Tag: poland

Understanding Holocaust Denial: Debunking the 280,000 Victim Figure

With Holocaust Memorial Day approaching on the 27th January, the febrile atmosphere around Israel, Palestine and Gaza has been accompanied by both a worldwide increase in antisemitism and an increase in Holocaust scepticism and outright denial. In particular, across social media, the figure of (only) 270,000- 280,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust is being widely quoted. I hadn’t seen it before so I wondered where does this figure originate?

That figure – often also cited as 270,000, 271,000, 271,301, or around 280,000 – originates, unsurprisingly, from Holocaust denial and distortion circles where it is (mis)represented as the ‘true’ or ‘official’ total number of Jewish victims. This low figure has circulated in Holocaust denial literature since at least the 1980s (e.g., in pamphlets like ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’ and related neo-Nazi/revisionist materials) and is frequently and falsely attributed  to the Red Cross to provide credibility. This number comes from the deliberate selection and malign misrepresentation of a genuine document held in German archives and the attribution to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been repeatedly dismissed by the ICRC who accept the 6 million figure.

The figure of c. 280,000 refers specifically to a document dated 16 January 1984 issued by the Special Registry Office in Bad Arolsen, Germany which was set up in 1949 as the International Tracing Service. The organisation is now known as the Arolsen Archives and contains c. 40 million documents regarding victims of Nazi persecution. 

In regard to the document relating to the figure of 280,000, the Arolsen Archives state “The document is genuine and comes from the Special Registry Office in Bad Arolsen. It lists the numbers of death certificates issued upon application for prisoners from concentration camps, such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. The figures do not include the millions of Jews murdered in extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or those who died in mass shootings.”

What is clear is that the document the Holocaust deniers are using to produce that figure of c. 280,000 provides information on the number of Jewish prisoners murdered in a number of German concentration camps (not the main extermination camps) for whom death certificates were issued retrospectively by the Special Registry Office. The SRO is the only body authorized to issue death certificates for people who died under these circumstances and requires an application from victims’ next of kin….if they exist. 

Underlined, at the bottom of the document is the following:

The registration figures from the special registry office do not allow for any conclusions to be drawn about the actual number of deaths in the concentration camps.

Arolsen, January 16, 1984

Crucially the records held at the Special Registry Office exclude the vast majority of murders in the main extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek, where most victims were killed immediately upon arrival, usually via the gas chambers, without registration or death certificates. They also exclude the 1.5-2 million Jews shot in mass executions by the Einsatzgruppen and other units across Western Russia and Eastern Europe (for example at sites like Babi Yar in the Ukraine where 33,000 Jews were shot over two days in September 1941), they exclude deaths in ghettos from starvation and disease, they exclude deaths in the many work camps, and they exclude deaths and killings during the forced marches and evacuations.

The scholarly consensus, based on decades of research, is that in the 1930s there were approximately 9.5 million Jews in all of Europe and by 1945 there were about 3.3-3.8 million Jews left. Do the maths.