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The baseline assumption for belief, for people who don't know a lot about Holocaust history, is that there is a coherent narrative that makes sense, the historians have consistently agreed on, and the historical evidence has consistently supported.
The problems with this mode of thinking are multiple, but the relevant one here arises when people are asked to evaluate specific parts of the narrative. It becomes a self reinforcing circle. Looking something like: Given that X happened it seems very likely that Y also happened.
Take 3 big Holocaust events that definitely happened. 1, 2, 3. Take one Holocaust event that definitely didn't happen. 4. Say that events 2 and 4 are equally evidenced. Except in the case of 4 there was, by chance, completely exculpatory evidence discovered. Can you still take event 2 as undeniably true?
Both events were equally evidenced. Eyewitness testimony by the hundreds. Both camps were liberated mostly intact. Memoirs written of the horrifying events that unfolded when hundreds of people were crammed into a small chamber to be executed. Infant children trampled under the panicking mass of soon to be slaughtered jews as their mothers wailed in absolute horror. Clawing at the walls, begging for mercy... Except in one case we know for 100% fact that it was all lies conjured up by some guy. Literally just made it all up. Not just that, hundreds of eye witnesses testified jews were being gassed to American investigators. Every single one of them lying.
I have a problem with this. For me, 2 now seems a lot less likely to be true. If 4 was false, but is otherwise exactly the same, the entire catalog of evidence for 2 should now be under serious scrutiny. Eyewitness testimony is no longer enough. You need hard physical evidence because it has been discovered that the bar for evidence that has been set can be met with nothing but lies.
But for people who believe in the narrative, not evidence, they can't do that. 1 happened, 3 happened... What are the odds 2 didn't happen? All the historians agree. All the mainstream. Not even Alex Jones would deny the Holocaust... 2 obviously happened or the Holocaust historians wouldn't say it happened.
I don't know how to better express it. As soon as you find 2 to be within the scope of scrutiny due to the similarity to the standard of evidence used to prove 4, you are a denier. It's no longer 6 million, which it never was. It's no longer 5.2-5.8 million. It's now around 4 million. Congrats. You are a denier. Have fun reasoning with people who, through a reality defying congruence of evidence manage to piece together that every single data point relating to jews from 1900's onwards reinforces the fact that German Nazis killed 6 million of them for ideological reasons between 1939-1945.
It's honestly not worth the effort. You start seeing things. Becoming crazy. Arguing about nothing with people who never looked at any evidence in the first place. The notion never entered their mind. To them it's just a feeling. A self reinforcing circle of things that had to happen.
Well, what's the coherent historical narrative for the deniers that makes sense?
If I go to a place like the CODOH site or its bookstore, all I see is endless debunkings of this-and-that, but I have yet to encounter something like a simple timeline or a summary of what the deniers actually think happened vis-a-vis Nazis and the Jews - ie. what the Nazis actually tried to accomplish, how were the Jews in the occupied or Nazi-aligned areas of Europe moved around during the course of the war, how did we end up with there being millions of Jews in the area of Poland before WW2 and 200 000 after the war, and so on.
The closest is the Sanning book endlessly thrown at any questions of "Where did the Jews go?" and, among the many critiques of the book made by me and others here, one is that its narrative essentially relies on going "Well, a huge amount of them went to Soviet Union and then the Soviets murdered them or something idk ¯_(ツ)_/¯" without the deniers apparently feeling any duty to present basically any concrete evidence to prove this claimed genocide.
If there is such a coherent narrative somewhere that doesn't simply revolve around the mainstream historiography and whatever its claimed errors are, where is it?
There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end.
If you want to presuppose that population estimates for the jewish diaspora in Europe were 100% accurate, and that post war you could accurately estimate exactly where those jews ended up after the war, you are very correct in deducing that those jews had to go somewhere if not counted somewhere. If you then want to conclude that every single jew not accounted for had to have been killed by Germans, go right ahead.
However, if you hold that in contrast with any other similar event in the history of the war, you would conclude that the above standard is insane. The best illustration of this being the post-war German population that was ethnically cleansed from the eastern regions. What are those estimates like? Give or take 2 million. No certainty, no assurances, no grand narrative that holds the truth hostage. Everyone just accepts that available data is extremely bad. No one pretends to know anything.
Now, because the Germans are not a sacred cow beyond reproach, they did a more thorough investigation and found the confirmed number of dead to be closer to 500k. Imagine that. An expulsion of 16 million people, 14 million can be roughly accounted for. Not by name or anything, just by looking at broad population numbers that Germany had. Instead of just blindly counting the missing 2 million as confirmed dead at the hands of evil slavs who hate Germans, they can just not know the answer of where the last 1.5 million went or if they ever were, since they are not bound by a theory of history that is illegal to question.
As a side note: People looking at the ethnic cleansing of Germans post war don't cite anti-German war propaganda from the Soviet Union as proof of hateful intent to lend credence to the notion that these 1.5 million were definitely killed by slavs. I mean, there is no lack of accounts of rape and murder done by Russian soldiers in the occupied areas. There's no lack of intent, as can be seen in speeches and other war propaganda. That's proof of something, right? At least enough to add another 500k, right?... See how insane this looks? Yet somehow the 'convergence of evidence' is, seemingly, the most popular go to excuse for why people here believe in the holocaust.
Do we really know how many Germans died? We don't. And no one loses any sleep over not having a grand theory of exactly what happened. There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end.
So the answer is "the deniers don't have a coherent historical narrative that makes sense"? Considering the manhours of energy spent poring over minutiae in camp construction and witness testimony, one would think that there would be at least one attempt at constructing an overarching history of the Jews in WW2 Europe from a denier perspective, without being tied to just being commentary on the mainstream historiography (which has produced a wealth of such narratives).
At least according to Wikipedia, the official German estimate of the deaths from Eastern European expulsions of Germans is in the ballpark of a bit over 2 million (which has always been the number I've understood to be correct, before this) and the theories that the actual number is around half a million continue to be "challenger" theories. Even so, whichever the number is, we're talking about whether the amount of Germans dying in Central/Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WW2 is around 0,5 % or 2 %, not whether the amount of Jews dying in the same region in 1941-1945 is over a half or in low single digits; the sheer scales of population reduction in certain demographic group are completely different.
There are plenty of 'deniers' who have larger historical narratives about what happened, like David Irving and others. I'm not one of them. I find historical narratives in general to be nonsense. The world, as I've lived in it, doesn't objectively move in easily digested narratives. Sometimes there are things I don't understand. Causal chains of events that are beyond me. But history somehow doesn't have this problem ever. I'm inherently skeptical of history because of this. Same with news media and the like.
I have seen real time how one narrative can make way for another. I mean, do we need to imagine how history according to mainstream news sources looks with regards to someone like Trump? Seems awfully important to recognize who is writing the story.
As for German deaths, this is the article I read They float all the same theories a 'denier' would float relating to jews and how difficult it can be to estimate things.
I agree that the scale is different. But you can't go from that to the mainstream historical holocaust narrative without contradicting the methodology used to ascertain German civilian losses and the inherent skepticism baked into that narrative. Holocaust history has its own standard. On top of that, the Germans have the luxury of not having to deal with the Soviet Union. A regime that has many a time been caught intentionally distorting its demographic data. That in and of itself is a big factor and to that end I find 4 million as opposed to 6 to be very reasonable based on nothing but population estimates.
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