Estimated pre-war Jewish population and estimated number of murdered Jews per country during the Holocaust, 1930 to 1945

A continent measured community by community

Before the Second World War, about 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, the great majority of them in the countries of the east and center of the continent. By 1945, roughly two out of every three had been murdered. Looking at the toll country by country shows both the scale of the destruction and how unevenly it fell: some communities were almost entirely wiped out, while a few were largely saved. For the wider history and the overall toll, see our overview of the Holocaust in statistics and facts.

The pattern was shaped by geography and time. The countries with the largest Jewish populations, Poland and the Soviet Union, were also those the Nazis occupied earliest and held longest, and they suffered the greatest losses. Elsewhere, how many survived often depended on how quickly deportations began, how far a country was from the killing centers, and whether local authorities and populations helped or resisted. The figures here compare the pre-war Jewish population of each country with the number murdered, and they pair with our companion report on Jewish deaths by location.

Pre-war population against the death toll

The chart below places the pre-war Jewish population of each country next to the number murdered. For the largest communities the two bars are tragically close, a sign of near-total destruction.

The eastern communities hit hardest: in Poland the pre-war population and the death toll are almost the same height, showing that almost the entire community was destroyed.

Poland stands apart. Its pre-war community of about 3.4 million was reduced by some three million deaths, the destruction of roughly nine in ten Polish Jews. The Soviet Union, with about three million Jews before the war, lost around one million on this measure, though other sources put the figure higher. Romania lost about 287,000 of 757,000; Hungary about 270,000; Czechoslovakia some 260,000; and Germany about 165,000. Smaller communities were often destroyed in even greater proportion: Lithuania lost about 145,000 of 150,000, and the Netherlands about 102,000 of 140,000, nearly three quarters of Dutch Jewry. The closer the two bars, the more complete the annihilation.

The map before the catastrophe

To read the death tolls correctly it helps to see where Europes Jews lived beforehand. The community was heavily concentrated in the east.

Concentrated in the east: Poland and the Soviet Union together were home to about two thirds of the Jews in these countries.

Poland and the Soviet Union alone accounted for roughly two thirds of the Jewish population in these countries, about 6.4 million people between them. Romania, Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia formed a second tier, each with several hundred thousand. Western Europe, by contrast, had smaller communities: France with about 300,000 and the Netherlands with 140,000. This concentration is why the Holocaust was, above all, a catastrophe of eastern European Jewry. The heartland of Jewish life for centuries lay exactly where the Nazi killing machine operated most intensively and for longest.

Where the community was almost destroyed

Measured as a share of the community, the losses in the east are staggering. In Poland only an estimated one to two percent of Jews under German occupation survived, so about 90 percent were murdered. Lithuania lost a similar or even higher share, with about 145,000 of 150,000 Jews killed. Latvia lost around three quarters of its community, as did Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Greece, where some 58,800 of 70,000 Jews were murdered.

The chart below shows the share of the pre-war community murdered in the countries hit hardest, where the destruction was close to total.

Near-total destruction: in Lithuania, Poland and Yugoslavia around nine in ten Jews were murdered.

One figure needs care to read. Germany shows about 165,000 deaths against a 1933 population of 500,000, which looks like a lower share, around a third. But most German Jews emigrated before the war to escape persecution; of those who remained under Nazi rule, close to 70 percent were murdered. The same is true of Austria. In other words, the pre-war population and the death toll are not always measured at the same moment, and the proportion killed of those actually trapped under Nazi control was almost always far higher than a simple comparison suggests.

Across the whole continent

Beyond the largest communities, the pattern of near-total destruction continued across much of Europe. In Greece, about 58,800 of 70,000 Jews were murdered, some 84 percent, and the ancient community of Salonica, one of the great centers of Sephardic Jewish life, was almost entirely wiped out. In Yugoslavia around 60,000 of 68,500 died. Even the smallest communities were pursued: the Nazis murdered Jews in Luxembourg, Norway, Estonia and Albania, and hunted down individuals in hiding wherever they could reach them.

The intent was the same everywhere the Nazis held power, the complete destruction of Jewish life, and only distance, time and the actions of local people limited how fully it was carried out. Western European communities such as France and Belgium, farther from the killing centers and occupied later, lost a smaller share, roughly a quarter to a third, though tens of thousands were still deported and murdered. The uneven map of survival was written by proximity to the machinery of murder and by the choices of the societies caught up in it.

The communities that survived

Against this near-total destruction, a small number of countries stand out for how many of their Jews lived. The chart shows four of them.

Survival was possible: in Denmark, Bulgaria and Finland almost no Jews were murdered, and most of Italys community survived.

Denmark is the most famous case. When the Germans moved to deport Danish Jews in 1943, the Danish population helped ferry almost the entire community of about 7,000 people across the water to neutral Sweden, and only around 116 died. Bulgaria refused to hand over the roughly 48,000 Jews within its own borders, though it did deport about 11,000 from the territories it occupied in Thrace and Macedonia. Finland, a co-belligerent of Germany, largely protected its tiny community, losing only a handful. Italy lost about 7,500 of 46,000, a minority, with many saved after the country left the Axis. These cases show that the outcome was not inevitable: where states and societies chose to protect their Jews, most survived.

Reading the figures with care

Country figures for the Holocaust vary between sources, and it helps to understand why. The pre-war populations are drawn from censuses taken in different years, from 1930 in some countries to 1941 in others, so they do not all describe the same moment. Borders changed dramatically during the period, which makes a country like Hungary, whose territory expanded in 1941, hard to compare over time. And some victims are counted differently depending on where they were killed rather than where they came from.

The compilation used here excludes the Baltic states from its Soviet total and puts the Soviet Jewish death toll at about one million. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, counting a wider territory, gives a higher figure of around 1.34 million. Neither is wrong; they measure slightly different things. The countries in this table sum to about 5.6 million deaths, and the small gap to the widely accepted total of six million reflects victims and territories not fully captured in any single country breakdown. The safest approach, taken throughout this report, is to treat every figure as a careful estimate rather than an exact count.

Communities that never returned

The destruction did not end with the killing. The Jewish communities of eastern Europe, which had been the heart of Jewish life for centuries, were largely gone, and in most cases they were never rebuilt. Poland, home to about 3.3 million Jews before the war, had only around 45,000 by 1950, as the few survivors emigrated in the face of continued hostility and violence. Across Europe as a whole the Jewish population fell from about 9.5 million in 1933 to roughly 3.5 million by 1950.

The centre of Jewish life shifted permanently away from the continent, toward the United States and the State of Israel, which was founded in 1948. Cities and regions that had been home to flourishing Jewish culture, from Warsaw and Vilnius to Salonica, were left with only remnants of the communities that had lived there. The country figures in this report are, in that sense, a map of a world that the Holocaust erased.

How the country figures are known

The estimates by country are built from several kinds of evidence: pre-war and wartime censuses, surviving German and Axis records, deportation and camp documents, and postwar demographic studies that compared who had lived in a place before the war with who remained after it. Where a community was almost entirely destroyed, as in Poland, the death toll is estimated from the difference between a large pre-war population and the tiny number of survivors.

Because so many people were murdered far from any camp, and because records were lost or deliberately destroyed, no country figure is exact, and reputable sources differ at the margins. What the evidence establishes beyond doubt is the overall shape: about six million Jewish people murdered, the heaviest losses in the east, and the near-total destruction of communities that had existed for centuries. Institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, which has recorded the names of more than 4.8 million individual victims, continue to refine these figures.

Jewish losses by country in numbers

A few figures capture how the Holocaust fell across Europe.

Each figure stands for individual people and communities, many of which no longer exist.

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