The 'Holocaust' is an anomaly in the world of historical scholarship. That is a sentence I suspect many professional historians would like to speak, but yet cannot do so because they have been continually muzzled, cozened and cajoled into the 'party line' on the issue of the 'Holocaust'. Call that a personal opinion, but I have had enough chats with my colleagues over the last several years to become quite convinced that quite a few historians - academic and lay - are aware of the lack of evidence for the 'Holocaust' but yet feel they have to pay lip-service to it or just stay quiet.
The lack of evidence is something that is usually brought up in debates around the 'Holocaust' by Holocaust revisionists - or 'Holocaust deniers' as they pejoratively known by the media and their opponents - for the simple reason that it is a known fact among every branch of 'Holocaust' scholarship - good, bad or indifferent - which the vast majority of people are unaware of because this is the exact opposite of what the media claims about the subject (often touting the hilariously incorrect and rather obviously biased professional 'Holocaust' promoters/hacks who pretend to be scholars as a day job).
In practical terms this means that the average person believes the opposite of what is an established fact in 'Holocaust studies' (the lack of any solid evidence [or the lack of a 'smoking gun' as it tends to be phrased these days]): they believe that the ‘Holocaust’ is the best evidenced event in history, where comparative to its modernity and scale it is by far the least. The evidence in fact is so slight - primarily being selected quotes/claims by a dozen or so 'eyewitnesses' with the same selective few document-based claims thrown in for good measure - that it makes the trained historian - who doesn't stick at 'believing because everyone believes' - incredulous that this is actually believed and promoted by otherwise excellent scholars.
But then to paraphrase a well-known jewish author people really do believe weird things.
They also believe unbelievable things to paraphrase another such author.
People ardently believe in the existence of Big Foot and devote their lives to the subject.
Other people believe that UFOs and aliens from outer-space have visited earth.
Likewise they can spend their lives working on and polishing this thesis: some even commit criminal acts and go to prison for their beliefs.
The interesting thing about both the Big Foot and UFO believers is that their pet theories share a great deal of commonality with the 'Holocaust'. Like the 'Holocaust': the claims that Big Foot exists and that aliens have visited earth are based almost exclusively on eyewitness testimony and corroborating them with each other.
Just like in the 'Holocaust': these testimonies are wildly different from each other and rely on the proponents to do some creative selective merging of them to create a superficially coherent narrative. Just like the 'Holocaust' the testimonies of the first few individuals to 'come forward' are regarded as being the key for the intellectual credibility of the theses, because there are the ones that are least likely to be contaminated by exposure to different ideas.
As with the 'Holocaust': the Big Foot and UFOs proponents also cite selective other pieces of evidence to support their position; including some selective documentation, photographs and video footage.
Sound familiar?
It should given that it is exactly the same types of evidence and techniques that 'Holocaust' proponents use to propagate their theory about 'what happened' to large numbers of jews during the bloodiest conflict in history (ignoring the obvious and simpler counter-explanations). It is a theory - like those of Bigfoot and UFO proponents - which is based on a predetermined conclusion and then evidence is 'discovered' to fit this narrative while evidence that contradicts the claims of proponents is discarded or suppressed (i.e.. it is affected by confirmation bias).
So then why is the 'Holocaust' any different in terms of being uncritically accepted by many of those who make history their business, while Big Foot and UFOs are uncategorically rejected by most who make history their business?
The answer is because the 'Holocaust' is a conspiracy theory with the force of the state behind it.
Are you thus surprised how many intellectual authority figures are as credulous believers like the average folksy yokel?
You shouldn't be.