How many dead at Auschwitz?

9 million persons, according to the documentary film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955), for which the historical advisors were the historians Henri Michel and Olga Wormser-Migot.[1]

8 million persons, according to the French office for war crimes research and the French war crimes information service (1945). [2]

7 million persons, according to Raphaël Feigelson (1945).[3]

6 million Jews, according to Tibère Kremer, author of a preface for Miklos Nyiszli (1951).[4]

5 million to 5.5 million persons, according to Bernard Czardybon (1945?), in line with confessions attributed to SS men and according to the daily Le Monde (1978), which added: “90% of whom Jews”.[5]

4.5 million persons, according to Henryk Mandelbaum (1945).[6]

4 million persons, according to a Soviet document to which the Nuremberg tribunal attributed “probative value”. This figure was inscribed nineteen times, with a commentary in as many languages, on the Auschwitz-Birkenau monument. It was repeated by a considerable number of persons, amongst whom the Polish historian Franciszek Piper. It was to be declared false in 1990 and replaced, on the monument, in 1995 by the figure of 1,500,000 with the agreement of the same F. Piper, for whom it is a maximum, the minimum being 1,100,000. According to Miriam Novitch (1967), of the 4 million dead 2.7 million were Jews. According to Rabbi Moshe Weiss (1991), more than 4 million died at Auchwitz, of whom 3 million were Jews.[7]

3.5 million persons, according to the Dictionnaire de la langue française published by Hachette (1991). According to Claude Lanzmann (1980), there were 3.5 million gassing victims, of whom 95% were Jews, as well as many other deaths.[8]

3 million persons up to December 1, 1943, according to a confession extorted from Rudolf Höss (1946), former Auschwitz commandant.[9]

3 million Jews gassed, according to David Susskind (1986) and according to Heritage, the leading California Jewish weekly (1993).[10]

2.5 million persons, according to Rudolf Vrba in a sworn statement for the Eichmann trial (1961).[11]

2 million (?) to 4 million (?), according to historian Yehuda Bauer (1982).[12]

2 million to 3 million Jews killed as well as thousands of non-Jews, according to a confession attributed to SS sergeant Pery Broad.[13]

2 million to 2.5 million persons killed, according to a confession attributed to SS physician Dr Friedrich Entress (1945).[14]

2 million persons, according to historian Léon Poliakov (1951); 2 million Jews gassed, according to the historians Georges Wellers (1973) and Lucy Davidowicz (1975).[15]

1.6 million persons, according to historian Yehuda Bauer (1989), of whom 1,352,980 Jews.[16] (The latter figure is from Georges Wellers, 1983.)

1.5 million persons: this figure, chosen by Lech Walesa, replaced, in 1995 on the Birkenau monument, that of 4 million, withdrawn in 1990.[17]

1,471,595 persons, of whom 1,352,980 Jews, according to historian Georges Wellers (1983).[18]

1.25 million persons, approximately, of whom 1 million Jews killed and more than 250,000 non-Jews dead, according to historian Raul Hilberg.[19]

1.1 million to 1.5 million persons, according to historians Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenbaum and Franciszek Piper (1994).[20]

1 million persons, according to Jean-Claude Pressac (1989) and according to the Dictionnaire des noms propres published by Hachette (1992).[21]

800,000 to 900,000 persons, according to historian Gerald Reitlinger (1953).[22]

775,000 to 800,000 persons, according to Jean-Claude Pressac (1993), of whom 630,000 were Jews gassed.[23]

630,000 to 710,000 persons, according to Jean-Claude Pressac (1994), of whom between 470,000 and 550,000 were Jews gassed. [24]

To my knowledge, this last estimate (from 630,000 to 710,000 persons) is the lowest ever put forth by those who believe in the physical extermination of the Jews. It is sometimes said that in 1946/1947 the Polish judicial authorities admitted the figure of 300,000 deaths. This is an error. Those authorities estimated the total of dead at 300,000 persons registered on their arrival, but to that figure they added 3 to 4 million unregistered persons.[25]

For more than forty years the Soviet, Polish and West German authorities showed themselves to be very discreet regarding the existence of death registers (Sterbebücher) that had been kept during the war by the Auschwitz camp authorities. Under pressure from revisionists (Robert Faurisson and Ernst Zündel), in particular at the two Zündel trials (Toronto, 1985 and 1988), those authorities have ended up, since 1989, making revelations about the registers. They state that they have discovered registers only for the period from July 29, 1941 to December 31, 1943, not without some gaps. Since the camp was opened on May 20, 1940 and the Germans evacuated it on January 18, 1945, that period represents a little more than half the duration of the camp’s operation under their authority. The registers discovered seem to number 51 and apparently report 69,864 deaths (and not 74,000 as has been said by certain journalists).[26]

The upholders of the official version of the “Holocaust” have experienced some discomfort in the face of the need, imposed by the revisionists, to revise downwards, in such proportions, the number of deaths at Auschwitz. Can one explain why, at the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946), such an imposture had, straight away, been “deem[ed] to have probative value” thanks to article 21 of the tribunal’s charter? Can one explain why, over the decades, that lying figure of four million, repeated nineteen times on the Auschwitz-Birkenau monument, had been left there? Can one explain how, during official ceremonies, it was possible to ask so many of the great and the good of this world, including Pope John Paul II, to bow before such an invention of charlatans? Can one explain why, in 1990, France equipped herself with an anti-revisionist law forbidding any dispute of the “existence of crimes against humanity” as described and assessed by the Nuremberg tribunal? And then, how can one preserve against all revision the figure of 5.1 to 6 million Jews having died during the whole war if it is necessary, to such a degree, to revise the Auschwitz death figures?

Today there are Jews who explain that the Poles, and they alone, had invented the lie of the Auschwitz four million. Animated both by anti-semitism and nationalist pride, the Poles supposedly added to the nearly 1.5 million Jewish deaths about 2.5 million Polish or other deaths![27] This explanation is but a contrivance. The truth is that, already from the war’s end, not only the communist Jews but also the judicial authorities of Poland had repeated that the majority of dead at Auschwitz were Jews. At Cracow in 1946-1947, regarding the case of Rudolf Höss, both the examining magistrate and the prosecution had concluded that, in addition to a few hundred thousand “registered” deaths, there had been either 4 million or at least 2.5 million dead at Auschwitz, “most of whom Jews”.[28] During the winter of 1963-1964 a specific monument was erected in memory of the “millions of Jews, martyrs and fighters” exterminated in the camp; the inscription was in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew.[29]

Let us add finally that, for the historians of the “Holocaust”, most of the Jews at Auschwitz had been killed by means of an insecticide: Zyklon B.

For Arthur R. Butz and other revisionists, the total number of dead at Auschwitz must have been some 150,000, of whom about 100,000 Jews.[30] For them, most of the Jewish victims were not killed but died, above all in typhus epidemics. The revisionists point out that, if the Germans had had greater quantities of the insecticide Zyklon B at their disposal, precisely to combat those epidemics, there would have been fewer deaths at Auschwitz not only amongst the Jews, the Poles, the Russians and other detainees but also amongst the German physicians, functionaries and guards.

Summary and conclusion

According to the official historians (those protected by the laws of the French Republic and the media power), this number varies from 9,000,000 (that of Nuit et Brouillard, a film imposed since 1955 on all lycée pupils in France) to a number between 630,000 and 710,000 (the figure of an author recently published by the National Centre for Scientific Research – CNRS); according to these historians, those persons were, for the most part, victims of a policy of physical extermination. But, according to the revisionist authors, the number of deaths was 150,000, for the most part victims of various epidemics and, in particular, of typhus.

Under the influence of the revisionist authors the official historians have come to effect such significant downward revisions that one fails to comprehend by what right such or such figure should continue to be imposed in France by force of law. In themselves, the two official inscriptions successively borne by the Auschwitz-Birkenau monument, first until 1990, then as from 1995, today – although no-one so intended – take on the value of a warning: a reminder that there should be no such thing as an official truth, either in history or anything else.

 

Inscription on the Auschwitz-Birkenau monument until April 3, 1990:[31]

 

Inscription on the same monument as from 1995:

 

N.B. This study constitutes but a sketch of the answers given or imposed to the question: “How many dead at Auschwitz?” It would be easy to provide thousands of other references. The difficulty lies, however, in the fact that, according to the various case, the evaluations may address very different categories of dead: in one case, the number of the “killed”, of the “gassed”, of the “Jews” is evaluated and, in another case, one speaks of “dead”, of “victims” without distinguishing the “Jews” from the “non-Jews”. Also, sometimes the evaluations address only a limited period. For my part, I have avoided any numerical extrapolation from a figure given for a short period of the Auschwitz camp’s life.

 

Bibliographical note

Among the historians who uphold the thesis that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, the main studies addressing the number of dead there are, respectively, those of the Frenchman Georges Wellers, published in 1983 and 1990, and those of the Pole Franciszek Piper, published in 1991, 1992 and 1994:

  • G. Wellers, “Essai de détermination du nombre des morts au camps d’Auschwitz”, Le Monde juif, October-December 1983, p. 17-159; — “À propos du nombre de morts au camp d’Auschwitz”, Le Monde juif, October-December 1990, p. 187-195;
  • F. Piper “Estimating the Number of Deportees to and Victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp”, Yad Vashem Studies, XXI (1991), p. 40 — 103. 

This last study, corrected and expanded, was published in the form of an English language brochure printed in Poland:

– Auschwitz. How Many Perished? Jews, Poles, Gypsies…, [completed reprint], Printed in Poland by Poligrafia ITS, 30-306, Cracow 1992, 68 p.

One may also consult:

– “The Number of Victims”, in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1994, p. 61-80.

Of these five studies the most interesting are, for G. Wellers, that of 1983 and, for F. Piper, that of 1992 or, in abbreviated form below: “G. Wellers, op. cit., 1983” and “F. Piper, op. cit., 1992”. The two authors proceed with the recollection – painful for them – of the “errors” committed in the past as concerns the number of deaths at Auschwitz. In this regard I recommend a reading of G. Wellers, op. cit., 1983, p. 138-139 and of F. Piper, op. cit., 1992, p. 5-16. Nothing shows better than those pages the degree to which, even on so grave a subject as the number of dead, the worst fancies have been indulged in.

____________________

Notes

  1. Nuit et Brouillard, a 32-minute black and white film relentlessly shown over the last forty years in all of France’s secondary schools as well as on French television. Director: Alain Resnais. Historical advisors: Henri Michel (president of the Comité d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale) and Olga Wormser [later: Wormser-Migot] (the two had published Tragédie de la déportation [1940-1945]. Témoignages de survivants des camps de concentration allemands, Hachette, Paris 1954, 512 p., a book acclaimed in 1955 by the Académie française). Text: Jean Cayrol. 1956 Prix Jean Vigo (for cinema). In this film it is said that “nothing distinguished the gas chamber [in the singular] from an ordinary block”. The concrete ceiling of the “gas chamber” is shown “furrowed by fingernails” and, in this regard, the viewer is told that “even the concrete was being torn”. Then, that “it is intended to make soap from the bodies”. “As for the skin” of the bodies, an image shows that the Germans tanned it. These tales of clawed concrete, of human soap and of skin tanned by the Germans are of the order of myth. With the camera lingering on the general view of Birkenau the commentator says: “Nine million dead haunt this landscape”. This sentence is uttered towards the very end.
  1. Jacques Billiet, director of the Service d’information des crimes de guerre, Documents pour servir à l’histoire de la guerre / Camps de concentration, Office français d’édition, 1945, p. 7 (J. Billiet himself) as well as p. 196 (“Série de rapports de l’Office de recherches des crimes de guerre”; these same reports put the number of prisoners of war and political detainees having died in all the camps of Germany and the occupied lands at 26,000,000, p. 197). This publication was prepared by Eugène Aroneanu.
  1. Id., p. 196.
  1. “6,000,000 innocents went through the chimneys of the Auschwitz ovens because one of their forebears, close or distant, was of the Jewish religion”, writes Tibère Kremer in his preface to a text attributed to Dr Miklos Nyiszli, “’SS Obersturmführer Docteur Mengele’. Journal d’un médecin déporté au crématorium d’Auschwitz”, Les Temps modernes, March 1951, p. 1655.
  1. Bernard Czardybon at the trial of R. Höss in Cracow, according to F. Piper, op. cit., 1992, p. 7-8. For the confessions attributed to SS men, id., p. 8. “Auschwitz, where more than five million men, women and children, 90% of whom were Jews, perished” in Manifestation du souvenir à Paris devant le mémorial du martyr juif inconnu (Le Monde, April 20, 1978).
  1. Henryk Mandelbaum at the trial of R. Höss in Cracow, according to F. Piper, op. cit., 1992, p. 7.
  1. From 1945 to 1990 it is this figure of 4,000,000 that was to have force of law. It emanates from a Soviet document (008-USSR) dated May 6, 1945. This document had, for the Nuremberg Tribunal, “probative value” thanks to the stupefying article 21 of the tribunal’s charter. It appears on pages 241-261 of volume 39 of the official proceedings and documents of the Trial of the Major War Criminals before The International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 – 1 October 1946: IMT XXXIX). The Russian original was translated into German and it was this German translation that was reproduced in the English edition. The summary, in English, placed above the document, reads, inter alia: “Over four million people from the countries occupied by Germany were killed in Auschwitz, in most cases by gas immediately after their arrival” (p. 241). In fact the document itself reads, in German: “not fewer than 4,000,000” (p. 261). As for the considerable number of persons who have taken up that figure of four million or of about four million, one may, to begin, mention the names of former detainees Shlomo Dragon, Henry Tauber, Erwin Olszowka, the examining magistrate Jan Sehn, the prosecutor Pechalski, the professor-engineer Roman Dawidowski, the judges of the supreme national Tribunal of Poland, of prosecutors at American military tribunals, of all sorts of authors or historians and officials of the Auschwitz State Museum such as Kazimierz Smolen, Danuta Czech, et Franciskek Piper (according to F. Piper, op. cit., 1992, p. 7-8, 12-14). “Of the four million victims of Auschwitz, 2.7 million were Jews and 1.3 million were non-Jews” (Miriam Novitch, La Vérité sur Treblinka, Presses du Temps Présent, Paris 1967, p. 39. “More than 4,000,000 people perished [in Auschwitz]; almost 3,000,000 of them were Jews” (Rabbi Dr Moshe Weiss, Former Vice President Mizrachi-Hapoel Hamizrachi, “Yom HaShoah-Holocaust Remembrance”, Jewish Press [New York], April 5, 1991).
  1. Whether they liked it or not, the lawyers of the accused at Nuremberg often made common cause with the prosecution. Thus was it, for instance, that Dr Gustav Steinbauer, barrister of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, stated on July 19, 1946 before the tribunal: “Auschwitz alone has swallowed up 3½ million people – men, women, and children” (TMI, XIX, p. 55). “Auschwitz: […] a large extermination camp where about 3 and one half million Jews and Poles perished between 1940 and 1945” (Dictionnaire de la langue française, Hachette, 1991, 1430 p.). The following year the Hachette publishing house was to reduce that figure to one million (see note 21). “It is not possible to give, to the nearest thousand, the exact number of those who perished in the Birkenau gas chambers (the most serious estimates stand at around 3 and one half million), but ‘extermination’ must essentially be understood as that of the Jewish people. Ninety-five percent of those gassed at Birkenau were Jews […]. Still many [other detainees] lost their lives […]” (Claude Lanzmann’s preface to Filip Müller, Trois ans dans une chambre à gaz d’Auschwitz [in English Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers], Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet, 1980, p. 12).
  1. On April 5, 1946 Rudolf Höss, the first of the three successive commandants of Auschwitz, signed in his Nuremberg prison cell, for the American Lieutenant-Colonel Smith W. Brochart, Jr, an affidavit in English whereby he declared: “I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000” (doc. PS-3868). Before the tribunal ten days later, American associate trial counsel Colonel John Harlan Amen read out to him some excerpts from document PS-3868, including that reproduced above, and asked him: “That is all true, Witness?” (IMT, XI, p. 415). Höss answered: “Ja, es stimmt” – Yes, it’s accurate (“Yes, it is”). R. Höss had been tortured. It was necessary to wait until 1983 to obtain, from the very mouth of one of his torturers (Jews from the British Army’s Field Security Service), the circumstances and details of the tortures (Rupert Butler, Legions of Death, Arrow Books, London 1983, acknowledgements page and p. 234-238). On this point and on the manipulations and deception with which the texts attributed to Höss were used by the American prosecution, as well as on related revelations, see R. Faurisson, How the British obtained the confessions of Rudolf Höss, Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-1987, p. 389-403. Until these last few years Höss was held by the majority of “Holocaust” historians to be the no. 1 witness of the crimes of Auschwitz (homicidal gassings and number of the victims). In 1993 one of those historians, American professor Christopher Browning, when asked by a Jewish-British journalist to give his opinion on Faurisson’s article, ended up replying: “Höss was always a very weak and confused witness”. The same professor did not hesitate to conclude: “The revisionists use him all the time for this reason, in order to try and discredit the memory of Auschwitz as a whole” (Christopher Hitchens, Whose History is it?, Vanity Fair, December 1993, p. 117). Höss gave many other estimates besides that of the three million dead up to December 1, 1943.
  1. “When you quote the figure of 1,500,000 Jews, there again you’re falsifying the figures. It was 3,000,000 Jews that were exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau” (David Susskind, President of the Centre communautaire laïc juif of Brussels, letter published in Le Nouvel Observateur, May 30, l986, p. 29). In an editorial devoted to the matter of the Auschwitz Carmelites Heritage, California’s leading Jewish weekly, affirmed: “[…] huge quantities of poisonous Zyklon B pellets […] ended the lives of some Three Million Jews at Auschwitz” (June 7, 1993). The statement proves the indifference of that weekly’s editors to the fact that, already for three years, the world press, as a whole, had been revealing that such a figure constituted an enormous exaggeration.
  1. “Consequently, on the basis of my calculations the final death toll in Concentration Camp Auschwitz was 2,500,000”: that is what Rudolf Vrba stated under oath on July 16, 1961 at the Israeli embassy in London for the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Vrba had the cheek to add that this figure matched that given by Rudolf Höss at Nuremberg, whereas the latter had reckoned the number of dead at three million up to December 1, 1943, without providing any estimate for the following fourteen months. Vrba added: “Thus my estimations of the death toll in Auschwitz, and the estimations of the death toll made by Rudolf Höss, though made independently of each other and using different methods, were nevertheless in good agreement” (Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic, I Cannot Forgive, Bantam, New York 1964, p. 269-272).
  1. It is likely that, for the historian Yehuda Bauer, the total of dead at Auschwitz is from two million to four million, given that he wrote, in 1982, on the subject of those gassed alone: “Between April 1942 and November 1944, in addition to the Soviet POWs, the gas extinguished the lives of probably up to 2,000 gypsies (in 1944), a few hundred more Soviet POWs, and between1,500,000 and 3,500,000 Jews” (A History of the Holocaust, Franklin Watts, New York 1982, p. 215). In 1989, i.e. seven years later, Bauer estimated the total of dead (gassed or not) at 1.6 million, of whom 1,352,980 Jews (see note 16).
  1. SS sergeant Pery Broad, member of the camp’s political section (called “Gestapo”), is supposed to have written: “Two the three million Jews were put to death [at Auschwitz]! Besides thousands of Poles, Russians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, etc.” (“Erinnerungen von Broad”, KL Auschwitz in den Augen der SS, Verlag des Staatlichen Auschwitz-Museums, 1973, p. 141).
  1. “An SS physician, Friedrich Entress, who served as the camp doctor in 1942-1943, stated that, in his view, 2,000,000 to 2,500,000 people were killed in Auschwitz” (F. Piper, op. cit., 1992, p. 8).
  1. “Out of prudence, we are therefore going to stay with the figure of two million [dead at Auschwitz]” (Léon Poliakov, Bréviaire de la haine [in English Harvest of Hate], Calmann-Lévy, 1974 [1951], p. 496). “[…] the exact number of Jews murdered in the gas chambers just after alighting from the trains will never be known. The prudent estimate is in the order of two million…” (Georges Wellers, L’Étoile jaune à l’heure de Vichy / De Drancy à Auschwitz, Fayard, Paris 1973, p. 290): since this estimate concerns only the number (1) of Jews, (2) gassed, (3) on their arrival, it is likely that for the author the total number of persons having died at any moment and of any cause is indeed greater than the figure of two million; ten years later this total number was to be assessed by the same author as fewer than one and one half million (see note 18). For Lucy Dawidowicz, the figure of two million seems to be that of Jews gassed (The War against the Jews / 1933-1945, Holt, New York 1975, p. 149-149).
  1. “There were never four million victims in Auschwitz […]. The total number of people who died there […] was in the neighbourhood of 1,600,000 […]. The figure for Jews murdered by gassing is 1,323,000, with 29,980 [Poles] dying in the camp” (Yehuda Bauer, “Auschwitz and the Poles / Fighting the distortions”, Jerusalem Post, September 22, 1989, p. 6). The author says that here he is taking into account G. Wellers’s estimates in 1983, but he has turned the total of 1,471,595 (Wellers’s figure) into… 1,600,000! For his own 1982 estimate see note 12.
  1. Until April 3, 1990 the commemorative plaques at Auschwitz-Birkenau bore the inscription: “Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945″. The new text, developed after years of prevarications, is the following: “For ever let this place be a cry of despair and of warning to mankind, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe” (Luc Rosenzweig, Auschwitz, la Pologne et le génocide, Le Monde, January 27, 1995, p. 1).
  1. Wellers, op. cit., 1993. To compare with the same author’s 1973 estimate (see note 15).
  1. “Auschwitz […] Number [of Jews] Killed: 1,000,000 […]. The number of non-Jews who died in Auschwitz may be estimated on the basis of registrations and transfers at more than 250,000. Most were Poles” (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Holmes and Meier, New York 1985, p. 895). For R. Hilberg, it seems that the Jews were always “killed” whilst the non-Jews simply “died”.
  1. “At least 1,500,000 people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau” (p. 11). “At least 1,100,000 persons were killed or died in the camp. But if this number is regarded as a minimum estimate, what figure can we accept as a hypothetical ceiling? […] about 1,350,000 [Jews], with the total number of Auschwitz victims reaching about 1,500,000” (p. 71-72). The sentence from page 11 appears on a map inserted in a chapter under the byline of Yisrael Gutman, “Auschwitz – An Overview”. The sentences from pages 71-72 appear in a chapter signed by Franciszek Piper, “The Number of Victims” (Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz death Camp, op. cit., 1994). Formerly, for Piper, the number of dead at Auschwitz was four million (see note 7).
  1. “The figure of 4,000,000 victims is now regarded as ’emotional’ and should really [be] more in the order of 1,000,000” (Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989, p. 264). “Auschwitz […] where about 1,000,000 Jews and Poles perished between 1940 and 1945” (Dictionnaire des noms propres, Hachette, 1992). For J.-C. Pressac’s estimate in 1993 see note 23 and, for his 1994 figure, see note 24. For the estimate in a dictionary published by Hachette in 1991 see note 8).
  1. “The stark and inescapable fact that 800,000 to 900,0000 human beings perished in Auschwitz, its gas chambers and its camps” (Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, Sphere Books, London 1971 [1953], p. 500).
  1. “Total dead: 775,000 [but this figure] may comprise gaps. This is why the overall figure of 800,000 victims should be retained at present” (Jean-Claude Pressac, Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz / La Machinerie du meurtre de masse, éditions du CNRS, 1993, p. 148). For J.-C. Pressac’s evaluation in 1989 see note 21 and, for his evaluation in 1994, see note 24.
  1. “Total dead: 631,000-711,000; […] the number of victims is evaluated at 630,000 to 710,000” (German translation of the work cited just above: Die Krematorien von Auschwitz / Die Technik des Massenmordes, Piper, Munich 1994, p. 202). For J.-C. Pressac’s evaluation in 1989, see note 21 and, for his evaluation in 1993, see note 23.
  1. See F. Piper, op. cit., 1992, p. 12-13; the references to the Höss trial are provided by the author.
  1. Sterbebücher von Auschwitz / Death Books from Auschwitz / Ksiegi zgonow z Auschwitz (three volumes), Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Saur Verlag, Munich 1995.
  1. In 1983 G. Wellers ascribed this lie or error of spectacular dimensions neither to the Poles, nor to the Russians, nor to the communists. He wrote: “For some years, having understood the difficulties of this problem and having regained lucidity of judgment, one has avoided putting forth figures, but it is known that four million dead at Auschwitz is an exaggerated figure, due to the inevitable trauma, the natural shock that dominated the survivors’ psyche in the first years after the war’s end, after the end of their nightmare” (op. cit., 1983, p. 138-139). Wellers was thus calling into question the “survivors”, whilst forgetting to recall his own 1973 “prudent estimate” (see note 15). In 1989 Yehuda Bauer accused the “official Polish propagandists”, saying that “some Poles disseminate the wrong figures […] in order to create a national myth”; he denounced “the Poles’ concept of themselves as the crucified nation, the real sufferers of Europe” (“Auschwitz and the Poles / Fighting the Distortions”, Jerusalem Post, September 22, 1989, p. 6). “The figure propagated by the Communist regime was that 2,000,000 Jews and 2,000,000 non-Jews, mainly Poles, were killed” (Ben Helfgott, Chairman of Yad Vashem Charitable Trust, The Independent [London], August 3, 1990). “The communists tried to ‘de-Judaize’ Auschwitz […] said Lerman, who is also a member of the International Council of the State Museum of Auschwitz” (“The Polish communists’ false Auschwitz story”, Philadelphia Inquirer, March 29, 1992, p. A 1, 10). Luc Rosenzweig implicates “the national-communist vulgate” (Auschwitz, la Pologne et le génocide, Le Monde, January 27, 1995, p. 1).
  1. See note 25. Besides, it will be noted, in our list recapitulating the various estimates, that the Jews themselves have often indicated, as the number of their co-religionists having died at Auschwitz, figures greater than 1,500,000. They therefore have no right to impute their own exaggerations to non-Jews.
  1. “In memory of the millions of Jews, martyrs and fighters exterminated at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp by the Hitlerian race murderers, 1940-1945”. That inscription appeared on a monument built, according to J.-C. Pressac, during the winter of 1963-1964 and subsequently (?) removed (Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989, p. 262-263).
  1. “I feel reasonably secure in placing the total in the range 100,000-150,000, probably closer to the former […]. The number of Jewish dead of natural causes at Auschwitz seems less than 100,000” (Arthur R. Butz’s review of Why Did the Heavens not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History, by Arno J. Mayer, Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1989, p. 369-370); see also “Some Thoughts on Pressac’s Opus / A Response to a Major Critique of Holocaust Revisionism”, Id., May/June 1993, p. 26).
  1. In English: “Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945”; in German: “Martyrer- und Todesort von 4 Millionen Opfern ermordet von nazistischen Völkermordern, 1940-1945“.