There are no longer records of exactly how many victims were murdered in Auschwitz. When the Soviet army advanced towards the camp at the end of 1944, the nazis destroyed a large part of the camp archive. From the number of train transports, it is estimated that around 1.3 million people were murdered there. The four large crematoriums in Auschwitz-Birkenau came into operation only after the holocaust was past its peak. The extermination of Jews began in 1941 and during that year the nazis murdered around 1.1 million people in Eastern Europe. In 1942, they murdered an additional 2.7 million, of which approximately 200,000 were murdered in Auschwitz. In 1943, the year that the Auschwitz crematoriums began to operate, the number of victims dropped to 500,000 (of which 50% were murdered in Auschwitz). At the end of 1943, the SS dismantled a number of big extermination camps (Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka). Auschwitz was the only camp that remained operative for the purpose of receiving and murdering the 'remains' of the Jewish communities in occupied Europe. Between May and July 1944, 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Birkenau and gassed. That was the last and at that point the only remaining large Jewish community in Europe.