spare the killers the trauma of shooting so many persons day after day - were utilized too.
By early 1942, the "Final Solution" to the so-called "Jewish Question" was essentially finalized at the Wannsee Conference under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, where the plan to eliminate the Jewish population of Europe using a series of extermination camps set up in occupied Poland was presented and met with approval.
Construction of extermination camps had already begun the previous fall, and mass extermination, mostly as part of 'Operation Reinhard', had began operation by spring of 1942. Roughly 2 million persons, nearly all Jewish men, women, and children, were immediately gassed upon arrival at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka over the next two years, when these "Reinhard" camps were closed and razed. More victims would meet their fate in additional extermination camps such as Chełmno, but most infamously at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where slightly over 1 million persons, mostly Jews, died. Under the plan set forth at Wannsee, exterminations were hardly limited to the Jews of Poland, but rather Jews from all over Europe were rounded up and sent east by rail like cattle to the slaughter. Although the victims of the Reinhard Camps were originally buried, they would later be exhumed and cremated, and cremation of the victims was normal procedure at later camps such as Auschwitz.
##The Camps
There were two main types of camps run by Nazi Germany, which is sometimes a source of confusion. Concentration Camps were well known means of extrajudicial control implemented by the Nazis shortly after taking power, beginning with the construction of Dachau in 1933. Political opponents of all type, not just Jews, could find themselves imprisoned in these camps during the pre-war years, and while conditions were often brutal and squalid, and numerous deaths did occur from mistreatment, they were not usually a death sentence and the population fluctuated greatly. Although Concentration Camps were later made part of the 'Final Solution', their purpose was not as immediate extermination centers. Some were 'way stations', and others were work camps, where Germany intended to eke out every last bit of productivity from them through what was known as "extermination through labor". Jews and other undesirable elements, if deemed healthy enough to work, could find themselves spared for a time and "allowed" to toil away like slaves until their usefulness was at an end.
Although some Concentration Camps, such as Mauthausen, did include small gas chambers, mass gassing was not the primary purpose of the camp. Many camps, becoming extremely overcrowded, nevertheless resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of inhabitants due to the outbreak of diseases such as typhus, or starvation, all of which the camp administrations did little to prevent. Bergen-Belsen, which was not a work camp but rather served as something of a way station for prisoners of the camp systems being moved about, is perhaps one of the most infamous of camps on this count, saw some 50,000 deaths caused by the conditions. Often located in the Reich, camps liberated by the Western forces were exclusively Concentration Camps, and many survivor testimonies come from these camps.
The Concentration Camps are contrasted with the Extermination Camps, which were purpose built for mass killing, with large gas chambers and later on, crematoria, but little or no facilities for inmates. Often they were disguised with false facades to lull the new arrivals into a false sense of security, even though rumors were of course rife for the fate that awaited the deportees. Almost all arrivals were killed upon arrival at these camps, and in many cases the number of survivors numbered in the single digits, such as at Bełżec, where only seven Jews, forced to assist in operation of the camp, were alive after the war.
Several camps, however, were 'Hybrids' of both types, the most famous being Auschwitz, which was a vast complex of subcamps. The infamous 'selection' of prisoners, conducted by SS doctors upon arrival, meant life or death, with those deemed unsuited for labor immediately gassed and the more healthy and robust given at least temporary reprieve. The death count at Auschwitz numbered around 1 million, but it is also the source of many survivor testimonies.
##How Do We Know?
Running through the evidence piece by piece would take more space than we have here, but suffice to say, there is a lot of evidence, and not just the (mountains of) survivor testimony. We have testimonies and writings from many who participated, as well German documentation of the programs. This site catalogs some of the evidence we have for mass extermination as it relates to Auschwitz. I'll end this with a short list of excellent works that should help to introduce you to various aspects of Holocaust study.
##Further Reading