Since we revisionists have rejected the 6 million, it would probably be good to be clear on how many we think actually did die. Here is Jurgen Graf's estimate from his book Giant With a Feet of Clay:
Hilberg’s figure of approximately 150,000 deaths of Jews in German concentration, labor and transit camps – to be clearly distinguished from ‘extermination camps’ – may be a little bit too high, but is at least in the correct range. Jews who died in Auschwitz and Majdanek of sickness, exhaustion and so on, should also be included in this number. Of the maximum 180,000 deaths incurred at these two camps, some 60% were probably Jewish. Under no circumstances, therefore, could considerably more than about 350,000 Jews have met their death in German concentration camps. The mass shootings in the Soviet Union, the misery in the ghettos, and the evacuations of the camps in the last months of the war probably cost the lives of several hundred thousand Jews. In addition, there were the Jews deported by the Germans to the occupied Soviet territories, whose losses, in view of the extremely harsh conditions of war, probably also amounted to several hundred thousand. Under these circumstances, the total number of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution is probably between one and one and a half million.
I think this number he gave of 1-1.5 million is about right. I've seen other estimates, like 271k, based on the Red Cross, which I don't believe are correct at all. The Red Cross number is from the International Tracing Service (ITS). The problem is that this number is not complete by any means and doesn't purport to be. Deaths from the Reinhard camps and Einsatzgruppen are not included. The number the ITS gives for Auschwitz is also way below what Mattogno found in the documentation. More can be read here:
This is one of those "denier memes" that should be avoided if you don't want to look stupid by someone from the other side who knows what they're talking about.
I will do a "bottom-up" approach here rather the "top-down" missing Jews approach.
Auschwitz
-around 135,000 total deaths
-maybe 40% Jewish?
-this would yield 54,000, let's round to 60,000
Other Concentration Camps (KL/KZ system)
Total deaths (including Auschwitz) were probably over 300K (with deaths continuing after the Allies took over)
Hard to say exactly how many Jews, perhaps about as many at Auschwitz (we could also ask this in terms of what fraction of total KL deaths were at Auschwitz and I would guess about half).
So I would put this at an additional 60,000 without being able to claim any precision.
Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno
Hard to give specific figures but perhaps in the tens of thousands.
All together, the orthodox figure for all these camps would be around 3,000,000. I would say likely below 200,000. In which case, the standard numbers would be around a 15x exaggeration.
Einsatzgruppen and other Shooting Deaths in the East
The standard figure is around 2,000,000. I do not think the real number is anywhere near that high, although it's probably significant. What sort of exaggeration ratio might be reasonable here? I would hypothesize around 10x which suggest around 200,000 (although when you think it, even that is actually a quite large number of people to round up and shoot). I'm open to considering bigger numbers but given the lack of physical evidence at Babi Yar and other large massacre sites, I think most likely the figures are massively exaggerated (though not quite as much as for the 'death camps').
Other Deaths (Ghettos, etc)
The traditional figure here is around a million, but there's very little to go on here. Dalton has some discussion of this in his book.
This is probably where you'd have to switch over to the "top-down" approach and have this be a plug to get you to whatever you think the final figure might be.
Overall Net Population Change (Top-Down)
First of all, even if there was a population decrease, you can't automatically attribute all of this to Hitler, especially Jews outside his control.
For global Jewry, you could start with a simple model like this:
P(1945)=P(1939)+B-D
We could further break down D into "normal" and "excess" deaths. During bad conditions it's common for B to go down and for D to go up, but this would happen to everyone, not just Jews.
The orthodox values are something like
11.0 = 16.7 + (B-D)
which of course implies a very large value for D. But before the war, many authorities had estimated about a prewar population a full million lower. And the 1945 figure mostly comes from Jews themselves and we should expect it to be even less accurate than their prewar figures, even assuming the figures were compiled objectively (which I don't think is the case).
If, based on our bottom-up estimates, we posit an overall number of around 600,000 (10x exaggeration ratio), we should not overlook the difficulty of reconciling this to top-down figures.
If we posit 15.7M prewar, with 600,000 "Hitler" deaths and an additional delta due to "non-Hitler deaths" and decreased births, you'd still be expecting well over 14M postwar. At least holding definitions constant. There is good reason to think definitions were not constant and that many Jews were not necessarily counted as Jewish after the war. But we do need to ask whether it is reasonable to think 3M or more would have fallen through the definitional cracks.
There seems to be some disconnect between the bottom-up and top-down figures. I'm inclined to think this is because of the unreliability (if not outright falsification) of the top-down figures, but this is hard to prove.
To push this further would require detailed demographic modeling (and maybe consideration of genealogical and DNA data) and even with that I don't think any conclusive statement is possible. This seems to be what Faulk is trying to do.
If the general is feeling that a jew who was in German custody in any camp and died in or en-route to that camp was a holocaust victim then I would argue against that position. People die. Jews die. It is the natural state of things. So the question is how many jews would have died in the years 1936-1945? These should be taken into account as non holocaust deaths. Then one would have to look at those who might have died in battle, civilians who died in air attacks etc. We should actually only count those who were put to death deliberately by the Germans. This would be a much lower figure than is claimed. In my view this would be in the low tens of thousands.
Of the four million jews under German control, six million died and five million survived!
