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There are two points here:
(1) Okay, suppose we say that the 6 million figure is wrong, and only 1 million Jews (ignoring the Roma, etc.) were killed by the Nazis. They still killed 1 million people, on racist grounds. That's the important part here.
(2) "Don't you care about truth and accuracy"? Yeah, I do. And funny that you should invoke the Kamloops residential school graves, since I'm Catholic. We have our own version of this here in Ireland about mother and baby homes and accusations of mass graves, etc. Now, if they could prove that there were indeed graves of murdered children in Canada or wherever, I would not be nit-picking over "they claimed it was 1,000 graves but it was only 100", I would be angry, ashamed, and looking for heads on pikes. But too often the "querying were the numbers inflated" is not about establishing accurate data, it's to deny anything bad ever happened. No Jews were killed, if any died it was down to natural causes of disease, they were transit camps, the Germans never did anything wrong at all ever.
Which brings me to my conclusion: I don't care. I don't care if it was really 2 million not 6 million. I care that 2 million people were murdered because of their religious/ethnic background, and that is a stain that can never be washed away by any "I calculated the square volume of the claimed number of graves and it is vastly greater than the total acreage of the camp" playing with numbers.
So this is my question to you: why are you asking this question? Is it because you really do want only to calculate a tidy, accurate number - or do you want to say "Hitler and his administration never did anything wrong and the Jews were and are wreckers and fifth columnists"?
1 million dead Jews would be less than Holodomor or dozens of more recent genocides....
Imagine finding out the legitimacy of America's and Israel's moral narratives rested on fewer dead bodies than America's interventions against Iraq or Vietnam.
People have been arrested and imprisoned for questioning the holocaust narrative, lives destroyed... the regime has gone to really fucked up propagandistic ends to protect the post-war order's founding mythology, and I'm someone who doesn't contest the figure.
If you could actually show Hitler killed fewer Jews than Lenin killed Russians 20 years earlier.... Then why the fuck was the US and UK backing the USSR vs. Germany? Both of them invaded Poland. That was a cooperative effort. By rights Britain and France should have declared war on Russia in addition to Germany in '39...
Could it be the great powers motives for the second world war was just as cynical and suspect as the first, and the entire post war order founded on misrepresentations of the war and Churchill's and FDR's motives for killing a generation?
That's the logical conclusion that's been drowned out in national myth-making and the obscene parading of dead jews, gypsies, and other victims...
The Holocaust wasn't even begun until '42, America and Britain justify their war with events that happened after they declared...
But if it became public knowledge the Holocaust was grossly overstated (I doubt it was)... All of a sudden the last unifying pro-regime narrative dies.
There'd suddenly be entire schools of thought arguing Hitler was doing what was necessary to contain genocidal bolshevism... Swastikas would become accepted political kitsch for angsty teens just like hammer and sickles are.
"Rage for the Reich" would start playing sold out shows.
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I doubt there's anything really there in holocaust revisionism... culture shifted fast between 45 and 65...I imagine something would have outed if it was bunk...
But man, to think the question doesn't matter? It sure matters to every grade school and high school history teacher when they preach the good word of how Anne Frank gave her life so that the rest of us might live under US Global Hegemony.
Not anymore - WW2 as whole is fading into background.
See, for example, tally of holocaust movies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films
and you will see that peak holocaust interest was in late 90's- early 00's.
"moral legitimacy" of today's US+allies is based on democracy* and human rights, especially black and LGBTQ+ rights.
US embassies everywhere are flying rainbow flags, not Israeli flags. Big multinational corporations are declaring "Black lives matter", not "Jewish lives matter".
*Unlike Cold War One, "freedom" faded into background too. When was the last time US was talking about "free world", when was the last time US president was called "leader of the free world"?
This is post war justification, way post war. In the actual war time, Nazi propaganda was nothing than "JOO JOO JOO", while Allied (and Soviet) was absolutely silent about Jews.
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