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https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193

DOCUMENTING NUMBERS OF VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST AND NAZI PERSECUTION

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Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. There is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed in the Holocaust or World War II.

To accurately estimate the extent of human losses, scholars, Jewish organizations, and governmental agencies since the 1940s have relied on a variety of different records, such as census reports, captured German and Axis archives, and postwar investigations, to compile these statistics. As more documents come to light or as scholars arrive at a more precise understanding of the Holocaust, estimates of human losses may change.

The single most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to document numbers of victims of the Holocaust is that no one master list of those who perished exists anywhere in the world.
Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents
What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and disarmed soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

These estimates are calculated from wartime reports generated by those who implemented Nazi population policy, and postwar demographic studies on population loss during World War II.

Number of Deaths

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)

Jewish Loss by Location of Death

With regard to the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, best estimates for the breakdown of Jewish loss according to location of death follow:

Location of Death

Jewish Losses

Auschwitz complex (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps)

approximately 1 million

Treblinka 2

approximately 925,000

Sobibor

at least 167,000

Chelmno

156,000-172,000

Shooting operations at various locations in central and southern German-occupied Poland (the Government General)

at least 200,000

Shooting operations in German-annexed western Poland (District Wartheland

at least 20,000

Deaths in other facilities that the Germans designated as concentration camps

at least 150,000

Shooting operations and gas wagons at hundreds of locations in the German-occupied Soviet Union

at least 1.3 million

Shooting operations in the Soviet Union (German, Austrian, Czech Jews deported to the Soviet Union)

approximately 55,000

Shooting operations and gas wagons in Serbia

at least 15,088

Shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaša regime

23,000-25,000

Deaths in ghettos

at least 800,000

Notes on Documentation
No single wartime document
There is no single wartime document that contains the above cited estimates of Jewish deaths.

There are three obvious and interrelated reasons for the lack of a single document:

1. Compilation of comprehensive statistics of Jews killed by German and other Axis authorities began in 1942 and 1943. It broke down during the last year and a half of the war.

2. Beginning in 1943, as it became clear that they would lose the war, the Germans and their Axis partners destroyed much of the existing documentation. They also destroyed physical evidence of mass murder.

3. No personnel were available or inclined to count Jewish deaths until the very end of World War II and the Nazi regime. Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators. Though fragmentary, these sources provide essential figures from which to make calculations.

One centrally directed statistical study of Jews killed by German authorities survived the war. A copy was among the records captured by the US Army in 1945. Likewise, several regional compilations of such gruesome data were among the records captured by US, British, and Soviet forces after World War II. The US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union have used most of these documents at one time or another as exhibits in criminal or civil proceedings against Nazi offenders
Polish and Soviet civilian figures
With regard to the Polish and Soviet civilian figures, at this time there are not sufficient demographic tools to enable historians to distinguish between:

1. racially targeted individuals

2. persons actually or believed to be active in underground resistance

3. persons killed in reprisal for some actual or perceived resistance activity carried out by someone else

4. losses due to so-called collateral damage in actual military operations

Virtually all deaths of Soviet, Polish, and Serb civilians during the course of military and anti-partisan operations had, however, a racist component. German units conducted those operations with an ideologically driven and willful disregard for civilian life.

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Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution

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Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. There is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed in the Holocaust or World War II.

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Mosaic of victims

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The Germans persecuted, incarcerated in concentration camps, and killed real and perceived political opponents of the Nazi regime inside Germany. This included both Catholic and Lutheran clergy as well as persons engaged in real and perceived activities of resistance movements in German-occupied Europe.

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http://www.jhc.org.au/

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Hitler Youth pre-World War

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Hitler youth rally speech - Nuremberg 1935

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Uploaded by Shekel Master on 2014-06-30.

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Understanding Hitler's use of blame and shame to unify the nation and evoke war.

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Citation: C N Trueman "Hitler Youth Movement"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, . .

The Hitler Youth was a logical extension of Hitler's belief that the future of Nazi Germany was its children. The Hitler Youth was seen as being as important to a child as school was. In the early years of the Nazi government, Hitler had made it clear as to what he expected German children to be like:

"The weak must be chiselled away. I want young men and women who can suffer pain. A young German must be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp's steel."

Nazi education schemes part fitted in with this but Hitler wanted to occupy the minds of the young in Nazi Germany even more.

Movements for youngsters were part of German culture and the Hitler Youth had been created in the 1920's. By 1933 its membership stood at 100,000. After Hitler came to power, all other youth movements were abolished and as a result the Hitler Youth grew quickly. In 1936, the figure stood at 4 million members. In 1936, it became all but compulsory to join the Hitler Youth. Youths could avoid doing any active service if they paid their subscription but this became all but impossible after 1939.

The Hitler Youth catered for 10 to 18 year olds. There were separate organisations for boys and girls. The task of the boys section was to prepare the boys for military service. For girls, the organisation prepared them for motherhood.

Boys at 10, joined the Deutsches Jungvolk (German Young People) until the age of 13 when they transferred to the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) until the age of 18. In 1936, the writer J R Tunus wrote about the activities of the Hitler Jugend. He stated that part of their "military athletics" (Wehrsport) included marching, bayonet drill, grenade throwing, trench digging, map reading, gas defence, use of dugouts, how to get under barbed wire and pistol shooting.

Girls, at the age of 10, joined the Jungmadelbund (League of Young Girls) and at the age of 14 transferred to the Bund Deutscher Madel (League of German Girls). Girls had to be able to run 60 metres in 14 seconds, throw a ball 12 metres, complete a 2 hour march, swim 100 metres and know how to make a bed.

"Every girl belongs to us"
League of German Maidens poster

The whole Hitler Youth movement was overseen by Balder von Shirach.

To the outside world, the Hitler Youth seemed to personify German discipline. In fact, this image was far from accurate. School teachers complained that boys and girls were so tired from attending evening meetings of the Hitler Youth, that they could barely stay awake the next day at school. Also by 1938, attendance at Hitler Youth meetings was so poor - barely 25% - that the authorities decided to tighten up attendance with the 1939 law making attendance compulsory.

Further Reading:

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The Hitler Youth was a logical extension of Hitler's belief that the future of Nazi Germany was its children. The Hitler Youth was seen as being as important to a child as school was. In the early years of the Nazi government, Hitler had made it clear as to what he expected German children to be ...

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Nazi concentration camp badge - Wikipedia

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Allied Liberation

As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease.

The SS evacuated most of the prisoners to concentration camps further west during the spring of 1944. In late July 1944, as Soviet forces approached Lublin, the remaining camp staff hastily abandoned Majdanek, without fully dismantling the camp. Soviet troops first arrived at Majdanek during the night of July 22-23 and captured Lublin on July 24. Captured virtually intact, Majdanek was the first major concentration camp to be liberated. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and evidence of the horrors that had occurred there. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the sites of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of the Jews of Poland had already been killed.

The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing center and concentration camp, in January 1945. The Nazis had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward (in what would become known as "death marches"). Soviet soldiers found over six thousand emaciated prisoners alive when they entered the camp. There was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp, but in the remaining ones the Soviets found personal belongings of the victims. They discovered, for example, hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair.

In the following months, the Soviets liberated additional camps in the Baltic states and in Poland. Shortly before Germany's surrender, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrueck concentration camps.

US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, a few days after the Nazis began evacuating the camp. On the day of liberation, an underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards. American forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. They also liberated Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen.

British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. They entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle, in mid-April 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. More than 10,000 of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation.

Impact of Liberation

Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps, where piles of corpses lay unburied. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery.

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As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease.

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The Museum's collections database contains more than 270,000 records, including:

Photos and albums -Images of life before, during, and after the Holocaust

Personal stories -Interviews, home movies, memoirs, and diaries

Films -Historical footage and contemporary films about the Holocaust

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Michael Dalder/Reuters

It was a warm spring day when I first saw Dachau. The fields were green and the birds chirped in the nearby trees. But as my fellow prisoners and I marched through the camp's gates, a horrific stench overpowered us. We looked around and instantly knew why: Heaps of dead bodies lay scattered on the ground, rotting in the sun.

It was April of 1945, and I was 23 years old. Starvation had shriveled my body as well my hopes. Kazimierz Dolny, my hometown in central Poland, was reduced to a Jewish graveyard. And as I later learned, my parents, grandparents and all my siblings were among the dead.

At this point in the war, the Nazi camps were in complete disarray. Allied bombs had forced the Germans to scramble, and the SS was so worried about surviving, they no longer paid us much attention. There was no roll call at Dachau, no food or anything resembling a functioning prison. If a deranged inmate screamed "bread," all of us would attack each other, flailing our hands and bony elbows, only to discover there was nothing to eat.

For several days, we lay around the camp, starving, until the front drew closer. One day, the SS herded us into open cattle cars with barbed wire ceilings, then shuttled us away by train. Apparently, there wasn't even time for them to kill us. One night, the train stopped in the middle of the forest. Snow fell from the sky and settled on my eyelashes. I was cold, I was hungry, but I felt strangely at peace.

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Soon, however, gunfire shattered the stillness. The Germans and the Allies were shooting at each other, and we were caught in the crossfire. Bullets ripped through the cattle cars, and all around me, prisoners dropped. I fell to the floor, listening to the thud of metal piercing flesh. Then, as quickly as the battle started, it stopped. Silence returned. Dawn rose over the hills. The snow continued to fall. My friend Yitzhak and I lay on the floor with our hands over our heads, listening for the slightest sound. In the distance, we heard it, coming from the cars ahead of us: Loud, jubilant voices, speaking in Yiddish.

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"We are free at last!"

We lifted our heads. I looked over at Yitzhak. He had a baffled expression on his face and I assumed my own face mirrored his. We looked around and saw that there wasn't an SS soldier in sight. But I was still afraid.

"Let's not move yet," I whispered to Yitzhak. "We've got to be cautious."

We lay there for awhile, listening to the others step down from the trains, running, screaming, singing and laughing in the snow. I raised my head and saw them, my fellow prisoners, my fellow Jews, buzzing in all directions. One man was dragging a huge sack of food on his bony shoulders. Another died in front of me from pure elation, his cold fingers clutching a loaf of bread. I felt the chill in the air. I felt the floor below my body. I felt my friends lying beside me, and then I felt tears on my cheeks. I was starving, I was cold and I was infested with lice. But for the first time since 1939, my life was my own.

My friend Yitzhak and I stepped off the train and stumbled through the cold, looking for food and shelter. Joining us, was another friend named Yakov. Before long, we arrived in Allach, a town northwest of Munich. We knocked on the first door we saw and waited. No one came. Yitzchak turned back for the road, but I sensed that people were home. I knocked again and again. At last the handle turned and the door creaked open.

"Please don't hurt us," a feeble voice said from behind the door.

Looking through the crack of the doorway, I saw an elderly woman.

"Don't worry," I said in German. "We are just hoping you can spare us some hot food. Please, we need your help. We are starving."

She looked at my torn black-and-white-striped prison shirt then tried to close the door. "I'm sorry," she said. "We don't have enough to eat ourselves."

I stopped the door with my foot. "We aren't criminals," I said. "We're just Jews who have been in the concentration camps. Please, we won't hurt you."

I looked at her, and she looked at me. A moment passed, and then she opened the door. When I stepped inside, I saw that she was crying. So was her daughter, a beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl of about 16. We kept our distance and assured them in our broken German that we meant them no harm.

As the elderly woman heated water for the tub, we stripped down naked, right there in front of them in the foyer. The older woman took our clothes outside to burn; the lice had infested the fabric to such an extent that you could actually see the bugs. The daughter went to find us clothes from her father and brother's closets (the two had been drafted into the German army some years before). Then the older woman scrubbed us with soap and disinfectant for the better part of an hour.

The woman wasn't lying: There wasn't enough food in the house for all of us, so we promised to steal them groceries from the SS cellars. In exchange, the women said we could stay with them for a few days until we regained our strength. That first afternoon, the mother prepared a small pot of hot soup and some plain oatmeal. Yitzchak and Yakov feasted, but I ate little. My body was so exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open, let alone lift a spoon to my lips. The young woman led me upstairs to a bed with white sheets and a down comforter, and I instantly fell asleep.

At daybreak, I heard muffled voices coming through the floorboards below. I felt the warm glow of sunlight on my face and slowly opened my eyes. I saw my white bedding and white nightgown and couldn't understand where I was. For several moments, I thought I had died and God had finally taken me to heaven. But as I began to recognize the muffled voices, reality returned. Still in a daze, I crept downstairs and padded across the kitchen where my friends were enjoying breakfast with the two women.

"Welcome back, Pinek," they laughed. "Did you have a nice rest?"

"I slept through the whole day and night?"

"You slept through two days and nights," Yakov said. "Are you hungry?"

I was famished.
This story has been excerpted from Judith Schneiderman's memoir, I Sang to Survive, which was written with her granddaughter, Jennifer Schulz, and is available on Audible. Judith's husband, Paul Schneiderman, died in 2013.

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It was a warm spring day when I first saw Dachau. The fields were green and the birds chirped in the nearby trees. But as my fellow prisoners and I marched through the camp's gates, a horrific stench overpowered us. We looked around and instantly knew why: Heaps of dead bodies lay scattered on the ground, rotting in the sun.

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The rescue of persons targeted by the Nazis and the liberation of the camps are covered in this section of the timeline from A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust.