This estimated number is given by Martin Gilbert in his excellent book "Atlas of the Holocaust". It represents the authentic (analysis) total of Jews exterminated between September 1th, 1939 and May 8th, 1945. The total of the Jewish victims is just over 5,750,000 and is based on such country by country and region by region records as survive.

Such a total, however, can never be complete. Thousands of infants and babies were murdered, by the Nazi killing squads in the autumn of 1941, for example, before their birth could be recorded for any 'statistical' purpose. Thousands more individuals, especially in the remoter villages of Poland were 'added' to the deportation trains which left larger localities, without any numerical register being made of their existence or fate.

In fact, this total is a strict minimum. It does not include the many thousands of political opponents executed in the camps, the hundreds of thousands of Russian POW's, and all the forgotten minorities: gypsies, homosexuals, etc. Accurate numbers for exactly how many humans died as a result of the Nazi plans are simply not available and never will be.

Research by some of the worlds most able historians place the number of Holocaust victims murdered by German government policy to be not less than twelve million and probably more.

Some of the figures included in this list are extremly accurate. These numbers are coming from the extermination groups themselves. They are extracted from written reports sent to Berlin by the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen, and other internal German sources.

Just a last comment. These last years some historians and or revisionists have changed the estimated number of Jews killed during the Holocaust from 6 million to 2.5 million. This new estimation is based on the fact that Soviet historians may have inflated the number of Soviet victims for political reasons. Some revisionists or deniers are using this new estimated number of victims in order to minimize the Holocaust or even to deny its reality. Even with different estimates and keep in mnd, they are estimates, the Holocaust took the lives of millions of innocent people. Even if this new estimation is accurate, which it may not be, the question still must be asked; is the extermination of 2.5 million innocent victims more justifiable than the extermination of 6 million people? And even if there were "only"100,000 or 10,000 or 1,000 victims, this number does not justify the horror of the Nazi's extermination policy. The deniers are just trying to make banal the murder of millions of innocent people by German government policy.

Vincent Châtel and Chuck Ferree