The Concentration Camps in the Holocaust - Death Tolls
Holocaust Death Toll Included Many Groups Other Than Jews
In total, about 10 million victims were killed in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. Though the exact total will never be known, it is believed that between 5.2 and 5.8 million Jews, half of all European Jews at the time, were murdered. Though the most famous of the Nazis victims were Jews, many other groups were also systematically exterminated. At first, only Nazi opponents such as dissenting clergy, Social Democrats, Communists and others who were considered dangerous by Hitler were imprisoned, largely at Dachau, which was a camp especially for political enemies of the Reich.
Members of the Jehovahs Witnesses were targeted for their refusal to make the raised arm “Heil Hitler” salute or serve in the German Army. They were taken to concentration camps, told that they could renounce their religion and be saved, or remain loyal to their faith and die. Most chose death. Between 2500-5000 Witnesses were killed in the camps.
Soon, however, other small groups within Germany were being targeted as either anti-German or anti-Aryan. The Roma/Sinti people, otherwise known as Gypsies, were considered undesirable because of their nomadic ways and their non-German ancestry. Then, after his invasion of Poland, Hitler began his long-term plan to exterminate Poles and other Slavic populations, killing many millions of Poles, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians by the end of the war. Soviet POWs were sent to the death camps as well.
Other groups that threatened Hitlers idea of a racially pure and genetically superior German race were homosexuals, children of mixed African-German heritage, and people with mental and physical disabilities. Between 5,000-15,000 homosexuals were sent to the camps to be eliminated. While mixed race children and the disabled were rarely sent to concentration camps, they were forcibly sterilized so they could no longer sully the German gene pool. It is estimated that about 300,000-400,000 disabled persons were sterilized during the time of this program. Afterwards, Hitler and his regime decided that extermination was best and “Operation T4” was launched as a “euthanasia” program. Later, physicians were even encouraged to kill their patients by either indirect means such as starvation, or direct means like lethal injection.
It is difficult to know just how many victims from each group were killed in the death camps and by the mobile killing squads of the Nazis since registration of victims only occurred sporadically, and many of the victims who arrived at the train stations of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other camps were taken immediately to the gas chambers without any effort to catalogue their names or numbers. Their anonymity in death is one more lasting indictment of the crimes committed by Hitler and the leaders, soldiers, and citizens who helped him.
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