Isaac Sibson said:
Whilst the 6 million figure is perhaps an over-estimate
Unfortunately, Isaac, it isn't. While the exact figure will never be known, the fact is that the
Vernichtungslager in Poland (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor) accounted for over 4 million Jews and nearly two million other undesirables and
Untermenschen - Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.
Saddam is correct in that the current buildings at Auschwitz aren't the originals. The Final Solution was carried out with great secrecy - no written records were kept of the Wannsee Conference in late 1941 when the decision for total extermination was taken, the camps were sited out of Germany, deep in Poland, and the SS sought to destroy all evidence by blowing up the camps and their facilities before the Russians arrived.
I'm currently reading Martin Gilbert's "Auschwitz and the Allies", and I'm at the point where the news is starting to leak out. Much of it came from anti-Nazi businessmen with highly placed contacts, and even access to Hitler himself. An enterprise the size of Auschwitz-Birkenau needed the cooperation of German industry (regretfully, industry fell over itself to help), so the design of gas chambers, crematoria, etc. to handle the anticipated volume of, er, traffic had to be optimised, so that the whole thing would work smoothly. By mid-1942, the Jewish World Congress representative in Geneva had put two and two together - the news of special camps in the East and of experiments with poison gas (not specifically of Jews), coupled with a sudden acceleration of the rate of deportation of Jews from the occupied countries. The news was passed to the US and British Governments immediately, but they didn't believe it because they couldn't verify it. It wasn't until the summer of 1944 that the Allies had incontrovertible proof of what was happening in Auschwitz.
P.S. One interesting aspect is how the top Nazis sought to avoid responsibility for anything. Hitler invented for himself the post of
Führer, literally "guide". His idea was to lay down general policies and underlings were invited to "work towards the
Führer". This laid the foundation of a gangster regime, in which factions in the Nazi Party fought each other better to "work towards the
Führer, while
der Führer sat sublimely above it all. Much of the Final Solution was determined by Himmler and his offsider Adolf Eichmann, the Final Solution's time and motion man. Ian Kershaw is especially good on this aspect of the Nazi regime in his magnificent two-volume biography of Hitler.
