The Holocaust in numbers

What happened

Six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazi German regime, its allies, and its collaborators. ¹ That total is a sum of several separately documented categories of killing, each estimated from a different body of evidence. ¹

The largest identifiable piece is the killing centers. Five sites in German-occupied Poland were built for the specific purpose of murdering Jews with poison gas, which is what separates them from concentration camps, places that also held prisoners for forced labor and detention. ⁴ The counts: approximately 1,000,000 Jews at the Auschwitz camp complex, approximately 925,000 at Treblinka II, approximately 435,000 at Belzec, at least 167,000 at Sobibor, at least 152,000 at Chelmno. ¹ That is roughly 2.7 million people at five sites. ¹ Belzec ran for roughly ten months, March to December 1942. ⁴ Treblinka ran from July 1942 to September 1943. ⁴ Chelmno killed with carbon monoxide piped into sealed vans, Auschwitz-Birkenau with hydrogen cyanide sold commercially as Zyklon B. ⁴

The second piece is what historians now call the Holocaust by bullets. About 2 million Jews were murdered in mass shooting operations and related massacres at more than 1,500 locations across eastern Europe. ¹ Much of that was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, units of the Security Police and the SD that moved in behind the German army. ³ In the first nine months after the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, they organized and helped carry out the shooting of more than half a million people, the vast majority of them Jews. ³ At Babyn Yar outside Kyiv in September 1941, Einsatzgruppe C, Waffen SS men, and Ukrainian auxiliaries shot 33,771 Jews across two days, a number that comes from the reports the killers themselves sent back to Berlin. ³ Across Soviet territory, over 1.5 million and possibly more than 2 million people were killed by shooting or in gas vans. ³

Then there are the deaths with no single moment attached to them. Between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Jews died in ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps from deliberate privation, disease, and brutal treatment. ¹ At least 250,000 more were murdered in acts of violence outside camps and ghettos entirely. ¹

Laid out by country, the losses look like this. Poland had about 3,350,000 Jews in 1937 and lost between 2,770,000 and 3,000,000 of them. ² The Soviet Union counted 3,028,538 Jews in 1939 and lost about 1,340,000. ² Hungary, within its 1941 borders, had 825,007 and lost 564,507. ² Romania had 756,930 in 1930 and lost somewhere between 211,214 and 260,000. ² Germany itself had 237,723 Jews in 1939 and lost 165,200. ² Czechoslovakia lost 260,000, the Netherlands 102,000 of 140,245, Lithuania 130,000 of 153,000, Latvia 70,000 of 93,479, Greece between 58,800 and 65,000 of 71,611, Yugoslavia 67,228 of 82,242, and France between 72,900 and 74,000 of a prewar population of 300,000 to 330,000. ²

Why it still matters

Hungary's losses are known to the single person, 564,507. ² Poland's are known only within a band 230,000 wide. ² There is no single Nazi German document that accounts for every death, and no master list of those who perished exists anywhere in the world. ^{1 2} The estimates were assembled from surviving German reports and records, prewar and postwar demographic studies, records Jews created during and after the war, documentation produced by resistance groups and underground activists, and whatever else survives in the archives. ¹ Where the paperwork survived, the number is sharp. Where the German administration burned its files or the community that kept its own records was destroyed entirely, historians work from population arithmetic instead, and the answer comes out as a range.

Holocaust denial leans hard on that distinction, treating any range as an admission that nobody really knows. An estimate built partly on demography is a different kind of claim than a name on a transport list, and a good historian should say so out loud. The museum that publishes these figures does say so, in writing, and adds that the estimates of today might rise or fall as new documents are discovered or historians arrive at a more precise understanding of events. ² The killing centers are among the best documented aspects of the Holocaust. ¹ The Einsatzgruppen tallied their own murders and mailed the totals to headquarters, which is why the Babyn Yar figure is known to the last digit. ³

The count of people who were there changes every year. As of April 22, 2025, approximately 220,800 Jewish Holocaust survivors were alive, spread across more than 90 countries. ⁵ The median age was 87, with survivors ranging from 78 to over 100, and more than 1,400 of them past their hundredth birthday. ^{5 6} Half live in Israel, 18 percent in North America, 17 percent in western Europe. ⁵ The Claims Conference projections, published the same day under the title "Vanishing Witnesses," run out to 2040: within six years nearly half of today's survivors will have died, within ten years 70 percent, within fifteen years 90 percent. ⁶ Israel's survivor population is projected to fall from 110,100 in October 2024 to 62,900 by 2030, a 43 percent decline. ⁶ The United States goes from 34,600 to a projected 21,100 in the same period. ⁶ The former Soviet Union goes from 25,500 to 11,800, a 54 percent drop. ⁶

Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference, put the practical consequence this way: "most survivors are at a period of life where their need for care and services is growing." ⁵

The words you'll hear

Killing center. One of five sites in occupied Poland built specifically to murder Jews with poison gas, unlike concentration camps, which also functioned as places of forced labor and detention. ⁴

Einsatzgruppen. Mobile units of the Security Police and the SD that followed the German army into occupied territory and carried out mass shootings, beginning in Poland in September 1939 and escalating sharply after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. ³

Holocaust by bullets. Shorthand for the roughly 2 million Jews murdered in mass shooting operations and related massacres at more than 1,500 sites in eastern Europe, as opposed to the deaths in gas chambers. ¹

Babyn Yar. The ravine outside Kyiv where 33,771 Jews were shot over two days in September 1941, according to the reports sent to Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin. ³

Zyklon B. The commercial name for the hydrogen cyanide used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which operated from March 1942 to late 1944. ⁴

Vanishing Witnesses. The Claims Conference report released April 22, 2025, projecting the decline of the survivor population through 2040. ⁶