I think that denial can be also helpful because it keep the Holocaust historians "on toes" and makes them more critical of the evidence
(Shrug)
The "selling point" of every crank group--flat-earthers, creationists, holocaust deniers, UFO nuts, etc.--is divided into two part: one for the true believers and one for the general public.
To the true believers, they say what they really believe, namely, that there is a huge conspiracy by the "holocaust industry" or "atheist evolutionists" or "the government" to hide the truth about how the holocaust is a jewish lie, or God created the world in six days, or whatever the crank theory claims.
To the general public, they present a different face: they claim, with pretended innocence and eye-rolling, that they are just interested in "fair debate" and that such a "debate" will really help those they secretly (and not-so-secretly) despise, by "keeping them on their toes" and forcing them to "exmine the evidence" that evolution happened, or the holocaust occured, or the earth isn't flat.
I don't know which group Mr. Romanov belongs to--whether he is a "true believer" in the claim that the holocaust is a jewish lie, or whether he is merely decieved by true believers into accepting their "we just want to keep historians on their toes" claim at face value.
But whichever it is, the claim that historians are, or should be, "kept on their toes" by holocaust deniers and "examine the evidence" due to them is, simply put, nonsense. The claims made by holocaust deniers are, invariably, so ignorant and silly that "examining" them is an utter waste of time--the equivalent of "keeping a mathematician on his toes" by demaning he prove that 2+2=4, or "keeping a geographer on his toes" by demanding he prove the earth isn't flat.
Debunking such nonsense, far from "keeping historians on their toes", merely wastes their time, time which they could use to do what they really do routinely to keep them on their toes and re-examine their evidence--namely, keep up with the professional, peer-reviewed literature. A brief check of the literature will show that this is in fact the case. In professional, peer-reviewed, historical journals, including those dealing with the history of the holocaust, holocaust deniers are totally ignored. Obviously, historians themselves don't consider it remotely necessary to "practice" their holocaust-history skills by repeatedly debunking holocaust-denier nonsense.
When historians do bother to confront holocaust deniers, it is usually for political reasons--when some holocaust denier makes a lot of noise of the "they are afraid to debate me!!!" variety, and they don't want the public to get the wrong impression that historians take such nonsense seriously. But those brave souls who do so consider such distractions as, perhaps, politically important, but meaningless as far as historical scholarship is concerned.
As Richard Evans makes quite clear in his book ("Lying About Hitler", about his experience as an historian confronting the holocaust denier David Irving), no new facts, no clearer vision, no scholarly revolution, ever emerge by debating the holocaust deniers, just as no advance in biology ever occurs by debating creationists.
It's a waste of time, unfortunately necessary to confront those who would deny the annihilation of the jews in order to make Fascism "marketable" again, but of no importance whatever to scholarship; if the holocaust deniers really wanted to help historians in their research, they would shut the hell up so as to not force them to waste their time debunking their nonsense.
