I have already addressed the gas chamber speculation, ...
Now allow me to address it:
there were no gas chambers. Fred Leuchter, the first man to carry out a forensic investigation of the "gas chambers" at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek concluded from his findings that there was no evidence of hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, or any other lethal gas residue in the alleged "execution sites". In addition, Leuchter noted the facilities themselves were not capable of being utilized for gassing purposes. Leuchter wrote in his report:
"... the author finds no evidence that any of the facilities normally alleged to be execution gas chambers were ever used as such and finds, further, that because of the design and fabrication of these facilities, they could not have been utilized for execution gas chambers."
Zyklon B, the proposed lethal gas used in the "gas chambers", was not found in the "execution sites" investigated by Leuchter. This is especially suspicious because the iron-containing cyanide compound from the Zyklon B is very stable, and should have been easily detected in the investigation if it was truly there. Leuchter's findings were subsequently confirmed in an official report by the Krakow Forensic Institute.
Another interesting aspect of the alleged "gas chambers" is postwar reconstructions. The alleged "gas chamber" at Auschwitz, which has drawn tens of thousands of tourists annually for decades, was found to be a postwar Soviet reconstruction, similar to the alleged "gas chamber" at Dachau. The Soviets, by their Marxist origins, were well-versed in rewriting history; one could say they were experts in these dirty affairs. Add to these gas chamber reconstructions the Soviet inventions, exaggerations, and torture "confessions", and you have on your hands a fable that is hard to swallow.
Finally, there is the infamous Höss confession. Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, "confessed" that Adolf Eichmann told him "at least two and a half million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning," and that "at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million". Years after the war, British military intelligence sergeant Bernard Clarke described how Höss's "confession" was forced out of him through torture by his (Clarke) and five other British soldiers' hands. Höss privately said of his confession:
"Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and half million Jews. I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not."
I have yet to look at any sources for the figures of the victims but a brief perusal of existing sources assures me that the number is between 5 and 7 million for Jews and may be 12 million for all Nazi victims.
Your numbers are inaccurate. The estimate "between five and seven million Jews" is based on the Nuremberg trial figure of four million Auschwitz victims. Today, any reputable historian or scholar would laugh in your face if you said there were four million Auschwitz victims. In 1989, Israeli holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer stated the four million figure for Auschwitz was grossly inflated, and the actual figure was more along the lines of one million. The plaque outside of Auschwitz dropped from four million victims in 1990 and was replaced by a plaque in 1995 which declared one and a half million victims. According to various historians and scholars (Gerald Reitlinger, Jean-Claude Pressac, Fritjof Meyer), the Auschwitz death toll could be as low as 700,000, 630,000, or 500,000 (Jews and non-Jews). In 1945, Auschwitz estimates alone were as high as an unfeasible eight million; it is interesting to note how these figures continue to drop as more evidence is unearthed.
What makes the "between five and seven million Jews" estimation - six million for short - so curious is that it has never changed to suit continuously changing concentration camp death tolls. It is also important to note that Auschwitz-Birkenau is considered one of, if not the most deadly concentration camps of the Second World War; because its figures have undergone significant reductions, one would expect similar from the total estimates. Instead, they have remained unchanged, and have become somewhat of a cult phenomenon; as Norman Finkelstein, whose father is a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, would say, "the Holocaust Industry".
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, by Norman Finkelstein, is a very informative book regarding the critically important differences between the
holocaust and the
Holocaust. I am sure you have heard of it.
Finally, as I have already said, most of the inmates in the concentration camps died from typhus and starvation. Typhus was a very common wartime killer in those days, especially considering the close quarter circumstances of the inmates. During the First World War, typhus was responsible for the deaths of three million Russians alone; this does not take into account all of the Serbs, Austrians, Poles, and so on, who also faced the epidemic. The starvation factor is quite simple: near the end of the war, German supplies were running low, and German supply lines were destroyed by the Allied forces. Unfortunately, these things tend to happen when a large number of people are encamped in a small area: the results are a high number of deaths in a short amount of time.
Think of this not as a debate on the Holocaust, but a pilgrimage of it.
The hotly-contested questions regarding many of the major and controversial aspects of the holocaust in the opening post are much more likely to draw debate than "pilgrimage".
