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This is not true at all. There are many examples, but one of the most significant that comes to mind is the revisions to the alleged Majdanek "extermination camp". The Soviet prosecution submitted into evidence the claim that 1.5 million were murdered in a "Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and Crematories." Official Soviet-Polish investigation concluded there were seven gas chambers, a claim which stood as "history" for decades.
In the 1990s Revisionist scholars including Carlo Mattogno visited the archives and discovered original construction documents and work orders proving the hygienic purposes of the facilities which were allegedly homicidal gas chambers- including real shower rooms, laundry facilities, and delousing facilities. They disproved the technical possibility that the alleged structures could have operated as homicidal gas chambers. They also concluded a tragic but more realistic death toll of around 42,000 at the camp mostly due to catastrophic hygienic conditions and disease like epidemic typhus.
In 2005 the Majdanek Museum conceded most of the revisions pressed by Revisionist scholars, including revising the claim that 5 out of 7 of the alleged "gas chambers" served that purpose and revising the claimed death toll to 78,000, a 95% decline from the figure reported at Nuremberg by Soviet investigators.
The Revisionist research and methodology has proven to be true for Majdanek, and most sources including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum no longer even consider Majdanek an "extermination" camp after these recent revisions. The position of Holocaust Deniers is that a similar revision is needed at several other camps, where nearly identical claims of "factories of death" have been made with wildly exaggerated death tolls by Soviet investigators and eyewitnesses based on very thin evidence.
This revision is especially significant since Majdanek was the very first alleged "extermination camp" conquered and investigated by the Soviets in late 1944. The Soviets lied about a grand factory of death, crematories, and gas chambers in 1944 well before they liberated Auschwitz where they made precisely identical claims including the exact same accusation of the method of mass murder. The disproven claim made by the Soviets that the SS men climbed onto the roof to drop Zyklon B through the ceiling in fact made a public debut at Majdanek in 1944, and the same claim was later made at Auschwitz in 1945. The fact that the 1944 "investigations" have been disproven by Revisionists, even conceded by mainstream sources, shows that suspicion should be cast on identical claims made by identical investigators after Majdanek, which includes every camp.
Majdanek proves it is possible for an extermination camp to be "proven" by courts, witnesses, and historians, only for Revisionists to debunk the consensus with a proper historical and scientific methodology. The only question that remains is, were Revisionists only right about Majdanek, or are they also right about the other alleged camps? My position is that the revisions which they forced at Majdanek are also required at several other camps, where identical claims have been made by identical investigators and witnesses. But it's not correct to say they have "come up empty." They have disproven an entire "extermination camp".
That's an argument for revising the death toll downwards. That's not an argument that the holocaust never happened.
Yes, politically correct brigade pretends they are the same thing, but we don't have to accept their framing. At least some mass killings of racial undesirables, mostly Jews, were carried out by the Nazis during WWII, which is the definition of the holocaust.
It is not simply a matter of revising the death toll downwards, it's a demonstration that Revisionists are correct about the fallibility of the body evidence that has been used to "prove" the extraordinary claim that millions of people were murdered inside makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Revisionists contend that this narrative was psychological warfare, similar to the psych warfare that produced the most infamous propaganda in WWI about the German "corpse factories".
The Holocaust is not simply the claim that there were some killings of Jews, as that is a claim Revisionists do not contest. The Holocaust includes the claim that there was an official policy to exterminate the Jews and that millions were murdered in makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Those are the claims Revisionists contest, and Majdanek is not simply a revision of the death toll, it's a demonstrated case of the Revisionist model of the narrative being proven true for one of the 6 alleged "extermination camps." It's a case where, as Revisionists say, Soviet investigators, witnesses, courts, and historians all colluded to perpetuate an entirely false narrative that became "history" for decades, until Revisionists did the archival research and proved their case such that even the Majdanek museum could no longer hold the narrative together without abandoning the vast majority of it.
I’m assuming that as a revisionist you acknowledge that at least some Jewish communities were exterminated deliberately by the axis powers?
Because yes, obviously gas chambers is besides the point and the specific death toll doesn’t actually change the valence of the events. I don’t think you can dispute say, the crimes of the iron guard, or that the Nazis did wipe out plenty of Jewish communities.
Gas chambers are not "besides the point", the claim is that about half of all the Jews killed were murdered in these makeshift contraptions. There is no mainstream authority whatsoever that allows you to affirm "the Holocaust" without also affirming the gas chamber story, that story is an indispensable pillar of what constitutes "the Holocaust".
Yes there were communities that were killed, i.e. there were widespread reprisals against Jewish civilians in response to partisan activity, which was tragic but considered legal at the time. There were likewise Russian and Ukrainian and Polish and German communities that were wiped out and ethnically cleansed before, during, and after the war. We are told Jewish suffering is special because there was a specific policy to secretly exterminate them all, a claim which Revisionists refute, and that millions of them were herded into shower rooms and then gassed. "The Holocaust" as such absolutely depends on the truth of those claims, if those claims are false then the Holocaust narrative is also false by the definition put forward by all of its proponents.
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On the motte we can use the literal definitions of words.
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Thank you for proving my point. You can take potshots at which specific events happened at which specific locations. You can point out places where the initial investigators were wrong. What I have never seen is an explanation for what happened to all the Jews? Were the pre-war censuses wrong? Were the post-war censuses wrong? Where did they go? Pretty much every Jew can tell you about family members who died in the Holocaust. Are they all wrong?
I mean the obvious explanation for the censuses, and this is coming from someone who's pretty sure the Nazis exterminated at least some Jewish populations in WWII for no wartime reason, is "they don't tell us anything because they occurred before and after the most destructive war in human history, and Jews lived disproportionately along the battlefront between two major armies with pretty bad records for noncombatants and which was experiencing a wartime famine". Even if there weren't deliberate mass killings you'd expect the numbers of Jews to decline.
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Of course this is not a case of initial investigators being wrong, this is a case of investigators, courts, witnesses, and historians being systematically and insistently wrong for decades upon decades, including to this day. It's not a "potshot" to point to precedent for Revisionists being proven correct, especially since you have claimed they "came up with nothing". There is precedent for their case against the "gas chamber" narrative being proven correct at a formerly alleged "extermination camp", and the very first one in the historical timeline at that.
Census data is noisy, especially in the context of this topic. But if you are claiming that something specific happened, like a million people were brought to this exact area, killed, and then buried, it's pretty disingenuous to accuse Revisionists of taking "potshots" for critically analyzing the veracity of those claims.
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