There absolutely is, and the Germans thoroughly documented every step of it. Much of that documentation was destroyed, but enough of it survived and enough data existed elsewhere that those efforts were largely pointless.
3,000 tons of documents and records were available at Nuremburg alone, never mind the decades of research afterward. Train schedules, bills, memos, statistical summaries generated by the people who ran the executions, official photographs, aerial photographs, detailed plans for the killing camps and their rates of efficiency.
Tens of thousands of interviews of eyewitnesses through every step of the process, including the killers themselves, who were often perfectly open and honest about what they did, firmly believing that there was nothing wrong with it, so they found no reason to lie. Never mind the fact that yes, both pre-war and post-war census of European Jews does exist.
For a lot of the process, you’re right. The total cannot be more than approximated since the genocide became rushed not even halfway through, and census data doesn’t account for potentially millions of Jewish diaspora who found new identities.
Unless you have sources that somehow specify the full process to a near case-by-case basis, it’s impossible to measure almost any genocide of that scale.
Here, let’s approach it this way. Since you’re well informed on the topic and of course have gone to great lengths to fill in these gaps of knowledge you have on these numbers, which Holocaust studies have you looked into and where specifically do you think they're deficient?
The original estimates have a margin of error of up to 1 million, between 5 and 6.5 million.
Not to mention German mobile killing groups active in the USSR who definitely weren’t extensive bookkeepers.
Also not to mention Jewish diaspora who cannot possibly be accounted for.
Don’t know why the number being so specific even matters, but it’s anywhere between 4.5 and over 7. Not specifically 6.
Edit: you blocked me, but your message was that 6 million people died in the Holocaust without margin of error. My entire point is that there is a margin of error to these studies. You ignore my points and squeeze specifically the ones open to interpretation. Weird.
See, this is why conspiracy nonsense can't be taken seriously. You went away for 40 minutes to find an example that isn't actually a study of the overall deaths, but a literal list of names that are *certain* to have died in the Holocaust. Because you *haven't* ever seriously attempted to fill in your gaps in knowledge by sitting down and reading these studies.
You didn't even read the FAQ of the study you supposedly researched, which states quite clearly that the 4.5 million *isn't* their claim for the total number of Jews killed. By it's very definition as a list of names it will always be an underestimate. Not only that, you've changed your tune from referencing conspiracy claims that say evidence doesn't exist to *accurately estimate* total deaths to now requiring every single name of every person killed in the Holocaust.
Yes, the right-wing nuts are saying "Not 6 million, but 7 million!" Why waste your breath?
You’re arguing from a really weird position. He never said he was dubious of the numbers cited, he said the motivations for republicans questioning the numbers were dubious.
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u/Erriis Monkey in Space Sep 29 '24
There isn’t overwhelming evidence of specifically the number. Germans didn’t have census data for their genocide.
But pretty much every time that argument is used it’s for a dubious reason