I know that 6 million Jewish people were tragically murdered by the Nazi regime during World War Two. The amount of Jewish victims is not in question for me.

What is in question for me is that I’ve seen the Holocaust be described as specifically referring to the 6 million Jewish people who were killed, but I’ve also seen people say that 17 million people were killed in the Holocaust. If the Holocaust is solely referring to the Jewish victims, then is it appropriate to lump the deaths of other groups like Soviet POWs with the total number of victims?

I also know that I was specifically taught in grade school that the Holocaust killed 6 million Jewish people and 5.1 million other groups of people, but I was eventually called a Holocaust denier for not citing the 17 million number. I would never want to appear like a genocide denier, so I would really just love to know the acceptable way to talk about this subject