What genocide took more lives, slavery or the Haloucaust, and are there any other incidents bigger than this?

Question

Between slavery and the Holaucust, which one took more lives? And are there any other genocides in history that were just as horrific as these two?

Answer 1

Yes there are cases bigger than this.

The best site for these sorts of stats is at

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm

Lennin, Stalin, and later Mao used famine as a political weapon, resulting in millions of deaths. Hitler killed about 6,000,000 Jews in the Holocaust, and there were probably another million or two of gays, gypsies, slavs, Poles, and anti-Nazis killed as well.

7,000,000 is the rough figure for Stalin's politically induced famine of the early 30s. Personally I think that is low, Robert Conquest puts the total much higher, but I think he may have included the people Stalin had killed as part of the great purges as well.

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm

http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111famine.html

The famines associated with Mao's "Great Leap Forward" are estimated to have killed between 16,000,000 to 40,000,000 people.

No one is sure exactly how many people perished as a result of the spreading hunger. By comparing the number of deaths that could be expected under normal conditions with the number that occurred during the period of the Great Leap famine, scholars have estimated that somewhere between 16.5 million and 40 million people died before the experiment came to an end in 1961, making the Great Leap famine the largest in world history.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE2.HTM has the following stats

The People's Republic of China: Overview
8,427,000 Victims: The Totalization Period
7,474,000 Victims: Collectivization and "The Great Leap Forward"
10,729,000 Victims: The Great Famine and Retrenchment Period
7,731,000 Victims: The "Cultural Revolution"
874,000 Victims: Liberalization

Some sources estimate that Mao was responsible for up to 70,000,000 deaths in total.

And lets not forge Pol Pot, who took over Cambodia after the US abandoned the nation at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. His Khmer Rouge was ousted from power by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979. But it had already caused the deaths of between 1.5 million and 2 million people, according to Western estimates.

Remember the Nazis took power in 1933 and were crushed in 1945. The Communists had Russia from 1917 till 1990, more or less... and China from 1949 to the present (more or less).

If Hitler had been in power for 70 years he certianly would have killed more people.

Answer 2

Though both are horrible, technically speaking, slavery is not genocide. Slavery is forced labor (either sexual or physical labor).

But over the years, perhaps more people have died as slaves... it's impossible to put a number on it, because it 1) has been around since before written history, 2) is a global thing, 3) still is going on today--even in america.

Answer 3

Yep, as far as records show--the Haloucaust. But who knows how many slaves have been killed.

As far as something worse...Many people believe that abortion is the worst genocide that has ever taken place. The numbers are FAR HIGHER than the Haloucaust. I'm not trying to start a whole other discussion, just responding to what some people believe. You decide.

Answer 4

The Holocaust by far took more lives then slavery.

The only other loss of life that I can think of that might be close (or more) are the total Russian casualties for WW2 which were about 46 million including civilian casualties (which account for about 19m of the 46 total).

Note: Rough total of Jews killed during the Holocaust: 5.7m

Answer 5

Holocaust took more lives of course, since slaves were brought for labor not many wanted them to die...you know what I mean...during Holocaust people were not just killed, but disposed of like unnecessary things.

There was famine or "Stalin's Starvation" in Ukraine during early 1930s which took lives of millions of people simply because food that was grown in Ukraine was taken away from people by force in support of Communist Party.

Answer 6

Genocide and slavery, I must have missed the gas chambers and experimentation part in history.

Answer 7

those two events only weeded out the population, about time for more.....................