Blood Libel #31 | “We’ve been lied to—the Holocaust numbers don’t add up.”
Anti-Zionist:
It’s a lie that 6,000,000 jews died in the Holocaust. It was initially said that 4 million jews died in Auschwitz and then it was revised down to 1 million. So it’s clear that we’ve been lied to. The mathematics don't work.
Pro-Zionist:
It’s true that the Auschwitz death toll was revised—but that doesn’t mean we were lied to. The original Soviet estimate of 4 million was made in 1945, before historians had access to Nazi train records, camp archives, and population data. Decades later, with more evidence, researchers corrected that number to about 1.1 million—a figure now accepted by every major historical institution. But this doesn’t undermine the fact that Hitler and the Nazi’s murdered 6 million jews. In fact, it only supports it.
So where does the total of 6 million come from? Auschwitz was only one of six dedicated extermination camps. There were also mobile gas vans, mass shootings, starvation and disease in ghettos, and death marches.
While finding an exact count is nearly impossible, decades of research has produced credible documentation that support the fact that 6 million jews were murdered by the Nazi’s during the Holocaust:
Roughly 3 million Jews were murdered in extermination camps including Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Majdanek.
1.5 million were executed by Nazi firing squads in forests and fields across Eastern Europe.
Over 500,000 died from starvation and disease in ghettos even before deportations began.
Another 350,000 perished in concentration camps through forced labor and inhumane conditions.
As the Soviets advanced, the Nazis forced tens of thousands on death marches in the winter—254,000 died along the way.
Gas vans, a form of mobile extermination, killed around 200,000 more.
And about 196,000 Jews were massacred in local killings and buried in mass graves.
So no, the 6 million isn’t a myth. It’s not propaganda. It’s a documented reality—based on Nazi records, demographic studies, eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence. Revising one figure based on better evidence doesn’t discredit the Holocaust—it strengthens the credibility of the historical record. Denying that is not skepticism; it’s antisemitism.
BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS:
During a visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp on April 12, 1945, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower saw firsthand the horrors committed by the Nazi regime. Deeply affected by the experience, according to the U.S. National Park Service, Eisenhower stated about the atrocities he witnessed first hand:
Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.
He was prescient. As predicted here we are today. Thankfully, the Holocaust is one of the best-documented genocides in human history. The death toll is not a “Zionist conspiracy”—it’s corroborated by Nazi records, survivor testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and postwar forensic investigations.
Revising the Auschwitz toll from 4 million to 1.1 million wasn’t a fraud. It was a correction based on new access to data—a hallmark of responsible historical research, not deception.
Anyone claiming otherwise is not engaged in debate—they’re spreading Holocaust denial, a blood libel and a form of antisemitism.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a math debate—it’s a lie designed to undermine the reality of the Holocaust and delegitimize Jewish suffering.
This is how denial starts: question a number to deny the whole.
Holocaust deniers don’t begin by saying “it didn’t happen.” They start by sowing doubt—“weren’t we told 4 million at Auschwitz?”—and weaponize a legitimate revision in one statistic to undermine the entire historical record.
Yes, Auschwitz’s death toll was revised—from an early Soviet estimate of 4 million to a well-researched figure of 1.1 million—based on Nazi transport records, forensic analysis, and demographic data. That’s how honest history works: it updates in light of new evidence.
What’s not honest? Twisting that update to imply the entire death toll was fabricated.
According to Yad Vashem is the ultimate source for Holocaust education, documentation and research and they state while there is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust:
All the serious research confirms that the number of victims was between five and six million. Early calculations range from 5.1 million (Professor Raul Hilberg) to 5.95 million (Jacob Leschinsky). More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr. Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, estimates the Jewish losses at 5.59–5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr. Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29 million to six million.
The main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar censuses with postwar censuses and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing partial data on various deportations and murders is also used. We estimate that Yad Vashem currently has somewhat more than 4.7 million names of victims that are accessible. This figure is based primarily on some two million and a half Pages of Testimony, which often contain information about more than one Jew who perished in the Holocaust. As of early June 1999, more than 1.6 million Pages of Testimony had been computerized. In addition, we have thousands of documents containing names from the Holocaust era, many of which are those of victims. This body of documentation has yet to be fully researched and added to our computerized database. Eventually we hope, through our computerization project, to provide as much information as possible about each victim.
In “Holocaust Facts: Where Does the Figure of 6 Million Victims Come From?” Haaretz states:
In November 1945, Hoettl testified for the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials of accused Nazi war criminals. Later, in the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, he also submitted to a lengthy series of questions from the prosecution, speaking under oath from a courtroom in Austria.
On both occasions, he described a conversation he had had with Eichmann, the SS official who had principal responsibility for the logistics of the Jewish genocide, in Budapest in August 1944. In the 1961 testimony, Hoettl recalled how “Eichmann … told me that, according to his information, some 6,000,000 Jews had perished until then -- 4,000,000 in extermination camps and the remaining 2,000,000 through shooting by the Operations Units and other causes, such as disease, etc.”
The continue:
“Six million” is not, and was never intended to be, a precise accounting. But the number, which has now been part of the public consciousness for more than 50 years, would never have continued to be cited if it did not mirror the scholarly tallies that have followed in the succeeding decades, and confirmed that rough figure.
So let’s look at the evidence to support the claim.
The “6 million” is not based on Auschwitz alone—it’s the sum of all the killing.
This talking point pretends that Auschwitz was the Holocaust. It wasn’t.
1. Auschwitz Death Toll Revision: From 4 Million to 1.1 Million
The 4 million figure was a Soviet estimate made in 1945, based on limited forensic data and no access to Nazi transport or camp records.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, researchers gained access to Nazi archives, train transport lists, and civil records.
Today, the widely accepted figure is approximately 1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz, of which 90% were Jews.
📖 Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) on Auschwitz
2. Auschwitz Was One of Six Extermination Camps
The Holocaust was not confined to Auschwitz. There were five other extermination camps:
According to “The Nazi Concentration Camp System”
Of the thousands of Nazi camps, only six were extermination, or death camps: Auschwitz, Chełmno, Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. At these six camps alone, the Nazis murdered over 3 million people, primarily through gassing.”
3. Mass Shootings by Einsatzgruppen: ~1.5 Million Jews
Mobile SS killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) systematically murdered Jews, especially in the Soviet Union.
Victims were often marched to pits, shot, and buried in mass graves.
📖 Source: USHMM: Einsatzgruppen
4. Ghettos: Starvation and Disease – 500,000+ Dead
Over 1,000 ghettos were established.
Jews were subjected to starvation, overcrowding, and disease before deportations began.
Hundreds of thousands died in places like the Warsaw and Łódź ghettos.
📖 Source: USHMM: Ghettos in Nazi Europe
5. Death Marches: 250,000+ Jews Died
As the Allies closed in, Nazis forced prisoners to march west in freezing conditions with little food or shelter.
Around 250,000 died during these forced marches.
📖 Source: USHMM: Death Marches
6. Gas Vans: 200,000 Jews Murdered
In places like Chelmno, mobile gas vans were used before large-scale camp gas chambers.
These mobile killing units gassed victims using carbon monoxide.
📖 Source: Yad Vashem: Gas Vans
7. Other Massacres and Local Killings: ~200,000
Many massacres occurred in small towns and forests that were not part of formal extermination operations.
These include places like Ponary and Jedwabne.
📖 Source: USHMM: Mass Shootings
8. The Demographic Evidence: It All Adds Up
Pre-war Jewish population in Europe: approx. 9.5 million
Post-war Jewish population: approx. 3.5 million
Population studies show a loss of 6 million Jews that cannot be explained by emigration or natural causes.
📖 Source: American Jewish Yearbook 1945 (PDF)
📖 How Do We Know Six Million Died?
The agenda behind this libel is antisemitism—plain and simple.
Why do people cling to this libel?
Because if you can convince people the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated, you can:
Paint Jews as dishonest, manipulative, or conspiratorial
Undermine global sympathy for Jewish suffering
Blur the line between historical revisionism and Holocaust denial
Create space for more explicit antisemitism to flourish unchecked
This isn’t about academic skepticism. It’s about denying the lived experience of a people who were nearly annihilated—and opening the door to dehumanizing them again.
That’s not “skepticism.” That’s blood libel 101.
There is no honest doubt about the Holocaust’s scale. The 6 million figure isn’t guesswork—it’s the product of decades of scholarship across continents, languages, and political systems. It’s a consensus reached by historians, not propaganda spun by politicians.
If someone tries to convince you the numbers don’t add up, look at what they’re trying to subtract: truth, memory, and the humanity of a murdered people.
Don’t let them.