2. Miscellaneous
3. Auschwitz Death Registers

The Auschwitz Death Registers — A Summary

The discovery of the “death books” in a Soviet archive lends yet more credence to the revisionist position that there were no mass gassings at Auschwitz. As you will see in the table below, not all the death books were found, and so some of the data must be extrapolated. For reasons of time, I have not shown the methods of extrapolating the missing data, but neither the extrapolated data nor the method used in the extrapolation is needed to illustrate the revisionist viewpoint.

Consider the years 1942 and 1943, for which we have nearly complete records in the death books. We know that during these years, there were typhus epidemics that ravaged the camps. Although the Nazi high command ordered that all steps be taken to end the epidemics and save prisoner lives, this same high command also planned to expand the size of the Auschwitz camp greatly (in itself an argument against the extermination thesis). Using as their basis the number of deaths in 1942 and 1943, Nazi planners set out to build sufficient crematory capacity to handle the “normal” number of deaths through typhus at the camp. In these plans, we see that the number of crematories planned for Auschwitz was actually lower than the number planned for “ordinary” camps (that is, camps not now claimed to have been extermination centers) such as Dachau and Buchenwald, in terms of the ratio of corpses per crematory.

Thus, the crematories that were built would have had no excess capacity to handle the hundreds of thousands (let alone millions) of victims claimed to have been killed in mass exterminations. As it has been pointed out, if there were in fact homicidal gas chambers for mass murder, they would have to have had as an accomplice enough crematory capacity to dispose of the corpses. Without the crematory capacity, there could have been no mass gassing program.

As shown in the table below, the bottom line is that there are 67,227 recorded deaths in the partial set of Auschwitz death registers found (or at least made available) so far. To these are added an additional 63,069 extrapolated deaths, for a total death toll at Auschwitz/Birkenau of 130,296. Of course, toward the end of the war when conditions were chaotic, there could easily have been additional unrecorded deaths, but almost certainly the total death toll at Auschwitz/Birkenau is less than 150,000.