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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.
Quite a number (far from the majority, but certainly more than would be expected for an avowed antisemite) Eastern Bloc communists that Stalin put in positions of authority in East Germany, Hungary, Poland Czecheslovakia and Romania immediately after WW2 were Jewish. If Stalin was the kind of person to genocide Jews, he probably wouldn't have done so. Markus Wolf was one of the most important figures in Soviet/East German intelligence for the entire history of the DDR and was Jewish. Again, this doesn't seem like the behavior of someone who would have genocided Jews. Stalin's actions regarding ethnic transfers and his hysteria about the 'doctors' plot' were the product of what one might call an 'HBD mindset', an awareness of group dynamics as a Georgian himself. But he did not display the particular contempt for Jews specifically that Hitler did.
Immigration to Palestine/Israel before and after 1947 was thoroughly recorded. The same is true for immigration to the UK and US. Soviet Jewish communities would have noticed an influx of millions of otherwise unrecorded Jews streaming in during or after WW2; they did not. The Ashkenazi Jewish population of other countries is relatively well documented. There really isn't any good evidence that the Jews who vanished from Poland in WW2 ever reappeared anywhere else.
I don't know that I ever expected to be accused of declaring that my own people have unjust privilege on this board (if anything, it's usually the inverse!) but my point was that Stalin supposedly engaging in a secret genocide of regular Jewish civilians in Eastern Europe - as alleged by some Holocaust revisionists - is pretty ridiculous. The climate in the USSR in the crucial period 1940-1945 (actually well before peak Soviet antisemitism in 1952) wasn't indicative of an environment in which Jews were genocided by the Soviets.
Widespread legal discrimination against poor African Americans didn't occur in the United States in the 1990s, mass incarceration as a result of tough-on-crime policies saw surges in the number of prisoners of all ethnicities in the US). There was absolutely antisemitism in postwar Eastern Europe - I mention elsewhere in this thread Ana Pauker, who was definitely forced out of office (and would have been executed had the big man not died) by Stalin for being Jewish with relatives in Israel, and for allowing Jews to leave Romania as Foreign Minister. There was indeed a well-documented pogrom in Poland in 1946! This was a return to the way things had long been for Jews in the region.
So they vanished, silently assimilating into the gentile population (ironically, as I have argued, this is an excellent argument against ethnic antisemitism), whereupon they were never heard from again. Even as the USSR disintegrated and emigration to Israel provided an escape hatch for the Soviet Jews who had remained aware of their Jewish identity, these people never raised a hand. As religious freedom returned in the postwar Soviet age, they never thought to visit a synagogue or reconnect with the Jewish community their ancestors had been part of for more than 2000 years. In forty years, they forgot they were even Jewish (meanwhile Conversos in the Iberian world took centuries to shed their Jewishness), such that today their children and grandchildren have no idea what they are. It seems unlikely, to say the least.
That, I’m afraid, is precisely my point. Every single one of the examples you cite is extensively documented. An alleged Soviet genocide of Jews is not. And in any case, it’s hard for me to understand what you’re arguing for. Are you suggesting the Soviets killed the Jews or silently (and more effectively than any other state in history) assimilated them? Both are false, but they’re very different accusations.
I don’t claim there was any preferential treatment, only similar treatment to the majority of those other ethnic groups, who were not subject to genocide even if they were subject to persecution.
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