AboutDylan Pemberton Expertise My area of interest is the holocaust with particular reference to the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp. I can answer most questions regarding the lead up to and the ultimate deployment of 'The Final Solution' including the Wannsee Conference, ghetto liquidations, the Nuremberg Trials, post-war 'Nazi Hunting' by the likes of Simon Weisenthal etc. My knowledge / experience is perhaps best suited to someone who - for example - had a homework / coursework assignment in this area as opposed to a professional interest in which case there are, naturally, recognised experts and historians available.
Experience Lifelong interest in ensuring the events of the holocaust are never forgotten, visits to Auschwitz Birkenau and extensive literature on the subject.
Education/Credentials 10 GCSE's, several A-Levels, BTEC National Diploma Graphic Design, 15 years senior level business experience.
Expert: Dylan Pemberton Date: 10/29/2007 Subject: Holocaust figures for the amount of Slavics killed
Question Hello,
my problem is this:
On two websites, it claims that "By 1945 the war had claimed the lives of 3.5 million and 6 million other [not including Poles] Slavic civilians".
However, on Wikipedia, it claims "Some estimate that as many as one quarter of all Soviet civilian deaths (5 million Russian deaths, 3 million Ukrainian deaths and 1.5 million Belarusian deaths) at the hands of the Nazis and their allies were racially motivated".
So, I don't understand. Aren't the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians counted as Slavics? If they were, wouldn't that count as 9.5 million slavic deaths, at least?
Answer Hi Bell, thanks for your question. I guess the answer is actually in your question - what counts as Slavics? The figures on the number of people who died and from where often vary between different sources and indeed between different historians (and that's before we even think about the idiot 'revisionists')! This is perhaps part of an extension / continuation of Hitler's (and the wider Nazi party's) skewed view of race where linguistics come to the fore - what was once propoganda is now almost fact. For example, Hitler always spoke of a battle between the Aryan race and the Semitic races despite the fact that the word aryan was a linguistic term that originally referred to the Indo-European group of languages and had little or nothing to do with race. He thus distorted its meaning and furthermore, distorted the meaning of Semitic from being a language group (arabic, hebrew etc) to a religious term. However, despite this distortion, to this day most people still attach racial and religious connotations to the words Aryan and Semitic which I find vexing.
To answer your question though, having seen a broad number of estimates, I would say that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties is a good resource as it lists country casualties along with whether they were civilian deaths, holocuast victims, military deaths etc.
There is no definitive answer as so many of the victims never got to leave a voice behind. Perhaps the best and the worst summary of events is to paraphrase Stalin - the death of one is a tragedy but the death of a million is just a statistic. Therefore, precise numbers ultimately make little difference to the overall result - that World War II was a global human catastrophe.
