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It was etched into stone at the Auschwitz Museum for decades. It was the number of victims claimed at the Nuremberg Trials. It is a downward Revision of millions of deaths at that camp- of course Holocaust Revisionists maintain Auschwitz needs to be revised downward much lower even still. But Holocaust Revisionists, mathematically, can't revise the Auschwitz death-toll any more downward than mainstream Historians already have. The point being Revisionism is necessary and that has been proven in many cases like that one, and is necessary still in similar cases of wildly inflated death tolls at several other camps.
But "Revisionism" wasn't necessary, you just had to consult what mainstream historians, like Raul Hilberg, had been writing for decades.
If anything, this demonstrates that the mainstream historical account was always broadly accurate (Hilberg underestimated the death toll in 1961, we now know it was closer to 6 million).
The 4 million death toll was maintained by the Auschwitz Museum for decades. They literally had to go out and swap one memorial stone for a different one with a lower number. That is a Revision. Holocaust Historians are wildly variable in how many Jews they say were killed at various camps.
Deborah Lipstadt, our current United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism and mainstream historian, claimed that 1.2 million Jews were killed at Majdanek. The downward Revision of Majdanek from 2 million (the figure initially claimed by the Majdanek Museum) to 70,000 in the year 2003 is another case of a Revisionist victory that even flew in the face of claims made by mainstream historians like Lipstadt, and vindicated the findings of Holocaust Revisionists upon conducting their own archival research of the camp.
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