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These estimates -- bandied about in the press and on the web as indisputable "fact" -- have their source in Judge Parker's summation of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity at the Nuremberg Trials, viz

Hoess “estimated that in the camp of Auschwitz alone in that time (1940-1943) 2,500.000 were exterminated and that a frutehr 500,000 died from disease and starvation” ....Eichman estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000.000 Jews of which 4,000.000 were killed in extermination institutions.”

Neither of these estimates is at all reliable for a variety of reasons. As Raul Hilberg the premier Jewish historian on the subject, states “the raw data are seldom self-explanatory, and their interpretation requires the use of voluminous background materials that have to be analyzed in turn.” (See http://www.counterpunch.org.finklestein/80222009.html)

In addition, it is now generally acknowledged albeit discretely that Hoess and other witness were tortured -- or at least that there "accounts" are unreliable. See John Toland’s account in his biography “Adolf Hitler” of Kurt Gerstein, the SS lawyer who prosecuted camp personnel for homicide and who was later beaten by allied interrogators in an attempt to get him to attest to lamp shades of human skin and the like.
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