WHAT WAS CLAIMED
More Christians than Jews died at Auschwitz.
OUR VERDICT
False. The majority of those killed at Auschwitz were Jewish.
AAP FACTCHECK - More Christians died at the Auschwitz concentration camp than Jews, according to false claims being shared online.
The claim is based on information within a book published by a convicted Holocaust denier and is not true.
It appears to have originated from a post on X, which has since been widely shared on Facebook.
"According to official death toll records, more Christians died in Auschwitz than Jews," the post's caption reads.
It includes a photo of page 39 of a book titled "Holocaust Encyclopedia".
Highlighted text within the book claims: "If we go strictly by the preserved death certificates, then more Christians (mostly Poles) died at Auschwitz than Jews".
It also features a table claiming the "Death Books of Auschwitz" found 55.4 per cent of victims were Christian and 42.8 per cent were Jewish.
However, historians say the claim is false, notably as official records at the camp only recorded the deaths of prisoners who had been registered at the camp.
Dr Jordana Silverstein, a historian at the University of Melbourne who has written extensively on the Holocaust, said there is "absolutely no truth" to the claim.
"Jews were mostly murdered straight off the trains, before they were registered," Dr Silverstein said.
She said historians and scholars generally agree about one million Jews were killed at Auschwitz, and very few of them would have been officially recorded in camp records.
The Auschwitz museum website states: "The overwhelming majority of victims, mostly Jewish, perished in the gas chambers immediately after arrival, without being entered in the camp records, and without their deaths being noted in the German documents".
The one million estimate has been derived using several sources, including surviving Nazi reports and records; prewar and postwar demographic studies; records created by Jews during and after the war and documentation created by resistance groups and underground activists, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states.
The book used as evidence for the claim, Holocaust Encyclopedia, claims to be about "the biggest propaganda campaign mankind has ever seen".
Its lead author is Germar Rudolf, a convicted Holocaust denier.
It is not to be confused with the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published in 1990, which was edited by Holocaust survivor Israel Gutman, and called "an extraordinarily detailed and complete story of the awful phenomenon" by The New York Times.
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