Core Arguments For and Against the Mainstream Account

[Churchill]

This post is partly for self-clarification and partly as I haven’t seen a similar summary to the below elsewhere. Perhaps someone could point me to a similar presentation if it exists.

I created lists below to summarise key arguments both for and against the mainstream Holocaust account. One could accuse the mainstream historiography of being not sufficiently clear what their presumptions and basic arguments are, in my view revisionists have not always been exemplary in systematically clarifying what ALL the keystone arguments are.

Ideally, one would like to draw up arguments in favour and against that would be agreed upon as valid submissions in advance by both sides as in a formal debate.

There is a blend of direct and indirect arguments.
Note, not every single argument one could think of is presented here. I have attempted to be fair and presented what are the strongest arguments in my view. More arguments against the Holocaust than in favour of it are presented below. However, one could make a plausible argument that it is easier to raise objections than to put forward the positive case. The best positive case would presumably rest on a few simple arguments and as few assumptions possible.


I would be interested in comments and criticisms on this, especially would welcome more core arguments both for and against (in the same format of short summaries without going into great detail).



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Arguments in favour of the Holocaust consensus:


F1. Mainstream academic consensus in favour of the basic story.

F2. Holocaust revisionists often have political cause to deny or minimize the Holocaust and therefore are not neutral, trustworthy analysts.

F3.1 Revisionist accounts require extensive conspiracy to frame Germany (some level of conspiracy in the trials by the Allies and/or by later historians who were presumably fully aware of their deceiving the wider public).

F3.2 The Mainstream account has persisted since the 1940s, globally, and has never been seriously doubted by mainstream academic and other experts across this time over multiple generations.

F2. Confessions by Germans and collaborators of genocidal crimes.

F3. Many witnesses (Jews, Poles, etc) saying there were homicidal gassings.

F4. Discrimination against Jews by National Socialism as a matter of policy, alongside self-confessed dislike and hatred of Jews by Nationalist Socialists and European collaborators.

F5. Disappearance of millions of Jews from Poland, Hungary, Netherlands, Ukraine, etc while in German custody.

F6. There are no large Jewish populations in Eastern Europe since WWII.

F7. “Vergasungskeller” used as a description for alleged gas chamber by Auschwitz construction office.

F8. Many witnesses and documentation (Einsatzgruppen reports, etc) of mass shooting of Jewish civilians.


***********************************************************


Arguments for Scepticism:


S1. No document authorising or planning to genocide Jews (or any document acknowledging such an order) has been discovered.

S2. The Allies occupying Germany, alongside occupied Jews and Poles, had political motivation to accuse Germany of unprecedented crimes; Jews (i.e. presumably not neutral parties to this topic) were overwhelmingly the major creators of Holocaust historiography (Reitlinger, Poliakov, Hilberg, etc) when other mainstream historians were almost totally silent on it (S23 below)

S3.1 The Holocaust requires one to state that war-time Germany was engaged in a secret conspiracy to exterminate millions of Jews in camps - presumably German high officials were foolish enough to believe continental genocide could somehow be kept secret.

S3.2 Western Allies, Jewish groups, ordinary Jews in Europe, the Red Cross, the Vatican, did not act as if an unprecedented crime was being committed in their midst. If such a crime was going on, they would have been well aware of it: their inaction is inexplicable unless one concludes that the occasional accusations of gassings etc, were ultimately not taken seriously by those who promulgated them.

S4. Chaotic, mutually contradictory methods of extermination claimed by the contemporaneous witnesses in the Polish and Jewish underground (death by: electrocution, steam, vacuum, chlorine, exhaust gas, Zyklon B, etc, etc, etc).

S5. Questionable reliability of key eyewitnesses when their accounts are subject to critical examination.

S6. Very poor testimony of witnesses when cross-examined (Vrba, Friedman, etc at Zundel trial).

S7. Highly questionable account of mass burial then later exhumation and open-air cremation of hundreds of thousands of corpses during Operation Reinhard.

S8. The crematoria capacity at Birkenau is not reconcilable with the mainstream account of the total deaths.

S9. Questionable chemical evidence for homicidal gassings at alleged locations.

S10. Extensive medical facilities caring for new born children as well as the sick and elderly at Auschwitz (alleged centre of the genocide) - alongside recreational facilities for the healthy.

S11. Messages from Auschwitz decrypted and intercepted by British intelligence provide no evidence of a genocide campaign.

S12. Germany had shown clear evidence of wishing to deport, not murder, Jews prior to and also during the war, even willing to negotiate with Allies during wartime to expatriate them.

S13. Millions of Holocaust Survivors after the war ( i.e. “The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason: at the end of the war, they were still there.” -Butz)

S14. Highly questionable use of Diesel engines for murder.

S15. Aerial photos of Birkenau do not evidence mass killing and cremations.

S16. Autopsies performed in the West (Dr. Larsen), with not a single autopsy proving a homicidal gassing.

S17. Highly questionable technical feasibility of Birkenau alleged gas chambers functioning as gas chambers (issues of how Zyklon B was actually inserted and how gas was ventilated).

S18. Initial claims made by the Allies of Majdanek and Dachau, etc as “death camps” have been totally revised by the historiography. This mainstream revisionism allows for doubt as to the credibility of the entire story as no rational criteria is given by the mainstream for why some claims are open to fundamental doubt and not others.

S19. Lack of evidence of huge deposits of ash and bone in massive graves required to substantiate mainstream claim of body disposal.

S20. Claimed torture of prisoners in Allied custody, including alleged key witnesses (Hoess, “London Cage”, etc, etc).

S21 Mainstream historiography has been remarkably uninterested in the examination of physical evidence for the Holocaust, including even a routine lack of physically investigating the sites of alleged gassings and graves.

S22. Remarkable lack of mainstream curiosity on the actual details of the killing operations themselves and the scientific and technical aspects of the gas chambers and gas vans.

S23. Astonishing silence from mainstream historians from the 1950s to the 1970s regarding the Holocaust in general.

S24. Holocaust mainstream is reliant on conspiratorial re-interpretation of mundane phenomena such as rail transports, haircuts, showers and pesticide .

S25 The Holocaust mainstream narrative is highly reliant on post-war testimony: an event of this magnitude would not require subsequent court proceedings to prove it happened.

S26. State persecution of Holocaust scepticism in Europe and Canada (that is, in the present post-war era, the topic is simply not treated like any other normal historical event open to rational analysis; it holds a place more akin to a supposed event of mythical or quasi-religious significance. Therefore, the basic assumptions at the heart of the story are to be treated with the utmost scepticism).

[HansHill]

Interesting topic, i'll be sure to check back in to comment on some of these points as the thread develops.

Regarding your question about similar presentations, I would recommend Debating The Holocaust by Thomas Dalton, who summarises the key arguments and actors from each side of the debate.

**edit: No time like the present!**

S4 – suggest expanding to include not only the Polish underground, but also these methods introduced as evidence at Nuremberg

Suggest expanding S20 to address the other legal issues surrounding Nuremberg itself, that is, Judicial Notice and introduction of evidence, the allies being caught red handed attempting to frame the Germans for Katyn warcrimes, members of Justice Jackson’s legal team (James B. Donovan, Calvin A. Behle, and Hugh Daly) all testifying to homicidal gas chambers at Dachau which you note in S18 as since being dropped. Parts of Julius Streicher’s testimony (where he complained on the stand about being tortured were removed from the transcripts).

S.20.1 for Katyn itself being the standard of forensic investigations performed by the Germans showing that high-quality wartime evidence of massacres was indeed possible, and also mentioning the Allies acting in unison to hide Stalin’s warcrimes and obfuscate any neutral investigations into the massacre to further implicate Germany.

Suggest 26.1 re treatment of the topic, it is treated by proponents as having occured a priori and self-evident, even when attempting to debate the issues with Revisionists (example is Prof Green who asserts in his replies to Rudolf that we know gassings took place therefore can eliminate certain scientific hypotheses)

[Archie]

I don't object to the idea and can contribute when I get the chance, but this is more difficult and involved than one might guess. For people who are new to the topic, I think it is a mistake to try to present EVERYTHING. The fire hose approach just doesn't work. It's too much. People can't follow it or remember any of it. If you want to convince people, I think what you want to do is pick some very strong points and really drive those home. The goal should not be to convert people in one go but rather merely to convince them that the revisionist position is worthy of consideration and point them to resources for further investigation.

When I restarted the forum, I made a Beginner's Guide section. It's a work in progress, but the idea is to have some accessible introductory materials available for the newbies. There's some similar stuff on the CODOH homepage. Again, I think for introductory material, digestibility is much more important than comprehensiveness.
https://codohforum.com/viewforum.php?f=9

However, having master list of common arguments, documents, etc could be of use to more seasoned revisionists, especially if there were a way to drill down to specifics. Organizing our material is an ongoing need. The Holocaust Encyclopedia was a step in the right direction and with modern technological tools I think it will get easier and easier to organize, synthesize, and summarize our material.

If I were to try to boil the debate down, I would say there are several key categories of evidence.

1 - Demographics
2 - Wartime Documents (especially captured German documents)
3 - Testimonies
4 - Forensics

This covers most of what gets debated. And then we could throw in a fifth category for everything else

5 - Other (many of these will be indirect or "meta" arguments or philosophical points)

The argument below I think would be an example of an argument from the "other" category. It isn't a direct refutation of the Holocaust but rather an observation that undermines it indirectly. Ron Unz's articles at Unz.com are an interesting example because he uses the indirect approach almost exclusively which I think nicely complements the more direct approaches that revisionists have traditionally used.

S23. Astonishing silence from mainstream historians from the 1950s to the 1970s regarding the Holocaust in general.

In general, I would say that revisionists really hammer the dubious quality of the testimonies and the many forensic problems. The mainstream Holocaust position is that you have to take their word for it that it's true and we aren't allowed to debate it. To the extent they do present evidence for the Holocaust in some incidental way it is mostly testimonial with some demographics and some documents. The anti-revisionist side makes a special effort to try to use documents when possible instead of just using testimonies because they don't want to be vulnerable to the charge of relying too heavily on testimony. The circumstantial demographic argument about missing Jews (often expressed as a demand to prove "where did they go?") is perhaps their favorite argument of all. The anti-revisionists do talk about forensics but they are on the defensive with this. They are really just trying to neutralize revisionist attacks. Both sides use wartimes documents, but obviously the points of focus and the interpretations are very different.

Lastly, I will say that I think revisionists have done a much, much better job of packaging our material than anti-revisionists have. The anti-revisionists have done a curiously bad job of this. I suspect this is by design (whether they realize it or not). They don't have good arguments and so their tactic is to drag the debate out and make it as exhausting and confusing as possible. I have actually been toying with the idea of writing some materials attempting to put forth the best case possible FOR the Holocaust. I think I could do way better than everything out there currently. Why would I do this when I don't believe in the Holocaust? Because I think the anti-revisionist side has really failed to present their case adequately and this leaves us shadowboxing more often than not. See below for discussion of this point.

https://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=33734

See also these collections of best evidence for the Holocaust (not very good, imo)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_ ... _Holocaust

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial

[Archie]

"Arguments in favour of the Holocaust consensus"

I would add

-A variety of documents referring to extermination, annihilation, liquidation, etc (Himmler Posen speech, that one Goebbels diary, etc)
-The euthanasia program is quite important to their case. The euthanasia program was real so this gives them a starting point. And they talk about T-4 personnel being assigned to AR.
-On demographics, they cite the Korherr report and the Hoefle telegram specifically in addition to census figures
-In addition to the Vergasungskeller, we could add Pressac's other "traces," the gas-tight doors and so forth.

[borjastick]

On this matter it is worth noting that life is too short to argue with halfwits and buffoons, some of whom come here, the sort of people who couldn't recognise a crappy argument if you talked them through it step by step. Those who cannot, will not or are intellectually incapable of seeing truth when it is right in front of them. Then we have another group (same people probably) who are directly paid by a certain group or take their lead from the 'struggle' of anti semitism which they feel is their raison d'etre. These are the people who constantly and tirelessly argue irrelevant details and points so as to crush your will to live and make you ask yourself whether head butting a brick wall would be preferable to presenting solid facts to a monkey who will not accept what you are saying.

Sometimes the way to deal with a tantrum from a child in a supermarket is to leave them right there and go off for a coffee or something. They soon realise the target of their lunacy has left the building...

A common trick by these idiots is to ignore your claim or point and continuously make a completely stupid point which is designed simply to take you off into a siding.

Another is to do an 'Eric' which happened a couple of years back with the utterly farcical reasoning that if we cannot prove where they went they must have been killed in the camps. Give me a break, how old are these children?

If the holocaust happened the proof would be everywhere and the discussion would be solely about the scale and depravity of the event and not the minutiae which these bozos try to bog you down with.

They have proved not one jot of the claimed gas chambers and 6m dead because they cannot.

Rise above these people and know that there were no gas chambers, no six million, no shitting out diamonds every day, no Angel of Death and no historical and biblical link between ashkenazi converts and the holy land.

The current nonsense about not being able to show mass deportations into Russia simply reveals that those who make such claims are willfully ignorant of the war, the iron curtain and the shape of Europe post war. They have no intention of recognising the truth about the jews and Hitler because the repercussions today would be catastrophic for the scoundrels who think they are the chosen ones...

[Churchill]

Many thanks for contributions above.

I don't object to the idea and can contribute when I get the chance, but this is more difficult and involved than one might guess. For people who are new to the topic, I think it is a mistake to try to present EVERYTHING. The fire hose approach just doesn't work. It's too much. People can't follow it or remember any of it. If you want to convince people, I think what you want to do is pick some very strong points and really drive those home. The goal should not be to convert people in one go but rather merely to convince them that the revisionist position is worthy of consideration and point them to resources for further investigation.

I don’t disagree re throwing material at people does not work either way. Related to this, an argument such as F4 or S5 is necessarily going to have at least hundreds of sub-sections or sub-arguments if one had a comprehensive document of the core arguments. My goal above is simply summarising key points without giving all details.
I’ll comment in another post further below regarding persuasion generally, particularly on a taboo subject matter like this
[Just noticed the numeration in Arguments For is messed up, not sure if I can edit original post]

This covers most of what gets debated. And then we could throw in a fifth category for everything else

5 - Other (many of these will be indirect or "meta" arguments or philosophical points)

The argument below I think would be an example of an argument from the "other" category. It isn't a direct refutation of the Holocaust but rather an observation that undermines it indirectly. Ron Unz's articles at Unz.com are an interesting example because he uses the indirect approach almost exclusively which I think nicely complements the more direct approaches that revisionists have traditionally used.

I'll also comment on the indirect, meta, arguments later as I believe this topic is a special case where indirect arguments are often more intriguing than physical evidence.

I have actually been toying with the idea of writing some materials attempting to put forth the best case possible FOR the Holocaust. I think I could do way better than everything out there currently.

Could you expand on this and say what you would put forward as the strongest mainstream case?

[Churchill]

This covers most of what gets debated. And then we could throw in a fifth category for everything else

5 - Other (many of these will be indirect or "meta" arguments or philosophical points)

S23. Astonishing silence from mainstream historians from the 1950s to the 1970s regarding the Holocaust in general.

Meta arguments are very strong in this case as they undermine the source of most people’s acceptance in the account - the mainstream consensus itself - while also avoiding extremely technical issues of chemistry, or cremation, etc. that the average person (including actual historians who know the sources) have no sure way of adjudicating and they have reason to distrust people who want to revise the historical record.
It immeasurably easier to determine that contemporaneous people and institutions from 1941-1945 did not act as if the holocaust was happening, or that historians ignored the topic for decades after the war, by reading a few mainstream books on the topic than trying to determine certainties over cremation capacity for example.

None of these more indirect, contextual, arguments in and of itself proves a genocide was or was not taking place. However, this kind of meta evidence typically is not really open to dispute by the mainstream (unlike highly technical matters above) and it requires very convoluted explanations to counter.

In any kind of debate, a Socratic approach of inducing your opponent to doubt their own concepts and assumptions is far superior to throwing extraneous material at them that 1.) They have reason to doubt your motives for bringing up and 2.) They rely on their own sources or assumptions so they they have no way of distancing themselves from them when their problems are pointed out.

[Archie]

[Just noticed the numeration in Arguments For is messed up, not sure if I can edit original post]

Sorry about that but we had some trouble with people abusing the edit function. If the edit window has closed, just do a reply/new post here in the thread with the revised version and say that it's a revision to the OP. I can replace the OP with the revised version.

You might also consider making this into a wiki page.
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=101

[goyim terror alarm]

You could add some logical arguments based on what they claim there. For example: why would the Germans build gas chambers, transport them to camps, manufacture and transport Zyklon B and use it on them, transport coal to burn the bodies, instead of just... killing them on the spot and throwing them in mass graves like every other genocide?

Another thing to keep in mind: EVEN IF all of their nonsense was true (talking about the widely accepted stuff, not the baby shooting range masturbation machines 26 million people turned into soap claims), it wouldn't justify the absolute demonization of Hitler either.
They claim it's worse than anything that's ever happened before because it's... "an industrialization of death" (this is what they told me at school at least, I couldn't quickly find any source stating that right now)? How does this make any sense? I'd argue someone like Pol Pot is worse than even their ridiculous caricature of Hitler, and a contemporary figure like George W. Bush is comparable.

[Archie]

I have actually been toying with the idea of writing some materials attempting to put forth the best case possible FOR the Holocaust. I think I could do way better than everything out there currently.

Could you expand on this and say what you would put forward as the strongest mainstream case?

It wouldn't be anything especially novel. The key would be more in the execution rather than the topics. I would probably discuss the following in some depth.

-Demographics: The official figures show a drop in the Jewish population of 5-6M. If true, this is a good circumstantial argument.

-Einsatzgruppen and Euthanasia (T4 and 14f13): These aspects of it are relatively well documented so I would focus on these.

-Final Solution: Here I think we run into some major problems with orthodoxy but I would do my best to "steel man" it. I would probably synthesize something from some of the better mainstream scholars like Browning. It would need to be a functionalist approach since the intentionalist theories seem to be dead.

-Gas chambers: There are also major problems here, of course. I would need to compile the best testimonies I could find and attempt to neutralize/address the many problematic ones. As far as documents, there are a few like PS-501 on gas vans that could be cited and the Pressac material.

[Stubble]

I have actually been toying with the idea of writing some materials attempting to put forth the best case possible FOR the Holocaust. I think I could do way better than everything out there currently.

Could you expand on this and say what you would put forward as the strongest mainstream case?

It wouldn't be anything especially novel. The key would be more in the execution rather than the topics. I would probably discuss the following in some depth.

-Demographics: The official figures show a drop in the Jewish population of 5-6M. If true, this is a good circumstantial argument.

-Einsatzgruppen and Euthanasia (T4 and 14f13): These aspects of it are relatively well documented so I would focus on these.

-Final Solution: Here I think we run into some major problems with orthodoxy but I would do my best to "steel man" it. I would probably synthesize something from some of the better mainstream scholars like Browning. It would need to be a functionalist approach since the intentionalist theories seem to be dead.

-Gas chambers: There are also major problems here, of course. I would need to compile the best testimonies I could find and attempt to neutralize/address the many problematic ones. As far as documents, there are a few like PS-501 on gas vans that could be cited and the Pressac material.

So you believe ad hoc is the strongest orthodox case? Then why bother with explaining or steel manning the 'final solution'. No need for wannsee to be anything other than what it was, for example.

It is further undermined by the insistence that t4 personnel were chosen specifically because of the experience (they did not use) in execution.

The orthodoxy falls on its face and withers away without a preplanned genocide. So much hinges on it for their argument.

[Archie]

Could you expand on this and say what you would put forward as the strongest mainstream case?

It wouldn't be anything especially novel. The key would be more in the execution rather than the topics. I would probably discuss the following in some depth.

-Demographics: The official figures show a drop in the Jewish population of 5-6M. If true, this is a good circumstantial argument.

-Einsatzgruppen and Euthanasia (T4 and 14f13): These aspects of it are relatively well documented so I would focus on these.

-Final Solution: Here I think we run into some major problems with orthodoxy but I would do my best to "steel man" it. I would probably synthesize something from some of the better mainstream scholars like Browning. It would need to be a functionalist approach since the intentionalist theories seem to be dead.

-Gas chambers: There are also major problems here, of course. I would need to compile the best testimonies I could find and attempt to neutralize/address the many problematic ones. As far as documents, there are a few like PS-501 on gas vans that could be cited and the Pressac material.

So you believe ad hoc is the strongest orthodox case? Then why bother with explaining or steel manning the 'final solution'. No need for wannsee to be anything other than what it was, for example.

It is further undermined by the insistence that t4 personnel were chosen specifically because of the experience (they did not use) in execution.

The orthodoxy falls on its face and withers away without a preplanned genocide. So much hinges on it for their argument.

I agree to a large extent. But I regard the intentionalist theory as already debunked. I don't see much point in bothering with a position that the best mainstream scholars don't believe anymore.

The intentionalist theory is simpler and more intuitive, and it was the original story for a good three decades. But the problem is that there are too many documents that contradict it (Madagascar plan etc), so it has fallen out of favor. There is mainstream scholarship by Browning and others that debunks it pretty convincingly. Hence I think any attempt to salvage the Holocaust thesis will have to be functionalist by necessity.

[Archie]

Here are a few more revisionist arguments.

-Many key aspects of the Holocaust such as the Zyklon, shaving hair, showering, etc had mundane explanations. The Holocaust story asks us to accept a sinister secondary interpretation when it is much more likely that these mundane things have simply been mispresented (for reasons of propaganda, or possibly confusion in some cases).

-The six million figure was promoted prematurely by Zionists before any detailed statistical accounting would have been possible. The Jewish population statistics are often contradictory and not very reliable. Moreover, all post-war statistical estimates were anchored in and conscious of the already established propaganda figure.

-The Birkenau crematoria were designed as ordinary cremation facilities, not as murder facilities. (This argument is a bit involved, but I think it is quite important.) There is nothing about the blueprints that would indicate they were intended to be mass gassing facilities. Moreover, in 1942 when the crematoria were being planned there were plans to expand the camp and there were very high recorded deaths at this time (the camp was placed under quarantine in the summer of 1942 because of a typhus epidemic). The recorded deaths at Auschwitz were considerable (about half of the concentration camp deaths). This more than explains the cremation facilities and fits better than the traditional story that these were conceived as "industrial" extermination facilities with gas chambers.

[Stubble]

It wouldn't be anything especially novel. The key would be more in the execution rather than the topics. I would probably discuss the following in some depth.

-Demographics: The official figures show a drop in the Jewish population of 5-6M. If true, this is a good circumstantial argument.

-Einsatzgruppen and Euthanasia (T4 and 14f13): These aspects of it are relatively well documented so I would focus on these.

-Final Solution: Here I think we run into some major problems with orthodoxy but I would do my best to "steel man" it. I would probably synthesize something from some of the better mainstream scholars like Browning. It would need to be a functionalist approach since the intentionalist theories seem to be dead.

-Gas chambers: There are also major problems here, of course. I would need to compile the best testimonies I could find and attempt to neutralize/address the many problematic ones. As far as documents, there are a few like PS-501 on gas vans that could be cited and the Pressac material.

So you believe ad hoc is the strongest orthodox case? Then why bother with explaining or steel manning the 'final solution'. No need for wannsee to be anything other than what it was, for example.

It is further undermined by the insistence that t4 personnel were chosen specifically because of the experience (they did not use) in execution.

The orthodoxy falls on its face and withers away without a preplanned genocide. So much hinges on it for their argument.

I agree to a large extent. But I regard the intentionalist theory as already debunked. I don't see much point in bothering with a position that the best mainstream scholars don't believe anymore.

The intentionalist theory is simpler and more intuitive, and it was the original story for a good three decades. But the problem is that there are too many documents that contradict it (Madagascar plan etc), so it has fallen out of favor. There is mainstream scholarship by Browning and others that debunks it pretty convincingly. Hence I think any attempt to salvage the Holocaust thesis will have to be functionalist by necessity.

Fair, but even ad hoc falls apart when it should shine the greatest, under the Soviet advance. Instead of killing the internees in the east and folding ss personnel into combat units, the Germans elected to salvation march them into Germany proper.

Waste of manpower and resources for a genocide, eh?

[SanityCheck]

I agree to a large extent. But I regard the intentionalist theory as already debunked. I don't see much point in bothering with a position that the best mainstream scholars don't believe anymore.

The intentionalist theory is simpler and more intuitive, and it was the original story for a good three decades. But the problem is that there are too many documents that contradict it (Madagascar plan etc), so it has fallen out of favor. There is mainstream scholarship by Browning and others that debunks it pretty convincingly. Hence I think any attempt to salvage the Holocaust thesis will have to be functionalist by necessity.

The terms intentionalist and functionalist have been unhelpful since the 1990s and are not really applied anymore. I think they are easily misunderstood or misapplied, since in your remarks you refer to the Madagascar Plan. This was always discussed as a way-station but I doubt that one can say convincingly that early historians were all talking in terms of a firm intention from 1939 or 1940 onwards.

The more tenable claim is that 'intentionalists' emphasised a pre-Barbarossa general order (Breitman argued for this) or emphasised July 1941, which did not stick, and the few self-identified 'intentionalists' then shut up about the origins 30 years ago. Browning was debunking this line in the 1980s but contributing also to the consensus of a decision making process rather than a 'big bang' one off decision applying everywhere.

The Final Solution was not implemented across Europe until July 1942, in the shape that it took with the destinations and camps that were involved. The year prior to this contained various initiatives and some dead ends, but also many potential alternatives at the lowest level of implementation. But implementation is not a political decision, and a political decision should be more general than how it's exactly being implemented.

Therefore nobody is a Broszat-style functionalist anymore, either.