The 100 day period of the Holocaust that was the deadliest in human history

In a “hyperintense” 100 day stretch over a million Jewish people were slaughtered in what was likely the deadliest three months in human history.

Almost a quarter of all the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust were killed during a “hyperintense,” 100-day stretch in 1942 — as many as 15,000 a day for a total of 1.47 million — likely the deadliest three months in human history, according to a new study.

The exceptionally barbaric period from August to October that year fell during the Operation Reinhardt mass-slaughter campaign that began in 1942.

Some 1.7 million Polish Jews perished in the “largest single murder campaign of the Holocaust” from March 1942 to November 1943, mostly in gas chambers in the Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor death camps, according to Prof. Lewi Stone, who is a Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University, and Math Department at RMIT University.

“Apart from very few exceptions, victims who were transported to the death camps were rapidly murdered upon arrival in the gas chambers, thus giving the system perfected by the Nazis all the characteristics of an automated assembly line,” Stone told Newsweek.

The kill rate during Operation Reinhardt has been “poorly quantified in the past,” said Stone, lead author of the study published Wednesday in the science Advances academic journal.

“The Holocaust kill rate is some 10 times higher than estimates suggested by authorities on comparative genocide,” according to the study’s abstract.

Most of the records of the killings were destroyed by the Nazis, said Stone, who based his analysis on German train deportation data to the three death camps compiled in the 1980s by historian Yitzhak Arad, according to the Times of Israel.

The findings show “the Nazis’ focused genocide with the goal of obliterating the entire Jewish people of occupied Poland in as short as time possible, mostly within three months,” Stone told Newsweek.

“That the massacre occurred in such a short time frame, and under complete deception, ensured the Jewish people did not have a chance and made the formation of organised resistance extremely difficult,” he said.

The average death rate of almost 15,000 per day during the “extreme phase of hyperintense killing” — which began after Adolf Hitler ordered a speed-up in operations — is almost three times higher than prior estimates.

Stone argued that the murder rate dropped in November 1942 because “there were relatively few Jews left” in Nazi-occupied Poland, “so the rate of the killing likely subsided because of the difficulty of rounding up victims.”

The shocking study means the three-month period in 1942 had a much higher death rate than the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which has been considered the swiftest killing campaign of the 20th century, with about 800,000 people slain in 100 days.

“Historians, social scientists, policymakers and journalists have consistently relied on inaccurate assessments that greatly underestimated the Holocaust kill rate during Operation Reinhard,” wrote Stone, also a professor at RMIT University in Australia.

“These underestimates have been repeated for nearly two decades without substantial criticism, a pattern that has effectively rewritten the history of the Holocaust in a way that diminishes its historical standing and the scale of human life it encompasses.”

This article originally appeared on The New York Post and was reproduced with permission