Holocaust’s ‘Pulse of Death’ was far worse than previously believed
A quarter of all the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed in roughly 100 days in what is described as a ‘pulse of death’, where Hitler ordered the death camps to step up operations.
The spike of ‘hyper-intense killing’ was far worse than previously believed, new research shows.
Up to 15,000 people were murdered per day – far higher than more recent genocides such as the Rwandan genocide, with 1.47 million people dying between August and October 1942.
The figures are based on train records of Operation Reinhard, showing that the highly coordinated executions using train transports and gas chambers killed about 10 times more than is commonly believed.
The death rate dropped thereafter simply because there were far fewer Jews left to kill, says mathematician Lewi Stone from Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Stone says, ‘Even though the Holocaust is one of the best documented genocides in a historical sense, there is surprisingly little quantitative data available.
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‘The Reichsbahn railway network was a critical component of the Nazi’s blueprint for genocide and destruction,’ Stone writes in his new paper.
‘Records of train schedules and movements, fragmentary as they are, have since become an important source of data used to estimate the spatial and temporal patterns of victims who were shuttled to the death camps.’
‘The Nazis’ extremely efficient extermination machine presumably could have continued to run smoothly for many more months at the kill rates identified here had there been a continuous supply of victims in the GG [Nazi-occupied Poland].
‘Instead, the enormous pulse of death … consumed the large majority of possible Jewish victims. The subsequent rapid plunge in the death rate … simply reflects that there were very few Jewish victims left alive to murder by this stage in the GG.’
