More than six million may have died

RONALD MacEachan's letter (South China Morning Post, January 31) challenging scholarly estimations of the numbers of Jews murdered in the Holocaust marks the second example last month in your letters column of the tactics employed in the growing worldwide attempt to create a 'revisionist' environment in which Holocaust denial can flourish. (These tactics are well documented in Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, 1993).

The literature on Holocaust statistics from these revisionists as well as legitimate scholars is enormous. While there will probably never be any degree of precision on the exact number of Jews who died in this tragic era, legitimate scholars estimate the figure from around five million to just over six million. The data gathering process is very complex - with information coming from a variety of sources. The complexity of this process, the methodology of estimation and the resources used in this process can be examined in F. Furet, Ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York, 1989) and I. Gutman, Ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York, 1990).

Furthermore, new data now emerging from the former Soviet Union, which had kept these statistics in archives previously unavailable to outside researchers, tends to raise the figures even higher than current estimates.

Mr MacEachan's estimation that there were only one to 11/2 million murdered in the Holocaust is negated even by Nazi records.

One such Nazi record calculates that nearly three million mainly East European Jews had already been killed by the end of 1942! (See report from Richard Korherr to Nazi police chief Heinrich Himmler, dated March 23, 1943, ND No 5192-4).

In reference to Mr MacEachan's estimation of the maximum possible number of daily murders, it can be noted that Maidanek, the death camp located on the outskirts of Lublin, had its busiest single day on November 2, 1943, when Einsatzgruppen of the SS machine-gunned 18,400 prisoners, the victims being interred in ditches they themselves had been forced to dig. (Documented in E. Gryn & Z. Murawska, The Maidanek Concentration Camp, a Polish publication).