5 important facts about Holocaust Remembrance Day

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor Saturday, January 27, 2024

The death toll

The commonly expressed estimate for the number of people killed in the Nazi-run concentration camps is often stated as being 6 million Jews, plus millions of people from other “unwanted” groups.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the estimate is drawn from multiple documents and sources, because there “is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed in the Holocaust or World War II.”

“To accurately estimate the extent of human losses, scholars, Jewish organizations, and governmental agencies since the 1940s have relied on a variety of different records, such as census reports, captured German and Axis archives, and postwar investigations, to compile these statistics,” explained the Museum.

“As more documents come to light or as scholars arrive at a more precise understanding of the Holocaust, estimates of human losses may change.”