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Evidence for the Holocaust comes in four main varieties:
Contemporary documents, including a wide variety of "letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches"; Holocaust train schedules and statistical summaries generated by the SS; and photographs, including official photographs, clandestine photographs by survivors, aerial photographs, and film footage of the liberation of the camps. More than 3,000 tons of records were collected for the Nuremberg trials.
Later testimony from tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, including survivors such as Sonderkommandos, who directly witnessed the extermination process; perpetrators such as Nazi leaders, SS guards, and Nazi concentration camp commandants; and local townspeople.[ Moreover, virtually none of the perpetrators put on trial denied the reality of the systematic murder, with the most common excuse (where one was given) being that they were just following orders.
Material evidence in the form of concentration and extermination camps, which still exist with various amounts of the original structure preserved, and thousands of mass graves containing the corpses of Holocaust victims.
Circumstantial evidence: during World War II, the population of Jews in German-occupied Europe was reduced by about six million. About 2.7 million Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kulmhof extermination camp, and the Operation Reinhard camps never to be seen or heard from again.
