The above illustrates the essentially tendentious nature of the concept of "Holocaust denial". It is defined in such a way as to preclude any questioning of established interpretations of what happened during the Second World War.Denial of those two elements: 1. Intent and planning, and 2. Carrying out that plan, constitutes Holocaust denial.
Only a wilfully blind person would dispute that some millions of European Jews perished during the war while under German control, the majority being actively killed either by shooting (the more common methodology) or by poison-gassing. But it perfectly possible to question whether the German Government ever had a comprehensive extermination plan aimed at all Jews under its control; it is perfectly possible to explain the mass mortality of the Jews without recourse to the postulation of such a plan.
What we can say is that the German Government had a policy of making all of German-dominated Europe "Jew-free" by removing all the Jews living on that territory and sending them somewhere else. The removal of all Jews was called the "Endlösung der Judenfrage in Europa" (the final solution of the Jewish Question in Europe), a term that was used officially since at least 1938; a Foreign Ministry with that title was started in 1938, and on it was found the one surviving copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference.
The policy of a "Jew-free" Europe was to be achieved before the war by emigration ,and after the outbreak of war by forced mass-deportation to locations outside Europe, for which two plans existed, one for deportation to Madagascar, started in 1940, and one for deportation to Siberia, started at the beginning of 1941 and superseding the Madagascar Plan.
Thus, if Britain had agreed to make peace with Germany in 1940, the Madagascar Plan would have been implemented, and the Jews of the part of Europe dominated by Germany (ie west of the Soviet border) would have been resettled on the highlands of Madagascar, an area as pleasant as the highlands of Kenya.
If Germany had defeated the Soviet Union in 1941, it would have compelled the rump Russian state existing to the east of the Urals to take all the Jews of Europe (if they had not already been sent to Madagascar).
German documents, such as Rosenberg's "Braune Mappe", or Stahlecker's letter to Lohse of 8 August 1941, demonstrate conclusively that the German plan was to solve the Jewish Question through expulsion to a destination outside Europe after the expected victory over the Soviet Union and subsequently over Britain. In the meantime, the Soviet Jews were to be ghettoised, and those capable of work were to be used for rural work, such as forestry in the White Sea area or for draining the Prypiat' Marshes. The deportation of non-Soviet Jews into the occupied Soviet areas and subsequently across the Urals was likewise not to commence until after the expected German victory.
The German invaders of the Soviet Union did carry out some large-scale massacres of Soviet Jews, but the purpose was to panic those Jews who had not already fled or been evacuated by the Soviet authorities into packing their bags and fleeing over the Urals. That is precisely what Hitler meant when he said to his cronies in October 1941, "It is a good thing if we are preceded by the terror that we are going to exterminate Jewry".
Why was it a good thing if the advancing German forces were preceded by terror? Because the Jews would run away, leaving the territory "Jew-free", and thereby obviating the need to go to the trouble of ghettoising them.
If the German aim had been physical extermination of the Soviet Jews, a preceding terror that caused the Jews to flee would have been counter-productive, it would not have been a "good thing" as Hitler termed it.
However, the course of events was that Germany did not defeat the Soviet Union, and it was left with millions of Jews on its hands, Jews who were eating scarce food and occupying scarce living space. It was at that point that proposals to kill a segment of the Jewish populations of various locations, generally those that could not be used for labour, began to emerge.
The available German documentation shows that those proposals came originally from local German occupation authorities which were faced with the immediate problem of storing the "warehoused" Jews. For example, Greiser's letter to Himmler of 31 May 1942 shows that it was he who had suggested "special treatment" (A technical term meaning extra-judicial execution with the approval of the RSHA) of 100,000 Jews of Reichsgau Wartheland (about one-third of the Jewish population of that area); Greiser's request led to the establishment of the extermination centre at Kulmhof (Chelmno).
In the case of the ghettoised Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement, the Goebbels diary entry of 27 March 1942 shows that the proposal accepted by the German Government was the "liquidation" of that part of the population assessed as unusable for forced labour, estimated at 60%, and that Globocnik had been appointed to carry out that action. In other words, it was not total extermination, and only the Jews of Poland were affected by the action.
There is no causal relationship between the development of poison-gassing as a killing methodology and the various proposals to drastically reduce the number of "warehoused" Jews in the East; the construction of gas-chambers does not prove the existence of a comprehensive plan to physically exterminate the entire Jewish population under German control.
The historical fact is that the homicidal gassing methodology, both that using CO and that using HCN, were developed for purposes totally unrelated to policy regarding the surplus Jews. The CO gassing methodology was developed initially for "euthanasing" a proportion of the institutionalised population of Germany, in particular those that were unable because of mental illness or grave personality disorders to perform any work in their own support and hence represented an unbearable burden in wartime. The "gas van" using its own exhaust as the killing medium was developed to "euthanase" inmates of mental hospitals in the conquered Soviet territories. That methodology was later applied to "euthanasing" Jews unable to work, but that was an afterthought. It was also used on sick concentration-camp inmates despatched to the Euthanasia centres.
Likewise, the use of the HCN in Zyklon-B for homicidal purposes was initially developed at Auschwitz for the purpose of killing Soviet POWs who had been weeded out of the POW camps as "dangerous Communists" and had been sent to the concentration camps for "Sonderbehandlung". The methodology was then used on sick inmates of Auschwitz camp under Aktion 14f13, which then came to include masses of Jews who arrived at Auschwitz and were immediately or subsequently selected as unfit for labour.
Thus, it is entirely possible to question the existence of a definitive German Government decision for a comprehensive physical extermination of all Jews under German control, without disputing the reality of a million-fold Jewish mortality during the Second World War, including the death of many hundreds of thousands, possibly over one million, in gas-chambers.