Projection is an ugly thing, Dogzilla, especially since you still don't
have a coherent argument.
In case you forgot, you are the one with the burden of proof to say something coherent and relevant which might actually challenge the commonly accepted facts and interpretations of the Holocaust and WWII.
No,
you were the one who raised WWII vis-a-vis the Holocaust. Which led you to start uttering such profundities as 'there was a war going on', a statement which simply wipes out the possibility that some of what was going on was considered to be
war crimes, never mind how those crimes would be perceived, understood and remembered 70 years later by non-Jews as well as Jews.
Nice try at shifting the burden of proof but it's
your job to take into consideration the known facts and state your case.
Past posts of yours indicate you believe that Jews died from collateral damage and other causes which you think can be reduced to 'there was a war going on' and thus handwaved away. The burden of proof is very much on you to outline evidence proving this, rather than expecting everyone else to do your work for you.
It's also up to you to be pretty clear where you are talking about. The Holocaust affected three main groupings of areas, the USSR/Baltic states, Poland and the rest of Europe. Things were different in each of these area-groupings.
For the rest of Europe in particular, your concerns about collateral damage and other causes are basically irrelevant, since Holocaust losses are essentially calculated from documented deportations versus number of returning survivors. Jews who died of old age in France or Germany or Austria are not counted, any more than Jews born in hiding are not counted. The act of deportation was a deliberate one aimed at Jews because they were Jews. A pensioner who died after being deported was just as deliberately killed as if they had been executed in a reprisal. In both cases, one can make the specious argument that they would have died within a year or so anyway, but this would also apply for all other historical death tolls and is thus hardly unique to the Holocaust.
Your other conjecture, that Jews might be executed for 'legitimate' reasons, ignores the universal assessment of Nazi justice as excessively biased, with minor crimes being spun into acts worthy of the death sentence. Non-Jews and Jews suffered from this mania for the guillotine and firing-squad in very large numbers; Jews were given shorter shrift
because they were Jews. There was a racial bias to Nazi practices which extended to their judicial system, the euthanasia program and to their extrajudicial system of terror, i.e. the camps.
Austria gives a good example. There were 46,791 victims of deportations, i.e. Austrian Jews who died after being deported because they were Jews. The total number of Jewish victims of Nazi crimes is 48,767 (taken from Jonny Moser, 'Oesterreich', p.73, in the Benz collection Dimension des Voelkermords. I am discounting Austrian Jews who were deported from other countries to avoid double-counts.).
The difference is 1,976, i.e 96% of the headline figure died because of being deported as Jews.
Of the 1,976 Jewish victims of Nazi crimes who did not die after deportation because they were Jews, 1,578 died after being sent to 'ordinary' KZs, 9 were executed, 18 were murdered, 8 died in prisons on Austrian territory, and 363 were subjected to euthanasia.
Adding the KZ deaths to the deportation deaths, which is perfectly valid since the majority of KZ deaths occurred when the Jews were sent to KZs
because they were Jews, then we reach 99.1% of the death toll. The difference is basically explained by the 363 euthanasia victims, who were selected on a more cursory basis
because they were Jews, and died as victims of a crime carried out in the name of Nazi racial ideology as a whole. The murders were also acts of racial persecution, occurring mainly during Kristallnacht which was an antisemitic pogrom and thus
because they were Jews. The executions were carried out by a biased judicial system that was manifestly prejudiced against Jews as a result of Nazi diktat, frequently converting prison sentences to death sentences
because the convicts were Jews.
Moser highlights on p.70 the fact that in 1945, the Jewish council in Vienna, a rump body which existed to oversee the exempted Jews in mixed marriages that we discussed before, was hit by an air raid, killing 19 Jews. But he doesn't then include them in the figure of 48,767.
Now, by all means repeat this exercise for every country in Europe, stating precisely who died how at what time and show us that Jews really were being killed in large numbers in a race-blind fashion. Don't forget also to compare with the numbers of non-Jewish victims of executions and deportations.
A good starting point can be found
here which incidentally answers many of your questions.
