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So the answer is "the deniers don't have a coherent historical narrative that makes sense"? Considering the manhours of energy spent poring over minutiae in camp construction and witness testimony, one would think that there would be at least one attempt at constructing an overarching history of the Jews in WW2 Europe from a denier perspective, without being tied to just being commentary on the mainstream historiography (which has produced a wealth of such narratives).
At least according to Wikipedia, the official German estimate of the deaths from Eastern European expulsions of Germans is in the ballpark of a bit over 2 million (which has always been the number I've understood to be correct, before this) and the theories that the actual number is around half a million continue to be "challenger" theories. Even so, whichever the number is, we're talking about whether the amount of Germans dying in Central/Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WW2 is around 0,5 % or 2 %, not whether the amount of Jews dying in the same region in 1941-1945 is over a half or in low single digits; the sheer scales of population reduction in certain demographic group are completely different.
There are plenty of 'deniers' who have larger historical narratives about what happened, like David Irving and others. I'm not one of them. I find historical narratives in general to be nonsense. The world, as I've lived in it, doesn't objectively move in easily digested narratives. Sometimes there are things I don't understand. Causal chains of events that are beyond me. But history somehow doesn't have this problem ever. I'm inherently skeptical of history because of this. Same with news media and the like.
I have seen real time how one narrative can make way for another. I mean, do we need to imagine how history according to mainstream news sources looks with regards to someone like Trump? Seems awfully important to recognize who is writing the story.
As for German deaths, this is the article I read They float all the same theories a 'denier' would float relating to jews and how difficult it can be to estimate things.
I agree that the scale is different. But you can't go from that to the mainstream historical holocaust narrative without contradicting the methodology used to ascertain German civilian losses and the inherent skepticism baked into that narrative. Holocaust history has its own standard. On top of that, the Germans have the luxury of not having to deal with the Soviet Union. A regime that has many a time been caught intentionally distorting its demographic data. That in and of itself is a big factor and to that end I find 4 million as opposed to 6 to be very reasonable based on nothing but population estimates.
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