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That claim cannot stand without accepting the story of gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Without it, the claim is non-recoverable:
If you take that away, there is no alternative explanation for where, when, or how the Germans were supposed to have murdered those Jews. You are left with the claimed murder of 3 million people with 0 bodies, 0 documents, 0 physical evidence, 0 witnesses, and 0 theories of how it was supposed to have even happened at all. In other words, it didn't happen. There is no substitute for the gas chamber claim in substantiating the accusations the Nazis "attempted to exterminate all the Jews." They did not, the gas chamber lie is the only thing holding that other lie together. This isn't a rhetorical point. If you admit 3 million people weren't killed in death showers it's an impossible task to explain where, when, and how those 3 million claimed victims were supposed to have been murdered by the Germans.
If the gas chamber story is dropped, the claim the Nazis "attempted to exterminate all the Jews" goes along with it. The dependency of the claim that the Nazis "attempted to exterminate all the Jews" on the gas chamber myth is also due to the fact that:
Lest you think Revisionists are straw manning the mainstream position in that passage, you can read Raul Hilberg's position on how the German plan to exterminate all the Jews supposedly came about:
So there you have it- no plans, no budget, no orders; instead it was "mind-reading" by lower-level officers. This is the mainstream position which has emerged due to the inability of mainstream historians to find any documents substantiating their characterization of German policy in this respect.
On the other hand, there are thousands of documents directly stating that the German policy with respect to the Jews was exactly what Revisionists say it was. Whereas the mainstream has resorted to "mind-reading" in a theory they call gradual radicalization.
The gas chamber myth is the only leg that other claim is standing on.
This is the reason the gas chamber story will never be conceded like so many other myths about Jewish soap and human-skin lampshades have been Revised. And all the claimed gas chambers in the Western-liberated camps were investigated and proven false. It's only the "gas chambers" supposedly found by Soviet-Polish investigators, who banned outside observers from accessing the facilities and investigating the claims, where the death shows are said to exist today.
This was a crucial part of the Aha moment for me: "Ok so the Western Allies liberate the Western camps and immediately claimed finding extermination camps with gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. But then those claims were investigated and proven false. The Soviets liberated the Eastern camps and immediately claimed finding extermination camps with gas chambers disguised as shower rooms and banned outside observers from investigating. Those are where all of the extermination camps are claimed to exist today."
What are the chances of that? Versus the chance that the whole story was wartime atrocity propaganda that got dropped in the Western camps but maintained in the Eastern camps under the auspice of Soviet investigation.
Finally, the gas chamber story is the most important aspect of the Holocaust because it's the single most visceral depiction of the Holocaust that influences mass audiences. Children watching Schindler's List for example and, in school, being shown children gassed inside death showers. If that gets dropped and admitted as a propaganda lie, there's no recovery for the Holocaust narrative as a whole.
What do you think the Einsatzgruppen were for? Or do you dispute their existence, too?
I am amazed that you have extruded so many words and still avoided answering my question. If you don't believe the Nazis murdered those millions of Jews, why wouldn't they? If your claim is "They didn't actually want those Jews dead; slaughtering millions of civilians was too evil even for them, however much they loathed those civilians' race" I would like you to write it plainly. If your claim is "They might have wanted those Jews dead in the abstract, but the logistics were just too hard to figure out and/or they needed them alive for their slave labor so long as the war effort was ongoing even if they wanted them dead in the long term" I would like you to write that plainly. There will be follow-up questions depending on which answer you pick, if either, but unless you do answer plainly - preferably without using the words "gas", "chamber", or "shower" - I am going to lose any remaining faith that you are actually taking this topic seriously.
The Einsatzgruppen was for security behind the front-lines, in particular security from partisans and partisan actions. Jews were heavily involved in the partisan warfare against the Germans and that was extremely harmful for the German war effort. It was part of their self-stated reasoning for concentrating the Jews in camps in the first place.
The Einsatzgruppen likewise received no order for the general extermination of the Jews like you asserted in your original post. The Einsatzgruppen did receive a general extermination order of Soviet Commissars- the infamous Commissar order. But that only contrasts what a real "extermination policy" looks like - i.e. we have documents giving the order, whereas there is no document ordering the extermination of all the Jews because that wasn't real.
Well for one, Jewish labor was crucial for the German war effort. Documents show, including intercepted top-secret communication out of Auschwitz, that the SS camp administration was desperate to reduce the mortality rate in these camps in order to maintain production of crucial supplies.
Secondly, deportation is a much more palatable solution than murder for the public and international bodies. One of the reasons Jews are so resentful against all of Europe is because of how willing the nations of Europe, foremost Poland, were to actually hand over Jews for deportation. Deportation is simply an easier solution than murder and makes it vastly more likely to motivate cooperation among all involved in the effort, including cooperation from Jews themselves. It is well-known that the Nazis collaborated with the Zionists in facilitating the migration of German Jews to Palestine.
Try to imagine the controversy that exists in the United States over the deportation of illegal aliens. Would it make any sense for even the most diehard deportation advocate to say "hey guys, instead of deportation how about we diabolically murder them using an exotic killing method that so happens to resemble ubiquitous delousing procedures."
Obviously no person who actually wanted all the Illegal Aliens in the United States removed would advocate for an extermination camp. Public support and cooperation is hard enough for deportation, throw in an "extermination camp" and it's totally untenable. Illegal Aliens would fight to the death to avoid being deported to an extermination camp, why would you introduce that security risk when you just want them to be gone?
The Israelis know this too.
If you don't believe the Israelis have a plan to exterminate all Palestinians, then why wouldn't they? The answer to that question is the same as the answer to your question. And the irony is that Israel is clearly angling to implement the (real) Nazi Final Solution on the Gazans. And by that I don't mean Israel is planning to lure the Gazans into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. I mean Israel wants to deport them.
But the Holocaust Consensus is the side that claims German policy with respect to the Jews changed radically and essentially overnight switched from "deportation" as the Final Solution to "extermination" (although there's of course no documentary evidence for this at all). The Revisionist side is merely that the "Final Solution" as such was a continuation of the deportation policies. If you want to play the "why wouldn't they" I would ask you instead "why would they?" Why would their longstanding policy radically change from "Deportation" to "Extermination"?
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