A common misconsception that is spread by left wing and even "right wing" media ignorant people is that roughly 4 million jews died at Auschwitz.

Fixed that for you.

However that is a fallacy.

Well done for discovering what historians have said for over fifty years. I mean it. You have taken one step towards being less ignorant.

Auschwitz was not the only extermination camp. And people didn't just die in the extermination camps.

During the period 1933-1945 the Nazis built and operated sometshing of the order of 44,000 concentration camps. Many of those were set up as temporary detention camps lasting just a few months and then shut down. Some lasted for many years. Auschwitz itself was a massive complex of 40 individual camps that lasted from 1939 to 1945.

Only six concentration camp complexes (Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau) were Vernichtungslager ("Extermination Camps"), but that doesn't mean that there were no or few deaths in the other camps.

Most concentration camps were detention camps or work camps, not extermination camps. Never the less, people still died there: beaten to death, worked to death, tortured to death or executed for "infractions" against the camp rules, starved, died of disease and maltreatment. More people died of malicious neglect than deliberate execution.

At least one camp, the Theresienstadt concentration camp, was a Potemkin Village fake, set up with cinemas, swimming pools and sports facilities, for the benefit of the visiting Red Cross. When you hear people talking about how great the concentration camps were, they are either talking specifically about Theresienstadt for that short period while the Red Cross was given access, or a handful of other detention camps holding foreign citizens of countries the Nazis did not want to offend.

Figures accepted by most historians are:

• Auschwitz II-Birkenau: about 1.1 million murdered.
• Treblinka: 700,000 to 900,000 murdered.
• Belzec: 430,000 and 500,000 murdered.
• Sobibor: 170,000 to 250,000 murdered.
• Chełmno: 152,000 - 200,000 murdered.
• Majdanek: 78,000 to 360,000 murdered.

In addition, there were about 1.3 million murdered by mobile gassing and shooting squads in the Soviet Union, approaching a million who died in Polish ghettos, a quarter of million people with disabilities in German euthanasia programs, and many millions more in other work camps and detention camps all over occupied Europe.

Of course none of these figures are exact. We will never know the exact number of people murdered, but we can be sure it wasn't a few, and we can be sure they weren't accidental deaths. The best estimate is around 15 million people murdered or died of intentional neglect in total, not including war deaths or unavoidable civilian deaths.

The gas chambers may be the most horrific of the Nazi extermination program, but it was not even close to the most deadly.