Only 69,000 Auschwitz prisoners deaths can be confirmed

Revisionists do not deny that many prisoners died at KL Auschwitz. However, they claim that these deaths resulted from:

• shortages in the camp’s food supply, caused by the generally difficult food situation during the war;
• and primarily numerous epidemic diseases which spread naturally among the prisoners.

This claim is supposedly supported by the camp registry office (Standesamt) death certificates, or rather death books (Sterbebücher). Since almost 69,000 such death certificates have survived, the deniers assume these to account for the total number of KL Auschwitz prisoner deaths.

Facts:

The Museum collections include 68,864 death certificates, which, in accordance with SS practice, were bound together in 1,500-certificate volumes, each as a separate book.

Source: A-BSM.

This collection, however, is incomplete. There are missing books, and many of those that have survived have missing pages (certificates). For example, only two of the four 1941 death books have survived; in turn, the fifth 1942 volume contains only 142 death certificates instead of 1,500, whereas the eighth volume contains only 36 certificates, and so on. Nevertheless, it is possible to determine the total number of death certificates based on the serial numbers assigned to them. Thus:

The death books for the third decade of November and for December 1941, as well as the last days of 1942 and 1943, are incomplete. Based on other documents, it is possible to determine that the total number of death certificates the camp originally issued from August 1941 to December 1943 was approximately 90,000.

Death certificates are also missing for 1940 and the first seven months of 1941, when such documents were still issued by civilian registry offices outside KL Auschwitz, based on death notifications (Sterbeurkunde) officially sent from the camp to the families of the victims.

The first KL Auschwitz death certificate, numbered 1/1941 (seen in the top left corner), issued by the KL Auschwitz registry office on 4 August 1941. Source: APMA-B.

No death certificates have survived for 1944. Furthermore, no death certificates were ever issued for deceased Soviet prisoners of war.

Although up to the end of August 1942 the number of issued death certificates corresponded to the number of male and female prisoners who had died in the camp, later such certificates stopped being issued for the victims of selections for the gas chamber, which were carried out in hospital blocks and during so-called general roll calls. These selections started being carried out during a major typhus epidemic which broke out in the autumn of 1942 and, in a short space of time, resulted in the deaths of thousands of prisoners, as well as at least several or a dozen or so SS men and their family members. Since strict isolation of the camp was ordered and all prisoner transfers and releases were suspended at that time, it may be assumed that a marked decline in the prisoner population reflected only the scale of mortality. Therefore, taking into account the lack of death certificates for over 20,000 prisoners who had definitely been in the camp from September to December 1942, it is safe to assume that that many prisoners had died.

In 1943, in turn, probably to economise on paper and clerical work, the issuing of death certificates for deceased Jews was gradually limited. While in January 66–71% of the death certificates concerned Jews (who at the time accounted for almost 40% of the Auschwitz inmates, indirectly indicating the scale of selections at the end of the preceding year), in February this percentage fell to 54%, then in March to 26–35%, and in April to only 5–6%. This trend continued up to the end of that year. Since a significant increase in the number of registered Jewish prisoners in the camp may be noted throughout 1943, it follows that in this period, death certificates were issued for diseased Jews very sparingly or only in exceptional cases.

However, the total number of registered KL Auschwitz prisoner deaths can be estimated quite precisely in a different way: by subtracting from the total number of issued prisoner numbers (400,000) all the cases of transfers to other camps, official releases from the camp, prisoner escapes, and prisoner liberations in January 1945. This leaves a general figure of around 200,000 prisoners who died in KL Auschwitz. Nevertheless, it should be reiterated and stressed that this figure does not include all those who were delivered to the camp and immediately murdered: in the gas chambers (mainly Jews) or shot (mainly Poles) without being registered as prisoners or formally recorded in any other way.