The Soviets exaggerated it initially because they didn't care. They just wanted to score propaganda points and pretend they weren't committing mass rape as a weapon of terror (or that they had conducted their own wholesale extermination of the Polish intelligentsia). Over time, we've been able to get more accurate measurements on the reality of the mass executions, mostly because the Soviet grip on information was lost and we can actually do a proper analysis of the data.
Besides, the way the allies had to count the initial people killed in the concentration and extermination camps was physical. Yes some extermination camps (like Auschwitz and Dachau) cremated people who had been killed. But there were tons of mass graves anyway. Bodies moved with bulldozers. The Americans dug up tons of mass graves, then re-interred them by counting them. They would dig out lye pits in squares and bury them hundreds to thousands at a time, sometimes stacking pits on top of each other. So you could have a mass grave of 5 thousand at the bottom, then bury it (but not to the top), then start smaller mass graves on top of that, then bury those, then do it again. Three was the highest I found, which suggests these would have been deep pits. The Americans explicitly labeled these pits with the exact counts in each one.
The argument about the number of people killed in the holocaust is becoming more and more about categorization than evidence. Do you count non-jewish Polish or Danish soldiers who were mass executed as part of an ethnic cleansing? In the end, the mass graves and de-populated towns speak for themselves that this is a fucking stunning amount of murder.
Knowing how things work, do you really think the number hasn't been exaggerated at all?
The Soviets exaggerated it initially because they didn't care. They just wanted to score propaganda points and pretend they weren't committing mass rape as a weapon of terror (or that they had conducted their own wholesale extermination of the Polish intelligentsia). Over time, we've been able to get more accurate measurements on the reality of the mass executions, mostly because the Soviet grip on information was lost and we can actually do a proper analysis of the data.
Besides, the way the allies had to count the initial people killed in the concentration and extermination camps was physical. Yes some extermination camps (like Auschwitz and Dachau) cremated people who had been killed. But there were tons of mass graves anyway. Bodies moved with bulldozers. The Americans dug up tons of mass graves, then re-interred them by counting them. They would dig out lye pits in squares and bury them hundreds to thousands at a time, sometimes stacking pits on top of each other. So you could have a mass grave of 5 thousand at the bottom, then bury it (but not to the top), then start smaller mass graves on top of that, then bury those, then do it again. Three was the highest I found, which suggests these would have been deep pits. The Americans explicitly labeled these pits with the exact counts in each one.
The argument about the number of people killed in the holocaust is becoming more and more about categorization than evidence. Do you count non-jewish Polish or Danish soldiers who were mass executed as part of an ethnic cleansing? In the end, the mass graves and de-populated towns speak for themselves that this is a fucking stunning amount of murder.