fireofice wrote:While it is true that we technically do have less evidence for a historical Jesus than we do for the holocaust, this overlooks the fact that the standard of evidence we should have for the holocaust is much higher than for a Jewish guy from 2000 years ago that at the time was not of much significance.
Yes, this is the key point. Ancient history is a whole different ball game. The Holocaust is said to have occurred in the heart of Europe during a time with photography, motion pictures, radio, telecommunications, mass printing, and so on. Realistically, had there been an extermination program on the scale alleged, everyone would have known about it during the war.
[See Arthur Butz's 1982 IHR Conference talk for more on this argument]
https://codoh.com/library/document/context-and-perspective-in-the-holocaust/en/With most major historical events, the most basic facts are not usually disputed because they are never secret to begin with and they are acknowledged and documented as they happen. Regarding WWII, we know generally what happened, at least broadly, because it was noticed and reported as it unfolded. And everyone acted like a war was going on and everyone after the war acted like there had just been a war. So either there was a war or there was a mass delusion and everyone on multiple continents came to believe there was a war going on. The more uncertain part is assessing the hidden parts of history. Especially since various parties often have an interest in distorting the record.
In the case of the Holocaust we have a large scale historical episode occurring over several years. Yet despite this grand scale of it, the Germans managed to keep it remarkably secret during the war. To be sure, there were atrocity reports and extermination claims, but these seem to have been regarded as exaggerated and unconfirmed and were not taken all that seriously. We might then ask: At what precise point were the atrocity stories "confirmed"? And how was it decided which parts to discard and which parts to accept as historical fact? The answer would have to be at the war crimes trials. The extermination of the six million Jews was established at Nuremberg. Later on historians like Hilberg, who relied mostly on Nuremberg documents, and the museum authorities at the camps have modified the story slightly--dropping the soap and lampshades, revising down some of the camp death tolls--but this mild revision has occurred only on the margins, leaving the core pillars of the story unchanged.
The evidence on this question could generally be divided up as 1) confessions, 2) survivor and other testimonies, 3) wartime documentation, 4) forensic evidence, 5) demographics.
As has been noted countless times by revisionists, the Holocaust depends very heavily on postwar testimonies. Primarily confessions extracted at hysterical show trials and biased accounts from Jews themselves. Of these often preposterous survivor accounts, relatively few of them even purport to have directly witnessed gassings and so forth and thus were not in a position to be able to confirm any of the disputed points. Documentary evidence is used some as well, but even many Holocaust historians have stated or implied that the documentary evidence is not very strong, particularly on the point of gas chambers and the lack of any sort of extermination orders or written evidence of an extermination program. Most of the documents, if read neutrally, would not normally be considered proof of anything, certainly not at the standard normally required for a criminal case. Without the testimonies, the documents would not be much of anything. They start with the Holocaust narrative as established in the postwar testimony, then they read all the documents under the a priori assumption that six million Jews were exterminated. And any contrary documentary evidence like references to sending Jews to Madagascar and such is brushed aside with any of several ready excuses. It's in code language, or the person didn't know what was going on, or the document describes only that specific moment but things were changed later on. And then when we move to question of physical evidence, the case falls apart entirely. No convincing gas chambers. No enormous mass graves. Demographic arguments are largely inconclusive as we must rely on Jewish and Soviet sources for the key data and the results are not that robust given the range of assumptions that can be employed.
