The Holocaust's devastation may have ramped up faster than anyone imagined.
With limited data, previous reports have concluded that 6 million Jews were killed throughout the Holocaust. But just how quickly they were murdered has probably been vastly underestimated, a study published Wednesday found.
"Scholars have struggled to estimate death tolls" after retreating German forces destroyed records at the end of World War II, BuzzFeed News says. So for this study, Tel Aviv University biomathematician Lewi Stone looked at railroad records during the Holocaust's deadliest murder campaign. The yearlong Operation Reinhard saw 480 railway deportations from Polish towns, but three months of the campaign were especially deadly. About 1.5 million Jews were killed during just 100 days in 1942, the study shows.
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This new finding reveals a "hyperintense kill rate" during Operation Reinhard, as the study puts it. While previous estimates put the Holocaust kill rate at an astounding 50,000 murders per month, the death rate may have been up to 10 times higher during those three months. That's about double the monthly death rate of 243,300 during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
A University of Bern historian suggested the new study's estimates are too high, saying the entire operation killed 1.32 million people, per BuzzFeed News. Still, seeing as "large-scale murder operations in the last 25 years" were possibly "preventable," the study says understanding the Holocaust and other genocides could be "the most important goal of social science."
Read more at BuzzFeed News, or read the whole study at Science Advances.
