How many people died at Auschwitz?
Then came the
Leuchter Report in 1988. This was followed by a
"re-evaluation" of the total deaths at Auschwitz (down to 1.1
million). As a budding historian - and a Jew - Cole was
intrigued.
Previous to 1992, anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million
"gassing" deaths at Auschwitz was labeled an anti-Semite,
neo-nazi skinhead (at the very least). Quietly, because of
revisionist findings, the official figure was lowered to 1.1
million. No mention of that missing 3 million.
Foner's assertions are simply not true; although it is correct to note
that the Polish Communist government did claim that four million people
were exterminated at Auschwitz, historians (Feig, Reitlinger, Hilberg,
et al.) have never supported that figure. Consider the estimates
provided by Buszko at the end of his article on Auschwitz, which appeared
in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust:
Leon Poliakov, the author of the well-documented "Harvest of
Hate," which was, we note, first published in 1956, provides
the following information, which clearly demonstrates that Foner's
contention, cited above, is an outright lie:
(8) In his affidavits, Hoess spoke of two and a half million,
'a figure set officially,' he wrote, under the signature of
[Eichmann], in a report to Himmler. This figure has been
accepted by several authors, and it appears in the verdict at
the trial of the major war criminals. However, there is no
reason for accepting without question the statistics attributed
to Eichmann, which may err on either side.
Adding the number of
victims to those deported from different countries gives a lower
figure, although we have little data, for example, on the number
of Polish Jews sent to Auschwitz. An approximate figure in the
neighborhood of two million seems closer to the truth."
(Ibid.)
According to Snyder,
Adolf Eichmann reported to Himmler, in 1944, that
four million had been killed in the camps, and another million had been
shot or killed by mobile units. (Encyclopedia of the Third Reich.
1989)
Eichmann's report, which referenced all the camps (most of which
were in Nazi-occupied Poland), may have been the source of the Polish Communist
government's figures. (Snyder is a Professor of History at the City
College and the City University of New York.)
During the war crimes trials,
Höss was was asked if it was true that
he had no exact numbers because he had been forbidden to compile them,
and he agreed. He also agreed that
Adolf Eichmann had told him that
that more than two million people had been exterminated there.
(von Lang, 120)
The Institut Fuer Zeitgeschichte, Munich, provided the following
capsulated paragraph about Auschwitz in a March, 1992, letter of
inquiry. (See auschwitz IFZ.report)
According to figures provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the
overall number of victims of Auschwitz in the years 1940-1945 is estimated at
between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 people. The majority of them, and above all
the mass transports of Jews who arrived beginning in 1942, died in the gas
chambers. (Waclaw Dlugoborski and Franciszek Piper, Eds. Auschwitz 1940-1945. Central Issues in the History of the Camp. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000, 5 vols., 1799 pp., ISBN 83-85047-87-5)
Jews were not the only victims of this Nazi German killing machine -
historians estimate that among the people sent to Auschwitz there were at
least 1,100,000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, over 140,000
Poles (mostly political prisoners), approximately 20,000 Gypsies from several
European countries, over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and over 10,000
prisoners of other nationalities.
The Leuchter Report, which Foner alludes to extensively in his Spotlight
article, has been thoroughly refuted. For detailed information about the
report, see the Leuchter FAQ.
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and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.
Foner's Spotlight article made the following assertions regarding the
number of people killed at the camp:
Like most Americans, since his youth Cole had been instructed
in the "irrefutable fact" that homicidal gassings had taken
place at Auschwitz. The number of those so executed - also
declared irrefutable - was 4.1 million.
Buszko's article, and the above estimates, appeared in the 1990 edition
of the Encyclopedia, which clearly puts the lie to Foner's comment that
"anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million .. " figure "previous to
1992..." was "...labeled an anti-Semite...". Buszko is not only a Jewish
historian, but Polish as well.
After some thirty months of intense activity, the Auschwitz
balance sheet showed close to two million immediate
exterminations (this figure can never be fixed exactly), (8) to
which one must add the deaths of some 300,000 registered
prisoners - Jews for the most part, but not entirely - for whom
the gas chamber was only one of any number of ways by which they
might have perished. (Poliakov, 202)
Feig also provides evidence of the false nature of Foner's comment when
she notes that:
Höss testified that the Tesch directors could not help
but know of the use for their product because they sold him enough to
annihilate two million people.'
Feig's book was published in 1981The extermination camp in Birkenau, established in the second
half of 1941, was joined to the concentration camp Auschwitz,
existing since May 1940. From January 1942 on in five gas
chambers and from the end of June 1943 in four additional large
gassing-rooms gassings with
Zyklon B have been undertaken. Up
until November 1944 more than one million Jews and at least 4000
gypsies have been murdered by gas. (IFZ)
While it is admittedly difficult to compile exact figures, since the
Nazis did not maintain registration records for those who were to be
exterminated immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz, it seems accurate
to assert that the number of Jews killed fell somewhere between one
and one-point-six million.