With Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) this Tuesday, it’s time to dispel a popular myth.
Most myths about the Holocaust come from bigots. But this one is different. It came from a man who wanted people to recognize the gravity of the Holocaust.
It’s the false idea that 11 million people were killed — 6 million Jews and 5 million others. The 6 million figure is accurate; the 5 million is not. In the latest episode, I lay out where this myth came from and why it’s so damaging.
The history of this myth shows how easily people in government and the media accept something as fact. President Carter cited it in 1979, and it has been “reported” by major news agencies many times over the years.
During Trump’s first term, when his team inexplicably put out a statement about the Holocaust without mentioning Jewish victims, they pointed to a Huffington Post article making this claim. NPR once ran a false “correction” that treated the myth as fact. The Washington Post published a letter claiming the figure in a headline.
It began with Simon Wiesenthal. He was “an Austrian Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to ensuring that the crimes of the Nazi regime were not forgotten and that those responsible were brought to justice,” says the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which fights antisemitism and other forms of hate.
He made up the number because he was convinced that people wouldn’t care about 6 million murdered Jews. Deborah Lipstadt, the lie-fighting historian who served as President Biden’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, explained in the Jewish Review of Books:
“He admitted that he had invented the figure of eleven million victims in order to stimulate interest in the Holocaust among non-Jews. He chose five million because it was almost, but not quite, as large as six million.”
Of course, the effort backfired. Now, when Jews talk about the 6 million victims, accusations abound that Jews are trying to make the Holocaust all about themselves.
The numbers
Many people confuse the Holocaust with World War II. “The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s deliberate, organized, state-sponsored persecution and genocide of European Jews,” the World War II Museum explains. Six million Jews were killed, including 1.5 million children.
There also were non-Jews killed in the genocide, including as many as 250,000 Roma people, some people targeted for being disabled or gay, and others. “The number of non-Jewish civilians killed for racial or ideological reasons does not come close to five million,” Lipstadt explains. To be safe, some organizations now say “6 million Jews and millions of others.”
Meanwhile, the Nazis did kill millions of other people in the war, including an estimated 3.3 million Soviet POWs. People all over the world were killed by both the Axis and Allied powers, and many more died from the devastation. The museum estimates 15 million battle deaths and 45 million civilian deaths.
The word “genocide” was created to describe the Holocaust. In this episode, I discuss other genocides dating back to the late 1800s. When you learn this history, you see even more clearly how despicable it is for people to falsely use the term in describing Israel’s response to Gaza’s October 7 massacres.
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It’s important to note that the Holocaust death tolls include Jews killed by Islamist Nazi units across Europe, but do not include Jewish people killed in pogroms across Arab and Muslim nations at the time.
The truth matters, always. A lie made up for good reasons can be just as damaging in the long run.
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Spotify question. I can’t catch up on older podcasts. When I click on them, the latest podcast starts streaming. (BTW, I only use Spotify for Josh Levs.)