Holocaust denial

I have been reading a lot of stuff recently, some of which has disturbed me.  There are a lot of people out there who say the Holocaust, that horrible time in history they taught us about in school never really happened the way they say it did. 

They cite how there's no way camps like auschewits(sp?) had the capacity to eliminate as many people as they said were held there.  They talk about how zyklon-b wasn't really powerful enough to kill anyone, and those showers apparently outfitted with this chemical were actually used for a delousing procedure.  They talk about how it doesn't make any sense to trick people into going to their death when you've already got them in your custody.

I don't know man; holocaust deniers seem to have information to back them up, all kinds of evidence, to which the holocaust sympathizers only have name calling and questioning the motives of those who deny it.  I am someone who really would like to believe that the holocaust happened, if only so that I can believe there isn't a vast conspiracy behind it.  So, any holocaust sympathizers with a good rebuttal to what they're saying?

Enough of this shit. You fucking nerds and you're need to argue about stupid shit

The IHR says (original, Samisdat, and revised versions combined):

None. The only evidence is the postwar testimony of individual "survivors." This testimony is contradictory, and no "survivor" claims to have actually witnessed any gassing. There are no contemporaneous documents and no hard evidence whatsoever: no mounds of ashes, no crematoria capable of disposing of millions of corpses, no piles of clothes, no human soap, no lamp shades made of human skin, no records, no credible demographic statistics.

Nizkor replies:

Lie piled upon lie, with not a shred of proof.

This is as good a place as any to present some detailed evidence which is consistently ignored, as a sort of primer on Holocaust denial. It will make this reply much longer than the other sixty-five, but perhaps the reader will understand the necessity for this.

Let's look at their claims one at a time:

# Supposedly the only evidence, "the postwar testimony of individual survivors."

First of all, consider the implicit conspiracy theory. Notice how the testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is automatically dismissed as unconvincing. This total dismissal of inmates' testimony, along with the equally-total dismissal of the Nazis' own testimony (!), is the largest unspoken assumption of Holocaust-denial.

This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and forged myriad documents to prove that it did; then, after the war, they rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say.

The conspirators also supposedly managed to torture hundreds of key Nazis into confessing to crimes which they never committed, or into framing their fellow Nazis for those crimes, and to plant hundreds of documents in Nazi files which were never discovered until after the war, and only then, in many cases, by sheer luck. Goebbels' diary, for example, was barely rescued from being sold as 7,000 pages of scrap paper, but buried in the scattered manuscript were several telling entries (as translated in Lochner, The Goebbels Diaries, 1948, pp. 86, 147-148):

February 14, 1942: The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.