A fake historiography relying on logical fallacies.

presented by faithfully steadfast believers and defenders of 

THE WW2 NARRATIVE THAT IS NOW REVERENTLY REFERRED TO AS
‘THE HOLOCAUST’

* WDTG = ‘Where Did They Go’, if it was not into gas-chambers and then into the ground?

 ˚˚ ˚˚ ˚˚ 

  
WDTG is an argument by elimination. You assume the possibilities are:
A) Holocaust extermination camps,
or
B) they got scattered around.

Then you "rule out" B by simply saying there is "no evidence."
Then you conclude A is true.

The problem here is that you can't just cavalierly "rule out" B, so this just ends up being an argument from ignorance.

Wikipedia description:
This argument has always come off to me like, ’you can't call us on our Bullsh#t unless you can track all the Jews’ (which Jews actively prevent people from doing).
Really, it should be far, far easier to prove directly that hundreds of thousands of people were executed at a precise location than it is to prove that they did not end up anywhere else.
From the beginning, it was a huge red flag to me that this was the go-to argument [of those who assert that the ‘holocaust’ is irrefutably-accurate history].

Point 1: With any sort of "either A or B" style argument, the baseline expectations matter. There can be major asymmetry among the possibilities as far as how easy each one is to confirm/disconfirm. A simple example of the problem of asymmetry: My keys are either in my pocket or they are somewhere else. There is “no evidence” that my keys are somewhere else. Therefore, my keys are in my pocket.
There is asymmetry here because it is simple to check if the keys are really in my pocket but it is not simple at all to confirm that the keys are not “somewhere else." This argument abuses this asymmetry.

We obviously have a major disagreement about the baselines. [The religiously-believing ‘defenders’ of “the Holocaust”] consistently downplay the amount of documentation that should be expected for a mass extermination program while also insisting that documentation for population movements should be ubiquitous.

On the question of expected documentation of the extermination program (as distinct from isolated local massacres and other less organized forms of violence), I would expect that if such a program had existed that there would have been many discussions about this and eventually orders issued (like the euthanasia order in 1939), that this program would have had to have been actively managed throughout the war (especially to kill anything close to six million), and that there would have been abundant documentation related to the technical means by which this was to be accomplished. Already on these basic points, we run into major difficulties. The extermination orders are famously lacking, documentary references to the “final solution” often contradict the received interpretation, and on the technical means we are told that the Germans had non-technical personnel like Höß jerryrig gas chambers locally at the camps. And although all of this was all very top secret, the Workd Jewish Council had already “found out” about the Hitler order (which does not exist) in the summer of 1942.

Regarding expected documentation for population movements, I do not agree that this would necessarily be well-documented, especially with numerical precision. There is a reason we have terms like “undocumented migrants.” Jews are a small minority mixed among larger populations, they are not easy to count consistently, and they often claim or discard their Jewish identity depending on circumstances.

Point 1a. There can also be asymmetry due to differential resources and political power. This is crucial. Already by mid-1945, the Allies had committed themselves to a narrative of German depravity and barbarity. The motivations for this are obvious. The captured German documents have come to us via war crimes trials where the prosecution had enormous advantages. Much of the early history was largely based on prosecution documents. The assumption around here is that the surviving documents are strongly biased FOR the Germans because the Germans destroyed the incriminating material and/or were impossibly circumspect. The alternative possibility is not considered. There was a tremendous effort to find every scrap of damning paper that could be found. The same resources were simply not available on the other side. Traditionally, a lot of documents cited on the revisionist side have been “own goals” where the document if read carefully contradicts the narrative but which the prosecution evidently did not appreciate at the time (the documents cited by Butz are often of this type).

Point 2: Here is a completely different framework for looking at this question, one that is not as susceptible to the distortions and asymmetries mentioned, nor as biased toward blind acceptance of regime narratives. Take some of the common elements of “the Holocaust” and simply trace them back in time and see how well they hold up. The six million, the gas chambers, extermination, the final solution, the master race, etc. What we find when we do this is that it doesn’t hold up well at all. Combine this with a critical view of the concentration camp propaganda at the end of the war and the war crimes trials and this pushes us toward the view that “the Holocaust” is very plausibly mythical. The absolute certainty claimed by Holocaust promoters, which is grossly out of proportion with the actual evidence, only further reinforces this suspicion. This method is not conclusive by itself, but it flips the switch, so to speak. It reorients one's approach to the entire question. From there, most people end up concluding it’s mostly a hoax.

Professional ‘holocaust’ defender/promulgator Nick Terry wrote:  

The revisionist trajectory would be something like:
- Wartime atrocity stories.
- Highly misleading concentration camp propaganda.
- Show trials by the victors.
- Founding myth of Israel.
- Histories taking much of the above at face value.
- Turns into a big Jewish special interest in the 60s and 70s, much greater emphasis.
- Revisionists expose the hoax in the 70s and 80s.
- Authoritarian crackdown [i.e. censorship, demonisation, intimidation and criminalisation of dissent] in response starting in the 90s.
- WhereDidTheyGo? as a last ditch argument.

[When] I wrote, "From there, most people end up concluding it’s mostly a hoax" that is to say, once they begin investigating the origins of it, most people end up not believing it.
 How many people know all the arguments and still believe? There are not that many, in my experience. If we're talking population at large, then most are uninformed believers as a default position.

The censorship I regard as an extension of the authoritarian crackdown. The interesting thing about Pressac to me is how little the book was promoted and how totally unavailable it was, despite supposedly being the definitive refutation of the revisionists. I regard Pressac as something of a quasi-revisionist and his book contains many statements that the mainstream would not be comfortable with. My understanding is that in interviews late in life he moved even further back toward revisionism. The one attempt to seriously engage with revisionism ended up deviating quite a bit from orthodoxy (and was pretty much swept under the carpet).

HITLER’S ”PROPHECY” 
Hitler's "prophecy" from January 1939 which predicts the "annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe" is too early to refer to "the holocaust" and the rest of the speech is makes it clear he was not contemplating the literal mass execution of all Jews.  

”Do not reproach me on the grounds of your humanitarian concerns. The German Volk does not wish to be governed by another people; it does not wish others to determine its affairs in its place. France to the French; England to the English; America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans!
We are determined to undercut the efforts of a certain foreign people to nest here; a people whose members knew how to capture all leading positions. We will banish this people. We are willing to educate our own Volk to assume these leadership functions. We have hundreds of thousands of the most intelligent children of peasants and workers. We will have them educated, and we are already educating them. We are hoping that one day we can place them in all leading positions within the state along with others from our educated classes.  No longer shall these be occupied by members of a people alien to us. 
Above all, as the literal meaning of the term already indicates, German culture is exclusively German; it is not Jewish. Hence we shall place the administration and the care for our culture in the hands of our Volk. Should the rest of the world be outraged and protest hypocritically against Germany’s barbarous expulsion of such an extraordinary, culturally valuable, irreplaceable element, then we can only be astonished at the consequences such a stance would imply.

I believe the earlier this problem is resolved, the better. For Europe cannot find peace before it has dealt properly with the Jewish question.

It is possible that the necessity of resolving this problem sooner or later should bring about agreement in Europe, even between nations which otherwise might not have reconciled themselves as readily with one another. There is more than enough room for settlement on this earth. All we need to do is put an end to the prevailing assumption that the Dear Lord chose the Jewish people to be the beneficiaries of a certain percentage of the productive capacities of other peoples’ bodies and their labors. Either the Jews will have to adjust to constructive, respectable activities, such as other people are already engaged in, or, sooner or later, they will succumb to a crisis of yet inconceivable proportions.”
 
~ ADOLF HITLER  Reichstag speech January 1939   

This sort of rhetoric was common on both sides with both Jews and Nazis talking about extermination, annihilation, etc. You can't always take these words to be literal because they were saying this stuff before ‘the holocaust’ is said to have started. It's also easy to find examples of e.g. Americans using exterminationist rhetoric against the Germans and Japanese. It doesn't prove anything.

Himmler made several similar comments about killing women and children on several occasions. In some passages it is not clear whether this refers to a general extermination order or something more specific, but several examples he states unambiguously that these were limited actions (families of partisans and commissars), not a general extermination policy. (See for example his December 1943 Weimar speech and his October 1942 visit to Mussolini, which I've posted on here before). You can say you don't believe him and that you think it was a general order, but he said what he said.

On the more general issue of the "final solution" documents, the Luther memo is a big one. It was a summary of Jewish policy of the Reich. So I don't know why you say "just" the Luther memo. Really the entire NG-2586 bundle conflicts with holocaust interpretation.
A poster at CODOH has a good summary of this (mostly based on Butz).
forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12296
The above clearly understands the term Final Solution to be territorial.
 

“Mr Reich Minister Lammers informed me that the Führer had repeatedly declared to him that he wants to hear that the Solution of the Jewish Problem has been postponed until after the war is over. That being so, the current discussions are of purely theoretical value, in Mr Reich Minister Lammers' opinion. He will moreover take pains to ensure that, whatever else happens, no fundamental decisions are taken without his knowledge in consequence of a surprise briefing by any third party.” 
~ The Schlegelberger Letter 

To state the obvious, postponing the "final solution" until after the war makes no sense under the holocaust interpretation (mass execution).

Regarding the gas chambers and the technical means, you have missed my point. If they were planning on executing millions of people and burning all the bodies, how likely is it that they would delegate the technical means for this major effort to the local camp commandant? How likely is it that Höß himself was left to settle upon Zyklon B as an improvement over the Russian tank engine gassings at Treblinka, as described in his affidavit? For a mass gassing program involving millions of people, one might expect there to have been some engineering projects to accomplish this. But since such did not exist, we are given idiotic stories about "improvised" gas chambers.

Speaking of ZyklonB and the Hitler order, here is the text of the "intel" the WJC received in Aug 1942 that I referred to.  

Received alarming report stating that, in the Führer's Headquarters, a plan has been discussed, and is under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering 3½ to 4 millions should, after deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated, in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question in Europe. Action is reported to be planned for the autumn. Ways of execution are still being discussed including the use of prussic acid. We transmit this information with all the necessary reservation, as exactitude cannot be confirmed by us. Our informant is reported to have close connexions with the highest German authorities, and his reports are generally reliable.

So here, contrary to Höß, we are told the ZyklonB decision was being discussed "in the Führer's Headquarters." The reality of course that they would have first made the decision to exterminate and then they would have committees and competent technical teams or some such to determine the most efficient means. The Riegner story was bogus as the above is not accurate even from an holocaust perspective. Exterminated "at one blow" in the autumn. And this supposedly came from some well-placed inside source.

Notice here that we have:
1) Hitler making speeches in 1939 about "annihilation" of the Jews in Europe,
2) the Germans are looking at sending the Jews to Madagascar "for the final solution" in 1940,
3) Jews are claiming to have "inside" info about a big extermination order in the summer of 1942, (including the use of prussic acid!),
4) Yet, and this is a major contradiction, the program is somehow totally secret, so secret that even in 1944 Jews still don't know what's in store for them.

Historical conclusions are usually probabilistic. You can't get very far without drawing inferences and making determinations about the strength of evidence. [An argument] that claims we can only reject things that are 100% physically impossible but not things that are merely wildly implausible, is stupid and fallacious.
The reason I don't believe this is the same reason a teacher doesn't believe it when a kid says he doesn't have his homework because the dog ate it. My position is sound. Meanwhile over in [holocaust faithful-believer] land, we have to believe the kid because it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE for a dog to eat a piece of paper and hence to disbelieve the kid's EXCUSE would be an "argument from incredulity." Imbecilic. Think probability ratios.
 

Gibson wrote: ↑Fri Apr 14, 2023
...There is also a major contradiction with relying on PUBLIC statements as proof of a TOP SECRET extermination program....
.. .. .. ..

Re: the December 1941 theory for the Hitler order.

Here is what Gerlach says in his 1998 paper:
“In my opinion, Hitler made this decision in early December 1941.” And then in the footnote he says: "Up until now, the Dutch historian L.J. Hartog (in Der Befehl zum Judenmord: Hitler, Amerika und die Juden [Bodenheim, 1997], Dutch ed., 1994) is the only scholar to have provided documentary evidence in support of this view. I examine his position in detail below."

So then nobody had even offered this theory until 1994 and Gerlach's language clearly indicates that the matter is open to interpretation. This implies the documentation is equivocal and uncertain, as does the fact that this theory is totally at odds with what we read in earlier histories. Early works point to the summer of 1941 as the start of the final solution, as does the Nuremberg judgment.

Reitlinger (1953):
‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’ was a code-name for Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. It was used by German officials after the summer of 1941 in order to avoid the necessity of admitting to each other that such plans existed, but previously the expression had been used quite loosely in varying contexts, the underlying suggestion always being emigration. It is probably but by no means certain that the choice of terms had been in the first place Adolf Hitler’s. (pp. 1)

In his intro we see he admits that the phrase final solution was used earlier and that it referred to emigration. But then he claims the exact same phrase started to be used to refer to mass killing in the summer of 1941. Later (on pages 82-84) he discusses the Goering decree to Heydrich which he interprets as an extermination order, noting that “it is dated surprisingly late, July 31st, 1941, when the extermination groups had been nearly six weeks in Russia.” And then he strongly disputes Goering's defense at Nuremberg with respect to this document.

Hilberg (1961)
On July 31, 1941, six weeks after the invasion of the USSR had started, the order was given. It was signed not by Hitler but by Göring, and the recipient of the order was Heydrich. [...]
The order of July 31 marks a turning point in anti-Jewish history. With the dispatch of that order, the centuries-old policy of expulsion was terminated and a new policy of annihilation was inaugurated. As such, the cryptic Göring letter has had an importance which far transcends the brief span of the German destruction process. (pp. 262)
So Hilberg also clearly sees this as being an extermination/"final solution" order, although he admits that it is "cryptic."

Dawidowicz (1975)
It was he [Göring] who authorized the involvement of the state apparatus in the Final Solution and legitimated it as a state undertaking. He did so by assigning the task of coordinating state and party agencies to Heydrich, who, as Chief of the Security Police and SD and head of the RHSA, represented the nexus of state and party. On July 31, 1941, Göring sent Heydrich the following directive: [...]
Now, in the summer of 1941, when Himmler transmitted Hitler’s order for the Final Solution, he told Höss that Auschwitz had been selected for that purpose because of its easy rail access, its isolation from populated areas, and the physical possibilities its location afforded for concealment and camouflage of its installations. (pp. 130)
he even accepts the 1941 dating from the Höß affidavit. And it is actually not completely crazy of to think this since the closet thing he has to an extermination order is also from summer 1941.

All three of these "classic" writers favour a summer 1941 dating and all see the Göring decree to Heydrich as an extermination order which was then followed up with the Jan 1942 meeting in Wannsee.

If we have early examples of the phrase "final solution" that show it meant something else and we also have late examples in 1942, this means it simply does not mean what we are told it means.
The above is Goebbels's reaction to some sort of summary of the Wannsee meeting in January 1942. If Goebbels was privy to the imagined December 1941 Hitler extermination order and was up on the Wannsee discussions, there's simply no way that as late as March 7 he would still be thinking about sending the Jews to Madagascar after the war.

Regarding the broader point of extermination-y words, if we can find these words on both sides IN THE 1930s before "the Holocaust" started, this should at the very least give us pause about automatically interpreting later examples to mean literal execution of all or virtually all Jews.

Here for example is the title of a 1936 book (foreword by the German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger)
Der Gelbe Fleck. Die Ausrottung von 500,000 Deutschen Juden
Since nobody seriously claims the Jews in Germany were being "exterminated" in 1936 in a literal sense, this is simply histrionics on the part of the Jews (who had also claimed the Tsar was "exterminating" them in the 19th century). Likewise on the German side, at Nuremberg they dug up this sort of rhetoric from Julius Streicher as early as 1925, not realizing these early examples, if anything, weaken their argument since they show such language was and is common and usually not literal.

There is also a major contradiction with relying on PUBLIC statements as proof of a TOP SECRET extermination program. The Hitler prophecy language was made in public in 1939 and was repeated in other public speeches including after the start of the supposed final solution. There are also examples in Goebbels's public statements such as this angry response to Allied bombings in June 1942.
In this war the Jews are playing their most criminal game, and they will have to pay for that with the extermination (Ausrottung) of their race in Europe and perhaps far beyond. They are not to be taken seriously in this conflict, because they represent neither British nor American, but exclusively Jewish interests.

So then we have the Germans making public statements like above. We also have the WJC with a supposed inside source who knows about a Hitler order to kill all the Jews by the end of the year, possibly with cyanide gas. But at the same time in INTERNAL communications they take such cautious, sanitized minutes to the point of being misleading.

From the Wannsee minutes ("euphemisms" galore, less explicit than public speeches)
At the beginning of the discussion ... Heydrich, reported that the Reichsmarschall had appointed him delegate for the preparations for the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe...
A clear reference to the summer 1941 directive.  
Even if you want to argue that "evacuation" is code for gas chambers, the comment about needing Hitler's approval does not square with the idea that he had already authorized "the final solution," whether you think that happened in December 1941 (based on the favored theory here) or earlier as insisted upon in the classic literature.

The reference to "labour in the East" here is undoubtedly literal because it frankly acknowledges that there would be high mortality among the labourers. I know you guys will jump to assume that the next part "treated accordingly" must mean to kill them. But the language is general and could refer also to something else. And either way, it would contradict the idea of them being killed essentially within days of being deported. And we already know that Goebbels evidently assumed there would still be Jews to send off somewhere after the war.  
They've supposedly already received an order to kill all the Jews yet they are going back and forth about mixed Jews and sterilization within the Reich and all the carve outs that were to be made for veterans, the elderly etc (special treatment, if you will)

Here is another Goebbels diary entry that indicates he understood evacuation to the East in literal, geographic terms, not as a codeword for gas chambers.  

And here's one where he gives an interesting variation on the Hitler prophecy where he uses the word "expulsion" instead of annihilation/extermination/destruction. Also keep in mind that by this point (early 1943), according to the orthodox history, the Germans had already killed over 4 million Jews.  
Goebbels was speaking from a Darwinian/natural selection/eugenicist/racialist point of view. The idea is that the harsh climate would make the Jews sharp and formidable while easy conditions would make them dumb and indolent. Therefore from his perspective it would be better for the Jews to have their homeland somewhere with easy conditions.

.. .. .. .. .. ..

If I were going to write something proving the holocaust and debunking revisionism, here are two key things I would focus on. The idea here is that we would first need to show that such a program existed and then show how it proceeded and how far it went in practice.
- Explains when and how the extermination program was started, how it developed, under whose orders, and how it was carried out, preferably with hard documentation.

- Demonstrates how successful the extermination program was in practice, the scale of killing that was achieved, and by what technical means this mass killing was accomplished, supported by proof.

On the first point, if the documentation were indeed overwhelming, you would simply say:
here is the precise timeline, here's the Hitler order (if this got lost, fine, then show all the smoke around the Hitler order), here are all the discussions they had about killing methods, here are the discussions among mid-level staff, here are all the low-level documents related to implementation, etc.

If you had all this, the IMT and Hilberg would have got it all right to begin with and there would no serious disagreement. What we actually find is that the primary sources conflict with the classic story and we are given convoluted explanations for this. Moreover, you've had to change the story in pretty significant ways. I quoted the early literature which is at odds with your current version to highlight this. That there has been so much stumbling over such essential points means the documentation is not strong and unambiguous, as you claim. Even supposing all your circuitous explanations were correct, you would still be guilty of dramatically overstating your case. You claim a level of certainty normally reserved for physical sciences (or religion). You yourself just made the flat earth comparison. If you actually had that level of evidence you wouldn't have to do all these contortions you are doing, nor would you have needed to switch up the story in the 90s on the final solution.

On the second point, we once again see lots of stumbling even trying to explain the most basic things. For example, we have the blueprints for the Birkenau Kremas which one would thing would settle the matter once and for all ... but oh they didn't design them as gas chambers initially even though they were constructed in 1943. Mm-hmm. (At this point, you guys launch into the Pressac criminal trace stuff but this requires complex argumentation and even Pressac himself only calls these "traces"). Go read Hoess's explanation of how the gassing operation was established at Auschwitz, how they decided on Zyklon, etc. It is incoherent and impossible.

If you had very strong documentation of the extermination program, perhaps we could forgive spotty documentation and locally improvised gassings. But when both answers are spotty and we see that much of it is based on concentration camp legends and war crimes trials, the whole thing starts looking doubtful.

[‘Holocaust’ faithful-believers] think the Hitler order must have come in December 1941, based largely on a Goebbels diary entry that paraphrases the Hitler prophecy. All the early writers said the Hitler order had come earlier. The most important documents were available at the IMT/NMT. They had the Göring decree, the Wannsee minutes, the Luther memo, etc. These are all German documents that discuss their Jewish policy and the "final solution."

The main reason for the change [in the holocaust pseudo-historical ‘official’ narrative] from the 60s through to the 90s I think is that they had to abandon the more intentionalist interpretations because those are so easy to debunk (Madagascar plan, etc).

Goebbels talking in 1942 about settling the Jews in Madagascar or Africa after the war is not consistent with the usual holocaust story. I assumed I didn't need to spell out really obvious contradictions [but it appears I was] giving [believers] too much credit):
* If they are all dead, there won't be any to send to Africa or anywhere else. Nothing bizarre about that logic.

* That the Germans used rhetoric referring to extermination/annihilation of the Jews in public is not consistent with the claim that the extermination program was so secret that they could not discuss the real policy even in the minutes of meetings about "the final solution."

* That Göring assigned Heydrich with carrying out the "final solution" in June 1941 but then Hitler declared another "final final solution" in December is not consistent with the classic story that "the final solution" was a secret codeword for killing all the Jews.

...German documents were captured by the Allies and sifted by the prosecution teams for incriminating material to use in the trials. The documents that have been published and given publicity are hugely skewed toward incriminating documents. And it is very possible that inconvenient documents (from the Allied perspective) weren't preserved at all.

The Göring directive to Heydrich of July 31, 1941... uses BOTH terms, Gesamtlösung and Endlösung. I doubt this distinction was of any real importance at the time, but subsequently a huge importance was attached to the term Endlösung in the Holocaust mythology.
 
At Nuremberg, Göring put one over on Jackson by highlighting Gesamtlösung and insisting this was totally different from the dreaded "final solution." Jackson was probably looking at the English copy and wasn't prepared to contest the translation.

www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=26565&start=5320

... ... ... ...

GIBSON:
I am consistently surprised by [defenders of ‘the holocaust’ mass-gassing allegation] heavy reliance on Eichmann. In my mind, the whole thing sinks or swims on the earlier, foundational testimonies. If Höß et al don't hold up, Eichmann can't save it. This can't be settled by late testimonies recorded under suspicious circumstances.

NICK ’& THE NUMBERS’ TERRY:
Eichmann had every opportunity to provide the Third Reich with a proper alibi, refute the accusations of genocide and explain what had actually happened instead, because he was speaking and indeed also writing in a situation far beyond any putative control by the Allies or any Jewish organisations, or anyone else a [skeptic] might try to claim was involved in enforcing the global silence on what actually happened.

The time for the proper alibi was in any case 1945 to 1949 when Nazis were interrogated as a collective group in the course of investigations and multiple trials, with enough people who should have been in the know, including Höß, failing to explain what 'really' happened if we are to accept the [skeptic] case. Instead there are denials of knowledge, denials of responsibility and people who were clearly not in the proper information loop displaying feigned or real ignorance, while the people who needed to be in the loop, plus a lot of others who learned things when they weren't supposed to, point to extermination.

The chance that all of the German witnesses testifying... at this time were lying, coerced, tortured, telling their interrogators what they wanted to hear on this issue (and this issue only, evidently), is vanishingly small.

After May 1949, with the trials largely over and the establishment of West Germany, and after 1955, with most convicted war criminals released and prisoners from the USSR returned to Germany, the vanishingly small chance reduces further, since there were enough people who needed to be in the loop alive and at liberty, so they could have provided the proper alibi. That didn't happen in West Germany, but there were also enough Nazis on the run in Latin America to do this, and Eichmann was certainly the best possible witness to do so. Except he didn't.

This means denial hit an inflationary limit to its global conspiracy already before the end of the 1950s. The entire 'revisionist' enterprise was therefore stillborn before it even got properly under way with Rassinier. It was a zombie idea before it ever got off the ground. One of the many reasons we can say this, but hardly the only one, is the fact that Eichmann failed to provide a proper alibi explanation and instead confirmed gassings and extermination.

GIBSON:
From 1945 to 1949, the incentive was to keep your head down. This suggestion that Eichmann and whoever else should have come forward and set the record straight is crazy talk. Why would you put a big target on your back for the denazification enforcers or the war crimes investigators? Particularly if you served at a camp or something, why would any sane person want to draw attention to that fact?! That's why just about the only German revisionism you'll see in print around then is stuff like Der Weg published over in Argentina.

One who did come forward was Stäglich and he was forced out of his position as a judge, had his pension cut, and was stripped of his doctoral title. That sort of retaliation will deter people.

Nazis "war criminals" are still being prosecuted today, incidentally, and now there are explicit anti-denial laws, so there was never really a time at which it would have been safe to speak your mind.

Even in America where HD is legal, if you started giving a firsthand account disputing the holocaust, the OSI Jews would get you denaturalized and have you extradited to Germany or Israel for prosecution. They are trying to deport and imprison Germar Rudolf right now just for his research and publishing activities (and he had no firsthand involvement in the H, obviously).

[Regarding the post-war Nürnberg show-trials], arguing that there were no mass gassings at Nuremberg would have been like trying to argue that witches don't exist at your witch trial. It's a non-starter.

Quite a few defendants did dispute it and/or made statements that were implicit denials (impossible, lack of knowledge). E.g. I do not see how Göring would have been in a position to PROVE on the stand that Jews were NOT exterminated at Auschwitz.
When Höß got up there and said he presided over the extermination of 3M people at the camp and did this under the orders of Himmler (dead) and Eichmann (missing), how is Göring supposed to disprove this?

...Let's cut to the chase. There was no point at which it would have been individually advantageous to dispute the story. And especially would it not be advantageous to "come forward" and dispute it based on firsthand experience. There has never been any moment either in Germany, America or anywhere else where this would have been a good idea in terms of narrow personal interest. Only a deeply committed martyr might consider this. Suppose you were a German or Ukrainian who came to America in 1950. Are you going to start making a lot of noise and openly disputing the American narrative on the war? Or are you going to shut up and keep collecting your paycheck from the auto factory? Easy choice.

You [Nick Terry] dismiss Stäglich and Christopherson as “peripheral” yet this is exactly the sort of person we would expect to come forward since it is far lower risk than someone closer to the action. The more relevant your direct personal knowledge, the more vulnerable you would be to war crimes charges.

... ... ... ... ...

G I B S O N
There's a huge difference between 100 bodies, 500 bodies, 10,000 bodies, 50,000 bodies, 100,000 bodies, 500,000 bodies, and 1,000,000 bodies.  Holyhoax promoters are treating the mass-gassing mythology as a true/false, binary, but with that approach there would be no way of distinguishing between, say, 5,000 non-gassed bodies and 900,000 gassed bodies. 

The most obvious way to corroborate that 900,000 were killed at a camp would be to find the 900,000 bodies.  The Treblinka story of course maintains that these bodies were all disinterred then burned, ignoring entirely the difficulties such would entail.  How convenient that this means the story is corroborated by NOT finding any bodies. 
But we should still expect to find "ash", which is of course much more difficult to translate into a number of bodies, particularly when we must rely on Communist propaganda for the forensics.  

At this point, I'm sure you'd say the transportation figures corroborate the numbers.  But again only if we assume that everyone transported was also was gassed and burned.      
The problem here is that the aspects of the question for which there is best corroboration are the least extraordinary parts of the story.  Which is like if you were to brag about catching a 100 pound trout and when asked for proof I showed you my fishing pole, my fishing license, my fishing boat, my receipt from the bait shop, etc.  This would be proof of the mundane (that I fish) but not of the extraordinary (that I caught a 100 pound trout).  

The only forensics done initially were the various propaganda reports on the camps done by the Allies. 

Take a look at Hilberg.  His book contains immense detail, lots of stuff nobody cares about.  But for the gas chambers what sources does he use?  Overwhelmingly testimonies.  A few documents.  No forensics whatsoever.  This point was frequently made by Faurisson.  These are "paper historians."  Faurisson did "paper" research as well but he also felt there needed to be an investigation of the "crime scene."  This is most definitely NOT the approach of the traditional scholarship.  This came up at the first Zundel trial.  

Here was Pressac's assessment of the situation in 1989: