I was reading through a thread about holocaust deniers and some of the comments were talking about how the Holocaust might be exaggerated. These arguments a lot harder for me to disprove then the flat out denial. Is there a way of debunking these or is there any legitimacy to them?
Between 5 and 6 million Jews were killed in Europe between 1939 and 1945 by the Germans, through shooting, gassing, starvation and deprivation.
What Holocaust deniers like to lash onto is the fact that the death tolls of individual camps were exaggerated by the Soviets when they liberated the camps (the death camps were all in Poland and therefore discovered by the Red Army) and by the communist Polish government. It's not clear whether this was done for propaganda purposes or because of lack of accurate data. Probably both. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the Soviets were genuinely profoundly shocked by what they found at Auschwitz and Majdanek, the two death camps that were left standing when they overran the Germans in Poland.
Majdanek was the first death camp to be liberated and the official Polish-Soviet Commission for Investigating the Crimes Committed by the Germans in the Majdanek Extermination camp stated in its late 1944 report that 1,500,000 people had been exterminated there. In reality there had been 80,000 victims.
A Soviet report submitted to the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945 gave 4 million as the number of dead at Auschwitz. The correct number is 1,100,000.
The other death camps (Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka and Chelmno) had been dismantled by the Germans before the end of the war, so it was harder to gauge what had happened there, but they did investigate the site of Treblinka. Check out this famous essay by Vasily Grossman, a Soviet war correspondent to get an idea of the horror these events provoked. Writing in late 1944, Grossman estimates that there had been three million victims at Treblinka. This number was his wild guess based on eyewitness testimonies of the numbers of trains and the number of people per train, as well as on the capacity of the gas chambers. Scholarly research since has arrived at an estimate of 750,000 to 900,000.
You will notice that when we add up these Soviet estimates we arrive at 8,500,000 victims for these three camps alone. No serious researcher has ever lent credit to these numbers.
What you have to keep in mind about Holocaust deniers is that they are not interested in the truth. They are interested in spreading a conspiracy theory. This conspiracy theory is that "the Jews" have exaggerated or fabricated the Holocaust for their own nefarious purposes. If that sounds plausible to you, congratulations, you hold antisemitic views (I don't mean specifically you, OP, I mean the general "you"). Holocaust "revisionism" is not a legitimate branch of Holocaust research, it is racist propaganda.