re: #258 researchok

re: #258 researchok

On my visit to Auschwitz.

A lifetime ago- and yesterday.

Written when I was still writing.

A good piece. But I think, as someone dealing with denial, that this needs correction:

One and a half million Jews perished in that camp alone- of that number, half a million were children under 16 years of age. This is not an exaggeration or calculation. By their own admission and record keeping, those who perpetrated the evil, have told us so. These numbers do not include the millions of Poles and others put to death in Auschwitz.

About a million people perished in Auschwitz. I know what is written on the tablets there and the number is exaggerated for whatever reason. Moreover, the number on the tablets does not refer to Jews but to all victims, so “the millions of Poles and others put to death in Auschwitz” is plain wrong. The “about million” estimate was arrived by former Au. Museum director F. Piper in a special study, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz substantiated the number of 1,000,000, though he left the place for 1,500,000 on rather shaky assumptions about the number of Polish Jews. During the Irving v. Lipstadt trial Prof. van Pelt, an unquestioned expert on Auschwitz, re-examined and reiterated Piper’s lower number, stating:

hdot.org

Given the fact that 1,095,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and 205,000 were registered as inmates in the camp, it follows that 890,000 Jews who arrived were not registered. Of these some 25,000 would have been Durchgangs-Juden, which leads to the conclusion that 865,000 Jews were killed on arrival.
The mortality of the registered Jews is more difficult to determine. It is clear that, of the registered inmates, 190,000 were transferred to other concentration camps—most of them after the death marches of January 1945. A total of 8,000 inmates were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, some 1,500 inmates were released, and some 500 escaped. This means that some 199,500 inmates, or roughly half of all the registered inmates, are accounted for. The rest, or 200,000, must have died in the camp. According to Piper, the mortality rate for the general camp population (mainly Poles and Jews), was around 50 per cent over the life of the camp—for the Soviet prisoners- of-war and the Romani it was much higher. As a result Piper came to a rough estimate of 100,000 registered Jews that died in the camp. The result is that the total mortality of Jews in Auschwitz was 960,000.