I was taught that there were 11 million victims of the Holocaust with 6 million Jewish people and 5 million non-Jewish people. I did some reading into the non-Jewish numbers and the sources I'm getting (mostly from Holocaust Museums such as this) say that the 11 million number is not accurate. Other sources, however, state that around 11 million or even 17 million victims died in the Holocaust.
I just wanted to ask what is the general consensus is of non-Jewish and Jewish victims in the Holocaust and what number is the most accurate for historical accuracy.
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 11-17 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
First let me point out a definitional issue that's controversial and might influence the answers you get. Historians disagree on what events are included under "the Holocaust". Some people say that the Holocaust only includes the genocide of the Jews, while others use the term more broadly to include other groups like Roma and people with disabilities who were murdered by the Nazis. Obviously I understand what you mean with your question, but I thought I should point that out at the beginning.
It's important to recognize that we don't know and will never know the exact number of people killed by the Nazis. Even our figures on the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust are estimates, and even today, credible scholars give differing figures, generally ranging between 5 and 6 million victims. The main source of uncertainty is the number of people who were killed during the "Holocaust by bullets" in the occupied Soviet Union, when tens of thousands of Jews were killed in mass shootings by German and Romanian forces (as well as local auxiliaries) during Operation Barbarossa. That said, the figure of 6 million is generally used as a round number for public discourse.
As far as non-Jewish victims go, we know the largest groups of non-Jewish victims were Soviet and Polish civilians and Soviet POWs. Even here, the figures vary quite a bit. The figures that are given by the USHMM above are generally lower-bound figures for the non-Jewish victims. The number of Soviet civilians killed by Nazi Germany varies greatly depending on how you define "killed by Nazi Germany". The figure of 7 million directly killed by the Germans (including Jews) is a rough estimate, and some Russian sources give slightly higher figures (around 7.4 million). At least 2 million more Soviet civilians who were deported to the Reich as forced labor (the so-called Ostarbeiter or "eastern workers") also died during the war. Russian figures also estimate that about 4 million more Soviet civilians died of disease and starvation during the German occupation of the western Soviet Union, which is how some sources arrive at the higher figure of 17 million total deaths. Part of the problem here is the source base; the official Soviet investigations, which were conducted by the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) in the immediate aftermath of the war, were the initial source base for the study of German crimes against Soviet civilians, but we now know that the figures recorded by the ChGK were often significantly inflated and not reliable, necessitating more research based on more accurate sources (census figures, etc.) to arrive at the modern figures.
The USHMM source above also cites the lower-bound figure for the deaths of non-Jewish Poles, although this figure is closer to the consensus; some Polish sources cite figures as high as 2.8 million, however. The majority of the Jews killed during the Holocaust were Polish, with up to 3.3 million Polish Jews (>90% of the prewar Polish Jewish population).
The figure the USHMM gives for Soviet POWs is closer to the standard figure of 3.3 million prisoners of war (about 58% of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners taken during the war); some Soviet sources cited lower figures for various reasons, but 3.3 million is generally accepted as the most accurate estimate in the west (it was derived from German records by Christian Streit, the first historian to research the fate of Soviet POWs in detail). This is complicated a bit by the presence of Jewish-Soviet POWs, who were generally killed immediately upon being identified or, if they made it to the main POW camps, were sent to concentration camps and killed.
There's also a great deal of uncertainty about the number of Roma who were killed during the Romani genocide (there are several terms for this genocide but it's a controversial subject so I'm going to sidestep that and just use a neutral term). The big problem here is that the Roma communities of Europe weren't organized in any sort of centralized way, and there were still large groups of unassimilated Roma who existed at the margins of society, making it very difficult to determine the number of Roma who were living in Europe prior to the war and the number who were killed during the genocide. The figure of 250,000 to 500,000 given by the USHMM is the generally accepted range, out of a Roma population of approximately 1 million in prewar Europe. Some Romani scholars and activists, like Ian Hancock, claim much higher figures, as high as 1.5 million, based on much higher estimates of the prewar Roma population, as high as 2 million. It should be noted that most historians are closer to the figures cited by the USHMM.
The figures for people with disabilities who were killed in institutions within the Reich as part of the Nazi "euthanasia" program (Aktion T4) are probably highly accurate since the records kept there were more precise, but the number of people with disabilities who were killed outside the Reich is less certain. We know that the Germans murdered thousands of people with disabilities in Poland, beginning shortly after the invasion in September 1939, and that thousands more were killed in the occupied Soviet Union, but there are still sites that we're just now discovering and many of the records are either incomplete or missing, so the figures outside Germany are very rough estimates. It should be noted, though, that the killing of people with disabilities was a critical step on the path to the Holocaust, both because it was a radicalization of Nazi ideology toward extermination for the first time, and because both the people and the methods that were used to carry out the "euthanasia" program (gassing in gas chambers and gas vans) were later applied in the extermination camps. This is an area of ongoing research and it's possible the numbers will increase as new cases are discovered (particularly in the occupied USSR).
As you can see, determining the numbers of victims of Nazi atrocities is a difficult and ongoing process. The biggest problem is that many of the sources that we need to create more precise figures have either been destroyed (as part of Nazis' efforts to cover up the traces of their crimes) or they simply never existed in the first place (particularly for the killings in the occupied Soviet Union). Furthermore, there's the question of how many people were killed by Nazi Germany's allies, and again, these figures are less precise because the state of research on those countries is generally less advanced than the research on Germany. For example, there's still substantial variation in the estimates of the number of Jews who were killed by the Romanians (from 280,000 to 380,000), and again, the state of documentation there is less than ideal and narrowing down those figures further might be difficult. The simple answer to your question is that we don't really know and probably never will, but I wanted to at least contextualize the figures you've seen. The variation between the lower numbers (11 million) and the higher ones (17 million or more) is mainly due to which groups were included in those figures and how they were counted, but there's also significant uncertainty around the figures for some of these groups and it may be difficult for us to refine them further due to the lack of sources to adequately document more precise figures.