How many Jewish victims were killed by Nazi Germany versus collaborators and occupied territories?
Executive summary
Historians agree that approximately six million Jewish people were murdered during the Holocaust, a figure established and memorialized by major institutions including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem [1] [2]. Sources clearly document that roughly 2.7 million Jews were killed in the five Nazi killing centers—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno—yet they do not provide a definitive, source-backed numerical split between victims killed directly by Nazi German forces and those killed by local collaborators or authorities in occupied territories [1] [2].
1. The baseline number: six million Jewish victims and where that figure comes from
The consensus figure of about six million Jewish victims is the foundation of modern Holocaust scholarship and is reflected in institutional records and encyclopedic work compiled by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which documents the toll of Nazi policies and the efforts to calculate victims for legal and historical reasons [1]. Yad Vashem’s collections likewise record millions of names and state that five million of the near-six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices are commemorated in its archives, reiterating both the scale and the joint reference to “Nazis and accomplices” [2].
2. What is precisely documented: the five killing centers and 2.7 million victims
One of the most precisely documented aspects of the genocide are the deportations to and gassing operations at the five major extermination camps; the USHMM’s work aggregates transport records and camp data to estimate that 2.7 million Jewish victims were murdered in those centers alone, a subset of the broader six‑million figure [1]. Those figures derive from surviving Nazi records, transport lists, camp registers and postwar testimony, and are among the most certain death‑toll calculations available [1].
3. The murkier majority: mass shootings, ghettos, camps, and occupied territories
Beyond the killing centers, millions of Jews died in mass shootings, in ghettos from starvation and disease, in forced labor, and in other concentration and transit camps; many of these killings occurred in occupied Soviet territories, Poland, the Baltic states and elsewhere, where responsibility frequently involved both German units (Einsatzgruppen, SS, Ordnungspolizei) and local auxiliary units or state authorities [1] [3]. National breakdowns illustrate scope—Poland lost about three million Jews, the Soviet Union lost over one‑third of its Jewish population, France about 25 percent, Italy 15–20 percent—yet these country figures do not translate into a clean tally separating German-perpetrated murders from collaborator actions [3].
4. Why a clean numerical split between “Nazis” and “collaborators/occupied territories” is not available in the sources
Primary institutional sources collected here make explicit that responsibility was often shared or overlapping: Yad Vashem and the USHMM describe victims as murdered by “Nazis and their accomplices,” and their databases and name‑lists record victims and places but do not systematically allocate each death to a single perpetrator category [2] [4]. The chaos of war, the variety of killing methods, the involvement of local authorities under German direction, and gaps in surviving documentation mean historians can document totals and many local patterns but cannot with confidence produce a single, universally accepted numerical split between killings carried out solely by Nazi Germans and those carried out by collaborators acting independently or alongside occupying forces [1] [4].
5. Alternative framings and the importance of institutional records
Different sources emphasize different aspects: some focus on perpetrator testimony and decision‑making within Nazi institutions to trace direct German responsibility (PBS on perpetrators and victims), while memorial institutions like Yad Vashem and USHMM emphasize name‑by‑name commemoration and country‑level losses, thereby highlighting both central Nazi planning and local manifestations of violence [5] [2] [4]. The available reporting and archives therefore support a firm assertion of overall scale and of the central role of Nazi Germany in planning and executing genocide, while also recognizing extensive collaboration in many local contexts—without producing a definitive numeric partition that assigns each murder to either German or collaborator hands alone [1] [2] [4].