Holocaust: Jewish deaths by location| ��ƽ��

Estimated number of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945, by location

Characteristic	Poland	Soviet Union	Yugoslavia	Broad region
Shooting operations and gas wagons in the German-occupied Soviet Union*	-	1,300,000	-	-
Auschwitz complex	1,000,000	-	-	-
Treblinka 2	925,000	-	-	-
Deaths in ghettos*	-	-	-	800,000
Belzec	434,508	-	-	-
Shooting operations in central and southern German-occupied Poland*	200,000	-	-	-
Sobibor*	167,000	-	-	-
Chelmno*	167,000	-	-	-
Deaths in other facilities that the Germans designated as concentration camps*	-	-	-	150,000
Shooting operations of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews transported to the German-occupied Soviet Union*	-	55,000	-	-
Shooting operations in German-occupied western Poland*	20,000	-	-	-
Shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaša regime**	-	-	24,000	-
Shooting operations and gas wagons in Serbia*	-	-	15,088	-
Other*	-	-	-	500,000

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Release date

December 2020

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Region

Europe, EU, Central and Eastern Europe

Survey time period

1933 to 1945

Supplementary notes

*Lower estimate.

**A range of 23,000 to 25,000 deaths was given here; the average of these numbers is given for display purposes.

***Majdanek was traditionally considered one of the extermination camp, although recent research suggests that it may have been used as a concentration camp.

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Europe's Jewish population in 1939 was around 9.5 million people, and it is estimated that six million of these were ultimately killed by 1945. The persecution of German Jews escalated during the interwar period, particularly after Hitler's ascent to power in 1933, and again after Kristallnacht in 1938. However, the scale of this increased drastically following the German invasions of Poland in 1939 and the USSR in 1941, when Germany annexed regions with some of the largest Jewish populations in Europe.

Extermination Camps

As part of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", the Nazi occupiers established six extermination camps in present-day Poland; these were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek***, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Prisoners, mostly Jews, were transported from all over Europe to these camps. Upon arrival, the majority of victims were sent directly to purpose-built chambers or vans, where they were murdered with carbon monoxide or Zyklon B gas. A relatively small number of prisoners were also forced to dispose of the victims' bodies, which often included their own family members, friends, or persons known to them. Most of the deceased were incinerated, and many of the camp records were destroyed; this means that precise figures for the number of deaths in extermination camps will never be known. It has been estimated that at least 2.7 million Jews were murdered in these six camps; over two thirds of these were killed at Auschwitz or Treblinka.

Einsatzgruppen

After extermination camps, the most common method of murder was through mass shootings. The majority of these shootings were not carried out by regular soldiers, but specialized task forces known as "Einsatzgruppen". Each group was just a few hundred men each, but they were responsible for some of the largest individual acts of genocide in the war. The largest of these took place at Babi Yar, near Kyiv in 1941, where almost 35,000 victims were beaten, humiliated, and then shot over a two day period. The Einsatzgruppen were most active in the annexed Soviet territories (although additional regiments were active in Poland and the Balkans), and their ranks were often bolstered by local volunteers. It has been estimated that Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the genocide of more than two million people in fewer than six years.