The killing only stopped when there was no one left to murder.
From August to October 1942, 1.2 million Jews were slain in the Nazi death camps, an almost inconceivable 15,000 people per day, a new study suggests.
This is more than previously calculated, and is a rate that surpasses recent genocides such as the one that occurred in Rwanda in 1994. In fact, roughly 25 percent of all Holocaust victims were murdered from August to October 1942, which was quite likely the deadliest three months in human history as the German killing machine was at its most lethal.
Study lead author Lewi Stone, a mathematical biologist from Tel Aviv University and Australia’s RMIT University, used railway transportation records to reach his conclusions. The “special trains” that transported the victims were kept on strict time schedules, of which the Germans had detailed records of each trip.
Overall, some 480 train trips were made from 393 separate Polish towns, destined for death camps such as Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of those three was strictly for mass murder, unlike camps such as Auschwitz, which also served as forced labor camps.
“Apart from very few exceptions, victims who were transported to the death camps were rapidly murdered upon arrival in the gas chambers, thus giving the system perfected by the Nazis all the characteristics of an automated assembly line,” Stone told Newsweek.
Stone estimates that the Nazi’s murder campaign could have continued at this pace had there been more victims still living in German-occupied Poland. Instead, the murder rate tapered off in November 1942 as a result of there being essentially “no one left to kill,” Stone said.
He also said the numbers show “the Nazis’ focused genocide with the goal of obliterating the entire Jewish people of occupied Poland in as short as time possible, mostly within three months,” according to Newsweek.
And compared to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, which has been suggested as the most intense genocide of the 20th century, the murder rate during those three months of the Holocaust was 83 percent higher.
The study, “Quantifying the Holocaust: Hyperintense kill rates during the Nazi genocide,” was published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.
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