It is important to put the work of the couple historians (and wannabes like Pressac) regarding the holocaust into perspective. That perspective is to realize that their major has been to revise the Nuremburg findings to make the claims for the holocaust appear reasonable.
It is those who write about the holocaust (who are all loosely elevated to the status of historian) who have refined and purified the stories. They have removed from the common public knowledge the testimony about steaming and electrocution and vacuum chamber suffocation. They have removed those an many other things such as the "special method" of burning bodies without fuel.
It is to these writers that the holocaust and in particular the gassing owes its greatest debt as the Nuremberg trials themselves stand as a testament to the concept of victor's justice and that any old evidence would do. While today it is gospel that at Treblinka execution was by diesel exhaust gas, at Nuremberg the major method was determined to be steaming followed by electrocution and then by gassing with both diesel exhaust and cyanide.
While some may credit this change to scholarly research the facts are otherwise. Consider that the findings of Nuremberg were arrived at with the resources of four nations in complete control of Europe with all the manpower and money needed to determine what happened. In comparison, these writers/historians rarely have more than their own personal resources to work with.
It is not serious to suggest that a few people with other full time jobs and a limited set of paperwork years later could match the millions of man-hours of experienced criminal investigators and prosecutors with total access to any and all information and at the fresh crime scenes.
Do you think millions of man-hours is an exageration? Fourty hours a week by fifty weeks a year is two thousand hours. A mere five hundred people for one year is one million man-hours by minimal stardard of a 40 hour work week.
Yet this is what we are expected to believe. This in itself is incredible. Thus they have done and are doing something else, they are creating a credible picture of the Holocaust to replace the incredible picture that emerged from Nuremberg.
With all the "damning" evidence of the trials the entire story would appear obviously false to even the casual observer. These writers have pared away the absurd and incredible parts and woven a single issue story of gassing, gassing and more gassing. They have revised the only official record of events into something that appears superficially credible.
What is most interesting is that in all but the most recent cases this has been done without even once visiting the scenes of the crimes. So what did they have to work with? The Nuremburg evidence of course but they discard most of it in creating their single issue story.
Could they have worked with the witnesses they found at the time? Possibly but they were in no position to determine if the person was in fact a witness or just telling a story. And then the way memory works, there is no way for the stories to be reliable information years much less decades later.
And why did they not visit the scenes of the crimes? Because they were all in communist controlled countries and access was strictly controlled almost to the point of being prohibited. The Soviet Union did not even permit access to the files they captured.
The only thing they could do with the resources they had available to them was to come up with a consistent and credible story that could be told simply. The story had to have at least some basis in the trial records so entirely new stories could not be invented, at least not at first. Further they were bound by certain hard requirements of the story such as six million Jews regardless of how the numbers added up. Note that it was immediately permissiable to ignore the six million non-jews.
So over the years major parts of the trial record have been eliminated from the retelling of the story. They were finally able, by the 1970s to narrow it down to two means of death, roving execution squads and gassing. And of the gassing, ony two types of gas used. At no time did they add up the numbers but simply declared 6 million else if they had the total would not be six million. Thus when three million fewer were gassed at Auschwitz then three million more were shot by the roving bands.
These writers (perhaps better known referred to as story tellers as they wove a modestly credible story from incredible details in the formal record) have succeeded in establishing the orthodox view of the holocaust. It still has a lot of holes in it but you have to look closer each year to find them. For example, as late as 1990 a person could be called antisemitic for saying that four and a half million gassed at Auschwitz was ridiculous. But it was ridiculous and now the number is somewhat less ridiculous. As another example, in 1980 a person could be called anti-semitic for declaring soap was not made from the bodies of Jews.
What they have not done is equally interesting. They have not attempted to correct the tribunal records. Thus when there is documentation of liberated camps at the time of liberation that indicates an ugly story they let it stand.
A real historian would document how the camps came to be in the condition found they rather let the image stand that the camps were in such condition from the moment they were opened. Of course, anyone suggesting the end of war camp conditions were anything other than deliberately caused can still be called a Nazi apologist. No matter what the negative, the only explanation permitted is Pure Nazi Evil.
Thus these writers are clearly acting as storytellers. It is the story of human evil upon the innocent which ends in the triumph of good with the establishment of Israel. It is the story of a reward for suffering. The descent into hell to later rise to heaven and become a god, (an Israeli in this case.)
Thus in telling the story, the worse the hell the greater the reward. Where the storytellers have failed is in finding a way for those who suffer to have caused the triumph. Those being rewarded are supposed to triumph over evil by their own labors.
Thus the struggle becomes the post war struggle to found Israel. Whereas a real historian would trace the Zionist movement from the late 1800s through 1947, the prewar part is rarely discussed in the context of the holocaust by the storytellers. The complete story is something that simply can not be properly told because the mythos lacks the struggle of the innocent to end the evil as the story of Zionism is rather ugly at times.
Interestingly the Cold War prevented the Russians from being portrayed as the saviours. It became politically infeasable to link the jewish members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as having saved their fellow Jews. It simply would not have played in the west during the Cold War.
Thus lacking a mythic element it is a story told in separate parts, the suffering and the triumph while the pre-war part of the triumph is ignored. Those who tell full story of zionism with the holocaust in context are generally "reviled" as somehow unpleasant people, perhaps even unclean.
But how else can the present be understood without putting the holocaust into the context of Zionism? Are people to be left with the impression that a return to Palestine was an idea that started in 1945 among those who were in the camps?
But if it is all told as history then the suffering a triumph elements vanish and it clearly becomes the use of the holocaust to promote the 70 year old goal of Zionism. It changes from suffering and triumph to a more common story of the exploitation of human suffering by those who did not suffer for long term political goals. It becomes at best a story of political opportunism.