For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory.
Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.
Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity.
Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, , and ,—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives.
Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought.
The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations. Drawing of a solitary confinement cell by artist Jacques Rossi, who spent nineteen years in the Gulag after he was arrested in the Stalin purges of — It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive.
Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between and , while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. The total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million. The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit less. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of —, in which more than five million people starved.
Of those who starved, the 3. Tens of thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state requisitioned food for export.
The first victims of starvation were the nomads of Soviet Kazakhstan, where about 1. The famine spread to Soviet Russia and peaked in Soviet Ukraine. Stalin requisitioned grain in Soviet Ukraine knowing that such a policy would kill millions. Blaming Ukrainians for the failure of his own policy, he ordered a series of measures—such as sealing the borders of that Soviet republic—that ensured mass death.
A poster from In , as his vision of modernization faltered, Stalin ordered the Great Terror. Because we now have the killing orders and the death quotas, inaccessible so long as the Soviet Union existed, we now know that the number of victims was not in the millions.
We also know that, as in the early s, the main victims were the peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps. In all, , people were killed during the Great Terror, to which might be added a few hundred thousand more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions. The total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made before we had access to Soviet sources.
At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed.
Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe. Tags Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics. Browse A-Z Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically. For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust. Wise — International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. About This Site. Glossary : Full Glossary.
Key Facts. More information about this image. Introduction The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and captured soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. There are three obvious and interrelated reasons for the lack of a single document: Compilation of comprehensive statistics of Jews killed by German and other Axis authorities began in and It broke down during the last year and a half of the war.
Beginning in , as it became clear that they would lose the war, the Germans and their Axis partners destroyed much of the existing documentation.
They also destroyed physical evidence of mass murder. No personnel were available or inclined to count Jewish deaths until the very end of World War II and the Nazi regime. Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators. Though fragmentary, these sources provide essential figures from which to make calculations.
Polish and Soviet civilian figures With regard to the Polish and Soviet civilian figures, at this time there are not sufficient demographic tools to enable historians to distinguish between: racially targeted individuals persons actually or believed to be active in underground resistance persons killed in reprisal for some actual or perceived resistance activity carried out by someone else losses due to so-called collateral damage in actual military operations Virtually all deaths of Soviet, Polish, and Serb civilians during the course of military and anti-partisan operations had, however, a racist component.
Conclusion Counting victims is important for research and to understand the magnitude of the crimes. See Also Article Introduction to the Holocaust. Article "Final Solution": Overview. In Asia and the Pacific, between 3 million and more than 10 million civilians, mostly Chinese estimated at 7. The best-known Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre, in which 50 to thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered.
Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported that 2. General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Heipei and Shantung. Axis forces employed biological and chemical weapons.
The Imperial Japanese Army used a variety of such weapons during its invasion and occupation of China and in early conflicts against the Soviets. Both the Germans and Japanese tested such weapons against civilians and sometimes on prisoners of war.
The Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre of 22, Polish officers and the imprisonment or execution of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD in the Baltic states and eastern Poland annexed by the Red Army. The mass-bombing of civilian areas, notably the cities of Warsaw, Rotterdam and London, included the aerial targeting of hospitals and fleeing refugees by the German Luftwaffe, along with the bombings of Tokyo and the German cities of Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne by the Western Allies.
These bombings may be considered war crimes. The latter resulted in the destruction of more than cities and the death of more than , German civilians.
However, no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed before or during World War II. The German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was responsible for the Holocaust, the killing of approximately 6 million Jews, 2. About 12 million, mostly Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced laborers. In addition to Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags labor camps led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war POWs and Soviet citizens who were thought to be Nazi supporters.
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