Majdanek Concentration Camp - Death Toll

Death Toll

The Soviets initially overestimated the number of deaths, claiming in July 1944 that there were no fewer than 400,000 Jewish victims, and the official Soviet count was of 1.5 million victims of different nationalities, Independent Canadian journalist Raymond Arthur Davies, who was based in Moscow and on the payroll of the Canadian Jewish Congress, visited Majdanek on August 28, 1944. The following day he sent a telegram to Saul Hayes, the executive director of the Canadian Jewish Congress. It states: "I do wish stress that Majdanek where one million Jews and half a million others killed" and "You can tell America that at least three million Jews killed of whom at least a third were killed in Majdanek"though this estimate was never taken seriously by scholars.

In 1961, Raul Hilberg estimated the number of the Jewish victims at 50,000, though at the time other sources, including the camp museum, officially estimated 100,000 Jewish victims and up to 200,000 non-Jews killed.

In 1992, Czesław Rajca published a lower estimate of 235,000; it was displayed at the camp museum.

The 2005 research by the Head of Scientific Department at Majdanek Museum, historian Tomasz Kranz indicates that there were 79,000 victims, 59,000 of whom were Jews.

The differences in estimates stem from different methods used for estimating and the amounts of evidence available to the researchers. The Soviet figures relied on the most crude methodology, also used to make early Auschwitz estimates—it was assumed that the number of victims more or less corresponded to the crematoria capacities. Later researchers tried to take much more evidence into account, using records of deportations and population censuses, as well as the Nazis' own records. Hilberg's 1961 estimate, using these records, aligns closely with Kranz's report.

Theodor Klein - Maschinen- of Ludwigshafen, Germany, built ovens of Majdanek.