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I think that the debate over the historicity of the Holocaust is a good opportunity to discuss the fundamental nature of how we know what we know.
Holocaust deniers are right when they say that most people just accept the mainstream theories without thinking too much about them.
However, in my experience at least, Holocaust deniers are mostly wrong when they depict themselves as open-minded seekers of truth. Again, at least in my experience, most Holocaust deniers believe that it did not happen with just the same sort of religious ardor that they criticize in others.
Holocaust deniers are right that there are various questionable aspects about the mainstream narratives.
However, I am not convinced that they themselves present a more convincing theory. And this is important because, I think, in any major historical event that involved large numbers of people, it will always be possible to pick holes in any given theory.
After any event that involves thousands of people, there will probably be some people afterward who either lie about what happened for personal gain or are genuinely misremembering / hallucinating things because they have mental issues.
However, this does not mean that the event did not happen.
When trying to figure out the truth of something like the Holocaust, I think that we should realize that there is not and probably never will be, barring the invention of time travel, any near-perfect theory that covers all the evidence in a way that makes everyone satisfied.
Given that there is no near-perfect theory, and certainly no perfect theory, the question then is what theory seems to be the most plausible.
For me, what seems more plausible?
The Nazi regime, which openly hated Jews and praised political violence, and which was known for killing even their own former political comrades sometimes (the Night of the Long Knives), actually did wipe out much of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe during the time that they occupied those territories.
The Nazi regime did not. The US and USSR and various European governments cooperated to create a hoax and perpetuate it all through the Cold War, and the various supposed witnesses are largely lying.
To me, #1 seems more plausible.
A similar line of thought can be extended to, for example, the John Kennedy assassination and 9/11. With major modifications, though. For example, it would have taken a much smaller group of people to kill John Kennedy than to kill several million Jews.
I find it much much easier to believe that the "official" story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is wrong than that the Holocaust never happened.
However, the point stands that just because the "official" theory has holes in it does not necessarily mean that any other theory is more plausible. One can pick holes in the other theories too.
Much of the debate over these kinds of historical questions boils down to people picking holes in the other side's theory while ignoring the holes in their own theory.
And unlike at least some people who question the "official" story of John Kennedy's assassination, Holocaust deniers rarely even bother to present a comprehensive alternative theory.
People who think that Oswald did not act alone at least often present some kind of theory to explain what happened. The CIA did it, or the anti-Castro Cubans, or the mafia, or some combination. Most Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, just pick holes in the mainstream theories without actually presenting a comprehensive theory of what they think happened.
As a side note, from what I understand, it did not even really take that many people to kill several million Jews, unless you count all the soldiers whose efforts were necessary to extend Nazis control into Eastern Europe to begin with.
Once the Nazis controlled those territories, the actual effort it would have taken to kill millions of Jews was quite small. A few thousand Einsatzgruppen soldiers, a few thousand camp personnel, and some railroad workers.
Holocaust questioners often argue "why would the Nazis have devoted so much effort to killing all those Jews in the middle of a war". And, even putting aside the fact that wanting to dismantle Jewish power was a major Nazi political aim, that question still makes little sense because the actual effort it would have taken to kill those Jews according to the mainstream theories was quite small.
I have done the math before of looking into necessary use of railroads, material, and soldiers and I figured out that even at the height of the Holocaust, the extermination campaign would have been using maybe about 1-2% of the total German war effort just on the East Front alone.
I do not feel like finding and posting the math right now, but anyone can do it themselves if they want to. For example, look at numbers for how many railroad cars per day it took to supply the German armies on the East Front and then compare them to how many railroad cars per day moving Jews to the camps would have required.
It is not hard for an authoritarian regime to round up and kill huge numbers of mostly unarmed people.
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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