I couldn't disagree with you more. There's a lot of perfectly-legitimate questioning of the scope of the Holocaust (i.e., Smith says 6.1 million Jews, Jones say 6.8 million, Brown says no, more like 5.4 million). Even Raul Hilberg's seminal work from the early sixties (The Destruction of the European Jews) claimed 5 million as I recall. That number reflected the understanding of the time.
But there's got to be some kind of line beyond which "questioning the scope of the Holocaust" becomes "questioning the Holocaust." I seem to recall this Williamson guy claimed the number was 200,000 to 300,000.
Such a claim serves to deny the systematic murder of at least 5 million Jewish victims (not to mention the non-Jewish victims, a population equally difficult to count with tight precision).
Well, he is not denying the Holocaust in essence: deliberate, utterly evil mass murder of Jews based on their ethnicity alone. I agree that the numbers he is throwing around are ridiculously low.
My point is, he is not an idiot; I read some of his writings on other subjects and he is a thoughtful man. Is he also an anti-Semite? Possibly, even though he denies that.
It was still a heck of a lot of people. One human being destroyed by such utter arrogance and fairy tale spinning as der Fuerher perpetrated is too much.
My father was a combat veteran in Army Infantry, N. Africa, Sicily, Italy, Germany fighting the Nazis every step of the way. When they entered to liberate a concentration camp, the German guards were still “defending” their turf. . and hundreds of them died where they stood. Daddy talked about seeing piles of bodies piled ten feet high for over a quarter of a mile. - What a mess! An ungodly mess where the “old man’s war” becomes “the young man’s fight”! I won’t split hairs if anyone says “millions died”. Millions upon millions DID die, of all nationalities. Unspeakable. Unspeakable what I SAW that whole mess do to my father’s psychological life until the day that he died in his 80’s!