Best and worst / least successful arguments

[Lamprecht]

One of the responses clarifies that not all camps liberated by the Soviets became alleged "death camps", however it remains true that all of those that did become alleged "death camps" were liberated by the Soviets (and the Western allies didn't come anywhere near them):

Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, Gross Rosen were all liberated by the Soviets. As far as I'm aware no Western or neutral inspection was conducted in these camps.

Well yes, not all the Soviet liberated camps were. But there were reports of "homicidal gas chambers" at camps the Western allies "liberated" but the investigations were slightly less corrupt than the USSR, who were notorious liars and propagandists.

For those where it was convenient or possible to label them "Extermination camps" -- they did. For example: Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. These were top-secret camps which were dismantled long before the war ended and there were reports of large numbers of Jews being sent there. Likely, the outbound train records were all in one central location for each camp, so they would have been easy to destroy. It is claimed the Germans tried to cover their tracks at these camps, calling them "evacuation" camps in documents and digging up the rotting corpses and burning them in pyres. But then why wouldn't they give one guy a typewriter and have him type up a bunch of fake outbound records? It would have taken one day.

For more on this see: viewtopic.php?t=12927

At Majdanek the Soviets "liberated" it rather quickly in mid-1944 so they had time and motive to pump up the atrocity propaganda. See the massive death toll drop at Majdanek. Auschwitz was, well, Auschwitz.

[Archie]

I would distinguish here between strategies for debating propagandists vs. what will be effective when discussing the topic with an intelligent, fair-minded person. I would approach the two quite differently.

For the non-propagandist, the main difficulties will be

1) The moral taboo associated with the position ("Only bad people and Nazis think that way")
2) Convincing them that the topic is worthy of consideration to begin with
3) Many people will lack the intellectual confidence to adopt a "fringe" position even if they find a lot of the arguments convincing

It follows from these issues that generally it will be much easier to make a case to people who are already inclined to right wing politics. Personally speaking, by the time I heard any revisionist stuff I'd already read Kevin MacDonald and stuff like that. In that case I'd already gotten over number 1 and 3 leaving only 2 remaining. In principle it should be possible to convince people with very conventional politics but in practice such people will put up a lot of mental roadblocks. It's generally not something they want to get into.

I think one of the best ways to sow doubt is simply to inform people of the actual current academic version of the holocaust (with the usual Hollywood or classroom schmaltz stripped away). The reality is that even the establishment holocaust historiography deviates substantially from "The Holocaust" as understood by most people. If exposed to this, I think most intellectually curious people will naturally come up with their own doubts about it. A lot of revisionist arguments require a fair bit of background knowledge to fully appreciate them. People might be intrigued by technical arguments etc but they won't usually be immediately convinced because they will wonder if the material is being distorted in some way even if they themselves can't see any flaws in the argument. They won't be confident enough in the topic to draw a firm conclusion, especially if most "smart people" still seem to believe in the holocaust. So I think the best approach here is to give them something "official" that will intrigue them and that will encourage them to investigate further. For example, most people have no idea that the "holocaust footage" that we've all seen is not actually from any of the "extermination camps." Most people will be a little confused by this. By itself it does not conclusively disprove the holocaust in one go. But it might make some people want to watch some documentaries or read some articles.

For propagandists, the situation is quite different. Many things that will be effective with the first group will just be side-stepped by a propagandist. If you tell them the gas chamber at Dachau was faked by the Allies, many of them will readily concede this point and declare it to be "irrelevant" because the gas chamber at Dachau being fake does not logically preclude the possibility of a real gas chamber at Auschwitz. I don't have too much experience directly arguing with these types but I think the best approach is to pivot back to the core pillars of the holocaust and expose the shocking lack of evidence. They'd rather drag you into a debate about something like typewriter analysis on the Franke-Gricksch report or some such. No. If their story is true, there should be loads of hard evidence for it. If a modern state has an extermination program to kill millions of people, you can only cover that up so well and inevitably everybody would know about it. Yet with this story we have no orders (mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy!), no documents (they spoke only in "euphemisms"!), no gas chamber plans (they made it up as they went!), no remains (they burned millions of bodies!). And during the war nobody seems to have taken the stories very seriously. But oh look we found a piece of paper that no one ever heard of until 30 years after the war that proves the holocaust. No. Force them to explain away the major problems. Force them to do their reverse Occam's razor routine. Why did the Germans built more crematories at Auschwitz in 1943? Could it be because there was a severe and well-documented typhus epidemic in 1942? Oh, no. That is far too logical. Rather, they just coincidentally expanded their gassing operation that was supposedly already well under way. And why did they design regular crematories with regular morgues only to then have to sloppily convert them into gas chambers? Force them to come up with triple bank shot explanations for this stuff.

[PrudentRegret]

Personally speaking, by the time I heard any revisionist stuff I'd already read Kevin MacDonald and stuff like that.

This is interesting- the opposite was the case for me. I was anti-anti semitic, pro-Israel, had never read any of Dr. MacDonald, etc. I stumbled across The Chemistry of Auschwitz and was shocked at how scholarly and thorough the content was. I had successfully been convinced that revisionism was roughly equivalent to "Flat Earth" theory, but just watching one video shattered that misconception. It's clear why censorship is such an important tool for keeping Revisionism at bay.

But then the big thing that convinced me was learning about Majdanek.

I don't see how reasonable people can understand the history of the investigations, propaganda, and subsequent revisions at Majdanek and then not generalize the pattern there to the broader Holocaust narrative. It's just obvious to me.

That, and the fact that the "propagandist" side of the aisle essentially openly admits that they need to assert the Holocaust narrative as the null hypothesis and anybody who wants to dispute it has the burden of proof to "disprove" it.

Lol, no. You are just telling me that your position can't be supported by hard physical evidence, and that's why you find it necessary to assert your position is the null hypothesis. The more you try to convince me that your position is the null, the more you are telling me you don't have the hard evidence to support your position.