Between 1940 and 1945 about 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz. Around 1.1 million of them were murdered there, nine in ten of them Jews. The other victims were mainly Poles, Roma and Sinti, and Soviet prisoners of war, together with prisoners of many other nationalities.
The figures below come from the research of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. They are estimates, rounded to the nearest thousand, because the SS destroyed much of the camp’s documentation and never registered most of the people it murdered.
| Group | Deported to Auschwitz | Murdered at Auschwitz |
|---|---|---|
| Jews | 1,100,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Poles | 140,000–150,000 | 70,000–75,000 |
| Roma and Sinti | 23,000 | 21,000 |
| Soviet prisoners of war | 15,000 | 15,000 |
| Other nationalities | 25,000 | 10,000–15,000 |
| Total | about 1,300,000 | about 1,100,000 |
Source: Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, based on the research of Franciszek Piper.
About 400,000 people were registered as prisoners and given a camp number: roughly 205,000 Jews and 195,000 non-Jews. Everyone else, close to 900,000 people, was never registered. Almost all of them were Jews murdered in the gas chambers on the day they arrived.
Jews: deported from all over Europe
Jews were the largest group of victims by far. Until early 1942 relatively few Jews were held in Auschwitz, mostly Polish Jews arrested together with non-Jewish Polish prisoners. From spring 1942, as Birkenau became a centre of the mass murder of European Jews, trains of Jewish deportees arrived from across occupied and allied Europe. About 197,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 1942, about 270,000 in 1943 and more than 600,000 in 1944.
| Country of origin | Jews deported to Auschwitz |
|---|---|
| Hungary | 430,000 |
| Occupied Poland | 300,000 |
| Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia | 73,000 |
| France | 69,000 |
| Netherlands | 60,000 |
| Greece | 55,000 |
| Belgium | 25,000 |
| Germany and Austria | 23,000 |
| Yugoslavia | 10,000 |
| Italy | 7,500 |
| Norway | 690 |
From July 1942 at the latest, the SS carried out regular selections on arrival. On average only about one in five deportees was chosen for forced labour and registered in the camp. The others, including the elderly, the sick, most mothers with young children and the children themselves, were sent directly to the gas chambers. According to the Memorial, more than 200,000 children and young people were among the victims of Auschwitz.
Those selected for work faced hunger, disease, beatings and exhausting labour, and many did not survive more than a few months. Of 973 Slovak Jews admitted to the camp on 17 April 1942, only 88 were still alive less than four months later.
Poles
Poles were the first prisoners of Auschwitz and the largest group in its first two years. The first mass transport, 728 Polish political prisoners from the prison in Tarnów, arrived on 14 June 1940. Of the nearly 8,000 people registered in 1940, almost all were Poles: members of the resistance, the intelligentsia, clergy, people caught in street round-ups, and later whole families deported from villages in the Zamość region and from Warsaw after the 1944 uprising.
About 140,000–150,000 Poles were deported to Auschwitz. Around half of them, 70,000–75,000 people, died there from starvation, disease, forced labour, beatings and executions, many of them shot at the Death Wall in the courtyard of Block 11.
Roma and Sinti
About 23,000 Roma and Sinti from across Europe were deported to Auschwitz, many of them whole families from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. They were held together in a separate section of Birkenau, the so-called Gypsy family camp, where hunger and epidemics killed thousands.
On the night of 2 August 1944 the SS liquidated the camp. About 1,408 Roma were transferred to Buchenwald, and the remaining 2,897 men, women and children were murdered in the gas chambers. Around 21,000 Roma and Sinti died at Auschwitz. Today 2 August is commemorated as the Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day.
Soviet prisoners of war
About 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war were brought to Auschwitz, most of them in 1941, and almost none survived. In 1941 they were forced to build Birkenau in brutal conditions, and many were starved, shot or worked to death. Soviet prisoners were also among the first victims of poison gas: about 600 of them were killed with Zyklon B in the cellars of Block 11 in early September 1941.
Prisoners of other nationalities
Around 25,000 people of other nationalities were also deported to the camp, among them Czechs, Belarusians, Ukrainians, French, Yugoslavs, Germans and Austrians. Some were political prisoners, others were held as so-called asocials or criminals, as Jehovah’s Witnesses, or as homosexual men. Between 10,000 and 15,000 of them died in Auschwitz.
How do we know the numbers?
Right after the war, the number of victims was greatly overestimated. A Soviet commission that investigated the camp in 1945 calculated the death toll from the capacity of the crematoria and announced a figure of about four million. The camp commandant Rudolf Höss gave a similar number at Nuremberg, but later, while awaiting trial in Poland, admitted that it was greatly inflated.
Historians rejected the crematoria method, because many victims were burned in open pits and the capacity of the furnaces says little about how many people were actually brought to the camp. Instead they counted the transports. For France, transport lists survive; for Greece, railway documents; for Hungary, German and Hungarian records. For Polish Jews, for whom almost no lists exist, researchers used the population figures of the ghettos that were deported to Auschwitz.
In 1990 Franciszek Piper, a historian at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, published the result of this work: about 1.3 million people deported and 1.1 million murdered. Communist censorship had delayed publication of such research for years. Later studies have confirmed his figures, and historians do not expect them to change substantially. The Holocaust deniers who misuse the revision of the old four-million figure ignore one simple fact: the lower number comes from counting the victims one transport at a time.
Names, not only numbers
For most of the victims, no camp record exists. The Jews selected for the gas chambers on arrival were never registered, so their names are known only from deportation lists, family memories and the work of institutions such as Yad Vashem and the Memorial. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial continues to collect the names and stories of the victims, and in Block 27 of Auschwitz I visitors can see the Book of Names prepared by Yad Vashem, listing millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. More about the history of the camp and its liberation in January 1945 can be found in our other articles.
For the wider context of the murder of Europe’s Jews, read our overview of the Holocaust. More about individual groups of victims: Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz and the story of Maksymilian Kolbe.
Frequently asked questions
About 1.1 million of the roughly 1.3 million people deported to the camp.
About 90 percent. Around one million of the 1.1 million victims were Jews.
Hungary. About 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 1944, most of them between May and July. The second largest group came from occupied Poland, about 300,000 people.
Yes. More than 200,000 children and young people were among the victims. Most Jewish children were murdered in the gas chambers on the day they arrived.
The early figure of 4 million was an estimate made in 1945 from the capacity of the crematoria. Historians later counted the actual transports to the camp, which gave about 1.1 million victims.
You can read more about how historians established the number of victims on the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial website.
Plan your visit to the Memorial
Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau in person is the most powerful way to understand its history. We organise guided visits with licensed Memorial educators from Kraków, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna and other cities. See our tours
