This is getting pretty ridiculous! I was making a benign and completely uncontroversial statement about WWII and all of a sudden I've got the whole hornets' nest over me! What's wrong with you people? If you ask ANY historian on WWII (and no I don't mean David Irving) about the physical evidence for the deliberate, intentional industrial killing of the Jews you will get the same answer: it doesn't exist. The mainstream will say that it doesn't exist because the Nazis successfully managed to destroy all the evidence, all gas chambers, all documents etc. before the allies rolled in. I don't see why I should document this with academic references when this is in no way controversial.
Notice that there is ample physical evidence that a HUGE amount of Jews died in the concentration camps, but as far as I know NOT from gassing or other deliberate industrial killing. Again, this doesn't mean that there was no gas chambers or no gassing, only that the physical evidence for it is absent.
Apparently I have to stand on trial for something you have conjured in your imagination about my views on this subject. Therefore I will make very explicit my views so that there can be no misunderstanding. Were a huge number of innocent Jews rounded up in concentration camps by the Nazis? Yes. Did a huge number of them die? Yes. Were the Nazis responsible for their deaths? Absolutely. Was this evil? Indeed. Are there any circumstances that in any way reduces the evilness or responsibility of the Nazis for these deaths? Absolutely not.
Does it matter whether these Jews were killed in gas chambers or "just" died of starvation, disease or freezing? Not to me. The Nazis are just as evil and responsible in either case. Stalin starved millions of innocent Ukrainians to death in the 1930s and the fact that they died of hunger rather than of a bullet or gas in no way reduces the evilness of Stalin. Quite the contrary.
So, then the million dollar question: were the Jews gassed to death? If I were a prosecutor in the case against the Nazis in a trial, I would prosecute them for killing the Jews, but I would recognize that the lack of evidence would make it hard to convict the Nazis on the account of gassing. This does not mean that the gassing did not take place, only that it would be a gamble in a court of law to try to have them convicted for this.
I find it disturbing that the people who agree with Hitler on 95% of the issue seems to predicate their evaluation of Hitler on whether he gassed the Jews or not. Let's for a second imagine (purely hypothetical, guys, no need for alarm) that new evidence came to light that decisively proved that there were no gas chambers and that the vast majority of jews died from starvation and disease. Would this change your view of the Nazis? Would you then say "oh, since he didn't actually deliberately gas them to death he was not really that bad a guy"? I bloody well hope not!
I believe that the reason the Nazis created such a trauma in the European psyche is because Germany wasn't a third world country filled with illiterates. Germany was the land of philosophers and poets and the book "Mein Kampf" was a massive bestseller in that country. What Europe finds so scary is the fact that it wasn't dumb brutes that embraced Nazism. It was the intellectuals, the university students, the well-educated.
I think that the Nazis provided Europe with a glimpse of an extremely disturbing truth: the Germans were civilized, they were educated, they were socially concerned. They were like the rest of Europe. And it ended up with death and destruction on a massive scale. If that could happen in Germany there is no reason why it couldn't happen in any other European country. It made Europeans ask themselves for a fraction of a second: "are we the baddies?" And that is a very, very good question.
I use to say that a Nazi is nothing other than a really, really, really angry and hateful social democrat. Special circumstances (WWI, a major depression) lead the Germans down the path of Nazism. Up until recently Europe has only seen happy times since WWII. But what if those times are changing? What if we've entered a depression that is equal in size of the 30s? What if Europe all of a sudden is facing many extremely challenging problems simultaneously such as abysmall birth rates, a huge debt crisis, a welfare state in crisis, massive immigration problems, possibly a bit of peak oil and possibly an emerging islamofascism in the Middle East? How will all those fat'n happy social democrats then react and behave? I'm not sure, but I must admit that I really don't want to experience the answer.
