One-quarter of Nazi Holocaust murders may have happened in just 3 months

A new study of historical German railroad records suggests the Nazi regime murdered more than 1.5 million people—the majority of whom were Polish Jews—during a single 3-month period in 1942, Buzzfeed reports. Although many records were destroyed by Nazis at the end of the war, a biomathematician estimated the regime’s murder rate by examining records of special trains used to deport victims to three major death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. About 25% of the 6 million Jewish Holocaust victims were murdered during a “hyperintense” period during the summer of 1942, in which the kill rate climbed to some 500,000 people per month, the researcher reports today in Science Advances . The rate is higher than previous estimates, which some historians say is evidence of imprecisions in the data set used for the new analysis.

*Clarification, 8 January, 11:50 a.m.: The wording of this item has been changed to clarify who ran the death camps.