When you walk through the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau today, the silence is heavy. It’s a physical weight. Most people arrive with a single, staggering number in their heads—six million. That’s the figure we’re taught in school. It’s the baseline for understanding the Holocaust. But when you start digging into the historical records to figure out exactly how many people were killed in the concentration camps, the picture gets a lot more complicated, and honestly, even more devastating.
The "six million" refers to the total number of Jewish victims across all of Nazi-occupied Europe. It’s an accurate estimate based on decades of census data, deportation lists, and post-war testimony. However, the concentration camp system was just one part of a massive, industrial-scale killing machine. To really understand the scale of the horror, you have to look at the different ways people were murdered. Many weren't killed in "camps" at all, but in forests, ravines, and the streets of their own neighborhoods.
Breaking down the math of the camp system
It’s easy to use the words "concentration camp" and "death camp" interchangeably. Historians don't. This distinction is vital if you want to know how many people were killed in the concentration camps versus other sites.
Concentration camps, like Dachau or Buchenwald, were primarily designed for imprisonment, forced labor, and "re-education" through brutality. People died there in droves, sure. They died from typhus, starvation, and exhaustion. But they weren't always sent there with the immediate intent of execution. Death camps—or killing centers—were different. Places like Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka existed for one reason: to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Most people who arrived at these locations were dead within two or three hours.
The specific numbers at the major sites
The figures are hard to stomach. Dr. Franciszek Piper, a renowned historian and former director of the Historical Department at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, spent years refining the data for the most infamous site. His research concluded that at least 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz alone. About 90% of them were Jewish.
But look at the other sites:
- Treblinka II: Between 870,000 and 925,000 people were killed here. Almost all were Jews.
- Bełżec: Roughly 434,500 victims.
- Sobibór: At least 170,000, though some estimates push it higher.
- Chełmno: About 152,000 people were murdered in gas vans.
- Majdanek: For a long time, the Soviet-influenced numbers were way off (claiming 1.5 million), but modern research by Tomasz Kranz suggests around 78,000 deaths.
When you add these up, you start to see that the majority of the "six million" died in these specific killing centers or through the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) in Eastern Europe.
✨ Don't miss: Why the Air France Crash Toronto Miracle Still Changes How We Fly
Why the numbers kept changing after the war
You might wonder why we don't have a single, perfect receipt for every life lost. The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers, right? Sorta. They were great at paperwork until the end was near.
As the Allied forces closed in, the SS went into overdrive trying to hide the evidence. They burned documents. They blew up crematoria. They even dug up mass graves to burn the remains in a horrific effort called Sonderaktion 1005. Because of this, historians have to play detective. They compare train schedules (the Deutsche Reichsbahn kept very good records of "cargo") with the population records of the ghettos the trains were coming from.
If a train left Warsaw with 6,000 people and arrived at Treblinka, and those 6,000 people were never heard from again, the math is grimly simple.
The victims who weren't Jewish
While the Holocaust was specifically the state-sponsored genocide of the Jewish people, the concentration camp system claimed millions of other lives. This is where the question of how many people were killed in the concentration camps expands into an even broader tragedy.
Estimates for non-Jewish victims are harder to pin down because the documentation was often less systematic. We know that roughly 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians were killed. Then there are the Soviet prisoners of war. At least 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German custody, many through deliberate starvation or execution in camps like Mauthausen.
We also have to remember:
🔗 Read more: Robert Hanssen: What Most People Get Wrong About the FBI's Most Damaging Spy
- The Romani and Sinti people (estimates range from 250,000 to 500,000).
- Individuals with disabilities (the T4 program killed around 250,000).
- Political dissidents, Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay men.
The system was a net designed to catch anyone the regime deemed "undesirable."
Living conditions vs. execution
It wasn't always the gas chambers. In camps like Bergen-Belsen, the primary killer wasn't a "weapon" in the traditional sense. It was filth. When Anne Frank died there in 1945, it was likely from typhus. As the camp system collapsed in the final months of the war, overcrowding became lethal. Food supplies stopped. Water became contaminated.
Thousands died after liberation. Their bodies were so far gone from starvation that their digestive systems couldn't handle the rich food given to them by well-meaning Allied soldiers. This "slow death" is often left out of the raw statistics, but it’s a massive part of the camp system's toll.
The geography of the "Holocaust by Bullets"
We can't talk about the death toll without acknowledging that many people never even made it to a camp. Father Patrick Desbois, a French priest, has spent years documenting what he calls the "Holocaust by Bullets."
In places like Ukraine and Belarus, the Einsatzgruppen would march entire villages into the woods. They made people dig their own graves before shooting them. This happened in broad daylight, often with the knowledge of the local population. Roughly 1.5 to 2 million Jews were murdered in these mass shootings. If you only look at the camp records, you miss a third of the total victims.
What we get wrong about the "liberation"
The movies always show the tanks rolling in and everyone cheering. It happened, but it wasn't the end of the dying. At Bergen-Belsen, the British found 13,000 unburied bodies. In the following weeks, another 14,000 people died despite receiving medical care.
💡 You might also like: Why the Recent Snowfall Western New York State Emergency Was Different
The trauma didn't have a "stop" button. The death toll from the camps ripples out into the years following the war—suicides, complications from chronic malnutrition, and the psychological destruction of entire lineages.
Acknowledging the margin of error
Is it possible the numbers are higher? Or lower? Honestly, most historians at institutions like Yad Vashem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) believe the numbers are more likely to be underestimated than overestimated.
The 1.1 million at Auschwitz is a "minimum" figure. We know people were taken straight from the trains to the gas chambers without ever being registered. They weren't given numbers. They weren't "prisoners" in the administrative sense; they were simply targets for immediate liquidation.
How to research this yourself
If you want to look at the primary sources, don't just take a social media post's word for it. The data is available if you know where to look.
- The Arolsen Archives: This is the world's most comprehensive archive on Nazi persecution. They have millions of digital documents, including transport lists and prisoner cards.
- Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names: They have spent decades collecting the names of the individuals behind the statistics. They currently have over 4.8 million names documented.
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia: This is the gold standard for verified, peer-reviewed historical data.
Practical steps for deeper understanding
Understanding the scale of how many people were killed in the concentration camps requires more than just reading a list of millions. To honor the memory of the victims, consider these actions:
- Look at the "Stolpersteine": If you are in Europe, look for the "stumbling stones"—brass plaques in the sidewalk outside the last known residence of victims. It turns a statistic back into a person with a name and an address.
- Visit local memorials: You don't have to go to Poland. Many cities have Holocaust museums that focus on the stories of local survivors.
- Support oral history projects: Listen to the testimonies on the USC Shoah Foundation website. Hearing a survivor describe the arrival process at a camp provides a context that numbers never can.
- Verify before sharing: If you see a "fact" about Holocaust numbers online that seems to downplay the tragedy or drastically inflate it without sources, check it against the USHMM database.
The numbers are staggering, but they aren't just math. Each "one" in that 1.1 million or six million was a life, a family, and a future that was systematically extinguished. Keeping the numbers accurate is the only way to ensure the scale of the crime is never forgotten or distorted.