OK, here's the problem. You've not even vaguely proven that there
is a "holocaust standard" of evidence versus another standard of evidence. The only way to make such a claim is comparatively, by showing that other events in history are discussed, written up and studied in a totally different way to the Holocaust, with an obvious common standard of evidence that is absent from discussion, writing and research on the Holocaust.
You can, of course, introduce the era as a reference point. But doing so will immediately beg the question of whether different standards of evidence prevail regarding earlier epochs. Which is true, they do. Ancient historians have very few written sources to rely upon, what sources are available are often laden with mythology, most were written down long after the events they describe. Archaeology is great for some things but not for others, but it's more often used for ancient history because it helps date things more reliably.
Medievalists have more written sources, and thus don't rely as heavily on archaeology, because there are fewer gaping blank holes. But enough that it's not always possible to date the births and deaths of kings and queens accurately. The written sources are still largely hearsay and some accounts of events - the sole account - can be written down many years later. Medievalists get very creative squeezing sources like law codes dry for what they reveal about society at the time, because other sources aren't available.
Early modernists tend to cry because they find literally one file of modern-looking bank records or trade figures or corn prices, and have to guess the others, since some idiot burned them 200 years ago in a revolution. But there are now things like letters and diaries and a great deal more contemporary evidence, even if it doesn't always come from the object of interest.
Modernists have it a lot easier, but there are still big differences between the Napoleonic era in Europe, and the 1990s in the same continent. That might not apply to Africa or Asia, however. How many child soldiers in Sierra Leone kept diaries? Some might be literate enough to write memoirs, but not many. Very few soldiers with Wellington were literate enough to write letters, keep a diary or write reminiscences later on. A very large number of soldiers with Haig could do those things, and even more with Montgomery. But then people got lazy and insisted that someone audio or videotape them reminscing, since
oral history became a big deal. Not just for the Holocaust, for all kinds of topics.
Most historians consider themselves
social historians. A growing number consider themselves
cultural historians. These fields have very different expectations of historical evidence and thus might be considered to have different standards of evidence. Most historians are generally interested in why questions, which often require different kinds of evidence to who, what, when and how questions.
Thus, it's an absolute certainty that whatever standards of evidence you think should prevail in history, do not in fact prevail for the overwhelming majority of historical research. That begs questions about whether your standards of evidence really hold true anywhere other than in your head.
This is also true of the histories of mass murders, genocides and wars. I refer you back to the Sierra Leone example. We cannot expect the RUF to have left massive written records. The country is rather lacking in the kind of resources that one might expect to be available in Washington, DC, and nobody is going to make much of an effort to exhaustively research every single atrocity in the conflict. Thus the best that anyone can do is provide a feeble estimate for the number who died in the
prolonged civil war there, even though there were atrocities and
Charles Taylor is on trial for war crimes. Nobody can really count how many have died in the
Second Congo War other than through simple subtraction demographics. More estimates for the
Rwandan genocide.
And it's no different for many conflicts in Europe or Asia.
The Russian Civil War was a pretty momentous event, the atrocities committed in the Red Terror laid the foundation for much of the world's foreign policy until 1991. But we can only guess at the true extent. More guesstimates and demographics for the
Great Leap Forward, another of many events leading to the discrediting of the idea of communism as a viable political system. There's
a prize-winning new book out about the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward by Frank Dikoetter at SOAS. As I have a few big journeys coming up I might well get hold of a copy and see what evidence he has, and how it compares to what I know of the evidence for the 1932 Ukrainian famine or the big famines discussed in Mike Davis's
Late Victorian Holocausts about 19th Century famines.
These are all historical events. Moreover they're relevant historical events for any comparison to the Holocaust, because they concern violent upheavals resulting in major losses of life, whose impacts often continue to reverberate internationally. That's a valid data-set for comparison.
You're not going to find the strawman version of history peddled by deniers in studies of these upheavals. Historians use witness testimonies, they don't obsess over physical evidence, and they don't cry if a specific type of document is unavailable.
Otherwise, Solzhenitsyn would never have been able to write
The Gulag Archipelago, would he now?
