WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Red Cross records show fewer than 300,000 Jews died in the Holocaust.
OUR VERDICT
False. The figure relates to death certificates issued following an application from a next of kin for a select number of concentration camps.
AAP FACTCHECK - Red Cross documents do not show that fewer than 300,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust, despite claims on social media.
The claim relates to a document published by the aid organisation which lists the number of death certificates issued following an application by the next of kin. The figure only relates to a select number of concentration camps.
One post includes a cropped version of the 1984 Red Cross document and claims it shows there were only 280,000 deaths across all concentration camps.
Other posts use an earlier version of the same document, dated 1979. It features a lesser figure of 271,301.
The document has also been shared on X with the claim it shows "detailed records of how many people died in concentration camps".
"Let's assume they [the Red Cross] are slightly off," one post reads. "Do you think they were 5.7 million off?"
This is a reference to the widely accepted number of deaths, six million.
Dr Ran Porat, an expert on Jewish history at Monash University, said the document is popular among Holocaust deniers and had been debunked by the Arolsen Archives (International Center on Nazi Persecution).
The organisation explains the genuine document comes from what was called the Special Registry Office in Bad Arolsen, a small town in central Germany.
Set up in 1949, the Special Registry Office was the only body authorised to retrospectively issue death certificates for prisoners killed in Nazi concentration camps.
"Death certificates are issued upon receipt of an application from the next of kin when there is sufficient documentation of the death of the person concerned," the Arolsen Archive explains.
Therefore the document being used in the claim only lists the number of death certificates issued following application by the next of kin, it says.
"The Special Registry Office can only issue death certificates for a fraction of those who were murdered by the National Socialists.
"The figures do not include the millions of Jews murdered in extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or those who died in mass shootings."
A paragraph at the foot of the document reads (translated to English): "The notarization figures of the Special Registry Office do not allow any conclusions to be drawn on the actual number of deaths in the concentration camps."
Historian Sebastian Farre, who has researched the history of the Red Cross and Nazi concentration camp detainees, told AAP FactCheck that revisionist literature selectively used information that suited an agenda.
This was done "without conducting a scientific analysis of the origins of these sources and the context in which they were produced, particularly refusing to compare them with the vast body of information produced by the Red Cross and the documents preserved in Arolsen," he said.
Rather than 300,000, it is commonly accepted that around six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
Professor Farre said that figure was arrived at following thousands of studies, some of them recent, that described the genocide in great detail.
"The figure of 6 million is a compromise that results from the difficulty of accurately quantifying the massacres, but the vast majority of studies provide an estimate between 5 and 7 million," Prof Farre said.
"They particularly rely on the significant contribution of Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, the first edition of which was published in 1961.
"A report on documenting the number of victims of the Holocaust, hosted by the Jewish Virtual Library, acknowledges it is a difficult task because there is no single wartime document that lists how many people were killed by the Nazis," he said.
"That includes the Red Cross document used in the recent claims."
Dr Porat noted there had been a rise in anti-Semitic claims in recent months.
"Specifically, challenging the symbolic number of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust is not new and has been used by Holocaust deniers for decades," Dr Porat said.
AAP FactCheck has previously debunked other false claims about the Holocaust based on Red Cross documents.
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