About six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, according to the consensus of major research institutions and historians.

What that number means

Historians usually give a range of about 5.1 to 6 million Jewish victims, because exact counting is impossible: records were destroyed, many killings happened outside formal camps, and wartime chaos left gaps in the data. The widely cited “about six million” figure comes from combining Nazi documentation, transport lists, demographic studies comparing pre‑war and post‑war Jewish populations, and survivor testimony.

How the deaths are broken down

Research by institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates:

  • Around 2.7 million Jews were murdered in dedicated killing centers such as Chełmno, Bełżec, SobibĂłr, Treblinka, and Auschwitz‑Birkenau, mostly by poison gas.
  • About 2 million were shot in mass executions across occupied Eastern Europe by mobile killing units and collaborators.
  • Between 800,000 and 1,000,000 were murdered through starvation, disease, forced labor, and brutality in ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps.

These categories together support the overall figure of about six million Jewish victims.

Why historians are confident

The six‑million estimate is not based on a single document but on converging evidence: Nazi reports, census comparisons, postwar investigations, and detailed country‑by‑country studies of pre‑war and post‑war Jewish communities. While specialists still refine local figures and discuss margins of error, there is overwhelming scholarly agreement that roughly six million Jews were systematically murdered in the Holocaust.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.