Yad Vashem Fraud

I can understand your concern, and you also need to recognize that many Jewish victims of the German part of the Holocaust alone were not recognized as Jewish victims at the time. 6,000,000 Jewish victims alone is more than likely a significant underestimate of how many Jewish victims there were. There are also unrecognized Jewish victims whom were oppressed in the Soviet Union (including in the Soviet-named “The Doctor’s Plot”) and the Arab & Arabized Middle East (including in the 1929 Hebron Pogrom—which was a pogrom in British- and Arab-occupied Israel—and the 1947 Aleppo Pogrom).

Looking at the comments that people are making in regards to the numbers, here are my thoughts:

1
In a database of over 4 million names, you will have a certain number of errors. If 99% of the information is accurate, then that is a 1% error rate, meaning that 40,000 of the names could have some type of error. "Error" does NOT mean that the person was wrongly included in the list. It may often mean that the birth year was wrong or some other detail is wrong.

2
Many many Jewish communities , especially in Poland, but in Hungary and other places as well, had entire towns and villages full of Jews that were murdered by the nazi thugs, down to the last Jew. This means that there was nobody left to submit a Page of Testimony to Yad Vashem. Most historians estimate that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust exceeded 6.5 million. The mere fact that the Yad Vashem database is not 100% perfect does not speak to this stark and shocking reality of the number of Jews murdered.

3
Over the last 15 years, Father Desbois in Europe has been doing unprecedented work in terms of finding mass graves of murdered Jews that were not even known previously. If one is not familliar with his work, do some research and learn for yourself.

To speak of Yad Vashem "BULKING UP" the numbers is an accusation that , besides making no sense, is an insult to the tragic reality of the Holocaust. People should educate themselves and be careful about about what they write. Finding a few errors does not give one a license to
discredit the careful work of Yad Vashem.

I agree with Nathan that there certainly no basis for disparaging the work of YV, which is has brought a tremendous amount of awareness and is a great tribute to those who perished.

I also agree that the 4,000,000 number must be way off, not only because of the survivors included, but also because of the duplicates. For example, they have hundreds of thousands of names added from the Lodz Ghetto registations. There were multiple registrations over the years of the Ghetto's existance, and obviously, many people were registered more than once. The list includes survivors, and also all of those who perished for whom relatives already submitted pages of testimony. In addition, every time I search a surname, there are numerous results which are clearly duplicated from multiple family members submitting testimony for the same victims.

For those reasons, I find this project to be so groundbreaking. While we may never reach the magnitude of names recorded by YV (who knows?), the names we do have are accurate, crowdchecked, and for the most part not duplicated. There is also the added benefit to seeing the names in the context of places and families. Kudos to all who have contributed so much to this project!