Core Arguments For and Against the Mainstream Account

[Archie]

I agree that things like Euthanaisa and Eugenics were regrettable, however those were a feature of the 1930s, and not a feature of Germany. You do realise that the German eugenics policy was almost entirely an American export, yes? Similarly Euthanaisa has regretably had a much longer shelf life and foot print than National Socialst Germany, so no, you don't have a slam dunk here either. I'm sure there are many books written about the distaste modernity has evolved for Eugenics and Euthanasia across both developed and developing nations, i don't see why you put this at the feet of Revisionists?

I've always found the euthanasia material to undermine the Holocaust story for the simple reason that the evidence for it is so much stronger than for the supposed genocidal extermination program even though the latter is claimed to have been nearly two orders of magnitude larger. And you could make the same point about Einsatzgruppen. When you look at the cherry-picked pro-Holocaust documents, why are they so skewed toward euthanasia and Einsatzgruppen? Because those are the parts of the story that have at least some factual basis (however dilute).

[Churchill]

Broader geography for the Holocaust would be considering regions and countries: histories of the persecution and murder of Jews in the Warthegau, not just histories of Chelmno; histories of the Holocaust in Lithuania, and so on. But also histories of the concentration camp system such as Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL, since the KZs overlapped with the Holocaust. Themes include collective responses (Jewish councils, resistance, self-rescue), bystander responses (often to join in the plunder and killing, other times to help rescue), perpetrator motivation, expropriation and 'Aryanisation', propaganda and ideological antisemitism, among many others. Oh, and Jewish forced labour, of course. Focusing on life as well as destruction, survival as well as murder and death, therefore.

Narrating all of these together is what one finds in standard overviews such as Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination 1939-1945 (2007). There is accordingly less on each theme, including the treatment of the extermination camps, but that is the challenge in summing up any era of history.

Again I don’t see an argument here. Revisionists are not revising the general story of what happened during WWII. One can write a history of Europe in this period and the Holocaust simply does not appear (i.e. the conspicuous absence of this topic by the mainstream after the war trials).
I don’t think anyone disputes Norway was occupied by Germany or that Jews were trafficked around Europe. The mainstream deals with them and insofar as non-controversial issues are not discussed there is no fundamental dispute here.
Its surely self-evident that revisionist books focus on what they are focused on. At least in terms of form, this is no different than Van Pelt’s Case for Auschwitz.

we can consider a history like, Europe since Napoleon by David Thomson...

This tells us nothing, since it's generally accepted that the Holocaust did not move into greater prominence within the Anglo-American mainstream until the 1970s or even later

You say it tells us nothing then implicitly acknowledge the book is a typical example of the Holocaust being non-existent or only vaguely present in mainstream books of the time.
On the contrary, the book tells us a lot precisely because its revisionism is typical.

David Thomson's book in its revised 1966 edition came at a time when social history was taking off, when women's history was about to be established, and when there was the beginnings of more detailed study of the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the first half of the 20th Century. Pretty much none of that is especially conspicuous in his bibliography, which relies on Deutscher for Stalin and Bullock for Hitler. I don't see where he referenced E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) in the revised edition, and he did not use any of the existing overviews on the Holocaust at all (Poliakov 1951, Reitlinger 1956, Hilberg 1961).

I don’t understand what is being argued here.

The book doesn't mention the Armenian genocide at all, even though there is coverage of European colonial empires and WWI, and manages a few references to Armenians as minorities in Russia and Turkey.

Armenia is not in Europe or a European colony.

Israel shows up with a reference to the 1948 war that doesn't mention the flight or expulsion of Palestinians.

Again I don’t understand the relevance. Israel is not in Europe.

41 hits for Jews and 22 for Jewish in 1000 pages, versus 88 for Belgian and 67 for Dutch - bear in mind Belgium contained fewer people than there were Jews in Europe through to the 1940s.

There is no Jewish state in Europe and Jews were minorities within the important European states. They were sizeable minorities in some cases but we’re not talking about universal democracies in most of this time period. None of the above is surprising, again, I don’t know what your contention is here.

So acknowledging the annihilation of the Jews in WWII without providing further details is very consistent with the approach to comparable topics.
The book was outdated as hell even when I encountered it at school in the 1980s, and was clearly inferior to the country-specific studies I needed just to revise for school exams. So it wasn't a textbook or used as such. It was entirely absent from reading lists by the time I got to university, before the end of the Cold War.

The mainstream Holocaust account is of an unprecedented genocide in recent European history, with totally novel murder weapons in the form of extermination camps and mass gassings. The murderous intent, purported scale and its "industrial" methods are the signatures of this modern myth - regardless of whether one believes it is an historical event or not. Its not a comparable topic to anything in European history - especially during the period this book covers. Yet, this totally singular event is basically not discussed in this mainstream work of history at the time.

You acknowledge yourself that this lack of discussion is in fact typical for the time, not particular to this book. There was basically no state or social pressure against historians in this time period writing, what would now be deemed, revisionist history. Surely this must give pause.