I see Archie has written a best case for Holocaust revision here. It is full of flaws.
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This is because the nature of the evidence is highly interdependent and doubts in one area naturally carry over to everything else. For example, if you conclude that the Auschwitz gas chambers are fake, this will automatically raise questions about the gas chambers at Treblinka and elsewhere. If you conclude that the confession of Rudolf Hoess is false, it automatically raises questions about other supposed confessions.
The evidence for the Holocaust is not interdependent. The evidence of what happened to the Norwegian Jews, is completely separate to the evidence as to what happened to the Greek Jews. Jews all over Europe had very different experiences during WWII. The majority of Danish Jews found shelter in neutral Sweden. French Jews had varying experiences, depending on if they were in occupied or Vichy France. Finnish Jews remained there. Estonia had no Jews left by 1942.
It is also wrong to claim that if one gas chamber is concluded to be fake, then they all should be doubted. Claims about gassings at Bergen-Belsen, were fake. There are doubts about the Dachau gas chambers. That does not mean the well evidenced gas chambers in Birkenau or the AR camps, should be automatically doubted. Likewise, concluding one testimony is false, is not a reason to doubt them all.
Archie makes that false argument, because Holocaust so-called revisionism, is all about created doubt, that is used to justify denying many of the key events, in particular, the use of gas chambers to mass murder.
The ideals of the revisionist school are not really so different from what is professed by most modern professional historians. And, credit where credit is due, many professional historians are broadly "revisionist" in many respects.
That is false. Holocaust so-called revisionism, is nothing like historical revisionism. For historian to revise a history, they need evidence that supports a new version of events. That usually comes in the form of finding a new witness, or document, or from an archaeological investigation. An example of a revision of the Holocaust, is when the Polish Auschwitz Museum authority, dropped the 4 million death toll, and revised it to 1.1 million. That was an evidence based revision, caused by switching from the exaggerated, inaccurate Soviet death toll, to the evidenced death toll, used by Western historians.
If a historian found an eyewitness who had worked inside a Birkenau Krema and he said it never had a gas chamber and it was only used to store and then cremate corpses, that would be a revision. Holocaust so-called revisionists cannot produce such evidence, so their tactic is the one Archie suggests, create doubt. Find the evidence regarding the construction of the gas chambers unconvicing. Think of all the eyewitnesses to the gassings as liars. The result is a non history, with no conclusion as to what happened and no actual revised history of what took place inside the Kremas.
Some so-called revisionists have suggested revisions, but none are well enough evidenced for them to reach a consensus. Suggested revisions include bomb shelters, corpse stores, delousing chambers and showers, or a combination thereof. The so-called revisionists, who are unsatisfied with the evidence the Kremas were used for gassings, are then satisfied with the unevidenced suggestions. History, for them, is based on what they want to have happened, rather than what is evidenced to have happened.
Holocaust revisionism is concerned with factual claims about history. The validity of our position depends on the strength of our reasoning and evidence, and it must sink or swim on that basis.
It sinks, due to its inability to evidence what happened. The strength of its reasoning is also very poor. Just because the testimony of one witness may be doubtful, does not therefore mean they are all doubtful. Just because Rudolf Germar cannot work out how gassings were possible, based on his chemical testing, does not therefore mean there were no gas chambers.
Strictly speaking, revisionists do allege, at least implicitly, a conspiracy in the sense of multiple actors promoting falsehoods. "Conspiracy theories" have a bad reputation because highly intricate, organized plots are suggested on the basis of pure speculation or shoddy research.
That is correct and it applies to so-called revisionism. They gloss over the sheer volume of work that would be needed to fake the mass murder of millions of people. That the narrative of mass killings started with reports by the Polish, is ignored, as even they cannot bring themselves to believe the Poles hoaxed the world. No evidence of a hoax taking place is presented, to explain why, for example, France, would admit to collaborating with the Nazis, in assisting to kill some of its Jewish citizens. For millions of Jews, arrested by the Nazis, with a lot of assistance, 1939-44, not to have been killed, would mean millions of Jews alive, somewhere. Not only is there no evidence of that, but by 1944 the last ghetto at Lodz had closed down and the largest camp, Auschwitz, had a smaller population in 1944, than it had in 1943. Where were all of those millions of Jews in 1944 and why would the Nazis, knowing they were accused of killing them, not evidence millions were still alive?
If only so-called revisionists applied their levels of doubt to the conspiracy they suggest, as they do to the testimony of Rudolf Hoess.
In most of Europe, it is now illegal to do research on the Holocaust unless you respect certain predetermined conclusions.
Holocaust revisionists have accessed archive for research purposes, for example Mattogno, Irving and Rudolf. I would encourage all to do more research, so hopefully, like Pressac, they realise that the evidence is overwhelmingly for the Holocaust having taken place. It is not illegal to do research. It is illegal in some countries, to deny or diminish what took place, particularly mass killings. That is because such claims are not evidence based. It would not be illegal to publish evidence such as a document, found in an archive, that listed transports of people from TII to other camps, as that would be legitimate evidenced based revision.
Revisionists point out that the evidentiary basis for the Holocaust (to the extent there has even been any attempt to justify it in terms of evidence) largely consists testimonies collected after the war, a surprisingly weak and unreliable foundation for such extraordinary claims. These witnesses simply do not hold up under scrutiny as their stories are full of serious contradictions, errors, and absurdities.
That is just not true. So-called revisionists conflate hearsay with eyewitness evidence, to create false impressions about contradicting evidence. The eyewitnesses who worked inside the A-B Kremas all agree on what took place and the process there. That many make errors, getting dates wrong or making estimations that cannot be correct, is normal for witnesses. As for absurdities, since so-called revisionism is based on doubt, they are biased and want to find reasons to disbelieve. They take hyperbole and figures of speech literally. Their so called scrutiny of the witnesses, has no grounding in the scientific study of witness evidence, memory and recall. It results in the extraordinary claim that 100% of the eyewitnesses to gassings lied, which as anyone who knows witnesses, knows how unlikely that is. Someone, even accidentally, would blow the lie, yet, somehow, with so many witnesses, over so many decades that has never happened.
The story falls apart even more when we consider physical evidence. The supposed "gas chambers" at camps like Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau, and Mauthausen lack the features necessary for mass gassings and the rooms in question had obvious mundane uses. After the war, the Allies presented these rooms as sinister mass murder facilities for purposes of propaganda.
The gas chambers at A-B were mostly destroyed, the only buildings at the camp, where that happened. One was converted to an air raid shelter. Other gas chambers, were delousing chambers that were also used to gas prisoners. During the war, the Nazis knew they were being accused of mass gassings, which they could have stopped by letting independent observers, such as the Red Cross, visit. The destruction of evidence is illegal and when someone destroys evidence, it can be inferred the are covering up a crime.
There are also no mass graves sufficient in size to corroborate the claimed millions of Jews who are said to have been executed at these "death camps." The claim is that almost all of these millions of bodies were burned which is highly implausible for technical reasons.
Again, the Nazis are guilty of the destruction of evidence. So-called revisionists are very vague as to how much disturbed ground there is at the AR camps. They merely assert there is not enough, ignoring that for months, the corpses were never buried and went straight to cremation. The c800,000 who died at TII, were not all buried there. That GPR finds 5 large pits in a row, in the area of the camp that witnesses state the main mass graves were located, is evidence to prove mass graves.
As for the implausibility of cremation pyres, there are photos of the type of pyre used at the AR camps, from Dresden and Ohrdruf. Just because a so-called revisionist finds the witness descriptions implausible, does not evidence there were no mass pyres. Large areas of buried cremains corroborate the witnesses.
