While there are important precursors in the early modern era to modern source-based history-writing, history established itself as a distinctive modern discipline in the 19th century. The Germans called it Geschichtswissenschaft, which can be translated as historical science, without implying anything about nomothetic or natural science. I presume that Balsamo was alluding to Geschichtswissenschaft when he spoke about historical science.
No, it doesn't.
Plenty of archives have been taken over, destroyed, plundered, removed, restituted or otherwise affected by the many political upheavals of the modern era - the French Revolution saw
a substantial destruction of archival records including business and ecclesiastical records; the records of the Imperial German Army were largely incinerated by the Royal Air Force in a 1945 air raid on Potsdam, while your Nazi heroes stole archives from all across Europe, meaning that many ended up in Soviet hands after 1945.
Holocaust studies is an umbrella term for any scholarship on the Holocaust. It is not a discipline or a methodology. It is trivially easy to show that academics in English, other humanities, and every single social science have approached aspects of the Holocaust using the methodologies of their respective disciplines.
Holocaust studies no more has a unique methodology than do First World War studies - literature departments clearly study the memoirs, novels and poetry of the First World War, just as they might study Primo Levi, and there are plenty of courses in history departments on WWI that foreground the literature and cultural representations of that conflict.
The historiography of the Holocaust is simply history, and uses historical methodology; its authors have been trained as historians, been awarded history degrees, and are most likely to be found in history departments.
Interdisciplinary research centres for Holocaust studies are no different to interdisciplinary research centres for Medieval Studies, Early Modern Studies, South Asian Studies or any other form of era/area studies - they are ways to bring together academics from different university departments together, and can easily result in hardcore economic and social historians of 17th Century England being bored out of their minds listening to a paper on Shakespeare produced by a colleague from the English department - both work in 'Early Modern Studies', after all.
All central German state records of the Nazi era were seized by the western Allies or Soviet Union - not just those relating to the Holocaust. Then they were restituted, see Astrid Eckert, The Struggle for the Files (2012).
You're simply making up nonsense claiming that the German archives captured by western powers contain "Soviet interpolations". They don't, and you can produce no evidence to support this claim, so don't bother offering speculative conspiracy theories peddled by some ignorant revisionist hack.
I hate to break it to you, but "historical science" has always used eyewitness accounts. Ranke said as much in his programmatic foreword where he coined the phrase 'wie es eigentlich gewesen war'.
Nor is there a meaningful distinction to be drawn between history from above and history from below in this regard. Historians have
always considered the memoirs, diaries and letters of politicans, generals and diplomats to be relevant sources, to be evaluated alongside state papers and in many cases, to be used where state papers fall silent or are missing. US Presidential libraries have frequently established large-scale oral history programs to interview members of particular administrations.
The use of diaries, letters, memoirs, interrogations/cross-examinations, journalistic interviews, oral histories and other ego-documents from "ordinary" and mid-ranking participants is
completely standard in the historiography of pretty much every single major modern conflict, whether wars, genocides or political struggles such as civil rights. Official records are easily destroyed - at the end of apartheid, South Africa incinerated metric tons of police records - or might never have been generated - how many reports would a commander in an African civil war file with a superior? - so historians of modern conflicts use whatever they can get their hands on.
It is however trivially easy to demonstrate that historians of the Holocaust rely heavily on contemporary, "official" documents, in two ways.
Firstly, "the Holocaust" is a shorthand term covering the entire era of the persecution and mass murder of European Jews from 1933 to 1945 and applies across Europe to Axis states not just the Third Reich. The volume of Nazi and Axis documentation on different aspects of these processes is considerable, despite various attempts to destroy records. This applies also to the killing and death inflicted in ghettos, labour camps, 'ordinary' concentration camps and in mobile killing operations.
Secondly, historians use documents on the extermination camps, the personnel of the camps, deportations to the camps, and the immediate organisational context as a matter of course, knowing that many records were destroyed - Globocnik's final report on Aktion Reinhard, a document that survives, explicitly states that the records of the Reinhard camps were destroyed. The conclusion that these camps were extermination camps does not therefore rest solely on testimony, but is reinforced by direct documentary references to killing and gassing, supported by common-sense inferences based on the totality of the documents mentioning these camps or organisations. These documents also confirm and corroborate numerous points mentioned by non-Nazi sources - for example, Christian Wirth's involvement in Aktion Reinhard is documented, and it's also mentioned by a Polish underground report, Kurt Gerstein and other eyewitness accounts.
You are literally 88 years behind the times here; historians of WWI have researched the atrocities that did take place between 1914 and 1918 while also exploring the role of propaganda during the First World War. See John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914 (2001), which shows that the Imperial German Army really did execute over 6,000 Belgian and French civilians in reprisals in 1914, largely in response to a hysterical belief in 'francs-tireurs' and often due to inexperienced soldiers blaming civilians for 'friendly fire' incidents, while the Allied press then publicised hysterical reactions to real atrocities. The sources confirming reprisal executions are often German Army regimental and divisional histories published in the 1920s and 1930s.
The term "atrocity propaganda" is analytically worthless, as the mere fact that atrocities might be publicised does not say anything meaningful about whether they happened or not. The term propaganda is also used indiscriminately, in ways that annihilate important differences between government actions, media reporting, and other responses, as well as the differences between responses during conflicts and their aftermath.
To give an example, a series of atrocities against Chinese prisoners of war and civilians were undeniably committed by Japanese forces at Nanjing in 1937 - this received relatively little publicity at the time, but was not unknown. Historians have shown that through to 1945, reporters, writers and official propagandists in wartime China paid it much less attention than became the case by the end of the 20th Century in Communist China (see Parks M. Coble, ‘Writing about Atrocity: Wartime Accounts and their Contemporary Uses’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2, China in World War II, 1937–1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy (March 2011), pp. 379-398). Commemoration of Nanjing did not become a major trend in China until the 1980s, by which time Japanese journalists had already debated Nanjing during the 1970s. The establishment of a memorial and use of Nanjing in Sino-Japanese relations certainly has propagandistic elements, and there are politicised interpretations from both 'maximalists' (some Chinese and Japanese commentators) as well as 'minimalists' (i.e. Japanese negationists). This hasn't prevented historians internationally from exploring the event historically, and rejecting negationism (see in particular the contributions to Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (ed), The Nanking atrocity, 1937-38: complicating the picture. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
Holocaust denial has in any case failed to produce any "history of an atrocity propaganda campaign" for the Holocaust. Passing invocations of the term don't count, nor do brief discussions of some aspects of publicity or propaganda.
Historians of the Holocaust have already examined in some detail how the persecution and mass murder of European Jews was publicised, 'propagandised', politicised and discussed internationally during the war.
This includes the story of an
actual propaganda campaign mounted in the US by another bunch of lunatic revisionists, i.e. the Revisionist Zionist 'Bergson Group', who took out newspaper adverts and staged pageants about the mass murder of Jews in Europe during 1943. This propaganda campaign was strongly resisted by other Jewish organisations in the US, who rejected the tactics and methods used by the Bergson Group; it was also entirely secondary to the emergence of news of mass murder in 1942, which was not transmitted via Revisionist Zionist channels, nor did it supplant the process of reporting news from occupied Europe in 1943-1944.
The process of gathering news of persecution and mass murder of Jews between 1942 and 1944 involved the press, national governments and governments-in-exile, NGOs, intellectuals/academics, non-Jewish as well as Jewish organisations outside occupied Europe as well as resistance organisations, intelligence services, Germans and non-Germans, Jews and non-Jews inside occupied Europe. This was an international process, involving neutrals, Allies and the Axis countries. Swiss military intelligence, for example, received detailed information from an SS source regarding the Einsatzgruppen, the evolution of gas vans and about Auschwitz in early 1944.
Much of the news wasn't publicised and was kept secret, and what appeared in the papers was usually a fraction of the information passed on. There is a strong consensus that the global press under-reported the Holocaust at the time, and it is relatively under-represented in official and unofficial Allied propaganda compared to other themes.
Good luck trying to prove that the news of the Holocaust was an
invented atrocity propaganda campaign - the term campaign is unwarranted to describe the entire process because it was sporadic, the term propaganda is refuted by the mere existence of unpublicised intelligence reports, and to prove invention you need to account for why different reporters and recipients received news on the same atrocities independently. As in
all of the reports.
Historians have managed to prove all manner of economic, political, social, military and genocidal developments across the ages and around the world without always disposing of name lists.
So if your excuse is 'where are the names', you're effectively conceding Balsamo's point, which is that 'Holocaust revisionists' are not historians because they cannot figure out how to prove their claims according to completely conventional standards.
A wide variety of conventional historical sources including contemporary German documents, contemporary Polish underground reports, contemporary Jewish council records and contemporary diaries or manuscripts collectively document the deportation of 1.274 million Polish Jews
to the Aktion Reinhard camps in 1942. These sources allow historians to quantify broadly how many from Warsaw, how many from Radom, Krakow, Lwow etc were deported, without disposing of name lists, which were not compiled for these deportations, and which don't exist.
All these sources unanimously fail to provide any substantive evidence that the 1.274 million deportees passed
through these camps.
To prove that the camps were transit camps, one could hypothetically find reports from different sources confirming that the majority of the 1.274 million deportees turned up somewhere else. To compete with the sources that say the deported Jews were exterminated at the Reinhard camps, then if one had other sources with at least an equal level of granularity and detail pointing to transit and arrival somewhere else, then you might reach the level of establishing a genuine contradiction and force historians to decide between two alternatives.
We have documents giving statistical breakdowns of the deportations from Warsaw and documents confirming their deportation to Treblinka, if you had documents with statistical breakdowns of the transfers of Warsaw Jews from Treblinka to somewhere else, then you might begin to cast doubt on the fate of the Jews of Warsaw, generally accepted as having been killed in Treblinka.
Unfortunately for you, such sources do not exist.
We don't have name lists for Warsaw and Treblinka, nor do you have them for somewhere further east. Nor do historians of countless other incidents involving just as many people, either in the 20th Century or earlier eras.
We do have statistical documents and sources providing figures for Warsaw and Treblinka. But you don't have any reports specifying 5000, 7000, 10,000, 250,000 or any other figures talking of the Jews of Warsaw arriving somewhere other than Treblinka, having travelled via Treblinka.
You can find sources that show movements of smaller numbers to other locations, but none that show a transit via Treblinka. You can also find diaries and the like recording hearsay of deportations heading to other locations, but none that record a transit via Treblinka.
In fact, you don't have a single source
of any kind that speaks of the Jews of Warsaw being 'transited' via Treblinka in 1942.
Therefore a belief in transit via Treblinka is completely un-historical, as it cannot be backed up by sources. Period.
