Israel vs Germany: Who Killed More?
In this grim genocide numbers game, Israel doesn't come out looking so good.
People who defend Israel like to play a numbers game. They like to talk about how insulting and absurd it is for people to make comparisons with the Nazi genocide of us Jews. They bring up the six million number and talk about how nothing compares with it. They talk about how what’s happening in Gaza is a drop in the bucket when taken in context. You can hear this argument made all the time by all sorts of defenders of the Israeli-American siege of Gaza. Here’s a quote from something someone wrote on Substack that got some traction:
“…people have no concept of the scale of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a killing machine. Over 10,000 Jews were murdered in a single day, on many days. In one 100 day period 1.5 million Jews were murdered. Jews were lined up and shot into pits or crammed into rooms and gassed. The lucky ones got a shelf to sleep on, a piece of bread and a few months of labor until their bodies gave out. Don’t compare anything to the Holocaust.”
My initial reaction to reading something like this is to think, well…Israel is killing hundreds of people a day, every day, and also horribly disfiguring and crippling as many or more. Lots of people are also dying from disease, infections, malnutrition, and ultimately succumbing to horrible injuries from the constant carpet bombing that Israel is carrying out. Is that nothing? Is this a morality contest for racking up bodies? Does this person think that unless Israel surpasses 10,000 a day or whatever arbitrary figure they come up with, Israel (and they themselves) are in the clear? That unless it is 10,000 a day, they’re not like the Nazis — that they’re moral and right?
But today a secondary thought appeared in my mind. If you are doing comparative accounting of mass slaughter and using the Holocaust as the gold standard for evil, six million doesn’t mean much when talking about the number of people Israel has killed in Gaza. That’s because the sizes of the two political entities being compared — Israel vs Germany — are vastly different. During its genocide, Germany had at least ten times the population that Israel has today. For this numbers morality game to have any meaning, you need to readjust your figures — instead of absolute sums, you need to work with something that gets closer to a per-capita genocide rate.
In our hyper-information age, people are obsessed with numbers. Numbers are everything. Without numbers, things don’t have meaning for many of us. It’s a bit of an unhealthy obsession I think. But since it’s so vital to people, I want work with the numbers a bit to see if we can put things into perspective.
Population of Nazi Germany
When the Nazis started their genocide of the Jews, the population of Germany increased as Germany invaded and annexed neighboring territories — from about 65 million in 1933 to almost 90 million in 1940, which then included Austria, the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Moravia, chunks of Poland, and other territories. Germany’s population increased even more when Germany invaded Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. And if you add in France, the Netherlands, and other countries either occupied by Germany and/or ruled by allies and proxies, that population under Germany’s control can jump really fast to 200 million people. But I don’t want to be accused of exaggeration or get bogged down into counting all the territories — that’s not the purpose what I’m doing here. So let’s give a mid-lowball figure for Germany’s wartime population at 100 million. And yes, we can’t just count ethnic Germans in this. A big part of the Holocaust was carried out in annexed and occupied territories not by Germans directly but with help by local collaborators and proxies. Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians… Many people in these allied/annexed populations weren’t passive but actively helped carry out the genocide.
Victims of Nazi Genocide
For a population of 100 million, Nazi Germany oversaw the murder of 6 million Jews. We can increase the number of victims by adding the murder of Roma and other minorities and give a figure of 7 million for the sake of fairness. I’m going to exclude the German mass murder of Soviet POWs and their own German civilians and other wartime deaths for the sake of clarity and because generally defenders of Israel never add these people to their genocide numbers game.
Population of Israel
I’ll do the maximalist population of Israel, which was about 10.1 million in 2024. . About 2 million of that are Palestinian citizens of Israel. I could take them out for this calculation as they are not engaged in the actions in Gaza, but I’ll keep them in for fairness’ sake, as they are part of Israeli society.
Victims of Israeli Genocide
The number of people murdered in Gaza is not easy to calculate. We do not have the benefit of hindsight like we do with the German case. The official count from Gaza of people who died a violent death is around 50,000. But that’s believed by most experts in the field of mortality to be a serious undercount…and strangely enough this number has barely budged in a year. A recent conservative estimate puts the number of “violent deaths” to be closer to 75,000. That itself is probably an undercount because it does not include the number of people dying from malnutrition and disease, and ultimately succumbing to complications from injuries or existing medical issues. (Many Jews in the Holocaust also died from “natural causes” like malnutrition and disease.) The Lancet estimates that for every documented violent death in a war zone there are four additional indirect deaths. If we follow this formula, that brings us to 375,000 dead. Now this might be too much. I don’t know. It’s a big range and maybe axioms developed in other conflicts can’t be perfectly projected onto Gaza. Who knows. So let’s start with a middle of the road estimate: that Israel has so far killed 100,000 people in Gaza.
Now let’s normalize these numbers to reflect the population differences between Nazi Germany and Israel.
Population of Nazi Germany (which includes some occupied/annexed territories): 100 million.
Population of Israel: 10 million.
The ratio is: 10 to 1.To normalize Israel’s mass murder rates relative to Germany, we have to increase Israel’s by a factor of 10.
100,000 * 10 = 1,000,000
That brings Israel’s relative murder rate in Gaza to 1 million. We can also use this to normalize Nazi Germany’s genocide relative to Israel by dividing 6 million by a factor of 10.
6,000,000 / 10 = 600,000
This means Germany oversaw the murder of only 600,000 Jews, relatively speaking. Maybe this is why Germany is such a staunch supporter of Israel? Israel mass murder in Gaza increases Germany’s normalcy. “We didn’t kill that many Jews, not when you put it in context of what Israel is doing!”
But back to Gaza, the 100,000 number might be a conservative estimate. There could be a lot more people dead in Gaza, given the restriction of food and medical supplies and the horrific injuries sustained by so many people — burns, amputations, sharp wounds. But you see where this is going? People are obsessed with numbers, so it makes sense to dwell on it. Even with a conservative estimate, Israel has killed 1 million people in relative terms when compared to Nazi Germany’s slaughter of the Jews. And I do want to note that if we increase Nazi Germany’s population to include other allies and proxies, we’d get a much bigger relative number to Israel’s population — closer to a 20 to 1. So that would double Israel’s relative genocide rate to 2 million, given even this conservative estimate.
Not sure how anyone can argue that killing one or two million vs six million represents some massive moral difference between Israel and Germany. But I’m sure someone will do just that. Or they’ll call out my accounting as bullshit and propagandistic, or whatever.
But remember, Israel’s war is far from over. The Holocaust ran for about four years. Israel’s cleansing campaign in Gaza has been going for less than two. So Israel’s got plenty of time to catch up to the Holocaust numbers that supporters of Israel love to throw around so much.
Yeah, I know. Truly a grim science we got going here.
—Yasha
Editorial note: This paper has not been peer reviewed. If I got the math or numbers wrong or you got better ideas, do let me know.
I think Japan killed even more people than Germany including members of my family in the Philippines. You don’t see Filipinos or Chinese or Koreans justifying a genocide because of it. Maybe because Japan was bombed by the US and everyone decided karma had taken care of things.
I think the main objection one can make is that because genocides are by definition selective of the targeted outgroups, the Germany/Israel comparison should be made not relative to the whole populations under the authority of each government, but relative to the population of the victimised minorities.
So Israel has killed 5% of the Gaza population by your assumptions (100k out of 2M), whereas Germany killed 50% of the Jews in the territories under its control (6M out of 12M).
Then again, that only 80 years after being on the other end Israeli Jews have already reached a tenth of what Hitler and acolytes did … is a confirmation that they've learned a lesson from History, indeed. Just not the lesson they supposedly wanted everyone else to learn.