History Speaks Replies to Thomas Dalton

The Final Rebuttal!

Note: This post is in reply to Thomas Dalton’s rebuttal from an earlier round of the debate. Closing statements will follow this final rebuttal, to be written over the next two weeks.

Thomas,

Below, I will respond chronologically to the points raised in your rebuttal. This chronology skips over your challenge that I substantiate my specific estimates of Jewish deaths in the various stages of the Holocaust. I do however respond to your challenge in the form of an appendix, posted below my conclusion.

A ‘Dodgy’ Rebuttal: Kulmhof and Aktion Reinhardt

Before I respond to your arguments on the Reinhardt camps, I need to grumble a bit about how you have dodged mine.

You skipped over Kulmhof entirely, disregarding my arguments and documentary evidence, while making the bare assertion that “the evidence is so painfully lacking that it is scarcely worth the time here.”¹ You also failed to address the documentary evidence I previously provided on, for example, Treblinka II. Specifically, you ignored Himmler’s reference to the fact that (Bialystok) Jews, whom we know were sent to Treblinka, sent there were executed. You elided the Stroop Report’s description of deportation to Treblinka II as a method of execution.²

Nevertheless, I will address your Reinhardt camp arguments.

Reinhardt Camps: Incomplete Physical Evidence & Resettlement Theory

One of your core premises is that the physical evidence for 1.4 million Reinhardt-camp deaths is incomplete. That premise is true.³ But I deny altogether its significance for your case.

The physical evidence for the victims of every genocide or war in history is ‘incomplete.’ If you deny exterminations at the Reinhardt camps (or deny the Holocaust more generally) because of incomplete physical evidence, you should also deny the historicity of every other genocide and war.

Moreover, the ‘incomplete’ physical evidence for Reinhardt-camp exterminations is still enormous. At Belzec alone, Andrzej Kola’s 1997 and 1999 excavations identified 33 mass graves, loaded with ash. Your own Carlo Mattogno calculated⁴ the total surface area of the graves to be 5,919 square meters, and their total volume at 21,310 cubic meters. (And we are only discussing physical evidence; the compelling documentary and testimonial evidence for exterminations at the Reinhardt camps converge with the physical evidence.)

Regardless, you use the premise of incomplete physical evidence to argue for an alternative theory of what happened to 1.4 million Jewish deportees. Specifically, you contend that these Jews were channelled out of the Reinhardt camps and resettled in the ‘Russian East.’ Your justify your conclusion through a binary framing of the issue, according to which resettlement and extermination are the only logically possible explanations for the disappearance of 1.4 million Jews in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Your binary framing of the issue is correct. As a major denier work explained:

So the only possible explanations for the ‘disappearance’ of 1.4 million Jews from the Reinhardt camps are resettlement or extermination. One must embrace one theory or the other.

But why would one prefer resettlement theory to the standard extermination narrative? There is evidence for extermination at the Reinhardt camps—not just the 'incomplete' physical evidence; there is also documentary evidence like the aforementioned Stroop Report, and literally all eyewitnesses. Conversely, there is literally zero (0) evidence of any kind for the existence of eastern settlements to accommodate any number of (much less all 1.4 million) Reinhardt-camp Jews.⁵

I would now ask our readers to give me a moment to illuminate how ridiculous denier resettlement theory is.

A resettlement of the 1.4 million Reinhardt-camp deportees would have amounted to a community (a country, really; “Jewlantis”) with a larger population than contemporary Estonia. And yet—in contrast to, say, the Daunians, a preliterate, ancient civilization in what is now southern Italy, for whose communities we have considerable archaeological evidence—there is no evidence for Jewlantis, a European nation that supposedly existed within living memory.

You attempt, Thomas, to diminish the absurdity of resettlement theory by asserting that there is no reason to assume all 1.4 million were resettled in one “new nation” of Jews. Okay. Let us suppose the 1.4 million were deposited into 24 settlements with an average population of 57,000; that would be equivalent to twenty four Greenlands. But whether we are talking about one Estonia (“Jewlantis”), twenty four Greenlands, or for that matter thirty five Leichensteins, common sense still requires us to assume there would be physical evidence (infrastructure, homes, human remains, etc), as well as testimonial, infrastructural, economic, and communicative traces of these nations, not to mention train records of the actual deportations from the Reinhardt camps to the East. But you have literally nothing. There is no evidence for “resettlements.”⁶ 

I have by now indulged your resettlement daydream quite enough. The bottom line is that, by setting up an extermination-resettlement dichotomy, you (like Graf, Mattogno, Kues, and Rudolf) have boxed yourself into a position best described as a joke.

Diesel Revisited

Your claim that only “one man,” Fuchs, attested to the use of gasoline engines is false. As noted in an extensive post on this matter published by Holocaust Controversies, eyewitnesses to gasoline engines include SS men Erich Bauer and Franz Hödl; SS-Oberscharführer Walter Piller; Kulmhof gas van driver Walter Burmeister. These are higher quality witnesses than any who can be used to support the existence of diesel engines. Fuchs, Piller, and Burmeister were all SS personnel who were in a much better position to know about the mechanics of killing than horrified Jewish camp inmates, with their bird’s-eye view of the killing process.

You insist that the Nazis could not have used gasoline engines to kill people because a more efficient method of killing—by producer gas—was available. I previously exposed your underlying premise of supreme SS technical efficiency as a Hollywood myth. In any case, gasoline engines easily emit sufficient levels of carbon monoxide to kill people in enclosed spaces (“gas chambers”).⁷

More Dodging: This Time on Auschwitz

On Auschwitz, you have ignored the documents I provided that prove Leichenkeller 1 was a homicidal gas chamber. These include Bischoff’s (29 January 1943) reference to LK1 as a “gassing cellar”; orders for gas-tight doors with peepholes to be equipped to LK 1; and the 6 March 1943 letter from Auschwitz to the Topf company contemplating the installation of a “pre-heating” system in LK1.⁸ It is just as well that you ignored these documents, since they collectively demolish your theory that LK1 was a morgue.

You ignored the Allied reconnaissance aerial photography of the roof on Krematorium 2, which clearly shows disturbances atop the roof corresponding to the induction holes.⁹ You declined to comment on Johann Kremer’s (2 September 1942) diary entry, which describes a “special action” at Auschwitz, remarks that “Dante’s Inferno seems almost a comedy” in comparison, and concludes that Auschwitz is “justly called an extermination camp.”

Still, I will respond to the Auschwitz-related arguments you made in the rebuttal.

Rebutting Dalton’s Auschwitz Arguments

Your argument against the plausibility of homicidal gassing in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Bunkers turns on a heavily exaggerated notion of how frequently they were used. Hence your erroneous estimate of 250,000 victims (the actual figure is around 100,000).

The process of gassing in the Bunkers was very different than the process of gassing in the Krematoria. Victims were not murdered in the Bunkers in an assembly line-fashion throughout the day; rather, the occasional execution would occur in the evenings.

The limited scale of the gassings, and the timing of gassings at night, could easily accommodate a process of natural overnight ventilation of the Bunkers. To quote from Pressac’s essay, “The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz”:

[T]he doors were to be opened and remain open for the whole night. By daybreak it would be possible to remove the bodies without danger and transport them to burial pits dug in the birch forest.¹⁰

Regarding Krematoria IV and V, assuming that they were not mechanically ventilated, the Sonderkommando—wearing their gas masks—could have simply opened the doors and windows of the Krematoria after a gassing, allowing the hydrogen cyanide to dissipate naturally in the atmosphere. I recommend to our readers this piece by the chemist Harry W. Mazal, who explains this process in terms of Graham's Law of Diffusion.¹¹

Still More Dodging: German Policy and Quotes from German leaders

After discussing the Reinhardt camps and Auschwitz, you proceed to examine my section on German extermination policy, as well as my quotes from German leaders attesting to that policy. Or at least, you examine some of these quotes.

You completely ignore the 26 October 1942 report on Himmler’s decision to generally legalize the ad hoc murder of Jews by SS men, provided that such killings were not motivated by personal (pecuniary, sexual, sadistic, etc) reasons; you also ignore the Täubner court-martial, in which the judge clearly states killing Jews is a lawful act for SS men. You fail to address Hans Frank’s 24 August 1942 announcement that Polish Jews would no longer be fed, and that 1.2 million would be condemned to death by starvation. You do not acknowledge Robert Ley’s 3 May 1943 statement that the Nazis would not give up their struggle until the last European Jew was dead (gestorben).

On Dalton’s Wordplay and Selective Quoting

In discussing Hans Frank’s (December 1941) and Joseph Goebbels’ (March 1942) references to the “liquidation” of Jews, you argue that they meant this in a non-homicidal sense. You offer a non-homicidal definition of liquidate, namely “to ‘make fluid,’ and to dissolve, in some sense.” If Goebbels or Frank were talking about “Jewish power,” “Jewry,” or “Jewish-German marriages,” this non-homicidal definition would make sense. But Goebbels and Frank were taking about a specific group of Jewish people: deportees to the death camps of the East. What could it even mean to “dissolve” or “make fluid” the Jewish deportees?

The word liquidate, as applied to people—as opposed to concepts, organizations, institutions, and so on—plainly means to kill. It meant to kill in Nazi propaganda films about the Katyn massacre (which described the “liquidation” of the victims), and meant killing when Goebbels and Frank discussed liquidation of Jews deported to the East. In the context of these passages, recognizing that Goebbels and Frank were native German speakers is enough to prove that they were discussing the killing of Jews.

More troubling than your linguistic games is your misuse of Hans Frank’s December 1941 speech, which you quote as follows:

What is to happen to the Jews [after evacuation]? … We have in the General Government an estimated 2.5 million Jews—perhaps with those closely related to Jews and what goes with it, now 3.5 million Jews.  We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them…

Read in isolation, this passage sounds as if Frank is dismissing the idea of killing Jews. But you have mendaciously cut Frank off in mid-sentence! Right after your quoted portion, Frank goes on to say

[B]ut we somehow must take steps that lead to [their] successful extermination.

You also omit an earlier portion of the speech in which Frank declared

Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews, wherever we find them and wherever it is possible.

It is only through these highly selective omissions that you can use this speech—a copy of which is pictured below, with the relevant portions highlighted by me—to maintain that Frank was “unaware of any program of genocide.”           

Regarding Himmler’s 6 October 1943 Posen speech, you helpfully concede that the Reichsführer-SS was describing the killing of Jews and their families. However, you suggest that Himmler “seems to be referring to” the killing of only a subset of Jews: “partisan (fighter) Jews and their families.” This interpretation is contradicted by the speech itself. Himmler speaks of making the Jewish people (Volk) disappear from the earth. Himmler’s use of the racial term Volk shows that he was talking about the Jews as such, not merely partisans.

Another argument you make regarding the 6 October 1943 Posen speech is that Himmler’s call to kill Jews was merely aspirational, rather than an expression of ongoing Nazi policy. You write:

Even if Himmler called for the killing of all Jews—even then, that doesn’t mean it was possible, or that it happened.  Leaders proclaim, assert, and demand all kinds of things, many of which never materialize

The problem with this argument is that Himmler is not merely calling for the murder of Jews. Using the past-tense (Präteritum) verb mußte, Himmler is referring to a decision that has already been made, and to something that has already been happening. He says that “[t]he difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth.”¹² Himmler is reporting on and attesting to the ongoing murder of the Jews. His statement is horrifyingly empirical, not aspirational.

The same problem applies to your treatment of the 14 March 1945 Goebbels diary entry, in which the Nazi Propaganda Minister advocated “kill[ing] Jews like rats.” You correctly interpret this as a call “for Jews to be killed en masse,” though you seem to believe that this is an aspirational (rather than empirical) statement by Goebbels. But after calling for the Jews to be killed en masse, Goebbels goes on to write

In Germany we have, thank god, thoroughly attended to this already. I hope that the world will take this as an example.

Confessions and Coercion

You raise the issue of coerced confessions, focusing specifically on Rudolf Höss (tortured by Jewish-British soldiers bent on revenge) and Adolf Eichmann (extrajudicially kidnapped by Israelis).

We learned about Höss’ torture at the hands of British soldiers from his memoirs. But these memoirs also emphasize that he was treated well (not tortured) by the authorities at Nuremberg and by the Polish authorities to which he testified. Why accept the reliability of the memoirs for the allegations of torture, but not on Auschwitz as an extermination camp?

Various colleagues of Höss who were interrogated on the matter—from Hans Aumeier, to Pery Broad, to Eduard Wirths, to Wilhelm Boger, to Wilhelm Clausen—similarly confessed to the role of Auschwitz as an extermination camp with mass gassings of Jews. Would you have our readers believe that all these men were tortured into false confessions?

As to Eichmann, more pertinent than anything he said at trial is what I mentioned in my opening statement: before his kidnapping by the Israelis, Eichmann confessed his involvement in and knowledge of the extermination of the Jews to pro-Nazi friends in Argentina. Are you suggesting that Eichmann’s fellow SS alumnus Willem Sassen, who recorded his discussions with the former, tortured or hoodwinked Eichmann into making a false confession of genocide?

Eichmann’s is far from the only confession that cannot possibly be spun as coercive. In 1971, Albert Speer confessed in a private letter that he knew about the Holocaust and had lied about this in his book and at trial. The Palestinian-Arab Nazi collaborator Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who spent much of the war in Berlin, confessed in his memoirs that he too knew about the exterminations.¹³

I have yet to hear an even vaguely coherent explanation for these non-coercive confessions from any denier, and you avoided them altogether in your rebuttal.

A Dodge by History Speaks? Disposal of Ash and Human Remains at the Camps

In this post, I have avoided your argument that the Nazis could not have possibly disposed of so many bodies and so much ash. I did so because I extensively debunked these same arguments in my previous rebuttal, which devoted entire sections to (1) cremation capacity at Auschwitz, (2) body disposal at the Reinhardt camps, (3) the grinding of bones and teeth into ash, and (4) body disposal in ghettos. You have not significantly modified your arguments, and I do not here have the space or inclination to repeat myself.¹⁴

Conclusion

Your rebuttal fails to raise reasonable doubt about the Nazi extermination of the Jews. You largely failed to respond to the formidable body of positive evidence I produced for the Holocaust—the non-coercive confessions, the numerous wartime references to extermination of the Jews, Himmler’s express legalization of murdering Jews by SS men, the abundant documentary evidence for LK1 being a gas chamber rather than a morgue, documentary evidence that the Germans saw deportation to Treblinka II as a form of execution, and so on. When you did respond to my arguments, you did so in a singularly unpersuasive fashion.

You were also unable to provide any evidence for the existence of Jewish resettlements, despite your endorsement of resettlement as an alternative explanation as to how millions of Jews (or at least the 1.4 million Jews in the Reinhardt camps) disappeared in Nazi custody. Unless you can find evidence of resettlements, your alternative explanation as to what happened to the Jews, and your Holocaust denial more generally, cannot be considered legitimate forms of historical inquiry.

Appendix: Statistical Questions

2,000,000 Jews shot?

In his rebuttal, Thomas challenged me to corroborate in specific detail my estimate of nearly 2,000,000 Jewish victims of mass shootings, as well as my overall estimate of over 5,000,000 Jewish Holocaust victims. This appendix addresses his challenge.

The starting point for data on mass shooting victims is Richard Korherr’s famous report, which indicates that 633,000 Jews were killed by Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union between June 1941 and summer 1942.¹⁵

To get the full figure of Jews shot by the Germans between June 1941 and autumn 1942, we have to not only take into account Korherr’s figure, but also numerous other shootings not claimed by the Einsatzgruppen (nor listed in the headlines of the Einsatzgruppen Reports). I have designed the following table, which lists and adds up the victims of such mass shootings:

The mass shootings enumerated in my chart add up to 447,000. By adding this figure Korherr’s 633,000 figure to the mass shootings mentioned above, we increase our total to about 1,080,000. And this is just through summer 1942.

To our figure of 1,080,000 must be added about 325,000 Jews listed as shot by the SSPF¹⁶ between September and December 1942, in a report sent by Himmler to Hitler.¹⁷ (Himmler describes 363,211 executed Jews in the report, but tens of thousands of these—notably the Jews of Bialystok—were killed by gassing in Treblinka II, not by bullets.) Now we are at about 1.405 million.

The next step is to add Jewish fatalities listed on 30 July 1943 Katzmann Report. This report describes the murder of 434,000 Jews in Galicia (Poland), between July 1941 and July 1943; about 180,000 of these Jews were shot by the SSPF, while about 250,000 were deported to Belzec and gassed.

At the time Katzmann wrote his report, 21,000 Jews were still alive in Galicia. These Jews were shot by the end of November 1943. So we add 21,000 to the 180,000 shooting victims mentioned in the Katzmann report, to confirm a figure of about 201,000 Galician Jews shot to death. This should be added to our previous figure of 1.405 million.

Our total figure of Jewish deaths from mass shooting has risen to about 1.606 million. To this we now add the victims of mass shootings at the camps. The most notorious of these was Operation Harvest Festival (3-4 November 1943), in which about 43,000 Jews were shot by the SS and the Ordnungspolizei. Another major camp in which shootings took place was Maly Trostenets.¹⁸ According to Yad Vashem, most of the camp’s 65,000 Jewish victims were shot.

After taking into account these and other mass shootings at camps, our total figure of shooting deaths approximates 1.7 million. Now, we can account for the Jews who were shot in or near ghettos. I do not have the space here to conduct a chapter-and-verse calculation for all these victims.¹⁹ Suffice it to say that many tens of thousands of Jews were shot during the liquidation of ghettos—such as in Głogów Małopolski (5,000 in 1942),  Majdan Tatarski (3,800 in April 1942), Krakow (2,000 on March 13-16 1943), and Warsaw (7,000 on 16 May 1943). Many tens of thousands more were also shot before the ghetto liquidations, in the course of police actions, reprisals (especially after ghetto uprisings), deportations to death camps, and other killing operations.

Our final count can be topped off by adding the tens of thousands of Jews shot in Yugoslavia by the Ustaše and the Germans between 1941 and 1944; many tens of thousands more shot by the Romanians after summer 1942;²⁰ as well as the victims of scattered German shooting actions in 1943 and 1944.²¹

Having accounted for all of the various types of mass shootings, and scrupulously avoided double-counting, we have arrived at a final mass-shooting death toll of almost two million.

More Than Five Million Total Deaths

To calculate a comprehensive death total for the Holocaust, we must combine the nearly 2,000,000 mass shooting deaths with the number of Jews who died in German camps (including the Reinhardt camps, KLs, and assorted forced-labour camps). From a comparison of deportation records with immediate postwar statistics on camp survivors, we can confidently say that about three million Jews ‘disappeared’ in the camps.²² About 2.7 million of these Jews were gassed; the rest were worked to death, perished from disease and neglect, or died on death marches near the end of the war.²³

Thus, the mass shooting death count plus camps count already gets us to nearly 5,000,000. Add to this figure the hundreds of thousands²⁴ of documented deaths in the ghettos of Poland, Ukraine, and Terezin, and the figure of Jewish dead is surely above 5,000,000, though still several hundred thousand below the familiar 6,000,000.

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1. You showcase your ignorance of Kulmhof by claiming that the euthanasia Hartheim Castle was “part of the Chelmno/Kulmhof camp facility.” Schloss Hartheim is in Linz, Austria; Kulmhof was almost 1,000 kilometers away, housed near the village of Chelmno in West-Central Poland.

2. As I previously noted, one of the telegrams cited in the Stroop Report states that “6,929 Jews were annihilated (vernichtet)” by transportation to Treblinka II (“T. II”).

3. Obviously, I believe the physical evidence is much more thorough than you do. I consider, for example, that the 33 Belzec mass graves identified by Kola could readily accommodate hundreds of thousands of corpses, particularly given that the majority were children or emaciated adults. Nevertheless, I accept that the physical evidence is ‘incomplete’ insofar as it does not account for every last body of the 1.4 million victims at the Reinhardt camps.

4. See Carlo Mattogno, Belzec: Propaganda, Testimonies, Archaeological Research and History (Castle Hill Publishers, 2004), p. 73. Available online at https://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/09-b.pdf.

5. Logically speaking, we must prefer an explanation supported by incomplete evidence to one supported by zero evidence, even if we disagree about how compelling the extant evidence for exterminations at the Reinhardt camp is.

6. At one point, you attempt to explain this lack of evidence for resettlements by insinuating that the Germans may have simply dumped the 1.4 million Jews somewhere in the Russian East, without provisioning them with food or infrastructure. (You claim that the Jews were “dispersed over a large area,” with many “abandoned.”) In this connection, I should mention that the 1.4 million Jews sent to the Reinhardt camps were mostly children and elderly Jews, deemed unfit for labour by the Germans. ‘Abandoning’ these Jews in the ‘Russian East’ without providing them food, money, and housing would have been a death sentence, genocide in another form.

7. I would also note parenthetically that killing by producer gas would be a more dangerous process (for the killers) than killing by gasoline engines, because of the extremely high concentrations of carbon monoxide producer gas engines omit. So both SS technical incompetence as well as safety concerns could explain the preference for gasoline engines.

8. Heating might make sense for a morgue, to prevent the freezing of corpses. But "pre-heating" makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, pre-heating for what? Homicidal gassing, quite obviously. Zyklon B evaporates more rapidly in higher temperatures.

9. The evidentiary weight of these photographs is such that deniers such as John Ball have been forced to claim, without evidence, that the photographs were forged or secretly “edited.”

10. See Jean-Claude Pressac (with Robert-Jan Van Pelt), “The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds. (Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 183-245, p. 212.

11. It is important in this regard to recall that Krematoria IV and V (unlike the mechanically ventilated Krematoria II and III) were at ground level. 

12. „Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen.“ Quoted by Peter Longerich in the following article: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/der-ungeschriebene-befehl-a-430d6d39-0002-0001-0000-000019864687 

13. Al-Husseini lived at freedom in the Arab world after the war, and was never prosecuted for his Nazi collaboration.

14. I strongly encourage our readers to examine the arguments from my previous post (contained in the four sections linked above), and to judge them against Thomas’s challenges. As to you, Thomas, I hope you reflect on the concept of “argument from incredulity,” which is what your concerns about the ‘implausibility’ of body disposal at Auschwitz and the Reinhardt camp amount to.

15. As Gert Robel showed, in a chapter he authored for Wolfganz Benz’s Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (De Gruyter, 1991),  Korherr’s approximate figures can be corroborated by examining the Einsatzgruppen Reports through April 1942, and counting only those mass shootings claimed by the Einsatzgruppen themselves, (data on these shootings appear in the ‘headlines’ of the reports). One must also examine the Stahlecker Reports and the Jäger Report. The killings listed in these sources sometimes overlap; but if one avoids double-counting one arrives at an estimate close to Korherr’s 633,000.

16. These shootings were not included in Korherr’s report, since they were carried out by the SSPF, not by the Einsatzgruppen.

17. Himmler’s report was based on Meldung 51. The latter was not circulated by the RSHA and Korherr therefore had no access to these data.

18. It should be clarified that, contrary to a misperception one encounters occasionally, none of the victims of Harvest Festival were shot at Maly Trostenets.

19. There were literally hundreds of ghettos, in which about 450,000 Jews perished. Parsing out the victims of mass shootings from this total—450,000 deaths from all causes—would require an essay, and we are operating under a word count.  

20. We have already accounted for mass shootings conducted by the Romanians before summer 1942 (see my above chart).

21. For example, at least 1,600 Jews were shot by the German 22nd Reserve Police Battalion in February 1943, and 4,000 Jews from Oszmiana shot up to the summer of 1943.

22. These camps include not only the Aktion Reinhardt camps and Auschwitz, but other camps in the main KL system, and assorted forced-labour camps.

23. Jews were also shot in the camps. But these shooting victims must be excluded from our ‘camp deaths’ figure to avoid double-counting, as I already counted them towards our “mass shooting” estimate.

24. I went into considerable detail in my last submission about how I sustain a figure of 450,000 Jewish deaths in ghettos. I will not repeat myself here.
One semantical clarification must however be made. One cannot add each of the 450,000 ghetto deaths to my figure of nearly 5,000,000 Holocaust deaths in camps and mass shootings. Rather, ghetto deaths caused by mass shooting have to be subtracted from the “ghetto deaths” total, because I have already counted these as “mass shooting” deaths. (If we do not subtract these deaths from the ghetto deaths total, we will have engaged in double-counting.)