The Nazi murder rate during the height of the Holocaust was almost three times higher than previously thought, and only declined because there was "no one left to kill", a disturbing new study has found.

At the regime’s murderous peak, around 15,000 Jews were slaughtered every day in the death camps of German-occupied Poland under Operation Reinhard, or executed and shot in neighbouring regions, new research shows.

Previous estimates suggested that the maximum Holocaust death rate was around 6,000 victims each day at Auschwitz, but evidence of exact figures has proved difficult to find because the killings were covered up by the Nazis.

To determine the true picture, Professor Lewi Stone, of the University of Tel Aviv in Israel, and RMIT University, studied records of the ‘special trains’ used to transport millions of Jews to the three camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in Poland.

After plotting the numbers on graphs over time he found a "three month phase of hyperintense killing" highlighting "the Nazis pure focused goal of obliterating the entire Jewish people of occupied Poland in as short as time possible".