The “Other” Victims of WWII

Summary: I recently went to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, and I found misinformation and a lack of information. As a World War II historian and genocide educator, I created a course specifically to teach about the war and the genocides that occurred in a more humanitarian way – not just as statistics. The information available at the museum undercuts America’s own war crimes and primarily focused on the Jewish experience during the genocide, ignoring the “others.”

The National World War II Museum has five buildings on a six-acre campus and most buildings have several floors with multiple exhibits, and there are two theatres. There was an exhibit on the Japanese Internment Camps that America used during the war, and in that exhibit the museum had misinformation on one of their signs.

Japanese Internment Camps

Regretfully, they stated that “over 100,000 Japanese people” were interned in the camps, and while that statistic is technically true, it is not close enough. It was actually about 120,000 Japanese people, so their statistic is off by about 20%, and the placard could have easily replaced that zero with a two.

There were about 127,000 Japanese people living in America at that time, about two-thirds were second or third generation American citizens. Almost 95% of all people of Japanese descent were put into concentration camps. Not to mention that the American military was sent to Latin America to collect over 2,200 Japanese people living there to bring them to the camps in America.

According to the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, the internment camps fit the definition of a genocide, the same way that the Holocaust and napalm bombing do.

Napalm Bombing of Japan

In the exhibits on the atomic bombs and napalm bombs which America dropped on Japan they did not list the number of civilians killed by napalm, and if they did, it was so well hidden that I missed it. The US ran 65 air raids on Tokyo alone in which they dropped napalm, a jellied gasoline which sets water on fire and burns up to 2,190 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,200 degrees Celsius, in addition to the other cities that were firebombed mercilessly.

65 raids on Tokyo resulted in a total of:

• 787,145 homes and buildings destroyed
• and 2,625,279 people displaced

The Deadliest Air Raid in history was March 9-10, 1945, which resulted in:

• Estimated 80,000 – 130,000 dead
• Over 1 Million became homeless overnight
• 25% of the city was demolished overnight
• 42,700 tons of napalm dropped on Japan alone (94,137,386 pounds)
• 180 square miles of 67 cities destroyed completely
• 300,000+ people killed
• 400,000+ injured

In total, 42,700 tons of napalm were dropped on Japan, and 180 square miles of 67 cities were destroyed completely. There are many estimates for the death tolls caused by the napalm, some believe that more than one million people were killed, but the United States Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 333,000 people were killed and 473,000 were wounded.

A placard in the exhibits on the Holocaust in the National WWII Museum, by Dawn-Eve Mertz.

The Holocaust

There were several exhibits and nearly two floors of a building dedicated to the Holocaust, but hardly a mention of the non-Jewish victims. They had some information on the T4 program the Nazis designed to kill disabled people, and a few mentions of the Romani and Sinti people who were persecuted and killed, but very little information overall about the “others.”

This is often done intentionally to create the idea that the Holocaust was a Jewish experience, and that they were the most important victims. Museums with ties to Yad Vashem in Israel propagate the harmful narratives of Holocaust Exceptionalism and Uniqueness – the idea that Jewish suffering is more important and unique than other genocides.

Teaching about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust is certainly important, but it should not undermine other victims or other genocides. The word holocaust has also been weaponized to diminish other genocides. The word is simply a synonym for genocide, but “the Holocaust” mostly refers to the Shoah, or the Jewish Holocaust.

How many deaths did the Nazis actually cause?

The estimates are the most plausible statistics that can be verified.

• 5.1 – 6 million Jewish people
  • 2.9 million Polish Jews
  • 50,000 Jewish Soviet POWs
  • 850,000 – 1.6 million Ukrainian Jews
  • 180,000 German Jews
  • The remaining roughly 1.3 million Jewish people were from the other countries the Nazis invaded, including but not limited to: France, Denmark, The Netherlands, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, etc
• 1 million non-Slavic Polish civilians
• 10.3 – 21.77 million Slavic people
  • 4.5 – 10 million Soviet civilians died from direct violence such as executions and bombing raids
    • Including 3.85 – 4.6 million Ukrainians (including 850,000 – 1.6 million Jews)
  • 4 – 9 million Soviet civilians died from war-related famine or disease
  • 1.8 – 2.77 million Ethnic Poles (Poland was not a Soviet country, just an occupied country)
• 300,000 – 400,000 people were legally sterilized, and an unknown number were illegally sterilized, and many died due to the sterilization surgery because they re-used medical devices without cleaning them and performed surgery without anesthesia or proper medical care
• 200,000 – 300,000 disabled civilians, mostly from Germany and Austria, but also from the countries they invaded
• 250,000 – 500,000 Romani and Sinti
• 100,000 people (mostly men) were arrested for suspected or confirmed homosexuality, about 50,000 sentenced to prison and of those between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to a concentration camp, many thousands died
• 70,000 criminals/asocials, mostly from Germany and Austria, were imprisoned, many thousands died
• 3,000 – 7,114 Catholic clergy members
• 1,700 – 1,900 Jehovah’s Witnesses
• 152 – 259 Jesuits

Be mindful that there are a lot of overlapping statistics, so adding them all together to get a total death toll gets tricky. The fact that those people are often counted for two separate statistics is usually forgotten.

The Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan to exterminate 60 million people in Eastern Europe to make room for the German expansion included Slavs, Jews, and Romani. Romani are sometimes thought of as Slavs (even though their origins are from Asia rather than Eastern Europe), so the deaths of up to half a million Romani people count towards the number of total Slavs killed.

The Holocaust Encyclopedia, a search engine operated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, does not go into detail about the systematic execution of Slavic people.

The Jewish Virtual Library, an American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, barely mentions “7 million” Slavic deaths, and they primarily cite the USHMM and Israeli media outlets as their sources. The 7 million Slavic deaths they refer to is a combination of the Soviet and ethnic Polish civilians who were killed intentionally by the Nazis. There were many millions more who died as a result of bombing, starvation, or disease caused by the war.

The statistic of six million Jewish deaths includes those that were a result of starvation and disease, roughly 800,000 of them, and about 50,000 Jewish Soviet POWs. However, statistics of the “others” do not often include those who died from hunger or disease, or POWs.

As with anything that came out of the Soviet Union, take some of the statistics with a grain of salt as many cannot be proven indefinitely and the Soviets have been known to hide the true scope of their casualties in wars and conflicts to keep appearances up that they were undefeatable, and they were accused of blaming the deaths of some civilians on the Nazis when they in fact did it.

Jewish suffering takes precedence over the “others” in museums.