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Until a few years ago, I was operating under the misconception that the total number of non-Jews (homosexuals, the disabled, Slavs etc.) murdered in the Holocaust was somewhere in the region of 5 million. I subsequently learned that this figure was invented from whole cloth for propaganda purposes, and the real figure is significantly lower, perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude.
(Not interested into getting into a debate about what this misconception of mine might imply about the accuracy of other Holocaust-related figures - you know who you are.)
This is wrong. The number of non Axis affiliated non Jews killed in WW2 that by the same criteria as the Jews, where all dead counted as victims of the holocaust, is definitely substantially higher than 5 million. There is uncertainty and a range about possible victims but because minimum to maximum is larger, and there isn't as strong lobby, there is no doubt of it being higher than whatever the number of Jews killed. Or Jews murdered, however one would conclude that.
If criteria is people killed because of people stealing their food, outright killing them, blockade, enslavement, and harsh conditions brought through human action? The number is higher. Frankly, in eastern europe, a certain % of the dead must be allocated to the USSR for sure. Or for some dead person you could allocate different percentage of guilt. For some the party that destroyed them is without doubt a certain one. In other cases like starvation it can become more tricky.
For example if USSR follows scorch earth tactics and destroy food supplies, allies blockade food, nazis steal whatever of the food remains, and the person dies. Who killed them? There could also be considerations of who is more to blame for the civilian suffering because of their aggressive actions in the war and/or causing the war. Not to mention those more directly killed by USSR which isn't a small number.
In my view the most to blame for European theater are Nazi Germany and USSR, probably more the first to blame for more cruel conduct, but there is also a lot of fog of war and propaganda, leaving some room to explore this issue further, especially since USSR was also particularly cruel. Still, my evaluation at this point would have me put the Nazis as more responsible for most dead. Certainly it is pseudohistory that ignores USSR aggressive behavior and treats it as a victim of WW2 (the people living there are victims of the Nazis). Both powers wanted to invade each other and expand at each other expense and also were happy to invade at expend of other groups. The AngloAmerican allies also have their own responsibility for both those they directly killed (i.e Axis civilians especially but they even killed civilians of occupied countries, including deliberately bombing civilian populations of occupied countries and pretending it was an accident, based on the strategy of inciting the locals into more aggressive action against Nazi Germany), and through blockade, and whatever responsibility they might have for the war and throwing fuel into the fire in the period before it became world war. Especially in terms of aerial bombardment of civilian populations the greatest escalation came from the British first. However, in my estimation, even without angloamerican involvement after 1939, a nazi-soviet conflict that bloodies up significantly eastern Europe was very likely. And the ideologies of the Soviets and Nazi Germany made the treatment of civilians predictably disastrous.
That one Jewish ultranationalist propagandist came up with a figure that became popular figure of official 11 million number doesn't prove that it is lower. It does illustrate as a millionth example how culture can be dominated by false narratives. The 5 million is indeed self serving bullshit to fit his favorite narrative, because it is higher than 5 million. Nor should we accept the propaganda of seperating deaths from those of an intentional genocide tm, and pretending the others weren't. No care has been done by those making such framings to actually exclude people in the case of those they assign as genuine victims, based on a set of criteria. Nor do we see consistent criteria that could include people in those they don't give the status of victims of genocide.
The Jewish lobby and holocaust lobby also engaged in downplaying the armenian genocide. Downplaying the victimization of other groups by not only Jewish communists. And by that I mean the actual Jewish communist mass murderers that were quite a few, although downplayment of communist crimes as a means of indirectly excusing Jewish involvement in them also can qualify. As we see even the victimization of non Jews by the nazis is par for the course. And of course, even some revisionists of establishment consensus tm have an incentive to promote this idea. And it is tied by a weird perspective, the weirdo ideology to judge the national socialists only by their treatment of the Jews. Which is a false way to judge them since the effect of their actions on non Jews was of greater significance in their own period.
Of course in the mythology of nazism and how it is used in modern narratives, it is milked by pro jewish racists, anti europeans, antifa ideologues, far leftists, etc. One could see the post ww2 narratives as having a greater influence on the long term than what the nazis actually did, or didn't do.
But it is wrong that less than 5 million non Jews died in WW2 from non axis ethnic groups, and it is wrong that the nazis are responsible for more deaths of Jews than non Jews. And it is also good to not overly inflate the death of ethnic groups, and grossly understate of others. Especially when this is done in ways that serve the pervasive racist propaganda of our time. Such as the propaganda machine that Wiesenthal was part of. You are playing into his propaganda if you accept any of his claims at face value, including the "less than 5 million non Jews died, believe me".
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Your link goes to a long wikipedia page on the life on Simon Wiesenthal. Would you please clarify where in that long article is the claim that the estimate of non-Jews killed in the Holocaust was invented without backing of evidence?
I’m kids sympathetic to the point of AngoAmerican Imperial propaganda having more of an impact on the post war era than anything the Nazis ever did. It became a way to legitimize the rule of the Anglophone order and the right of the UN as an allied government to effectively control international affairs. It gave NATO the right to invade other countries in the name of protecting the world from communism and authoritarian regimes and anyone else we didn’t like. For the most part, we’re fairly decent as far as empires go, but at the same time, the narrative of us as the people who Stopped a Genocide and Defeated Evil Incarnate gives legitimacy to the effort that would be hard to create without the story.
It’s actually kinda funny to me to listen as both the Pro-Israeli and Pro-Palestinian factions try to weaponize the holocaust narrative to win the arguments about the war in Gaza. To the Pro-Israeli side, “Never Again” means that the Jews of Israel must be allowed to use force as much as they want to defeat the genocidal Hamas. To the Pro-Palestinian side, “Never Again” means that bombing Gaza is just like the Auswitz. It’s like using that narrative gets you the stamp of approval to do whatever is necessary to defeat your enemy. Heck even Putin tried to justify taking Ukraine by invoking the need to “denazify” Ukraine of Azov.
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IIRC, at least one browser (Brave) refuses to obey the "highlight this passage on the page" section of URLs due to privacy concerns.
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The link for me had the relevant passage highlighted. Maybe because I'm on Android?
I'm on desktop (Opera browser), and it goes straight to the highlighted section for me as well.
That said, Bauer is one of those insisting that the Holocaust can only refer to Jews murdered by the Nazis, so the pushback against the "other undesirables killed in the Holocaust" feels a little unseemly, particularly insisting that only those killed in the known camps count (why not include massive numbers of Poles and Romanians killed in town, but not the camps?)
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Didn't the Nazis kill plenty of Poles, Roma and Slavs, or are we now defining Holocaust to only include dead Jews? Seems like a lot of word games are being played here.
This passage, by itself, does not actually necessarily imply that the real figure is lower, just that this one was selected arbitrarily.
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"Holocaust" implies deliberate killings in the gas chambers, or deliberate worked-to-death-with-short-rations in the concentration camps. This applies uncontroversially to the Jews and the Roma (of whom only about 300,000 were holocausted).
My understanding (I am not an expert) is that several million non-Jewish Poles died due to war-related famine, but without the requisite intent on the part of the Nazis to be included in the Holocaust. If you count Nazi deaths as generously as anti-communists count communist deaths, the 11 million civilians killed by Nazis is roughly correct.
"War-related famine" was not exactly incidental; it was a matter of German policy.
Generally "the Holocaust" is used by historians to refer only to the murder of Jews. Some people say you should lump in other groups murdered by the Germans but I think it is fairly coherent to exclude them because as you have noted a. the Germans pursued Jews with a unique sort of intent and b. the methods and organization with which they murdered Jews was in large part distinct.
Yes, there were plenty of instances where the Germans rounded up groups of Poles, or Russians, or Serbs, or Italians, and shot them to death. But it was not done on the scale or with the deliberate forethought of the initial phases of the Holocaust where something on the order of ~2.3-2.5 million Jews were killed in mass executions.
Yes, there were other nationalities and classes who went to the gas chambers, particularly ethnic Poles and particularly at Auschwitz. But at nowhere near the numbers that Jews did; and a number of the extermination camps pretty much exclusively killed Jews.
The caveat to all of this is that the Holocaust was not going to be unique if the Germans had won. It was merely to be the first in a grand series of genocides to depopulate Eastern Europe for German settlement. As it stands if you tally the dead in history's genocides, coming in at numbers 2 and 3 on the list is the German murder of Soviet POWs and the German murder of ethnic Poles.
Wikipedia agrees with you but I was (in the UK in the 1990s) taught in school that the Holocaust included gypsies and homosexuals.
The Germans avoid this question by calling the memorials in Berlin the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism without using the word "Holocaust". (The latter is a recent renaming - when I went there circa 2013 the English-language signage still called it the Memorial to the Murdered Gypsies of Europe)
Wikipedia's "Holocaust" article first specifies that it limits the term only to European Jews, then mentions "non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these", linking to their "Holocaust victims" article that includes a dozen categories. I don't think all the wiki editors are 100% on the same page here...
The shocking things about the Holocaust vs the mass civilian death tolls common in war were the deliberateness of it (dead prisoners were the goal, not just negligence) and the industrialization of it (literally "holokaustos"=="whole burnt offering", referring to the crematoria). Neither characteristic was restricted to just the Jewish victims, even if the proportionate effect on Jewish victims was an order of magnitude or more greater. The genocide of other "untermenschen" was also intentional, and though it was much less industrialized, there were still over 100,000 non-Jews murdered at Auschwitz, not just a handful of exceptions. Seems to me like they should count too.
I suppose it was also astonishing that the Holocaust included a country trying to kill its own citizens, rather than just being uncaring about others', and that characteristic wouldn't apply to any Polish or Soviet victims of the Nazis, but that includes the majority of the (predominantly Polish) Jewish people murdered too; the self-destructiveness of the Holocaust was important but not central.
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Thank you for finding the relevant passage.
It's a good question, which WWII civilian deaths get (or should get) counted towards Holocaust. It wouldn't count, say, a Polish man who got hit by a jeep driven a German soldier on a typical patrol route. It wouldn't count if that same Polish man got shot by that same German soldier on that same patrol route. But would it count if, instead of the patrol route, this German soldier was rounding up Polish men in the neighborhood to be transported to a concentration camp, and shot this particular Polish man who was trying to escape the sweep? Or would it only count if that concentration camp's primary purpose was extermination, and not forced labor or internment (like US internment camps for Japanese-Americans)?
Does it only count if it was done by, or on behalf of, Germans?
(I don't know, I haven't thought about it before. I do know that my family tree got substantially pruned by both the Nazis and the Soviets.)
Is the presence of a "concentration camp" per se really the deciding factor? I heard an account recently of the Nazis conquering a Slavic village and, as a standard part of their war plan, immediately rounding up and killing everyone present, men, women, and children. Is this excluded because it was less industrialized and more like standard savage ancient warfare? Is the village itself considered a very short-lived, improvised concentration camp? It seems like a distinct phenomenon from the long-term "corpse factories" we know as "concentration camps", but I think I'd be slightly more surprised to hear it excluded from the Holocaust than included.
Excellent point, and I should have thought of that because I know that in Kyiv the Jews were rounded up to Baby Yar, which is just a ravine conveniently deep for disposing the bodies.
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Weren't a relatively large chunk of victims in the Holocaust, especially early in the war, basically rounded up and shot? The death camps were, IIRC, a fairly late addition, and even then many of the deaths were from forced labor and disease.
Which isn't to say that the death camps didn't exist, just that "The Holocaust" is a much broader event than just gas chambers. And also isn't to suggest that deaths from bullets or starvation are somehow more morally excusable.
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