Introduction

It's well known that 6 million jews died in the holocaust. No citation needed.

Is a citation needed?

Who was the first one to claim this?

Who was counting?

Background

If you trace the beginnings of the discovery of the genocide of Jewish people back to it's source, you'll often end up at the public prosecution of Nazi officers.

If you ask a historian who counted the 6 million bodies they'll tell you "The Nazi's admitted it was six million. The Nazi leaders knew it but they destroyed the military records when they were losing the war to bury the evidence – but they gave an admission in court so that's the end of it."

That's quite the horrific scene.

When I first heard about the holocaust I must have been a child – around 11 years old. I remember it vividly. I remember the shock. I remember the disbelief. I pictured in my mind a gas chamber, with innocent human beings grasping for life. I started crying.

Six million people. Six million lives.

Australia's entire population at the time when I learnt this was 25 million.

That's 1 in every 4 people in the country of Australia you would have to collect and put them in a gas chamber.

Why this article?

I like to know the magnitude of things. I like to know scale, speed, impact. I like to learn numbers. I think numbers tell interesting stories.

I want to know the foundation of this narrative.

The final solution began in 1941, and the war ended in 1945. So we have approximately 4 years of mass slaughter.

Logistics

At the start of World War 2, in 1939, there were approximately 565,000 Jews living in Germany.

All together in central Europe there were approximately 5 million Jews, this is what would largely be called "Nazi" controlled area during World War 2. Source: Holocaust Museum

The distance between Berlin, Germany and Auschwitz, Poland is about 600km, and takes 8 hours by train.

The Sydney metro line can accommodate about 1,000 people per train.

If we assume these numbers then we can accommodate 1,000 people per train, then it would take 6,000 trains to transport them all.

y=6,000,000 people ÷ 1,000 people per train
y=6,000 trains

Synchronous

It follows that if this is the average distance from any Jew to Auschwitz, then 6,000 trains running at 8 hours per train, would take 48,000 hours to transport 6 million Jews (assuming 1 train at a time).

y=6,000 trains x 8 hours per train
y=48,000 hours

One year has 8,760 hours. So we can divide 48,000 hours by 8,760 to get the number of years it would take to transport 6 million Jews. Approximately 5.5 years.

y=48,000 hours ÷ 8,760 hours per year
y=5.479 years

Asynchronous

Trains don't run one at a time, we have multiple trains running.

We need to squash 48,000 hours into 4 years worth of hours.

y=4*365*24
y=35,000 hours

z=48,000 hours ÷ 35,000 hours
z=1.37 trains needed

So we have 1.37 trains running without stopping.

A train with 1,000 Jews will arrive every 17 hours.

Or 3,287 Jews per day per train.

or 1,200,000 Jews per year.

With bombings

Due to allied bombing raids, starting from 1943 and peaking in mid-1944, central Europe lost approximately 60-80% of it's rail capacity.

By late 1944 coal deliveries had collapsed.

Albert Speer (Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany) stated that railway destruction was one of the most damaging Allied strategies.

From mid-1994 to 1945 we have a reduced capacity of 60-80%. Let's assume 70%.

For 1 year (1944-1945) we have 30% capacity, meaning 986 Jews per day.

For the prior 3 years (1941-1943) we have to balance it, so the we assume an increased capacity,

y=6,000,000-(986*365)
y=5,640,110 in 3 years

z=5,640,110 ÷ 3
z=1,876,666 per year

a=1,876,666 ÷ 1,200,000
a=156% capacity

So from 1941 to 1943 there were 5,127 Jews transported per day.

At this rate, if the train lines were not bombed by the Allies, then we can estimate that 9 million Jews could have died by 1945. Essentially Europe's entire Jewish population. Source: Holocaust Museum

Extermination

The Nazis had 6 death camps.

There were 52 crematoriums across the camps.

Crematoriums

It takes about 90 minutes to cremate a body.

If we were to cremate 6 million bodies in 52 crematoriums it would take 6,000,000 ÷ 52 = 115,384 hours.

115,384 hours ÷ 8,760 hours per year = 13.2 years.

To finish in 4 years, we need 171 crematoriums.

We're at about a third of our capacity. Considering they were collecting Jews and we assume they intended to exterminate them (on track to finish in 5 or 6 years), it is an odd number of crematoriums to have, why didn't they have more?

If they were aiming to save costs, it's far less efficient to use open pits than crematoriums due to heat loss.

Coke

It takes about 90 kilograms of coke to cremate a body.

If we were to cremate 6 million bodies in 52 crematoriums it would take 6,000,000 x 90 = 540,000,000 kilograms of coke.

Official documents released by the Soviets after the liberartion of Auschwitz note that between Feb 1942 and October 1943 there was 497 tonnes of coke delivered to Auschwitz. Source: Debunking holocaust denial

We can assume this as the average delivery speed and approximate the remaining years.

y=4 x 12 months
y=48 months

Feb 1942 to Oct 1943 is 21 months.

Average the delivery to per month.

y=497/21
y=23 tonnes per month delivered

Calculate the total coke delivered in 4 year from 1941 to 1945.

y=23 tonnes * 48 months
y=1,104 tonnes

z=540,000 - 1,104 tonnes = 538,896 tonnes

We're short about 538,000 tonnes of coke required for the capacity needed to cremate 6 million.

The density of coke is about 1.3 grams per cubic centimeter.

Just for curiosity sake, we can calculate how much space would be needed to store 540,000 tonnes.

y=540,000,000kg * 1000g/kg / 1.3g/cm
y=415,384,615,384 cubic centimeters

That’s a huge volume — about the size of 170 Olympic swimming pools.

From aerial photos, there is no evidence of massive coke storage.

There's also no reports from camp survivors or Allies who liberated or surveilled the area of mass coke storage.

Camp capacity

At it's peak, Auschwitz had 100,000 prisoners.

If there were 850 Jews entering daily, then 850 had to die daily.

y=5127 Jews transported daily ÷ 6 camps total
y=850 Jews per camp arriving daily

If we assume Auschwitz had 8 crematoriums, then each oven has a daily capacity of 12 Jews, or a total daily capacity of 96 Jews.

That means 754 Jews were not cremated, or about 88% of the total daily arrivals.

If it takes 15 minutes to move one Jew from a gas chamber to a open pit for cremation, then it would take 180 hours for one camp guard to do it. 30 guards would take 6 hours.

For 4 years, 30 guards spent 6 hours per day carrying corpses?

If they burnt 754 corpses in open fire pits and not in crematoriums, it will take even more coke due to heat losses. Crematoriums are designed to be fuel and time efficient. We can estimate maybe 200 kgs of coke per body, even more if it were winter, maybe 400 kgs.

This might double the total amount of coke required per day, in space, weight, and delivery requirements.

Why gas chambers?

The tale says that the Nazi officers ordered soldiers to murder Jewish women and children, and when a piece of brain of an innocent Jew splattered onto the face of a German soldier he started to vomit.

The gas chambers were invented to be more humane for the soldiers who were struggling to kill Jews.

It's an odd area to place empathy.

Millions of soldiers were killing eachother on the battle fields.

Winston Churchill ordered his soldiers to firebomb Dresden – dropping more than 4,000 tonnes of bombs on a civilian city.

These soldiers tolerated it.

Bolsheviks in Russia had civilians in slave labour camps, these soldiers tolerated it.

Why was so much empathy placed on these executioners, did the officers who were responsible for making the orders know what they were doing was wrong and upset everyone?

Why was the mental health of these executioners considered more important than any other soldier who was fighting?

Is it really less traumatizing to carry a dead corpse to a fire pit and burn it than to shoot them?

Fingernails in the walls

It's said that as Jews were being gassed to death, they clawed at the walls and left scratch marks.

For a scratch to occur, you need enough force to cause permanent plastic deformation.

A material can only scratch another if it can generate contact stresses exceeding the other material’s yield strength without itself plastically deforming first.

Stress is defined as s=F/A.

The hardness of concrete is often defined as H=3s, where H is can be measured by the Rockwell Hardness test.

Typical values range 0.5-1.5 GPa conservatively, we assume 1 GPa.

Stress (s) is then equal to around 0.33 GPa.

For a finger nail to cause enough stress to exceed the yield strength of concrete, it would need to be able to generate a force greater than 330 MPa.

Is that possible?

If the area of a finger nail is 2cm long by 0.5cm wide, then it follows that the force required is about 33,300 Newtons.

If you weighed 70kg, your standing force is about 700 Newtons.

If we hand wave our calculations, you can see that if you push at a wall with your standing force with a finger nail, then you're still 32,600 Newtons short of scratching the walls of the gas chamber.

Even if we do our best to assume you can push at a wall with the acceleration of 100m/s^2, an order of magnitude greater than gravity, then we're still tens of thousands of Newtons away from the proposed force required.

Survivor stories

The gas chambers weren't the start and the end. According to survivor testimonies there were other methods of torture being used.

The living God theory

Jesus was innocently killed, but his word became law.

The jews were innocently killed, but their history became law.

Should we accept that there are foundations which are so strong they should always maintain the baseline for civilisational contintuaiton?

Or are there circumstances in which we worship a living, changing God. A truth that is not absolute? But is instead adaptive.

If the bible is the knowledge needed to operate as a human (ie 'not go to hell' as defined by "god"), then is there more knowledge that is needed to adapt our civilisation?

Is the narrative of the holocaust adaptive?

Should we never forget, and never forgive?

Conclusion

For six million Jews to have been targetted and killed by Hitler, then the soldiers would have had to have identified and murdered 171 Jews per hour.

If you question how this is possible, or doubt it publically, in many countries you will be arrested and possibly sentenced to prison.

It's quite the horrific event, almost nothing compares to the suffering it invokes psychologically for many people. My childhood self included.