At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, the Allies charged that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz. During a 1979 visit to the camp, Pope John Paul II stood before this memorial and blessed the four million victims. In July 1990, the Polish government's Auschwitz State Museum, along with Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center, conceded that the four million figure was a gross exaggeration, and references to it were accordingly removed from the Auschwitz monument. Israeli and Polish officials announced a tentative revised toll of 1.1 million Auschwitz dead. Professor Mayer acknowledges that the question of how many really died in Auschwitz remains open.
Many questions remain open . . .
We have simply no answers to these questions at this time. While Mayer believes that such chambers did exist at Auschwitz, he points out that most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity. In its Judgment, the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal quoted at length from his testimony to support its findings of extermination. In fact, no such camp ever existed.