Yes - but tu quoque - What else did Hilberg study except the holocaust? - and as a result he accepts Wiernik as a key source. Your double standards point applies to David Irving, probably Fritz Berg and a few mostly anonymous posters. It's not there in most revisionist books.
Hilberg taught political science for decades. It is virtually impossible to function as an academic in history or social science without being dragged beyond one's research specialism through teaching as well as exposure to other research. It is likewise impossible to get to PhD level without having encountered other topics than one's research interests.
Moreover, specialist research is then weighed up in a variety of ways against other specialist research. That would go for competition for grants, jobs, spots in more general journals, on one level. Specialist research is brought together at national and international conferences, this happened already quite early on for the Holocaust, and continues to happen - there was a conference on European resistance movements in the late 50s with a panel on Jewish resistance that included Philip Friedman, for example. There have been countless panels at the German Studies Association, AHA, ASEES and other major scholarly association conferences in the past couple of decades on the Holocaust, which exist alongside all the other panels on everything else these associations cover.
Specialist research is necessarily juxtaposed in teaching, and written up in overviews; then there are the explicit comparativists, along with the simple cases of influence where one piece of research inspires others to adopt similar approaches or interests. Plenty of scholars also change topics and study something else; thus we have Mathias Beer writing about Nazi gas vans in one essay, but the Heimatvertreibungen in another, or Donald Bloxham writing about the Holocaust and then the Armenian genocide.
One can also turn the question of influence around: Hilberg was clearly influenced by the political science and historical research agendas surrounding bureaucracy; he himself points to hearing lectures by the emigre historian Hans Rosenberg on the Prussian civil service as starting him off down his research path. This research perspective made great sense when contending with the paper trail left behind by the Third Reich, and had its parallels in other research projects that were begun independently in the 1950s and 1960s as scholars got to grips with the Nazi documents.
Revisionism, by contrast, is a rather small oeuvre of mostly publicistic pamphlets and brochures written by non-academics with political axes to grind. The core literature consists of just over 150 books and pamphlets written since the late 1940s, a third of which have been churned out by Mattogno. The value of this oeuvre is diminished by the fact that much of it cannot now be cited as it was of hilariously poor quality or simply flat-out wrong, and has been completely superseded, so we don't see too many references to Hoggan, Harwood or Rassinier any more.
It is quite clear that the majority of revisionism has been produced or published in contexts which display double standards. This certainly goes for pre-IHR revisionism; most of the 'classics' display hilarious double standards over the expulsions and Stalinist crimes. The IHR and more recently, the Barnes Review (journal and publishing house/mail order company), are almost pathologically guilty of double standards in hyping Allied and Soviet atrocities. The same goes for Juergen Graf, who is a one man contaminator of 'contemporary' revisionism due to his antisemitism, double standards, and belief in other conspiracy theories - despite all of this Mattogno still works with him.
Obviously, revisionism is also extremely isolated as a 'scholarly' endeavour, since it is down to around 3 to 5 'serious' researchers, with the majority of the authors of the 150 books and pamphlets either dead or retired. The most active of the researchers are of course monomaniacs who do nothing else but write about the Holocaust, and appear to have an extremely shaky grasp of the comparisons they do make.
Since
all serious revisionists invoke Katyn, it's clear that your claim about double standards is simply falsified. Holding Katyn up as a paradigmatic crime fails entirely, because the Stalinist regime committed
hundreds of other crimes which were not investigated in the same way. It doesn't really help the denier case to invoke this comparison when the serious revisionists evidently know sod all about Stalinism or the evidence for Stalinist crimes. The comparison is "asymmetric", which is a fancier way of saying it's a strawman.
The bigger problem with the Katyn gambit is that the implicit method (to wail mass graves, mass graves over and over) is simply not practiced in essentially all historiogaphical discussion of mass atrocities, never mind the social sciences. Since Katyn was one part of a mass atrocity that claimed just over 20,000 lives, the proper point of comparison would be the entire set of atrocities of similar magnitude, arguably going down to even smaller atrocities that claimed only thousands of lives, as the
actual Katyn graves contained just a few thousand victims, the
other mass grave sites where Polish officers were buried were never discovered by the Nazis!
One searches the literature on mass atrocities in vain for the routine discussion of mass graves and forensics, because the atrocities discussed in that literature took place in varying historical contexts - most were simply never investigated forensically because they either took place before there was a modern conception of forensics, or because they were perpetrated by regimes that successfully covered them up, or simply reported them to itself while never bothering to do forensics.
Accordingly, essentially no study of mass atrocity really bases its fact-finding exclusively, primarily or deterministically on forensics. The preferred method is to prioritise perpetrator sources while not ignoring victim or bystander sources. Typically, a mass atrocity is first known from bystander sources and then as regimes crumble, perpetrator sources become available.
For the Holocaust, as you really ought to know by now, investigations were conducted quite extensively in the 1940s - to a far greater extent than has been the case for the Armenian genocide, or indeed most other mass atrocities affecting victims into six or seven figures.
Those investigations existed in a specific historical context, i.e. they had mostly to be conducted in impoverished and devastated Eastern Europe with significant shortages of skilled personnel, who were obviously overwhelmed by the sheer scale of all Nazi atrocities, and confounded on repeated occasions by the use of mass cremation, rendering the estimates produced in 1943-45 frequently useless for posterity.
As more reliable and cheaper methods exist by which to establish the orders of magnitude of Nazi atrocities, namely documents and demographics, nobody sane is ever going to go around Eastern Europe 'counting teeth' as you demand above when we can look up the Jaeger report and find out how many Jews were murdered in Fort IX at Kaunas or Ponary outside Wilno, contrasting such a source with other Nazi documents, bystander sources, and ghetto documents. There isn't even an issue with 1005 being present since their activities on these sites is documented in contemporary reports of KdS Litauen.
That is a significantly easier mass atrocity to gauge than, say, the horrors of Ochota district during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The fact of mass slaughter by the Dirlewanger and Kaminski units is not disputed by any of the participants and left a variety of historical evidence. But the aftermath of the uprising saw the mass cremation of bodies by Nazi cleanup squads, and the circumstances of the massacres were such that nobody was keeping count. We will
never know the exact number of people who died in the Ochota massacres in 1944. Based on the extensive efforts of the Poles to reconstruct the precise course of events using eyewitness testimonies counting up shootings house by house and street by street, it seems to be at least as great as the atrocities at Fort IX or Ponary. No doubt, one can find much higher figures circulating in the literature and on the internet, but that goes for almost all other comparable examples.
And that is far more normal for mass atrocities than the spurious precision demanded by atrocity deniers, not just for the Holocaust but a variety of other atrocities.
Which brings me onto the final problem: there are Srebrenica deniers out there, not just Serbian nationalists but a certain number of left-wing anti-imperialists including Chomsky's writing partner Edward Herman. There are also 9/11 deniers who essentially believe that there were no real victims on any of the planes on 11th September 2001 and some who seem to think there were no victims on the ground. Both of those mass atrocities - claiming just over 8,000 and just under 3,000 lives respectively - were exhaustively documented using the latest advanced techniques including DNA analysis, techniques that were unavailable in the 1940s and which could be used due to the
relatively small number of victims in these cases and the considerable prosperity of the EU and United States.
In the same time-frame as Srebrenica and 9/11, civil wars in Africa have killed millions of people under conditions where it would be impossible to reconstruct the numbers precisely even through documents, which probably barely exist.
The positivist distinction of fact (text of a given provenance) and generalisation (sociology) is highly relevant to understanding Faurisson's interpretation of the holocaust.
Both Faurisson as well as revisionism as a whole have been criticised as hyperpositivist. But Faurisson's interpretation of classical positivism-era historigraphical methods was flawed: his reading of Langlois and Seignobos falls entirely flat because Langlois and Seignobos had a very different idea of what was meant by 'document' to the one Faurisson used. Faurisson confused what the German tradition calls Urkunden with all documents.
Oversimplification on my part, best if we forget I said that.
You just don't have the measure of the man at all. Firstly, as you point out, he did have a comparative basis for his revisionism, albeit in imaginative literature, which contradicts your point about not making comparisons in other fields. That some others do not follow his methods indicates his originality. The deflating nature of his interpretation of Rimbaud's education is similar to his deflating achievement in showing the agenda of holocaust narratives. He is an atheist, not a catholic and has no particular reason to hate Jews (not that catholics do either, strictly speaking).
Importing rather unique methods from literary criticism and applying them to history is not testing the methodology on other examples. In the same era as Faurisson evolved his 'Ajax method', cultural history was looking towards literary criticism more generally to locate methodologies which could illuminate texts, especially medieval and early modern texts. This transfer of techniques has proved to be enormously successful and is now fairly standard.
Moreover, the wider application of literary critical methods to historical sources has reminded scholars that most historical sources are unconsciously or consciously influenced by literary and cultural traditions. Autobiographies, memoirs and free-form written testimonies, which contrary to denier delusions exist for other periods and other people than just the Holocaust, are frequently written under the influence of specific literary traditions and it is helpful to bear those in mind when reading them. Identifying the literary genres and influences can of course help date older texts but it's also very useful for modern texts.
If one reexamines for example the Gerstein report, the literariness of the text, its breathlessness of description (long run-on sentences) and use of repetition should be swiftly apparent. The literary artifices become in this case distortions of the description of the historical event that Gerstein was seeking to convey. As we have other texts by him from the time, as well as other sources on Gerstein, there is little room for the claim that Gerstein didn't visit the camp, especially when there are numerous other sources corroborating much of what he says.
The difference between literary criticism and historiography is that literature can focus on 'key' texts, sometimes organised into canons, and is not obliged to be systematic. A literary analysis of a single text is simply a literary analysis. It is not history, and comments based on the singular analysis isolated from other sources fail the basic requirements of the historical method.
The historical analysis of texts considers several texts together in order to reconstruct events through the eyes of several participants or observers. We have all seen cases where a single-source account survives in a history book, no matter what the period or topic, but the norm is to find several contrasting, converging or corroborating accounts. The method of corroboration is critical because historians of all epochs are confronted by the issue of sorting out fact from distortion. Politicians, priests and other historical eyewitnesses routinely lie or offer inaccurate accounts of the events they describe. Historical criticism cross-examines witnesses by contrasting them with each other
and scrutinising them in the light of other types of sources.
Faurisson's 'Ajax method' did not do this; it isolated a few 'star witnesses' and held them up as 'the most important witness' to the events in question, and moreover the Faurissonian tradition incorrigibly isolates eyewitness testimony from other types of sources. That is why Mattogno analyses witnesses in one set of chapters then fantasises about documents in other chapters, keeping the two source types thoroughly separate.
As for Faurission's antisemitism, it's rather pointless to try apologising and obfuscating for the man, when he is such an obvious Jew-hater.
Presumably you have to know A and B before you can compare them. I cannot believe we would seriously disagree here.
Such an argument is not necessarily valid in historiography because what does 'knowing' A and B mean here? Someone can easily discover a diachronic continuity and be forced to reconstruct all stages of the 'comparison', or might be inspired by A to look in more detail at B and end up advancing our knowledge of B.
On the other hand, some comparisons are ritualistically invoked and become less plausible as research develops, and differences are exposed. A good example of this happening would be fascism theory. While there are many points of similarity between Nazism and Italian fascism, the differences became all too apparent by the 1980s.
This and much of the rest of what you say here is of great interest to me, but as in journalism, "what" comes before "why" and this thread is devoted to the "what".
Again: historiography places significantly more emphasis on why and that influences the what. In asking why does something happen, historians seek out new topics and new source bases in order to better illuminate the core question. They also use comparisons, as I have pointed out. Research into Nazism and the Holocaust has obviously not stood still in the past 30 years, and the shape of both subjects looks rather different today simply because hundreds if not thousands of historians have explored fresh territory, all of which feeds back into the understanding of the whole, and thus the bigger picture looks very different.
In other words, they've figured out that they're backing a losing horse, but stick with Pressac publicly for appearances' sake.
Auschwitz: the surprising hidden truth.
Nothing of the sort, I'm afraid. Wendy Lower's PhD and first book was on Nazi occupation of Zhytomyr district; Timothy Snyder worked on East European nationalism and also examined the ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia by the UPA. They are both working academics who teach and and trying to figure out how to narrate and explain much bigger subjects than Auschwitz.
Since both are East Europeanists, they have observed that the conventional old-school historiography of the Holocaust seemed to be more fixated on things like the death camps and notions of 'modernity' which do not stand up to scrutiny when one goes out into the field in Volhynia or Zhytomyr regions, where things were very different. Nonetheless, Snyder still has a chapter in 'Bloodlands' entitled 'the death factories', based largely around Treblinka.
Current consensus breaks down the Holocaust death toll as follows: nearly 50% inside the 1941 borders of the USSR, i.e. about 2.6 million, with less than half a million of that number deported westwards to the death camps; shootings claimed well over 2 million lives in the USSR, Poland and Yugoslavia, ghettos, camps and reservations like Transnistria claimed up to 700,000 lives with the precise balance between shootings and starvation constantly being revised in the direction of shooting; and 2.6 million deported to the death camps, with at least 100,000 dying after selection for labour at Auschwitz largely from starvation, and copious evidence of deaths in transit to the Reinhard camps. Accordingly, the death camps represent less than 50% of the Holocaust, and Auschwitz is less than 20% of the Holocaust.
It is thus unsurprising when historians of Eastern Europe criticise an 'Auschwitz syndrome' when Auschwitz was not representative of 80% of the Holocaust. The death camps may be a much bigger proportion, but the circumstances of deportation to the Reinhard camps place them in a much more regional context than Auschwitz, which took in victims from across Europe.
Jews deported to Treblinka and Sobibor were routinely mown down in 'local resettlements' of the elderly and transpotunfaehige, or simply to reduce the numbers in order that the ghetto fit onto the available train, or because there were no railheads nearby. They died like flies en route in the summer heat, and were also sieved on some occasions to be sent to forced labour camps nearby. These experiences do not match the experiences of Drancy and Westerbork in western Europe.
In the popular imagination, especially in France during the 1970s and 1980s, and in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, 'Auschwitz' appeared as a kind of be-all and end-all. In West Germany, 'Auschwitz' became the metonym for the Holocaust as a whole, until the term 'Holocaust' became more current after 1978. Deniers reacted to the iconic status of Auschwitz by selecting it for their main focus of attack.
Unfortunately for you, that attack has been a consistent failure; it has never succeeded in mobilising interest among academics or a wider audience in the public sphere. So the research agendas of historians of the Holocaust or modern Europe have simply never been set by revisionists. Therefore it would be a fantasy to imagine that negationism has had any kind of impact when there are far more obvious and major factors at work, e.g. the opening of East European archives after the end of the Cold War, and a greater number of people moving into the Holocaust field who understand East European languages.
