I saw this in my news feeds, and wondered: how in the world could six million Jews have supposedly died at the hands of the Nazis, when there are only fourteen million of them today, and the world's population has increased over three-fold since the 1930s?

I looked up the modern numbers, and they say that the Jewish population was seventeen million before the war, then eleven after-- perfectly matching that perfect "six million dead" claim. Which still seems dubious-- was over one third of the world's Jewish population even within reach of the Third Reich, much less murdered? I thought there were a lot more Jews on the planet period-- but let's even set that aside.

What about period population and census data? It actually shows that the Jewish population went up slightly during the war. That's not to say that Jews didn't die at the hands of the Nazis-- evidently, about one hundred and thirty six thousand of them did. But just that the Jews elsewhere in the world made up for it in terms of new births.

I've also played with numbers in a spreadsheet in the past. To kill six million people over the four and a half years Auschwitz was open, for example, comes out to nearly three people killed, every single minute of every single hour of every single day, for four and a half years straight. It's possible-- but seems far-fetched to me.

That's still genocide, and that's still a lot of people killed! But the "six million" claim seems implausible to me, and was probably used as an ex post facto justification for the formation of Israel (six million was prophesized in scripture!), when it became apparent that the Israel situation was morphing into somewhat of a disaster.

In general, "The Holocaust" has always struck me as one of those half-truth, half tall tales, like the stories told about "Thanksgiving" or Abraham Lincoln or the evils of the "Gilded Age": there is a kernel of truth in that the events did happen, but the details are all wrong-- meant to tell a common story or parable rather than be historically accurate.