Sorry bout that, Taz. I didn't see your prior mention.
I wouldn't say most, but likely a lot of those killed had a paper trail.
Well. I dunno. 16 miles of files!
Toward the end of the war, documentation (for all practical intents and purposes) ceased and the Nazis destroyed what they could ... but I think their nauseatingly efficient paper trail is still largely intact.
Of course, we won't know until the PhD boys tear into the archive and start writing.
Just remember that the people killed in the camps were only a portion of the victims of the holocaust. German officers and the SS were nortorious for killing people at random throughout the war. This is not to mention the extermination squads that followed the invasion forces into the Slavik countries and Russia. I highly doubt those victims had a paper trail.
Sure.
But. There were over 20,000 ghettos and camps. I doubt the extermination squads matched the ghettos/camps in numbers.
wiki writes:
1,000,000 (total) who were killed in "Open-air shootings"
Taz writes:
The most common misconception about the holocaust is that most victims were Jews ...
wiki writes:
More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr. Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, estimates the Jewish losses at
5.59-5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr. Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29-6 million. The main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar censuses with postwar censuses and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing partial data on various deportations and murders is also used. We estimate that Yad Vashem currently has somewhat more than
four million names of victims that are accessible.
Soviet POWs 2-3 million
Politicals 1-1.5 million
Serbs, Croats 600,000
Poles 200,000+
Roma 220,000-500,000
Freemasons Number Unknown
Disabled 75,000-250,000
Spanish POWs 7,000-16,000
Jehovah's Witnesses 2,500-5,000
The number of people killed at the major extermination camps has been estimated as follows:
Auschwitz: 1.4 million; Belzec: 600,000; Chelmno: 320,000; Jasenovac: 53,000 - 600,000; Majdanek: 360,000; Maly Trostinets: 65,000; Sobibr: 250,000; and Treblinka: 870,000.
This gives a total of over 3.8 million, excluding Jasenovac (where most victims were ethnic Serbs). Of these, 80-90% were estimated to be Jews.
In addition to those who died in the above extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. Another 800,000 to 1 million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented).
Even if you add everybody else together, the Jewish folks wiped out in the camps still got them beat ... to say nothing of the Jewish folks killed by the extermination squads, the ghettos, etc.
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