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The element of the story you gloss over is the extensive but not-much-talked about cooperation between the Nazis and Zionists, which is a subject which was discussed in Ron Unz's new article on Israel and the Holocaust earlier this month. In addition to the extensive efforts of the Germans to transfer Jews to Palestine, there existed plans for a post-war Jewish state in multiple forms, including the Madagascar Plan (a plan which Joseph Goebbels still mentioned in his diaries when the Holocaust had supposedly already been decided and implemented). After the Madagascar Plan, there were various plans for resettlement in the Pale of Settlement, newly conquered Russian territory, the Lublin district of occupied Poland, etc.
This is why the gas chamber and alleged extermination program are such important claims in the story. Without those elements, this is a story of a country that brutally collapsed right in the middle of a mass resettlement. Like if Israel decided to concentrate and then resettle all Palestinians out of Israel into Egyptian territory, but then Israel was destroyed and conquered by Iran right as that was happening. And then the Iranians made a bunch of ridiculous claims about death factories using absurd methods of mass murder- i.e. the Israelis turned the Palestinians into bars of soap!
So, the Nazi plans all entailed the creation of a Jewish state after expulsion from the European sphere. Historians though claim that (for some reason) this long-standing policy was replaced with an extermination order (they can't say who, when, where or why such a radical change in policy was decided, and such an order has never been found) using primarily homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
The gas chamber legend and alleged extermination order are the only things that set them apart, which is why those claims are so important to the broader history.
If Israel was in the process of resettling all 5.4m Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and was then invaded by Iran, and when the dust settled it turned out that perhaps 500,000 of those Palestinians survived and were discovered by the Iranian occupiers, the rest having vanished from history never to contact their countless surviving relatives overseas ever again, I think it would be fair to suggest they had died in the war. If it turned out that the Israeli civilian casualty rate was such that only 500,000 out of 9.5m Israelis were killed, it would be reasonable to ask what the Israelis had done to ensure a civilian casualty rate that was 90% for Palestinians but just 5% for Israelis.
Beyond the usual discussions, though, I think there are a few questions you gloss over.
Firstly, most mainstream Holocaust historians accept that Hitler’s initial plan was not to murder all Jews if he could persuade them to leave by other means. They acknowledge Hitler’s deep enmity toward Jews, but they also acknowledge that emigration was obviously the first preference of the Third Reich.
Secondly, you seem to imply that a Jewish Madagascar under Nazi authority would have been (a) capable of hosting the exiled population and (b) something analogous to a Jewish state like Israel. I don’t think either of those are likely. If anything, a Jewish Madagascar would have been - at best - like an occupied West Bank, which you have previously railed against as highly unethical. In reality, given the extremely generous NGO support for the Palestinians, life on Nazi Madagascar would have been much worse.
Thirdly, Hitler wasn’t only concerned by Jews on his territory. Hitler was of the profound belief that all Jews, everywhere, were a threat to his project and to Aryan civilization. Hitler railed against Soviet, American and British Jews long before he was at war with them and indeed long before he was even in power. The argument that ‘it just doesn’t make sense for him to kill them, even if he was hostile to them’ often ignores this fact.
Hitler believed Jews were a great threat to his civilization whether they were within or beyond Germanic lands, and in this context the Holocaust makes more sense for Nazi leadership, since the mere exile of Jewry would not ‘solve’ their Jewish Problem under these circumstances, particularly if those exiled Jews bore a (reasonable, we might say) grudge about all their expropriated land and property and general ill treatment.
And this is the crux of the whole question. If Hitler doesn’t merely hate Jews but considers them eternal enemies of his civilization, then leaving them alive in their own state in Madagascar or in Palestine or elsewhere just doesn’t make sense amid the heightened tension of wartime, unless you think he was such a great guy that he just considered it morally wrong to kill them (but not to do any of the other stuff he unambiguously intended, like ethnically cleansing West Slavs to make way for German settlers and so on).
The revisionist interpretation requires that Hitler - who had no issue killing his political enemies, or indeed even friends, often on spurious or fully false flag charges - chose not to kill the Jews under his total control, despite extreme public hostility toward them for 20+ years, blaming them for almost everything that went wrong in Germany, and considering even their existence in foreign lands a great threat to Aryan civilization, because…he was a nice guy? Because that was a step too far?
The Holocaust would appear to be more congruent with Hitler’s writing, ideology and deeply-held worldview than the absence of the Holocaust. Nowhere does Hitler express any empathy or compassion for the majority of the Jewish population that would suggest he was not content for them to die.
The same could be said for the rhetoric of various Israeli politicians towards the Palestinians.
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Broadly on your side in this sub-exchange, but puzzled how ‘thirdly’ fits with the claim that a Jewish state would have prevented the Holocaust. Palestine was not only well within Germany’s reach, but it was right next to their primary goal in North Africa. If the Germans had taken Egypt and the British had withdrawn to Iraq, it seems like the Palestinian Jews would have been screwed regardless of their relative population share - if Anita Shapira is to be believed, the Yishuv’s plan (such as it was) was to cooperate so as not to give a pretext for reprisals.
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Dunno, Ashkenazi Jews are much better at running a society than Palestinians.
Without extensive imports (which Germany was already short of) of food and fuel the great majority of the settlers wouldn’t have survived the first 24 months, it would have been like Darien or one of the other failed European settlements of Central America. Beyond that time the survivors may have been OK, depending on the level of German meddling.
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If Iran had the grip on the region that Stalin had behind the Iron Curtain, you would not trust any reports coming out of Iran about the state of Palestinian survivors and how many of them were killed by Israel, and how. If Iran refused any international observers or investigators and deployed their own kangaroo courts to place the blame for every single Palestinian death during their brutal conquest of Israel onto Israel, you would not accept that either.
Yes, the Madagascar plan is comparable to the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians to the occupied West Bank, that's my point (with the major exception that Palestinians were indigenous to Palestine and Jews were not indigenous to Europe). So were the plans to concentrate the Jews in the East in the Pale of Settlement/Lublin/Russia which never came to fruition because the Eastern Front and then entire regime collapsed. Those plans are in fact comparable to plans you support for dealing with Palestinians, and to a lesser extent non-European migrants.
It's interesting you call adversarial rhetoric from leaders the "crux of the whole question" rather than the mountain of documents that quite clearly lay out the policy objectives as described by Revisionists... South Africa's submission to the ICC accusing Israel of genocide follows a similar line of argument, under the heading Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others (pp. 59 - 67), i.e. here's a brief sample from those pages:
This is especially interesting because, since no written orders for extermination or mass gas chamber executions have ever been found, the mainstream historical position has heavily relied on vague rhetoric from German leaders and cherry-picking diary vague diary entries to allege a genocidal policy intent in lieu of any orders actually establishing it, like you are doing in your post here. But now that it's Israeli leaders giving the same sort of rhetoric you would hear from Goebbels or Hitler (in many cases worse), I assume you don't think this is evidence of a genocidal intent. But don't tell me these things are not comparable, they absolutely are comparable.
“Genocidal intent” is a largely bullshit term (even if it’s sometimes necessary) outside of the most banal “I will commit genocide” declaration (and even then), just look at how many thing politicians say they’ll do and then don’t.
That said I think, exactly like some of the speeches and diary entries you mention, that some on the extreme right fringe of Israeli politics (not Bibi) have expressed what could become an openness to genocide. And I certainly think there are a substantial number of religious Zionists who don’t particularly care what happens to the Palestinians, or whether they live or died.
But litigating genocidal intent is different than litigating genocide. And yes, I absolutely think that if there’s some geopolitical chaos and 90% of Palestinians on territory controlled by Israel vanish in 4 years Israel should be the prime and obvious suspect in their disappearance. So I’m not, in that sense, disagreeing with you at all.
Edit: And regarding your first point re. the Iranian control example, I agree and am glad you acknowledge that the central question about the whole revisionism debate does revolve around estimates of the prewar and postwar Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe, as I have long argued here.
I don't think it's a bullshit term given that you appealed to it without calling it that in your previous post. Revisionists point to all the documentary evidence that the plan was resettlement and concentration. You point to Hitler's speeches portraying Jews as an enemy to infer a genocidal intent even if you don't call it that. In any case, you are trying to draw a difference between these two cases where we only find more similarities...
Bibi has invoked Biblical prophecy and associated the Palestinians with Amalek:
The revisionism debate does not revolve around population estimates, because that data is fundamentally incomplete and unreliable. The Revisionist case weighs most heavily on the documentary and physical evidence, with population census data being too inconclusive for the question at hand. For what it's worth, the mainstream position does not revolve around estimates of prewar and postwar population estimates either, by far the most important body of evidence is testimony from witnesses which has been picked apart by Revisionists for decades.
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