Hello historians, unfortunanly these days I cannot watch any conservative meaning video or ww2 related video on YouTube without encountering barious comments proclaiming that the holocaust was a hoax, at first believing that it was a troll, seeing the replies made me realize these people were serious. Any advice as to leave these people just blaming Jews and not being able to counter my response?
So, the thing is that in all likelihood, you will not convince Holocaust Deniers of the error of their ways by showing how wrong they are. De-radicalization programs for Neo-Nazis in Germany and elsewhere have shown that the way of convincing Neo-Nazis and anti-Semites of the error of their ways is a process that does not involve arguments on the contents of their arguments so much as it involves a lot of social work, job creation, long talk sessions about many a topic, and family care. So, if you go into this, don't expect to actually change a Holocaust Deniers mind or even get to them to acquiesce to the existence of virtually anything. Because these people don't give a shit a about the basic facts of reality, there is no mutual basis for a discussion.
The reason why it can be nonetheless useful to engage in these discussions in a public forum on some scale is not to show the Holocaust Denier the error of their ways but to engage the public reading or watching the exchange and demonstrating to them Holocaust Deniers as what they are: Liers and bigots. In a sense engaging and debunking these arguments for the sake of the audience of such an exchange can be important because it'll immediately destroy any doubt such an audience might develop after Holocaust Deniers present their lies in a manner that at first might look reasonable (but are really not). So remember, that you engage their argument and not themselves and that you are arguing for the benefit of readers who are not Holocaust Deniers but need to be demonstrated that all their arugments are bullshit that should not be given credence to.
That all said, the MM has been posted below but here are some other posts providing a run down of the most common arguments they present and how they are debunked:
The Red Cross and Concentration Camps
Laws, Documents and Orders for the construction of camps
Varous things about proof for the Holocaust
The Auschwitz Death Tolls and why they "changed"
Did Hitler know about the Holocaust
Was the Holocaust technically murder
A more extensive discussion about evidence for the Holocaust
Engaging with a denier about questions such as the number of survivors, life expectancy etc. pp.
Killing rate of the gas chamber in Auschwitz and the number of people killed in Auschwitz
The whole "6 million Jews in Russia" before the Holocaust thing
and many more, if you check out my user profile as well as the hdot.org website that offers a lot of material.
This Monday Methods thread provides you with a very good place to start.
You don't, because holocaust denial is an exercise in active bad faith.
Holocaust denial - and, more broadly, genocide/atrocity denial - is not simply 'asking questions', or part of the legitimate historical revisionism process. It is a form of political agitation which is used to handwave, apologise for, and otherwise rehabilitate genocidal ideologies and regimes. This is used for multiple, often parallel reasons:
In order to make that ideology 'acceptable' in discourse (again);
To generate controversy and attention (and, by extension, support);
To consolidate political power.
Holocaust denial is probably the clearest example of this, but denial of the Armenian, Coptic, and Greek genocides continues to be a staple of Turkish ultranationalism (including by the State of Turkey). Similarly, Japanese negationism of the Rape of Nanking is extremely common amongst Japanese nationalists.
I personally believe that it is important to make a distinction between those who are 'genuinely' ignorant - who have, perhaps, been hoodwinked by deniers - and those who are engaging in active denial in bad faith. That distinction is made by attempting to ascertain whether they 'mean' what they say; the famous Irving vs Penguin Books Ltd case found that Irving was a denier, as it was simply not possible for him to be exposed to what he was exposed to in good faith, during his time as a historian, and not come to the conclusion that the Holocaust was the intentional, industrialised genocide of about six million Jews.
To summarise that point - it is only worth discussing the holocaust with the aim to 'change someone's mind' if they are approaching the topic in good faith. Otherwise, as has already been mentioned in this thread, it becomes more about revealing the denier as a denier to others, since they will not 'change their minds'.
/u/commiespaceinvader already contributed to this thread, but I wanted to link this Monday Methods post, which he authored, and which (to my surprise) hasn't already been posted. It's a great introduction to the topic. it was already posted, i'm just blind
Further reading:
Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt; Denying History, Shermer and Grobman; http://hdot.org.