While the Nazis did not restrict their machinery of mass-slaughter to the murder of Jews, the often-cited statistic that there were five-million “others” killed alongside six-million Jews has no basis in historical fact. This myth, which has circulated since the 1970s, has refused to die, despite the efforts of numerous historians. Ron Kampeas writes:
The problem, according to Yehuda Bauer, [the dean of Israeli historians of the Shoah], who has debunked the number repeatedly in his writings over the decades, is not that non-Jews were not victims; they were. It is that [this] arbitrarily chosen tally of non-Jewish victims diminishes the centrality to the Nazi ideology of systematically wiping any trace of the Jewish people from the planet.
In fact, in Bauer’s opinion, the term “genocide” could accurately be applied to [Polish victims of] the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma, and others should not come under the rubric “Holocaust.” . . . “All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all Russians.”
The number five million adheres to no known understanding of the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis. While as many as 35 million people were killed overall because of Nazi aggression, the number of non-Jews who died in the concentration camps is no more than half a million. Using the eleven-million figure often leads to muddled history. [An article in the] Huffington Post-UK, for instance, lists as a separate class “twins,” as if Josef Mengele, the murderous doctor at Auschwitz, sought out twins of any heritage for his experiments. In fact, they were chosen only from among the Jews and Roma arriving at the camp.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/remember-the-11-million-why-an-inflated-victims-tally-irks-holocaust-historians/