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You assume a certain amount of jews and then assert they have to be accounted for.
You have no grounds to assert anything if the amount of estimated jews is lower than you need it to be. So we are basing our entire belief for the holocaust on the assumption that population estimates. We then grandstand on this premise whenever any specific issue is taken with the holocaust narrative.
The problem here is obvious. You can dismiss every single item of critique without engaging with it. Any attempt to bring a hammer and chisel on the ugly rock of lies that is modern belief in the holocaust gets thwarted away.
What's worse, we're pretending that we hold to a different position than the alleged revisionists. As no claims to a specific amount of jews are made. Instead we afford ourselves the luxury of believing that the number of 'missing' jews just so happens to coincide with the reigning holocaust narrative. If the narrative says numbers go down, our belief in a fixed amount of jews in need of accounting for also goes down. It's a completely onesided standard that leaves one in no place to cast any aspersions on the alleged 'seeds of doubt' being sown by 'revisionists'. Since our belief in the holocaust is completely circular. That is, we start of by believing the holocaust narrative, and then use that belief as proof that it happened.
Besides that, uncertainty is a very common thing in history, especially with regards to numbers and populations, and especially around WW2.
The early 20th century was well after the advent of modernity and modern statistics. There is no reason why estimates of the Jewish population of countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia would be off by a factor of three, five or more, which the most common revisionist theories require. It is the duty of revisionists to account for an alternate theory, either by claiming that the dead Jews never existed or, if they claim that they did exist but were not killed, by showing where they went and what happened to them. If they cannot then, on the basis of means, motive and opportunity and in the absence of an alternate explanation the default hypothesis should be that the Germans were responsible for their death.
I imagine this is an extremely fringe view even among Holocaust revisionists, but I know a few people who deny that the Germans ever intended to exterminate the Jews, because the Germans are just too civilized to commit such barbarism. When pressed about the large number of Jews who went missing during the war, they blame the Russians. Everyone knows they’re bloodthirsty and evil, and we know they committed genocides against other groups. Clearly they must be to blame.
I don’t really find it all that convincing, but it is a view I’ve encountered several times before.
But as Mandalay said, and as revisionists often gleefully claim, there were plenty of Jews in the Soviet military and broader leadership. Would they really have stood by and allowed the large scale extermination of millions of Jews on the basis of race without ever discussing it? That seems unlikely, especially if claims about Jewish solidarity and ethnic identity are true. Before Germany and the USSR turned on each other, Soviet Jews pleaded openly with Stalin to lobby Hitler for better treatment of Jews in the German half of Poland, for example.
Oh, I agree. Like I said, I don’t find it convincing, but it is a few I’ve encountered several times in the wild, always from Americans of German descent. I imagine there is a bit of motivated thinking as a result of their ancestors’ ethnic background.
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Alternative theory to what? The idea that there exists some supernatural synchronicity between a population estimate and the amount of jews killed in the holocaust? That's not a theory, that's just you employing circular reasoning to ignore revisionist arguments.
4 million people did not die at Auschwitz. No one needed to prove where they all went to correct that assessment. The fine folks at the holocaust museums did not need to consult a population estimate from the 1920's before they could say that, no, 1.9 million people did not die in Majdanek, contrary to what Soviet prosecutors maintained during the Nuremburg trials. It was more like 68k. No one knows where those guys went...
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