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I don’t think the history of the holocaust is any different than any other event in history. Most of it, for the lay public are believed without looking for evidence. Nobody’s out demanding proof of Lincoln actually being shot in Ford’s theater. Or whether Hamilton was shot by Burr in a duel.
For professionals, there are always journals, pictures, and physical evidence to seek, and tbh I’m not sure how closely the public perception of history matches what the average person thinks they know about history. I’m pretty sure large numbers of Eastern European Jews were killed by the Nazis. I’m not sure where the exact number lies, but I’m not sure an exact number matters. I’m also positive that a lot of the post war publicity around the even wasn’t just aimed at “killing people is bad” (which it obviously is) but in creating a founding myth for the new order of NATO and Atlanticist Allies, basically casting ourselves as heroes for fight genocidal maniacs and making the world safe for democracy and freedom. History, any history is complicated.
I does. If one reduces the number of victims to under million and reframes extermination camps into working camps with terrible conditions in which it was easy to get executed and you know they happened to be in the pale of settlement that was the main battlefield of the war - suddenly it ceases to exist as a moral pillar and turns into - nazis are just communist but without scale and ambition ...
Well, yeah, which is why the most hardcore Holocaust deniers typically reframe casualty numbers to 320,000-600,000, they don't stick with 4 million because 4 million would still unambiguously be a deliberate genocide of Jews in particular.
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