The Holocaust Statistics & Facts

What the Holocaust was

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. It took place across German-controlled and Axis-controlled Europe between 1933 and 1945. Antisemitism, the hatred of Jews, was a basic tenet of Nazi ideology, and it was the foundation on which the genocide was built. What began as discrimination and exclusion after the Nazis came to power in 1933 escalated, step by step, into an organised programme of mass murder.

The killing became systematic after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Over the next four years the Nazi regime and those who helped it murdered about six million Jewish men, women and children. This was roughly two out of every three Jews then living in Europe. The figures below, drawn from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, set out the documented scale of that loss. Behind every number is a person whose life, family and future were destroyed.

A world that was destroyed

To understand the scale of the loss, it helps to begin with what existed before it. In 1933, the year the Nazis took power, about 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe. They made up 1.7 percent of the continents population but more than 60 percent of the worlds Jewish population, which then stood at around 15.3 million. Europe was the heart of Jewish life, with communities that in some cases stretched back more than a thousand years.

The largest communities: most of Europes Jews lived in the east. Poland alone was home to about three million, and the European Soviet Union to more than 2.5 million.

The great majority of European Jews lived in the east. Poland had the largest community, with about three million people, some 9.5 percent of the country. The European part of the Soviet Union had more than 2.5 million, and Romania around 756,000. In central Europe the largest community was in Germany, with about 525,000 members, followed by Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Austria. These were not isolated populations but established parts of national life, present in commerce, science, the arts, religion and politics. Within twelve years most of them would be gone.

How the six million were murdered

The Nazis and their collaborators killed Jews in several ways and in many places. The two main methods were poison gas, used in the killing centers, and mass shooting. Others died from deliberate starvation, disease and brutal treatment in ghettos and camps. The chart below shows how the six million victims are accounted for by site and method.

Four broad categories: the killing centers and the mass shootings together account for the large majority of the six million.

About 2.7 million Jewish people were murdered in the five killing centers, most of them gassed within hours of arrival. Around two million were shot in mass shooting operations and related massacres carried out in more than 1,500 cities, towns and villages across occupied eastern Europe, often at the edge of pits dug near their own communities. Between 800,000 and one million died as prisoners in ghettos, labor camps and concentration camps, killed by hunger, disease, exposure and violence. At least a further 250,000 were killed in other acts of violence outside the camps and ghettos, including in riots, individual executions, and on forced marches and transports. Each of these categories represents a distinct machinery of murder, and together they made the destruction of European Jewry almost total in the areas the Nazis controlled longest.

The five killing centers

The Nazi regime built five killing centers in occupied Poland for the specific purpose of murdering people, chiefly Jews, on an industrial scale using poison gas. They were Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Because the perpetrators kept records of transports and gassings, the death tolls at these sites are among the best documented of the whole genocide.

Auschwitz was the deadliest: about one million Jewish people were murdered there, and around 925,000 at Treblinka.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the camps, was the deadliest site of the Holocaust: about one million Jewish people were murdered there, alongside tens of thousands of Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war. At Treblinka, around 925,000 Jews were killed in little more than a year. Belzec accounted for approximately 435,000, Sobibor for at least 167,000, and Chelmno, the first killing center to begin operating in December 1941, for at least 152,000. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were the three camps of Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder the Jews of German-occupied Poland, and they were dismantled once that task was largely complete. Unlike Auschwitz, which was also a vast concentration and labor camp complex, these sites existed almost solely to kill.

Inside Auschwitz

Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi camps and the deadliest single site of the Holocaust. About 1.1 million people were murdered there between 1940 and 1945. Although the great majority were Jews, the camp also killed tens of thousands of others, and its victims by group are shown below.

The deadliest site: of about 1.1 million people murdered at Auschwitz, roughly one million were Jews.

Of the roughly 1.1 million people killed at Auschwitz, about one million were Jews, most of them gassed with the poison Zyklon B within hours of arriving. The camp also murdered between 70,000 and 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, about 21,000 Roma and Sinti, some 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and 10,000 to 15,000 others. When Soviet troops reached the camp on 27 January 1945, they found only about 7,000 prisoners still alive, most of them sick or close to death. That date is now marked each year as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Holocaust by Bullets

Roughly a third of all Jewish victims, about two million people, were not gassed but shot. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen followed the army into the occupied territories. Together with Order Police battalions, Waffen-SS units and local collaborators, they carried out mass shootings of Jews, communists and others in more than 1,500 cities, towns and villages. This phase of the genocide is often called the Holocaust by Bullets.

The killing was swift and close to home. Victims were rounded up, marched to ravines, forests or pits near their own communities, forced to hand over their valuables, and shot in groups. In the first months of the invasion alone, these units shot more than half a million people, the vast majority of them Jews, and by the end of 1941 about half a million Jews had been murdered in the conquered Soviet areas. Over the course of the war, the Einsatzgruppen and the units that helped them murdered well over one million people in this way.

The most notorious of these massacres took place at Babyn Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. On 29 and 30 September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries shot 33,771 Jewish men, women and children there in the space of two days, one of the largest single massacres of the entire war. The ravine remained a killing site for two more years, and in total close to 100,000 people were murdered there. Because the perpetrators destroyed many of their own records, the exact number shot across all of these operations can never be known, which is one reason the total is given as about two million.

The ghettos

Before and alongside the killing, the Nazis confined Jews in ghettos: sealed, overcrowded districts that separated them from the rest of the population and from the outside world. More than 1,000 ghettos were established across German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. They were not the final destination but a stage on the way to it, and the conditions inside them were lethal in their own right.

The largest was the Warsaw ghetto, sealed in November 1940. At its height it held more than 400,000 people crammed into an area of about 1.3 square miles, with an average of some seven people to a room and an official food ration set at only around 181 calories a day. Tens of thousands died of starvation and disease. In the summer of 1942, over the course of about two months, German forces deported more than a quarter of a million residents of the ghetto to the Treblinka killing center. The second largest ghetto, in Lodz, held about 160,000 people, and hundreds of smaller ghettos held communities across occupied Europe.

The ghettos were also sites of resistance. When the Germans returned to Warsaw in April 1943 to deport those who remained, a few hundred poorly armed Jewish fighters rose against them in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the largest Jewish revolt of the war. They held out for nearly a month before the Germans crushed the revolt and burned the ghetto to the ground. At least 7,000 Jews died in the fighting or in hiding, and most of the survivors were deported to camps and killing centers.

The toll by country

The Holocaust reached across the continent, but it did not fall evenly. The death toll in each country depended on the size of its prewar Jewish community, how long and how completely the Nazis controlled it, and the conduct of local authorities and populations. The chart shows the estimated number of Jewish victims in the countries with the largest losses.

Poland above all: up to three million Polish Jews were murdered, far more than in any other country.

Poland suffered by far the greatest loss. Home to Europes largest Jewish community, it saw between 2.77 and three million of its Jewish citizens murdered, the overwhelming majority of the prewar population. In the occupied Soviet Union, about 1.34 million Jews were killed, many in the mass shootings that followed the German invasion. Within its 1941 borders Hungary lost about 565,000, most of them deported to Auschwitz in the space of a few months in 1944. Czechoslovakia lost around 260,000, Germany about 165,000, Lithuania about 130,000 and the Netherlands about 102,000, nearly three quarters of Dutch Jewry. France lost between roughly 73,000 and 74,000. In several communities the proportion killed was staggering: in Poland, Lithuania and the occupied Soviet territories, whole towns and their Jewish populations were annihilated.

Two out of every three

Set against the prewar population, the scale of the loss becomes starker still. Of the roughly 9.5 million Jews who lived in Europe in 1933, about six million were murdered by 1945. The chart shows that proportion: nearly two out of every three European Jews were killed.

A community devastated: of about 9.5 million European Jews in 1933, roughly six million were murdered and about 3.5 million survived.

The consequences did not end in 1945. The Jewish communities of eastern Europe, which had been the center of Jewish life for centuries, were largely destroyed and never rebuilt. Poland, which had counted more than three million Jews before the war, had about 45,000 by 1950. Across Europe the Jewish population fell from about 9.5 million in 1933 to roughly 3.5 million in 1950, and the balance of Jewish life shifted permanently away from the continent toward the Americas and, later, Israel.

Not rebuilt: Europes Jewish population stood at about 9.5 million in 1933 and only about 3.5 million in 1950, and did not return to its former level.

The wider toll of Nazi persecution

Although the term Holocaust refers specifically to the murder of six million Jews, Nazi Germany and its collaborators also persecuted and killed millions of other people for racial, political and ideological reasons. These victims are documented as distinct groups rather than as a single round number.

Millions more: around 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war and about 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles were among those murdered.

The largest groups of non-Jewish victims were Soviet prisoners of war, around 3.3 million of whom died in German captivity from starvation, exposure and execution, and non-Jewish ethnic Poles, about 1.8 million of whom were killed. More than 310,000 Serb civilians were murdered by the Ustasa authorities of the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia. Between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma were murdered in a genocide that Romani people call the Porajmos. Between 250,000 and 300,000 people with disabilities, including at least 10,000 children, were killed in the so-called euthanasia programme. Nazi Germany also murdered political opponents, people it labelled criminals and asocials, Jehovahs Witnesses, and gay men, among others. Millions more soldiers and civilians of many nations died in the war fought against Nazi tyranny.

One point is worth clarifying, because it is often confused. A commonly repeated figure of eleven million victims, said to be six million Jews and five million others, is not supported by rigorous research. The figure of six million Jewish victims is firmly established, but the round number of five million non-Jewish victims was not the product of careful historical study. The wider toll of Nazi persecution was real and vast, but it is best understood through the documented figures for each group, as shown above, rather than through a single approximate total.

From power to genocide, 1933 to 1945

The Holocaust was not a single event but a process that grew more radical over twelve years. The key stages are set out below.

January 1933. Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. The Nazis quickly turn the country into a one-party dictatorship and begin to exclude Jews from public life.

September 1935. The Nuremberg Race Laws strip German Jews of citizenship and forbid marriage and relations between Jews and other Germans, giving pseudo-legal form to Nazi racism.

November 1938. In the pogrom known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany and Austria are attacked and burned, and about 30,000 Jewish men are arrested.

September 1939. Germany invades Poland, beginning the Second World War in Europe and bringing millions of Jews under Nazi control. Ghettos are established to concentrate and isolate Jewish communities.

June 1941. Germany invades the Soviet Union. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen follow the army and shoot Jews, communists and others in mass operations. By the end of the year they have murdered close to one million people.

December 1941. The first killing center, Chelmno, begins operating. Over the following year the Nazis open four more, and gassing becomes the central method of murder.

January 1942. At the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, senior officials coordinate the plan they called the Final Solution, the murder of all European Jews.

1944. In just under two months, about 440,000 Jews are deported from Hungary, most of them to Auschwitz, in one of the fastest and largest deportations of the entire Holocaust.

1945. As Allied forces advance, the Nazis force prisoners on deadly marches away from the camps. Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, and the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 brings the Holocaust to an end.

The youngest victims

Children were among the most vulnerable victims of the Holocaust. As many as 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered, along with tens of thousands of Romani children and thousands of children with disabilities. The very young were rarely selected for forced labor, and on arrival at the killing centers children, the elderly and pregnant women were usually sent straight to the gas chambers.

The survival rate for the youngest was terribly low. By one estimate, only about 6 to 11 percent of the Jewish children alive in prewar Europe survived, compared with roughly a third of the adults. Those children who did survive often owed their lives to being hidden, whether concealed physically or given false identities by families and strangers who took great risks to protect them. Their stories, and the far greater number of children who did not survive, are a central part of how the Holocaust is remembered.

After the liberation

Liberation did not mean a return to normal life. The communities that survivors came from had in most cases been destroyed, their families murdered and their homes taken by others. Many could not, or would not, go back. At the end of 1945, of the 1.5 to two million people across Europe who refused to return to their prewar homes, about one in ten were Jewish, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors lived for years in displaced persons camps while they waited for somewhere to go.

The map of Jewish life was permanently redrawn. Before the war more than 60 percent of the worlds Jews had lived in Europe; by 1950 only about a third did. Large numbers of survivors emigrated, above all to the United States and to the land that in 1948 became the State of Israel. The great centers of Jewish culture in eastern Europe, in Poland, Lithuania and beyond, were gone, and they were never rebuilt.

Rescue and justice

Amid the near-total collapse of moral order, a small number of non-Jews risked their own lives to hide, shelter and rescue Jews. The Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem honors them as the Righteous Among the Nations, and by 2024 it had recognised more than 28,000 people from 51 countries, among them the German industrialist Oskar Schindler. Their number was small against the scale of the catastrophe, but their example is a reminder that even then, choices were possible.

After the war, some of those responsible were brought to justice. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried 22 leading figures of the Nazi regime in 1945 and 1946, and twelve of them were sentenced to death. Further national and international trials indicted hundreds more. Yet only a fraction of the perpetrators ever faced a court: by one account, roughly one in ten of the Germans who worked at Auschwitz was ever tried. The distance between the number who committed these crimes and the number who answered for them remains one of the hard legacies of the Holocaust.

How the numbers are known

The Holocaust is the best-documented genocide in history. This matters, because the figures are sometimes challenged in bad faith. The estimates rest on several independent kinds of evidence. Nazi Germany kept extensive records, including transport lists, camp registers and reports on shootings, and although officials tried to destroy much of this paper trail as the war ended, a great deal survived and was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials and later prosecutions.

Alongside the perpetrators own documents, historians compare prewar and postwar censuses to measure how many people were missing, and they draw on records kept by Jewish organisations, resistance groups and survivors. Because thousands of victims were murdered and buried in remote places, and because some records were destroyed, no single master list of the dead exists and exact precision is impossible. This is why serious estimates are given as ranges and why the figure of six million is understood as an approximation of an enormous, and enormously well-evidenced, crime. Institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem continue the work of documenting the victims, and Yad Vashem has recorded the names of more than 4.8 million individual Jewish victims.

The Holocaust in numbers

A few figures summarise the documented scale of the Holocaust and the wider Nazi persecution.

These numbers are not the whole story. Each one stands for individual people, and remembering them as people, rather than only as statistics, is the reason the figures are documented so carefully.

Frequently Asked Questions