I have no interest in Holocaust denial or its opposite. It does bother me that people go to jail for researching it or questioning the provenance of proof, as is the case in Europe. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that should be the criteria; why not let people investigate it to their heart’s content? Let’s say, hypothetically, that only 400,000 Jews were discovered to be eliminated in the camps. I still hew to the argument that Jews were persecuted for being Jews; that’s like persecuting someone for being a woman, or a cripple, or a Muslim for that matter. It is persecuting someone for the concept of their beingness, and that is wrong. The numbers are immaterial. I objected strenuously to the 1400 Gazans killed for what Tom Friedman said was a necessary lesson to teach them not to exist.

Let’s hear what some insiders think of the ‘War on Terror’:

“Mexico squandered three years on wild goose chases, hunting imaginary ‘terrorists’ who were supposed to be convening in Acapulco, sipping margaritas on a beach in Cancun, or plotting to smuggle nuclear or biological weapons from Mexico City. All paranoid nonsense from the nutcases in Bush’s administration,” Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino, the country’s second-most-powerful politician and head of domestic security, argued, shortly before he died in a plane crash. “And during this time, the drug cartels [in northern Mexico] organized, grew and now pose an imminent threat to Mexican civil society.”

1.) At the Nuremburg trials and other trials of the immediate post-war period, many numbers were brought forward by various sources as to the number of victims of the Holocaust in total, or of various partial aspects (like a particular camp.) They generally were guesswork, some of them being much too high, others much too low. The ones you quoted from the Red Cross apparently belong in the latter category. This is not at all unreasonable – only a few months after the end of the war in Europe, which was the most devastating and chaotic in history, without having had access to the camps during the war years, and after hasty Nazi cover-up efforts. Naturally, a systematic outside evaluation of such a colossal event was impossible at this point.
In the several decades since then, a large body of well-researched historiography has emerged, based on tremendous efforts to recover the remaining historical evidence, of which there is plenty. The numbers aren’t set in stone, but the vast majority of researchers places the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust at about 5 to 6 million.

2.) The large majority of those who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau were never registered as camp inmates. Think about it: Of course the SS didn’t bother with registering people who were to be killed right after their arrival in the camp anyway. Individual histories are thus impossible to ascertain from the records that the SS did keep (which principally included only prisoners who were selected to remain alive for working – at least for a while.)

3.) It may be possible that you were given the death toll for the camp Auschwitz I. This was a distinct part of the concentration camp system “Auschwitz” and is not identical to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp. Auschwitz I was a “normal” concentration camp in that its purpose was primarily forced labor and not organized mass murder. Still, there was a death toll of about 70,000 among its prisoners, which coincides with the number you quoted above, so I reckoned you might have been given those numbers.

If anybody has any doubts, I can only urge you to consult one of the many comprehensive works about this topic, starting maybe with the late Raul Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews”. Go ahead and read it with a critical eye, consider its methodology and come to your own conclusions.