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There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end.
If you want to presuppose that population estimates for the jewish diaspora in Europe were 100% accurate, and that post war you could accurately estimate exactly where those jews ended up after the war, you are very correct in deducing that those jews had to go somewhere if not counted somewhere. If you then want to conclude that every single jew not accounted for had to have been killed by Germans, go right ahead.
However, if you hold that in contrast with any other similar event in the history of the war, you would conclude that the above standard is insane. The best illustration of this being the post-war German population that was ethnically cleansed from the eastern regions. What are those estimates like? Give or take 2 million. No certainty, no assurances, no grand narrative that holds the truth hostage. Everyone just accepts that available data is extremely bad. No one pretends to know anything.
Now, because the Germans are not a sacred cow beyond reproach, they did a more thorough investigation and found the confirmed number of dead to be closer to 500k. Imagine that. An expulsion of 16 million people, 14 million can be roughly accounted for. Not by name or anything, just by looking at broad population numbers that Germany had. Instead of just blindly counting the missing 2 million as confirmed dead at the hands of evil slavs who hate Germans, they can just not know the answer of where the last 1.5 million went or if they ever were, since they are not bound by a theory of history that is illegal to question.
As a side note: People looking at the ethnic cleansing of Germans post war don't cite anti-German war propaganda from the Soviet Union as proof of hateful intent to lend credence to the notion that these 1.5 million were definitely killed by slavs. I mean, there is no lack of accounts of rape and murder done by Russian soldiers in the occupied areas. There's no lack of intent, as can be seen in speeches and other war propaganda. That's proof of something, right? At least enough to add another 500k, right?... See how insane this looks? Yet somehow the 'convergence of evidence' is, seemingly, the most popular go to excuse for why people here believe in the holocaust.
Do we really know how many Germans died? We don't. And no one loses any sleep over not having a grand theory of exactly what happened. There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end.
So the answer is "the deniers don't have a coherent historical narrative that makes sense"? Considering the manhours of energy spent poring over minutiae in camp construction and witness testimony, one would think that there would be at least one attempt at constructing an overarching history of the Jews in WW2 Europe from a denier perspective, without being tied to just being commentary on the mainstream historiography (which has produced a wealth of such narratives).
At least according to Wikipedia, the official German estimate of the deaths from Eastern European expulsions of Germans is in the ballpark of a bit over 2 million (which has always been the number I've understood to be correct, before this) and the theories that the actual number is around half a million continue to be "challenger" theories. Even so, whichever the number is, we're talking about whether the amount of Germans dying in Central/Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WW2 is around 0,5 % or 2 %, not whether the amount of Jews dying in the same region in 1941-1945 is over a half or in low single digits; the sheer scales of population reduction in certain demographic group are completely different.
There are plenty of 'deniers' who have larger historical narratives about what happened, like David Irving and others. I'm not one of them. I find historical narratives in general to be nonsense. The world, as I've lived in it, doesn't objectively move in easily digested narratives. Sometimes there are things I don't understand. Causal chains of events that are beyond me. But history somehow doesn't have this problem ever. I'm inherently skeptical of history because of this. Same with news media and the like.
I have seen real time how one narrative can make way for another. I mean, do we need to imagine how history according to mainstream news sources looks with regards to someone like Trump? Seems awfully important to recognize who is writing the story.
As for German deaths, this is the article I read They float all the same theories a 'denier' would float relating to jews and how difficult it can be to estimate things.
I agree that the scale is different. But you can't go from that to the mainstream historical holocaust narrative without contradicting the methodology used to ascertain German civilian losses and the inherent skepticism baked into that narrative. Holocaust history has its own standard. On top of that, the Germans have the luxury of not having to deal with the Soviet Union. A regime that has many a time been caught intentionally distorting its demographic data. That in and of itself is a big factor and to that end I find 4 million as opposed to 6 to be very reasonable based on nothing but population estimates.
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The proportion of Jews presumed dead/vanished in Eastern Europe (in many cases over 80% or 90%) vastly, vastly exceeds the casualty rate for gentile civilians in the same locations. The occurrence of a targeted genocide is therefore a rational deduction.
And isn’t it interesting that, as you note, 85%+ at least of the Germans you consider survived the war, and the great majority of civilians in occupied Eastern Europe also survived, but 80%+ of Jews disappeared? That alone is enough to consider that something in particular happened to them.
It's enough to recognize that there is a great discrepancy between pre-war population estimates and post-war ones. Asserting that because the discrepancy exists, you therefor know what happened is not rational.
Doubly so for the motive and method of the killer after eyewitness testimony that is relied on to evidence the occurrence has in some cases been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be baseless lies, and in others eyewitness testimony stands as completely unbelievable, as with masturbation machines, German soldiers throwing toddlers into the air for target practice or electric flooring.
I think something bad certainly happened to a lot of jews during this time, but the scale of which is not accurately reflected in mainstream holocaust history and it does not lend itself to much credibility so long as it relies on eyewitness testimony.
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The theory that "in war, shit happens" does not explain why so many more civilians died in Eastern Europe than in, say, France during World War 2, even if you account for the relative durations that those territories were actively being fought over. It also does not explain why specifically Jews, and also Poles and Roma, died in such larger numbers relative to their population sizes compared to members of other ethnicities.
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