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Too many eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust to be fake. Too many of them don't seem like the type to exaggerate, even if some of them were unreliable. Not plausible that they could all be lying. Also too high a proportion of people died whose names we know and whose life history we can track with certainty to be an accident.
Eyewitness accounts are well-known to be among the least reliable sources of evidence. The evidentiary value of eyewitness accounts heavily depends on the quality of those accounts. If Yankel Wiernik is not a reliable witness- and the cultural relevance (or lack thereof) of his work speaks to a lack of reliability, it also calls into question other witnesses who recycled claims in his work. There are essentially no contemporaneous accounts, and the "earliest" accounts are extremely unreliable. The accounts made decades after the fact are the ones closest to what is claimed today.
The evidentiary value of witness accounts relies on them being independent and contemporaneous, Soviet Show-Trials and Witch Trials famously relied on eyewitness accounts in lieu of other forms of evidence.
Eyewitness accounts are about the most reliable sources of evidence you get when it comes to history. The more of them you have the better, since you can cross reference them. And there really seems to be too many eyewitness accounts to discount, particularly contemporaneous accounts. Like a letter President Truman sent Eisenhower in 1945 about the problem of finding housing for displaced civilians in Europe in which he writes "Apparently it is being taken for granted that all displaced persons, irrespective of their former persecution or the likelihood that their repatriation or resettlement will be delayed, must remain in camps--many of which are overcrowded and heavily guarded. Some of these camps are the very ones where these people were herded together, starved, tortured and made to witness the death of their fellow-inmates and friends and relatives" and quotes a report from another source (Earl Harrison, an American on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees) who wrote "As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy." And that's just one random letter from Truman, we've got scads of accounts from US soldiers, survivors, and European citizens. Famously Eisenhower held a press conference in 1945 where he said "When I found the first camp like that I think I was never so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things...It is something we have been trying desperately to find out, whether or not the German population as a whole knew about that. I can’t say. It does appear, from all the evidence we can find, that they were isolated areas and this one piece of evidence that the mayor being shown the thing and going home and hanging himself would indicate he didn’t know about it. On the other hand, what makes the story so thin with me is when we find these very high ranking Nazis denying knowledge of it. If they didn’t, they deliberately closed their eyes, that is all. As far as I’m concerned these people are just as guilty as anybody else – those high ranking Nazis – but I think it would be impossible to say, however, the German nation knew it as a whole. But a lot of them know it, because I told them to go out and give them a decent burial. We made a film an hour long and we have made many Germans look at it, and it is not pretty." To say that there are essentially no contemporaneous accounts is simply not true.
If you discount those accounts because they were by Americans, who were at war with the Germans, then you're holding an absurdly high bar for historical evidence. I doubt more than 10% of what we teach in history books could meet such a standard of evidence.
What about archaeological evidence?
Eyewitness evidence is waaaaaaaaaaay better than archeological evidence when it comes to history. Ask any historian what they would rather dig up: a clay tablet with a contemporary account of an event, or a bunch of pot shards. Better yet, ask them if they’d rather have an ancient Akkadian magically transported to the modern day to talk to, or to find a new pile of old foundations and grave goods from the same era. Eyewitness wins every time.
It's better in the sense that it gives you more context as to how people thought about something. Invaluable for a historian.
But that's not what you said. You said it was more reliable. Which is not true. And why people who care about reliability more than breadth of content (such as the judiciary) care more about material evidence than eye witness accounts.
Conflating breadth and reliability as quality is equivocation.
Consider an infamous historical case similar to the one that occupies us here: did Carthaginians really sacrifice children? Which one is going to be more reliable, eye witness accounts of people engaged in total war, or human remains?
I disagree. While you have to take the potential biases or other points of unreliability into account when dealing with eyewitness testimony, they are still more reliable for a historian than most other forms of evidence. All evidence has to be interpreted properly, whether it's eyewitness testimony or a pile of bones in the desert. Bones, for instance, can tell us many useful things: some of the injuries this human may have undergone, and whether they had a chance to heal or not, carbon dating information on provenance, gender, level of bone health, etc. If the historical question you are trying to answer is "How did Richard III die" then access to his bones may be very helpful indeed. But if the question is "What wars did Richard III wage, and against who, and why?" then written accounts will tell you far more, and far more reliably, then digging up bones will.
You didn't answer my question.
I think they did. Eyewitness accounts is more reliable, especially concerning matters very unreliably transmitted by archeological evidence. Answering a question like yours, however, requires careful interpretation.
Concerning the question of Carthaginian child sacrifice: According to their press releases, archeologists from Oxford, presumable better positioned to interpret the evidence, argue that the literary evidence supports the archeological evidence. I also note that the press release mentions that other archaeologist disagree on the matter, and I have no expertise to evaluate their claims other than common sense.
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Eye witness accounts will be more reliable than human remains in the case of trying to determine whether Carthaginians really sacrificed children, particularly for something that occurred so long ago in the historical record. That doesn't mean that eye witness accounts are the only kind of evidence, or can never be wrong, it's just a recognition of the fact that testimony gives us more specific and more reliable information than trying to interpret 2,000 year old bones in a hole in the desert. When physical evidence matches eye witness testimony it gives that testimony more credibility, but if you dig up Carthage and you can't find pits full of baby bones that means either the eye witness was not reliable, or that no physical evidence survived the passage of time, or evidence survived the passage of time and you haven't found it yet.
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