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Notes -
This is just Motte and Bailey reasoning.
Revisionists don’t merely quibble with minor to moderate details of the official account, they claim (typically) that less than a million, certainly fewer than two million, Jews died altogether and that Nazi Germany had no deliberate plan to kill any large number of Jews in an organized way, and those who did die died solely of disease and (unintentional) famine.
Disputing individual accounts is easy. There were at least tens of thousands of people who survived, of course some lied. There are 9/11 survivors who lied about being on a higher floor so that their escape seemed ‘even luckier’ than it actually was. Exaggeration is hardly unusual. But no quibbling with details or individual stories can change the three core facts of the Holocaust:
At least 4 million (largely) CEE Jews vanished during WW2 never to appear again. They didn’t show up in Russia, in Israel, in the West or anywhere else, never contacted friends or family again and so on. The size of Jewish communities in the former Pale was well-documented by both Jewish and secular/Christian sources, eg. the governments of Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia and so on, censuses, statisticians’ estimates and extrapolations from numbers of synagogues and Jewish schools etc.
The death rate for civilian Jews was universally much higher, by an order of magnitude in many countries, than the death rate for gentile civilians, both urban and rural. This means their treatment can’t be explained away by the generic depredations of war upon the peasantry. The fact that almost all the Jews in many affected regions died while the vast majority of gentiles likewise occupied by a hostile foreign power survived suggests ‘special’ treatment that resulted causally in their death.
The leadership of the Nazi government had spent twenty years blaming the Jews for the many severe problems they had with Germany, from hyperinflation and capitalist exploitation to the Bolshevik threat, social and cultural degeneracy and, worst of all, the Treaty of Versailles. They had openly promoted the removal of Jews from all territory under their control since before they achieved absolute power, which they had had for a decade by the point of Wannsee. The war and Allied blockades prevented any voluntary or forced mass deportation beyond Nazi-occupied Europe, which was (as ‘mainstream’ Holocaust historians plainly admit) the longstanding Nazi preference. The war was increasingly going poorly for Germany as of 1943.
None of these are conclusive proof of what exactly happened, but they suggest that 4+ million people under the occupation of an invading power for whom a central shibboleth was hostility towards their ethnic group (and a desire to cleanse their territory of them) died during that very occupation in great disproportion to any other civilian population under the same occupation. The guiding presumption, even without any additional evidence, is logically that the German occupiers killed them or facilitated their deaths in some way.
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